A Picture of the World After Death hr673

 

There was a local temple one block away from my home in my hometown. The temple wasn't a grand splendid kind that often appeared in sightseeing brochures, but a small somber one that seemed more like a meeting place of a hamlet. People in my hamlet regularly used it for various kinds of assembly, such as a parishioners' meeting, a sutra reading practice of elders, and funeral prayers. It had the cemetery in the yard where stone statues of a guardian deity of children lined up. My mother used to take my sister and me there to pray at the statues. In the old days, those local temples in Japan served as family history keepers for the residents of the area. People would use a temple to examine the other family when their daughters or sons were getting married. For so many purposes, the local temple was deeply integrated with the residents' daily lives when I was a child.

During those days, an assembly for children living in the hamlet was held annually in the temple every summer. Grandmothers would take their grandchildren to the temple where the monk preached and handed a bag of candies and snacks. A hall of the temple had a large wall picture that depicted the world after death with an ancient eerie fearful touch. The dead cross a river that separates this world and the next. They meet one by one a humongous fiend with a horrifying face who judges them according to their deeds in their lifetime. A dead person who lies to the fiend is to get their tongue pulled out. Some of the dead climb above clouds where heaven is, and some are kicked off down to a pit where hell is. In hell, the dead are boiled in a caldron or burned by lurid fire. Grown-ups told the children that they would end up there if they did evil. I suppose the picture would be regarded as inappropriate for children if it were now, for the reason of giving them a traumatic memory.

There is a proverb in Japan that is 'Hell and heaven exists in this life.' As it says, innocent people get killed every day and less fortunate people endure scarce suffering days that make them feel as if they are being boiled in a caldron. Looking back, I also had some experiences in which I felt as if I had been in hell. Especially when my parents deceived me and destroyed my music business, I writhed in agony with anger and grief. I duly agree from my own experiences that hell exists in this life, but then, where in this life does heaven exist?

I have some possible instances that I can think of. When I completed one of my songs after almost ten years with my aimed quality and no compromise, I burst into laughter with tears rolling down on my cheeks, feeling like I was floating toward the sky with extreme happiness. Also, whenever I acknowledge someone purchased, downloaded and read my book somewhere, my heart gets warm and is shined with a sense of happiness even though it pays me a dollar or so. I think people can be in heaven in this life when what they are engrossed in by doing their best is rewarded somewhat, even a little, after they go through many kinds of hardships.

We don't have to wait for the end of this life since we can be either in heaven or hell today. At least we can decide which place to walk toward today. Even if hope and despair always coexist and fall on us as a set whenever we strive for what we want, I would rather keep trying and head for heaven. An image of hell that was shown in the picture of the temple remains in my brain and still scares me. I just don't want to be in a place like that. 

Welcome to the Real World hr672

 

In the mid-80’s, flashy, rhythmic songs were dominant throughout the Japanese pop music scene. It may have had to do with the Japanese bubble economy which sent the nation frivolous and on a spree. The kind of songs that influenced me by touching and reaching my heart had been no longer the mainstream.

My partner and I moved to Tokyo to be professional singer-songwriters just in those days. While we continued to search for the band members, we were aggressively sending out our demo tapes to the major record companies. In addition, my partner was visiting the companies in person to hand out the demos. Since we didn’t have any connections or acquaintances there, my partner would sneak through the reception, get into the elevator to the production department floor by mingling with other employees, circle around the desks of the staff with saying, “Please listen to my demo tape.” Most office workers made a face and refused, but there was rarely someone among them who showed him a person he had better turn to, or actually listened to the tape. My partner had routinely visited the production department in all the major record companies in Tokyo in that way and consequently acquired some connections with producers.

One day, a producer introduced to him the in-house competition for a debut song of the company’s contracted idol singer. He allowed my partner to join other contracted songwriters and enter the competition with a song written for the singer. We would get a contract if the song was selected. Until then, we had written songs exclusively for ourselves and had never even imagined writing for other singers. While I had no interest in it at all, my partner gave it a try to use this opportunity as a footing for our possible record deal. He wrote quite a few songs for the idol singer and submitted the best one to the competition. Several weeks later, the producer called him for a meeting where he was told that his song wasn’t selected. The producer let him listen to the selected one. He couldn’t accept the result because the selected song was a disaster. When he asked the producer to point out at least one thing that was superior to his own song, he couldn’t answer.

That was a too familiar instance of what we had experienced about our songs. Whenever we got some advice or opinions from music producers, they sounded irrelevant and off-base. They made us fail the audition or told us our songs were not good, and gave us unconvincing reasons that were out of the point. To sum up, so-called ‘music producers’ of the major Japanese record companies were simply office workers who graduated from the renowned university and happened to like music as a hobby. We, on the other hand, had bet our life on music, had thought about nothing other than music all day and had striven to create better music every day for almost a decade. It was natural we didn’t click with each other as the depth of passion for music was too far different. The more I got involved with the Japanese music business, the more I learned how important aspects of looks, impact, and trends were, much more than quality and creativity.

In fact, it happened so many times that when we got a call from a producer who listened to our songs and liked them, he instantly lost interest the moment he saw our looks at the first meeting. We often brought our own marketing ideas about how we should be produced and promoted, which also made them turn us away. It seemed that they wanted musicians to be beautiful puppets with no brains.

