pashon?

sou, to do this thing called tutorial college next year i have to do an application, and the options for essay were:

1. write about a book you have always wanted to read but haven't. why would you like to read this book?

2. what is your passion? write about it.

3. if you had teh chance to devote three months to studying whatever you'd like to study, what would you choose to do? etc etc

I chose number 2, as I think myself a passionate person. Thoughts? Comments? Anything?

My Passion

The late July humidity still hung over Kyoto like a vast, all-encompassing wool blanket, but after three weeks there I only noticed it in the back of my mind. Wiping sweat off of my brow had become second nature, like scratching an itch or popping my ears when I go up into high altitude. The backpack hanging on my shoulders was heavy, full of last-minute gifts my host family, the Yanagiharas, had given me before I left their narrow urban home across the street from train tracks leading into downtown. As wiping my forehead had become second nature, sleeping through the numerous late-night trains and trams racing down those tracks had also become habit. My first night there, surrounded by electric fans and foreign walls, I had woken up countless times because of these trains, but my last night I slept soundly through them.
There on the platform at Kyoto Station with me were 18 fellow American travelers, and many of their host families’ members. Representing the Yanagihara family was my host mother (who signs her emails to me “Kyoto mama”), my host brother Takuma, and my host mother’s father, who lived with the family.
He hadn’t said much to me in my days living under the same roof as him, save for a few comments about our mutual interest in baseball, and when he was drunk at a restaurant we went out to. The family only went out to dinner three times a year, I was told, and as if they hadn’t made me feel welcome enough, they decided to schedule one of those three times while I was living with them. After my host-grandfather had had a few sakes, he gregariously looked at me and commended my ability to drink an Asahi beer. Beyond those few times, he was stoic and said very little.
Although the program wasn’t set up with this goal in mind, I became closer with my host mother than I did my host brother. When I showed her a picture of my family during my first hour in their house, she showed a genuine interest in these perfect strangers as I had never seen in someone I knew, let alone someone I just met. I showed them the gifts I had brought from America, and she received them as if they were undeserved, as if they would not be sharing their home with me for 10 days, feeding me, showing me the real Japan. We talked, using their electronic dictionary for the harder words, about my life back in America, what I wanted to study in college, her family, her husband (whom I never met; he was doing agricultural cultivation projects in China), and how we felt about the chances for peace in the world. This last topic may surprise many people, as my Japanese was good but certainly not academic, and her English almost nonexistent. How we reached this subject, I honestly do not remember. In my Japanese classes we usually did not get beyond what we liked, what we planned on doing that weekend, what we wanted to be when we grew up, basically, things that you talk about with three years worth studying a language. But somehow our conversations came to being about different cultures getting along, people with opposing opinions accepting each other, and being able to communicate through these obstacles. I had had much experience with this in my time in Israel studying the Israelis conflict with Palestine, and she told of her and her husband’s relations with China, with whom Japan has had serious issues for centuries, and were just at that time beginning once again to come to the forefront.
I put down my suitcase and bowed deeply to her, and then I gave her a hug. I took a step back, and I could see she was trying to say something, but both she and I knew that the things we each wanted to say to each other would most likely not be understood. She patted her heart with her hand, and said to me “Onaji kimochi ne. Wakarimasu ne.” We have the same feeling, I know it. In this foreign land for me, with a student she’d only just met, we made that connection. Without a common language, heritage, religion, background, age, or future, we found a way to communicate, so much so that we didn’t even have to talk to understand each other. We had made a living example of that which we had wished for the world. It wasn’t verbal or physical, and it wasn’t there when I first arrived in the Far East. But gradually it grew into me; somewhere in Japan I found it, even if it was as imperceptible as a bullet train passing by a house in the silence of night.
That is my passion.