In Japan, we have a summer tradition called Obon, when families welcome the spirits of their ancestors back home and honor their memory. This year, Obon falls between August 13 and 16. Many companies close for the holiday, and families gather at relatives’ homes to pay their respects to those who came before them. Today, I found myself thinking about my father, who passed away four years ago from COVID-19.

I wrote about him around this same time of year, on August 18, 2023, in a post titled “About My Father: Lessons Learned from His Life.” Three years have passed since then. Strangely enough, I now buy and eat pineapple—the fruit my father always used to bring home—at least once a month, and I visit his grave several times a year to tell him how life is going. As a student, I never respected my father; if anything, I looked down on him. But as I grew older, got married, was blessed with children, and began to think seriously about my own role and responsibilities as a father, I finally came to understand what he felt and what he carried.

The three most important things I learned from my father remain just as I wrote back then. But there is one more thing—something I have come to feel may be the final lesson he taught me, through his very existence: never forget gratitude.

Every morning, my mother made my father a boxed lunch. When he came home late at night, drunk, she still had dinner waiting for him—all while nursing her own mother, and single-handedly managing both her job and the entire household, flawlessly. Because this was simply how things had always been since the day I was born, I took it for granted. But it was an extraordinarily difficult thing to do. Even now, I think my father could have shown my mother far more gratitude than he did.

When I dropped out of high school and shut myself away at home to study for university entrance exams, I was pushed to my mental limit, and one day I punched a hole in the wall of our house. My mother was furious: “Look what you’ve done to the house your father built! What an ungrateful son you are!” But my father simply said, “A hole or two in the walls of this beat-up old house doesn’t matter. At least you didn’t hit a person. Masanori, are you okay?” I have never forgotten his voice and his expression in that moment. I only bowed my head and apologized to him for it once while he was alive—so now, whenever I picture his face, I press my hands together in prayer, with both apology and gratitude in my heart.

It is thanks to my father that I was able to clearly shape, within myself, what a father’s role and responsibility should be. His favorite phrase was, “You’ll understand when you become a father yourself.” I hated those words—I always wanted to say, “No, just explain it to me now.” So I never use that phrase myself. But including those very words, I am grateful from the bottom of my heart for the father I had. When my time comes and I cross over to the other side, I hope I can sit down with him again—eat his terrible hiyashi chuka cold noodles with melon in them, his miso-fried green peppers and eggplant, and some pineapple—and thank him in person over a cup of One Cup sake.

Masaki “Mark” Iino
Founder & CEO
SOPHOLA, Inc