Leave The Wall Alone

Old people leave, and new people come. Remaining people move to new roles. I sometimes feel very sad about things changing, and it makes me think. But any change is a good change. Change is always positive, so I believe.

I happened to remember my last day of one of old companies. It was the worst in the history. When I was leaving the office, the boss cursed me that I can’t do anything valuable in the rest of my life if I leave the job. They also threatened me that if I leave, I am never be allowed to continue studying my major and profession (no one can stop that though), and even threatened me that I have to tell people that I didn’t leave the job voluntary. Instead I have to tell I was “sent” for temporally transfer by the company and will come back soon. It sounded quite ridiculous but i said whatever you are comfortable. It was quite an experience.

If I look back, the boss might have had some serious mental issue, which was actually not very unusual in our field. He occasionally used to pick somebody  to bring down and tell bad stories of the person, and my turn came eventually. He started abusing or ignoring me which other colleagues blindly followed, maybe to save themselves. And the circumstance around me turned to become violent. It is actually one of typical Japanese group psycho dynamics. I could sense the fear of people around. What made me most frightened was the nameless people around who blindly admired and believed the influential person and changed their perspective in a brink. Many things happened, and they almost damaged me. It took a few years for me to realize I am not the one who is crazy. It took  another one year to recover to the level that I could make  a move to escape from it.

Because of the all last words I was threatened not to leave the job, even now, I often see a nightmare that I am still working in the same company and can’t leave for some reason. That is the scariest nightmare of me, not a ghost, not a serial killer, not even a black hole that I ever be falling down, but still working there. I know you can’t imagine. When I wake up heart-beating fast, I tell myself I would kill myself without hesitation if I had to go back there even for one day.

People are weak.

We are so weak that we don’t realize hurting other people, because we are sometimes too busy to cover our own eyes by hands not to see what is actually happening in front of us. Taking in it, only thing we can do is to realize it and make the world a place that we get to be happy as we are. Why do we necessarily brame each other for being weak if that’s our default setting, and that’s actually one of beauties that we could have? I want to live in the world of kindness and grace.

After all those things, I clearly set a rule to myself; in any situation that I am sprit for two different interests and opinions, I will always take my side as an individual. I will never want to take the side of anyone else, any other person, groups, ideology, organizations, or countries. I am scared of myself leaning over something else for my ease and safety, and stop using my own brain. I will never stop questioning. I will never stop thinking.

Haruki Murakami said in his famous speech, “Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg.” I love the line. Well, if it was me, I wouldn’t support the egg committing suicide attack, but would say to him “Don’t bother and waste your time. Leave the wall alone and go do something fun.” That’s the kind of freedom of soul that I am seeking in my whole life.  I support everybody who choose their own life, or at least try to choose it by themselves. If that is the world becomes looking like, even the Holocaust would never be possible to happen, maybe.

Reaching Somewhere

The Crazy April is over, and now it’s Crazy May. I am planning work for a Crazy June these days. I have a physical pain in my heart.

I work in very hiper-active and agressive way at office, though it is actually by a lot of intentional effort. I am slow and merrow by nature, more poetic than logical, which only close friends knows well. I trained myself considerablly hard over years and kind of created a work-personality which is quite different from my natural character. On and off.

People have different motivation and value at work. Money, self-growth, friends, achievement, finding-self, social causes, whatever. I think my motivation is to go see far, as far as I can, and dig into detail as deep as I can, because only that way work can be meanigful. Some people think that I make a big deal of every little problems all the time, but if you compromize for one tiny thing, like a badly painted wall soaks rains and gets weaker by time, you end up compromizing many other things and only achieve a compromized goal in the end.

Poeple get used to compromization. It’s a simple psychological theory; once you say yes to what you are not proud of, you carry a burden of the compromization and feel less confident to say no to other coming stuff. One thing leads to another. I see such situations A LOT, a lot. Every day, every week. So I try hard not to get myself into it, nore to let other people too. Because in the end, everything bounces back to us.

Therefore, I usually respect people who mess up my plan by suggesting something new, because only they can take me and my project to a higher level. I like people who make things complex by bringing overlooked problems (and I like people who also help me simplified in the end). Oppositely, I cant get along with people who don’t really care and take failures like a bad weather or natural disaster, because they never learn, and I don’t learn anything from them. Persistence is the key. It’s an obsession, in the other words. It’s important to let things go sometimes, but if you let everything go, there won’t be anything remaining in your hand.

