A few days after my mother died in 2019, I reached out to my old high school debate partner, Sayuri Oyama. Via text message, I let her know what had happened, I inquired after the well-being of her own parents, and as it was Thanksgiving, I let her know how grateful I was for our friendship. Si replied via email. She was in our hometown of Cupertino, visiting her own parents, along with her eldest son, Marcus, and her sister, Misa. Just before receiving my text she had been talking about me with her dad. He had wanted to know if she had kept in touch with anyone from high school.

About the timing of these seemingly unrelated events, Si wrote, “They have a saying in Japanese, ‘ishin denshin’ which means something like sharing thoughts of the other person at the same time (they are thinking of you). It’s a reminder to me of how connected we are.” One of many Japanese idioms that defies precise translation into English, I have come to understand “ishin denshin” as referring to unspoken communication between two hearts that are what we might define as “simpatico”.

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Friends for several years, Si and I became Oxford Debate partners during our senior year of high school. We were good together. More important, though, we experienced partnership, and the trust, respect and intimacy true partnership entails. Whether in debate rounds, in the car on our way to tournaments, or at any of several libraries doing our research, sitting beside Si, even in silence, felt like exactly where I was meant to be.

After high school, we remained close for many years, even as she went to college on the east coast and then taught English in Japan. However, when we reunited in December of 2018, it was the first time we had seen each other in probably two decades, and we probably had not spoken, or even written to each other, in almost as long. There had been no falling out, just a falling away, no doubt sped up and exacerbated by the rampant proliferation of social media connections that had become de rigueur in the first decade of this century. If you weren’t on Facebook, or the like, it was all too easy to be forgotten. Si had no social media presence to speak of, and though I would never forget her, I did allow Facebook to Facebook communication to take the place of face-to-face interactions.

When we finally remedied the long silence between us, it was when I was back east as part of my nationwide travelling engagement party tour, celebrating Lily and I my forthcoming nuptials. The day of our New York City engagement party, I set out early in the morning to catch the train to Bronxville, where I met Si just outside the Sarah Lawrence College campus where she served as a professor of Japanese and Japanese Literature. We picked up exactly where we had left off who knows how many years earlier. Being with her felt as natural and nourishing as it ever had. We parted that afternoon knowing that each would put forth the effort to remain in touch.

In fact, not long after that visit, Si sent me a DVD of an interview she had conducted of her own father before the assembled student body of Sarah Lawrence. Si’s dad, Jiro Oyama, was born in Los Angeles (Boyle Heights, to be exact) in 1925. He was 16 years old when World War II broke out. When, two months later, President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, suspending the constitutional rights of Japanese Americans, Jiro and his family were forcibly relocated. First, they were sent to the Santa Anita Racetrack, where an “assembly center” had been created while the concentration camps were being built. After several months at Santa Anita, they were sent to Jerome, Arkansas.

One of my best friends from childhood is Yoshi Kato and we have remained close through all of our adulthood. His parents have been like second parents to me. In fact, when my own parents proved physically unable to attend my wedding, it was Yoshi’s parents, Isao and Yuki, who attended not only the wedding, but also the rehearsal luncheon, as my family. The reality has never been lost on me that had we grown up some four decades prior, I would have had to witness my good friend and his family endure the same fate as Si’s father and countless others. What astonished me in watching Si’s interview of her father was how this man had always been so gentle, generous, kind and free of cynicism. Growing up, I never knew him to be jaded about anything.

During Asian Pacific Islander Heritage Month in 2022, it dawned on me that the Los Angeles Breakfast Club was doing nothing to commemorate the important history of the AAPI community or celebrate its extensive contributions to our culture. I sought to remedy this oversight in my own humble way by giving a brief talk during one of our weekly “Adventures in Friendship” a section of the program usually reserved for our longtime chaplain, Reverend Barbara Adams. I spoke of Yuriko Kikuchi, a legendary dancer, who had recently died at the age of 102. She was the first non-white performer ever to dance in the Martha Graham Dance Company.

When Yuriko was a child, her burgeoning dance career was interrupted during World War II as she and her family were interned at the Gila River Relocation Camp in Arizona. The interruption was only temporary, of course. She was released from the camp in 1943 and went to New York City. The next year, she joined Martha Graham. She performed on Broadway, on the big screen, and even started her own dance company.

