It is never too late to learn from past mistakes

Itsuko Okabe, an essayist who died Tuesday at age 85, had been in delicate health since infancy.

This might explain why her works reflected a constant awareness of life as a gift. Her gratitude for this gift went hand in hand with her warmth and compassion for people and things that were fragile or not agreeable to the times they were in.

Born into an Osaka merchant family, Okabe lost hearing in her right ear when she was 2. She then contracted tuberculosis as a teenager, which forced her to leave the girls' high school she was attending.

She came to hate life and blamed her mother for having brought her into the world. But her mother would respond with humor, telling her, "Oh, you're looking like you want to die again." This made Okabe both laugh and cry.

Okabe eventually became betrothed, but her fiance died in the bloody Battle of Okinawa.

He was the sort of young man who, before he departed for the front, wrote, "Victory can be also sad." And he told Okabe: "This war is a mistake. I don't want to die for His Majesty the Emperor." But Okabe gave him a cold send-off, saying, "I would die willingly."

As someone who came of age in that mind-numbing jingoistic era, any thought or expression of pacifism was beyond her. It was only after the war that she came to bitterly regret her own thoughts and words.

She branded herself as a "woman aggressor." Her thoughts, deepened amid pangs of conscience, found expression in as many as 130 published works.

Years ago, I visited her at her home in Kyoto during midsummer. Her bare arms were thin and delicate. She told me, laughing, "All my life, I've always lost weight in summer and winter alike." But she added, "Because I'm frail, I don't break." It must have been her internal strength that enabled her to turn her frailty into elasticity.

In "Chura ni Ikiru" (Living purely), published last summer by Fujiwara Shoten, Okabe voiced her gratitude to her fiance. "Had he not said those most precious words to me (before he left for the front), my life would have been completely meaningless," she wrote.

Those words continued to glow in Okabe's heart to her dying day, and her fiance's conviction also kept illuminating postwar Japan.

--The Asahi Shimbun, May 1(IHT/Asahi: May 2,2008)