It's nearly the end of the year, and I constantly bemoan the passing of time. There is so much to do, and so little time to do it in.
Recently I came into contact with something that made me realise that time is just a figment of your imagination, and that there is no limit to what you can achieve with your time if you just set your mind to it.
First of all, I was at an appreciation dinner for Hasamaya, a boutique sake brewery in Miyagi Prefecture, Japan. The lady running the show — and in fact the brewery — was far from old. Caoli Cano was mature, I admit, several years younger than me, but her fine porcelain skin would have led you to think she was in her early 30s.
The fact that Cano was in charge of a sake brewery in Japan was already cause for applause. Sake, like wine or other alcoholic beverages, has always been a man's world. But Cano is the 12th generation of a family of sake brewers, with a brewery that dates back over 250 years, approximately to the same time that King Rama I established a new capital city on the east bank of the Chao Phraya River and called it Rattanakosin.
What is also truly commendable is that Cano didn't always have it in her mind to carry on the sake tradition. She had studied music seriously, and had made a name for herself as one of the early proponents of J-pop, writing her own music to boot. She has worked with Sony Music Entertainment Japan, and has also produced music for several international artists. She was picked by Andrew Lloyd Webber to write the Japanese lyrics for Love Never Dies, the sequel to Phantom Of The Opera.
When it came to the brewery, however, her parents were apprehensive. They probably thought it had come to the end of the road, and gingerly — or perhaps smartly — hinted that they really wouldn't mind if she didn't join the family sake tradition if she was happy with her music career.
Perhaps it was the sake in her DNA (or the lees in her epidermis that keep her skin so youthful), but Cano ended up embracing the sake brewery. She learned the traditional way, through apprenticeship, and gradually learned all there was to know about the secrets of brewing haute sake, from the exact temperature needed at each step of the process to the special kind of rice required for the best final product. This J-pop girl has taken her sake into the new millennium, and its third century of existence.
Within the same week, I met a young man by the name of Yoichi Nakanishi, who is the fifth generation of
a family of bonsai cultivators in Japan's Kagawa Prefecture.
He was explaining the art of bonsai, standing next to a beautiful specimen of Juniper pine with a curved trunk.
He is in his 40s, but the bonsai is at least a century old.
Nakanishi was another person who grew up with other plans on his mind. He played football in the national league and harboured dreams of opening a Japanese pub. But he eventually was lured by the call of the bonsai, and has never looked back. I found it amazing a bonsai Nakanishi might begin nurturing today will not reach maturity until his grandchildren's generation, if it ever does. It is said that the bonsai in Japan's Imperial Palace dates back some 500 years, and if well tended, could live another 500.
To know that you will never see the fruits of your endeavours, yet remain passionate enough to carry on this ancient tradition, is hard to come to terms with. But it does make you see that you are a mere speck in space and time. What you have started today will determine the beauty of an end product that won't be evident until the next generation.
That's a humbling thought.
Usnisa Sukhsvasti is the features editor of the Bangkok Post.