I was naive enough to believe that making better songs would open the door to a contract with a record company. However, that wasn’t true to reality. In reality, the Japanese music industry had become trashy and petty. The question was, if I would give up being a professional singer-songwriter then. Since singing and writing songs was the only thing that I was good at, I couldn’t afford to quit trying. Besides, I still believed that there must have been people who wanted to listen to the songs that could save them by touching their hearts and changing their life, just as those songs did to me once. Now that the Japanese music scene had deteriorated in the real world, sending out that kind of songs was necessary all the more. Although I knew there must have been a way to do so, I couldn’t figure out how to find it. And so it went, the struggle stuck, clutched, and pursued my partner and me all along in those early days of my career.

The Unhappy at the Happiest Place hr671

 

Looking back, the bottom of my life was several years in the mid-80’s when I left my hometown and came to live in Tokyo where I was struggling for success as a musician. While I was working part-time for a living, I was making songs, looking for band members, doing gigs and selling our demos to the record companies. Those days were so energy-consuming without any luck that my mind and body had been both tuckered out. I began to drink and smoke.

It happened at the theme park in the Tokyo area which host was the mouse. I had been working part-time as an attraction cast member at the park that was newly opened only a few years back. Because it was in the midst of the Japanese holiday week, the park was quite crowded. The attraction where I worked had a full house all day and a long waiting line continued. When I was introducing the attraction over the PA system at the holding area inside, I saw a group of three peevishly-looking men in their late twenties eating popcorn. After I put down the microphone, I approached them and gently with a smile asked not to eat inside, which was strictly instructed as a working procedure. Then I noticed they were sitting on a swung chain in front of the mural painting. I went to them and again asked not to because the chain was easily detached from the poles thus dangerous, which was also what the cast member was strictly told to do. The whole thing originated with these two trivial incidents.

Next to the holding area was the preshow area where the short movie was shown. In the middle of the movie, I saw some people open the door and enter the next theater, which was prohibited. I followed them into the theater where the main attraction was. They were the same men who had infringed the attraction rules at the holding area. I politely asked them to return to the preshow or go out as they weren’t allowed to skip the process. One of them said to me angrily, “You have kept telling me not to do this and that all the way! Stop that already!” They refused what I asked and tried to stay in the main theater. I explained the preshow would end merely in about a few minutes and asked them to go back. Then he yelled at me, “Shut up, ugly!”

The word ‘ugly’ had been a cue for me since I was a child. I battered a boy who uttered the word to me at elementary school. Even in my adult life, I once tried to strangle a middle-aged hoodlum and push him over the bridge-rail down to the river. In that case, I was carrying all the musical instruments and walking slowly when the man yelled at me from behind, “Walk fast!” I turned around and explained why I couldn’t do so with a heavy burden, and he said, “Don’t bar the way, ugly!” Probably because of my complex, I easily lost control whenever somebody told me ‘ugly’.

The man’s cue at the theme park made me thrust him with my both hands. He fired up as well and shouted, “Violence! Violence here!” Next moment, I found myself punching him. He looked surprised and terrified, then repeated like a child, “Violence! I was hit by an employee!” Other cast members came running toward us. Without a word, I left the attraction for the break area where I smoked a Camel.

Nobody came to me and I returned to work after I pulled myself together half an hour or so later. Neither the supervisor nor my colleagues mentioned the incident. They acted perfectly as if nothing had happened. They behaved similarly the next day, too, except for a distant attitude. Since it was in those times when companies’ awareness of compliance was low and social media where people upload their video clips was yet to come, the incident didn’t raise a fuss. Even so, I didn’t feel relieved not to be fired. I just felt sorry for the mouse who was the host of the park, that I did violence at my favorite place. I noticed how low I had gotten as a person. The sense I needed to clean up my act and change led me to quit the job soon after the incident.

I am so ashamed of my past self. I couldn’t, and still can’t, forgive my behavior. Just because I was unhappy, I shouldn’t have taken it out to others. I realized I was a foolish punk myself, and bitterly hated myself for that. The decision to quit the job was the new cue to try to become a better person. What I didn’t see was that the cue consequently turned my life for the better. I thought I was completely cornered and resigned to live at the bottom, not knowing I had gotten out of the worst already.

A Long Way to Freedom hr670

 

I have started a video Podcast.

A complex about looks resides in me always, all my life. When I was a child, my mother used to say, “If only you don’t have a nose like that,” by shading my nose with her hand. She daily instructed me that the only way for me to make it through in this society was to be affable to anyone since I wasn’t pretty. Adding to the piggy nose, I was fat, and given a constant notion from my mother that I was ugly. Although I had a dream to be a singer, the complex about being ugly led me to switch my dream to be a radio personality that could hide looks. Then, while I had been suffering many more bitter experiences of my looks mainly at school as a teenager that relentlessly implied my ugliness, there came a big music trend in Japan, in which singer-songwriters who didn’t have good looks and abstained from TV appearances made big hits. I saw a new path appear in front of me. My dream to be a singer was back on and with my own songs this time.

Sadly, that music trend didn’t last long. By the time I got down to pursue my music career in earnest, the trend had died out and good looks had been required for singer-songwriters as well. Although many record companies and music producers contacted me when they listened to my songs that I sent to them, they turned down the offer as soon as they saw me at the first meeting. I had tried to hide my looks as much as possible in the course of my career as a musician because they would work adversely. My complex had deepened further.

