More than 50 years ago, the late President John F. Kennedy said when written in Chinese the word “crisis” is composed of two characters. One represents danger, and the other represents opportunity.
But did you also know, according to my research, when written in Japanese the word “crisis” also is composed of two characters with one also representing danger, and the other representing opportunity.

When the earthquake hit Japan’s northeastern coast, it made history three times in one day. First, it was the biggest earthquake in Japan’s history. Second, the earthquake spawned the biggest tsunami in Japan’s history. And third, the tsunami caused the biggest nuclear accident in Japan’s history. With thousands confirmed dead, missing and homeless, the “danger” aspect of this three-headed crisis is clear. It’s the “opportunity” part of the Japanese crisis, however, that is not so clear.

In Washington, DC, I have a friend who has the unique distinction of being both Japanese and Korean. Yoonsuh’s home, her family and many of her friends are back in Japan. When I spoke to her on the phone shortly after the crisis struck Japan, I could hear and feel the stress in her voice. Still, she exemplified an unusual calm for someone who was experiencing all of the emotion that comes into play when one is deeply connected to a disaster but find themselves far, far away.

Later, when I met Yoonsuh face-to-face, the emotion in her voice was gone and calm permeated everything about her. I realized that I was witnessing and experiencing firsthand what millions around the world were seeing during the many and varied newscasts that have since followed the disaster. There was calmness, orderliness and an authentic stoicism. Through my work with the government of Japan’s JETRO Atlanta office and my association with Korean culture via Yong Studios in Washington, DC, I have seen and marveled at this attitude and behavior before. Yoonsuh, my uniquely Korean and Japanese friend, displayed them both admirably. Surely, there is no doubt in my mind, the Japanese peoples’ determined strength and resolve will lead the country into “building back better” than ever before!

But what does all of this have to do with my original point regarding the Japanese and Chinese characters for the words “crisis” and how the “danger” aspect of this three-headed crisis is clear whereas the “opportunity” part is not so clear? I will answer that question, but first, please allow me to share an important fact with you about America’s readiness:

If an earthquake or tsunami similar to the ones that struck Japan were to hit the California coastline today, we, in the United States of America, would not be ready. Thousands of public buildings and homes would not stand and millions of lives would be at stake.

With that said, the “opportunity” part of the word crisis that President Kennedy spoke about many years ago now is clear. In fact here are three “opportunities”:

Opportunity #1– Japan will rebuild. The country has a remarkable opportunity to build back better. The disasters have produced a myriad of individual, community, national and international (not to mention economic) opportunities to bring people and structures in greater harmony with the common good.

Opportunity #2– The United States and much of the world have an opportunity to learn how to better prepare people for those unavoidable disasters on the horizon. How should our structures be built or rebuilt? What type of coordinated systems should be put in place to withstand and recover from earthquakes, tsunamis, nuclear calamities or, most recently in the U.S., tornadoes and river flooding? These and more are the types of questions governments are now tackling more earnestly. We can give some thanks to the disasters in Japan for that.

Opportunity #3– As Japan continues to deal with the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident, the world will continue to witness the calmness, the orderliness and quiet resolve of the Japanese people–an Asian people who are reminding us that there is a strength that lies within that can face any crisis any time.

My friend Yoonsuh continues to teach me about Opportunity #3.

-Floyd Nelson

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With well over a 150 employees, the new Safeway has brought a wealth of products, services and convenience to residents living in Washington, DC’s Southwest and Capitol Riverfront Communities. But this grocery store’s most important tangible offering can not be found behind the glass doors of the frozen food section or in the bakery area on $5 Fridays. The new Waterfront Safeway has become a unique place where a diverse community comes together. Look closely and you will see that it has become a gathering place for all of the unique and wonderful differences that exists in humanity.

Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, non-believers and more all shop at the Waterfront Safeway. And so do Democrats, Republicans, Independents, boat owners, non-swimmers, the wealthy, the not-so wealthy, runners, wheel-chair users, soldiers, women, men, and children from all over the United States. In fact, people from Latin America, the Caribbean, Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East have been known to meander the isles. (The United Nations has six official languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish. I personally have heard all six spoken while standing in line at the self-checkout at Waterfront Safeway!)

To put it another way, if you sit near the automatic sliding glass doors at the front of the store, and you sit there long enough, you will witness the comings and goings of every race, gender, religion, nationality, ethnicity, age, language, culture, sexual orientation, physical condition, appearance, political affiliation, socio-economic position, personality and point of view come into the Southwest DC Waterfront Safeway.

