Yoko Nonaka

• On February 8th, for the memorial, we were in Yoko's Kitchen to celebrate her life. She planned her memorial in great detail, wishing for her friends to talk about their interaction with her. We confirmed that she was a very positive person, actually a positive reinforcer who had the gift of identifying the positive side of each situation and announcing the good news. We also learned that she had a profound impact on many people's life as well as on the development and flourishing of entities.
• Today, for Yoko's funeral, we are here to celebrate her death and to establish her legacy by learning from the teachings of her life.
• Yoko was not simply a happy person smiling away at the world. As the crowd at her memorial demonstrated — a true cross-section of Silicon Valley — Yoko had a complex and multifaceted personality, which found its expression in a number of parallel lives. For example, while Yoko was the fairy bringing happiness and joy to the distressed, sick, or fearful, Yoko's nights had the unwelcome company of nightmares, and she needed somebody to hold her hand during her sleep.
• Yoko did not have an easy life. She was a sickly little girl whose early life was paced by the visits to her father's hospital bed in the sanatorium, where he was nursing tuberculosis. At the tender age of seven years she was coaxed to the hospital for surreptitious surgery to her left leg for some local tuberculosis in the bone; a traumatic experience that marred her forever.
• Around the same time her father succumbed to tuberculosis, sending her mother off to work to provide for her three girls, and sending Yoko-chan from Nishinomiya-shi to aunt Setsuko in Kochi-shi. This was the start of one of Yoko's parallel lives, with her second mother Setsuko, who left a profound mark on her character and aspirations.
• After high school, Yoko dropped out of school, a move she always regretted because it precluded her from the access to a rewarding career. She found herself as a hostess in the brand new Takaragaike Convention Center in Kyoto, the former imperial city marked by the Philosopher's Walk and a rich intellectual environment, which she preferred over her native Nishinomiya.
• In 1997 she fondly retraced her steps, joining for an international conference at Takaragaike, but this time lodging at the prestigious and freshly renovated Kyoto Hotel, strategically located for efficiently revisiting the most cherished places of her memory. Being able to retrace the Philosopher's Walk with Shige was an especially moving moment in her recent life.
• After Takaragaike she moved on to Itami, closer to international travel. There she formed a bond with a gang of similarly minded girls, which came to constitute another of Yoko's parallel lives. This bond has lasted to today, as one by one the other girls embraced e-mail and Yoko rekindled their mutual friendship.
• With others from Itami, Yoko made the big cultural and geographical jump to London, which at that time was the center of the universe. Yoko went back to school, but she also learned the hard school of life, having to provide for her own survival in an exotic, very foreign and distant country. Tears were still coming to her eyes when she was remembering her job as a dish-washer in a Japanese restaurant, with so many little dishes to wash for each customer.
• Eventually, Yoko ended up in California. Her life there was not easy. Her marriage ended up in divorce and she found herself forced to work to make ends meet, while providing for a child. To find a barely decent job in the highly competitive Silicon Valley, Yoko had to go back to college to earn a degree, which allowed her to land a job at PARC, at the time still the most prestigious industrial computer science research center in the world.
• She fought hard to improve her employment, and eventually made a jump in the unknown by transferring to a yet to be formed company, without a clear business plan but with a sparkling boss. As a charter member of the new company, she felt a strong responsibility, much stronger than her hierarchical position would demand.
• She tried to make time for parallel lives that could bring the richness and satisfaction that a day job necessary to put food on the table cannot bring. They included painting, traveling, world events, movies, and entertaining.
• Unfortunately, her day job consumed more and more hours of each day, spilled into the weekend, and the hours themselves became a much heavier burden. Yet she clang on to her job because she liked her coworkers and felt in an insecure financial position, with a husband working for a fraction of his former salary in an entry-level job in a profession that had become obsolete.
• On top of her grueling work schedule, Yoko went to night school to get a degree in supply chain management and logistics, so she could be more proficient at her job. To balance her work and life, she also attended night school for Italian, for painting, and for sketching.
• As the avid readers of Yoko's Christmas newsletters know, in 1998 she finally decided to take a break and to work half-time. Yoko's life changed quite dramatically. Actually, Yoko rediscovered life after being completely submersed 24/7 in her job; in her own words, she experienced once again "conscious living." She got to know the neighbors, discovered the bird activity in her garden, finally decorated her house, started again her gastronomic adventures, and became an avid reader actively participating in a book group.
• At that time she also started a journey to rediscover her true inner values, studying what is important and what does not matter and thus can be ignored. With an empty nest and no longer having to cook Scandinavian-American dishes in the hope her child might show up for dinner, Yoko started rediscovering her vernacular childhood cuisine.
• She started scouting the various Japanese grocery stores in the Bay Area and even summoned her sisters to visit her so they could bring arcane ingredients impossible to buy around Palo Alto. With each shopping spree her food became more traditional and purer. The tofu had to be produced the old way, mochi had to be handmade by a monk, only the best green teas became drinkable, and buying nori became an art in itself.
• The emphasis was not only on tradition and vernacular, it was also on health. Every dish had to be lovingly prepared from scratch, exclusively with organic ingredients. Even organic, meat became a rare dish, beer disappeared very fast and wine gradually, while her husband remained the only coffee drinker in the house. Yoko's dishes became more and more arcane, an exotic oriental mystery to those not familiar in the zen of cooking and eating, or who never saw Tanpopo.
