Two years ago the earth rumbled inside and shook the island
of Japan harder than most of the earth ever gets shaken. It seized control of the city for a
horrifying span of several minutes, shaking enormous skyscrapers like nothing,
and then it stopped. But it also opened
a wave up in the earth, and that wave swallowed tens of thousands of lives from
the island of Japan. When the wave hit,
it also hit a nuclear power plant, and that’s the situation that continued to
terrify everyone on those islands, and even a lot of people all around the
world who had barely any reason to really be worried beyond the basic worries
of any given day than the people in Japan did.
For several weeks, people had no idea if their island was going to blow
up. Then they got the idea that they
were probably safe if they were far enough away, but still, anything could
happen. Even worse, they really had no
idea what was going on with all of that waste that had escaped from the plant.
I know a lot of people in Japan, although I only knew a few before the earthquake. I was told that they were okay before I’d even been given the news about the earthquake, which is always the best way for shocking news to be delivered.
My cousin Dan is actually the one who gave me the news, and I didn’t even understand him. The thing was, one week earlier, March 4, I bought this ticket to Tokyo for March 30, 2011. I wanted to teach English there for at least a year. I had been thinking about Japan since I was a very little kid, working in a foreign country since studying abroad six years earlier, and that specific plan for about a year.
I woke up on March 11 very excited because I was going to buy my first laptop in five years. I received a text from my cousin saying, “So… are you still going to go to Japan?” I thought he was nagging me for not firming up plans to eat together in the city, and was jokingly asking if I was even still going since I hadn’t talked to him in a while about it.
I was living at home at the time. I’d traveled for some beautiful possessed reason almost the entire previous year, and I was hibernating in the snow-filled north in a manner of speaking. I was very ready to break free and have a new adventure in a new country, one I had been dreaming of and was so intricately linked to my spiritual quest of understanding my place to be in the world.
I went downstairs and my mom told me that all of our Japanese friends were okay, but that there had been an enormous 9.0 earthquake near Japan that had caused a tsunami and killed tens of thousands of people. It was shocking and horrible news, but it had been prefaced with, “Everyone you know is okay, so life is still okay”, which is pretty much how everyone reacts to all of the bad news in the world unless something really grabs them. Otherwise there’s just too much to sort through every day. But of course, I woke up much faster with the news, and figured that as bad as it was, it was over now and I could still go there, and even better, I could put my good where it would do the most by teaching and cheering up whomever I met.
We continued with our plans to go to Saratoga Springs for dinner at a Japanese restaurant and to get my laptop, because I still needed it, especially if I was going to go to Japan. Better yet, I was buying a Japanese laptop, so I would be very minutely and indirectly helping their economy somehow.
When we got home we turned on the news and saw that there was a nuclear power plant in Fukushima, over a hundred miles north of Tokyo, and that it had been hit by the wave and was in a severe state of uncertainty and possible disaster unparalleled in modern times. It was very clear that this was the worst situation Japan had been in since World War II. It got scarier with every minute.
I went through the uninvolved motions of loading the software onto my computer while my eyes stayed fixed to the television. In a way it felt wrong to be receiving such an expensive and joy-giving device simultaneously, but I didn't see how postponing purchasing a tool that would allow me to monitor the situation more carefully and continue to express myself while I was alive would improve the situation over there.
I eventually had to turn off the television because it wasn’t improving the situation, and I went into a quiet room with the laptop and began writing and creating. I don’t even remember what it was about, but I remember that it felt spiritual, that there was a huge importance surrounding this instrument and how I played it.
After that, the news from Japan was worse every day. My friends told me not to come, because they were afraid for my life. They were so calm and polite and refusing to panic. I knew they were very distressed and worried, but they had amazing perspective that despite their uncertainty and hardship, others had it much worse and needed their support.
Amazingly, in the parts of the country that had been spared the tsunami but felt the earthquake, there wasn’t nearly as much damage as one might expect from a 9.0 earthquake. Thank Japanese adaptation and engineering for that. After all, they didn’t just make my laptop by accident.
It was a few days before I realized that my own plans were seriously unlikely for the first time in a long time. For a year I had been learning myself and passing on the message that if you want to succeed in your dreams you have to learn patience and that if you really want something, with all your heart, you can find a way to do it so long as you have physical freedom and enough health to move. But you have to want it.
