50 [Congratulatory 50th Anniversary] Listen to my son...

"Mmm-hmmm, mmm-hmmm, mmm-hmmm, mmm-hmmm.

"What's that?

I was humming my favorite song that I had been singing without thinking.

The song was used in an anime and I came across it, but the original song "In Other Words" was born in New York in 1922, and when it was re-recorded by someone else in 1956, the now well-known "Fly Me to the Moon" was introduced to the world. After a while, it became widely known as a standard jazz number, and the United States, which was in the midst of the Apollo program at the time, actually launched this recorded song to the moon on an Apollo flight, making it famous as the first song to be brought to the moon by a man.

What? What are you trying to say?

"Ah! That's right! Music is also a culture!

...Please don't make a face like "What's wrong with you? No, seriously.

"This is one of my favorite songs. "This is my favorite song. It's called 'Take Me to the Moon'...

"The moon..." That's absurd. That thing that shines in the sky at night? It's impossible, because even arrows can't reach it and fall down.

The moon is that thing that shines in the sky at night?

"It's probably tens of thousands of kilometers away, so arrows won't work. ....

How far is a kilometer?

"Wait a minute... well, here's .... I think it's .

I'm going to get a stick of wood that I've been whittling to use as an axe handle for chopping wood later. It's cut to about a meter long. On the hand-made straight stick, I draw a scale of about 5mm and 1cm with a pen I brought from the earth to make an instant scale. I had a 1cm pen in my luggage, so I'm sure I'm not too far off the mark. When I first bought my calipers (*1), I measured the length of many things, and it was useful.

"This stick is about 1 meter long, and 1,000 of these would be 1 km long. This stick is about 1 meter long.

"A thousand of them is .... You just said tens of thousands of kilometers, but I'm not sure. I don't understand.

In this world, thousands and tens of thousands are usually numbers that only land managers, merchants, and military personnel have the chance to touch.

"If it's so far away, how did you measure it?

Do you know that the moon is a celestial body, a star?

Stars are the little shiny things around them, right?

It's impossible to get them to understand that in my class because they have to understand planets and satellites. In fact, it is impossible for amateurs to measure the distance between planets and satellites, and they don't even want to try, right?

Well, that's too technical for me, so I'll leave it at ..... Music, music, music! Music enriches your life, it's a culture that accompanies you through all times of life, whether you're happy, sad or lonely. Music enriches life.

But we don't have minstrels here in the middle of nowhere, do we?

If you don't have one, why don't you sing one yourself?

...that night.

"Listen to me sing!

Masaru sang and sang and sang and sang until the children got angry that they couldn't sleep. Moderation is the key to everything.