Frozen Teardrop (9 page)

In this book I do not intend to explain and write about the moments leading up to the jumps, recount how many jumps and spins I did, what I felt when the marks came up, placements, figures and numbers, and so forth. I think this will bore the reader and I know too many books are out there with all this repetitive nonsense. It would be much simpler to write about this and tell you what I placed when and where, and what jump I landed or didn't. But who I am and who I have become is not about that. To me, the results never did and never will impress me. That is why, perhaps, I never wanted to be an Olympic gold medalist.

To me it is the life one has led, the thoughts one has thought, and the actions one has taken that intrigue me the most. The psychological nature of a human being fascinates me. You are reading this book because destiny has led you to it and I am here to express to people about the humble little slice of life that I know about through my experiences. Not a skating life but a human life. That is what I feel I must do.

Living in Japan I never could travel with my teammates to the competition because they were flying from Switzerland and I was far, far away in Tokyo. The Swiss federation would do a despicable thing when paying for the trip for my coach and me. If the competition venue was closer to Switzerland than Japan, they would pay for our flight to join the team from Switzerland, but if the competition was closer to Japan, they would pay only for our flight from Japan to the competition location. It was rude and unforgivable and was just added to a list of things they would later do to me.

My mother always came with my coach and me to competitions. I was too young to be myself and I needed my mother so very much. I loved having my mother with me. She was my best teacher, supporter, tree trunk of life, my savior and most of all my best friend, all intertwined with being my mother. She knew she had to be all of these for me, as I had no one else. For my very first World Junior Championships skating competitions we did, however, travel with the Japanese team and it was a great experience. We stopped in Vienna for a bit to train before going to Budapest in Hungary for the competition. I placed sixth overall, and although I was happy with my result the Swiss were not.

It was very hard for me because I was living in Japan, yet wasn't Japanese, and skating for Switzerland, yet wasn't really Swiss either, because I had lived there only four months of my life and they did not see me as a typical Swiss. By now, I really didn't know where home was. I was always a fish out of water, the odd one out. People used to tell me “You're so spoiled,” but little did they know of all the turmoil I was going through. No one could have guessed it by just looking at my life at that time as I was good at hiding my emotions and putting a smile on my face. But I didn't speak. I didn't ever voice anything out loud because I was too scared.

The Swiss tragically never saw me as a Swiss. In their thinking I didn't have their views, I didn't have a Swiss coach, I didn't speak just like them, and so forth. As for me, I thought, “Just watch me skate. Judge me on that, not on where I live or whom I speak to.” I wanted them so badly to be proud of me, their skater. But skating doesn't happen that way. It is a very political sport and a skater can't just skate well. They need the whole village, the whole country to back them up so judges can be bribed and marks can be tweaked. You alone cannot win anything. Pure skating alone will not win anything. That is the sadness of the sport and the part that I detested most.

The Swiss delegates were not able to see my skating on a regular basis due to my training in Tokyo. They expected that when I did go to competition, nothing was good enough other than winning the gold medal. As a result I was a big failure to them in their eyes and I felt it. Not having support from my own people, or my own coach who was more my dictator, or my own federation who were mere trial judges, was hard to deal with as a child. Once again, it was just my mother and I who were trying to figure everything out.

From when I was little, spinning and artistry was always my forte and that's what set me apart from anybody else, and really that's the only thing I wanted to do. I however, from the very beginning, always mentioned that I would never be a show skater. I loved skating for me, but just for a little while, not forever. I wanted to skate, but I would become doubtful of it as I grew older. I became too scared to skate anymore. The responsibility and consequences were too heavy on my shoulders. It was like a snowball rolling downhill that became bigger and bigger, that we couldn't stop until it would smash into an obstacle so large it would break into pieces.

Most importantly skating seemed not pure anymore and became tainted with politics. Competition skating was too harsh on my heart and soul, and later on, show skating sold something that was too sacred for me: Spinning. Spinning had been my glorious meditation and I felt I could no longer do that for the judge's marks or for money. I felt it was a disgrace and a dishonor for me to do to my God-given talent. I became ashamed of myself for spinning in that way and in that arena. I could not see how happy I was making people with my glorious spins, while I was so trapped in my own pain.

