I recently befriended a 79-year-old Japanese person, and I am so excited.

It started when my friend in Chicago called to say: “I am with a Japanese person who do not quite understand English. Because he is thinking about making a large furniture purchase, I would like to make sure that he understands what I am explaining to him. I don’t think he understand English well enough for me to be comfortable. Can you help me?”

What a kind person my friend is…

In few seconds, a Japanese elder started talking to me on the phone. I immediately knew he was from my region because of the dialect he spoke. He started talking about all kinds of things — why he wanted to buy the furniture, why he was traveling in Chicago, his family, his work. He also asked me who I was, what I do, where my family lives, and so on. After we had spoken for almost 30 minutes, about everything but the furniture that he was purchasing, he said: “You seem to be a nice person. I now consider you as my young friend. You should come and stay at my home in Japan when you come back to Japan. My wife will prepare a meal for you. By the way, I decided to purchase the furniture from your friend.”

He gave me his contact information in Japan and asked for mine in return. When I asked him if he would use e-mails, he said “I don’t use e-mails because I like to hear my friends’ voices. We can also send letters to each other. It is so much more meaningful, isn’t it?”

After our talk, I wrote him a letter and inserted it into an envelope. I also decided to print out my picture and enclosed it with the letter. I have to admit that it has been quite a while since I wrote a letter on paper. It felt great to spend the time to do that rather than simply sending an e-mail. Typing an e-mail is much faster than writing a letter by hand, but using a pen to write gives me the chance to organize my thoughts in more personal and orderly manner. Moreover, I feel that I can be more creative when writing on paper than simply typing on a keyboard.  It also gave me more time to reflect. I imagined the smile when he and his wife find my letter with a foreign stamp, and I thought about my parents.

While I was walking to postoffice to buy a stamp and mail it, I thought “I am so glad that this incidental encounter happened to me. If all our actions were simply based on doing things in the most convenient possible way, my friend might not have called me and I wouldn’t have taken time to talk to the person. Most importantly, I might not have a time to think about my parents in Japan while I was writing a letter to him.”

We can connect and communicate easily through social networking and e-mails, but we may be missing something very important and meaningful if we do not embrace the beauty of inconvenience.

Knowing Japanese culture, I am sure that I will receive a nice letter from my new friend. I cannot wait to read his handwritten thoughts.