High School Graduation

Yesterday was the graduation ceremony for my son, a very proud day for any parent. The Japanese are big fans of long, formal ceremonies, and for three hours we watched as each student made a complex system of bows to the faculty before getting his or her diploma, which was followed by long speeches by the principal and other school staff. The principle’s speech was interesting, essentially boiling down to this: in order to become an expert at something in life, you need to be prepared to spend three hours a day doing it for ten years, which translates to about 1000 hours. You also need three things: 運 un, 根 kon and 鈍 don, pronounced ‘oon,’ ‘kohn’ and ‘dohn.’ The first represents 運気 unki (oonki), or luck, since you always need some luck in life, and the second is 根気 konki (kohn-ki), a persevering spirit. Finally you need 鈍感 donkan (dohn-kahn), or a dull-witted nature, so you don’t realize how difficult it is to spend so much time mastering something and give up in the middle. There were also a lot of words of remembrance about the earthquake and tsunamis of three years ago, which happened just as my son was entering high school. They cancelled his entrance ceremony at the time because it was deemed improper to celebrate any happy event while so many people were experiencing such sadness.