Fuden-an: Leaves from a Tea-journal

With the first bruiting of 'October', temperatures here in Japan became thoroughly clement. In our household, until just recently some caged bell-crickets that in mid-September we had been sent would daily delight our ears with their lively, silvery chirring.

In recent years - perhaps due to new developments in freight and postal services - the delivery of not just food-stuffs but even living creatures has been much on the increase. For example, the gifts that we have received as deliveries this year have included not only these bell-crickets but also many other creatures that will delight children, such as live crayfish, live coleoptera, and even living fireflies. Even more surprising is to find these delivered in plastic cases also provided with exactly the earth or rocks, or what have you, that each kind of creature may feel most comfortable with.

When I was a small child, my parents would take me to Kure, a coastal town in Hiroshima Prefecture, and there on the beach I would collect as many little crabs as I could, and then my father would carry them home for me, in a disused cake box into which he would place fern-leaves, and so on, sprinkled with water. When compared with such primitive devices, today's contrivances are almost dream-like. Yet I do from time to time find myself wondering whether so much convenience may be entirely to the good.

Be that as it may, the fever of the Olympics having passed, the chief topic in the world of Japanese sport has now turned to matters such as mergers between professional baseball teams, while, in the U.S. Major League, Japan-born Ichiro, presently with the Seattle Mariners, has created a new world record with his score of 262 hits in a single year: bracing 'big news' arriving as though borne, and suitably enough, on the fresh breezes of autumn.

Yet behind this happy achievement must lie long endurance of a degree of pressure unimaginable to most of us, and an unflaggingly determined effort that to us remains otherwise invisible. And one can only bow one's head in unstinted acknowledgement of Ichiro's ability to betray not one particle of all that grind.

And I am always impressed by his replies in his occasional interviews with the media. After he had first transferred to the Major League, there immediately to begin chalking up achievements that far surpassed our anticipations, when interviewed during that first year and asked just how he had managed these feats, all he would say - and so gracefully lightly - was, 'Well, I didn't come here entirely unprepared ….' What he was so modestly alluding to was the fact that, for many years before achieving his goal of becoming a Major League player, he had constantly practiced batting with the type of ball that is produced and used in the U.S.A. And, when one learned of this, one could not help groaning - in helpless recognition of all that determination, as to which he himself had chosen merely to hint.

And, concerning his having achieved his next goal - that of a year's score of 200 hits - all he would say was, 'But more pleasing still will be to achieve two hundred and one.' In short, he is someone that constantly pushes his goal yet further, prepares and strives to reach that next goal, and then does just that. What seems to give him joy and satisfaction is not merely to attain some goal, but to surpass it.

Among the catchphrases that have recently become current in this society is tasseikan . But what Ichiro is doing is always to move beyond merely basking in a 'sense of achievement'. And, in Japan of late, I cannot recall having seen or heard any person that is capable of discussing an equally impressive attainment on their own part with anything like Ichiro's disarming nonchalance.

　　Although it is of course true that, when each of us starts out in life, each one does this at their own particular level, as to what they find easily manageable, what is at the same time important is the experience of having found an objective towards which always to be moving. And I myself feel that the model offered by Ichiro has bestowed even upon me a strengthening of courage and determination.