Radical Transformation: Fatherhood, Music, and Worlds tied together

There are some words that only come alive when life experience gives them weight.

For years, I found it hard to connect with the expression “radical transformation.” I’ve experienced deep change, yes—through beauty, through momentary encounters that grew to shape my life, through challenges, pain and moments of upheaval that reshaped my outlook. But nothing ever quite matched the suddenness or certainty those words suggest.

That changed last October, when I became a father.

My wife and I welcomed our first child, a beautiful boy—half Japanese, half Irish, uniquely and wholly himself. He has been gentle, calm, and somehow absolutely present in every moment since he arrived. He is adored by his mother and me, and even at this young age, he has transformed the way I see everything.

One thought struck me early on with unexpected force:

My choices no longer end with me.

Every decision I make now has a visible and immediate ripple effect—on him, his future, and the life we are building together. I can no longer afford the illusion that my path is mine alone to walk.

This realization brought new depth to my music as well.

I remember my first journey to Japan. Someone asked, “Why Japan?” I answered truthfully at the time: I wanted to immerse myself in a place that shared nothing with my background. I thought that by removing familiar context, I might learn more about who I was. In truth, I found myself unanchored. Without the threads of family, history, and shared cultural memory, I lost sight of myself.

It wasn’t until I returned to Ireland in 2008 that I began to rediscover my place. In those familiar surroundings, I saw myself more clearly in others—in their gestures, their humour, their ways of being. And strangely, that recognition also helped me understand Japan more deeply. The people I had known there—their hopes, frustrations, what they said, and didn't say—took on new dimensions. The human became more human.

Now I find myself returning to Japan again, this time not physically, but inwardly—through the satsumabiwa, through performance, and through the legacy of what has been entrusted to me by my teacher, Fumon-sensei.

In the past, I felt a great responsibility to preserve the art I had received. Fumon-sensei shared it with me with such generosity, and I felt an obligation to honour that gift. I still do. But something has shifted. I now understand that tradition is not only a thing to protect—it is something to live, something to offer. My son gives me a new reason to do this work. Through him, I understand more clearly that culture is not exclusive. It is not a closed system.

It is a conversation.

My son carries two heritages, and I want him to feel he belongs fully to both. I hope that the work I do—as a performer, as a writer, as someone navigating two musical traditions—can show him that his identity is not an exclusive binary. It is a bridge. It is a tide with eddies and currents, all part of a greater sea.

And so this, for me, is what radical transformation truly means:

Not the shattering of one life to begin another, but the widening of one’s being, the deepening of one's soul and the extension of one's field of vision and care.