Over the last weekend, I was at a university in Hachi-oji, Tokyo, for the schooling class in my correspondence course. This is my usual place where I do the “resetting” of my life. I met with many of my old friends there surrounded by the beautiful green on the campus. Chatting with them gave me a complete cure from the traveling exhaustion.
The people in various age groups mixed together and met after class and exchanged candid talks, laughed or cried, as the case might be, and derived comfort and joy from each other. I sincerely thank them for that.
During a two-day class of “Education History of Japan,” a woman born in 1929 gave us a talk about her experience of World War II. In her talk, she mentioned what she described as something more horrible than war itself, or attacks by the enemy. Her story went like this:
Her father was rather short in stature and was ineligible to be inducted into the military. But instead he was doing his best on the home-front, helping the people in the community.
While conducting a bucket brigade to stop the fire of the airraided houses day after day, he casually said, “What’s the use of fighting like this?” indicating his adamant opposition to the war. His words reached the ear of the Special Higher Police. He was arrested and taken to the police headquarters with his friends.
The woman, reminiscing about the incident, continued, “My father returned with a friend on his back, who was already dead. A consequence of torture.” Her clear voice and seeking spirit at such an advanced age moved me so much that tears welled up in my eyes.
We also heard a younger woman who described a scene of conversation with a Korean friend while studying abroad in Korea. “Hating each other won’t help us or give any solution. The only way is for us to help each other internationally, opening the way for new generations…,” she quoted a Korean friend. “These words propelled me to determine to dedicate my life to the establishment of a true Korean-Japanese friendship,” she continued.
Those two schooling days in Tokyo made me think about the education in Japan and where it should go. Learning opens new ways of our thinking. Education has an extremely close relationship with the work that I am pursuing now.
Politics exists for the happiness of good citizens. Medical service exists to save the people from physical suffering. What outrages me, however, is that something exactly opposite is happening in our society today.
During the recent holiday period, I visited Naoshima Island in Kagawa Prefecture for its Chichu Art Museum in the building designed by Mr. Tadao Ando, the world-famous architect. It is a fantastic island with its rows of houses and back alleys of old, untouched mountain forests, colorful flowers, and so on and so forth. A woman who used to work at my clinic once was fascinated by the island atmosphere, fell in love with it and opened her own acupuncture clinic there, carrying on her work vivaciously.
The Inland Sea of Japan (Seto-naikai) is filled with quiet beauty and time there seems to flow just as quietly and at ease. Lots of young people tour the area, which seems to energize their spirit. The remarkable coexistence of stillness and dynamism, and the harmony between human beings and nature etched an unquenchable impression of the island in my memory. It was a fantastic moment of encounter!
Then today, I had an opportunity to listen to a lecture by my mentor Mr. Rempu Fujimoto. During the lecture, he spoke about the profound meaning of “Mui-Shizen” and “Rentatsu-Shizen,” two noted phrases of Chinese origin referring respectively to the “state of abandoning artifice and just being oneself, doing nothing and taking things as they come” and the “process of accumulated training and discipline aimed at the goal of achieving the coveted skills.” The point of the lecture was that the former was the ultimate result of the latter.
The process of our training as acupuncturists consists on the one hand of the acquisition of the skill to handle the needle, and on the other hand, reaching the state of the mind qualifying us to use the needle. He said in his lecture that we must always try to rectify and straighten out our mind’s propensity. He emphasized that we should “enjoy” making the effort with enthusiasm.
The place of training is none other than the place where we live, which we are not allowed to run away from. “Simply because we are not able to run away from the environment we live in, we have genuine training and discipline there,” he said. I wholeheartedly agree with him. Hearing him say so was a profound moment of excitement to me, too.
His lecture propelled me to a new level of determination to forge ahead toward the state of “Mui-shizen.” As I think of the profound lecture by my mentor, fresh eagerness rises in my heart and soul to share with my patients the excitement of practicing acupuncture.