I am vain by nature. I grew up hearing my mother say that the most important thing is how we look to others. It seems I’m unable to break her spell. While my life has been a long journey to fix my flaws and complexes, the biggest obstacle is my vanity. I thought it was about time to face off. Now that I’m no longer young, my vanity has been forced to be compromised drastically. Aging has made my looks even worse, my moves clumsier, my careless mistakes more frequent. I’m too old to care about good looks that are way out of my reach now. To get rid of the complex by beating my vanity once and for all, I decided to take on a video Podcast that would reveal my bad looks to the public.

I connected my microphone into my computer and set a photo shoot light that I newly bought. The light got broken quickly and the microphone didn’t work properly on the computer. I ended up shooting with my smartphone. Although I had recorded several Podcasts without a picture for some time, doing on video is a whole different business. Sitting in front of a smartphone with makeup and good clothes feels as if I were in front of others. Because I’m not social, I easily get extremely tense and can’t talk as I usually do. On every recording, I sweat all over from tension. Sometimes my head goes blank and I just stare into space while opening and closing my mouth that utters nothing. I begin to get nervous a couple of days before the recording and feel like running away by the time I start shooting.

However, I feel surprisingly refreshed when I finish, and I want to do more. Since it appears to work as therapy for my social phobia and stage fright too, I think I had better continue. Above all, it helps me to be free from my mother’s spell though it took so long. I should be content to show myself as I am even if nobody watches or I look hideous or I can’t speak as I intend to. And I hope that recording becomes enjoyable for me someday. That would be the day when I have overcome my complex and have won this battle. 

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~Talking and Reading from Japan by Hidemi Woods~

video Podcast: [ Youtube ] [ spotify ]

Podcast: [ Amazon Music ] [Apple Podcast] [Castbox]

For Myself Rather Than for the Earth hr669

 

I am stingy. I switch off the lights, turn off a faucet, and shut the refrigerator door as soon as I finish using them. I mend holey socks and replace loose elastic strings on pajama pants instead of buying new ones. Whether at home or at a restaurant, I never leave food on my plate. I finish drinks completely, too. People in Japan where I live tend to leave a small amount of drinks in a glass at a restaurant as if it were good manners. I strongly oppose it.

I assume my stinginess had been nurtured by my grandparents who raised me. They were super duper stingy for whom I can be no match. Basically our house was in darkness because they wouldn’t use electricity. Even at dinner time, we turned on the least necessary light for the table and ate our house-grown vegetables mainly. My grandparents were neither vegetarians nor poor. They were quite wealthy for that matter. They lived like that because they wanted to. Being thrifty was their principle.

My grandmother spent most of her day mending something. I don’t recollect that she ever bought new clothes. She was wearing old kimonos that she had kept patching or sewing up a rent for years. If one of her kimonos got to the state where it was too tattered to be worn, it transformed into dusters by her. She mended old futons to keep using, stitched up old towels to make them dust cloths, and washed used disposable plastic bowls of instant noodles to use them as pots for plants in the front yard. She never wasted anything and hardly threw away anything. The scary thing was, she was an amateur compared to her husband.

My grandfather was wearing old shoes with a hole and a worn-out jacket with drooping front pockets when he went out. At the department store, he would exclaim in a loud voice, “How expensive!” on every merchandise he saw, and go home without shopping for anything although he had plenty of money. He used to take me with him there when I was little and I hated to be with him as I was so embarrassed at his behavior. He sometimes ate out on his way home from an errand and often took leftovers home with him in a doggie bag. He would give it to me as if it had been a nice souvenir. Inside of the bag were always meager pieces of food, some of which were half bitten off. I was impressed by his courage to ask the server for a doggie bag to take this kind of leftover each time. I couldn’t figure out how it was possible that he wasn’t embarrassed or ashamed but proud of what he was doing. He just didn’t care what people thought about him or how he looked to them. He was confident in what he did and how he looked. His attitude appeared that his way was the right one and others’ were wrong. With that belief in his mind, he enjoyed his way immensely.

Lately, I feel that the times have been catching up with my stinginess. As companies and governments have promoted high-sounding agendas such as a sustainable society or an eco-friendly environment, more and more people are considering food loss and energy conservation. They are shopping by bringing their reusable eco bags and using old stuff instead of throwing them away. But I sense my way is slightly different from others. I am stingy not for public interest. It’s simply my natural way that I like to take. I may look embarrassing and laughable to others, but I would rather be true to myself. I don’t think it’s worth giving up our true selves by prioritizing how we look to others over what we really want to be. And I suppose my grandparents felt the same way. I have finally been made to realize that.

Good and Evil hr668

 I haven’t seen my parents for about five years now. When I saw them last time, they were in their late seventies and my mother told me an episode for a giggle. It goes as follows.

During a recent trip my parents took, they went along the highway beside a lake by car. They found a signboard that advertised a tour boat on the lake. It was already late afternoon but they thought it was still early to check in the hotel. They decided to drop by the lake for the sightseeing boat. When they pulled up their car, the staff at the ticket window was closing the tour boat office and the boat crew who had just returned from the last tour of the day was leaving the boat. My mother jumped on the staff and asked for the tour. The staff replied that today’s tours had been over and told her to come back tomorrow. That was the point where my mother unleashed her specialty. A fabrication.

