Shijo-Tsushin #6 April, 1996
I was born left-handed, a minority in a world filled with people who use their right hand for daily work. I'm the type of person that people who have met me for the first time say 'oh, you're left-handed,' to when I pick up a pen to write or pick up my chopsticks at meal time. The aforementioned woman had made a kind offer when she said what meant to be 'you can buy left-handed scissors.'
The thing is, though, despite my grandmother's concern for a girl that was, god forbid, born left-handed, and despite her efforts every time I held a crayon in my left hand as a child, I've stubbornly remained left-handed. But that also means I have a lot of experience in adapting to the right-handed world. It's true that if I use right-handed scissors, the blade is reversed. However, as far as I'm concerned, that's what scissors are like. I did get left-handed scissors before I entered first grade, but by that time I'd either become too used to right-handed scissors or the person in the stationary company that had developed the left-handed scissors was right-handed because it didn't cut well at all. I've never used left-handed scissors since then.
Some admirable left-handed people go out of their way to sit at the left end of the table so that their elbows won't bump and disturb the right-handed person sitting next to them, but I personally am pretty lackadaisical about my left-handedness. Or more precisely, I am completely unaware of the fact in my daily life. It's only when people comment 'oh, you're left-handed' that I remember, 'oh, yeah, I am.' Although I don't really care when people point out the fact that I'm left handed, I can't deny that I've also wanted to say 'so what?' When someone says 'your calligraphy is good for a left-handed person' as if it were a monkey that was doing the writing instead of me, I have hidden my annoyance and thought to myself 'geez, it's only a difference between holding a pencil in the right hand or the left hand.' You see, I can't see myself write, and as far as I'm concerned, I look the same as the people that I do see writing and they are all right-handed. I never doubted for a single moment that I looked any different. That is, until I saw it with my very own eyes.
They may still be a minority, but there are far more left-handed people in America than in Japan. They hold their ball point pens in their left hand and crook their arm widely around as they write horizontally from left to right so that they don't smudge the undried ink. It was when I saw such a left-handed comrade write that I muttered, in spite of myself, 'oh, that person's left-handed.'
Actually, it wasn't the left-handedness that I noticed. It was the bent-sideways posture of the person that I couldn't take my eyes off. And the moment I thought 'how odd,' I understood why the right-handed world couldn't help saying to me 'oh, you're left-handed.'
Since then, I've become tolerant of the world's right-handed population. What was funny, though, was a comment made not long after my return to Japan from America by a boy confessing his love to me. He said "Well, it's because you're a kikokushijo, a Tokyo University student and left-handed." Inspite of that explanation it's still a mystery to me why he got to like me, but it was the first and last time that 'left-handedness' was part of a confession of love to me.
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