YM COLUMN ARCHIVE

January 20, 2010

My thought while busing around

I’m busing around here and there. This moment, I’m on a bullet train writing this column on the way back home on a single-day schedule after having given a lecture at a certain primary school in the town called Fuchu near Fukuyama. Tomorrow I’m off for Fukushima on an overnight trip. I could make it a single-day trip, if I dared to, but I decided to stay overnight there, because a local squad of Young Astronauts Club-Japan (YAC) is to be soon set up there, and people involved in YAC activity wanted to see me; besides I wanted, on my part, to know local situation about space education. I’ll have to leave Fukushima early in the morning because I have a meeting at Marunouchi, Tokyo, in the afternoon on the day after tomorrow. Such a form of my behavior seems to appear “A poor man has no time for leisure” to the others, some of whom says I’m strangling my own neck. I’m sure that “A poor man -----“ points me out definitely right, but “strangling” is out of my consciousness; totally not at all, because I just faithfully follow what comes up to my mind in making schedule.

The other day I had a previous engagement to deliver a lecture at a certain middle school when a well-known big corporation wanted me to lecture them at the same hour same day. I was asked by one of my best friends, which was a kind of hard to turn it down, so I slurred my words, “Well, I’m sorry but I have a prior commitment”, to which my friend sharply said, “How much you get for your speaker fee?” I said, “I don’t know exactly how much but I guess it’s a sensible fee for ordinary schools” and then said he, “Turn it down. You’ll get thirty times as much from us.” He further pressed on saying “NPO you’re running now must be financially difficult. You can’t go on managing NPO for such petty fee of lecture.” It’s really a headache. Nevertheless, I'll never lose my resolve. This is deeply rooted to the fundamental way of living in which I was raised up in my childhood, and so there is nothing I can do about it; why so takes a long time in explaining.

I think I wrote some time before of the Q & A I had with Wernher von Braun at his visit to Japan in 1972; it was a shocking impact for me when he decisively said, “During those years I was working to develop large rocket under Nazi regime, the greatest objective of my life was to go to Moon or Mars, for which I was willingly determined to accomplish the project even with the help from devil.” In addition to Von Braun, I can’t forget of his rival, Sergey Kororyofu (spelled in Roman alphabet), who was banished to the intense cold land of Siberia purged by Stalin and was forced to such laborious work that his jawbones were broken and all of his teeth came off; despite of such hardship he was thinking to plan strategy for space development of his homeland. These anecdotes, I think, belong to the category of the most respectful “human dignity” related to the spirits of determination under the particular circumstances of the ages and environments.

I learned such spirits for the first time in my life when I was at primary school. I picked up from muddy roadside to eat the chocolate thrown by an Australian GI from jeep. Having seen this, my father who seldom got angry with me clapped it off my hand to ground with a stern look I had never seen. I couldn’t know why. He flatly said, “Don’t forget the pride of Japanese”. I learned many things from my mother and father. As if like a total summing up of those lessons, I was absorbed in reading “Cuore” by Edmondo De Amicis when I was in the fifth grade of primary school. A series of events that happened to the family of a heroine or happened to her in a classroom of a school moved me so much that I read it with tears as if the tale had a significant importance to my own life. Even in my adulthood, I sometimes get shocked to have found myself living in the same way as I was in those days.

The world of “Cuore”, determination of Von Braun and ambition of Kororyofu all reveal the human spirits to confront the various problems under the constrained environments of the ages. How much profound knowledge you may have or how much money you may make, it means just nothing that you really lived in the time of yours, unless you are courageous enough to face the age of your life. With space age coming, mankind has begun to see the world expanded in time and space dimensions. Various information is obtainable by just sitting at desk thanks to informational revolution. Under such circumstances, however, it may be vitally important to continue further efforts to be unyoked from the “jig” to measure time and situation.

I welcome your opinions on this column to the following E-mail address.
matogawa@planetary.or.jp

                             (Translated by The Planetary Society of Japan)

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