Chapter 1

Introduction

Survive! Just think to survive!

––My father’s words

When I was a teenager, I happened to tell my father that unless I could contribute to some great endeavor, I didn’t see my life as worth living. Tadao, my father, got very angry at me and told me that coming back home and seeing his mother again had been his primary focus during the war. He told me “if you start to think it is okay to die, you surely will die.”

Now that I am in my 60s, I understand very well what Tadao felt, and also why he got so angry with my words. However, as a young man, I thought my father would agree that a life only matters when it serves a greater purpose. Tadao had been a sergeant in the Imperial Army of Japan, where the training books taught ...

Get Service Design and Delivery now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.