About the time that this issue goes out in the mail I will have turned fifty. In recognition of this upcoming milestone, I recently asked myself if I could summarize what of value I have learned during the last half century. What I came up with are the following two observations: First, life always works out. And second, it never works out the way you expect.

　　　Earlier this month I was in Asia for three weeks on business. To put this in context, during the last twenty-eight years I have crossed the Pacific over two hundred times. Most of that travel has been back and forth between the U.S. and Japan (or visa versa, since for sixteen of those years I was residing in Japan and traveling back the other way). During the last four years, however, these travels every three to four months have taken me in turn, and in varying degrees of frequency, to almost every country in East and Southeast Asia.

　　　So having one foot in the East and the other in the West has become, quite simply, the story of my life. As I say, life works out, if not the way you expect it to: This migratory life-style is not one I would have ever thought up for myself, however neither is it one I would trade in for any other. Were it not for these circumstances I would never have encountered Odano Sensei to begin with, much less been able to keep up the association for all these years.

　　　Furthermore, the worldly pursuits that put me on and off of airplanes so frequently also afford me

　　　I visited Odano Sensei this last trip on the morning of November first (as I was checking out of my hotel room that same morning I noticed that the date was a string of five ones, since according to the Japanese calendar this year is also the eleventh year of Heisei). Sitting across from her in her four-and-a-half mat sitting room I remarked to her about what an unlikely pair we make. Our respective birthplaces are about as distant as is possible on the circumference of the same globe. She was born at the beginning of the century; I, just mid-way. I am half again as tall as she is and easily twice her weight. She regards sleep as a waste of precious time; I regard it as one of life's pleasures. She lives on miniscule amounts of food; I have, at fifty, eaten more than an average lifetime quota. Hers has been a life of single-minded purpose and focus; mine has just happened haphazardly. The differences go on and on.

　　　We both found this conversation highly amusing. This, she said, is what is meant by the phrase, a meeting made in heaven.

　　　The other highlight of this trip was an incident in Beijing. I met a Chinese couple in their early sixties who had both been born and raised in Japan. The wife, who was party to some business discussions I was engaged in, gave me a capsule version of her life story while we waited for the meeting to begin. We conversed in Japanese.

　　　She was born to Chinese parents near Kamakura and grew up in Japan up until the age of sixteen. In 1956, as part of Mao's Hundred Flowers policy, the still new communist regime was actively enticing oversees Chinese to return in order help rebuild the motherland, and she watched friends and acquaintances in the local Chinese community set off. When she got it into her head that she too wanted to participate in the dream of a new China, her father was strongly opposed-it was still far to early, he knew, to see which way the wind was really blowing. So she obtained a passport and booked a passage on her own in order to demonstrate to her father that he was no match for her determination. Reluctantly he acquiesced and off she went.

　　　Japanese society is not altogether kind to resident foreign Asian nationals, and although she didn't suggest this, I suspect that she may have been motivated, at least in part, by a vision of belonging. Never allowed to feel that the nation she was

　　　The first year, she said, was magical. There was plenty to eat then in China, and though she spoke little Chinese, as a retuning Chinese she received a warm welcome and was given preferential treatment everywhere she went.

　　　When things changed, they changed almost overnight. With the anti-right movement of 1957, her foreign exposure suddenly became a liability, and the people who had taken to her so warmly a year earlier were, with good reason, now mortally afraid to be seen associating with her. Furthermore, the door on her retreat to Japan closed behind her and she was trapped-an unwanted guest in an unfamiliar land.

　　　She spoke to me about her "re-education" as a field laborer, about life during the famine years, and also during the Cultural Revolution. One day during the Cultural Revolution she heard a truck pull up to the gate of the hospital where she was working as a pharmacist. Curious, she poked her head out to look. The truck was piled high to overflowing with human corpses. It seems that an in infamous "anti-revolutionary" had died in the hospital the night before and they had come to haul the body away with those of executed unwanteds to a dumping ground. For several months afterwards, she says, she suffered from recurring nightmares.

　　　Life never works out the way that you expect it to, however it always works out. She met and married a man from a similar background and the two of them somehow muddled through. To this day, the two of them speak Japanese to one another at home.

　　　As theirs was not a world they particularly wanted to bring life into, they purposely avoided having children. However things improved gradually under Deng (when Mao died, she told me, it was a good thing) and shortly before she turned forty she had a son. The son is now attending university in Japan and she and her husband go back to Japan almost every year to visit their respective families. But they are also both too entrenched now in China to consider returning to Japan to live. I enjoy visiting, she said, however I am always glad to return to my own house in Beijing.

　　　That evening her husband joined us for dinner. He had grown up playing on the beaches of Northern Kyushu and is now a senior engineer in China's coal research institute; although past retirement, he is evidently too important to be let go.

　　　He was interested to know how it was that I came to speak Japanese and the discussion turned to differences in language and culture. Can haiku, he asked, be translated into English? I told him that yes, there are translations, however I find them uninteresting. The same, he told me, is true of Chinese. I was surprised to hear this; China has a long and sophisticated poetic tradition of its own and I had thought that Japanese forms might well have derived form the Chinese art. That may in part be true, he said. However Chinese cannot match the fluidity and manner of Japanese expression-I find it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to explain the sensibilities of haiku to my Chinese friends.

　　　Here, however, was a bilingual Chinese man telling me that his assessment of Japanese expression was approximately the same as my own. In stating these observations to an American he was obviously not tainted by deference; he could have easily told me that China is the birthplace of Japanese culture-the view held by most Chinese and Japanese. We were simply comparing notes, as one non-Japanese to another, on what we found intriguing about the Japanese language in which we were conversing.

　　　As I listened to these remarks, I felt the excitement of another piece of the puzzle slipping into place. What Chinese and Japanese have in common is the ideographic script. What Japanese has and Chinese does not is the phonetic backbone that Odano Sensei calls the meihaon. Therefore clearly it is this phonetic backbone that makes the difference.

　　　Neither my Chinese friend nor I have any investment in these comments. We are not out to promote the Japanese language as in some way superior or elite. Both of us, however, from the perspective of our respective national languages, regard Japanese as unique. What it is that is unique, I believe, is worth noting, especially if it adds to a broader and more complete human understanding.

　　　As an afterthought, I will add to my fifty-year list the observation that life happens quickly and we learn slowly. Understanding forged from bits and pieces of experience such as the above takes years to accumulate. At the same time, such moments are what make the journey. I savor and cherish every moment of every opportunity I have to visit Odano Sensei. And I also cherish the Chinese woman's story and her husband's insights. My guess is that moments like these are what will remain in memory when all else is said and done. These are, indeed, meetings made in heaven.