At a White House news conference, on a terrible day in March, filled with words like earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown, President Barack Obama spoke to a world and said: “When you see what’s happening in Japan, you are reminded that for all our differences in culture or language or religion, that ultimately humanity is one.”

On a much smaller and vastly less dramatic scale, thousands of miles away from the earthquake’s epicenter near Sendai, Japan, I am reminded that one could sit near the automatic sliding glass doors at “a gathering place” in Southwest Washington, DC and witness the comings and goings of a diverse community whose very presence should remind us all us “that for all our differences in culture or language or religion, that ultimately humanity is one.”

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(President Barack Obama’s speech at Cairo University and recent news events prompted a repeat of the following. Many of you know this particular DID YOU KNOW? originally ran April 10, 2009.)

On CNN earlier this week, Dr. Rick Warren, Pastor of the 20,000-member Saddleback Church in California and bestselling author of The Purpose Driven Life, said:

“There are 600,000 Buddhist in the world, there are 800,000 Hindus in the world, there are a billion Muslims in the world, there are 2.3 billion Christians in the world…you have to get along together.”

Dr. Warren, who was picked to deliver the religious invocation at the U.S. Presidential Inauguration earlier this year, spoke these words to Larry King on CNN’s Larry King Live.

There is no doubt there are different people worshiping different religions all over the world. Many of us know that. And we also know there are different things that are important to each of them.

From some religions we know ethics and codes of conduct matter. We see this, for example, in the practices of Buddhism, Hinduism and Taoism. From other religions, we know it is the belief in a single God and established rules of orderly living—Islam, Judaism and Christianity come to mind. And from still other religions—primarily the indigenous ones on every continent—nature and ancestor worship figure prominently.

Differences, yes. But commonalities, also…yes!

Regardless of one’s religion, there is one thing that is common to all: The transcendence from the visible world around us to a spiritual one that is above and beyond our common human limitations. What does that mean? It means all religions are the result of an attempt by people to connect with a higher reality. Another way to look at: Religion exits because we want to be in touch with something that is bigger than us.

And religions have other things in common, too. Some can be seen in the following passages from:

The Qur’an-

Why do you dispute with us about GOD when He is equally your Lord and our Lord? To us belong our actions, to you yours. And we are true to Him.

The Torah-

Thou shalt not hate thy brother in thine heart: thou shalt not in any wise rebuke thy neighbor and not suffer sin upon him. Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself: I am Lord.

The Bible-

And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment. And the second is like, namely this, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself: there is no other commandment greater than these.

These three texts are representative of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. They are considered the Abrahamic Religions because all three are derived from the same source–Abraham. (It should be underscored there are other important Abrahamic Religions. They include: Bahá’í, Rastafarian, Samaritan, and Druze.)

Other similarities among the Abrahamic faiths are quite interesting. Along with the greatest similarity being the belief in one supreme God, there are, if one opens the pages of The Torah, The Bible and The Qur’an, the same names and familiar stories in each religious book– Adam, Eve, Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob, Noah, Moses, David, Solomon and more.

These similarities could be the reason Mahatma Gandhi, who was born a Hindu, responded the way he did when he was asked was he a Hindu: “Yes, I am,” said Gandhi. “I am also a Christian, a Muslim, a Buddhist and a Jew.”

In Washington, DC, on Massachusetts Avenue, just a few minutes from the White House, there is a memorial garden dedicated to Kahlil Gibran, the Lebanese-American author of The Prophet. One of the Mr. Gibran’s quotes at the memorial garden reads:

“I love you, my brother, whoever you are
Whether you worship in your church,
Kneel in your temple, or pray in your mosque.
You and I are all children of one faith,
For the diverse paths of religion are
Fingers of the loving hand of one Supreme Being.
A hand extended to all.”

Mr. Gibran and Dr. Rick Warren must be allies because on CNN’s Larry King Live, Dr. Warren also said:

“We’re all human beings. We have to work on issues, even on issue we don’t always agree on. What people don’t understand is you don’t have to agree with every body in order to love them.”

