Ten Years

I settled in Hong Kong today ten years ago (23 June 1996). Well, I am not surprised that I have been in this former British colony for ten years as I fell in love with her when I visited her for the first time in 1995.

My first visa to Hong Kong issued by British Embassy, Tokyo ten years ago.
I came to Hong Kong just a year before its handover from the U.K. to China.

But I am surprised by how distant my former home has become. I have not been back in Japan already for five years so far. Although I recently planned to go back there for a short visit, I decided not to go because I could feel any familiarity to the country anymore. It is already not a country where I can go back but more like a foreign country...

Well, I felt I was back when my plane landed on Hong Kong International Airport after my last visit to Japan in the summer of 2001. It was two years before I beame the citizen of this city.

Tears well up in my eyes whenever I look back my past ten years in Hong Kong.

I covered the entrance of the People's Liberation Army to the last British colony in Asia few hours before her handover to China (at 9:00 p.m. on 30 June 1997) as a reporter.

Then I got an opportunity to support Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) government midst of the Asian Financial Crisis in 1998 again as a reporter. Writing about the SAR's ability and determination to maintain Hong Kong dollar's stability, I felt as if I had been a war correspondent. I started to identify as a Hong Konger-to-be that time.

But nothing makes me cry more than the memories from the SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) crisis of 2003. The epidemic of this mystery disease depressed the entire city. But the courage of heroic medical workers and kindness of Hong Kong people under the crisis made me love this city even more...

I was granted the permanent residency, the quasi-citizenship, of SAR after the worst crisis she had ever experienced after her liberation from the Japanese occupation in 1945.

So now I feel Hong Kong is the only place for me to go back, if I go out of it. Well, then I should have written this in Chinese, though...