The Hong Kong Cranes Club had its monthly gathering on the last day of October with guest speaker Tokusen Aoki, the Operational Director of the Philippines branch of the Japanese optical chain store Paris Miki. 

Tokusen shared about his life growing up in a missionary family across the world, being born in South America and speaking Spanish as his first language, moving to Russia, attending high school and university in USA, and working in Japan. Now he is in the Philippines with his wife and three children. He shared about how his experience doing mission work as a young adult was challenging, but also how it helped shape his attitude and ability to face challenges later in his working life. 

Raised in the Unificationist environment, with the vision of changing the world and building the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth, he expressed how his experience has been that wherever you might find yourself in life, you can find or create opportunities to bring positive change to the world. He shared about the volunteer work he was able to initiate with his company to help the survivors of a tsunami in the Philippines, and how that created relationships and opened opportunities for future development. 

In the Q&A session at the end, when asked about what he thought about how he was able to find these opportunities and have such heavenly fortune, Tokusen expressed his appreciation for his parents and how he felt that he was receiving the benefits of the lives and sacrifices that his parents had made.

The Hong Kong members were all inspired by Tokusen’s smile and positivity regardless of the difficulty of some of the issues discussed.