Across the night sky, a belt of bright stars stretches. The Milky Way is called ”Amanogawa” in Japanese, meaning the river in heaven. This story tells of two star-crossed lovers: one is a weaver on one side of the river, and the other is a farmer on the other side. They work diligently, waiting to see each other once a year. Let's wish clear sky for their reunion and make your own wish, a teacher in an elementary school said. We decorated bamboo with paper ornaments and wrote wishes on strips of paper. The wind blows through the bamboo leaves, making a light, dry sound in the sky.
We are all made from stardust, a physics professor told us. Hydrogen, carbon, oxygen - the materials that constitute us - are ordinary throughout the universe. Elements lighter than iron are synthesized in stars, then squashed into heavier elements in extreme heat and pressure in supernovae. The explosion scatters those newly-forged elements into space as gas and dust clouds. Eventually, gravity gathers these scattered elements to form solar systems, like where we live. We live on the edge of the Milky Way galaxy, which is shaped like a rotating disk.
Later, we looked up at the stars from a mountain in Wakayama during summer school. Deep in the mountains away from city lights, the sky was already dark. When the facility lights were turned off, we found ourselves surrounded by thousands of stars twinkling all over the sky. All of these stars are the results of past or ongoing star formation processes.
The Milky Way took my breath away, it was the brightest I had ever seen. The legendary river literally flowed from one end of the sky to the other. I was astonished, and then a question hit me. Wait - why do the legendary river from elementary school and our galaxy have the same name? Is our galaxy somehow named after the river story? I thought for a few seconds… Oh. OH. They're the same thing. The "river” I'd been wishing on my whole childhood was actually the galaxy we live in, seen from the inside. I could finally see why the rotating disk looked like this - since we're viewing the disc from the side edge, it looks like a belt. That understanding made me see myself as part of the universe - a process far vaster and longer than my small wishes about test scores. Yet even those personal concerns have their place, just as each element plays its part in the cosmic cycle. The story was no longer a distant legend to wish upon, but something we're actively creating as part of the universe's ongoing process.
