Some notes on the Christmas column below.
First, this is true. Every single word.
Second, I published this during the Christmas of 2011.
That was the year of Japan’s devastating earthquake and tsunami, which claimed twenty thousand lives, displaced hundreds of thousands more, and erased the infrastructure of an entire coastline. It was a year of shock and dismay.
Next, we don’t see the man in the column anymore. Finally, times took their toll and he closed doors and moved back to his hometown, in the distant north. I had his email contact for a while, but over the years I’ve lost it.
But every Christmas we think of him. Every Christmas we wonder how he’s doing.
We knew his name, but never used it. Japanese-style, we called him by his position. He was “Tencho-san.”
“Tencho” means “Shopkeeper” or “Shop Manager.” “San” is a Japanese honorific meaning perhaps “Mister.”
Mr. Shopkeeper? Mr. Manager? All translations fall short. He was then, and in our hearts now, simply this… Tencho-san.
Tencho-san was a small fellow, short and frail, maybe around my age. His shop was just down the street and we stopped in often. I never saw any other staff. He ran it by himself and rarely took days off.
Yet, he was more than just a shopkeeper. Read the column and see.
Last, the words “osechi” and “omochi” refer to holiday season Japanese dishes. “Osechi” is an ornate collection of various delicacies and “omochi” is rice cake.
Tsutaya was a super-sized video and DVD rental outlet. It’s still huge today, but has become a bookstore chain instead.
“Tonari no Totoro” is a magical animated film, beloved by all Japanese children. The English title is “My Neighbor Totoro.”
And here is the column, which might be better titled as: “My Neighbor Tencho-san.”
'Tis the Season to Tell Stories
Dec. 17 2011
The warmth of the holiday season often cooks up a nice story — a helping of goodwill to be served with turkey and plum pudding, osechi and omochi, or whatever other delicacies might grace your international table.
And that's what I've got this time — a small story.
First, some background…
There's this man I've known for years. He operates the video shop down the block in the neighborhood where we used to live, where my children grew up.
A video shop. That says a lot right there. It's not exactly the wave of the future.
Yet, in this era of Tsutaya-like rental giants and easy Internet downloads, he has refused to close up and walk away. He perseveres, despite the odds and his ever-dwindling income. Despite the certainty that his shop days are numbered.
Why? Because he loves his work. He loves movies.
Oh, the sparkle of the cinematic experience! Good vs. Evil! Tears of sorrow vs. tears of joy!
And always that dot of human hope shining on in a world far too often consumed by darkness. The dot that never goes out and, in the end, overcomes and illuminates even the deepest of nights.
He told me once he really wasn't in the video business at all. He was in the "hope" business – allowing people, through the media of film, to find release and encouragement in their workaday lives.
He used to pull my boys aside and speak about the magic of film, how the stories were made, what they taught and how they linked to other stories beyond. His words must have hit home, as my older son is now near his Ph.D. in Cinematic Studies.
Through the years, videos morphed into DVDs and loss of profits due to changing times pushed my friend's business into smaller and smaller quarters. Until it became but a cubbyhole, a cigar-like room pinched even tighter by the many shelves he somehow wiggled in.
We moved away, but I still manage to pop in on him once a year. Two graying romantics, no wit wiser than our younger days. And last year, last Christmas Eve, he told me this story.
A boy entered his shop. A boy of perhaps seven. A boy with a drippy nose and raw skin chapped by the bite of winter.
This boy was unlike the other kids who pestered their way in and out of the shop. His clothes were threadbare and he appeared unwashed. More than that, he appeared unwanted. The other children shunned him.
"Japan," the shopkeeper said, "is not the middle-class Mecca that the West often makes it. There are poor here too. And like poor anywhere what they mostly do is survive… And dream."
This boy would do his dreaming in front of the shop’s animation section. One by one, he would pick out the DVDs and gaze at the colorful covers, absorbed in what enchantment might lie therein.
But he never rented. Other children did. Always and often. Yet, this boy only looked.
The shopkeeper came to the conclusion that the boy had no money. Or perhaps had no DVD player.
The boy appeared nearly every day, sometimes for minutes, sometimes for much longer. He was a quiet child. With shiny eyes.
The shopkeeper watched him and wondered. The businessman in him, the one with the ever-shrinking profits, knew he shouldn't do what he was thinking.
But the other part of him, the greater part, wouldn't listen.
"Young fellow? Want to see this? Then… here." He placed the DVD in the case.
"You have a player, right? Take it home and watch. No fee. It's my gift."
The boy mumbled his thanks, clutched the film — Hayao Miyazaki's "Tonari no Totoro" — and burst from the store.
With the shopkeeper shouting, "Just bring it back when you're done."
Of course, he never saw the boy again.
"I figured he’d sold it. I might have done the same, if I was in need."
Months passed. His rental business sputtered on.
And then one spring morning, in the season when families uproot and move away, he found a paper sack at the door to his shop.
Inside was "Tonari no Totoro." And with it an envelope of coins.
One-yen coins, five-yen coins, ten-yen coins, a child's lifetime savings of coins. Adding up to… no, not quite enough for the rental fee.
But the shopkeeper held the envelope and understood this:
Never had he been paid so much money in his life.
"The boy was saving up. In the end, he gave me all he had. A little boy! All he had!"
"So tell me," he says. "How can I quit? People only need a bit of hope to keep on going. And me? Why, I'm bursting with hope. I've got an entire envelope full."
"More than enough to get me through."
True… businesses vanish. People move on. Times change.
Yet hope endures. In the face of earthquakes, tsunamis, economic blight or whatever, that's the message of 2011.
Hope endures.
Season's greetings — and hopes for a great new year — to one and all.
(c) Thomas Noah Wood
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