Actually I  never really care what happens to my personal life. I just let things happen like a natural disaster and accept whatever happens. It’s easier and happier. Often, I question myself which way I want to go further. But I guess, for now, I think I should just blindly walk far and far withoug looking back, till I get to a place where I can really feel that I have reached somewhere.

Indian Diet

OK, I admit that I am becoming a little bit “round shaped” these days, in other words, gramorous (maybe it’s a wrong word choice for me but still).

I had been a very thin person in my whole life and used to get sick very often. But when I went to Japan twice in the last three months and was fed the fatty rice every day, I passed the certain weight called “the standard weight.” I don’t get sick, I have more stamina, so I don’t lose weight easily also, good or bad.

Like some Korean mothers, my Japanese mom quite cares about her single daughter’s beauty and often send me some cosmetics, diet protein, and a series of books titled “How to become the most beautiful woman in the world” written by a famous diet consultant of Miss Universes. It sounds ridicurous but I actually learnt how much my life is against being nominated for Mss Universe.

My mother is a kind of person who buy three exact-same shirts from a discount cart and wear every day and who never wears cosmetics in her whole life. So I am not really convinced when she tries to educate me on beauty. But basically her point is that if I don’t start being conscious in my 30th, I will pay a prise in my 50th. That actually makese sense.

My colleague taught me how to cook chapati

I wanna stay in fit and look hot in my 50s too, so I do little by little. Eating healthy food, doing light exercise, drinking lots of water, etc, etc. I basically hate makeup, am pretty bad at selecitng cloth (my concept of shopping is also basically a buy-one-get-two t-shirt cart), and I am a major meat eater and drinker. So those things don’t naturally come to me. It needs a certain effort not to come to the office in gym t-shirt with jumping messy hair.

The beauty book tells me I should eat brown stuff (brown bread, brown rice, brown sugar) and avoid white stuff (white bread, white rice, white sugar), so I cook chapati, use jaggery for taste, and drink tea and red wine. Indian food can be fatty but also healthy if you select and cook well. I am sorry but I can’t avoid potato chips even all books say it’s the world worst food ever, because I have an old tie and emotional connection with them.

Running High

March makes me feel scared of April. And April makes me more scared of May. Yeah, all day, all the time.

The moment you set a target or a goal of your work or life, though we say it is a motivation or a drive putting it in a positive way, crap,  it also becomes your weakness. The higher you set the goal or standard, or the more you want it to become true, the more you are scared of being failed. So the challenge is; how can we keep our spontaneous and relaxed attitude while running in the maximum speed you’ve ever be?

Marketing and sales are clearly driven by numbers; whatever you do, you don’t do, you do great, or badly, affect the numbers very clearly. Ask anyone in your marketing team and they would tell you that they see the dream of being chased pretty often. How to deal with the pressure depends on the person.

I basically try ignoring the possible fact that I may not be capable of handling the goal as hard as I can. I try to keep myself in running-high all the time to pull myself away from the slight sign of fear. Most of the time, feeling fear is the same as feeling isolated. Isolation creates a doubt of myself and stop my own system of openness and creativity. So I try not to be scared; of people, of mistakes, of future, of being annoyed, of seeing the reality, become alone, or whatever. Even so, I am often caught and feel like doing a deadman walking. Let’s say that even President Obama or Manmohan Singh may also feel the same way quite daily, or at least let me say quite a few Japanese prime ministers have actually quit because of stress, pressure, or gastric ulceration. Fear is one emotion that is very difficult to make others understand. The higher the position be, the more the person is lonely because of the gravity of the fear.

I sometimes feel that my heart is squeezed up and almost stopping because of stress and pressure, and often can’t sleep thinking of new project’s failure. The good part of being in Marketing is that you are always trying something always new because of rapid trend change in the technology and market, but the bad thing is that you are always challenged to adjust and go beyond. Do I have an idea? If I have an idea, do we have power or knowledge to execute? If we have all of them, do we have money and followers? Even when you made a success, you are facing a higher goal next day. An endless civil war.

