わたしを活かして生きていく

I was born in Japan and raised in Japan, but my roots are in Korea. My nationality is Korean, my passport is Korean. I carry two names — a Japanese one and a Korean one.

My parents held their own culture close. Even while living in Japan, they made sure I learned the Korean language and Korean ways. Meanwhile, Japanese culture — the thing closest at hand — was something I knew astonishingly little about. Tea ceremony, kimono, the traditional arts: they felt lofty, like something I had no business approaching casually.

Though I grew up in Japan, I never quite understood the distance between what Japanese people say and what they mean, and for a time the country felt difficult to me. And yet, looking back, my senses and my sense of beauty were unmistakably raised by the landscapes and the daily life of Japan.

From early childhood my parents' work took us to America again and again, and later I studied in England. After that I worked for foreign companies; now I also hold a company in the Middle East and have made my home in Portugal, living among people and values from many countries.

For me, cultural difference was never something exceptional — it was simply always close at hand. Rather than measuring everything against one country or one set of values, I came to look at things while moving between cultures. That way of seeing grew naturally out of these experiences.

It was as an adult that I began, properly, to study Japanese culture. Because I did not absorb it as a matter of course from birth — because I learned it later — every gesture and every idea comes with a freshness that still surprises me, and I face it with a longing that has not faded.

I do not confine myself to one nationality or one culture. I move between several, and I see the world from there. That is why I can love Japanese culture from the inside and, at the same time, stand back far enough to see how it is received from abroad — what value it holds, where it stands in the world.

Things too ordinary for Japanese people to notice are sometimes received elsewhere as something rare. And the forms and traditions Japanese people treasure do not always carry across as they are.

To hold both views, inside and outside, and to build a bridge — carrying Japanese culture into a form the world can receive, without losing what it essentially is. I think that may be the role only I can play.

For me, loving Japan is not a matter of nationality. It is learning its sense of beauty and its spirit, keeping them alive in my own daily life, and passing them on to the world. I love Japan as a way of living.

I believe motherhood will save the world.
Because every person was born of a woman.
Motherhood is not something only women carry.
That feeling — the one that makes you want to protect a baby.

If everyone could remember being a baby themselves, and come to hold themselves the way they would hold that child, I think cruelty would stop happening.

From kindergarten on, apparently, I kept asking my parents, “Why was I born?” — with the distinct undertone of I never wanted to be born into a place that makes me do all these unpleasant things.

One day my mother said,
“That is for you to find out.” I must have been five or six, but I remember being completely convinced.

Through my teenage years especially, I threw myself into finding it. I pushed and pushed and pushed, and again and again things happened that felt like being told: that is not the answer.

Then one day a strange man (the one who later became my husband) said,
“You seem to be living in such a hurry — but we are alive only because someone happened to bring us into the world, and we have not died yet.”

I was stunned. And I felt the strength drain out of my whole body.

I still do not know the answer. Sometimes I feel I will find it one day; and even if I never do, somewhere along the way simply being on that road has come to feel like a great pleasure. Perhaps I already hold the answer.

Living, you sometimes run into things that make you think: did that really have to happen?

Everything was going well, and then suddenly it wasn't. Something I believed in collapsed. I have often thought — I have worked hard enough already, so why me?

For moments like those, I have magic words.
“Now it is finally getting interesting.”

Of course I do not actually find it interesting. If I could, I would like everything to pass quietly, without incident; honestly, I would like to run away. Even so, when life stops going the way I planned, I say these words on purpose.

Perhaps this is not misfortune. Perhaps I have been handed a question. Whatever appears in front of me surely carries some message. What am I meant to let go of by going through this? What am I meant to notice? How do I need to change the way I have been thinking, the way I have been seeing things? Thinking like that, something in me begins to rise.

If I only clear the problem away, get through it somehow, and stay exactly as I was, a similar question tends to come round again — as though the universe were saying, you still have not noticed this.

When I do not know how to move forward, I move as hard as I can in the direction that settles something in me. Not whether it looks admirable to others, not whether it matches the world's idea of correct, not whether anyone will approve. I believe there is always a way forward that I myself can accept.

There will be hesitation, and failure, and long detours. But I want to choose for myself, feel for myself, and carry it for myself.

I am a small universe. Just as the great universe is still expanding, inside me too there are places I do not yet know, connected to that greater one, spreading endlessly. A person can change at any point, and become someone new any number of times.

So when an unexpected question is placed in front of me:
“Now it is finally getting interesting.”

Who will I meet in myself from here? What is waiting to happen, and who will I meet along the way? Thinking that, I want to meet everything that comes with a yes, and a yes.

I am, always, infinite.

The true thing.

I have always believed in what cannot be seen.
But I did not want to believe in what was vague.

As a child, I was after the true thing.
I disliked flowers.
More than something that blooms beautifully,
I trusted the tree — rooted in the soil, standing in silence.

I wore nothing but green, kept my hair short,
and went about with a frown on my face.
A little contrary, I suppose.

But at some point I noticed.
Flowers are beautiful, aren't they.

It is all right to find something beautiful and simply call it beautiful.

In this world there are things I want to see, and things I do not.
Even so, all of it must connect, somewhere,
to something beautiful.

it is fairly recently that i came to feel that way

I love going to museums with my children.
Which painting each of us loved best.
Why that one drew us in.
I love the time we spend arguing it out.

There is no correct answer in art, and even looking at the same painting, what appears in each heart is different. What is born between a painting and a person belongs to that person alone. Sometimes it tells you about an inside of yourself you had not noticed.

I feel that the scenery we see while we are alive is like a transparent, infinite canvas given to us in advance — and that by acting, we lay our own colours onto it.

Unless you turn that transparency into colour yourself, you will never get to see what kind of painting emerges. What you see at the moment of dying is known only to you. So I think everyone who is alive is an artist.

To express is to bring what is inside you out.
I think it is one of the essential circulations that keep the heart and the body well.

Clear skin, hair with lustre, teeth kept white.

And above all, to live with light in your eyes.
That light surpasses any jewellery.

If you do not begrudge the trouble of staying beautiful, a person can stay beautiful for as long as they live.

It is what my mother told me, over and over.
And I hope that I, too, have been passing it on to my daughter.