"Moving in Life from Shame into Song"
Tama Ozaki

by Andy Couturier (C) 2000
Kunisaki, Oita, Kyushu, Japan

  
 
Articles from the Japan Times series "Alternative Luxuries"
(each article will be rewritten into a book chapter in the forthcoming: A Different Kind of Luxury)
  
     
 
Previous Article | Table of Contents | Next Article
  
  When Tama Ozaki left for India at 19 years old, she felt that she would never want to come back to Japan. "I was in a real emergency situation at the time," says the woman with the warm but powerful voice. "I was eating compulsively even when I wasn't hungry, and drinking too. I was completely unhappy."  
  We are speaking following a lively night of song with some of the residents of the newly-opened group home for mentally-challenged adults where Ozaki is the caregiver and administrator. She has been telling me the fascinating story of how she went from growing up in an apartment in a big city, to studying the sitar in India, to returning to Japan to live a self-sufficient life for several years in a remote mountain hamlet. And, most recently, she been building a community in a small seaside town together with people stigmatized by mental illness so that they might regain some dignity and move towards their own self-sufficiency.  
  Ozaki's experiences growing up, the dissatisfactions and contradictions she felt, exemplify in many ways the dilemmas facing many Japanese women today. "As I child I was told that I should never show my anger," she tells me. "Also I loved to have intense experiences such as running face-on into typhoon winds. But, of course, I was expected to be quiet and reserved."  
  Ozaki's mother had a strong yearning for everything Western and sent her daughter to piano lessons and Catholic kindergarten. "This was less because she thought they were good in themselves," Ozaki tells me, "but because she was ashamed of Japan for being outdated and 'stinking of the past.' But I had no idea what the prayers meant, or why my mother wanted me to go there. This was one of the causes, I think, of the growing sense of incongruity I felt inside."  
  However the main reason that Ozaki chose her unusual path in life was her recognition that she had been lied to.  
  Like the people she works with now, Ozaki's story is one of overcoming the shame and breaking the silence in her family. "I was born with a genetically-determined deformity on my face," says Ozaki. "It was a small thing, a split in my upper lip, and it was fixed surgically soon after I was born. I was told, though, that I had injured myself falling down the stairs. I couldn't understand why my parents tried to hide this from me. My mother was ashamed because she felt personally responsible for giving birth to a child with a deformity."  
  As Ozaki moved toward adulthood, the internal contradictions became too much and she knew she had to make a change. But why India?  
   
  "As a teenager, I saw a picture in a book of photographs taken in India," she says. "In it, a dog was eating a human corpse right there in the street, and I felt a rush of excitement, that India must be a really amazing, a really free place."  
  I tell her that it didn't seem to me like a particularly inspiring reason to go to India.  
  "Yes," she laughs, "but for me, I needed to go to a place that was far removed from the rules and morals of Japanese society. I didn't like who I had become: smiling and shopping with my friends and then coming home and feeling empty when I was alone. I was in crisis. I needed to be free, and I had to go."  
  In the city of Varnassi, which is a holy place for Hindus, an old gentleman at a tea shop told her that she must attend a concert of Indian music happening that evening. "I didn't know anything: I just literally put one foot in front of the other," says Ozaki. "I got to the concert hall and there on the dais was a big fleshy Indian man in white garments who was singing in a deep, deep voice. I smelled the incense floating around the room, and a part of me woke up at that moment. The concert went on literally all night. In the morning I walked out in a trance, and there was the large red sun rising over the Ganges river."  
  Ozaki eventually decided to study the sitar, and lived for six months with a large Indian family of musicians in the house of her teacher. "The main thing I learned was that human beings cannot create music. Music comes from God. Humans can only try to listen very, very carefully to try and hear the music made over there."  
  The other thing Ozaki learned in India, she tells me, is how to get angry. "In Japan, it's not necessary to yell at people, and women especially are trained not to do so. But in India there is always someone trying to sell you something you don't want, or overcharging you, or taxi drivers taking you to places you didn't want to go. You have to shout at people sometimes or they just won't listen. This is an important skill."  
  It's a skill that has been useful in her new line of work. When she started to do the paperwork involved in opening the group home, the local officials tried to do everything they could to stand in her way. It's quite possible that without Ozaki's strong, determined leadership, the inspiring place would never have opened.  
  "There's a tremendous shame involved in mental illness in Japan," says Ozaki. "Even today, it is still associated with criminality. Sometimes the family doesn't want to have the person back after they are released from the hospital. They are worried that others in the village will ostracize the whole family as crazy or criminal or genetically damaged. "  
  Thus the secrets are kept and the cycle repeats itself. "The shame," Ozaki says, "is worse for the patient than the illness itself."  
  The sense of dignity in being able to have a normal life and provide for oneself after being treated like a subhuman for years in a hospital is powerful to witness. Says Katsuhiko Tsuboi, a resident that I had the honor to spend some time with, "My strongest memory of Tama is working together at a cotton candy stall at a festival last year. There was a long line of people waiting, and the two of us had to just put our heads down and work, work, work. We earned our own money, and at the end I really felt great."  
  Ozaki tells me that "Katsuhiko has changed tremendously in just a few months. Before, he felt dependent and 'disabled,' but now he's gained a lot of confidence and is a leader at the group home."  
  In the future, Ozaki wants to open three or four group homes outside of the village in the open countryside with those who are mentally challenged living together with those who are not. The community would have a theater space, a restaurant, and tea house for the public, all run on solar and wind power. And, as in the current group home, residents would be able to grow a lot of their own organic food.  
  At the end of the evening I am treated again to some of Ozaki's soulful compositions for voice and sitar. The metal strings create a lush ringing sound like a chorus of bells as she sings her songs of nature, of friendship and of peace. I recall her words from earlier in the day and recognize the message as one and the same as her work with the people in the group home. "We have to remember that any of us could have this happen to us at any time, but that no matter what, we are all members of one human community."  
     
 
Previous Article | Table of Contents | Next Article
  
 
______________________________
  
  If you would like to participate in building this community, or give your time, energy or money to this project please phone 0978-74-0389 or write to Ozaki c/o Group Home Yama-Chan, Postal Code 873-0643, Oita Ken, Higashi Kunisaki Machi, Tomiku, Ura 1333  
  It is OK to copy, print and forward these articles for non-commercial purposes BUT please just send me a brief email at andy@theopening.org along the lines of "I have copied/printed/forwarded this article" to let me know that you have done so. Thanks.