About Me — Bart Emanuel
A.K.A. bakagaijin, 馬鹿外人 — (a stupid, foolish, dull, or ridiculous foreigner, especially one of European descent).
I was born in Texas, moved to Japan when I was six months old, and lived mostly there for the next sixteen years. I say mostly because we spent a year in the U.S. every 4–5 years. For me, these were for First Grade / the First year of Primary School (Middlesboro, in the very southeast corner of Kentucky), Seventh Grade / the First year of Middle School (Muskogee, in the Eastern part of Oklahoma), and 12th Grade / the Senior year of High School, in Knoxville, in the Eastern part of Tennessee).
I don’t think my parents intended for it to be that way, but each of these years happened to coincide with what I think of as potentially important years in any young human’s growth.
For me, the experience was one of being wrenched away from home, from comfort, and from all the people I knew, and being inserted into a very foreign place (America was a foreign place to me at the time), with total strangers who thought (and spoke) differently than I did.
Of course, there was also a sense of adventure and excitement in travel, and in going to new places, especially since my American parents tried to give our family some knowledge of what America was.
As it happened, the America they knew as they were growing up in Kentucky and Oklahoma was changing.
This was the ’60s and ‘70s, and the themes of racial injustice, social unrest, equality for all people, and for all sexes, the questionable morality of our involvement in Vietnam were prominently felt by all of us who experienced that time.
What I learned early in my life was this: the world today will never be the same place it seemed to be yesterday.
I look back fondly on the years I spent at my school in Japan, the Canadian Academy, in Kobe. You can read a little about it in the early chapters of my book, “The Family Business,” which are mostly biographical.
In 1976 I graduated from High School, and my family left me two weeks later at my dormitory at the University of Tennessee to begin my studies there. My family went back to Japan, where my parents continued their work as Southern Baptist missionaries.
For the first time in my life, I felt freedom. It was as if a big weight had suddenly been lifted from my chest. I was eager to experience all those things that had been, up until that point, taboo, or that I thought had been taboo.
I found that I had a lot of catching up to do with my peers. It was exciting, but I both loved it and hated it, and left after three years, for a great number of reasons, not the least being a need to get out of one place and see the world.
I joined the Navy to see the world, and I did. After boot camp, I was sent to the Defense Language Institute to learn Russian. Monterey, California. To me, this was paradise. I loved it.
I ended up spending nine years in the Navy. I found myself. I got to see the world. I earned my “dolphins,” in submarines, and my “wings” as an aircrewman flying on reconnaissance missions. I was good at what I did, and I knew I was doing something important.
I got to live in Japan again, as an adult.
Along the way, I fell in and out of love, finished my degree, met the love of my life, Nancy, got married, moved, started a family, and moved again.
I left the Navy because it was time to go, found a job in High Tech, continued to travel the world, and saw my kids grow up and start their own lives away from ours.
Now, here we are, empty nesters looking forward to Retirement, living in Virginia in a big house with two dogs and three cats.
“Wait,” you may ask, “what about the rest of the stuff you just glossed over?”
Well, that’s a story still waiting to be told. You can catch glimpses of it here, in “My Life in Vignettes”
And to get a glimpse into the inventor in me:
If you are enjoying my stories, I’d like to encourage you to sign-up for a Medium membership, for unlimited access to these and a world of wonderful stories by many talented writers. It’s likely much less than you think! Take a look, here: https://medium.com/membership/@bartemanuel
