When Tama Ozaki left for India at 19, she felt that she would never want to come back to Japan. "I was in a real emergency situation at the time," she says in a warm but powerful voice. "I was eating compulsively, and drinking too. I was completely unhappy."
It has been a lively night of song with some of the residents of the newly opened group home for mentally challenged adults where Ozaki is the caregiver and administrator. She has been telling me how she went from growing up in an apartment in a big city, to studying the sitar in India, to returning to Japan to live a self-sufficient life for several years in a remote mountain hamlet. Most recently, she has been building a community of people stigmatized by mental illness in a small seaside town, so that they might regain some dignity and move toward self-sufficiency.
Ozaki's experiences growing up, the dissatisfactions and contradictions she felt, exemplify in many ways the dilemmas facing many Japanese women today.