NIAGARA FALLS — Japan has always been a land of great contrasts.

Cherry blossoms bloom in crowded cities. Serenity floats amidst chaotic streets. Americans who live there often report an undeniable connection to the people of the recently devastated Asian island where citizens are stoically responding to the recent triple tragedy of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear breakdown.

Two with connections to the Niagara region, including Emily Connor who lived in Lewiston and Josh Smith, now living in Grand Island, have recently returned from Japan and shared stories about their lives in what is often called “the land of the rising sun.”

Josh's Story

It’s rather odd to see a young man with an anglo name like Josh Smith pick up an ancient Japanese flute and play it like a master.

Smith, a Grand Island resident, spent the last ten years in Japan teaching English and eventually getting a masters and a doctorate degree in Japanese culture.

While he moved back to the states in October with his Japanese wife and their small daughter --before the earthquake struck -- he and his family are deeply saddened by the disasters that have struck their friends and family.

 Smith first visited as a Buffalo State exchange student after being drawn to the country with an interest stirred by a high school art teacher’s Japanese painting, created in a Zen-like style.

He found the artist’s style fascinating, because, he said, “the part you didn’t paint was just as important as the part you painted.”

He stayed for a year with an elderly couple in Kobay on the outskirts of the Seaport town.

Oddly enough, he didn’t meet his Japanese wife until he returned home to finish his senior year at Buffalo State. He was working in the bookstore when he met Satomi, a Japanese exchange student, when she was shopping at the bookstore where he worked. After he graduated, he returned to Japan to teach English while she finished her studies in Seattle.  They were married in twice, with a ceremony in each country, in 2003.

While Satomi went to work for a trade company in Japan, Josh worked as an English teacher and went to Japanese schools for his masters and doctorate in traditional Japanese culture. While in school he became fluent in the Shakuhatchi, a Japanese bamboo flute, and started performing and teaching that instrument.

The couple lived in Nara, a old, conservative rural area where Josh worried he might not fit in. To his surprise, he and Satomi found the community to be quite welcoming.

“I was accepted because I was so interested in traditional music,” he said, smiling. By the time they had their daughter, Miana, now 2, they had already begun to grow roots in the close-knit community.

So, returning to the states was hard. They did so because Josh hoped to do better for his family.

He believed his years of studying the Japanese language and the country’s history, would serve him better in the United States than in Japan.

Their plans call for building a Japanese themed garden and cultural center on Grand Island, with the help of Josh’s brother, who is currently finishing his horticultural degree. Josh has begun teaching research classes at Buffalo State college and plans to also teach the Shakuhatchi .

As they were settling in to their new lives, they were horrified at the news of the crisis in Japan. This, despite the fact that there had been lots of talk, Josh said, about a possible major earthquake.

Their hometown, Nara, in Northern Japan, is landlocked. Because it is rural, there was less devastation.

There’s a lot of orderliness in Japan,” he explained. Sometimes it can seem redundant and boring ... but at times like this, where there really is chaos there’s a feeling that, ‘well this is the situation, we just have to deal with it.’”

Satomi, whose parents and sister survived the quake without too much hardship, have expressed their country’s gratitude at the aid being sent from the United States.

“Everyone we talked to in Japan said they were so overwhelmed at how quickly America moved to help them,” she said.

The couple also admits they can’t help feeling relieved that they are safe in America, particularly because Satomi is pregnant and radiation levels near their home have been determined to be risky for small children and unborn children.

While the pair believe the triple tragedies will test the endurance of the Japanese people they believe the ancient culture will eventually restore itself.

For Smith, the Japanese cultural endurance can be understood by examining the country’s attachment to nature.

He talked of how the Japanese annually celebrate the blossoming of the cherry trees. The celebrations last about a week, the same amount of time that the blooms decorate the trees.

The fleeting blooms are a symbol Japanese understanding of impermanence of all things, Josh explained.

