Yuka Hayasaka

Yuka is the anti-Japanese. She has brown hair and huge breasts and a smile wider than the Mississippi and English that she plucks out of thin air and strings together like exotic beads. The first time I met her she wrapped me up in a great bear hug and I melted like an icicle on a warm day.

I got to know her through the most tenuous of connections… the acquaintance of a friend of a friend. Long before she ever laid eyes on me she offered to let me film her taiko team practicing and then to take me on the road with them.

Yuka is 23, and plays drums professionally. She lives in Oguni, a small town that has the dubious distinction of getting dumped on by more snow than just about anywhere south of the polar cap. She drives like a maniac, can drink three men under the table, and would give her last dime to almost anyone who asked for it. She’d be the perfect girlfriend but she has terrible taste in men.

Many Japanese have told me that they wouldn’t consider someone a "friend" until they had known them for at least a year. Five minutes after meeting Yuka I was seriously considering moving to her tiny town up in the mountains, and she and her friends would have welcomed me.

Getting to know her was like coming home.

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