(In the last 13 years, I have been keeping my journal at the end of each year since my birthday is in December. I do so in Japanese, my mother language, so I can fully express my thoughts. Below is a machine translation by DeepL Translator, and I edited it a little where it sounded very awkward. This year has been great learning, and I hope you read my journal and share your thoughts with me. If you understand Japanese, please read the original.)

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As the main topic of this year’s birthday diary, I would like to write about the story of how English, which was only a tool in an imaginary world, became physical.

Events of 2021

Since this is a long story about English, let’s start with a brief note about what has been memorable for me in the past year.

Exit (Acquisition)

Five Stars, where I worked for about six years since its pioneering days, was acquired by a European company called SumUp for $317 million.

Connecting through parenting

One of the interesting things about living in this region is that there are many people who are doing unique activities as entrepreneurs. You can meet these people through raising children.

The father of one of my 6-year-old’s classmates is the CEO of a startup that uses robotic technology to make rooms smarter. He has worked for Apple, Tesla, and other companies, and for a while worked directly under Elon Musk at Tesla, so I was able to hear many interesting stories from him. Musk is famous for his first principles thinking, but he is able to think in ways that ordinary people can’t imagine and build up from the basics, so he immediately understood the briefing from the team of experts and cut to the core. It’s scary.

The father of one of my friends at the day care my 3-year-old son attended is the founder of a start-up company that develops medical devices. He and I have become very good friends, and we spend a lot of time together, camping together, sending our kids to swimming lessons together after they graduate from day care, and happily exchanging business stories.

Mini Camping

This year, I was able to take my children to camp three times. Because of the pandemic, it was impossible to fly or go far away, so my friend and I decided to try camping in a nearby area. It turned out to be a very good experience for the children. Fortunately, there is a campground about 20 minutes away by car where we can escape the hustle and bustle of the city. We can take our small children to a campground where we can go home immediately if something happens, and we can have more camping experiences. I think I’ll continue this next year.

camping

The first time, I left my wife and daughter at home and stayed in the tent for the night alone with my three-year-old son. I didn’t miss my mother during the camping, and I was happy that I was old enough to make such memories alone with my son.

Business

In last year’s diary, I wrote that the pandemic caused me to live in seclusion, and that I had an uneasy start in terms of work, but as a result, I was able to grow the most financially. This year, we followed that trend and increased our sales significantly over last year, making it the largest year of sales since we started our business. Last year, we released Handoff, a tool we created to run our data pipeline service efficiently, as open source software for free. This year, we connected that core technology to our web services to further improve the efficiency of our data integration service operations.

Ever since I started my business about five years ago.

  1. started the business with no overhead consulting
  2. found common issues among target customers and improved the stability and efficiency of consulting
  3. shifted from consulting to services
  4. improve efficiency of service operations with software
  5. gradually commercialize

We had the following process in mind.

This web service is the fourth step in the above process. With this, the groundwork has been laid to provide services to even more customers. What I learned here is that there is a big difference in how to sell consulting and products/services. Up until now, I have been taking consulting style business through outbound sales. Since the latter half of this year, I have been experimenting with selling products and services while generating inbound leads through marketing activities centered on social networks.

The data integration business, as a small business, has been profitable since its inception a few years ago, and the profit margin has been growing. We are fortunate that our existing customers love us, and we are in the process of extending and expanding our contract for another full year next year. The current theme is to create a mold to acquire new customers from here.

Hobbies

Other hobbies include learning to smoke a brisket for 12 hours, and buying and experiencing Meta’s (Facebook) products such as Oculus Quest and Ray Ban Stories.

brisket

This is somewhere between a job and a hobby, but by the end of the year I was interested in reaching my target audience on LinkedIn, so I attended a copywriting workshop and participated in a challenge to post a video missive every weekday in December.

The 21 day video challenge on LinkedIn

The Embodiment of a Foreign Language Exactly 30 years ago, I was in my second year of high school during the summer vacation. I begged my parents to take me to an English summer school near London for about a month. Until then, I had no overseas experience, including travel. I was a 16-year-old pure-bred boy who landed at Heathrow Airport by myself on a British Airways flight. In the English class, all the students except myself were Italians in the mood for a vacation. Although I saw some Japanese university students in the other classes, I remember that I stubbornly avoided any contact with Japanese people because I had come all the way overseas.

In Japan, English was just read from textbooks, listened to tapes, and role-played in the classroom. Until then, it was just a tool in an imaginary world, but I used it to get to know the Italians in front of me. I realized that it was too late to think in Japanese and speak while translating, so I became more conscious of thinking in English. Especially with Massimo, who I became good friends with.

Now I can think in English.” “Me, too.

I remember exchanging these words with Massimo. I continued to correspond with him after returning to Japan, and met him again twice in Milan and other cities when I was a university student and a graduate student. We were able to rapidly deepen our friendship using English, which was a tool of our imaginary world.