“My husband and I are an old frail couple who came all the way from a very far place just to get on this boat. We had been looking forward to sightseeing this lake by boat so much for a long time. It’s extremely disappointing not to be able to get aboard. We arrived here later than we had planned because we couldn’t drive fast due to our age. We won’t have enough time tomorrow to come back here. If anything, I’m not sure if we could come back here ever again because we’re too old.”

In this made-up story of hers, there is not a jot of truth but all lies. However, the kind staff bought her fake misery and talked to the captain of the boat. He willingly untied the mooring rope and prepared the boat especially for my parents. They monopolized the entire boat as if it had been their charter tour. After she told this to me who was downright disgusted throughout the whole story, she added that although the tour had been boring and the lake hadn’t been appealing, she had exulted in her deed by which she made the staff work overtime just for her and my father and made the staff go home late that day. It appeared that she was proud of what she did to them since it showed how clever she was to take advantage of them. My father was smiling and nodding amusingly.

My parents are evil. They haven’t changed as they became older. My mother never stops deceiving people whether she gains benefits or not. Benefit doesn’t matter to her but deceiving is her purpose even if she would suffer a loss in return. Too many times I have seen her do harm by lying to her family, acquaintances and strangers alike. It seems someone’s unhappiness is her only pleasure. As her child, I have had more than enough share of suffering by her lies. It started by what she had kept teaching me as far as I can remember as her mantra that was all the people in the world were evil and they spoke ill of  me behind my back while they seemed nice. When I was hospitalized in a children’s ward for nephritis, she came to see me mere half an hour before the visiting hour was over at night and went home hurriedly though she promised she would come early afternoon everyday. A thorough examination day was scheduled for me at the hospital and I earnestly begged her to come early for once and accompany me because I was nervous and the nurse also urged my mother to do so. She made a promise, and of course she broke it and didn’t show up. The nurse accompanied me in place of my mother the whole day through numerous kinds of examinations. When they finished and I got back to my ward, my mother was sitting beside my empty bed, not apologetically but satisfactorily. Beside these instances, I was hurt by my mother’s constant lies, big and small. Worst of all, I couldn’t help trying to believe her while I duly knew she was lying, which enhanced my disappointment. As I grew older, her lies to me got more fierce thus the damage resulted bigger. My father is her puppet who does whatever she tells him to do and connives at her lying. Eventually they ruined my business and then stole my money. I learned a lesson in a hard way before I estranged myself from them and finally cut them off. We haven’t been in touch for years.

Although I sustained irretrievable damage from my mother a million times, I feel envious every time I see a mother and a daughter hanging together. I always wonder if there’s such a thing as good parents in this world when I watch the award show on TV and the recipients mention gratitude toward their supportive parents in their speeches. It sounds more implausible than envious to me. On my part, I want to think that a child from evil parents can grow into a good person. I sincerely try to prove it by being good myself.

Something Never Obsolete hr667

 There are many things that used to be common and have become obsolete now. In Japan where I was born and grew up, an analog calculator called ‘soroban’, a Japanese abacus, had been so popular and seen everywhere when I was a child. Almost every store and household had one and even the elementary school had mandatory classes for the fourth grader to teach how to use it so that students needed to buy it. Most stores in my neighborhood used it as a register. It had been a major tool to calculate until an electronic calculator appeared.

Private soroban schools were abounding accordingly. It was a common practice that students went there after school. In my neighborhood, all children who had learned the multiplication table attended the soroban school. I was one of them. The school was the teacher’s house located right next to my house which was actually part of my family’s premise that we rented him. The class was held twice a week, in which students with different grades and ages sat side by side on the floor and practised soroban on the long narrow low desks elbow to elbow.

Soroban has a national certification system that officially certifies a grade by an examination held regularly . After learning the basics, students would take the examination to get grade certification that started from the level six. The lesser the number, the higher the grade. For some reason, I was extremely good at soroban that required speed and accuracy. I was able to finger the beans on a soroban faster and more precisely than anybody else. I acquired the certification with one try straight from the level six to the level three, which made me the youngest level three holder at the age of ten. The school had never had a student who achieved that before me, and another girl named Junko. We were the same age, got in the school on the same day, and made this achievement at the same time.

Junko was the opposite of me except for skill in a soroban. She was pretty, thin, considerate, and from a poor family. She once suspended and ruined her timed session at the soroban school just to hand me tissues when I had a nosebleed next to her. When I was waiting for the soroban class to begin in front of the school with her and my mother came out of the house to hit me, she helped me run away by carrying my soroban bag and following me. She was the one who taught me how to ride a bicycle in place of my busy indifferent parents and witnessed my first-ever ride, and jumped for joy screaming “You got it! You got it!” over and over. She was such a kind girl.

After we moved on to practice for the level two examination, things had changed. The level two was a whole new game. While up to the level three the result was decided by the total marks of three subjects, which were multiplication, division and addition, the level two required above 80 marks for each subject. Digits were huge including decimals and slip addition was added as one more subject. To pass the level two, we had to score above 80 in all these four subjects. The teacher told Junko and me to brace ourselves for difficulty ahead because we wouldn’t pass with one try from here as we had done so far. He was right. Both of us failed the examination for the first time. Then we had stuck there for over a year by failing three times more in a row. Although we had been on a losing streak, we were looked up to at school because nobody there had ever passed the level two and we were the only students who were trying for it. But gradually, people around us had had an interest in our rivalry since we had progressed in sync. They began to whisper about which one of us would pass the level two first, which had incited competition against Junko in me while we were best friends. Since I was regarded as the top student there with Junko close behind me, I felt I should pass before her. My mother also started to demand that I should, out of her vain. I had been under more and more pressure so that I became convinced I must have beat her on the next try.

