Nippon Scape

Living to 97

Man’s life of fifty years is but as a dream.
Once receiving life, can any man not perish?

This is a passage from Atsumori, the play so beloved by Oda Nobunaga, the warlord who unified Japan in the Warring States period. It was long thought that to live a whole life was to live for roughly fifty years. In fact, it was not until the post-war period that the average Japanese life expectancy exceeded fifty; in the Meiji and Taisho periods, the average life expectancy was between forty and fifty years of age.

Therefore, in the past ‘to live’ and ‘to grow old’ must have meant something very different to what they mean today.

Chikabo was born in 1911 (Meiji 44 in the Japanese calendar). It was still the Meiji period and neither of the two world wars, nor the Great Kanto Earthquake had happened yet. It was a time before television and, of course, before the internet. Those born after the war, and in the Heisei period, can only imagine what the age in which he was born was like. However, they would feel sure that Chikabo at that time would never have thought he would live to be ninety-seven years old.

“I was a sickly child by nature. I was so frail that I was soon bed-ridden and had no physical strength and so, until I was about four years old, I couldn’t even go outdoors like other children. At that time, all I could do was read picture books in the house or play in the garden with the flowers and the insects. By no means would it ever have occurred to me that I might live to be ninety-seven, painting pictures, still active as an artist.”

Still active, still working, at ninety-seven. I expect there is hardly anyone with such aspirations. Thinking about society today, the issue of ‘old age’ comes to most people’s minds. Growing old and anticipating their retirement, they wonder what on earth they will do when they retire from active life, how they will spend their time, and what the meaning of their life will be. There are people who take up fishing and others who begin learning to play an instrument.

Then, there are those who participate in local activities, and those who take an interest in the education of young people. Certainly, I think each course gives meaning to old age in its respective way. Despite the fact that there are those who would grow sick of a life of incessant work, I imagine many would empathise. However, Chikabo never had in his head anything like the systematic life figured by the so-called middle-class salaryman.

“To me, even now I’m not old. You see, I was so poor I could hardly even talk of such a thing. I had to be always moving, always working. Until my sixties, my life was just like I was swimming in the mud. It was in my seventies that the flowers began to bloom a little and the spring of youth began. So, for me, seventy was a renaissance. And my eighties were the full bloom of youth because, really, day after day I flourished. As was to be expected, in my nineties, my physical strength declined, and yet everyday I’m still enthusiastic about everything. When people lose their enthusiasm, it’s the end isn’t it?”

Chikabo says his seventies were the spring of his youth because that was when finally he came to be acknowledged as an artist, as Kumada Chikabo. It was in 1981, when, at the age of seventy, exhibiting his work in an international exhibition of picture book originals in Bologna, that his work came to be appreciated. Of course, this appreciation did not stop at the domestic, but spread overseas.

“The way that Europeans show their appreciation is quite interesting. Seeing my pictures, Japanese people appreciate them without saying so. ‘It’s just as though Kumada’s pictures are alive. In his pictures you can feel the same spirit as with Fabre.’ That’s the kind of thing they’d say. That made me happy. Because I was being compared to Fabre, who I love.”

This was all a new experience for Chikabo. Until then, as an artist, he had felt that he was fumbling in the dark. And then suddenly, before his eyes, in a flash, it became bright. So, for him, the events that followed were bewildering. The media came to him frequently with cameras. When his pictures received exposure in magazines, newspapers and on television, the ripple of his fame spread wider and wider.

Then the Kumada Chikabo’s World series, which he still works on on an ongoing basis, began to sell with further editions year on year. To listen to the voice of your own heart is important but, however much an artist might love a life of isolation, receiving attention from the world would surely not make them unhappy – their pictures would receive public appreciation and, furthermore, they could enjoy having a little money. The age of seventy at which Chikabo experienced these things is, without a doubt, an age at which people are labelled as ‘elderly.’ Nevertheless, he felt with his whole being that his life truly began then. He sensed a complete change in the air. A time of joy and of busy activity, for him, there is no old age.

Sometimes you hear such things from people as ‘Who wants to live forever?’ and ‘I don’t want to get old.’ The many holes in our underdeveloped social security system stand out all the more in today’s aging society and the sense of unease surrounding old age cannot just be wiped away. In reality, even if we were to live a long life, the present situation is such that we cannot even begin to imagine what kind of a life that would be. In short, as the Buddha explained, ‘This world is suffering; to live is to suffer.’ Life brings with it emotional pain. Surely most people know this from personal experience. However, what on earth might cross our minds when we see Chikabo, ninety-seven years old and even now diligently working, moving his brush, his eyes sparkling with life? It must certainly make us reconsider that thing we call ‘old age.’ During the writing of this book, he asked his interviewer, ‘How old are you now?’ and, when I answered, ‘I’m thirty-five’, with a tremulous voice, he narrowed his eyes and simply declared ‘Lucky you.’