The Importance of People

Best wishes and Happy New Year to you all!

As we enter another new year, I turn my thoughts once again to the issue of human existence. I sincerely hope that this turns out to be a wonderful year.

In my younger days, I was the type of person who was always thinking about things. I had my own way of thinking that was a long way from anything like expert debate. When I see that this manner of contemplating nature, contemplating people, and contemplating society remains completely unchanged in me, even though I reached my sixtieth birthday on May 13 of last year, I realize that it must have been in my early twenties when I arrived at the essence of things.

I think it was Karl Marx who said that while it is the fate of human beings as material entities to die, human beings as a species will continue living forever. I like those words. If you look at human life on the axis of time, you can understand various things.

In very simple terms, light passes around Earth seven and a half times every second, and the distance that it travels in a year is called one light-year. In the perspective of this light-year world, the life of an individual human being flashes by in an instant. Even if the average life span is 85 years, this is no more than a twinkle.

When we look at the flow of the solar system, Earth, nature, and human beings (living creatures), we can see that human beings are continuing their life as a species. That is the meaning of existence. The true character of individual human beings is to think of both their own child and their neighbor' child as members of the human race and to have an awareness of continuing the species. This is the principle of not only human beings but also the universe and all living creatures.

Adults give birth to children, who then become adults themselves and give birth to children. In this way, the lives of individuals, which are momentary in themselves, connect together so that individual human beings go on existing forever. Since this means that the human race exists forever, I believe people become aware that all the children of the world are in fact their own children.

This theory of human existence that I hit upon is the starting point of my thinking about how human beings should be. In the I Ching (The Book of Change), there are the four characters for "paradise, heaven, acceptance, and fate."These four characters come from the saying heavenly paradise, acceptance of fate, no regret."According to the interpretation of the Chinese literature scholar Prof. Hiroshi Moriya, "Heaven and fate have the same kind of meaning, so they are called heaven's will. The will of heaven transcends the efforts of human beings. However much human beings might struggle and flounder, nothing can be done in the end. Accept the will of heaven meekly, and look objectively on bitterness and hardship. As a result, you will be able to respond coolly."

If you have an understanding of human beings and the human race in the context of time, as I explained earlier, I think that foresight will bubble forth and you will be able to sense the skills that are required for living now. To cite a very familiar example, if you have an understanding of the existence of parents, the existence of your self, the existence of children, and the feelings of thankfulness and gratitude, then you will be able to understand the essence of our business, from the existence of users to how makers and retail stores should be.

We can state with certainty that a small scale of living, like hegemony or thinking only of yourself, has no eternalness and is most disliked by people. Real victory lies in properly grasping human nature.