Junior staff or non business people sometimes ask me why and how we set a goal so high. Their point is “Okay, at least I understand the George Mallory’s word ‘Because there’s a mountain there‘, but you guys don’t even have a mountain but you’ve created the imaginary mountain. Why bother?” Yeah, point taken, but it’s just, I mean, we’ve got to go, and let us just see how the world will look like when we climb higher.

Still I tell you, the good thing of setting a goal is that at least we are running towards it, not we are running away from what is chasing us behind. In other words, it’s just like you are drawing a picture of the beautiful landscape that you’ve seen only in your dream. The picture in the end should be more beautiful than the one in the memory. Let’s speak this way.

A Prayer For A Warm Sunny Day

My grandmother passed away on February 7th, Tuesday, which is five days later my grandfather’s death.

I just describe for my record.

We don’t know why and how that could happen. She was just recovering from burn injury. In the morning of the day, her doctor reported that the result of her examination shows that she was going to die in a day or two. But she was watching TV and talking to my mother and even walking down to the bathroom by herself. It was difficult to believe. In the last moment, she suddenly lost her breath.

Two of my grandparent’s photos are in front of the Buddhist altar next to each other in their small house. We ask to nowhere why, now and then, but no one knows an answer. The priest lightly joked “I couldn’t prepare two different speeches in front of the same family in such a short notce.” A staff of the ceremony hall said “This is the very first unusual case I have ever encountered in my professional life.” A staff of the crematory said hello to my cousin’s little daughter, “Do you remember me? We met last week, too.” While we were having lunch in the ceremony hall, my cousin brother joked out, “Am I having a deja vu? I think I had the exact same lunch box last week.”

Everyone is still puzzled and shocked. My bigger aunt thinks after all my grandmother thought that she was the only one who could take care of my grandfather even in an afterlife. It could be so. After my grandfather’s death, my grandmother was on her bed actually telling my smaller aunt, “Grampa is calling me.” For God’s sake, why did he try to pull her in, why on the earth did she listen to him?

We don’t know who could influence the timing of her death; is it her will, is it God’s will, or is it my grandfather’s will? Or it’s a mixture of all, or maybe no one’s? In the confusion, I think I started believing in an soul and an afterlife. It all makes sense now.

But we try to get into the phase that we don’t question why anymore and accept things as they happened. We had a very small funeral with close family. Everyone cried, everyone had many vivid memories of her. She was one of women who were meant to be born as a mother. She took care of literally everyone; her husband, three daughters, the daughters’ husbands, the daughters’ husbands’ siblings, friends, grandchildren, grandchildren’s wives and kids. She was worried about everyone surrounding her. We wonder how she could do, and whether any of us could ever live like that. She had so many friends, too.

She expected me a lot. I was the only girl grandchild of her and she had so much dream on me. I wonder how good I was as her granddaughter. I might have dissapointed her being away from home. She wanted me to be a master of dressmaker or a kimono maker. She also trained me to be a master of tea ceremony, a good cook, or a decent wife with all these skills. I tried, but they didn’t interest me in deep after all. Although she kept complaining that I didn’t come back to Japan so often, I knew she was also very proud of having a grandchild working in India. She wanted to visit me once, but she was already too old to travel abroad.

We have to live life without her. All of us. We all have to be a little stronger.

I don’t know how to conclude here, so I don’t try to make a conclusion yet. On the way to Narita airport leaving my family behind, I saw the electric board on Nozomi Super Express showing the weather forecast of tomorrow. Without checking the actual forecast, I just started praying for a fine sunny day in Aichi tomorrow. I think I will always pray it will be a warm sunny day in Aichi that will make all my family a little happy and peaceful every day.

Family Affair (5) – Life Goes On


It’s a bit long story.

My grandfather has passed away. After I left Japan in January, he was immediately admitted to the hospital, and my mother called me up telling me “It seems like he might not come back home.” His death happened after a month. 95 years old. Not bad, at all.

