My mother, Teiko Sasano, was a teacher, a pioneering feminist and later a member of the Diet. She preached the advancement of women in Japanese society. And she preached at me, telling me from a very young age to get out and “become somebody.” That meant anything but an “ordinary” woman. But I was lonely as a child. I never saw my parents during the day.
Within our family, my mother was the absolute power. Whenever my father made mistakes, she mercilessly screamed at him and then turned to me and said: “See that? Daddy’s no good. You’ll be just fine if you do what I tell you to do.” She rarely had anything to do with our neighbors. She startled other housewives by sending my father to clean up the community ditch every Sunday. That was a woman’s job, but Mother always said she was too busy. And, besides, she didn’t care about those women. At the time, I, too, looked down on the middle-aged women chatting and wasting time on the streets. I thought, “I never want to become one of them.”
But I wasn’t driven like my mother. She used to quote a famous Western educator who said, “Boys, be ambitious!” Under the banners of independence and self-reliance, she imposed on me the idea that I should keep running until I became somebody. “You have to win!” That thought oppressed me for a long time.
When I was 20 and still in college, I made my musical debut in Tokyo. I’d joined a rock band. I remember thinking, “At last I’ve become somebody!” Being somebody was more important to me than doing things. But three years later I went through an identity crisis. I felt empty. At age 25, I made another debut–as a lesbian. In 1995 I wrote a book about the experience, titled “Coming OUT!,” and produced a lesbian-themed CD as a solo musician.
Up until now, women have lived in the age of men–with its competition, materialism and disunion. But Japanese men seem to have lost their joie de vivre. I think I understand why. They never develop a sense of their inner self.
Women, on the other hand, now sparkle with vitality. The world is being transformed, I think, into a spiritual age of femaleness, harmony and symbiosis. I sometimes think that my mother unconsciously hated anything that could be called female. She lived with anxiety and anger. Perhaps she had to think of economic independence before anything else. Belatedly, I have begun to understand some things. I don’t have to be somebody important if I choose not to be. I came to that conclusion recently at a Buddhist retreat in Kyoto. I decided to stop running. And, suddenly, there in front of me was the wide blue sky. There was no tunnel, nothing to interrupt my field of vision. What’s important is simply accepting things as they are. That might be the nature of the sparkle seen in young women today. They are free.
