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7 April 2024 - Gruyères
Waiting for my very first CityRunning Tuesday in Oerlikon it was a very cold evening, so I waited in a bookstore to stay warm and discovered Ken Mogi's The Way of Nagomi. I have long avoided a deep dive into Japanese culture because I knew just how deep it would be, but when Iwona gave me a subscription to Duolingo last Fall I took the plunge. Mogi's book is fairly short, but I augmented it with a study of the kanji in the words he introduced. This made reading somewhat slower but much more enriching. Meaning carried phonemically rather than phonetically it a clear asset of sino-derived orthographies. And Mogi's five rules of nagomido really hit home with me:
- Maintaining happy relationships with your family, even if you disagree with them
- Learning new things while always staying true to yourself
- Finding a sense of peace in whatever you're doing
- Mixing unlikely components to create a harmonious balance
- Having a greater understanding of the Japanese philosophy of life
I don't think I realistically understood the Japanese perspective on WWII until I watched The Wind Rises. For much of us, Japan is still an enigma. The biographies of Feynman I poured over in my teenage years included plenty about Julian Schwinger but nothing about Sin-Itiro Tomonaga even though the three of them shared the Nobel Prize in 1965. In gradschool I myself worked on BaBar alongside Japan's Belle. Did I ever meet those colleagues across the Pacific? No. I still wonder why the world is separated this way. Mogi's book gave me a window on why they don't want to be connected. Japan set out to conquer the world to bring it into harmony with their way of life in the 19th century. That idea failed badly in the 20th. Mogi shows that the Japanese perspective still has a lot to offer in the 21st.
