Four Days in Osaka - 2023 World XC Gold Medalist Mirriam Cherop's First Experience of Japan, and Its First Experience of Her
After the current management took over someone had a thread going asking for concrete examples of Twitter's real-life impact. My contribution was about Mongolian marathon national record holder Ser-Od Bat-Ochir, who had asked me almost two years ago to find him a new sponsor in Japan after his previous corporate league contact expired. At some point I sent a DM about it to a very tenuous contact I had on Twitter, a Tokyo-area fashion designer I'd never met but had had a short Twitter exchange with a couple of months earlier. The designer couldn't help but introduced me to a friend of his, Shingo Oshiro, CEO of Osaka-based solar panel company Shin Nihon Jusetsu West.
Oshiro-san listened to what I had to say, said, "OK, let's do it," and just like that Bat-Ochir had a new sponsor that would fund him and sponsor his visa through the Paris Olympics, then in post-career as a coach at the new women's ekiden team it was putting together. And because of that, Bat-Ochir's family of six got to stay in Japan and his four children will get to grow up here amid all the opportunity for a better future instead of going back to Mongolia where the youngest two had never even been. They're going to have different lives, all because of one Twitter DM to someone I'd never met. That kind of thing is part of what made Twitter special, and it won't be easy to replace. Hard not to feel like that's a bit by design.
This last week I got to experience another life-changing flower that grew out of that same DM message. Last fall Oshiro-san asked me to find a good international athlete that Shin Nihon Jusetsu could bring to live in Japan to run for its incipient ekiden team. There's no shortage of Kenyans and a few other nationalities running in the Japanese system, but this was a first for me. Working together with agent friend Malcolm Anderson we arranged to bring Kenyan Mirriam Cherop, silver medalist in the 1500 m at the 2018 World U20 Championships who took time off to have a son at age 20, started to make a comeback in the spring of 2022, and was part of Kenya's gold medal-winning team at this year's World XC Championships.
Her visa paperwork took longer than expected what with it being all new for the SNJ people, so last week they brought her over for four days as a special guest at the company's two-day 10th anniversary party. Mirriam just turned 24, making her exactly the same age I was when I first came here, and it was really interesting to be in the middle, seeing her first experience of what was going to be her new home, and to see how the people who brought her interacted with her for the first time and coped with it all actually starting to happen for real.
Mirriam landed in Osaka at about 10:00 p.m. Sunday night, her suitcase not having made the connection in Hong Kong. Monday was a formal dinner with all 600+ employees from across the country and dozens of presidents of important client companies. Tuesday was a company sports festival at a rented-out arena, the highlight of which was an intramural ekiden where Mirriam would start behind five-runner teams from each of SNJ's five subsidiaries and try to run them all down over 3.5 km.
Since she didn't have her suitcase, Monday morning we had to take her shopping at the downtown Kobe Nike store, where the employees asked for her autograph. I rehearsed a simple four-sentence self-introduction speech with her, and at the formal dinner when the new ekiden team was introduced onstage by a famous comedy duo to the crowd of almost 700 she took the mic, walked out to center stage, and introduced herself, in Japanese, less than 24 hours after arriving. It brought the house down. "I've never spoken in front of that many people before," she told me afterward.
Tuesday I told the other women that Mirriam was hypnotized by the sound of the semi, the cicadas blasting out our ears everywhere, and wanted to see one. When we got to the arena they all looked for some, and when one unexpectedly flew out of the trees right at them they all screamed and ran away laughing. She watched the first four events at the company sports festival with amusement, then ran the ekiden kitted out in her World XC Kenyan uniform and shoes borrowed from one of the Japanese women on the new SNJ team. The three-minute handicap they gave her was too much to make up, but she closed steadily to within one minute of the top two teams. A two-minute handicap and it would have been a really good race.
After that it was a nonstop parade of SNJ employees coming up to say hi and take selfies with her. There was a four-hour outdoor afterparty with a DJ onstage, some other famous comedians, food trucks, and even fireworks. Some of the other women on the ekiden team about the same age as Mirriam pulled her by the hand off to go find some food she'd like, and I just thought, "Yeah, she'll be fine," and went off to get my own food. A couple of hours later some performers on another stage started up a session of bon odori, a kind of traditional line dancing. At one point the video screen on the main stage zoomed in to show Mirriam in the line going through the steps with everyone else and I just laughed and thought again, "Yeah, she'll be fine."
She came back to the table where I was just in time for the first comedian, a guy in drag doing impersonations, to start his routine on the main stage. She died laughing when he pulled off his wig at the end, which made everyone around her die laughing. When the fireworks started she watch in open-mouthed amazement, the first time she'd ever seen them in person. When we got back to the hotel I asked if she'd had a good time and she said, "Yes, they're all really good people. I love them already."
Wednesday we went to the head office to go over contract and logistical details for her main arrival in September, then went out for lunch with the ekiden team members. It was really the most interesting part of the week. Everyone was very comfortable with each other now and wanted to get to know more. Coach Momoko wanted to see Mirriam's house on Google maps. Oshiro-san, whose hobby is growing exotic plants, was thrilled to find out Mirriam does farming back home. The other athletes all took stabs at speaking to her in English and were impressed with how easily she could remember Japanese phrases, then were kind of embarrassed when it came out she already speaks three other languages. And they all did a double-take when they remembered that Mirriam's son Ryan turns four this fall, something unthinkable for a 23 or 24-year-old female Japanese athlete.
And for all the growth that Mirriam will experience here and everything her salary as a corporate league athlete will do for her family and Ryan's prospects, that's really the other side of the equation. The chance for the Japanese people in this to grow, to recognize limitations and barriers in themselves and their society that they'd never considered before. Oshiro-san told me that they'd had a lot of trouble renting places for Bat-Ochir and Mirriam, that even though it was a very successful Japanese corporation doing the renting for its employees a lot of places wouldn't rent to them because foreigners were going to live there.
If you've ever tried to rent a place in Japan you've almost definitely experienced this, and you probably know that it's something the majority of Japanese people would never see happen, or even believe actually happens. When some highly skilled, smart, successful young people who want to do things in a better way actually experience it, well, maybe that's going to be the start to some real change for the better. Change is part of life and can cut both ways, and it was inevitable that Twitter was going to change at some point too. But what it was, the kind of environment where people across a range of fields, nationalities and interests were all together and open to interaction, led directly to better opportunities for Bat-Ochir's four kids and for Ryan. That's a beautiful thing, and it's hard not to feel a little sad that it's fading away.
© 2023 Brett Larner, all rights reserved
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