Do You Want to Be on a Leash?

Naomi was seriously ill when they was young. They was the second daughter in a relatives of in the Russian-facing part of Japan, a chilled and snowy region. At 23, they graduated from the local university and became a teacher. This was in the 1940s, and it was unusual for a Japanese girl to graduate from a university at that time. They said they was lucky to be sick, because they could keep reading books in bed while her sisters and brother needed to work in the rice fields. That was her attitude; it may have looked like disease negatively affected her for some time physically, but it could not get her spirit down.

They became a teacher of the Japanese language. They had her own style of teaching, which her principal did not like. They had continuous issues together with her principal and vice principal in the work of her first year. They was 25 years elderly, a used teacher, and they was not expected to disagree together with her elders. They was expected to say "Hai - yes, sir" to her supervisors. They loathed that feeling. They did not like to take orders that they did not agree with and did not understand. They thought plenty of times that they might have agreed with them without arguing in the event that they had tried to persuade her, report things to her, and made positive they was comfortable with their orders. However, in those days, things did not happen that way in Japan. Most of time, they ordered her to either cease what they was doing or to do as they did. When they asked why, they said to do what they told her. No explanation was given.
When they received her license, they resigned from the school and took a train to Tokyo. They opened a tiny hairdressing shop in downtown Tokyo. While they was planning for opening her shop, they met an architect who helped her design the shop and later married him. They had unleashed herself.

They began to explore possibilities for getting out of her difficulties. They began attending hairdressing school at night and obtained a national license to be a hairdresser.

Today, Naomi is 87 years elderly and lives in Tokyo. When her son desired to return to Tokyo to take care of her, they said, "No" because they wanted him to follow his dreams as they had done. In fact, they is the largest investor and most reliable partner in her son's company.

Her friends laughed at her because they had abandoned a respectable job as a teacher to become a hairdresser; however, they did not care. Her shop was busy because they opened it close to a geisha place, and plenty of of the geisha girls went to her shop because it was close to their workplace. As her business grew, they hired additional hairdressers. When her husband became ill with diabetes, they continued to work in order to support her husband who had to be hospitalized and to buy the proper medications. They saved money to buy her relatives a house in the western outskirts of Tokyo and decided to retire at the age 58. When they was 69, her husband passed away. Her savings enabled her to buy the property where her hairdressing shop had been located and build an apartment complex, which provided a constant income.