Harry Hakuei Kosato recalls the first days of helping to supply the pan-Asian fine restaurant San:Qi at The Four Seasons in Worli in 2008. “We’d get the tuna shipped from Japan. And, it was meant to be frozen through the journey. However, once, when the shipment arrived, we realised that it had been left outside in the airport, open to the heat. That was $2,500 lost. What do you do?” asks Kosato, who turned 50 last week.

A loss of $2,500 (around R1 lakh as per the 2007 exchange rates), in one day would be difficult to get over. But, Kosato says, he’d shrug and accept it. That’s ukeireru (pronounced oo-kay-ray-roo)  for you. The Japanese art of acceptance, recently captured in a book titled Ukeireru: Happiness and Acceptance through Japanese Wisdom by Scott Haas, a writer and a clinical psychologist, and published by Hachette India. Haas, who has previously written Why Be Happy? The Japanese Way of Acceptance, writes in Ukeireru, that the culture has several words to denote acceptance in its different forms and, while ukeireru refers to self-acceptance, it means much more. “It means acceptance of the relationships in our families, in school, at work, and in our communities. It means accepting others.”