On the day of the examination, I planned to have a warm-up before heading for the examination site by having my father time my calculation of the four subjects. Junko was going to drop by my house to go with me. However, I didn’t have enough time to finish all four timed subjects before she came because I overslept. I would have to do without a complete warm-up. My mother jumped on my decision fiercely and ordered me to finish a thorough warm-up. I explained that Junko would come before I finished. “I will make her wait,” my mother said, “Ignore her! You’ve just got to pass this time!” I was constrained to start calculation and I heard Junko coming in the middle of it. My mother ushered her into the dining room that was next to where I was practicing. I heard my mother talking to her to distract her attention but I knew she noticed I was practicing by the sound of soroban beans and my father’s voice of “Start!” and “Stop!” for timing. She was sitting at the table quietly sipping tea and listening to my mother’s gab. I imagined how much she wanted to practice too, instead of wasting valuable time before the examination just by waiting for me. When I finished a warm-up and saw her face in the dining room, guilt assaulted me furiously. We left for the examination together and she didn’t mention about my warm-up or her excruciating wait. My mother’s devious trick worked. I passed. Junko failed.

I was proven to be the best as the first level two certification holder at school. The teacher and all the students admired me. My mother seemed satisfied, but said it was her who made this happen, not me. As for me, I was all guilt. I passed by outfoxing Junko who had been incredibly nice to me all the time. Although everybody expected that I would move on to get the level one certification, I quit soroban. Junko continued, passed on the next try, and acquired the level one certification eventually.

The digital era arrived and a soroban became obsolete. People no longer used a soroban for calculation and the soroban school disappeared. It has been forgotten as time goes by. Yet, I still have an urge to scream and run away every time I remember the day of my last level two examination. Qualms and shame have never disappeared and die hard in me.

Lazy and Talented hr666

 

I started taking piano lessons at the age of four and had continued on and off until I was fourteen years old. Yet, not a single classical piece exists that I can play properly. There are several clear reasons for that.

Photo by Do The Lan on Pexels.com

To begin with, the motive for the lesson was wrong. My vain mother bought the piano as a symbol of wealth not to play it but to show it to visitors although she really hated music. Then she assumed she would be ashamed if someone noticed the piano in our house stood exclusively for a decorative purpose and she decided to make me play it well. I took lessons at my mother’s order, not from my own passion. At first, a neighbor woman who had played the piano when she was young came to my house regularly to teach me. With an introduction from her, I got into Kuribayashi Piano School before long.

The school held a recital once a year at the big hall in downtown. My mother would invite her parents to show the pretty dress in which she clothed me. She would make me practice so earnestly for this once because her vain couldn’t allow me to fail on the stage in front of a large audience. It used to be a big night for my family. The piece for each student was picked up according to their skill by Mr. Kuribayashi every year. Gradually, year after year, the students who were much younger than I was were assigned to much more difficult pieces than mine because I had developed my skill too slowly due to lack of practice. The spot of the students in a recital was decided in ascending order of difficulty of the piece, from the easiest to the most difficult. Consequently the best student of the school played last in the recital. In this order, I had become next to a small boy by the time I was a junior high student. The rehearsal was taken place in the large living room of Mr. Kuribayashi’s home. When my turn came and I sat in front of the piano, I found the chair was too high as the player before me was a small boy. I tried to adjust the chair but didn’t know how. I struggled for some time while other students were quietly waiting and staring. I became panicky with embarrassment. I was all of a sweat jiggling the chair for the time I felt eternally. I glanced at Mr. Kurubayashi for help. He was just watching without a word. At that moment, I suddenly realized. I had long been not his favorite any more. How could I have not known for such a long time, about such an  apparent fact like this, I wondered. Amid terrible embarrassment, horrible disappointment gripped me. A girl who was about my age became unable to just watch my embarrassing fight with the chair and came up to me. She adjusted the chair for me in a flash. That girl was assigned to the last spot of the recital that year, which meant she was the best student. She beautifully played her piece, Chopin’s ‘Fantaisie-Impromptu’ that I believe is the most difficult piece for the piano in the world. When I listened to her play, I felt embarrassed further for my low skill and my longtime self-conceit. And I was clearly convinced that she was the favorite of Mr. Kuribayashi. Immediately after the recital, I left the school.

While I liked music so much that I wanted to become a professional singer someday, I loathed practicing the piano. My older cousin who was good at the piano visited our house one day and asked me to show how much progress I had made so far in playing the piano. I couldn’t understand why she tried to ruin her visit that I had been looking forward to. As I had imagined, she pointed out flaws in my play and began to teach me by which the day was ruined for me. Before I knew it, the keys went blurred because I was crying. She was shocked to see it and apologized repeatedly, but seemed puzzled why practice gave me so much pain. I shared her wonder for that matter.