Now I had to learn both lessons. This was pretty easy from my viewpoint in the safe American countryside.
So I spent a lot of time writing and playing basketball with the guys down at the old high school gym.
My friend Brad was the first one to tell me we had to go play basketball when I was bummed out. The basketball saved me, but the crowd didn’t help. Every player told me every week that there was no way I was ever going to go, not now, not for years. They were scared, and they liked me, so they wanted me to be safe, but it angered me. I knew I was still supposed to go. I told myself that they wouldn't go there on an adventure in the first place, and that their opinion didn't matter, but they did matter, because they were human, and I'm human, and as much as I knew it could still work, I was scared.
On March 27 I canceled my ticket to Tokyo. We’d just come home from a dinner honoring my dad’s life work with ducks and duck decoys on Long Island, where he grew up and I started to grow up. It was a complete surprise to him. They voted to honor him and told my mom, and the whole extended family was in on it. Even better, when he finally figured out what was going on and that it wasn’t just a dinner out with the family, he got to make a speech and inform the people who ran the club that his own father had been a founding member, and he was in the audience watching his son be honored for carrying on one of his many passions. I never shared that passion with them, but it was moving to watch it celebrated.
Even so, I had a heavy heart when I got back to my uncle’s home, the same home I had stayed in the night before going on my big journeys to New Zealand and India, and canceled the journey. I was supposed to leave in two nights. Instead I was going back to a farm in the middle of nowhere with dead earth everywhere, and no idea where I was supposed to go next or what I was supposed to do.
The morning after the banquet we got to experience another surprise: my dad and my uncle honored their father for his life’s work of everything with a photographic slideshow of his life, going all the way back to brownish old black-and-white photos of him as a child. They showed him as a young Marine at Guadalcanal in Japan, and out west in Mexico, and sailing boats and camping in the wild and looking like he could run the world if someone would only ask him to. Instead he raised four great children, and many grandchildren. He kept pointing out my resemblance to his younger photos, and it really lifted my spirits from zero to infinity. We took a funny picture of him cutting a cake, since his 85th birthday was only a few days away, amazing for a man who smoked cigarettes for seventy years and volunteered to go to the worst war in the world. That's the last time I saw him alive, or at all.
On the way home that afternoon my dad asked me to drive the final stretch from Albany, which is about an hour southwest of our home. I turned on my iPod, picked my “on-the-go” playlist that had about 28 songs on it, and hit that button that supposedly randomizes the songs. It happened that four out of five songs in a row were by my favorite artist, not just from Japan, but in the world, Hiromi Uehara. You might think that’s likely since she’s my favorite music magician, but there were only 7 songs of hers on that list, and they all stacked up in a row, which was awesome and at the least gave that section a constant flow. I think I was listening to “Place to Be” or “Wind Song” or “Opening-Tuning-Prologue” when my dad rolled over mid-nap and said, “Oh, this is that Japanese pianist you like, what’s-her-name?”
“Hiromi.”
“Right. I think I heard she's playing around here soon."
“WHAT?!” I yelled.
"Yeah, they mentioned it on NPR, I think." Of course he heard it on NPR. Where else would he hear anything?
“WHEN were you going to tell me this?”
“Oh, I don’t know. They mentioned it the other day. I think it’s at Proctor’s in Schenectady. Maybe at the end of the week.” It was a Sunday.
“Well, thank you for finally telling me.”
“Any time.” He went back to his nap.
We got home and I looked up tickets, and sure enough, she was playing in Schenectady, which is only an hour from our house. It’s a terrible place to be mostly, but they did have this one old-school theater I’d never been to, and I could easily make the trip. After all, I needed some kind of guidance. Hiromi wasn’t just my favorite musician, but my favorite artist too. Even though a lot of her album titles appear to be simple words, or her explanations appear simple, they’re always the deepest guide signs I ever come across, and seem to synch perfectly with what I’m experiencing at that time in my life. I love when that happens. With anything, but especially the artists that I feel so deeply in my soul. You can listen to music and love it anyway, but sometimes you’re disappointed with what they have to say to explain it, not that they should have to at all. But it’s another opportunity for someone to express themselves, so I love liner notes, especially for music without words. At the time in 2011, the last album she had come out with was called Place to Be, and it was all about finding your place to be in the world, through a journey. And that’s the beauty of it. Everyone can relate to that. Everyone in the world.
