I have a friend who drove the Paris–Dakar back when the name meant nothing in Japan.
Friend is almost too familiar a word for him. He is a friend and a teacher, and there is a great deal I learn from him.
Opening the first path is hard
Opening the first path is very hard indeed.
But he cuts a way through the thorns anyway, saying that whoever comes next may find the walking easier.
Everyone knows the name Paris–Dakar now, but opening that first road must have taken enormous effort. Driving in that era, he really is a frontier spirit.
He laughs and says he might be a genuine rogue — and I think, well, you would have to be, to cut a path through thorns nobody else has seen. Next to that, I tell myself, I still have it easy.
He has passed on the routes he drove and the passion he drove them with, without holding anything back. So the walking is a little easier for me. Peking to Paris and the Dakar are different things, but I drive carrying that frontier spirit.
What is a frontier spirit?
First: someone with nerve.
And full of ideas.
And above all, someone who acts.
And what I see in him is a mind that goes at things without fearing failure.
The decision to take one step
Right now I am driving towards a road I have not yet seen. This challenge is a first for a Japanese woman.
Against a monotonous life with nothing in it, here there is conflict and tension and fighting and fear, constantly, until life itself runs at the speed of a race.
Why did I arrive at Peking to Paris, of all choices, one that pushes me to my limit?
Because I think it is the stage on which to raise what a person is made of, and give that back to the world.