I learnt a human life is unstable in the last period of life. He was close to death twice in the last three months, and somehow miracurously came back, and then gone finally. It happened when my grandmother passed away because of cancer. If we get chance to grow old as ninety or so, we get weaken our life and is gradually going out from the body. When he came back, we joked like “Oh, the evel king of the hell didn’t want him to come to his land!” But after all, I believe Buddha forgive and welcome him to his nice land. There comes my grandpa, all Buddhas up there!

When I met him an hour before leaving home to the airport, his mind was pretty clear. He asked me to get a bottle of alchohol secretly. That was his last wish to me. He asked me to kill him having him drinking a whole bottle of sake at once, because he doesn’t have power to open a bottle and drink by himself. Getting drunk once again, and die sleeping with no pain. My brother was there with me, and my grandfather shouted to him “You stupid may fail to do it so I don’t ask you, but Ai can do it properly till the end, right Ai?” He asked me to promise me, so I said okay and smiled. That was all I could do, and left the room crying.

Alright, it was a wild last wish, just like what he would ask for. We weren’t dissapointed till the last.

After I left Japan, my mother called me up and told a story that he asked for a piece of paper and pen in the hospital. He wrote “Gratitude” on the paper and gave it to my mother. She was moved and told me “It looked like he became a nice man in the end.”

This had an after story that my mother was surprised and immediately called my aunt, her elder sister, and reported her “Hey, our father finally became a good man!” My aunt was surprised and came to the hospital for her turn in the same day afternoon, but the good man moment was over, and he was already back to the old mean and scary father. She called my mother back saying, “What’s the difference?”

My grandfather had six grandchildren including me, my brother, and four cousins. We grew up together in my grandparent’s house, and six of us sitting toghether in front of my grandfather’s TV to watch cartoons every Saturday evening. Many people hated his long story telling which normally went on easily for three hours if we didn’t cut it off and say “Sorry grampa, I have to go soon.” I was actually fond of his long story, and often challanged myself how long I can be hearling someone’s story with concentration and tried to find points and things to learn. My brother, who’s a writer, also enjoyes hearling such never ending story. After both of us spend like two hours patiently hearing stories, we both often agreed how we are happy having such a funky grandfather. “Ha, you can say it because you’ve never lived with him”, my mother used to continue then.

After the funeral, I talked to my mother and my grandmother on the phone. My grandmother was in a hospital because of her burn injury and couldn’t attend the funeral. They told me, “Grandpa is still floating around here and there and not yet gone.” In Japanese Buddhism custom, we believe a spirit of the dead stay in this world for 49 days, and on the 49th day finally invited to the heaven. So we continue praying during the period, and do a kind of grand fairwell praying ceremony on the day again. But yet, “He’s floating around here and there” is a too funiky expression and I pictured him floating around in the air of the office or riding his bycicle on the Bombay streets.

Sometimes I feel like I am swimming a way out to sea alone without a float. Maybe everyone does. But it is a wrong picture. A death of important person, an illness, and a crisis make us realize the bond and connection, fortunately or unfortunately. We talk, cry, laugh, and overcome. It’s the same for famly, friendship, community, anything. We overcome. That’s the basic belief. Life goes on including the memory of the life of people who left this world.

Good To Great


Jim Collins’s Good To Great is one of the books the titles themselves are inspiring (which often means I haven’t read it yet). I love book titles. One of my hobbies is spending time in bookstores just checking around book cover designs, and evaluate the grade of titles, and imagine what is told inside, and learn something from them without reading.

I am deeply interested in copy writing which sell a new idea in the simplest way. Good book titles gives many ideas and insights in how to sell a book-long story, theory, or concept to readers without opening the book, and also the tone, font, and the design even gives you the idea whom it is talking to.

Speaking of Good To Great, I haven’t read it though fully, but basically the book talks about companies’ transformation from good to great, in terms of the business sucess, culture, ethics, and branding, etc, etc. But Whenever I go to a business management section in a book store, the red cover speaks to me personally, “Hey, are you just Good, or Great?”

When I find myself with full of lack and disabilities personally and professionally (which happens so often), I picture a dark forever-expanding cosmos or a tunnel with no end under the ground. Being extraordnally is something beyond imagination. After many years, I want to say I became wiser by ages, but I am not as confident as I was before, anymore. But maybe, though being great as a person is difficult, being great as a pair, as a group, and as an organization is possible. I may not be complete as one, but I may be able to fullfill a part of something Great, and Extraordinally.