I felt like I could relate to it even more because I was living it in an extreme literal way. I didn’t even know that album had come out until I’d spent seven months traveling alone and my friend told me about it during the summer I came back to America. Then I traveled across America and to Mexico and all sorts of exciting craziness that filled me with more confidence that if I wanted something and was patient, I could find a way. And that’s exactly what I was thinking about as I found myself back at home and looking for a guide post to point me to the future. So far I had one, a photograph, and it was very clearly pointing to Japan, and all of a sudden that ominous sepia tone with the crouched figure and wind in his face made perfect sense. Because I knew I was still going to Japan. Nobody else knew it, but I did.
I hadn’t even been to a Hiromi concert in almost two years. I’d seen her on the 4th of July in New York the summer before I went on my big journey from India to China and other places to be, and listened to a lot of her music since, but I hadn’t had a chance to see her since. Yet here she was in Schenectady, of all places.
So I took my friend, who’s a musician, because he loved her music but had never seen her.
Before the show we met these people who had driven all the way down from Canada to see her for their fifth or sixth time. I told them that I had just canceled a ticket to Japan but still was trying to figure out when I could go, and the guy told me with a dark look on his face, “That’s a good place not to be right now.” Then the show started and we were all ecstatically happy for an hour straight.
She played solo for the first time in my experience, and she owned it… she just strutted out there and looked at that instrument and she played it perfectly, and it made everyone happy. She was out there all alone, on her own, creating beautiful, fun, and mysterious music for everyone willing to listen, even though I know she was hurting inside.
After the show she gave a speech about the earthquake. She had actually been brave enough to go back to Japan to play shows already. She donated all of the DVD sales to the earthquake victims, and then gave my favorite speech in the world, simple and spiritually spectacular:
“Never take for granted the fact you are alive, and do what you love.”
I drove home, and I knew three things: I was really happy. I was going to write and write and write until the book was there to make people happy. And I was going to Japan.
Two weeks later I started forming a plan to move to San Francisco and take whatever bottom of the barrel job I could to start out and start sorting through my experiences for some understanding.
The day after I got that idea, I got a premonition to look at the US State Department website to get an update on the situation. They had been evacuating Americans since it happened. But that exact same day I was checking the website, they had changed the warning and said US citizens could now return to and visit Tokyo, with a detailed explanation of why that region was now safe. This was the same State Department which told me to be worried as all hell about India, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Egypt, you name it. And they were telling me it was safe.
I went to hang out with my friends in Vermont, and some of them were telling me that I was crazy for going. But then a girl from northern California told me that I’d clearly already made up my mind, and that I wanted to do it, so I should just do it.
That night I got an e-mail from an English school I had e-mailed weeks earlier. The owner said he desperately needed teachers because so many had left after the earthquake.
The next day I e-mailed him back and told him I would be there by May 5. It was April 14. I bought a new ticket on April 20.
In the intervening time, I made two movies with pictures on my new Japanese laptop, and understood why I’d done everything that I ever did.
Then I got on a plane to Tokyo, and showed up at the English Club.
The owner told me he was desperate, and couldn’t think of any reason for not hiring me unless I was absolutely awful. I was happy to hear that I didn’t appear to be that way at first meeting. And that’s when the Japanese journey began.
I taught and wrote for a year, and now I’m here, in San Francisco.
I just wrote a book on my Japanese laptop in 11 days. I’m the only one I know of who read the whole thing. I would be happy to know if it makes other people happy somehow, or engages their mind, or teaches them something they didn’t know, or at least entertains them. Whatever it does for others, I had to write it, because it showed me who I am and why I do what I do. And better yet, I have another real book to write that I had already outlined and started on before.
That gives me a good feeling after my first day back on the job as an English sensei. Teaching English as a foreign language isn't my dream, but I enjoy it enough to do it, and I get home early enough to focus on the book for most of the day and have a life the rest of the time.
