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          Million thanks for numerous heartwarming birthday messages!  What surprised me most is that on May 15, 2025 the Athletic Day’s “Co-House Cheer” section opened with “Happy Birthday to You” sung by all the students. I’m also grateful to my Book Club members, Ms. Miho Izumi’s Creative Workshop members and Fukuzawa Speech Day speakers for singing the song for me on May 17. Your unlimited generosity transformed my seventieth birthday into a monumental extravaganza. What is more, Mr. Gilley’s created virtual banknote featuring me is an unintended but splendid gift, for its serial number mysteriously coincided with the date of my birthday.

          My generation born in postwar Japan, thanks to nutrition education, benefits from the extension of average lifespan. In the 21^st century turning 60 called “Kanreki” [還暦]　in Japanese is so usual as to be considered part of compulsory education. When I reached the auspicious age of sixty a decade years ago (in 2015), this age was already considered part of compulsory education. Thus, I redefined the age sixty not only as the literal return to the zodiac cycle but also as the beginning of a brand-new lifecycle.

          What about turning “seventy” [古希], then? Surrounded by high school students every day, I feel like I’m living in a dream, radically retrofitting my own teenager days now.  Yes, turning seventy reminds me of the year when I was seventeen, concentrating on writing fiction and playing music as a high school student. Fifty-three years later, I still enjoy writing articles and playing music now.

          You may say I am a happy-go-lucky fellow. However, it is Du Fu　（杜甫、 712-770）, one of the greatest poets of the Tang dynasty who hoped to lead an easygoing life, ending up by stressing the unusualness of turning seventy in his enigmatic poem “The Qu River”（曲江） composed in 758, when the poet was forty seven years old:

朝 囘 日 日 典 春 衣
毎 日 江 頭 盡 醉 歸
酒 債 尋 常 行 處 有
人 生 七 十 古 來 稀
穿 花 蛺 蝶 深 深 見
點 水 蜻 蜓 款 款 飛
傳 語 風 光 共 流 轉
暫 時 相 賞 莫 相 違

(translation)

I come back from the court each day and pawn some spring clothing,
Every day I return to the river as drunk as I can be.
I have many debts for wine all over the place,
For men to live to seventy has always been unusual.
I see the butterflies go deeper and deeper between the flowers,
And dragonflies in leisured flight between drops of water.
As we're told, passing time is always on the move,
So little time to know each other: we should not be apart.

          On one hand, the first half of the poem shows that deeply in dept, the poet is too desperate to mature. Although he already turned forty-seven years old, the poet behaves like an angry young outsider taking a walk on the wild side. Here the age of “seventy” refers to something beyond imagination. On the other hand, the second half of the poem prefigures the modernist aesthetics of the moment, that is, what Edward Fitzgerald called the “momentary taste of being” only practiced writers were permitted to represent. Thus, to me this poem is the skillful poet’s anachronistic recreation of himself as a talented teenager. Without getting older he could not have given an insight into the genius of youth.  Likewise, without turning seventy on May 15, 2025, I could not have comprehended what was being seventeen like as well as what Du Fu wanted to say in this poem.