I suppose I was too busy to enjoy myself and what I do, and I had never asked to myself if I am actually valuable for someone else; for family, company, friendship, or community, whatever bigger than me. In fact without me knowing so well about it, I am grown up, and expectations are changed .

If my 20th was the journey to find my self, my 30th is the journey to release what I found as myself to the air and go looking for something much more valuable than that. I am in back-and-force yet, but the life, work, and people somehow give me many oppotunities to challange myself to the limit. It asks me, “What’s your contribution more than being yourself?” I can’t answer that now, obviously. But I would be, if I can stay in the right track. I have at least 50 years more if  I am lucky. I want to be more brave and good person so I can travel through this phase successfully.

Family Affair (4) Family Puzzle

Family makes me think of time; time of the past we’ve gone through, and the time of the future that we are going to go through. While back in Japan for holiday season, I have been thinking of our family’s silent survival against time. We born, we glow up, we reproduce, and we die, such things.

My granfather got slightly demented after the bath tab insident, and started needing help. That gave our family a new twist. Nurcing care became the center of the family life. My mother and her sisters take turns every day to take care of him and my grandmother. I helped only a little during the stay, clearning, blushing his teeth. It’s not easy, mentally and physically.

My grandfather is in back-and-force. One day he doesn’t even recognize me, and another day he is a wise man and express his sick situation even quating lines from old good books. Some time he is weak and gentle, and wispers how I am a good girl, and another time he is strong and angry. It’s different every day and every moment, but it’s developping, gradually and certainly.

The grandparents start talking about their own death. My grandfather sometimes claims “I wish someone just knock my head off while sleeping” but other time tells “But truth is I still want to live.” My grandmother scares me off saying “If you don’t come back so often, I am not sure if we can meet each other again.” Right, that could happen seriously. It’s difficult to leave family if you know there’s a chance that it can be the last moment or conversation.

On the other hand, my cousin sister delivered a beautiful boy a month ago. The little girl became a mother, watching her own baby looking like wondering where it came from. It was a touching landscape to me. I was holding her baby scarily and thinking “Oh my god, I am holding a person squeezed from my little cousin sister…” A start of a new life of a tiny person is actually a fresh start of life of all family members.

We all get old and die. It had been a mystery why people want kids so badly for a long time, but I kind of came to an undarnding that,for a family, we are one life together and die and reborn again and again just like a whole family is one body with old and fresh cells mixed together. If a baby is born, our sadness of living and dying exclusively is a little reduced and cured.

The continuation of life, the coming and going four seasons and all; I wanted to be out from this track, maybe. I was looking for a way to get out. I never wanted to have a moment I know how I live and die, the schedule, so I kind of chose a life that takes me somewhere I can’t imagine but valuable, exciting, and new. But when I go back and observe the sequence of life that I used to live, I find it is also very beautiful.

Family life is like a puzzle. We don’t know how the picture turns to be till you fit the last piece in. Which piece of the picture I am supposed to be, and how that colors up and fill the whole picture in the end, I don’t have idea yet. What we will see in the end is maybe something that is far different from what we expect. Whatever I would be, or whatever I do, I simply wish I add a beautiful and vivid color in it which gives a punch in the whole picture.

Family Affair (3) – The Selfish Gene

I called up my grandmother, who is the woman of the entire family of mine. After some innocent convesation and gossips, she started talking about me. The 85 years old woman said “You should make kids, with whoever that doesn’t matter to me. Don’t bother to get married if you don’t want. Be a single mother or whatever.” My old grandmother is encouraging me to be a single mother? That’s radical. Shocked, I told her “No kidding, being a single mother is not easy, especially in India.” She said, “Ok, just make a baby with someone and send it to home. You can stay there and I will take care of the baby here, don’t worry.”

Indian friends sometimes ask me if there’s no social pressure for marriage or baby thing in Japan, which is, indeed. My family is pretty respectful to me, yet they challange me now and then. To sum up, the family’s message to my love life and marriage has been drastically changed in the past two decades as following. Yeah, typical.

