About - Midori Itaya

Have you ever thought of what your fingertips are made of? That was something I often pondered about when I was a teenager. I would make a fox with them (with the index finger and pinky being the ears) or wriggle my fingers and thumb and think to myself how these, too, were merely made of particles produced by planet Earth. There is no way my body is the only thing made from a substance different from the rocks, water and trees. There is no way I was not born from Earth's dust. I was squeezed out of this planet, the same way it produces lava.

This philosophy of mine perhaps made me live life loving our precious Earth, constantly thinking that I could just hug this planet, as well as feeling I was always in its caring arms. Now, being 77 years of age, it seems as though I have spent the past five decades traveling across the globe in search of various spectacles of our beloved planet.

My first oversea trip was to Cuba, where people were dancing with joy shortly after its revolution. My 27-year-old self learned how to swim for the first time in Varedero's dazzling waters. I lay afloat in the southern sea, gazing up at the perfectly blue sky. Drifting while being held in the arms of the ocean isn’t so bad, I thought.

As age 30 drew near, I contemplated what it was that I wanted to do the most. Something I had not experienced before was giving birth to new life from my own body. At the time, I was working as a television director at a Japanese TV network, but I quit my job to put my all into bearing a child, caring for it in my womb, giving birth and nurturing it, without any distractions.

When my son was born I was deeply moved. I thought "Oh, I really am a living being! And so is my boy wailing 'Wah, wah!'" Just like elephants and lions, humans, too, are creatures inhabiting our planet Earth, I thought.

A month after his birth, my son faced death due to an unknown illness. Even when I visited the hospital, the child lay inside an incubator. I was neither unable to hold him in my arms or feed him my milk. As I headed home, I gazed up at the clear sky and thought "Oh my son, how I wanted to show you this beautiful planet!"

Fortunately, an operation saved his life and when he became a healthy 3-year-old, I left for India, thinking it was time to distance myself from my child.

Oh, the poverty of India in 1977! After I landed in Calcutta (Today known as Kolkata) I took a cab downtown, where I witnessed mass herds of street dwellers with not nearly enough space on the sidewalks to fit them all. Adults, children and the elderly all squat and lay on the pavement, living their lives using water from a pipe protruding 30 centimeters from the ground. They’d drink it. Boil it. Wash with it. Bath in it. As I passed, every single one of them would stick their hands out, shouting "A rupee please!” At the time, a fourth of Calcutta's population, some 12 million people, were living in such conditions.

Towards the end of that year, my husband was transferred to New York City where I followed him with my son. Once there, the 4-year-old was squeezing my hand, astonished to see blacks, whites and people of all races so up close for the first time. I, too, gazed upon numerous pedestrians walking through Manhattan and thought “People and dogs are no different. Humans, too, have many shades of skin and hair colors, as well as numerous crossbreeds. How intriguing!”

Just three weeks after arriving at the Big Apple, I woke up with red rashes all over my back, all itchy beyond comprehension. When I consulted a physician, I was introduced to a dermatologist at a university hospital. Upon checking my tissue and blood, the doctor diagnosed me with a fatal illness. I had pemphigus foliaceus. But some Latin name meant nothing to me. It was apparently a disease that would kill my skin cells, both on the outside and on my organs. There were no cures and introducing steroids to my body in mass doses was all they could do. If that gave no results, I would be given anticancer drugs. "Death is a matter of time so if you can, visit places you'd like to go today. It's an incurable disease," Dr. Ferner told me.

After two years of consuming copious amounts of steroids, an Iranian doctor heading New York Hospital's dermatology department told me “it was a misdiagnosis” with the reason being “because its not progressing.”

I was about three-months in since quitting steroids and was starting to feel a little better when an American friend told me "Why don't we go to a Zen temple in Manhattan to try out 'zazen' meditation?" To be honest, I was not so eager to go, but decided to check it out anyways. Zazen felt as though I was sitting on the vast landscape of North America while being beckoned into the depths of the universe. I thought, "I like this." I only practiced it for a few months or so, but the experience gave me deep insight into my own spiritual realm that would trigger a drastic turn in my life.

"This is unbelievable," I thought. Still dumbfounded, that night, I scribbled down everything that had happened to me.

"...Suddenly, just as I felt inside my head glitter with light, thoughts I had never contemplated before rushed through my head. Thoughts like, perhaps there is no such thing as time. And I am myself."

These were all concepts I had never thought of before.

“Perhaps there is no end or beginning. Time, ultimately, is perhaps a nonexistent construct. When I’m meditating, it feels as though I’ve forgotten about my material body. My consciousness that has parted with my material body is perhaps an existence identical to the consciousness of the universe. In the end, you and I are both human beings with the same exact conscious mind. All living beings are one. Grass, the tress — they are all one living being.”

When I returned to Japan from the United States, I realized how the way I viewed life had been completely transformed. I thought, I must have been given life to comprehend the meaning of human existence in the universe.