As I hated practice that much, lessons at Kuribayashi Piano School became a torture. I took a lesson once a week, but I often didn’t touch the piano for the whole week until my next lesson. I was such a lazy student who was always short of practice. Nevertheless, I was somehow the favorite of my teacher, Mr. Kuribayashi. He liked my playing that was stumbled almost constantly, and kept admiring me by saying “You’re talented.” While I was playing, he often hummed along and danced to it. He hadn’t been in good spirits like that with other students. He instructed them strictly and sometimes scolded them. My younger sister started taking lessons a few years later and going to the school with me. Unlike me, my sister was a diligent student and practiced playing every day at home. In one lesson, after Mr. Kuribayashi danced to my usual bad playing and uttered his ‘You’re talented’, in my sister’s turn he slapped my sister’s hand and yelled at her, “No, no, no! It’s not like that! Not at all!”, which drove her to quit the piano for good. On the other hand, he had never scolded me. He was pleased with my play no matter how badly I played. He just showed his frustration saying, “If only you would practice…” Even when I was lazy enough to come to his lesson without cutting my nails, he would quietly hand me a clipper and tell me to be ready while he taught another student. Since I was too dependent on his ‘You’re talented’ and fully conceited, sometimes it took months to finish one piece and move on to another. In those cases, Mr. Kuribayashi would say, “Let’s change the mood, shall we?” and introduce me to a different composer’s piece for lessons, but would never scold me even then.

Ironically, I have never hated playing the piano. On the contrary, I’m fond of it after decades have passed since I quit lessons. While I still don’t practice, being able to play Chopin’s ‘Fantaisie-Impromptu’ remains one of my far-fetched dreams to this day.

The Happiest Memory hr665

 

What I remember as the happiest memory in my childhood is the day that my parents took my younger sister and me to the confectionery factory for a guided tour when I was about seven or eight years old. Theme parks hadn’t arrived in Japan yet and even a factory tour was rare and unfamiliar back then while it has been popular and factories of many kinds have offered it nowadays. My father happened to find a major Japanese manufacturer offering a free tour at the factory that was a 40-minute drive from home. Since we didn’t go out much together because of my parents’ busy work, a factory tour sounded to me extra special and also to be something unimaginable. As we had made a reservation, the staff waited for and greeted us at the factory where we realized that we were the only group for the tour that day probably because it was a weekday.

A tour guide led just four of us around the huge factory and showed and explained each section in detail through the overwhelmingly big glass above the factory floor. Everywhere in the factory was thoroughly clean and all white. Walking along the long passage above the vast factory floor and looking down the machinery through the glass, I imagined that inside of a space station would be like this. I was amazed at automation. Everything was operated by automated equipment and few humans were around it, which was so futuristic. Cookies and snacks were flowing endlessly on the conveyors and hopping and wiggling as if they were dancing while they were seasoned. They looked to me some cute life-forms of another planet. My mother also looked so happy for this once. She said to me several times in excitement, “Look! That dough came out turning into these here! Look! Those pieces went in over there!” With an additional backdrop of my mother’s good mood, I was sticking to the glass, fascinated by the operation.

At the end of the tour, we were ushered to the large screening room. Many tables were set there and one of them had a big plate of confectionery on it. That was our table. The staff brought tea and told us to have as much confectionery as we liked. The short film that introduced the manufacturer’s history and business was shown on a big screen while I was munching freshly-baked, just-out -of-conveyor cookies and snacks. Since snacks were luxury for me who was raised by stingy grandparents, I had eaten neither so many of them nor the ones that were still warm at my fingertips before. We monopolized the whole thing as a single group and were treated like VIPs. I thought I was dreaming.

When we were leaving, they gave each of us a big bag filled with their confectionery as a souvenir. I was holding the bag to my chest in the back seat of our car as if it had been a treasure while the car was exiting the factory’s parking lot. I missed the place already and looked back to see it one last time from the rear window of the car. I saw the tour guide and a couple of other workers standing and bowing toward our car in front of the building. They waved to me, and I waved them back. We didn’t stop waving to each other until they became sizes of rice and finally disappeared from my sight when the car that my father drove slowly on purpose for me turned out the factory gate.

I had one more memory in which I felt the similar sense of that day. It happened at the theme park where the mouse works as a host. By then, I had already left home and begun to live on my own in Tokyo. It was a weekday in winter and the park was almost empty. When I was strolling about with my partner, the mascot of that mouse appeared with the space costume that matched the particular area’s theme. I greeted him with my partner and took a photograph together. I was chattering with him when my partner pointed at his shoe, saying, “Your shoe is tattered.” The mouse and I looked down with a surprise on it that was partly worn out indeed and he gestured embarrassment. I defended him by telling my partner that he had been traveling through space a lot, which relentless condition made his shoes worn off. Three of us laughed together. We said goodbye to the mouse and left him. I looked back a few steps away and saw him still waving to me. I waved him back. Other guests gathered around him, but he didn’t stop waving to me. I repeatedly looked back several times and saw him waving to me each time even while he was taking photographs with other guests. In the end, I reached the other foot of a bridge which arch hindered the sight of him. Yet, he kept waving to me while jumping so that I could see him. The scene of his big sweeping, waving hands toward me above his bobbing head over the asphalt arch had been burned into my brain.

Every time those two memories pop up in my mind, I feel heartwarming and yearning. I sometimes wonder why I have cherished those incidents in particular. I’m not a social character and not good at being with people. I hated people, especially when I was little. Somewhere in my deep subconsciousness, I assume that people don’t understand me and vice versa because they never treat me the way I think it should be. However, I proved wrong in those two memories. They treated me right with so much kindness, which was different from what I had believed as human behavior. I was betrayed by people in a good way and got connection instead. For a brief moment as it was, I sensed deeply connected to others and that gave me inexplicable happiness. It was totally unexpected, but extremely joyful enough to be the reason for my special, happiest memories.

