Those familiar with the Land of the Rising Sun know that the most beautiful days of the year are when the sakura, or Japanese cherry trees, blossom in springtime.
On the subtropical islands of Okinawa, where we conducted our research for our book about ikigai,* the sakura blossom in January. In Japan's large cities, the flowers can be seen between the end of March and the middle of April. And on the cold northern island of Hokkaido, the blossoming of the flowers is delayed until May.
Every year, the Japanese follow the sakura forecast keenly to know when the flowers will show their white
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* "Reason for being" in Japanese, or, translated more freely, "happiness of always being busy." We explore this concept in depth in Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life.
petals, which are treasured not only for their beauty but also for their important symbolism, as we will see later in this chapter. The "cherry blossom front," as it is known, moves from south to north; each city has a special tree to announce the beginning of what has become a nature festival in which the entire country takes part.
In Japan, there are ninety-six of these special "sample" trees. In Kyoto, for example, the tree can be found in the garden of the city's meteorological office. Each morning, an employee goes outside to see if the buds have opened. The day this happens the news spread across the whole country.
Hanami
When the blossom forecast, known as the sakura zensen, is fulfilled, the Japanese immediately crowd the country's parks for the ritual of hanami, which literally means "viewing the flowers."
If you visit a park or garden during this time, you'll find entire groups of office workers under the blossoming cherry trees, families enjoying a walk together, and couples taking pictures of each other with sakura in the background.
This celebration of nature and the renewal of life一and hope一is so long-standing a tradition that records of hanami festivals date back to the third century.
After the sun goes down, the celebration continues with what is known as yozakura, or "night cherry blossom." At dusk, traditional lanterns that hang from the trees are lit, giving the parks and gardens the magical atmosphere of a Studio Ghibli film.
Groups of friends and couples sit beneath the blossom at night with a glass of sake and some snacks to enjoy the moment. This is undoubtedly an Ichigo ichie experience since when the petal falls in a couple of weeks, they will have to wait a whole year to experience it again一with luck if they are still here
Sakura is visible proof of how the most beautiful things in life are fleeting and can't be postponed.
The cherry blossom celebration officially begins with kaika, a term that refers to the earliest buds. The flower opens completely after a week, reaching the state known as mankai, which means "the exact moment when the sakura flower is fully opened."
A week later the cherry blossom's petals begin to fall. This can happen earlier, caused by wind or rain, like during our visit to Kyoto's old town.
The Magic of the Kaika
Hikari Oe, the severely disabled son of the Nobel Prize-winning writer Kenzaburo Oe, discovered music while scrolling through a park with his parents, when he heard-and began to imitate-the sound of birdsong.
This is a typical kaika moment, when something unknown begins to blossom within us.
There is a kind of magic whenever a new passion is sparked though it often arises in unmagical places.
For example, Dan Brown says that it had never occurred to him to write until he came across a book that had been left behind in a hammock at a hotel swimming pool
He had gone on a package vacation with his wife and he was bored but the novel he found, The Doomsday Conspiracy by Sidney Sheldon, saved his vacation.
As soon as he got home he decided that he, too, would write a thriller, and he immediately set about doing so possessed by kaika. Years later, The Da Vinci Code was a worldwide bestseller, making him a millionaire.
Kaika is a strong presence when we fall in love, too. Like the cherry blossom that opens to announce the arrival of spring, someone who didn't even exist in our lives a moment before suddenly sweeps us off our feet, becoming our central focus.
In the mysterious realm of love, this blossoming can have the most unexpected effects. What makes us fall in love?
When we ask other people that unforgettable moment when a whole new world opens up to us, they tell us things such as the following:
· "The first time I heard his voice, I felt breathless."
· "Her eyes, at once shy and penetrating, made me want to know what she was like inside."
· "I fell in love with the gentle way he cleaned up the mess I'd just made."
All of these are unique, ichigo ichie moments that, if we know how to seize and value them, can light up the rest of our lives.
The Mankai Formula
When kaika is transformative, we want to turn it into mankai. In other words, we want to make sure that what has been born inside us matures and unfolds to its full potential. Mankai occurs, for example, when:
· The person who falls in love decides to tend the garden of the relationship, on both good and bad days, to prevent it from withering;
· The aspiring author who, after having an idea for a book, follows a daily schedule to progress with her writing until it is finished;
· The entrepreneur who doesn't want his idea to be a flash in the pan constantly seeks ways to improve and innovate.
In discussions of the marathon required to turn an initial idea or vocation into something we excel at, we often hear about Malcolm Gladwell/s 10,000-hour rule for progressing from kaika to mankai.
In his book Outliers, Gladwell demonstrates how, in his words, "ten thousand hours is the magic number of greatness," citing the following examples:
· Bill Gates started programming at the age of ten while in middle school in Seattle. Ten thousand hours later he was causing a sensation in the world of information in technology.
· The Beatles completed their ten thousand hours to greatness in the nightclubs of Hamburg, where they performed eight hours a day, before going back to the UK, where "Love Me Do" became a smash hit.
Gladwell's conclusion is that genius isn't enough; a great deal of effort and commitment is required for talent to be realized in all its brilliance.
