What they carried

With our favorite items by our side, even a room the size of a closet can feel cozy. Inside talked to four international students about the items they brought from abroad to make Bloomington feel more like home.

The Mentor

Yasu Harada likes to drink green tea while studying. It reminds him of his father’s family in Japan, who are tea farmers. Stash green tea’s bitter, earthy flavor is the best, Yasu says, because it tastes almost like home.

Yasu comes from a modern Japanese neighborhood surrounded by land and rice paddies. His hometown is famous for Buddhist temples dating back to the seventh and eighth centuries. “One thing I miss here is that I can see the mountains in my hometown, and there aren’t any here,” Yasu says.

Yasu is a doctoral student in the Jacobs School of Music. He became a resident assistant three years ago to save money on housing and food, and now serves as the graduate student in charge of international student housing in the Willkie Residence Center.

“When I first moved to the U.S., I had one suitcase and a backpack,” he says. “And now, my room is just a garbage box.”

Yasu did not bring many reminders of his friends and family to Bloomington. His first year he packed Japanese manga comic books and dual-language guidebooks to help him talk about his culture with English-speaking students. Those books are long gone, but from time to time he checks out manga from the library.

When Yasu goes home, he likes to walk around his neighborhood to see what has changed. New scents greet him each time he enters his family’s garden – last time, it was orange and  pine trees.

Yasu says he can replicate the music of home by watching videos on YouTube. What he can’t reproduce, however, is the osechi, a combination of traditional foods such as boiled vegetables and fish eggs that his mother cooks for the Japanese New Year. He goes home every two or three years during the summer, but he has to stay in Bloomington every winter break because of his job. “I have missed it for nine years,” Yasu says. “I haven’t eaten osechi for nine years.”

As a mentor, Yasu advises others to make a home on campus by getting involved. “The School of Music life is class, practice room, study in room or at the library,” Yasu says. “It’s kind of isolated. I felt like I missed something. I felt like I should have a connection with real life and the community.”