The Happiest Place in Tokyo hr664

 

It was 1983 when the theme park which host is the mouse opened in Japan for the first time outside the U.S. Two years after it opened, I left my hometown and began to live by myself in Tokyo to pursue my career as a musician. My partner was the one that I had a meeting with to join my first band and I had worked with ever since. He also moved to Tokyo and settled in an extremely shabby small 50-year-old wooden apartment. We were going to find  band members in Tokyo together and to start our new band. However, things didn’t go as smoothly as we had planned and we had fretted ourselves. For a change of a glum mood, we decided to visit the theme park for the first time.

In those days, the concept of a theme park hadn’t been pervasive in Japan and amusement parks were just big fairs with common rides for kids. I had no idea what a theme park meant either when I first visited there. Although I hadn’t even dreamed of that, the visit came to have changed my life significantly.

As I stepped in the park without any particular knowledge nor expectation, I was instantly shocked. What spread in front of my eyes was a world that was totally different from the Japanese one outside. All the buildings were pretty and cool as if they had been popped out of picture books or foreign movies. One of the areas duplicated a street of an American remote town which looked so attractive. Other than numerous authentic quality attractions, amazingly professional shows were played everywhere with great dancing and singing from the cast. The true entertainment was there. Also, not a single piece of litter was spotted on the ground. The moment someone dropped one popcorn, a cleaning worker appeared from somewhere and swept it in a flash. Each and every worker was kind and smiling. Even when a small child vomited, they didn’t make a wry face but cleaned with considerate treatment. The park’s number of visitors were not big because it had been only two years since the theme park opened and it hadn’t gotten so popular yet. That made it perfect with no crowd and I imagined that the intended concept of the person who came up with this park’s idea almost truly got materialized. Furthermore, Japanese signature courtesy and earnestness was added to that. The staff were standing straight in front of the attractions without slacking, waving at the passing guests with a smile and a bow. At the restaurant, they served with excellent attitude and speed though there was no custom for a tip. It seemed this was the very place that the world should be and a utopia that wasn’t believed to exist in the real world.

There was one more huge aspect that captured my heart. Since I was a child, I have had difficulty with being with people. Because I didn’t have a friend when I was little, talking to stuffed animals was my habit to relieve loneliness. To my surprise, in this park, man-sized stuffed animals appeared one after another all around and lived there as the residents, waving at the guests or looking at merchandise at the shop or teasing the staff. From up on the stage of the revue, they were singing toward the guests that dreams would come true. The world I had dreamed of did exist there and I became a captive to this magical park.

The day filled with emotion and excitement came to an end and the park’s closing time arrived. I didn’t want to leave. I strongly wished I could stay in this place. With tears in my eyes, I went through the park’s gate into the city of Tokyo where I now got to live and grungy anxiety and frustration engulfed me every day. I took the bus from the park remembering what my mother once told me when I couldn’t sleep. She said that if I waited patiently in my futon, a bus would eventually come to pick me up and take me to the dream world of stuffed animals. I finally understood she had unknowingly meant this bus and this park. Tokyo used to be the dream place for me who was born and raised in a rural part of Japan. But when I got there, Tokyo turned into mere somber reality. Now that I saw an earthly paradise like this theme park, I began to fancy myself living there or in some place that at least looked alike.

Ten years later, I was living in California, speaking English instead of Japanese. I hadn’t even dreamed of that kind of my future on that day when I first visited the theme park.

Living by Myself in Tokyo hr663

 

When I left my hometown for Tokyo and started living by myself there in the mid 80’s, quite a few second-run theaters for movies still remained. Those theaters showed two or three films at the price of one new film. The best experience of mine was when I saw ‘Top Gun’, ‘Taps’ and ‘Back to the Future’ as an all-night triple feature program at a second-run theater in a suburb of Tokyo. Those films were already a bit old by then and the show time was the middle of the night, so that the price was incredibly low accordingly. I left my apartment at night, ate out for dinner, got hamburgers to have inside the theater and was immersed into the movie world until dawn. The main attraction for me had been ‘Top Gun’ that turned out to be so-so. Instead, I was deeply moved by ‘Back to the Future’ although I had thought it would be a silly 50’s comedy judging from its trailer. The film became my best one and had held that position for many years to come.

 Back then, I had just moved to Tokyo to become a musician in spite of all the opposition from my family and friends. I had been feeling unsettled constantly because of anxiety and loneliness, which stemmed from uncertainty of my future. I had been clueless about whether I would be successful as a musician and how my life would unfold itself. I saw ‘Back to the Future’ in that state of mind and the story and the ending of the film encouraged me immensely.

