A Childhood in Tokyo - part 1

meditation, observation, and the shape of my childhood

Photo by Yoav Aziz on Unsplash

My family moved to Tokyo when I was five. Depending on how well you know me, and how many icebreakers we’ve participated in together, you might know that I met Pat Morita (Mr. Miyagi of Karate Kid) on our plane ride from New York to Tokyo. He was my hero at the time, and after hours of peeking back at him on the plane, I finally worked up the courage to introduce myself and ask him if I could be in his next Karate Kid movie.

Living in Japan is a gift I look back on often.  It wasn’t a picture perfect, carefree childhood, but it was my childhood and it’s forever shaped the way I see the world. My childhood is marked by the sound of cicadas during humid summers, and the sound of the small sweet potato truck announcing, “Yaki imo…. oishii, oishii” as it drove through our neighborhood in the winter, the way an ice-cream truck does in suburban American summers. To this day, I’d argue that a roasted sweet potato from one of those trucks is better than any packaged ice-cream.

 Japan is where I learned to listen. It was the first time I was in a place where the language I spoke didn’t make sense to most of the people I was surrounded by on a daily basis. Tokyo is where I learned to swim, ride a bike, and ride the subway to meet up with friends. It’s where we had Japanese curry and Tonkatsu on rotation every week with spaghetti and Korean food, where I watched Doraemon without understanding the language, and where I was introduced to Nintendo.

Photo by David Kristianto on Unsplash

Tokyo is where I learned how deep loneliness can reach, what grief feels like to a little girl (more on this in chapter 5 of my book, Tell Me The Dream Again), and where I learned to meditate, befriend silence, and became used to the feeling of not understanding or knowing, but observing as if my life depended on it.

Looking back now, I not only see the way God was with me then, I see the ways I was guided and formed in a contemplative way of being without even knowing it was happening, and all with an Eastern, not Western, backdrop.

At the international school I attended, everyone took Japanese language classes. One year in particular I remember how one of my teachers started our class each day with mediation.  After we all shuffled into class and took our seats, she told us to close our eyes and sit up as straight as possible. I remember feeling such relief for that momentary pause in our day. She would wait for the class to get quiet and then slowly walk around our semi-circle of desks with a ruler, gently lining the ruler up at each of our backs to help us sit taller and breath deeper.

A lot of us would giggle in the beginning as we settled in to that quiet space, but I know it re-centered us and helped us focus. Of all the Japanese teachers I had the years I was there, I remember her and her class the most. I can remember opening my eyes and finding her at the front of the class. She would describe our hiragana characters like drawings – the character for  “u,” was like an old lady hunched over, saying “Uuuuuuuuu” because her back hurt.

Can you see the old lady?

う

During those years, I remember visiting temples on field trips or encountering other quiet spaces like Japanese gardens, and how welcoming they felt to my body even then.

Photo by Hideki Nishiyama on Unsplash

I’ve been remembering all of this because I’m realizing that I’ve always leaned toward being contemplative, and that this leaning reaches back much further than I realized. It also reaches much farther beyond the Western world and way of things.

After I became a Christian and had been living back in the States for decades, I remember telling someone that I used to meditate in class when I was in elementary school.  They looked at me wide-eyed as it if it was something evil – something they were glad they didn’t have to go through in their grade school experience. I didn’t tell them how much I enjoyed that practice and how it changed the way I entered into a space of communal learning. To be honest, I wish we did it everywhere - especially in church gatherings.

Now I see how these things shaped me as a child and how they have stayed with me since then. I see the way that God was giving me space to breath and be, sit tall and receive, in a world I didn’t understand, through grief and trauma, even way back then.

Part 2 forthcoming…

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Questions to ponder and process

• When you look back on your own childhood, what places and people shaped the way you see the world?

• Who or what practices help you to sit tall and breathe deep back then? 

• Who or what practices help you to sit tall or breathe deep now?

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This Tuesday, I’ll be joining my friend, Brian Lee, founder and creator of Broken to Beloved, for a live conversation on the intersection of faith, identity, ethnicity, and belonging. Please join us! It’s a free event, but registration is required. Click the image below for the the link to register.

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A new devotional to check out

I’m honored to have contributed to the latest devotional journal from (in)Courage, 100 Days of Strength in Any Struggle, along with so many of my friends. This one is full of honest stories of struggle, and space to process your own.

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Grateful & shalomsick,