3 Japanese share how little it takes to turn your life around

What is happiness? Japan’s constitution enshrines the right to its pursuit but does not define it – and who ever has, satisfactorily? “A state of well-being and contentment,” says Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. We’re none the wiser.

Whatever it is, we all agree that it is worth pursuing, maybe the ultimate pursuit, and most of us think we’d know it if we found it, or do know it having found it, content to leave its definition to those whose happiness is defining the undefinable.

What makes us happy? Prosperity, health, love, friendship, success, long life – all these are in hand or within reach – not for all but for many – yet leave gaps, and happiness, ever elusive, ever restless, all too easily slips through them, back to wherever happiness goes when it is not in us.

But life is long, and getting longer, and it’s never too late, says PHP magazine (November), to recover lost happiness, discover new happiness, or maybe discover you’ve been happy all along, if only you’d known it.

It boils down to a very ancient word to the wise: “Know thyself.” How? Depends on the self to be known. Some turn to philosophy, others to meditation, others still to travel, experience, adventure. Characters in PHP’s drama include a man who at 92 is the world’s oldest triathlon athlete, another man who deep in midlife frustration started a one-line-a-day diary, and a woman who left the world behind altogether, though briefly, and ventured into space.

The debilities of age may not all be in the mind, but some are, and, the mind conquered, the body may yield. “This is my youth!” exults Hiromu Inada of his athletic triumphs. “I feel so good I want to shout. I never felt this way when I was young.” In 2018, aged 85, he became the world’s oldest Ironman Triathlon finisher. He’s repeated the feat three times, and feat it deserves to be called. It’s considered the world’s most grueling one-day sporting event: 3.9-km. swim, 180.2-km bicycle race, 42.2-km marathon run. Youth alone won’t get you through it, nor, as he proves, need age keep you out of it.

Thirty years ago he was a retired journalist nursing his wife through a serious illness. His body grew slack. A swimming pool opened in his neighborhood. He’d never swum before. It’s never too late. A quick learner and competitive by nature, he competed some years later in aquathlons – swimming and running races. One day, chancing to notice a passing cyclist wearing a helmet, he thought, “Cool!” He bought a bike, and a helmet, and the triathlonist seed was sown.

Suddenly his wife died. The day before they’d eaten birthday cake together in her hospital room. “I don’t remember this, but my son tells me I was delirious for three months afterwards.” But life goes on. It must. His wife had said to him, “You live for me after I’m gone.” He resumed training. That was 25 years ago.

“Those who can’t find what they want to do in life,” says Yoichi Ito, “let them come to me, I’ll preach them a sermon.” In his 50s, he teaches “entrepreneurship” at Musashino University in Tokyo. Thirty years ago he could never have imagined doing anything of the sort. He was a most unlikely entrepreneur. “I was a good student but a bad communicator.” His good grades got him a job with a bank but his poor social skills held him back. Others were moving up; not him. “Going to work was stressful to the point of nausea; I was developing complexes.”

“Whose life am I living?” he asked himself; “mine or my bosses’?” The most successful corporate people are those who make no such distinction. The distinction, once made, can’t be unmade. But here Ito faced a problem: “My life – what is it? Who am I?”

It’s distressing, though salutary, to discover you don’t know. “Well,” he decided, “I’ll keep a diary.” Writing is self-discovery. It’s also troublesome if you’re not used to it, and soon Ito’s diary shrank to one line a day, but compression is concentration, concentrated content bears the seeds of revelation, and soon he was discovering interests he never knew he had – in wildlife, for instance, after seeing a TV special on it. “Animals evolve in keeping with their environment” – the very thing he was failing to do at work. One thought leads to another, leading him in the end to business school and, in the fullness of time, to his present post. He’s never been busier, has less free time than ever, but has never felt freer. He is living, at last, his life.

Which brings us to Chiaki Mukai and outer space. With her 1994 flight aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia she became Japan’s first woman astronaut; a second mission four years later made her the first Japanese to make two space flights.

“I was a naughty child,” she writes in PHP. “No sooner home from school I’d throw my schoolbag down and run to the park to play or to the river to catch crayfish. No one ever told me to behave more like a girl.” Her father, a teacher and a “free spirit,” encouraged her; her mother, more traditional but easygoing, didn’t discourage her. She went her own way from the start. Her younger brother was lame in one leg. Her sympathy led her into medicine. She specialized in cardiology. When later on people asked her if going into space hadn’t frightened her, she could reply that every day of her life was a confrontation with death, not only professional but, like all of us, personal: “There are babies who die at birth, people who wake up in the morning feeling fine and are dead by evening.”

Recruited in 1985 by Japan’s space agency, she saw a chance to study space medicine. How does the body respond to zero gravity, space radiation, and so on? Is space habitable? The way things are going on earth it had better be, is one answer that comes immediately to mind.

“I’m 72 now,” writes Mukai in conclusion. “I’m no longer young and there’s no knowing when I might fall ill. Then there’s death – inevitable of course. But for that very reason, every day is happy. If I had my life to live over again, I’d live it exactly the same way.”

Being able to say that as death draws near seems as good a definition of happiness as any.

© Japan Today