In fact, I probably spent only about two weeks hanging out with Massimo. When I look back now, I can only marvel at how fast one can absorb and deepen friendships when one is young. (I would like to encourage people in their teens and twenties to be honest about their interests and be brave enough to take the plunge, whether at home or abroad.) Later, I stayed in Florence for 42 days in the summer of my first year of college to learn Italian, and participated in and presented at international conferences in graduate school. After that summer when I was 16 years old, my resistance to leaving Japan became less and less. In 2000, when she was a graduate student, she was offered a two-year visiting researcher position in the United States. My original plan was to stay for two years, but last year I celebrated 20 years in the US.

During those 20 years, my brain has come to process information in English. During my doctoral program at Carnegie Mellon University, I learned new knowledge in English. Since I started working, my work has been 100% in English. I have only a few Japanese friends. He married his American wife, so English is spoken at home as well. My two young children call me “Dada” instead of “Dad,” and I respond to them in English.

The reason why I wrote “information processing in English” instead of “thinking in English” is because I have doubts about whether it is actually possible to do deep thinking in English. I read a lot of books in my teens and twenties in Japanese that helped me build my personality, and reading literature and philosophy in English is really tiring. On the other hand, for the past 20 years, 99% of my daily experiences have been in English.

From the time I was born until I was 24 years old, I lived in Japanese, read and thought in Japanese in my teens and twenties, and after I moved to the U.S., my daily life and experiential learning was in English. The former and the latter do not mix like water and oil, and I am driven by the anxiety that they are disconnected.

I wonder if the person I am when I am thinking in Japanese and the person I am when I am speaking in English are split personality-wise.

There are several reasons for such fears.

One is that even now, 20 years later, I still feel that my thoughts in English are slipping away on the surface of my consciousness and are not connected to my deep, unconscious mind. To put it bluntly, thinking and speaking in English is a play on words, and I feel like I can spit out words that are distanced from my mind, like writing fiction. This is not a problem in everyday conversations at work or at home, but in situations where morality, ethics, or life views are being questioned, it is sometimes difficult to know if the words you speak in English are really coming from your heart or if they are just coming out of your mouth like an actor’s lines.

Secondly, there are some ideas that come out of thinking in Japanese, and some ideas that come out of thinking in English. There are times when I have trouble finding the same expression when I communicate in Japanese what I first wrote or spoke in English. It’s not a matter of not being able to translate directly, but the idea itself is different.

When I mentioned this to my wife, a cognitive scientist, she told me about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Also known as the linguistic relativity hypothesis, it states that our thoughts are influenced by the language we use. The world of the linguistic relativity hypothesis can be further divided into linguistic determinism and linguistic relativism. Linguistic determinism is a strong assertion that the language we use defines the limits of our cognition, a claim that has been dismissed by modern linguists. Linguistic relativism is a more moderate assertion that the language we use influences our decision making. Incidentally, modern cognitive psychology seems to carefully distinguish between situations in which linguistic relativism applies and those in which it does not through experiments. Some of the most famous experiments include those on the differences in color vocabulary between languages, and the differences in logical thinking caused by the presence or absence of subjunctive past (semi-factual) expressions. (The former is concerned with basic perceptions, while the latter is concerned with abstract concepts.)

In the field of cognitive science, scholars with different hypotheses continue to debate each other and conduct steady research by repeatedly conducting experiments specific to particular situations to identify situations where each theory contradicts each other. Some theories, such as linguistic relativity, which are easily believed by the public because they seem to be true, have not yet been conclusively understood or proven. In addition, popular theories such as “the left brain is logic, the right brain is sensation,” which are not supported at all by modern neuroscientific findings, but are still favored by the public, are still prevalent.

Even in the academic world, the understanding of the brain is at such a low level that if I were to ask whether my personality, memory, and thoughts in Japanese and English are really disconnected or just an assumption, I would probably say that a large part of it is my own assumption. (The reason why I wrote this is to ridicule myself as a person who seems to be self-absorbed in the seemingly complex and lofty theory of the split between the Japanese and English brains, saying that it is a simple assumption.)

When I first started writing this diary, I was thinking of writing about how to reconcile my old personality, which I developed in my twenties and then became buried and latent due to living in English, with the thinking traits I acquired after moving to the U.S. in order to survive in American society while speaking English, and the challenge of how to regain the integrity of who I am. I was thinking about it. However, as I was writing, and as I looked at papers on linguistic relativity, I began to think that nothing so extreme as a personality breakdown was occurring. Rather, the real problem may be the shallowness of my reading in English and the resulting lack of expressive power.

Since my activities will continue to be centered in the U.S., and since my children will grow up with English as their mother tongue, I would like to be able to have in-depth discussions in English. In order to do so, I have to make a steady effort to re-read literature and philosophy in English, including those that I used to read in Japanese.

After living in the U.S. for more than 20 years, I realized once again that I have not been able to use English for more than work and daily life. I am in a sorry state now, but it is not too late. I will continue to build up my English steadily.