Chapter 3 Ingenuity from Moderate Inferiority and Poverty

Ingenuity comes from feeling of moderate inferiority complex and poverty.

I mentioned earlier that an environment with a moderate shortage of goods, money, and human resources can bring good results to ingenuity. It is said that insufficient amounts and calories in the human diet maintain life more naturally and longer. It has been medically proven that high calories and a sufficient amount of food lead to shortened life through obesity. This is clear from the actual situation in developed countries.

By the way, I had no good reflexes and physical strength and I hated physical education through elementary school, junior high school, and high school days. I couldn't get the best feeling of superiority in the foot race and I couldn't make a splendid back hip circle, either. I couldn't shoot coolly in ball games such as soccer. I always thought that I should escape from class for some reason. It is an adult logic that if you are not good at sport skills, you should do your best in the school subjects. It is sometimes found that if someone is not good at something, he is bat at the other things by chain reaction.

Well, what should I have done then? I don't remember whether I had thought my parents would not have been happy if my PE grade and all the other subjects had not been good. I might have had a slight desire to recover in the other school subjects. Fortunately, I wasn't the target of bullying because of poor grades because my grades in other school subjects were fairly good. According to one of my high school friends Wataru Nakagawa in those days, I helped him a little with his studies. I don't remember much about it though.

Also, even after I graduated from high school until about 20 years old, when it was 20 years after World War II, my family was not a wealthy family just as most of others were. Few households had sufficient cash income at that time. Then I didn't feel that my family was poor. It was partially because my family owned the real estate such as rice fields, other fields and forests more than average even in the countryside.

Parents and grandparents raising three siblings of almost the same age seemed to have felt the need for education even in poverty. My family needed a lot of cash when my older brother was a local junior college student and my twin brother and myself were high school students. In retrospect, I can understand this economic situation of my family’s. As I wrote before, my twin brother had often had his tuition fees delinquent at Onomichi Commercial High School. I now think my parents and he had a lot of difficulty. I haven't heard any from my brother about this tuition delinquency since then. I may have been treated favorably as the youngest among the three siblings close in age. It may have been due to the condition that I left home early in the morning for the distant Fukuyama Technical High School before 7 am. My parents didn't let me experience the delinquent tuition.

Thanks to this insufficient personal ability of mine and economic environment of my family, I would have unknowingly got the idea that I had to devise something to make up for the lacking part from a young age. That is why I am now grateful for the moderate inferiority complex and poverty and my parents and brother who did not make me feel it.

Our mother rarely complained herself or complained about our neighbors. That's true because the eldest brother said so at the funeral greeting of our mother, who passed away on September 2, 2002 at the age of 80. Fortunately, my wife and I have lived near our parents' house in Onomichi since my age of 30 and I often visited my parents and talked to them. I remember our mother often saying at that time that our family had overcome the predicament because we children helped with the farming work.

We children and siblings didn't feel in that way in helping our parents, which was normal in those day. Our mother worked as a midwife too in addition to farming, so her cash income helped the whole household. The center of the family was our mother. She hospitalized and discharged several times due to illness, but each time our father continued to take care of her, saying that he would take her home when her illness improved. But about a year before our mother passed away, he got sick and died on the 2nd in November at the age of 79 a little before my mother passed away. In retrospect, I'm happy with a lot of time with our parents in their final chapter of life. Many people can’t share a lot of their time with their parents.

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