By JUDD MATSUNAGA, ESQ.
“Throughout our history, older people have achieved much for our families, our communities, and our country. That remains true today, and gives us ample reason this year to reserve a special day in honor of the senior citizens who mean so much to our land. For all they have achieved throughout life and for all they continue to accomplish, we owe older citizens our thanks and a heartfelt salute.” — President Ronald Reagan (1988)
In 1988, President Ronald Reagan took the initiative to honor seniors when he signed Proclamation 5847 and marked Aug. 21 as the day seniors will be celebrated. “We can best demonstrate our gratitude and esteem by making sure that our communities are good places in which older people can participate to the fullest and can find the encouragement, acceptance, assistance, and services they need to continue to lead lives of independence and dignity,” he said.
According to www.nationalcalendarday.com, one can observe National Senior Citizens Day by donating to a retirement and/or nursing home. “One of the kindest and most rewarding things one can do is to donate essential goods or gifts to a retirement and/or nursing home. Give your nearest facility a call and ask them whether they have a shortage of anything. Or simply drop off some chocolates, juice boxes, or any other treats. You can really make a difference in someone’s life.”
Do you have a senior family member? Perhaps it’s a parent, grandparent, aunt, or uncle. Visit them and spend some time together. If you can’t see them in person, don’t text — call! Let them hear the warmth in your voice when you tell them how much you appreciate them. If, however, you are able to visit, retirement homes can provide much entertainment if you look for it.
My favorite retirement home story is when a golfing buddy lost his wife and moved into a retirement home.
Still grieving, he walks into the courtyard and sits outside on a bench for some solitude. Two ladies come walking over. Although there are four other benches in the courtyard, they make a beeline straight to him. Sitting on each side, one lady says, “You’re new here.”
Not wanting to be bothered, he has a plan to discourage them and says, “Yeah, I’m new here because I just got out of jail.”
The lady on his other side says, “In jail? What did you do?” Trying to discourage them, he says, “I just got out of jail because I killed my wife.”
Without missing a beat, the two ladies said in unison, “Ohhh, you’re single!!!”
Comedian Gary Mule Deer has a joke about retirement home living. He says he heard how Bob Dole walks up to a lady in the retirement home and says, “Do you know who I am?” The lady responds, “No, but if you go to the office they’ll tell you.”
Here’s my favorite from Mule Deer. Do you remember the old Folgers Coffee commercials? The commercial had a jingle, “The best part of waking up is Folgers in your cup.” To a group of seniors citizens, Mule Deer sings it a little differently: “The best part of waking up is just waking up.”
All jocularity (humor) aside, this Rafu Shimpo article is to help the Sansei generation – now senior citizens. Why not the Nisei? The Nisei, i.e., my parents’ generation, are all pretty much gone. But for those Nisei that are still around, parts of this message still apply. This may not apply to the younger Yonsei and Gosei, who had a completely different experience than the Sansei.
The Sansei grew up in post-war America. At that time, for many white Americans, the Japanese were still “the enemy,” e.g., Remember Pearl Harbor? Hopefully, you have never experienced racial prejudice and discrimination, but I did. No, I was never beaten up because of my race, skin tone or facial features. But there were times when I would encounter disdain and/or distrust from white Americans.
My family moved from Crenshaw to Bel Air in the late 1960s. In my grammar school class, I was the only Japanese kid — as were my older sister and younger brother. I remember sleeping over at my best friend’s house. Bill was Caucasian. He and his family were originally from Texas. Bill’s family (his mom and sister) were very warm and welcoming to me. However, Bill’s dad, although always cordial and polite, never really made me feel welcome.
One sleepover, I think I found out why. Bill and I went up to the attic and opened up his father’s WWII foot locker. As we rummaged through his father’s photos, guns, knives and other mementos, Bill would tell me things his father had told him about how the Japanese treated their prisoners of war. I have no way of verifying the truth to his stories, but we were best friends, so I don’t think he was lying.
Bill told me that the Japanese would take a glass rod, jam it up the shaft of a prisoner’s penis, and then shatter the glass with a hammer. I would imagine that would cause infection and an excruciating death. Chances are, the next prisoner might be more willing to talk and disclose position of U.S. troops and other vital maps and information. Needless to say, I can understand why hundreds of white American families carried hatred and disdain for Japanese Americans, even though we had nothing to do with it.
Now, you might say, “That’s absurd, Japan signed the 1929 Geneva Conventions.” Actually, the 1929 Prisoners of War Convention was never signed or ratified by the Empire of Japan. Japan was ruthless, and committed many wartime atrocities against its enemies — including other Asian nations, e.g., comfort women. That’s why I’ve always been concerned about China taking over Hawaii. Chances are, the Chinese are not going to be too nice to the Japanese.