Swordsmiths
The attention to detail and patience of the Japanese can be seen in all kinds of disciplines. One of the most well-known cases is the restaurant Sukiyabshi Jiro, which, despite its location in the Ginza metro station, is considered the best in the world. The owner had to practice for several decades before he was able to make a good tamago (a Japanese omelet used in sushi).
For many arts and traditions, there is no school where you can learn their secrets; the knowledge is transmitted from master to apprentice. This is especially true in the case of people who make katanas and other Japanese swords.
Currently, there are three hundred active swordsmiths left in Japan, but only thirty make their living exclusively from their trade. Each of these swordsmiths has apprentices working under them so that the art of making their swords will not be lost.
Swordsmithing isn't something you can learn from a book or by taking a class. To acquire this skill, you must spend at least ten years studying under than it takes to earn a university degree.
Why is it so hard to forge a good katana? We won't go into the details here, but the process of smelting good steel is as complicated or more so than making a good sushi omelet.
One of the most prized features of steel is a slow level of carbon content, which preserves the steel's properties. The best Japanese sword blades contain as little as 1 percent, and no more than 1.2 percent. This low content is extremely difficult to achieve. The masters know intuitively when a blade has reached these levels, once it has spent three days in the fire, at a temperature of between 2,200 and 2,800 degrees.
The traditional Japanese sword symbolizes strength, perseverance, and simplicity, since there is nothing ornamental about it. Hence the determination to produce the best material and then to forge it with a hammer to achieve the greatest possible density.
A life lesson for the swordsmiths considered national treasures in Japan, is to eliminate the unnecessary to get to the essential-that where beauty and power lie. And that can be achieved only with patience and perseverance.
When Daniel Goleman, the author of Emotional Intelligence, and others argued that persistence doesn't guarantee anything and that some fields require extraordinary innate talent, Gladwell responded:
"There is a lot of confusion about the 10,000-hour rule that I talk about in Outliers. It doesn't apply to sports. And practice isn't a SUFFICIENT condition for success. I could play chess for a hundred years and I'll never be a grand master. The point is simply that natural ability requires a huge investment of time in order to be made manifest."
If we translate this into Japanese terms, the first part of the formula is ikigai: discovering something we become passionate about and which also comes easily to us.
Once we've identified our mission, then comes kaika, which is sometimes the most difficult part: setting aside other people's demands to make room for our passion, allowing the reason we feel we were put on the earth to begin to blossom.
The third thing is to stay on that path, to be patient, and to keep dreaming until we obtain mankai. To sum it up, the formula goes like this: ikigai + kaika + time = mankai.
If we discover our talent, open ourselves up to it, and make it a priority in our lives, our passion will be able to develop, leading to our happiness and that of others.
It's Never Too Late to Bloom
When we think of beginning, of developing something new, often what comes to mind is a young person with their whole life ahead of them, but this is only a prejudice. We all have the ability to make a new start in life, regardless of age.
Even an elderly person can decide to wipe the slate clean and reinvent themselves, because they, too, have their whole life ahead of them.
In Japan, people often make a completely fresh start at the end of their "official" working lives. People who have spent most of their lives in offices, attending to the needs of a company, take responsibility for their own lives. Like the old Jedis in the Star Wars movies, for as long as the Force is with them, they defy their age by doing what they had always dreamed of doing.
That's why it's common to see tour guides of eighty years or more in small train stations, volunteering their services to visitors, telling them about the local sights, and offering advice on bus schedules and hiking opportunities.
For example, a traveler getting off at the station in Yudanaka, a town known for its onsen一hot springs一and the jumping-off point for visiting the Nagano snow monkeys, will be greeted on their arrival by these charming elderly guides, who are happy to be able to practice their English with travelers from all over the world.
As we learned from the masters of longevity in Okinawa during our research for Ikigai, if you're brave enough to do what you love, every day could be the best day of your life.
Two Examples of Late Bloomers
The term late bloomer is often used to describe someone who discovers her talent, perhaps even the ikigai that guides her in life, at a later age.
Defying the conventional wisdom that intellectual growth reaches its height in young adults and that once we reach maturity it declines with age, late bloomers never cease to improve and renew, always using the wisdom they have gained to take another step toward new challenges.
Here are two examples to prove that great achievements have no age limit.
The first is Melchora Aquino de Ramos, a woman from the Philippines who was eighty-four when the unrest broke out that would lead to your country's independence. Far from being intimidated, she used the shop she ran as a shelter for the wounded and persecuted, in addition to offering advice to the revolutionaries from those modest quarters where secret meetings were held. Melchora Aquino refused to give any information, and as a result, she was deported to the Mariana Islands.
When the United States took control of the Philippines, Melchora returned home as a national heroine and was named "Grand Woman of the Revolution." She was actively involved in the creation of her new country for more than twenty years and died at the age of 107.
The arts are an even more fertile field for late bloomers. British-born Harry Bernstein published a short story at age twenty-four but would not begin his novel The Invisible Wall until he was ninety-three. He managed to finish it and witnessed its publication in 2007, at the age of ninety-six.
Berstein was asked about his decision to write his debut novel so late in life. He explained his loneliness after the loss of his wife, to whom he had been married for sixty-seven years, had motivated him. Encouraged by his readers' response, Bernstein would write another three novels before his death at the age of 101. In addition to leaving this legacy, he said in an interview with The New York Times, "God knows what other potential lurk in other people if we could only keep them alive well into their nineties."
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