As long as you have a fighting spirit, anything is possible! A positive attitude and a fighting spirit are the secrets to an active life!

Professional wrestler Antonio Inoki passed away at the age of 79. His achievements are worthy of praise: He entertained and invigorated many fans who enjoyed watching professional wrestling by shouting out his signature phrase, “As long as you have a fighting spirit, anything is possible!” There is nothing better than thinking positively and then putting whatever you set your mind into action knowing that anything is possible. The source of this positive attitude is a fighting spirit. Whether or not you have that fighting spirit can make a big difference throughout the course of your life.

Is it just me or are there more and more young people around me who lack spirit these days? In this day and age, it’s not rare to encounter young people who don’t even greet the people around them and they only mumble when they speak. Perhaps this lack of response is because they are just lazy or another reason is because they are only interested in playing the latest video games, but many young people don’t seem to be active. I am also concerned that many people are now hesitant or too timid to attend events that people used to enjoy attending when I would tell them. I feel that they are missing important opportunities because they don’t have any interest in learning new ideas or experiencing something new, and they have no drive to travel and explore unknown places.

Contrary to what I just said, when I look back on my life, I realize that I always did have more spirit than most people. This may be why I did whatever I wanted to do, worked as hard as I wanted to, and eventually succeeded in my business. Along with the founding of Sound House, I decided to build a natural hot spring bathhouse after I had received requests from the local people, and I completed it in just a few years. A while ago I had thought about making the head office in Kyoto someday. The next thing I know, here I was making a buyout deal with the Kyoto-based company and started working on restructuring the entire company. It turned out to be a complete success. When I had a desire to somehow open a branch office in Tokushima because I frequently traveled there for historical research, a year later I heard about an auction where I could buy property at a low price and then I immediately built a logistics center in Komatsushima.

Even more, the opening of our Onagawa Logistic Center was also a dream that came true in the blink of an eye after a chance encounter, and on October 1, 2022, the long-awaited shipping finally began. The Onagawa Project is physically challenging and I cannot handle it without a fighting spirit because Onagawa is really far from the rest of the Sound House offices: From Narita, it is a six-hour trip by four or five trains and from Tokushima, it is a journey by bus, train, monorail, plane, and then three more trains. That is quite a trip but it does not bother me because I have spirit. Moreover, I consider all the travel time to be the perfect chance to work remotely. As long as I have my laptop with me, I can read and write emails in the car or anywhere else without getting motion sickness. That proves that I have a fighting spirit. I’m going to use the past three days as an example. Three days ago, I was working in Tokyo in the morning, then I met up with my staff members in Kyoto that evening and spent the rest of the day with them. The next day we traveled to Tokushima from Kyoto, and then we ran up to Mount Tsurugi non-stop. Next, we came back down the mountain and I flew back to Tokyo that night. On the third day, I took the first train to Onagawa in Tokyo in the morning. That same afternoon, as if to prove that I am a master traveler, I took a car, a plane, rode the monorail, a train, and a bus, which means I had six connections scheduled down to the minute all the way to Tokushima where a company dinner was planned.

However, no matter how much spirit I had, this hectic travel exhausted me and I had to confront being a mere mortal. After arriving in Tokushima, I enjoyed a relaxing 30-minute bath for the first time in a long time to relieve my tired body. This gave me some energy back and we drank at the dinner, and then went on a pub crawl in downtown Tokushima, and we even enjoyed karaoke at midnight. This all happened last night and today, I brought new graduates who hung out with me last night as we headed to Takegashima early in the morning. We spent the morning rolling logs and cleaned up the island, all while soaking in sweat. The temperature was 30 degrees and felt like a midsummer day. It was extremely hot, but we had no choice but to endure it. I’m heading back to Tokyo now, and tomorrow I’m taking the first train to Onagawa again.

I don’t know how long this fighting spirit will last, but I’m not anxious about my future at all. I always strive to do what I can as long as this energy lasts. However, there is no way I can tell people to, “Do as I do” because this is just how I do things. This is proof that “As long as you have a fighting spirit, anything is possible!”