Mizuakari, Kumamoto and the Lessons of Taking the Long Way Round

On a Monday morning I came across photos taken exactly 13 years ago at the Mizuakari (水あかり) festival. I realized with a start how fast time passes.

The Mizuakari festival

Mizuakari, combining "mizu" (water) and "akari" (light), is a well-known autumn festival of light in Kumamoto, where I studied at university. When night falls, the area around the stone walls of Kumamoto Castle and the banks of the Tsuboi River becomes a river of light. About 54,000 candles are lit inside hand-drilled bamboo tubes, reflected on the still water.

What stays with me is not only the beauty but the festival's circular approach to operations. All the bamboo is cut and thinned by thousands of volunteers, residents and students to keep the forests healthy, and drilled one hole at a time over many months. After two radiant nights, the bamboo is collected and recycled into biochar. No waste, nothing lost.

The region has also lived through major earthquakes that brought down parts of the old castle walls, and through floods and landslides. The people quietly stood up and rebuilt, with a resilience very much like that of the Vietnamese people.

The university years

Looking at the Mizuakari lights of that year, memories of my years studying abroad came back whole. For me, the period from my first uncertain steps in language school to entering university was an invaluable training ground.

At university I always put studying first. I was fortunate to receive a scholarship every year, and in my second and final years I received two in the same year. I remember my graduation thesis defense best: among more than 150 students in the department that year, I was the only Vietnamese, and my defense received an excellent score, placing me among the top of the department alongside Japanese and Chinese classmates.

After leaving campus, I met many kind people ready to help in hard times. Those encounters built my ability to adapt and to judge people. And what remains warmest is friendship. I have close friends from university days, both Japanese and Vietnamese. Now each of us is in a different place and we rarely talk, but if I send a message, someone answers. Sometimes the friendship of grown men needs no noise; it is enough to know that each is doing well.

Starting late, and each person's own time zone

Sometimes I think I started my entrepreneurial path quite late compared with a close Japanese friend who was already running a startup while we were still at university. But everyone has their own time zone. The years I took the long way round, working as an IT engineer and then returning to Vietnam as a sales manager, turned out to be the period of building inner strength I needed. Now that I am ready, we two friends from those days are sitting down together to study and prepare collaboration on larger projects ahead.

In 2018 I went back to Kumamoto, met old friends, visited my university and bowed in gratitude to the teacher who had guided me. When work and our plans settle into a stable course, I would like to return to Japan once more, this time with my family rather than alone as before.

The dark periods

The journey of more than a decade has not been only beautiful memories. There were stretches when I fell into impasses that seemed to have no way out. There were pressures and problems that took my breath away, which I had to face alone because I did not know whom to tell and did not want my family to worry. In those moments the only way was to keep walking in the dark myself, searching and digging until I found the answer.

I think people are like balls. When thrown to the very bottom, if they do not shatter, that compression helps them bounce much higher than before. I remember Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, wishing young people a great deal of pain and suffering. Strength is not formed in comfort; it is forged through adversity.

No drop of sweat and no lonely night is wasted. Without the competition at university and those years of discipline, would I have had the rigor and perseverance to build and optimize an AI system that runs continuously with my own hands? Without having worked my way through nameless crises on my own, would a founder understand the difficulty of every role and keep humility before life?

Looking back at the 54,000 candles of Mizuakari 13 years ago, I do not regret starting early or late. I simply smile that I had a youth that was truly beautiful and worth living.

Whatever your age, whether you are at the bottom of a struggle or starting over, stay resilient. Having touched the bottom, you will bounce. The brightest light is always lit in the darkest, stillest night.