A Place Name Called Vienna

**A Place Name Called Vienna**

Today, a client who lives in Vienna, the capital of Austria, came to see me.

She married an Austrian and now lives there.

She brought her son with her.

His body responded well, and several of the physical issues she had been experiencing also began to change.

They left looking satisfied.

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Whenever I hear the name Vienna, I think of my friend Hashimoto.

I have known him for more than twenty years.

He was a percussionist who played instruments such as cymbals, the glockenspiel, and the xylophone.

He studied at a music university in Vienna and later became the first Asian guest player with the Vienna Philharmonic.

He also performed at Suntory Hall.

It is quite an impressive career.

But the stories surrounding that career probably tell us more about Hashimoto than the career itself.

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Hashimoto eventually left the world of classical orchestras.

There were several reasons.

One of them was the amount of time he had to wait before playing the cymbals.

He would count measures for an hour and a half.

Then, at one precise moment, he would strike the cymbals.

He had to keep counting all that time for a single note.

He found it unbearable.

It was not that he disliked playing the cymbals.

The hour and a half before playing them was simply too long.

That story feels very much like Hashimoto.

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The way he ended up in Vienna was also unusual.

Hashimoto failed the entrance examination for a music university in Japan.

Afterward, he went to a local bodyworker.

For some reason, that practitioner also had connections with the Austrian Embassy.

He said something along the lines of,

“If you cannot get into a music school in Japan, why not go to Vienna?”

Most people would probably have dismissed it as a joke.

Hashimoto actually went to Vienna to take the entrance examination.

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He traveled through Italy.

Somewhere along the way, he discovered that his destination was listed as “Vienna.”

Hashimoto told a flight attendant,

“I don’t want to go to Vienna. I want to go to Wien.”

Needless to say, Vienna is the English name for Wien.

In German, it is written as Wien.

When he left Japan, he still did not know that they were the same place.

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Even so, Hashimoto was accepted by the music university in Vienna.

Around sixty or seventy people took the examination.

Only one was accepted.

Years later, he asked the Austrian professor who had examined him,

“Why did you accept me?”

The professor replied with something like,

“Because the Asian man wearing a jacket over his overalls was interesting.”

Of course, Hashimoto must have been accepted because he could play.

But what remained in the professor’s memory was the overalls and the jacket.

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At the time, Hashimoto spoke almost no German.

He spoke very little English as well.

He did not even fully understand that German was spoken in Austria.

After he began living there, he apparently thought,

“This is some very strange English.”

After a while, he realized,

“Oh, this is German.”

Even so, he lived there, studied music, and made his way as a professional musician.

Perhaps something was being communicated even when he could not understand the language.

He must have possessed an extraordinary ability to connect with people.

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Simply hearing the word Vienna brings all these stories back to me.

Failing the entrance examination in Japan.

Being encouraged by a bodyworker to go to Vienna.

Not knowing that Vienna and Wien were the same place.

Taking the examination in overalls and a jacket.

Mistaking German for a kind of incomprehensible English.

And counting measures for an hour and a half to strike the cymbals once.

Each story about Hashimoto leaves a strong impression.

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Words and place names are strange things.

A single name can touch something deep inside our memory.

From there, faces, voices, and stories heard long ago begin to surface one after another.

Today, I met a client from Vienna.

That alone brought back so many memories of a friend I have known for more than twenty years.

We never quite know how the things inside our memory are connected.

A single place name, Vienna, struck a cymbal inside my mind.

It was that kind of day.