“You look forward to it. You enjoy it, and then it’s gone. It’s all part of the cycle,” he said. “It will come around again, next year.”

Emily's Story

Kevin Connor fell in love with his daughter Emily’s Japan.

When he visited his 21-year-old daughter in Japan last October, not only was he captivated by the beauty of the country, he also realized his daughter was safer there than just about anywhere else in the world.

“Aside from the earthquake, day in, day out, I’d much prefer to have my daughter in Tokyo, where they let 4-year-old school kids on the subway by themselves,” said Kevin. “There is zero violent crime. It’s one of the most respectful societies I’ve ever seen.”

Emily, born in Lewiston, is described by her father as independent and extremely focused. She taught herself Japanese when she was about 12-years-old, pretty much by playing Japanese video games and watching Anime, a popular form of Japanese animation very popular in the United States.

“I didn't even realize she spoke Japanese until we were in a sushi restaurant in Toronto and she started conversing with chefs as if it was her native tongue,” her father said. “It was just amazing.”

Emily was already becoming a sensation on the Internet before she left to go live on her own in Japan at 17 after a childhood spent moving around the country with her family and attending a variety of schools.

The teenager, bored one day, had posted a video on YouTube, with the only intent being to have a little fun with the whole “record yourself and share it with the world,” mindset.

She made one video in Japanese and one in English. “I made it for my little sister, who was really into Pokemon,” Emily said during a recent interview in her father’s Town of Lockport home. She also made several videos of spin-off characters of herself, including one as a “Goth,” and some as a Japanese language teacher sharing some goofy lessons.

Apparently, young people who patrol the Internet for videos to amuse themselves liked what they saw.

“I woke up one day and there were a 100,000 views,” Emily said, to this day still surprised by the interest strangers have in her homemade productions.

Four years worth of videos stirred the interest of fans from around the world. Currently she has about 45,000 friends on her Facebook page. But, her interest in the YouTube videos has pretty much waned. These days her intent is on her music and she’s finding success there, as well.

Conner’s band, ‘oh sunshine,’ performed recently at the South by Southwest Music Festival in Austin, Texas where a New York Times reviewer cited her group as among the best of the “baby bands.”

It was a coincidence that Connor and her bandmates already had plane tickets to get out of Japan shortly after the earthquake struck.

While she knows many people in Japan she said few were directly touched by the tragedies of the  quake and its aftermath. She does recall the moment the disasters hit as horrific, even though quakes are fairly commonplace in Japan.

“There’s tons of earthquakes in Japan. You feel the shakes every month..

When the latest quake struck, the largest tremors in 1000 years, Emily was inside her Tokyo apartment. “Luckily, I don’t have a lot of stuff in my apartment. Nothing fell,” she said.

She described the quakes that day as much like being in an airplane and experiencing terrible turbulence. During the quakes she talked by phone with her bandmate, guitarist Mikio Hirama, and at his urging, grabbed her most important papers, her cell phone and her laptop and raced to meet him on the open highway nearby. While they never saw the devastation that struck a swath of destruction through the island, they experience twenty or so random quakes for the next two days before they left for the states and Emily described her physical response as something like seasickness.

When asked if she was frightened, she shrugged.

“I’m an extremely neurotic and worried person by nature,” she said with a small smile. “It was pretty awful.”

While she is grateful to be home for a few months, she is looking forward to returning to Japan.

She describes Tokyo as extremely interesting and unique, a hodgepodge of different building styles crammed together, with tall thin buildings that might have as many as nine restaurants stacked on top of each other and thousands of people crossing the street at a single time.

To Emily Connor, it’s home, and she worries constantly about the people there and the impact of the terrible disasters, but remarks on the extraordinary respect the people there have for each other as they begin the work of recovery.

“I love my life in Japan and the people I’m surrounded by and what I do,” she said.

“The people are respectful, the streets are clean and its easy to get around,” she said. “And, they have everything you could ever want.”