Aki-Essays: golf essay (3-9-09)

The head of the club draws an arc. Being charged to its full potential, it pauses momentarily in the air. It, then, swings with full force and hits the stationary ball sitting atop the ground-level tee toward the net ahead.

This series of movements is a common scene seen at golf driving ranges as people might imagine. At a practice place, after being clouted with a clank, golf balls ceaselessly get absorbed by the net. Recently in Japan, amateur golf players are showing an increase in their number, including even kids.

Even those who don’t have much interest in golf must identify, as I hope, a male professional golfer, Ryo Ishikawa, 17, an influential being in Japan. Notwithstanding his young age, Ishikawa earned more than 100 million yen, or roughly around one million dollars, in 2008, ranking fifth amid other Japanese professional golfers. On every occasion of making an appearance, this suave young lad has never failed to lose his courtesy which lets people regard him as shy and be familiar with his nickname, “the hanikami prince,” or “the bashful prince.” Recently as he returned to Japan after his first participation in the Northern Trust Open in America, there were a lot of personnel of the mass media and others who awaited him at the airport. In public places, every poster of JAL (Japan Airlines) dons the face of the prince. The TV commercial of the airline is taking this way as well. More and more Japanese citizens are following each of his moves, and playing golf.

Amidst such a phenomenon, the morning TV news introduced another young golfer, this one being a lady, on Saturday (Feb 28th): the TV program informed me that Kumiko Kaneda, 19, turned professional while expounding her career in playing golf.

Kumiko began her golfing life at the age of three abiding by the intention of her father. Footage taken with a home video camera showed small Kumiko swinging a golf club. According to the footage, she seemed to always play golf, also practicing putting in her home. Later in the TV program, the principle of the father was introduced as “bring nothing close to her, except things about golf”: the father was managing to prevent Kumiko from being distracted by any other hobbies. Additionally, for instance, he devised a system in an effort to keep her interest: Kumiko hit a ball which was attached to a spoke to let the ball rotate around the axis on the other end. [I don’t follow this image, sorry.] [I meant sth looking like a roulette machine.]

Having grown up, though, in her junior-high school days she was attracted to experiencing some romance and quit playing golf. However, coincidentally, her father fell victim to a serious health concern and was soon hospitalized. And this incident brought her back onto the track of golf, Kumiko said in the footage. Although she flunked the test and failed to get the professional license last year, the TV program was also intended to announce that she succeeded in becoming a professional golfer.

Japanese people including me should be proud of these successful and hopeful young individuals, particularly in the current circumstances that are prone to make somber news. However, while there are such winners, there must also be losers which usually don’t surface to the public’s notice. [Actually, tangent: do you think that the Japanese media intentionally avoid the more “hard” news?]

It must be true that society in general prefers to hear sorts of good news, as do I. From a macro viewpoint, such triumphs as those of Mr. Ishikawa and Kumiko must just sound felicitous to us: they are so far on the side of winners, based on the criteria about playing golf. However, meanwhile, the life of a human can hardly be graded just on some certain standards, I want to believe. [unclear]

A failure should have a reason (or more.) I found a sentence like this in a piece of writing about how to manage “positive thinking.” The piece, the summary of a lecture on the theme, was intriguing because it brought cases of reincarnation into the context.

Although the summary introduced the cases of people who turned the clock back to their past lives, to the time of Jesus Christ or somewhere around the Second World War by hypnotism, I hope the following will be the easiest explanation: some patients are fated to go through a serious disease as a plan set before birth. For some reason which depends on the history of each person with a number of reincarnations, they need to have the perspective of a patient and be able to sympathize with physically weak people more naturally. Although in this explanation the difficulty is a disease, a problem can take a different kind of form depending on the subject. The point is just that people won’t keep regretting by understanding that each of their problems or failures has some reason worth considering seriously.

After all, you guys don’t totally believe in reincarnation. Neither do I. Otherwise, I would feel sorry for those suffering from poverty, for instance. But, meanwhile, I appreciate this way of thinking positively, even just to some extent. Kumiko might have chosen a separate path from playing golf when she was in junior high school. Even if she did so, she would have been learning many other things. Indeed, there must be dropouts off the track of being professional golfers, some of whose backgrounds are similar to Kumiko’s, living circumstances in which they were obliged or destined to just engage in playing the sport, but it doesn’t mean that they are the losers of their own lives. Life is not that simple.

As far as I am concerned, it seems that only the positive aspects of Ryo Ishikawa are highlighted and telecast. Does he have no drawbacks? Every time I compare myself with him, I tend to regret being myself. (If he were a lady, I would call out his first name with joy.)