We choose our friends but we don't choose our parents. Nor do they choose us. It's a pretty fraught relationship, sometimes, that between parent and child. Perhaps "love-hate" best describes it — hopefully with love dominant.

Confucius said — and what Confucius said is not irrelevant in Japan 2,500 years later — "Nowadays for a man to be filial means no more than that he is able to provide his parents with food. Even hounds and horses are, in some way, provided with food. If a man shows no reverence, where is the difference?"

Reverence. Parents were to be served not only dutifully but reverently. "I remember," a 46-year-old office worker tells Aera magazine, "my mother when her mother died. It was the first time I ever saw my mother cry. She said, 'I'd been meaning to show her filial respect — now it's too late!' That was 25 years ago. I made a vow to myself: Never would I be burdened with the same regret."