Dream Enables Me to Train Hard

My whole life up to now has been about wrestling. My father was a freestyle wrestler, who became a coach after retiring as an athlete. Following in my father’s footsteps, my two older brothers already had started wrestling when I began wrestling. My mother was an athlete, too—a tennis player. So, everyone in my family is an athlete and highly competitive. We all hate to lose. If you don’t want to lose, you have to become very good at what you’re doing. At least the logic is so simple, putting that into practice is not easy at all.

What should a person do to become very good at something? I think each person has their own way and approach. In my case, it comes down to discipline and training—and to keep working hard with a strong determination to never lose. They say that an athlete needs a good balance between mental strength, technique and physical capacity to exhibit their best performance as an athlete. I place the greatest emphasis on mental strength. Upping your technique and building physical resilience and stamina through training are of course very important, but I think the most important thing is mental strength. The athlete who has the stronger mental strength than the opponent is the one who comes out the winner.

I always wonder why I’m doing such a strenuous and demanding thing, but my dream enables me to train hard. I can push myself because I know that I need to do it to achieve what I’m aiming for, and because there are friends and team mates who has the same dream around me.

What Is Strength?

My life as a wrestler began at my father’s wrestling class at the age of three. My father was very stern, and I felt like I was being forced to train at the beginning. However, by the time that I was in junior high school, I had set my own goals and was engaging in training to become a strong athlete. It was around the same time that I started holding a clear dream of becoming an Olympian. After I went on to university, I met my current coach, Kazuhito Sakae. He was a strict coach like my father, so I hated it. But I was able to persevere because I had a dream.

In any kind of competition—not just only in wrestling—there is only one winner. Everyone else is a loser. But being a loser doesn’t necessarily mean that the person isn’t very strong or good at what they are doing. The important thing is that you train with a keen desire to win at any cost, to become better and stronger, and to go into competition that way. Your efforts never come to waste, even if you lost. The strength that is achieved only by those who gave it their all is the strength that will most definitely contribute to your future.

When coaching, my father placed the greatest emphasis on how we competed in a competition—not on whether we won or lost. The important thing was that we had done everything we could offensively. Perhaps, my father was teaching us what true strength is.

I have no doubt that being born into my family, where wrestling existed as a daily matter, and later meeting Coach Sakae built my foundation not only as an athlete but also as an individual.

Relaying the Magnificence of Pursuing a Dream

Now that I keep a little distance from a life that consisted only of wrestling, I sometimes think for a moment that it would be nice to go back to the days when that rugged world of wrestling was my entire life. But asking myself, “do I want to do that until 2020? ”, this is the question that I still haven’t found an answer.

There were many things that I learnt and experienced through wrestling. Without them, I think I would not be who I am today. Eventually, I want to communicate what I’ve gained through the wrestling to the next generation and help further boost the world of wrestling.

My current juniors in women’s freestyle wrestling are really doing well in competitions. But I want them to keep making an effort without becoming complacent. I want them to keep working at it even more in their day-to-day training, and I want to provide them with support as a coach. There are some around me who hold expectations that I will become a head coach in the future. But I think my current position as a coach, where I work in cooperation with other coaches and offer advice, is perfect for me, not the role as a head coach.

Having a dream is important. Dreams are something enables you to keep going on and trying despite repeated difficulties. It’s only after those experiences that your dream finally comes true. I think that dreams are something well worth pursuing even if you have to go to such lengths. Those are the kinds of things that I want to relay to others in my own way.

Apart from wrestling, I would like, as a woman, to marry, have children and raise a happy family. I would like to pursue my dream in that area as well. We only live once, so we should focus on the things that we want to do, and the things that we can only do at each particular moment. I want to live a life without regrets.