My Story 1. The Beginning In the late 1970s, the notorious English punk rock band Sex and Pistols rose to the fame. They caught young people’s imagination, who were fed with the establishment and authorities then. The Marxist revolution was losing its lustre, as many communist states succumbed to mere totalitarianism. Sex and Pistols was, however, in a total mess from the get-go, and in 1978, they finally broke up. Leading up to this point, their notoriety took the international music scene by storm. Despite that, everything with the band was spiralling out of control. Their influence and fashion lingered nonetheless, and the rebellious youth wearing chain necklaces and bondage pants were found everywhere. In the following year of 1979, on the other side of the planet, I was born to a middle-class family in Tokyo. My mother was an art teacher in a local primary school and my father was working in an accounting department of a large corporation. He was what was then known, in Japan, as “a salary-man”, meaning “chained to the salary of lifetime employment.” My family was a typical middle-class household living in the suburban area of the megalopolis. It was in the middle of the booming economy that Japan was enjoying, and my parents were baby boomers. Japan thrived during the post-war industrial age when mass production and mass consumption were the mainsprings of its soaring economy. With one goal in mind to catch up with the West, a large population of conformists underpinned by the collectivist culture helped the country bring about miraculous economic ascendance. The future looked bright for everyone in the country, and the generation of people that don’t know the harshness of the post-war period was slowly becoming the forerunners of the growing nation. For better or worse, those with the silver-spoon upbringing have even strengthened the conformist culture. The single-mindedness of the industrial ascendance further fostered the carefully safeguarded environment where many children grew up without being confronted with existential questions. Instead, they were obediently directed into preordained paths. Children in Japan then were often told; “do not have your opinion; do not express your own individuality; keep your head down; go to good school, get a stable job, and retire with the state pension.” Growing up hearing my parents moaning about their monotonous career paths, as a child, I was determined not to conform to the mantra, and thus developed Punk like an anti-establishment mentality. I was determined to be as an anti-thesis of my parents. It meant that I was to prioritize my passion over a sense of security and trust that it would work out ok. My mother was a mentally strong and stubborn woman who was yet always insecure about what she was passionate about. While she became a teacher, which provided her with a sense of security, her real passion was not teaching, but painting. In her early 20s, she felt deeply unfulfilled, as she secretly longed for becoming an artist. To make matters worse, her colleague was a middle-aged man who she had to share the staff room with. She was a recent graduate and a young woman then. At the time, gender equality was not a prevailing social norm in Japan, and the man was arrogant, condescending and seemed rejoicing in correcting whatever she said and how she went about things in the school. He would say to her, “oh, you should do this and you shouldn’t do that.” He was disrespectful of her individuality, and she felt suffocated and trapped at work. She sought refuge in her own imagination and creativity. After work, she spent all her spare time working on her paintings at home. Typically, she would paint for 6 hours after her day job in school. By her late 20s, her effort started bearing a fruit. Some art magazine featured an article on her painting. When she found out about it, she was exhilarated. Despite an early indication of her success, the peer pressure of settling down, having kids, and building a family was simultaneously creeping up on her. She could not help, but letting herself conform to social norms, and, as I know very well, she is an extremely scrupulous person, who never takes chances. Given all the hardship that being an artist entails, I feel now that she may have made the right choice. Only a couple of years after then that I was born, thus she was still passionate about painting. Being young and idealistic, she gave me a name in Japanese, meaning “art”. Her big dream of becoming an artist was handed down to her son. That was the start of my life.
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