10s to early 20s: Don’t waste your time with someone crappy or bonehead
28 to 29: Enough for quest, get marred with whoever you got
30: Get married with literally whatever, we are ok with even someone who commited a crime in the past (it’s the literalistic translation)
Passed 31: OK, no bother for marriage. Have a baby; it’s definitelly easier than finding Mr. Right.

Hmm, tragic.

I usually don’t mind or even enjoy when people push me. But I finally needed to think what all this is actually about, seriously. If they don’t care about who my future husband is, don’t care about who the hell their grandchildren’s father is, or even don’t care about me deliverying a child alone and is apart from my child in different countries, how the child is grown up without having a proper parents, what is that they really care of? Is it the fact that they have a new generation? Possibily.

My family is generous, good, and intelligent people. So comparatively I see a truth in it; the truth that is a kind of The Selfish Gene by Richerd Dokins type of truth, that they want the satisfaction and self realization from what their children turn to be or produce, and that is a kind of instinction more than a social moral. On the other hand, I have a different kind of selfish desire and dream of life.  Who is selfish, everyone, or nobody? What is the end goal of one family, happiness or some other kind? It is getting deeper.

It may sound a little too cold, but it is getting quite interesting. Let’s see.

Faimily Affair (2) – A Running Away Couple

DimsumA family is the weirdest thing, normally uncontrolablly weirdest. Love is an important element but there are so much more.

My grandmother, my father’s mother, was from a poor farmer family. Everyone was a poor farmer 70 – 80 years ago in Japan so it was pretty much common, but her family was one of the poorest. She was good in school, but her scary mother sold her out to a tea house when she was little, and she became a child labor, and later a Geisha, and worked for the tea house for her young age. It’s also a typical story. But the twist came after she met her husband.

My grandfater (which is a different grampa from the one who were drawn in a bathtab), was a newspaper journalist. He was a regular customer of my mother’s tea house, and he may have paid for her family debt to the tea house, or they ran away…, anyhow he took her out and got married.

They were poor, and borrowed money from all connections to save their lives. He was an over-enthusiastic journalist and was targetted by Yakuza because of his paper articles. In a fight, he shived and injured a member of Yakuza, and ran away from police taking Granma. From Tokai to Shikoku; Shikoku is the small island of South Japan, where there is a famous long pilgrimage route of Japanese Buddhism called Ohenro (Temple Lidging). They became a pair of Ohenro, and started wondering around.

For eight years, they were wondering in Shikoku alone either to avoid revenge from Yakuza or to wait the statute of limitations was to expire, I don’t know either. They moved here to there, a temple to another, did a begger, slept under the eaves of temples, and ate things given. My grandfather was a very good caligrapher, and he made money by drawing caligraphies (I don’t understand this part how, but I guess there were not many people who could write in the age, so it was obviously a small good business for days). Granma hated her husband after all, and I think that’s fair enough, but we believe they were so much in love at this point, because eight years is a long period that two of them survive a pair of homeless like that together.

They came back to their hometown after it’s over, and back to be a poorest farmar couple again. My granfather was retired, but Granma was still young, had two sons, and worked as a farmar and a cook of a school kitchen to let the boys eat. The long tough life got them into a terrible state in relationship, and they were deadly fighting to kill each other everyday, but at the same time, both of them seemed loved the sons deadly. Granma’s dream was to have two sons get into university and make them teachers, and it was what exactly happened. Both of them became school teachers and had a decently wealthy, and happy peaceful life. And the grandsons-and-daughters deadly loved her, too.

All the couple’s life story came to the light after Granma has passed away. One of the far related uncles came to the funeral and told the story to us for the first time. Nobody of my family knew it, even my father. I believe that my parents don’t have such huge stories behind, but who knows, as nobody knows what story is behind me (though fortunately or unfortunately, there’s not much story behind me, still it would be).

I loved my grandmother more than anyone else in my whole life. I loved her hidden passions and mysterious isolation and solitude. She was the only person who hugged and kissed me everyday when I come back from school (Japanese family don’t kiss or hug each other so much). After all, in the end, we die without revealing our whole life. No one never know. But still, maybe, something remains to the next generations from the way we live and love kids and others. I want to leave a good successful story, but yet, I want to believe that my family or whoever next generations will be people who understand the depth of life and enjoy hearling it irrespective good or bad insidents of the history.

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