______________________________________________________________________________________

Sources:

The Alliance for Jewish, Christian and Muslim Understanding:

http://www.allianceforunderstanding.org/index_flash.html

Rick Warren and The Saddleback Church:

http://www.saddleback.com/index.html

CNN Larry King Live!

http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/larry.king.live/

National Geographic’s The Knowledge Book (forward by David Wallechinsky)

DID YOU KNOW? © is a product of The Tajiri Institute and is intended to share information and teach us something about ourselves, each other and our world. The Tajiri Institute, a Washington DC-based, nonprofit, nonpartisan organization, works to promote understanding among “diverse” individuals and organizations by partnering with others to mobilize the incredible power of education, communication and collaboration. “Diverse” in this case refers to race, gender, ethnicity, culture, religion, age, disability, physical characteristics, language, sexual orientation and more. Please send all questions and comments to Floyd Nelson at communications@floydnelson.com. Thank you!

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You will notice the words “Ocean Mind”  floating in the banner at the top of this Website. The words refer to a phrase that came out of a conversation I had many years ago with Seiho Tajiri. (See the "Ocean Mind" essay on this Web page.)  Having an "Ocean Mind" is being receptive, appreciative and embracing of all of the differences that exist in human beings. These differences can include: race, language, culture, beliefs, religion, gender, sexual orientation, physical condition, physical appearance, education, politics, socio-economic position and even personality. “Ocean Mind” says human beings, like the ocean, have the capacity to touch all shores, all countries and all people—evenly and the same.

Floyd Nelson

 

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“A human being is a part of a whole…a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest…a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” -Albert Einstein

This story begins with the death of someone I loved very much–my father. Although he died many years ago, I continue to love him today just as much, or more, than I ever did. Someone once told me that physical life may end, but love…real love…never does.

My father was bald, muscular and very sensitive. Some say his sensitivity came from his mother, others say it came from being raised in the South. Anyway, my mom must have liked it because she married him shortly after they met.

Generally speaking, we were a happy family. We didn’t have much, but we didn’t seem to need much either. After all, we had each other–dad, mom, me, my brothers, my sisters, a black and white dog that looked like he was a mixture of everything and a cat that stayed away from home for days at a time. That was my family and my father loved each and every one of us all deeply.

I’ll never forget when I went away to school. My father insisted that he drive me. I sort of wished he had not. Because you see, we owned a fish market and he decided to drive me in that really, really, “extremely” bright yellow pick-up truck that he used to pick-up and deliver fresh fish. In fact, the words “Fresh Fish” were printed in blazing red on the side of each door. Oh yes, when I think about that first day of school, two things stand out:

1. How really, really, “extremely” bright yellow that pick-up truck was.

2. For the first time in my life, I saw my father cry.

“Are you going to be all right?” he asked as if to hide some of the tears that he was constantly wiping tears out of his eyes.

“Yeah,” I said, “I’ll be fine, Dad.”

Then, just before he climbed back into the truck to make the journey back home alone, my father said something to me that has stayed with me until this day:

“As long as you live, I want you to know that no one is better than you. No one is less than you either. We are all the same. Christian, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, male, female, black, white, yellow, red. We are all the same. We are all valuable. Always treat people the same, until they give you a reason to treat them otherwise.”

About 10 years after my father dropped me off at school in that really, really, “extremely” bright yellow pick-up truck, he died. Although it was classified as a heart attack, I like to say that he died of a “broken heart.” You see, my mother had died just 6 months previously. I distinctly recall my father saying at the funeral, “I don’t see any reason for me to stay around. All of you children will be fine now, but your mother is gone and I miss her. God knows that I loved her.”

When my father died, I felt emptiness. Despite all of the people I knew, I felt alone. It was during that difficult time in my life that I met Seiho Tajiri (pronounced: Say-ho Tah-jeer-ree) who had the distinction of being the oldest living Japanese resident in this country. For me, he became a friend, a father, a mother and a grandfather–all rolled into one.

Tajiri-san (as I would call in my attempt to show proper Japanese respect) was not a big man—he was 4’11″. He didn’t have much hair except for the few gray strands that he kept neatly combed back over his practically bald head. His original teeth were missing and he wore dentures that somehow seemed to slip and move around his mouth whenever he got excited and spoke a lot of Japanese or Korean or Chinese.

To be as old as he was–70? 80? Maybe even older–Tajiri-san was in remarkable shape. He would jog with his little dog Leo (Lay-oh), work in his garden and practice martial arts. He would never really talk about all the martial arts stuff that he knew, but you always got the feeling that he knew something. I managed to figure out that he had spent time in China and Korea. He would practice and work out regularly.

