In the summer of 1984, as a 19-year-old college freshman, I traveled to Fukuoka, Japan, for a training program. It was my first trip abroad. The head of the household where I stayed for about two months was Furuya Toshiki. He died a few days ago at the age of 89. I had heard that he moved to a nursing home this spring after developing dementia, but I never managed to visit him.
I learned of his death from his second daughter's Facebook page. About 10 years ago, Toshiki wrote a "shukatsu note" — a life-closing note — and gave a copy to his wife and each of his three daughters. In it, he had written out everything in detail, from how he wanted his funeral held to the words he wanted to leave his family. "Stay on good terms with one another." He also made one special request. "Place a pink crape myrtle blossom in the center of the white bouquet in my coffin."
After that, they say, he repeated the same request to his daughters every time the crape myrtle bloomed. Even when they joked, "What if you die in a season when the flowers aren't blooming?" he would not budge. Crape myrtle is a flower that florists rarely even carry. And he did, in fact, leave in the season when the crape myrtle was in full bloom.
He was the son of a Buddhist temple family, and his funeral was held at the temple at his hometown home. His family broke off a pink branch from the crape myrtle blooming beside the temple entrance and placed it at the center of the white bouquet. His daughters and grandchildren traded jokes and laughed until the very last moment. He loved a boisterous gathering, and he would have laughed along with them, muttering, "These kids…" Since everything happened just as he had written in the note, he may well have smiled with quiet satisfaction.
In Japan, preparing for the end of one's life is called shukatsu, written with characters meaning "end" and "activity." It sounds identical to another shukatsu, the word for job-hunting activity. The shukatsu note is also known as an ending note. In it, people record their savings and insurance, the treatment and care they want, funeral and burial arrangements, the people who should be notified of their death, and the words they want to leave their family. Unlike a will, it carries no legal force. It is a record of communication meant to prepare for the time when one can no longer express one's own thoughts, and to ease the burden on surviving family.
Many local governments in Japan produce shukatsu notes and distribute them free of charge. The city of Fujisawa encourages residents to discuss their wishes about treatment and care with family in advance and write them down. Midori Ward in Yokohama describes the note not as a document for preparing for death but as "a note for living the rest of your life richly." The idea is not to dwell on death ahead of time but to look back on the life and relationships that remain.
Toshiki did not write it in his shukatsu note, but he left me a special legacy: a balanced way of looking at Japan and the Japanese.
At 19, Japan was to me a bad country that brought to mind colonial rule and militarism. My antipathy toward Japanese people ran deep. Yet Toshiki's family welcomed an unfamiliar young Korean like a son. They looked after my meals and my bed and showed me Japanese life and culture. Through them I came to understand that while the wrongs of militarist Japan must be squarely faced, conscientious postwar citizens must not be condemned by the standards of that past. Perhaps the fact that I later walked all over Japan and published a book called "Why I Walk Japan" also began with that encounter.
Years later, when I visited Fukuoka with my wife, he and his house were unchanged. Past 70, he still drove out to the airport to meet us, and he looked after the two of us attentively throughout our stay. The following year, he and his wife came to Korea with their eldest daughter. Our children treated them with all their heart, as if meeting their own grandmother and grandfather. I remember clearly the flustered look on their faces at a table of spicy food, and the way they laughed over a glass of liquor. He cherished my wife like a daughter and our two sons like his own grandchildren.
On my memorial post, Toshiki's second daughter wrote, "My father, who had only daughters, thought of Mr. Lim as a son." She added that her father often spoke of the hospitality he received in Jeonju and missed it for a long time, and said, "It would make me happy if you thought of my father whenever you see a crape myrtle." Reading that, my wife and I broke into the tears we had been holding back.
In the middle of this month, I am going to Japan to attend my eldest child's graduation. When the ceremony is over, I plan to visit Etsuko, who has been left alone, and burn incense before his portrait. It aches to think that we can never again share a drink. All I can do is ask him to forgive me for coming so late.
From now on, I expect that every summer, when I see the crape myrtle in bloom, I will think of Toshiki, whom I met 41 years ago, and of myself at 19. When the pink sprays sway in the wind, his kindly, humor-filled smile will bloom along with them.
Looking back, what led me to understand Japan and to meet one human being as a human being rather than as a nation was not some grand theory or diplomatic slogan. It was the hospitality and the honest eyes of a Japanese family that warmly took in a young stranger. "Uncle Toshiki, thank you for everything. May you rest in peace."