I was in my mid-40s and I divorced my husband at the time, whom I had only maintained harmony with in a superficial way. I married my current husband, whom I was confident would understand me, and I would him. As we meditated together, we embarked on our journey towards the future.

It was then that something strange happened to me. I sat in front of my writing paper with the intent to pen an essay, but for some reason, I thought I should dictate my thoughts into a cassette player and pushed the record button.

“It is only a matter of time before dawn will break…” I began muttering. What is this? My mind was full of questions, but nevertheless I continued to deliver. “You have all prepared yourselves for it. A beautiful morning is just at hand…”

Between July and September of 1986, I recorded myself speak once a week, which I did so like I was interpreting an energy force that were not of words into Japanese . Written down, the message was long enough to be bound into a book. It was dubbed “Song of Light.”

According to those who were sending the energy, these words were a message from those who once lived on Earth but now were in the heavens to us still living on the planet. The epic described human history up until that point as “night” and told of how both those on terra firma and the heavens would together soon see the coming of “morning.”

What is this? I thought. I was bewildered, for I had never thought of any spiritual being in the heavens. But what the message conveyed was not something that could be thought of by just one person and I could not deny the fact that I was the one who personally interpreted the words.

Later, my husband and I were suggested building a park that would serve as a miniature model space for the morning to come. However, with the nation faced with its stock market crash of 1991, banks perished and our sponsors ceased to exist. Nevertheless we persisted, opening a small park with the little amount of money we had. But with such minimal funding, we had our limits and were forced to close down the park after five years.

Since creating a model space for morning on Earth was a suggestion made by those in the heavens, the same beings who sent me the “Song of Light,* the failure of the park in 1999 meant we could no longer believe in them.

Defeated, we returned to Tokyo where my husband went back to his old job. We all tried to make ends meet, including my son, who started working part-time as a motorcycle courier. Sixty was just around the corner for me and, having sunk almost our entire fortune into the park project, our family had to start from scratch.

Worse yet, I was diagnosed with a serious case of steroid diabetes and had to have my eyes operated. Although the surgery failed to cure my right eye, my left eye, fortunately, made a full recovery. Since then, I have been living with just the vision on my left.

Despite such circumstances, in 2003, my husband was able to set up his own law office and my son—just six months into his courier business—launched a information technology company, thanks to the aid of a close associate. The two have been doing well since then and the turbulent journey of my life seemed to have finally reached tranquil waters in my early 60s.

Thus, I started traveling again. I visited Italy, France, the Silk Road, Greece, Turkey, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Madagascar, Tanzania, Botswana, Morocco… the list goes on.

The more I travel, the more I learn how varying and alluring the Earth’s landscapes are. When I set foot on the Pamir Mountains during my trek on the Silk Road, I recalled how much I longed to visit this place as a child. Before my eyes was sublime sight of mountains towering 8,000 meters in height and the crystal-clear, ice-cold waters of the Karakul. As the altitude of the lakeside I was on was higher than Mount Fuji, my guide handed me a plastic bag filled with oxygen.

In Cappadocia, Turkey, I rode on a hot air balloon. The conditions must have been good and the old lady from the United Stated piloting my ride must have known what she was doing, as the balloon soared up to an astonishing altitude of 2,500 meters that day. As the aircraft silently rose into the sky, I thought to myself, perhaps this is what our consciousness experiences when we die. I kept playing with the planet and my journeys have given me an endless stock of memories.

As I experienced the 2008 global financial crisis triggered by the collapse of the Lehman Brothers, I felt that things were going exactly as described by “Song of Light,” which was why I decided to publish “Playing with Planet Earth [Chikyuboshi ni Asobu],” a simplified version of “Song of Light” that made the epic a little easier to understand.

From Obama to Trump. ISIS and wars across the globe. Brexit and the EU. And what about Japan?

The world in chaos, illnesses, war… they are all just play. They exist to make us cry, laugh and become emotional.

As Earth does its own thing, humans appear and disappear back into the planet, just like a bubble floating on the surface of the sea. The material existence of humans, turn to bone, ash…

I don’t know if I’m allow to ask for this, but when I die, I wish for my ashes to be sprinkled onto the roots of the peach or oak tree in my garden. If it is peach, I shall lend the tree a hand in blossoming its pink flowers come spring. It is oak, I could cover the tree with acorns.

Now that I have become one with Earth, I don’t think death is something that would come to me. Even this consciousness that perceives myself to be who I am is just a mere speck of our plant’s consciousness, which means that, once I rid my mind of the presumption that I am myself, it would expand exponentially and blend into the consciousness of the universe itself.

I am the universe. And that universe, as it defies time and space, just calmly continues to exist.

Midori Itaya

Essayist. Born 1941 in Tokyo, Japan, Itaya worked as a TV producer at Nippon Television Network Corp. after graduating the University of Tokyo’s School of Humanities. She became a writer after leaving her job.

Translation by

Keisuke Nakayama 

Translator. Born in Kobe, Japan, Nakayama studied in Boston and currently works in Tokyo. Sometimes an illustrator and graphic designer on the side.