Cross-cultural communication （162）　

162) Why revisit? ?Personal experience(taiken) and life experience(keiken)
I noticed that my recent cross-cultural blog posts often feature revisits. For example, 153)Revisiting the Romantic Road Cross-cultural communication (153) and 138) Revisiting Brooklyn Cross-cultural communication (138) While the titles don’t explicitly mention revisiting past memories, 134)Suzie and Muscadet Cross-cultural communication (134) and 113)Memories of Esaka Cross-cultural communication (113) all into the same category.

So, I tried to figure out why there have been so many revisits. My first thought was that after over 100 entries in a cross-cultural blog, I’m starting to run out of ideas, so I might be subconsciously using revisits as a crutch (of course, this is unconscious). However, with my work as a nursing home director and occupational medicine doctor six days a week, reading in Japanese, English, and French during my free time, reading the Nikkei Morning Edition on the commute every morning, and watching Netflix videos at night, I have no shortage of material. After much consideration, I concluded that “after living for over 70 years, the number of similar experiments naturally increases.” But this is something that happens to everyone of my generation. Why, then, did I feel the need to write about these similar experiments in a blog? I spent a few more days reflecting on this, and finally reached a conclusion.

I believe it is influenced by the works of Mori Arimasa, whom I admired during my medical school days. Mori was a philosopher and a professional pipe organist. He moved to France in the 1950s, taught Japanese culture at a university of Paris, and wrote numerous philosophical essays in Japanese. His most famous work is “The Distant Notre-Dame.” One of the central ideas in his many works is the difference between personal experience(taiken体験) and life experience(keiken経験). In simple terms, life experience(keiken) is not simply an accumulation of impressions (personal experience;taiken), but rather a fundamental discovery that changes the way one sees things, making the meaning of what is seen completely new and clarifying the overall perspective. This is what he calls true experience.

Perhaps Mori's philosophy has lingered in the back of my mind, and when I revisited a place from my past at the age of 74 in September 2025, I became aware that my perspective had changed in a similar way, prompting me to want to put it into words. As long as one does not develop dementia and maintains a certain level of physical health, the opportunities to transform mere personal experiences into true life experiences increase with age. For this reason, I intend to continue utilizing my knowledge as a physician and my “life experience” to the fullest extent possible, maintaining the health of my mind and body, and striving to create authentic life experiences in my daily life.

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