It was really fun. My students are all in their 20’s and 30’s, something I did not experience in Japan. In Japan they were all really young, teenagers, middle-aged or really old. And as much as I adored them, they were all Japanese. This class has students from all over the world: Japan, China, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Siberia, Kyrgyzstan… it’s awesome! Today I asked them all to write about a journey they went on, share with their partner, and have the partner report on the journey to the class. A lot of them had been on some great adventures, and a lot of them had come to America, and that was an adventure in itself. One girl from Japan said that life is a journey, every moment of her day, and I thought that was great.
Then I came home to my place in this new place to be. I don’t know much about San Francisco. Maybe I’ll love it here, maybe I’ll move somewhere else someday, maybe I’ll go back to New York after I’ve had my fill. I’ve been lucky enough to spend my 20s exploring as many opposites of what I know as possible so I could be more accessible to the world’s love which is always available but I don’t always know how to accept and give.
Now I’m realizing that today is my favorite instrument’s birthday. I just wrote my first real book on this thing. Who cares if it makes it big or even gets published? Well, I do, somewhat, but even before that, I not only did it, but I shared it openly with anyone who wants to see. And I played this instrument to move the genki around the music sphere.
I use the word “genki” a lot. It’s because every morning I asked my Japanese kindergartner’s “how are you?”, and they jumped up into the air pumping their fists like little Super Mario’s and yelled, “GENKI!”. When my surrogate Japanese mom (one of my student’s at the English club) asked me my favorite word, I jumped in the air, pumped my fist like Super Mario and said, “Genki!” Okay, I didn’t jump, but I smiled. So she made me a shirt with the genki kanji on it. Then she made me another one that says “Ben” in kanji. My roommate Greg explained to me that the specific characters she used for that sound means “exertion through study”. I’d written about 500 pages about pictures and taught hundreds of students the language that year, so I figured it fit. And it did, very snugly. I still wear it. Along with my genki shirt, and my back-up genki shirt which she gave me on my last day in Japan in case the other one got dirty.
I said good bye to all of them on March 30 and got on a plane home for America, one year after the date of my original ticket to Japan, the one I had given up on because of the earthquake.
Today, one of my students asked me very simply, “From all of your travels and experiences, what is your message to people?”
And I said, “You have to learn patience, and if you really want to do something you will find a way, as long as you are free and genki, in body and spirit. That if YOU really want it, you have to go for it."
Speaking of which, it’s time to get started on the next one.
What else would I do?
I know a lot of people in Japan, although I only knew a few before the earthquake. I was told that they were okay before I’d even been given the news about the earthquake, which is always the best way for shocking news to be delivered.
My cousin Dan is actually the one who gave me the news, and I didn’t even understand him. The thing was, one week earlier, March 4, I bought this ticket to Tokyo for March 30, 2011. I wanted to teach English there for at least a year. I had been thinking about Japan since I was a very little kid, working in a foreign country since studying abroad six years earlier, and that specific plan for about a year.
I woke up on March 11 very excited because I was going to buy my first laptop in five years. I received a text from my cousin saying, “So… are you still going to go to Japan?” I thought he was nagging me for not firming up plans to eat together in the city, and was jokingly asking if I was even still going since I hadn’t talked to him in a while about it.
I was living at home at the time. I’d traveled for some beautiful possessed reason almost the entire previous year, and I was hibernating in the snow-filled north in a manner of speaking. I was very ready to break free and have a new adventure in a new country, one I had been dreaming of and was so intricately linked to my spiritual quest of understanding my place to be in the world.
I went downstairs and my mom told me that all of our Japanese friends were okay, but that there had been an enormous 9.0 earthquake near Japan that had caused a tsunami and killed tens of thousands of people. It was shocking and horrible news, but it had been prefaced with, “Everyone you know is okay, so life is still okay”, which is pretty much how everyone reacts to all of the bad news in the world unless something really grabs them. Otherwise there’s just too much to sort through every day. But of course, I woke up much faster with the news, and figured that as bad as it was, it was over now and I could still go there, and even better, I could put my good where it would do the most by teaching and cheering up whomever I met.
We continued with our plans to go to Saratoga Springs for dinner at a Japanese restaurant and to get my laptop, because I still needed it, especially if I was going to go to Japan. Better yet, I was buying a Japanese laptop, so I would be very minutely and indirectly helping their economy somehow.