When I lived in my hometown with my family, many rules bound me. To begin with, that all-night movie experience was a dream within a dream since my curfew was as early as 9 p.m. Other rules were abundant. Singing while eating was forbidden, a gap between the body and the edge of the table must not exist during the meal, whistling or playing the piano after dark was prohibited, some ways of talking to my grandparents were banned, walking with audible steps inside the house wasn’t allowed, chewing something in the mouth in public was regarded as an act of barbarity, and so on and on. But once I began to live by myself, I was freed from all the family rules and everything was left to my discretion. I ate what I wanted, when I wanted. I woke up when I felt like it, since I didn’t work at an office. I slept until evening at times, and rarely cleaned or did the dishes. The bathroom got moldy. While I appreciated freedom, I realized how slack I really was. My music career didn’t go well either. I had expected I could find my band members easily as Tokyo was the biggest city in Japan where so many aspiring musician gathered from all parts of Japan. The reality was Tokyo simply had too many bad unmotivated musicians. It was extremely hard to find a member whom I desired and my band just kept breaking up. That was far from what I had planned as life in Tokyo. I sometimes got tempted to doubt if my decision to come here was the right one even though I hadn’t had any other choice.

When I finished to see the movies all night and left the theater, it was early morning in the real world. I headed back for my apartment. The train had started running and many commuters were walking hurriedly and gloomily toward the station already. They used the train bound for downtown that was an opposite direction to where I was going. I was waiting on the empty platform for my train while watching them waiting on the nearly overflowing platform. When their train came, they pushed and crammed themselves into the cars. The station workers additionally pushed their backs from outside to squeeze as many passengers as possible in and the train doors barely closed. Minutes after it departed, the platform got filled with commuters quickly again. I stepped in the empty opposite train and yawned in the seat, remembering ‘Back to the Future’. When I decided to live by myself in Tokyo that was a far and unknown big city, I was afraid and trembled for what my life was going to be like. I gave up my right to an inheritance by leaving my family, and a possible steady income by quitting college. I was alone by parting from my family and my friends who disagreed and didn’t support me mentally. I threw away everything which wasn’t easy for me. But as Marty’s father dared, I had dared in my own way and left for Tokyo. I hoped that action of mine changed my future. In a good way, I wished.

My Travel hr662

 

A trip can require an enormous effort. In my case, it starts by making time to plan in a hectic daily life which consumes me with work. Once I manage to find time for planning a trip, a long way to finish it awaits. I search all over the Internet for the best possible deal for a hotel and transportation that suits what I want to do during the trip. I narrow selections, choose the most saving plans, combine them into an itinerary, book everything, adjust my work schedule, and pack. The latest trip I took after that lengthy process was by plane. I could have taken the bullet train since the time that would be  taken to the destination was almost the same because the airport was much further than the train station from my home. But that particular airline carried a limited-time sale so that the fare was lower. My choice was decided on a plane for that reason.

No matter how many times I have flown, I feel nervous each time. Although I know that the chances of a car accident are much higher than a plane crash, that kind of logic doesn’t help me. I see many people drink alcohol before the flight and that shows I am not the only person who is nervous of flying. A long time ago, I took a flight to Dallas. Before landing, the plane was sucked into nasty turbulence. It repeated steep dives several times that gave some passengers screams and vomits. I was in a window seat and seeing the wing in the midst of a thick cloud that told me the plane tilted sharply. I heard something fall and break everywhere. Above all, I was most terrified when I saw the flight attendants panic, who were supposed to get used to and be trained for this situation. The plane finally got out of the thick cloud and I thought I would see out of the window broad highways or the edge of the runway that were common views after the plane descended that much. Instead, what came into my sight were tips of green trees. Because I had never seen trees so closely from the airplane, I was convinced that we were going to crash. I vaguely thought it was least expected that my end was Dallas. Then, the plane stopped descending and flew ahead horizontally. It made turns above trees with a move that was more like a bus’s rather than a plane’s. It seemed to spot the runway by doing so, and we landed safely.

For the latest trip I took, I checked in at the airport and was informed that my flight was delayed for two hours due to machine maintenance. I wasn’t sure if the airplane I was going on board would need further maintenance or a backup plane would fly in from somewhere, but either way, it made me uneasy since it came on top of the existing nervous factor that it was a low cost carrier. After I went through the security check and waited at the gate, the further delay was announced. I finally got on board a few hours behind schedule and the door of the plane was closed. Yet, it remained stationary, and wouldn’t move. The captain announced it was waiting for takeoff permission from the control tower. It sounded absurd because it was a small local airport where the runway was empty and only few flights a day came in and out. Forty minutes passed while many things crossed my mind. Why can’t a takeoff be permitted? Is there any problem? Is that the true reason? Does this plane still have some sort of machine troubles? The cabin was dead silent and tense as other passengers sat quiet and strained for the whole forty minutes. I thought this was the very time when we needed alcohol most. By the time the plane took off and safely finished its 90-minute flight, it was already night and I was exhausted. My elaborate travel itinerary got messed up on the first day though I had made it with full of leeway. The massive delay ate up the time for a meal at the restaurant. The express train I had booked from the airport to the city had long gone.

Flights are always accompanied with troubles. Other than delays, I have had my fair share of troubles regarding baggage, other passengers or attendants. Even so, I don’t hate flying. I don’t know why exactly, but I feel like I become a different person each time I take off and land on the destination. It is as if I jumped into a different dimension where a better version of my life exists. I like that feeling so much that I feel stuck circling at the same spot over and over without any changes when I haven’t flown for a long time. That’s why I need to take a plane to a different place once in a while in order to become a better self even if it’s nervous, risky and troublesome. I might as well stay home just to relax as to travel. It would be peaceful, calm and tranquil for me. But I know I couldn’t enjoy that because staying at the same place without traveling feels like being dead. Travel lets me keep changing so that I stay alive.