Often times he would playfully punch me in the stomach and say in a heavy Japanese accent, “You must study Tae Kwon Do. It makes you strong. It’s good for the mind, for the body and for the spirit. If you study martial arts, you will get to know other people. You will know their culture. Knowing one culture is not good enough.”

Clearly, Tajiri-san loved the martial arts, but there was one thing that he loved more than martial arts — soul food!

“How about lunch?” He would say if you ever visited his home after his daily workout.

“How about soul food?”

From collard greens to pig feet, from corn bread to candied yams, as Tajiri-san would often say, “I love them all.”

One day, in between his martial arts exercises which he did daily religiously and many trips to various soul food restaurants, I was sitting on the sofa in Tajiri-san’s home office when he abruptly put down the newspaper he was reading and started to complain. In fact, he was frustrated.

“I don’t understand your people!” In somewhat proper Japanese fashion, I listened quietly and nodded my head up and down to acknowledge his words.

I do not know what got him ticked off, but he was going at it strong. Now, he was even standing up with his hands on his hips and occasionally pointing at me as if to blame me for everything that he just read.

“Your people must expand their mind. You must grow. I don’t understand.” he said.

Then he paused. It was raining outside. He looked out the window and said:

“The problem with American people is they don’t have a big enough mind. Your minds are small, like a pond. Like a river. It’s not big enough.”

“Tajiri-san,” I said, “Do you mean like a lake or an ocean?”

“Yes, like an ocean,” he said. “Your mind has got to be bigger, like an ocean.”

People have a pond mind, a river mind or even a lake mind, but that is not good enough. They have got to have an “Ocean Mind.” That is the problem. You don’t have an “Ocean Mind.” You have to read. You have to study. You have to learn about other people, travel. You should study martial arts, and then you will have an “Ocean Mind.”

Tajiri-san and I spent many hours that day talking about “Ocean Mind.” What it meant? How to get it? How to keep it? I have thought about it for many years and now I think I finally understand what we talked about that rainy day.

“Ocean Mind” is being receptive, appreciative and embracing of all of the differences that exist in human beings. These differences can include: race, language, culture, beliefs, religion, gender, sexual orientation, physical condition, physical appearance, education, politics, socio-economic position and even personality. “Ocean Mind” says human beings, like the ocean, have the ability to touch all shores, all countries and all people—evenly and the same. The ocean does not distinguish between male and female, young and old, black or white. It relates to all things the same.

Some people already have an “Ocean Mind” perspective. For those who want to develop a deeper one, here are 10 things you can do to get one.

1. Establish friendships with people who are different.

2. Travel to or read about different countries.

3. Pray, meditate, chant, or think about all of the good things in the world

4. Work with different people.

5. Play with different people.

6. Worship with different people.

7. Listen to music that you do not ordinarily listen to.

8. Eat a meal with someone who is “different.”

9. Learn to say “hello,” “thank you” and “good bye” in two new languages other than your own.

10. Learn a martial art.

I promise you that if you do these things, you will get an “Ocean Mind.” And when you do, I truly believe that you, and the world we live in, will be richer, fuller and better than it has ever been. My father knew this. Tajiri-san understood it. Now, I am sharing it with you. If this world is ever going to be a better place, we have got to respect each other, appreciate each other and value all of the differences that we are. As the great scientist Albert Einstein said: “A human being is a part of a whole…Our task must be to…embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

Finally, I think another great person spoke about “Ocean Mind” best when he spoke to his church congregation one Sunday morning:

We are tied together in life and in the world. And you may think you got all you got by yourself. But you know, before you got out here to church this morning, you were dependent on more than half of the world. You get up in the morning and go to the bathroom, and you reach over for a bar of soap, and that’s handed to you by a Frenchman. You reach over for a sponge, and that is given to you by a Turk. You reach over for a towel, and that comes to your hand from the hands of a Pacific Islander. And then you go on to the kitchen to get your breakfast. You reach on over to get a little coffee, and that is poured in your cup by a South American. Or maybe you decide that you want a little tea this morning, only to discover that that is poured in your cup by a Chinese. Or maybe you want a little cocoa that is poured in your cup by a West African. Then you want a little bread and you reach over to get it, and that is given to you by the hands of an English-speaking farmer, not to mention the baker. Before you get through eating breakfast in the morning, you are dependent on more than half the world. That is the way God structured it; that is the way God structured this world. So let us be concerned about others because we are dependent on others.

–Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Floyd Nelson

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