Afterward we went to dinner at a Japanese restaurant. The food was delicious, but the television
was showing footage of the earthquake over and over, and most of the wait staff
was pretty preoccupied with that, as you can imagine.
When we got home we turned on the news and saw that there was a nuclear power plant in Fukushima, over a hundred miles north of Tokyo, and that it had been hit by the wave and was in a severe state of uncertainty and possible disaster unparalleled in modern times. It was very clear that this was the worst situation Japan had been in since World War II. It got scarier with every minute.
I went through the uninvolved motions of loading the software onto my computer while my eyes stayed fixed to the television. In a way it felt wrong to be receiving such an expensive and joy-giving device simultaneously, but I didn't see how postponing purchasing a tool that would allow me to monitor the situation more carefully and continue to express myself while I was alive would improve the situation over there.
I eventually had to turn off the television because it wasn’t improving the situation, and I went into a quiet room with the laptop and began writing and creating. I don’t even remember what it was about, but I remember that it felt spiritual, that there was a huge importance surrounding this instrument and how I played it.
After that, the news from Japan was worse every day. My friends told me not to come, because they were afraid for my life. They were so calm and polite and refusing to panic. I knew they were very distressed and worried, but they had amazing perspective that despite their uncertainty and hardship, others had it much worse and needed their support.
Amazingly, in the parts of the country that had been spared the tsunami but felt the earthquake, there wasn’t nearly as much damage as one might expect from a 9.0 earthquake. Thank Japanese adaptation and engineering for that. After all, they didn’t just make my laptop by accident.
It was a few days before I realized that my own plans were seriously unlikely for the first time in a long time. For a year I had been learning myself and passing on the message that if you want to succeed in your dreams you have to learn patience and that if you really want something, with all your heart, you can find a way to do it so long as you have physical freedom and enough health to move. But you have to want it.
Now I had to learn both lessons. This was pretty easy from my viewpoint in the safe American countryside.
So I spent a lot of time writing and playing basketball with the guys down at the old high school gym.
My friend Brad was the first one to tell me we had to go play basketball when I was bummed out. The basketball saved me, but the crowd didn’t help. Every player told me every week that there was no way I was ever going to go, not now, not for years. They were scared, and they liked me, so they wanted me to be safe, but it angered me. I knew I was still supposed to go. I told myself that they wouldn't go there on an adventure in the first place, and that their opinion didn't matter, but they did matter, because they were human, and I'm human, and as much as I knew it could still work, I was scared.
On March 27 I canceled my ticket to Tokyo. We’d just come home from a dinner honoring my dad’s life work with ducks and duck decoys on Long Island, where he grew up and I started to grow up. It was a complete surprise to him. They voted to honor him and told my mom, and the whole extended family was in on it. Even better, when he finally figured out what was going on and that it wasn’t just a dinner out with the family, he got to make a speech and inform the people who ran the club that his own father had been a founding member, and he was in the audience watching his son be honored for carrying on one of his many passions. I never shared that passion with them, but it was moving to watch it celebrated.
Even so, I had a heavy heart when I got back to my uncle’s home, the same home I had stayed in the night before going on my big journeys to New Zealand and India, and canceled the journey. I was supposed to leave in two nights. Instead I was going back to a farm in the middle of nowhere with dead earth everywhere, and no idea where I was supposed to go next or what I was supposed to do.
The morning after the banquet we got to experience another surprise: my dad and my uncle honored their father for his life’s work of everything with a photographic slideshow of his life, going all the way back to brownish old black-and-white photos of him as a child. They showed him as a young Marine at Guadalcanal in Japan, and out west in Mexico, and sailing boats and camping in the wild and looking like he could run the world if someone would only ask him to. Instead he raised four great children, and many grandchildren. He kept pointing out my resemblance to his younger photos, and it really lifted my spirits from zero to infinity. We took a funny picture of him cutting a cake, since his 85th birthday was only a few days away, amazing for a man who smoked cigarettes for seventy years and volunteered to go to the worst war in the world. That's the last time I saw him alive, or at all.
