Michael T. Mitsui grew up in British Columbia carrying a history that preceded him. His Japanese parents’ lives had been marked by war and by Hiroshima, a weight transmitted not through explicit declaration but through the way a family holds itself, through what it emphasizes and what it leaves unspoken. According to Mitsui, what that inheritance gave him, above all else, were the habits his parents lived by: perseverance, humility, and an understanding of loss that did not require an audience.
He would not have framed it that way as a young dancer. He had a floor to get back to.
Against the Current, Mitsui’s memoir now available on Amazon, is built on the space between those two things: the formation that shaped him before he could name it, and the career that gave his early life its visible architecture. He spent years on competitive ballroom floors in Canada before appearing as a dancer in Shall We Dance?, the 2004 Hollywood film starring Richard Gere and Jennifer Lopez that brought competitive ballroom to a mainstream American audience. His name is in the cast. That credit offers one measure of how far the circuit had taken him. What the memoir reaches for is something the circuit could not offer.
A Career Built for Forward Motion
Ballroom competition is structured for one direction. Training, partnerships, preparation, the score: everything orients toward a specific kind of outcome. Mitsui moved through that structure with full commitment, developing the precision and competitive focus the discipline demands. The memoir suggests he was also absorbing, in the background, questions his training had no framework for: about what the dancing was for, and what would remain when the external structure fell away.
What brought it down was not one event but several arriving in sequence. Injury altered the trajectory, as it does for most career dancers. Loss arrived in forms the memoir does not itemize in advance. And the pandemic imposed on Mitsui, as it did on anyone whose professional life was organized around studios, competitions, and the social ecosystem ballroom sustains, a confrontation with what remained when that infrastructure closed.
By the time those reckonings arrived, Mitsui had already made the most significant geographic turn of his adult life: a move to Japan, where he built dance studios and established a family. The country of his parents’ origins became the country of his own making. He describes the experience in the memoir not as resolution but as a deepening, one that brought questions about success and purpose into focus in ways the competitive years had not permitted.
On the Other Side of the Floor
Running studios rather than competing in them asks different things of a person. According to Mitsui, his parents’ influence, which had felt ambient during the dancing years, sharpened into something more legible. Their quiet persistence, the willingness to keep going without dramatizing the effort, had been modeling a way of living long before he could name what it was.
The memoir’s title draws from that recognition. Going against the current, in Mitsui’s framing, is not a declaration of defiance but something closer to honesty: a refusal to move only in the direction that is expected or convenient. The injuries, the losses, the decision to build a life in Japan rather than return to where he started, were not, according to Mitsui, detours from the real story. They were the real story.
His parents, shaped by Hiroshima and its aftermath, had already shown him how to read a life that way. Against the Current is the account of a man who spent a career in motion before understanding what, precisely, he was moving toward.
Against the Current by Michael T. Mitsui is available on Amazon.