2023/02/11 English

BGM: The Verve - Bitter Sweet Symphony

Today I worked early. This morning I enjoyed James Brown again. A friend of mine texted me on LINE about the work I am doing as an essential worker. I learned that I have been supported by so many, many people again. And also I remember my past days. They were really nightmares. Lonely, miserable days... I had to spend a long time understanding that I am autistic, and even after that, my boss didn't read the papers from my doctor about autism. And my doctor said that he couldn't write any papers to him because he couldn't show that to the person who didn't want to read them. I could do nothing about autism and had to endure a long time... I feel terrible about it again. It was quite a period of s**t, and now I find that people's recognization of autism has changed drastically. Bob Dylan was right. Time is changing exactly, quietly.

This afternoon, I thought that "do I have any original and stable style of writing?". I find no original style in my writing. At least, I have no "clear" or "characteristic" style like Haruki Murakami and Yoshio Kataoka. Their styles are easy to understand even if we did a blind test to find them. Once I tried to express a sensitive character of mine by using "Boku" (Haruki uses this as representing him in the first person) and copying Haruki Murakami's writings. Yes, I was really into him and adored him as a charisma. He has great skill in writing or using languages to express anything he can, and also he uses English really fluently. Because of this adoration, I copied Haruki and tried to live and write like him. I tried to enjoy Jazz and old Rock like him, and also imagined if I could enjoy the "campus life" of Waseda like his novels (I could never imagine that I would enter Waseda actually!).

And... suddenly I imagined if I could do any advice to the teenager myself like that. How would it be? Once, during that period, I was soaked into Haruki, Osamu Hashimoto (a Japanese great novelist who translated "The Tale of Genji" into modern Japanese), and the "Shibuya-Kei" music in the 90s (which is the genre of 90s city pop, post-punk, and acid jazz). I could never imagine that in my life lately, from my 40s, I would start writing my diary in Japanese and English to show myself to the world. Why could I imagine that? Indeed, I had an ambition of writing and expressing myself, but I would give up before trying saying "I can never speak English", and also "I am just an uncool person" from the beginning. Now I believe that expressing ourselves in English is quite an easy activity. Everyone can do it! Even if you were a child, you could do it with paper, a pencil, and a dictionary. But we tend to lose our pride or belief with various troubles in education or real life. That's the reason why we lose our ambition and start saying "I can never do it". We can do it following Eminem's message of "lose yourself".

This evening, probably because I had thought about English like that this afternoon, I read Yoshio Kataoka's discussion about English and Japanese "Living with Japanese". We often say that "There is no royal road to learning", and Yoshio Kataoka also says that we can use English fluently as the result of steady learning every day, so we can't "master" it by only listening to it easily. Learning it with taking a long time would train our "individual" characters, and those characters would bring us strong wills or subjects that enable us to commit to the public. This opinion of him is the one I couldn't find if I was staying in Japan and living in the Japanese language only so has value to think deeply. By the way, this diary has been written in over 500 days. Could I change myself even a little? I heard that there is a discipline which is called "Sennichikai Hougyou", which is the one we have to walk in Hieizan for over 1000 days. Then I have just done writing this over 500 days, in half of "Sennichikai Hougyou". I just have to keep on writing from now. I wish I can say "English is great!", as Haruo Mizuno.