On the way home that afternoon my dad asked me to drive the final stretch from Albany, which is about an hour southwest of our home. I turned on my iPod, picked my “on-the-go” playlist that had about 28 songs on it, and hit that button that supposedly randomizes the songs. It happened that four out of five songs in a row were by my favorite artist, not just from Japan, but in the world, Hiromi Uehara. You might think that’s likely since she’s my favorite music magician, but there were only 7 songs of hers on that list, and they all stacked up in a row, which was awesome and at the least gave that section a constant flow. I think I was listening to “Place to Be” or “Wind Song” or “Opening-Tuning-Prologue” when my dad rolled over mid-nap and said, “Oh, this is that Japanese pianist you like, what’s-her-name?”
“Hiromi.”
“Right. I think I heard she's playing around here soon."
“WHAT?!” I yelled.
"Yeah, they mentioned it on NPR, I think." Of course he heard it on NPR. Where else would he hear anything?
“WHEN were you going to tell me this?”
“Oh, I don’t know. They mentioned it the other day. I think it’s at Proctor’s in Schenectady. Maybe at the end of the week.” It was a Sunday.
“Well, thank you for finally telling me.”
“Any time.” He went back to his nap.
We got home and I looked up tickets, and sure enough, she was playing in Schenectady, which is only an hour from our house. It’s a terrible place to be mostly, but they did have this one old-school theater I’d never been to, and I could easily make the trip. After all, I needed some kind of guidance. Hiromi wasn’t just my favorite musician, but my favorite artist too. Even though a lot of her album titles appear to be simple words, or her explanations appear simple, they’re always the deepest guide signs I ever come across, and seem to synch perfectly with what I’m experiencing at that time in my life. I love when that happens. With anything, but especially the artists that I feel so deeply in my soul. You can listen to music and love it anyway, but sometimes you’re disappointed with what they have to say to explain it, not that they should have to at all. But it’s another opportunity for someone to express themselves, so I love liner notes, especially for music without words. At the time in 2011, the last album she had come out with was called Place to Be, and it was all about finding your place to be in the world, through a journey. And that’s the beauty of it. Everyone can relate to that. Everyone in the world.
I felt like I could relate to it even more because I was living it in an extreme literal way. I didn’t even know that album had come out until I’d spent seven months traveling alone and my friend told me about it during the summer I came back to America. Then I traveled across America and to Mexico and all sorts of exciting craziness that filled me with more confidence that if I wanted something and was patient, I could find a way. And that’s exactly what I was thinking about as I found myself back at home and looking for a guide post to point me to the future. So far I had one, a photograph, and it was very clearly pointing to Japan, and all of a sudden that ominous sepia tone with the crouched figure and wind in his face made perfect sense. Because I knew I was still going to Japan. Nobody else knew it, but I did.
I hadn’t even been to a Hiromi concert in almost two years. I’d seen her on the 4th of July in New York the summer before I went on my big journey from India to China and other places to be, and listened to a lot of her music since, but I hadn’t had a chance to see her since. Yet here she was in Schenectady, of all places.
So I took my friend, who’s a musician, because he loved her music but had never seen her.
Before the show we met these people who had driven all the way down from Canada to see her for their fifth or sixth time. I told them that I had just canceled a ticket to Japan but still was trying to figure out when I could go, and the guy told me with a dark look on his face, “That’s a good place not to be right now.” Then the show started and we were all ecstatically happy for an hour straight.
She played solo for the first time in my experience, and she owned it… she just strutted out there and looked at that instrument and she played it perfectly, and it made everyone happy. She was out there all alone, on her own, creating beautiful, fun, and mysterious music for everyone willing to listen, even though I know she was hurting inside.
After the show she gave a speech about the earthquake. She had actually been brave enough to go back to Japan to play shows already. She donated all of the DVD sales to the earthquake victims, and then gave my favorite speech in the world, simple and spiritually spectacular:
“Never take for granted the fact you are alive, and do what you love.”
I drove home, and I knew three things: I was really happy. I was going to write and write and write until the book was there to make people happy. And I was going to Japan.
Two weeks later I started forming a plan to move to San Francisco and take whatever bottom of the barrel job I could to start out and start sorting through my experiences for some understanding.
