Have you heard of the 25-year-old Japanese professional golf player competing on the LPGA tour, Ai Miyazato/宮里藍? When she was a high school student, she won a Japanese professional tournament as an amateur, which enabled her to become a professional player. After that, she won twelve tournaments during the 2004 and 2005 Japan LPGA seasons. In 2006, she moved to Los Angeles and started competing on the LPGA Tour. In the first year of LPGA, she did well, as many Japanese people expected. c However, in the second and third year, she was in a terrible slump, making people wonder if she would be able to get out of it. It wasn't until last year that she finally earned her first LPGA tour win. This season, she has already won five LPGA tournaments and is currently ranked No.1 in the Rolex Rankings.
A few days ago, in a Japanese news program, she was asked what she thought had made her get out of the slump. She listed a few reasons and said: "This season, even if she misses a shot, she can calmly accept the miss as a fact, quickly move on and think about what to do next". Her words convinced me that she had become a strong player.
Actually, it's not easy to accept terrible things as facts. When you need to take responsibility for them, you tend to feel like you want to shun the responsibility, or you get stuck with remorse and questioning what to do next. When you don't need to take responsibility but are affected by terrible things, you tend to blame them on others, not thinking about what to do next in order to pull through.
I think that the recent political conflict between Japan and China shows this tendency. I was angry that they just blamed each other, without trying to understand the other. I was disappointed by both the Japanese government and the Chinese government. It seems to me that the Japanese government doesn't have strategies, and gets stuck with thinking about what to do, and the Chinese government pays more attention to saving face and unifying China.