In speaking with my friend, fellow Breakfast Clubber June Aoichi Berk, I had expressed my utter amazement that this young woman could be in an internment camp, everything having been taken from her and her family, and yet, she had the composure, the resilience, just one year later, to reach the pinnacle of the dance world. I wondered how she could emotionally and psychologically and even physically bounce back from such an experience and do it so quickly. June explained to me that it was because Yuriko would never have felt like anything was taken from her. June told me that Yuriko’s parents, like June’s own parents, like the grandparents of my dear friend Sayuri Oyama, would never have allowed their children to feel that way. June taught me a Japanese phrase: “Ma-ke-nai-de”. According to her, the phrase means to never give up who you are, to never give up on your dreams, to hold your head up, and to stay dignified. That’s a lot of wisdom about how to persevere in one short little phrase.

I delivered these remarks to the Breakfast Club on May 7th, which was of particular significance as it was on that date in 1843 that the first Japanese immigrant arrived in the United States of America. When confronted by the darkness that can exist in the world, when facing the bad and ugly humanity is capable of, I pointed out that it is a comfort to think of the principles the Breakfast Club espouses, principles like hospitality and friendship and good manners. At least so long as we act upon those ideals, the petty expressions of human cruelty can find no place to inflict its destruction.

Of course, Earl Warren, who would become Governor of California, and later the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, was the Attorney General of California who spearheaded the movement to intern those of Japanese ancestry. And he was a Breakfast Clubber! So I concluded my remarks, by stressing the importance of remembering that the darkest impulses of humankind can happen anywhere. But maybe, just maybe, if we are so busy celebrating each other’s differences, and each other’s contributions, and all that each other has to offer, there simply won’t be time for anything else.

Almost a year later, in April 2023, I was asked by June to speak at a ceremony in Griffith Park’s Travel Town. The event was the dedication of a plaque commemorating all those who had been incarcerated there when that part of the park served as a temporary internment camp during World War II. It was an absolute honor to participate and to celebrate the occasion with the community. We celebrate something to express why that thing, that person, that place, matters to us. The lives of those incarcerated in that camp matter. Their names matter.

June showed her gratitude for my participation in the event by treating Lily and myself to a private tour of the Japanese American National Museum in Little Tokyo. June has long been associated with the museum. Lily and I had attended an interview of her there just a few weeks prior and being treated to such an insider’s view was an absolute privilege. The highlight was learning about how people can pay their respects to those who were incarcerated in the camps by placing stamps in the sacred book of names, the Ireichō. People schedule appointments to perform this ritual. Thanks to June, and somewhat sheepishly I now must admit, I was allowed to bypass the need for an appointment and the line of those waiting to honor loved ones, and I was welcomed into the on-site library.

To see how the entire research process was done, I gave the researcher the name of my old debate partner’s father, Jiro Oyama. Soon, I was given information about him as well as a commemorative card I could leave behind, letting the world know I was thinking of Jiro. I was also told how to determine on what page of the Ireichō I would find Jiro’s name. Thus instructed, June led me into the room housing the sacred book of names and there, while June documented the experience by taking photos, Lily and I paid our respects to the father of my dear friend, by using the Japanese hanko to place our marks next to his name.

When I got home that night, I sent the photos via text to Si. I had not heard from her in many months, but I was sure she would appreciate that I was thinking of her father, and her, and paying my respects in this way. To show our gratitude to June, we told her we would be introducing her to one of the best-kept secrets in all of Los Feliz, a Japanese teahouse so hidden as to be invisible from outside view. In fact, I would guess that most locals don’t even know about it.

It was Lily and my former neighbor and dear friend, Harry Ralston, who introduced us to Nehima. We were instructed to meet him on a sidewalk one weekend afternoon. No other details were given. Naturally, my first thought was “sex cult”. This should not be in any way construed as a comment on Harry’s character or reputation. It’s just that sex cults are never far from my thoughts. My fears were not allayed when he hit a button next to a non-descript metal door on a side of the street with no other businesses and no other people out and about. Before long, we were ushered inside and instructed to give up our phones and any other electronics. A sign caught my attention, advising us to be “worthy” of what we were to be served. I thought I recognized our host, and yet, I couldn’t quite place him. Then, we were led into the main area, and it was like walking into an authentic teahouse in Kyoto. Except, as I learned later, there are no teahouses like it, even in Kyoto, because no one there uses all the traditional techniques that Richard and Miho, the proprietors of Nehima, use, and certainly not in the way they do.

