{"id":32842,"date":"2019-06-28T03:50:37","date_gmt":"2019-06-28T10:50:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/?p=32842"},"modified":"2019-06-26T10:39:17","modified_gmt":"2019-06-26T17:39:17","slug":"the-search-for-a-friend","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/2019\/06\/28\/the-search-for-a-friend\/","title":{"rendered":"The search for a friend"},"content":{"rendered":"

Finding Fukue<\/em><\/strong> follows Jessica Stuart\u2019s journey to Japan to find her childhood friend.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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To what lengths would you go to find a childhood friend whose letters stopped coming decades ago? When online searches proved fruitless, Vancouver-born, Toronto-based musician Jessica Stuart headed back to Japan, and her journey is recorded in the CBC Short Docs film Finding Fukue<\/em>, which was produced with Real Stories. Since posted to YouTube last November, the charming and moving documentary has been viewed more than 3.6 million times to date.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I was 9 years old, my parents got English teaching jobs and moved us all to Japan for a year,\u201d shares Stuart as the film starts. Among the images we see are clips of home movies from that year, 1988. \u201cI was a blond kid, and that made me of interest to all the Japanese people because they had never really seen a blond-hair person before,\u201d she says. \u201cThey would point at me or my sister, touch my hair, talk at me; I didn\u2019t understand anything yet. The day after we arrived, I went to school for the first time and then that was crazy. I didn\u2019t feel that anyone was interested in getting to know me, except for one person, and her name was Fukue, and we became best of friends.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Stuarts \u2013 Wendy, Ron and daughters Fiona and Jessica \u2013 settled in Saku, then a small rural village with no foreigners. Now, however, Stuart has to start looking for her friend Fukue in a city of 100,000 people. She visits the elementary school they attended and gets a yearbook, where she gets Fukue\u2019s father\u2019s name and an address from the year 2000, but this leads her to a new development, where she and her translator (for the more complex encounters) meet some women who remember her family but can\u2019t help with finding Fukue.<\/p>\n

At Saku City Hall, a press contingent meets Stuart and she gets the word out on television and in print. Finally, a clerk at City Hall manages to find a phone number for Fukue\u2019s sister, who connects the two friends. The reunions \u2013 first by phone and then in person \u2013 are quite emotional. The two fall into a familiar comfort and get reacquainted. They have kept in touch since.<\/p>\n

The approximately 21-minute film can be found at youtu.be\/ZVlZMOB-Sq0<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Finding Fukue follows Jessica Stuart\u2019s journey to Japan to find her childhood friend. To what lengths would you go to find a childhood friend whose letters stopped coming decades ago? When online searches proved fruitless, Vancouver-born, Toronto-based musician Jessica Stuart headed back to Japan, and her journey is recorded in the CBC Short Docs film […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":32844,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[787],"tags":[3157,985,6010,6685,9090,9028,7387],"class_list":["post-32842","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tv-film","tag-canada","tag-cbc","tag-documentary","tag-friendship","tag-fukue","tag-japan","tag-jessica-stuart"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32842","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32842"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32842\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32844"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32842"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32842"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32842"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}