As I wrote in a previous post, a very close acquaintance of mine from the same apartment building will be stationed in Europe for a few months starting in June this spring. Hearing this story has awakened my desire to tour abroad, which had been virtually impossible due to the recent long Corona disaster. I remembered that my first overseas tour was the one I had ventured to go on during my last free summer vacation in dental school. I opened an old packet that contained all the documents from that time, and found that it was a month-long trip from July 18 to August 16, 1975, via Paris to London, followed by 2 weeks of language training in Oxford, a famous university city in the suburbs, and then 2 weeks of free travel using a round-the-Europe ticket (Eurail pass). I then traveled freely for two weeks using a round-trip European ticket (Eurail pass).
Looking back, I am amazed at how I dared to take such a daring trip abroad when I was a poor student. I grew up in a single-parent household, and my mother had died of cancer five years earlier at the age of 21, so I was a struggling student who had to support myself by working part-time as a tutor. Fortunately, however, I received many requests for tutoring and tutoring at private tutoring schools, and before I knew it, I was earning at the same level as a college graduate’s starting salary. (According to data I found on the Internet, the starting salary for a college graduate at that time was about 90,000 yen, or about 160,000 yen in today’s currency.)
By 1975, when I was in my fifth year of dental school, I had built up some savings. I looked up the cost of a one-month trip to Europe in the currency value of the time in a European travel guidebook that I happened to have left behind. As an example, it shows a 24-day tour that cost 570,000 yen.
The tour I participated in was organized by the University Co-op and I think it was somewhat inexpensive, but I think it would have cost about 500,000 yen because it included two weeks of language training in Oxford in the first half of the tour and a train ticket (Eurail pass) for a round-trip tour of Europe. (In today’s currency, the cost is about 1.8 times that amount, so in today’s terms, it would be about 900,000 yen.)
I am amazed at how much money I was able to save from my many part-time jobs while I was busy with practical training and raising money to pay for expensive medical textbooks and training materials. I look back and think that it was also bold of me to take an overseas trip that would probably exhaust my savings.
Looking back on my feelings at the time, I think it was above all the yearning I had for the lands of Europe and America that I had felt through my studies of English-speaking cultures from my time in the English Department. I think I was motivated first and foremost by a strong desire to see these places with my own eyes. Perhaps it was the privilege of being young, but in the midst of Japan’s rapid economic growth at the time, I was not anxious about the future, and I was extremely optimistic that once I graduated from dental school, the rest would take care of itself.
He also had a strong feeling that he should make the most of this last chance he had as a student. I was almost convinced that once I graduated from dental school and started my working life as a dentist, I would never have the chance to take such a long vacation and broaden my global perspective. And I believe I was not mistaken in my judgment at that time. Thereafter, I had several opportunities to participate in academic conferences abroad and to go on short sightseeing trips with my family, but all of them were for a hectic schedule of about one week at most. Above all, I think that the precious one month that I spent in actual contact with a society different from Japan’s when I was a young adolescent with lessened sensibilities was an irreplaceable experience.
Now, just looking back on the circumstances of my first overseas tour as a nostalgic student, I could go on for quite a few words. I would like to write more about my specific memories of that trip.
