I am going to jump around my memory banks for a while until I find my groove.  I make reference in my earlier post to the origins of my interest in East Asia.  I will likely return to my times in Japan as recollections re-emerge.  For the moment, however, I will fast forward to my final days of college.

Somewhere I acquired a deep-seated yearning to know what I was made of.  I wanted to test my mettle.   I first recall feeling as I prepared to graduate from college.  I found myself with a recurring daydream that I might parachute myself into the middle of the Amazon jungle with minimal supplies (a la chewing gum and a fish hook), and then challenge myself to bushwhack my way out.

In the end, I got cold feet and let the sense that I should start generating income rather than incurring academic debt pull me away from this plan.  By what seemed then as complete chance, I received and accepted an offer to work at General Motors instead.  What might have happened had I declined the offer?  Might I have gone to the actual Amazon?  Might I have travelled to China or Taiwan to round out my East Asian expertise?  I’ll never know.

In later years while in the crucible of a figurative startup “jungle”, this untended desire to test my mettle reappeared to shape my endurance in difficult circumstances.

When Star Wars came out in 1977, I was utterly transfixed.  I can’t figure out how I would have accomplished seeing the movie 21 times in the theaters.  I would have been six or seven, and recently moved back to Evansville, Indiana.  The only way I can imagine seeing the movie so many times would have been taking myself to the Rossie Theater a couple blocks away from my grandparents’ house where we lived for our first year in Evansville.  Whether or not I actually did see it 21 times in the theater, I am convinced that I did.  If it didn’t actually happen that way, it must be that my subconscious concocted the memory.

I was so moved by the film, that I always stood up in the isle during the ending scene when Luke Skywalker, Hans Solo and Chewbacca are presented medals of honor for defeating the Death Star to the ringing trumpets playing the Star Wars Anthem.

I didn’t realize until years later how influenced by East Asian culture George Lucas must have been in creating the Jedi.  As geopolitical events would have it, the mid 80’s was the zenith of Japan’s global economic dominance.  The US entertainment industry translated that fascination into movies about the ninja, and all things samurai.  As you might predict, as a slovenly adolescent I became transfixed by the mystique of “the Orient”.  Little did I recognize how much Star Wars might sow the seeds of my interest in the philosophies of the East.