Fujiko Suda: Worklife

Fujiko-san, a (belated) happy new year for you.
By the way, by “Never give up, never surrender”(your other com­ment) it sounds like Nathan Algren.. Yes, as you have wrote, spend­ing a cou­ple of months to mas­ter Japan­ese sword and lan­guage is not sim­ple laugh­able, but also mis­lead­ing peo­ple to take their life too eas­ily..
I think I missed that ele­ment for two rea­sons. First I was so in it, I had no inten­tion or room to focus on what I think dur­ing watch­ing the movie. Sec­ond, main rea­son, I am always fac­si­nated and excited by the sense that some­thing is hap­pen­ing and get­ting bet­ter. So when Tom Cruise was grad­u­ally mas­ter­ing his skill, I was yelling “Yes!” in my mind.. This acknowl­ede­ment also goes to other areas, for exam­ple I pre­fer trail­ers to the movie itself.
Falling into the trap you described is dan­ger­ous and I will always remem­ber it(and it might be say­ing Japan­ese tra­di­tion is rather prim­i­tive), and also know­ing how inac­cu­rate my Eng­lish is after learn­ing for 20+ years, I still find myself attracted to the pos­si­bil­i­ties that we can do what we want. And that(over-looking at the pos­i­tive side) is what dri­ves us toward seem­ingly impos­si­ble goal.

Well, I’m not so sure about the lan­guage part. Cap­tain Algren was after­all, a lin­guist, wasn’t he? He’s stud­ied the Amer­i­can Indian lan­guage. Of course Japan­ese lan­guage must be quite dif­fer­ent from that of Native Amer­i­can Indian’s but as a lin­guist, I think he would have been good at learn­ing a lan­guage, at least get a good under­stand­ing given he was very good at obser­va­tion. Even after spend­ing a win­ter in totally Japan­ese envi­ron­ment, he did not speak so flu­ently, very halt­ingly at best, but that seemed very authen­tic to me. We all learn to under­stand much faster than be able to speak.

I keep beat­ing up on the “Last Samu­rai”, but many inci­dents stayed with me, echo­ing in my mind. My favorite line by Cap­tain Algren was when Kat­sumoto said, do you belive in des­tiny? or some­thing like that, he replied
“I think, we do what we can, and the des­tiny reveals itself.“
As Stephen Hawkins says, in sci­en­tific sense, there is such thing as des­tiny, but it might as well be that there isn’t because nobody knows until it happens.

And when Kat­sumoto is con­tem­plat­ing com­mit­ing Sep­puku, which is con­sid­ered hon­or­able in Japan­ese cul­ture, say­ing Samurai’s death is by sword, Algren urges,
“Then let it be by enemy’s sword!“
Tech­ni­cally, it would most likely be by bul­lets rather than sword, and they both knew it. But I think by then Algren under­stood the cul­ture enough, and I think by say­ing so, he was mak­ing a pledge that he will be by Katsumoto’s side until death. The most impor­tant les­son in those words by Algren to me is “Never give up, never sur­ren­der” as you say, but in addi­tion to that, know­ing the likely end­ing, one choose how to live.
And as Katu­moto was dying said to Algren when Algren despaired that he has once again sur­vived when he should have died, you have some­thing you must do still. Of course at that time, Kat­sumoto had no way of pre­dict­ing what Algren would do later. The Algren held true to his belief, and the des­tiny revealed itself that he would teach the Japan’s unique cul­ture to the young emperor, who called Kat­sumoto “sen­sei” and plead for guid­ance. But Kat­sumoto could not give guid­ance with­out being like the oth­ers.
The words pierced my heart. The emperor asked,
“Please tell me how he died“
and Algren replied
“Let me tell you how he lived.“
The irony of life. That the lessons could not be directly learned from the mas­ter, but from the dis­ci­ple. That to show true love, one had to die. That heart had to be bro­ken before the lights could come through.

You see, there are so many ele­ments that was so true to life. But what makes me weary is my own expe­ri­ence. Before mov­ing to out­side of Japan, as 12-year old girl, I belived every­thing I read, includ­ing bunch of sto­ries by girl’s manga and how it por­trayed non-Japanese. Why, they were no dif­fer­ent than us except the lan­guage and the way they looked, the way they dressed. Biiig mis­take! Their behav­ior, social struc­ture, their per­cep­tion of accep­tance, hap­pi­ness were totally … for­eign! Yes, they wanted to be pop­u­lar, they wanted to be happy. But the def­i­n­i­tion of pop­u­lar and hap­pi­ness were entirely dif­fer­ent. Because of this kind of expe­ri­ence, I trust laugh­ter. The kind of uni­ver­sal laugh­ter helps us get over our dif­fer­ences much easier.

Geez, what long com­ment I’ve writ­ten! I’m glad you’ve given me the chance to say what I wanted to say, because with­out your pre­vi­ous com­ment, I wouldn’t have felt the right tim­ing to say all this!