As an elder law attorney the past 30 plus years, I’ve sat down with thousands of Japanese American Sansei (now seniors) and their families. Here’s what I’ve learned about the Sansei as they walk into their golden years. Our Nisei parents tried to raise us to fit in to the American mainstream. We got American names so that we could assimilate into white America. There was an emphasis to act properly, to act honorably, i.e., so we wouldn’t bring shame on the family name.
Guilt has played a major role in our lives. Perhaps our Nisei parents tried to keep us from future heartache and disappointment by teaching us that life is hard. But “do your best,” “hang in there,” or “keep going” (i.e., “ganbatte”). Gambatte, however, almost assumes hardship that must be endured. As a result, most of us Sansei wake up dragging regrets behind us like a chain.
If you have ever lain awake at night replaying yesterday’s failures, you know exactly how guilt keeps an accounting. We wake up still rehearsing the argument we lost. Still replaying the way we snapped at our spouse. Still tallying up every failure from the day before as if it were a debt still owed. It goes back through every conversation you wish you had handled differently; every moment you lost your temper. It takes that ledger of yesterday and tries to carry it forward into today.
There is a particular kind of fear that grips the human heart after failure. Not the fear of punishment exactly, but something deeper and more corrosive. The fear that we have finally done the one thing that exhausts God’s patience. Every one of us carries a private list somewhere in the back of our minds of the failures we consider unforgivable. The moments we think surely pushed us past the line of what grace can cover.
We might think, “I don’t deserve God’s mercy today because of what I did yesterday.” It’s as though we have to serve out some invisible sentence of feeling bad about yesterday, e.g., paying some emotional toll for what we did. But this instinct, however natural it feels, is just plain wrong, i.e., “sticking thinking.” It is a subtle form of works righteousness, an insistence on contributing something, even if that something is merely suffering or shame before grace can be fully received. We treat God’s mercy like it is recycled, like there is only so much to go around and we have probably already used our share. This is unbelief dressed up as humility.
Here’s the good news — the Sansei are not “enduring” barbed-wire and racial hatred anymore. Yes, your troubles are real, but you don’t need to go reach deep to your inner strength to survive. If you want more of God’s goodness, i.e., life more abundantly, all you have to do is ask. But — never once in the Bible is the goodness of God’s mercy tied to our worthiness. Yesterday’s guilt has no claim on today’s grace. Not a partial claim, not a diminished claim, no claim at all. Here’s what the Bible says: “God’s mercies are new every morning.” (Lamentations 3:23)
However, every single day mercy happens again. New mercy is available to you each new morning, it has never been touched by anyone else’s sin, never been diminished by your failures last week, never been thinned out by how many times you have needed it before. If you needed mercy yesterday and used it fully, that has absolutely no bearing on how much mercy is available to you today. God is not keeping score in a way that makes today’s grace smaller because yesterday’s grace was large.
We assume that because we are still living with the fallout of our failures, a broken relationship, a damaged reputation, a physical or financial cost, that this must mean God’s compassion toward us has diminished or failed. But consequences and compassion are not the same category. You can be walking through the very real, very painful consequences of your failure while simultaneously being fully wrapped in the compassion of God, who has not turned his face from you, who is not measuring out his kindness in proportion to how quickly you clean up the mess.
So when you watch the sun rise in the morning, understand that you are not simply witnessing a scientific phenomenon governed by orbital mechanics and axial tilt. You are witnessing a covenant being kept. You are witnessing the same faithfulness that held back the waters after the flood. The same faithfulness that met the women at an empty tomb in the early hours of resurrection morning. Every sunrise you have ever seen, every sunrise your grandparents saw is proof — undeniable, unbroken, mathematically certain proof that the God who made the promise is still keeping it.
In conclusion, grace, not guilt, is what gets to define the terms of today. Friends have failed you, family has disappointed you, and institutions you trusted have let you down. But the sun has never once, not a single time in recorded history, failed to rise. And God chose this specific daily inescapable phenomenon as his illustration of what his faithfulness toward you looks like. The sun kept its appointment every single morning without exception.
He did not tie his faithfulness to a comet that appears once in a lifetime or a rare alignment of stars that only astronomers notice. He tied it to the most ordinary, overlooked, taken for granted event in human experience, the sun coming up. Every single person on this planet, believer and unbeliever, faithful and faithless, has access to this daily demonstration. You do not have to earn the sunrise. You do not have to qualify for it through a certain number of good deeds. It comes for the murderer and the missionary, the addict and the saint, and it comes for you.
Judd Matsunaga, Esq., is the founding partner of the Elder Law Services of California, specializing in estate/Medi-Cal planning, probate, personal injury and real estate law. With offices in Torrance, Encino, Pasadena and Fountain Valley, he can be reached at (310) 318-2995. Opinions expressed in this column are not necessarily those of The Rafu Shimpo.