Longtime residents of Los Feliz will remember Richard and Miho from their shop New High Mart on Vermont Avenue. Those same residents might remember that Richard and Miho occasionally gave tea lessons in their shop. When Richard and Miho moved their enterprise exclusively online, they turned their attention to building this magical portal to another world, a world largely of their own imagination and creativity, where their artistry, excellence and dedication can flourish, nourish and inspire. Of course, there was once another hidden teahouse in Los Feliz, one that appeared in the summer of 2015, atop a hill behind the Observatory, nestled deep in Griffith Park.

Built atop an existing concrete foundation by artists who used reclaimed wood from the Griffith Park fire, the structure was not permitted and not insured, and so was not long for this earth (at least at that location). For its brief existence in the park, however, it was a mecca for hikers, especially those who wished to write a prayer and ring it into existence through the use of the teahouse’s prayer bell. Lily was one such hiker. This was in the years before we had even heard of “atmospheric rivers” and when we were forgetting that rain had ever existed. So, Lily wrote down her prayer, added it to the array of prayers on display, and with all her might, rang that bell, willing for it to rain. The next morning, the heavens parted and rain poured down upon us.

That the teahouse was built from wood that had been so scarred by trauma served to make it beautiful. Knowing that the powers-that-be could never allow it to remain made the teahouse even more beautiful still. There is a Japanese phrase that describes finding beauty in imperfections: “wabi-sabi”.

On and off through the years I have encountered that phrase, but it has only been in the past two years, while engaging in a project called “The Art Life” that I have begun to really contemplate its meaning. Then, when my wife suggested that we name a production company “Wabi-sabi” I realized I had really better get a working handle on its deeper ramifications. So, having introduced June to Nehima and to its proprietor, Richard, and witnessing the mutual admiration between them, I decided to ask each of them not for a definition of the phrase, but for what the phrase meant to them. In hearing their responses, and in asking many others about the phrase since then, I have come to understand why it is a concept so prevalent in Japanese art.  You see, the precise meaning of accepting and appreciating that which is transient, or imperfect, or incomplete will naturally depend upon one’s definitions of “acceptance”, “appreciation” “transience”, “imperfect” and “incomplete”, and so each definition will be as subtly unique as that person’s artistic fingerprint.

Weeks went by after I sent the photos of me paying tribute to Si’s father with hanko marks next to his name in the sacred book at the Japanese American National Museum. I heard nothing from my friend. By this time, I was certain that something was wrong. As I thought back, I realized that I had not heard from her since Christmas, more than six months prior. My texts, my emails, my calls, had all gone unreturned. Finally, on July 19th, 2023 I received a text from her husband, Kenji, letting me know that Sayuri had died in March. Cancer that had attacked her during our personal “hiatus” had come back with a vengeance.

In addition to her husband, Si left behind two sons. At the urging of their aunt, Si’s sister, Misa, I have kept my distance. She promises that when they are ready, when talking about their mother with someone who knew her when she was their age might appeal to them, she will let me know. I do follow her eldest son, Marcus, on Instagram, ironically, perhaps, seeing as how his mother eschewed all social media. Marcus certainly seems remarkable. He follows me as well. We frequently like (or I guess, “heart”) each other’s posts. When this happens, despite our never having met, and never having spoken or written to each other, it nevertheless feels, in some small, subtle, and unspeakably beautiful way, as if our hearts are connected. “Ishin denshin,” I hear his mother’s voice say. And she sounds pleased.

I know she would be pleased to see the way he embodies what my friend June describes as the “Ma-ke-nai-de” spirit of perseverance. He seems to be true to himself. He seems to be keeping his head up. He seems to be a young man of dignity.

As for me, I still occasionally feel Sayuri Oyama sitting next to me. I write and speak about her as often as I can. In fact, when my podcasting partner of the past 17 years, the best man at my wedding, was in town visiting this past Thanksgiving, I introduced him to Nehima. Dean is a remarkable man. He is beloved by fans the world over for having played one of The Lone Gunmen on “The X-Files” (and their own spinoff show). He is an accomplished painter, an award-winning inventor, a dancer, a punk rock drummer, and one of the most brilliant improv comedy performers of all time. So, I felt comfortable telling him that I was still angry about my friend’s death. I said that I understood that death comes to all of us, but that her dying, when she did, seemed like nothing less than “a flaw in the design.”

Dean listened and softly suggested, “Maybe the flaw is the point of the design.”

And as that sank in, he said, “You know … wabi-sabi.

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