How did my spinning start?, you may ask. Well, when I was about eight years old my father told me to find something special, something that no one else could do and that I would be the only one in the world to do it. He said that this is what would make him proud of me. He never said that it would make me win a gold medal, or it would make me a champion. But for him to say that this would make him proud of me, made me want to do it even more. As kids all we really want is for our parents to be proud of us. He had come home one time from a trip to Switzerland and had seen a Swiss skater spin and told me that I would not only have to spin like her, but even better than her. I felt from the time I was little that spinning would now be my thing. I would spin faster than anyone else, longer than anyone else, and in positions that I would create, and that only I could do. Spinning was to me the thing that would make me a champion in my father's eyes. That became all I wanted.

On the other hand, believe it or not, jumping wasn't a problem for me either. I was very tiny, even the tiniest among the Japanese kids my age, and I never missed a jump in competition and rarely in practice. But, as I became afraid of the intense pressures put on me as I started to do triples, my body and I began to fall apart. The fear broke my confidence in jumping. It was not my height that was the problem then. I didn't really start growing until I was in my mid-twenties. This was due to the hard training I was under and my not resting or sleeping enough so my body didn't have time to grow in any direction. At age nineteen I was five foot five and by the age of twenty-seven I was five foot nine. My growth plates in my spine were still open at age of twenty-five! Even my feet that had been so cramped in my too small skates (since my Japanese coach had always said the boot needs to be very fitted) grew two sizes once I stopped skating!

I didn't see my father much, yet I felt his presence strongly. He used to bring the most wonderful gifts back to us from all of his travels. I collected turtle figurines and he would make sure I had one from every country he visited. I loved the days when he returned and was so excited to see him. It would be like Christmas on those days. My father and I didn't need to talk much and we knew what the other was thinking. Even if he wasn't physically present, his wishes and his love were strongly felt. My father must have had so much courage to do what he did. He too must have suffered from being away from the family so frequently. I didn't talk to my sister much and the only real daily contact I had was with my mother. Looking back at that time I can see now that it was getting very intense and dangerous. At that time, however, neither my mother nor I realized anything.

I wasn't going to go through puberty in my teens and actually did not until I was twenty-six years old! While I was young, I was actually happy about it. First of all, I didn't really know what it was, since my mother never spoke to me about it, and I wasn't around kids my age enough to be talking about going through it or about cute boys or about anything girlish at all. In whatever ways the other kids my age were developing mentally and physically, I was not. I didn't know how to communicate with other kids, didn't know how to socialize or talk about normal things, and I didn't know how to have a good time and laugh and party. I was at a standstill, but I sure could skate better than anyone else.

My physical change and growth as a human spirit and soul were frozen and nothing was done about it. Either we didn't see what was happening or we just turned a blind eye for the sake of my skating, convincing ourselves that this was the normal way to do things. I didn't think I was missing out on anything when I didn't even know other things existed. Nothing seemed to be a problem because no one else made an issue out of my circumstance. I was so isolated in my mother's and my own world. We were in the bubble we had created. We both unfortunately didn't have enough courage to pop out of it for fear that our life, as we knew it, would collapse.

While I was around Japanese women who are for the most part more flat- chested than Europeans or Americans, nothing seemed to be a problem with my not developing. In school we had to wear white shirts with our uniform and I remember starting to see the other kids wearing bras under their shirts. I was so proud that I didn't have to wear one yet, because you can understand that in sports (well, I speak for skating) it's a nuisance to have breasts or hips or butts. We want to be flat-chested and skinny so that we can skate faster and jump higher and rotate quicker. Because of this anything will be done to delay puberty. Puberty is especially hard for a girl athlete in a sport like figure skating that ends when women are so young.

