A Summer of Doing Nothing | Naoyuki Agawa (Vice-President in charge of Shonan Fujisawa Campus)
July 22, 2011
A typhoon has passed, and it looks like it is going to get hot again. The sky will clear up and turn blue once more, the strong sun will beat down, and the temperature will rise.
From elementary school through college, we had summer vacation. We went to the sea, to the mountains. We traveled. Aside from the school homework that caused so much grief at the end of the break, summer was full of nothing but good things.
Every year during my elementary school days, I spent the entire summer at my uncle and aunt's house in Hiroshima. A few days into summer vacation, my parents would take my younger sister and me to Tokyo Station. We would board the "Asakaze" sleeper express, departing in the evening, and be seated in our reserved lower berths in the second-class car. While my mother was giving us detailed instructions, the departure bell would ring. My father and mother would get off onto the platform. When the bell stopped, the sleeper train would give a sudden lurch and slowly start to move. Our parents' figures would recede into the distance. The train would pull away from the platform. In the fading light of a summer evening, the express train would pass through Yurakucho, Shimbashi, and Shinagawa, heading west. The city's neon lights would twinkle.
My parents probably wanted to send their children off to Hiroshima during the hot summer so they could relax by themselves. But for my sister and me, who were in the lower grades of elementary school, the long train journey by ourselves was a great annual adventure, and we had no complaints. We would open the bento boxes our mother had prepared and eat our dinner. Sharing a single berth, we would eventually drift off to sleep, though the excitement and the rocking of the train made it hard to fall asleep. By the time we woke up the next morning, the "Asakaze" was already running near Saijo on the Sanyo Main Line. It descended the steep gradient from Hachihonmatsu to Seno, entered the just-awakening city of Hiroshima, and glided into platform one at Hiroshima Station, where our uncle and aunt were waiting. This was how the real summer began each year.
About forty years later, I became a university professor. I had been greatly looking forward to having summer vacations again, but for the past few years, I have not been able to take any long breaks at all. During these summers with nothing particularly fun to do, when I am home on the weekends, I mostly just lie on my bed or sofa and do nothing. There is a mountain of work that needs to be done even on weekends, but if I am tired, I do not do it. If I do not do it, I do not get tired. Unless a deadline is looming, I do not even write my Okashira Nikki.
Winston Churchill, who remained active as a politician, writer, and painter until old age, was once asked the secret to his success. He is said to have answered immediately: "Don't waste energy. If you can sit, don't stand. If you can lie down, don't sit." That is why, even from a young age, Churchill would not stand up when a lady entered the room. Although he often worked late into the night, it is said that if he had no plans, he would not get out of bed at all in the morning. How wise! I, too, will try not to work as much as possible.
When you are always busy, you lose your sense of composure. Churchill was a man full of humor, and that humor was surely born from the leisure he had when he was being idle. Charming people do not rush around. And they are interesting.
Once, there was an Officer in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. This man was lazy and said that the briefing materials for the Diet session were too thick to read, so he asked for them to be summarized on a piece of paper the size of a tissue. His subordinate went to great pains to write down just the key points on a small sheet of paper and handed it to him. A few days later, when this subordinate went into a restroom in the ministry, he saw the Officer in question bent over, rummaging through the trash can. When he asked what was wrong, the Officer replied sheepishly, "About those briefing materials... I mistook them for a tissue, blew my nose with them, and threw them away."
The same Officer, as he was rushing out of his room one day, made a quick request to his secretary. "You, could you withdraw 200,000 dollars from my account?" What, 200,000 dollars? While the few people present were still in shock, the Officer rushed back in a few seconds later. "Sorry, about that just now, I meant 200,000 yen," he said, and disappeared again.
I heard both of these stories from a former subordinate who later became a prominent figure himself.
When I was young, I once had the opportunity to tour a Japan Air Self-Defense Force base with a famous writer. After looking at fighter jets and transport planes, we were treated to lunch on the base. The base commander and the writer sat facing each other, eating and talking. I was just a tag-along, so I only ate in silence. As the conversation livened up, the famous writer, while keeping his eyes on the commander, picked up a bottle of soy sauce and poured it over his pickles. However, it was actually sauce. Sitting next to him, I noticed immediately, but the conversation was flowing and it all happened in an instant, so I failed to warn him. The writer, nodding deeply at the commander's words, picked up a piece of the sauce-covered pickle with his chopsticks and put it in his mouth with some rice. And his expression did not change at all. Not one bit. Not in the slightest.
Next is a story from SFC. In my seminar, we read US constitutional case law with the students. One day, I said, "There are three issues in this ruling. The first and second are as I've just explained, but what do you think the third one is? Okay, Mr./Ms. T." Suddenly called upon, T looked at me with a shocked expression and said, "Professor, why are you asking something like that? Is it a hobby of yours?"
On another day, we were on a retreat with my seminar members. I was driving a few students in my beat-up car through a summer resort when the portable fire extinguisher came loose and rolled to the feet of R, who was in the passenger seat. R picked it up, examined it, and said to me, "Professor, this fire extinguisher is past its best-before date."
Both T and R have graduated now, but they were and still are real characters.
Finally, a story about an American president. Before the Great Depression, in the mid-1920s, there was a US president named Calvin Coolidge. He was famous for being lazy; despite being president, he would not work in the afternoons. It is said he would take naps in the White House. He was also famous for being a man of few words at social gatherings, earning him the nickname "Silent Cal." At a party, a female writer sitting next to him said, "Mr. President, I've made a bet with a friend. If I can get you to say more than two words, I win." Hearing this, the president grinned and said, "You lose." He said nothing more.
On a brutally hot holiday afternoon, lying around doing nothing, reminiscing about stories like these and grinning to myself is, well, enjoyable in its own way. And so, a summer of doing nothing passes by.
(Published: July 22, 2011)