I had to come all the way to the US to be free from my stigma
What is the first thing that comes to your mind if you think about Japanese culture?
Anime? Manga? Sushi? Ramen? Geisha?
For someone like me, a Japanese woman who came of age in the 1980s, they were Ikebana (flower arrangement) and tea ceremony.
In those days, it was the social norm in Japan that a woman should become a good housewife, rather than pursue her career. Ikebana and tea ceremony were the two main things that she should learn before marriage.
I was a rebellious, ambitious girl, pursuing a modern career. Why would I want to learn such outdated things?
When I was in college, my mother said, “why don’t you learn ikebana and tea ceremony? Kyoto is the birthplace of both, so there should be good teachers there.”
“Hell no!” was my answer.
I graduated from college and got a job in Tokyo in 1985. I was one of only two women out of 250 college graduates that my company hired on the main career path (sogoshoku in Japanese).
Three years later I was one of 20 employees selected to study for an MBA in the US. After getting an MBA, I quit my first job to work for the Japanese subsidiary of an American high-tech company. In the summer of 1994, I moved to Seattle to work for the company’s headquarters.
My work at the headquarters required me to visit Asian subsidiaries, including Japan, quarterly. On my first or second business trip back to Japan, I picked up a book called “Ikebana for beginners” at a bookstore.
The book was full of illustrations, which looked like the geometry textbook in high school. “Ikebana explained in X-Y-Z axis, how cool is that!” was my honest impression.
When I came back to Seattle, I called the Japanese consulate general office and asked if there is an ikebana teacher in town. (You know, it was before the world wide web era.) They introduced me to a Japanese lady who was teaching Ikebana in Mercer Island, halfway from my house to work. How lucky!
To this day, it is not clear why I picked that book at the bookstore, and why I was determined to learn Ikebana in Seattle. Maybe I felt a strong need to find my identity at work. Among the 60-plus-people worldwide marketing group, I was the only Japanese representing the whole “Far East” countries.
Whatever the reason, it is the fact that I had to come all the way to the US to get rid of my stigma against Ikebana. Had I stayed in Japan, I would never have thought of learning it.