I remember overhearing other Japanese skaters saying that they did not want to get breasts because then they wouldn't be able to jump. They were laughing and teasing another girl who had developed a little. They said they bandaged their breasts tightly like the older generation used to do with their feet to keep them small, as a sign of beauty. That really struck me, and so then and there I decided I also wouldn't get breasts. I would wear tight tops and would stay skinny enough not to get them, and if I noticed them growing that meant I was gaining weight and I would have to get rid of them.

I never told anyone what was going inside of my head but a lot was turning and turning inside of it. Plus, I thought, what is the use of telling anyone? Everyone is doing it and my mother is doing everything possible for me to skate so I must take responsibility into my own hands and do everything possible for me to keep this body as it is and skate well and train hard. She was doing her job; I must do mine.

Injuries were a huge part of my skating life. I wasn't being trained in a proper or smart fashion by my coaches, and wasn't getting any physical care such as massages, and so the end result was that I was being injured. I was in pain every day from the age of eleven. I was so tired every day as well. Whenever my mother asked me how I was, I would say, “I am so tired of being so tired.” And we would laugh at the expression. That was the only way I could express it. But for us that meant I was working hard and it was a good sign.

The first serious injury I had was when I was eight. I broke my chin open on a spin and had to be rushed to the hospital to get stitches. Then I had a serious ankle injury when I could hardly walk, a broken toe from the trampoline class, and to top it off, a serious stress fracture in my spine when I was twelve, which had me off the ice for just a little while before guilt set in and I returned to training. Concussions from falls were ongoing too. This was just the start and many more injuries were to destroy my body. From the age of around eleven years I don't remember skating without pain.

My mother never, ever missed bringing me to a practice. We were at the rink no matter what, even if I was sick, or had a fever, suffering a concussion from falling on my head, or even if there was a flood or a monsoon. Even one time when my mother had surgery, the next morning she pushed herself to drive me to the rink at five in the morning. Half way there she was so dizzy that she couldn't drive me further. She ridiculously apologized profusely, as if what she had wanted to do was even remotely possible. She had to drive back home and, not wanting me to miss a day of skating, she dropped me off at the train station so I could get to the ice rink. Even when we once were victims of a car accident she stayed behind but arranged to get me a car so that I could get to the rink. Her dedication and strength was absolutely remarkable and incredible. She would and still does just drop everything, to do anything for me.

Still to this day I marvel how and where she got that strength. It could only be the deepness of how much she loves me as love conquers all. My mother is truly incredible. Sometimes we were the only ones at the rink. Not even my coach would be there because no one but my mother bravely drove through any kind of weather and circumstance to get me there. There was no way I would miss my skating practice, not even if hell froze over, not even if the sky collapsed, maybe not even if I lost a leg. It was done from the mentality that skating will cure anything. As long as I was at the rink and could skate, I was okay.

But it didn't come from me and I don't think it even came from what my mother believed in. It came from exterior pressures. For me, I was so young that all I wanted was for someone to tell me what to do. I wanted to be guided. By that time I had already chosen to skate so there was to be no more discussion if I still wanted to skate. That would be absurd. If I chose it I must always want it. Also, if I had a bad practice, my mother said, “Oh go to your room and paint.” It was something I loved to do, but at those times it would feel like a worthless thing to do.

Everything became less important than skating. Everything became of lesser value than skating. Everything else was put down because skating was elevated, high up on the list of being worthy. I even wanted to do ice dancing but at that time ice dancing was regarded as the failure of single skaters. But since when did what other people think and what society ranks high become so important in life? I think my mother didn't realize what made her think this way. She thought that she had the responsibility to produce a great child, a responsibility to my coach, to my father, and to herself. She thought her obligation was to get me to wherever I needed to go, well-prepared, dressed and fed, and then I should be great. Pleasing my teachers was our first priority. Then, for me, it was pleasing my mother and father. I was not important to myself. I felt guilty that so much was done for me so I thought the least I could do was skate and be an A student. Even if I answered one question wrong on my tests, I would feel so unworthy.