Kyohei Sorita

Kyohei Sorita

When I went to bed last night, I had just heard that Japan's former Prime Minister Abe was shot in Nara by an unknown assailant with a home-made gun. For reasons I can't easily explain, this news shook me to the core. I never liked Abe, thought of him as a wretched right-winger. But unlike Donald Trump, who expressed the view that his vice president "deserved" to be hanged, I am absolutely committed to non-violent solutions. I don't want crooked politicians to be assassinated; I want them jailed. Fined. Their lies and their deceptions exposed so they can fade away to the ignominy they richly deserve. I didn't want Abe to die.

The shock I felt comes from another direction. It brought home how deep my love for Japan is. I lived there a total of twenty-four years, when you put the pieces together. For a very long time I described it as a love-hate relationship. That's not accurate. It was more a question of admiration and annoyance. Love in a much larger sense. The culture of the place is still to a large degree insular and introspective, and people like me remain eternally marked as foreign. I hated that. In time, though, I accommodated even that and began to feel the warmth of a place that took me in, gave me a home, a good job, a comfortable existence. In time, the positive side of the place became dominant and I seriously considered retiring and living my life out there.

For that reason, I have to admit that my affection for the place runs deep. I care about it, want it to succeed (and not just because it pays me a pension!). I want to be able to mock its absurdities, but as when you discover you are free to poke fun of a parent or a sibling you don't want anybody else to do so, I smart when I hear criticism of Japan and when it shows its dark or shabby side.

That's why Abe's assassination hit me hard. I feel a sense of personal shame. I know there's no rational explanation for this, and maybe I ought to be ashamed of myself for trying to make this about me when it actually has nothing at all to do with me, but I feel like circling the wagons. Don't you dare, I want to tell the world, don't you dare think badly of Japan for this dastardly act by a crazed individual. It has nothing to do with Japan, in the end, and everything to do with modern-day anomie - a universal phenomenon.

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The gods must have been listening in on my thoughts this morning. I began looking for music to start the day with and came upon an NHK feature on Kyohei Sorita, one of the second-prize winners of the Chopin Competition in Warsaw that monopolized all my attention last October.

If you can find the time, I urge you to listen to the entire video. It focuses on Sorita the person as much as Sorita the musician, the two parts being largely indistinguishable. In the video he talks about the importance not only of technical proficiency, but of physical strength. He relates that he observed, at some point, that Asians, with their less muscular bodies, tended to crouch over the keyboard while Westerners sat back and sat tall. He decided he needed to learn from this and strengthen his body mass and his upper body muscles, so he could play with greater strength. What happened, though, was that he found he was playing too aggressively. He lost some of that muscle and began to play "softer" - the implication being "more musically."

Now that sounds very much like the cultural comparisons I lived with all those years in Japan which drove me up the wall. On the one hand, I can't really corroborate this kind of generalization, but I can't deny it, either. I have to leave it to others to decide whether there is any truth in it. The statement lives in the kind of place that religious conviction lives in - you believe it and it strengthens your faith, or you label it as poppycock and move on.

Sorita goes on, though, to another of those mystical Japanese comments which the rational part of your brain instinctively rejects out of hand. He is scheduled to play in a concert, and for a solid hour, right up to concert time, he is at the piano on stage because it has fallen asleep. Covid-19 has led to a lack of concert performances, he says, and the piano was in sore need of attention.

How could you not love a guy who tells you he needed to lose some muscle control in order to be a better pianist and then speaks of a piano as if it were a much-loved housebound dog in terrible need of a vigorous walk?

How great a country is Japan, that it has people like Kyohei Sorita in it?

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