Masa Sugiura

 There are people who achieved great things without ever going to university, such as Thomas Mann, Heinrich Mann, Herbert Spencer, and others.

I entered university three years later than my peers. Since I never repeated a year, I graduated at the age of twenty-five, but if things had gone slightly differently, I might have missed out on a college education entirely.

The fact that I never had to work a part-time job during my student years, could fully focus on my studies, and was even able to go on to graduate school in the United States is entirely thanks to my parents, who deeply understood the value of education.

From the very beginning, I had absolutely no desire to find employment at a regular company. Having taken the teacher training course and obtained my teaching license, I walked the path of a teacher without any hesitation.

To tell the truth, I didn't take the teacher training course at first. It required 1.5 times the usual course credits, and I wasn't seriously considering becoming a teacher in the beginning.

Although I eventually took it because my mother recommended it, the truth is that my grandfather was an elementary school teacher who finished his career as the principal of Tenjinjima Elementary School.
Teachers did not have to go to war. While the era I lived through was not a time of war, my mother had experienced it, and since her own father was a teacher, she knew better than anyone that he did not have to go to the battlefields.

My mother's side of the family comes from a samurai lineage, and Shotaro Arase, who was in the Kokura Domain around the time of the Meiji Restoration, is the furthest ancestor I can trace back to. Since that was around 1870, it was roughly 150 years ago.

In my maternal great-grandparents' generation, the couple could not have children, so an adopted husband and an adopted wife entered the Arase family from the Takashima and Sugiura families to carry on the family name. Both the Takashima and Sugiura families are also said to have been samurai families. Masa Sugiura, who married into the family from the Sugiura house, was a woman with the artistic flair of a geisha, and she was reportedly fond of playing the shamisen.

I, too, inherit one-eighth of my DNA from Masa Sugiura, and I sometimes think to myself that my own artistic temperament might be due to her influence.