When I first arrived in Japan, in January 1978, I did not imagine that I was about to begin the study of a country and a people that would captivate me for the rest of my life. Australia, where I grew up, was still resolutely Eurocentric. At the girls' school I had attended, French and German were the only foreign languages offered. There were no courses, or even parts of courses, on Asian art, history, or religion; I knew almost nothing about Japan. It was a shock, therefore, to arrive at Haneda Airport in the middle of winter from the heat and light of Australian summer, and to face the fact that I couldn't speak a word of Japanese. How was I going to survive?
　　I needn't have worried. My sponsors, the Gifu Rotary Club, had arranged for me to stay with six different families over the year, and at each I was looked after with rare sympathy and forbearance. Looking back, I am moved by how graciously they all coped with the ignorant seventeen-year-old girl who came to live with them. My host families ranged across a broad social spectrum: I began at the home of a dentist and his wife; moved to a small company employee's home; then a handbag shop, where we lived behind and upstairs from the shop. The summer was spent with a wealthy family in Nagoya. In the autumn I returned to Gifu and lived with a man who described himself as a professional pachinko player, and his wife who worked at a department store. The three generations of my last host family ran an inn on the banks of the Nagara River. I attended the same school throughout the year, the St Mary's Convent, run by Spanish and Japanese nuns.
　　 My host parents all had vivid and painful memories of the war years. Most of my host fathers had been too young to fight, but there was one who had slipped into northern Australia as a spy, another who had enlisted in a Kamikaze squadron, and a third who had been drafted into a student battalion. One of my host mothers had grown up in Japanese-occupied Korea; another had survived the fire-bombing of Gifu at the end of the war. It seems to me now that for that generation of Japanese, agreeing to host a young person from a former enemy nation may have been one way of creating something positive, something lasting, to make up for all that had been destroyed and lost during those terrible years.
　　 My year as an exchange student in Gifu changed the direction of my life. After I went back to Australia, I decided to major in Japanese at university, and later I returned to Japan several times for further study. I'm still happily studying Japanese literature―thanks to that first year in Gifu.