The day after I got that idea, I got a premonition to look at the US State Department website to get an update on the situation. They had been evacuating Americans since it happened. But that exact same day I was checking the website, they had changed the warning and said US citizens could now return to and visit Tokyo, with a detailed explanation of why that region was now safe. This was the same State Department which told me to be worried as all hell about India, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Egypt, you name it. And they were telling me it was safe.
I went to hang out with my friends in Vermont, and some of them were telling me that I was crazy for going. But then a girl from northern California told me that I’d clearly already made up my mind, and that I wanted to do it, so I should just do it.
That night I got an e-mail from an English school I had e-mailed weeks earlier. The owner said he desperately needed teachers because so many had left after the earthquake.
The next day I e-mailed him back and told him I would be there by May 5. It was April 14. I bought a new ticket on April 20.
In the intervening time, I made two movies with pictures on my new Japanese laptop, and understood why I’d done everything that I ever did.
Then I got on a plane to Tokyo, and showed up at the English Club.
The owner told me he was desperate, and couldn’t think of any reason for not hiring me unless I was absolutely awful. I was happy to hear that I didn’t appear to be that way at first meeting. And that’s when the Japanese journey began.
I taught and wrote for a year, and now I’m here, in San Francisco.
I just wrote a book on my Japanese laptop in 11 days. I’m the only one I know of who read the whole thing. I would be happy to know if it makes other people happy somehow, or engages their mind, or teaches them something they didn’t know, or at least entertains them. Whatever it does for others, I had to write it, because it showed me who I am and why I do what I do. And better yet, I have another real book to write that I had already outlined and started on before.
That gives me a good feeling after my first day back on the job as an English sensei. Teaching English as a foreign language isn't my dream, but I enjoy it enough to do it, and I get home early enough to focus on the book for most of the day and have a life the rest of the time.
It was really fun. My students are all in their 20’s and 30’s, something I did not experience in Japan. In Japan they were all really young, teenagers, middle-aged or really old. And as much as I adored them, they were all Japanese. This class has students from all over the world: Japan, China, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Siberia, Kyrgyzstan… it’s awesome! Today I asked them all to write about a journey they went on, share with their partner, and have the partner report on the journey to the class. A lot of them had been on some great adventures, and a lot of them had come to America, and that was an adventure in itself. One girl from Japan said that life is a journey, every moment of her day, and I thought that was great.
Then I came home to my place in this new place to be. I don’t know much about San Francisco. Maybe I’ll love it here, maybe I’ll move somewhere else someday, maybe I’ll go back to New York after I’ve had my fill. I’ve been lucky enough to spend my 20s exploring as many opposites of what I know as possible so I could be more accessible to the world’s love which is always available but I don’t always know how to accept and give.
Now I’m realizing that today is my favorite instrument’s birthday. I just wrote my first real book on this thing. Who cares if it makes it big or even gets published? Well, I do, somewhat, but even before that, I not only did it, but I shared it openly with anyone who wants to see. And I played this instrument to move the genki around the music sphere.
I use the word “genki” a lot. It’s because every morning I asked my Japanese kindergartner’s “how are you?”, and they jumped up into the air pumping their fists like little Super Mario’s and yelled, “GENKI!”. When my surrogate Japanese mom (one of my student’s at the English club) asked me my favorite word, I jumped in the air, pumped my fist like Super Mario and said, “Genki!” Okay, I didn’t jump, but I smiled. So she made me a shirt with the genki kanji on it. Then she made me another one that says “Ben” in kanji. My roommate Greg explained to me that the specific characters she used for that sound means “exertion through study”. I’d written about 500 pages about pictures and taught hundreds of students the language that year, so I figured it fit. And it did, very snugly. I still wear it. Along with my genki shirt, and my back-up genki shirt which she gave me on my last day in Japan in case the other one got dirty.
I said good bye to all of them on March 30 and got on a plane home for America, one year after the date of my original ticket to Japan, the one I had given up on because of the earthquake.
Today, one of my students asked me very simply, “From all of your travels and experiences, what is your message to people?”
And I said, “You have to learn patience, and if you really want to do something you will find a way, as long as you are free and genki, in body and spirit. That if YOU really want it, you have to go for it."
Speaking of which, it’s time to get started on the next one.
What else would I do?
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