Mega-Opportunities and How to Respond
People talk about once-in-a-lifetime opportunities as if there’s only one. One chance to make it big. One time to kick the bucket and go after your dream. But dreams change with life experience and age. What once seemed inimitably appealing loses its luster.
Still being prepared and open are keys to allowing. So when that one big one comes and knocks you off your game, you’re ready and set to go, go, go. My life has been filled with many fabulous opportunities which I grabbed. Yet life, or physics, for that matter, does not sit in one direction. To weigh the scales, I also had some utterly horrible life-changing experiences in retrospect. Yet now, as I reflect on my life, I see all these experiences were fabulous opportunities that enabled me to grow and learn more about my true nature.
This mega-opportunity turned me upside down to rearrange my thought patterns, lifestyle, and behavior. It happened in 1977 when I was 19 years old. I went on tour to Japan with the band KISS — on a press junket as one of ten music journalists. That trip and what transpired thereafter altered the course of just about everything in my life.
This impression of the Japanese and their amazing country: Nippon, plus the sequence of events on tour, led me to relocate to Tokyo for five life-changing years.
There are so many people whose choices and actions intertwined and meshed without them knowing to create the perfect conditions that led to the manifestation of the big opportunity.
They showed trust, love, warmth, support, and friendship during my time in Japan from 1977 through 1984. Beginning with my mother posthumously for being an adventurer who believed in me enough to allow me to move to a foreign country on my own before I was 20 years old. I also wish to thank the late Shoo Kusano, one of the great music moguls of Japan and former owner of Kusano Music and Music Life Magazine, for choosing to be my mentor. He was the first to teach me the fine art of downing a couple of whiskeys and then trying to stand straight while belting out karaoke. Mrs. Watanabe, former manager of the great Kabuki actor Tamasaburo Bando and The Ginza Kabuki Theater, who was, for all intents and purposes, my surrogate mother. Kei Ishizaka, a dear friend and music aficionado who granted me (the only foreigner allowed in the room) access to meet John Lennon and Yoko Ono at John’s very last appearance in Japan before he was murdered.
To my three corporate buddies — musketeers of Toshiba-EMI, Shizuka my very best friend who was there for me through thick and thin soba noodles and sake, the Mihira family who adopted me as one of their own, and finally to my great love Yujiro to whom I send kisses from across the ocean.