• For her mind and inner spirit, Yoko changed her painting from being a masterful reproducer of Cézanne, to find her own style. She went from watercolor to gouache and then back to oil, first through a mauve then a teal phase, which transitioned in a final phase were color no longer mattered, just chiaroscuro. Finally, she became a skilled charcoal portraitist, specializing in the nude.
• The outdoors was not just a scenery to contemplate, it became an ecosystem in which she was an active part. She started working out every morning, go for a walk after lunch, and go for one more walk after dinner. This was always done with utmost awareness of the surroundings. She was living consciously.
• This regimen gradually left a strong mark on Yoko's body. From a zombie sleepwalking through life along a zombie husband, Yoko grew stronger by the day, both physically and in her spirit. This transformation continued all the way through October 2003, by which time she was a trim elegant lady and the bags under her eyes had completely disappeared.
• Yoko's break for "conscious living" started in 1998. This idillic life period came to an end after a year, when she realized that with her husband's meager salary she was not able to provide a comfortable life for her child, whom she wanted to get a good education so she did not have to go through the same tribulations she had to go through herself. Regretfully, Yoko went back to work full time.
• Because Yoko was now fully aware of the real life, she was determined not to slip back into the zombie life of a year earlier. Yoko became a master discriminator and prioritizer, deciding for each even so small action whether is was worthwhile and if it was not, she simply ignored it. This applied also to people — she became completely oblivious of politics and dealt only with nice people.
• Two words became important in Yoko's vocabulary: sakimidareru and neat.
• Sakimidareru can be translated with to bloom in profusion. It became important for Yoko that whatever she did, used, touched, read, organized… had to result in synergies and super-additivity, where the whole is more than the sum of the parts. Maybe this quest for super-additivity was what her friends characterized as positive reinforcement. Nice people were no longer just people, she felt almost an obligation for discovering and fostering the best in each person, to let her or him bloom in profusion. Sakimidareru.
• Neatness became Yoko's other quest. We had visited many a zen garden in Tohoku and Kyoto. Yoko admired them very much and appreciated the subtle differences between the various styles. However, she also took me to a zen monastery in Morioka to show how pedestrian the zen teaching process is. She did not like it, it was not in harmony with the quest for sakimidareru. She liked the result, but not the process.
• So Yoko developed a sense she called neatness. Everything had to be as simple as possible, devoid of any junkiness, and had to be elegant and clean in the esthetic sense. With the latter she tried to fend off any hint of neurosis; clean to her meant absent from bad looking dirt; it is more proper to think of the Japanese concepts of sabi (elegant simplicity) and shibui (sober refinement). Traveling back and forth between Switzerland and Japan she began to appreciate how in Japan they had perfect zen gardens and temples, while the landscapes or housings could look very junky because generic architects, engineers, and inhabitants did not care about the esthetics of their own immediate surroundings. For Yoko, everything had to be neat, neatness had to be a pervasive emergent property.
• Although she did her best, she could not completely fight or ignore the Silicon Valley's rat race. But now it was also more painful and urgent, because she had just smelled the roses again.
• At the office, fall 2002 had been very hard, and she lost sound sleep to frequent nightmares. And she was mostly alone as her husband got a new assignment with five-week trips around the world and work what his boss totaled to up to 163 hours in a particular week. According to the physicians, this is when she got struck with this rare and mostly unknown disease called MMMT.
• When you asked Yoko what she thought her most characteristic trait was, her reply was "I am very stoic." Indeed, under that constant smile was a person more stoic than a samurai.
• She successfully fought her disease, to the point of being declared in full remission after a very diligent physical exam on October 15, 2003. As noted earlier, she was at the peak of her life, both in inner harmony and physical beauty — she was neat.
• Yet, three weeks later the disease came back with a vengeance. Her last three months of life were spent in agony, but she never gave up fighting and made sure everything around her was neat.
• Her death was so atrocious that in her adopted country — where Euthanasia, the supreme nurse, is still banned — the official death certificate describes her death only in euphemistic medical terms. But the Japanese authorities were more precise and had to record all the cruelty of her death process: 22:50 lungs imploded, 3:33 heart stopped beating, total duration 288 minutes.
• Still, Yoko spent her last hours in serenity. Four hours before the implosion she had a glass of Veuve Clicquot to cheer the most trusted person in her life, the physician Jeff Croke who was her guide in the quest for neatness.
• But there were also dark clouds. When she was wheeled for a last trip to the living room to enjoy the hanami and then to the kitchen, her last work of art, her laconic comment was: "the house is no longer neat, it is already getting junky and dirty."
• Today, in the celebration of Yoko's death, we recognize her last actions and her last words as her legacy. Her lessons to us are:
• be stoic, even in the worst moment of your life you can still find something positive and celebrate it!
• accumulate the positive and let it bloom in profusion — sakimidareru!
• keep yourself and your socio-ecosystem neat!
• As Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote in The Little Prince, what is essential is invisible to the eye. Yoko has taught us how to see the essential.

Yoko Nonaka