And one story that always kind of captures my imagination.

The street's lost culture.

And you're listening to Kearning cultures.

So, what do we have today?

Today we want to understand how people, how a nation that's polarized,

can reconcile. And to do that, we're going to share a few stories from Bahrain, a tiny island

country in the Gulf, close to Qatar, and then hop up across the water to Northern Ireland,

and that'll become clear why we're going there when we get to it. I'm Hibbe

Fisher. I'm Rezana al-Zayani, and you're listening to Kearning Cultures. Let's start somewhere in the

middle, in Japan. I was studying in Japan. This is Yaquub, a Bahraini who spent a few years studying for his master's in Japan.

In a city called Nagoya.

It's in the main island of Japan.

It's headquarters for a Toyota company.

The year is 2011, and there are revolutions across the Arab world.

In Tunis, in Egypt.

Obviously, that was a very crazy time, so I was stuck to my laptop the whole day, day and night,

and I didn't get much sleep. You know, you're just following Egypt, you're following everywhere.

At the time where all of these events were happening, in Japan we also had a big disaster,

which was the East Japan earthquake

with Fukushima and everything. The death toll has risen to 4,314. At least 8,606 people are still missing.

More than two-thruing water would swept people away. So you have these debris. The earthquake causes a leak in a nuclear reactor in Fukushima, a nearby city to Ya'aqub.

Malfunctions are occurring at the power plant near Tokyo and a facility in Onagawa.

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