What I do not understand, I do not understand
“I still understand nothing.”
Chikabo, turning 97 years of age, declared this.
On first hearing them, these sound like the words of someone lacking confidence, and yet his facial expressions are overflowing with confidence.
“People all want to feel ‘this is this way, that is that,’ but I still understand nothing.”
As most of us know, people living in today’s urban civilisation are convinced that they must become social adults. We gather notions together from the narrow environment in which we personally have lived and store them up in our heads. And then we bind the spirit and the actions of ourselves and our families, our friends and our lovers, with those standards. Without a doubt, doing so is indispensable in staving off our insecurities, and in surviving this friendless world. That’s what I believe. ‘Hey you, how old are you? Stop acting like a child.’ Even without words, most people feel in some way that such implicit messages are embedded everywhere in their daily lives. Then, people call them common sense and, casting a sidelong glance at this common illusion, try desperately to grow up. How much peace of mind can being told ‘You too are a grown up now’ give to today’s adults?
Chikabo’s way of life was condensed in his short utterance, “I don’t believe anything.”
Why he came to think this way is a mystery.
However, he instinctively knew that the standards of society’s common sense would not make him happy.
“The house where I lived was broken to little pieces by the Great Kanto Earthquake. Yokohama had become a mountain of rubble. Looking at such scenes, anxious thoughts about what would become of me now passed through my mind. But, the next instant, school came into my head and I asked my father ‘What will happen with school now?’ He said, ‘I have no idea what will happen with school from now on.’ Hearing that, I thought ‘Yes! Just desserts!’ Mysterious things happen in my life. When I’m in trouble, the gods always come to help me. Ever since then, I was free from school.”
I expect many people will wonder what kind of person could speak with such insensitivity. In the Great Kanto Earthquake, more than 140,000 people died and more than 100,000 were injured. Nevertheless, he calls it salvation from the gods. However, who on earth can condemn his feelings as wrong? Accepting the reality of the Great Kanto Earthquake as a natural disaster, he offered prayers that the deceased who had fallen by the roadside would rest in peace and extended a helping hand to the injured. And, with his whole being, he felt indescribable sadness and dread. However, amidst that great disaster, he had come to find some thing of joy: his elementary school had been reduced to rubble. That, for him, was the real feeling. Chikabo, unswayed by common sense, social responses, was simply giving himself up to all the feelings, the honest responses of his heart.
Doing so, he saw something like a paradise even in the burned-out ruins spread out before him.
Whilst there is purity in such honesty, his apparently anti-social outlook was at times disdained as being thoughtless and too worldly-wise.
However, he paid no heed to such voices.
In his heart, and in his head, there was no equation:
‘Earthquake = a cause for regret.’
The Great Kanto Earthquake was, to him, no such simple, mechanical incident.
It was much more pregnant with complex meaning, much more raw than that.
In it, there was much he didn’t understand.
There was much beyond his imagination.
Perhaps it was not difficult to give an appearance of sympathy.
But, to share in sadness, in its true meaning, is no simple thing.
Chikabo did not lightly give himself up to those parts he did not understand.
Rather, he gave himself over to the real heart welling up within him.
To this day, Chikabo still doesn’t understand the social significance of the Great Kanto Earthquake.
The one thing he felt for sure was that it had freed him from school, that scene of homework and melancholy.
