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A male friend sent me this

Subject: Why Women Can’t Sleep

Coming of Age Day (Seijin no Hi) is a Japanese holiday held annually on the second Monday of January. The community congratulates and encourages all those who turned 20 years old over the past year, and recognizes their entry into adulthood.

Here’s a rough translation of the newspaper article along with my notes:

Title – “Thanks to my supporters and the people of this community, I’m doing well.” says Mr. Hibari who celebrates his coming of age. In 2006 he went to the US (Denver) for a transplant operation.

Hideyuki Hibari turned 20. (In the photo, he is a lanky, spectacled, tall young man talking with the other members of an organizing group for this year’s Coming of Age Day celebrations in Akita City.) He says, “I wanted to show my middle school classmates and teachers that I’m healthy and doing well.” Back in 2005 when he was in middle school, he was told by doctors that he had less than a year to live because of a birth defect in his heart.

At that time, his family knew that the only chance for survival he had was to go to the US for a heart transplant. The community rallied around the Hibari family and immediately began fundraising to raise the 60 million yen (almost $800,000) needed to pay for such an operation. As news of the fundraising effort spread nationwide, they were able to raise over $1.4 million which was able to cover the expenses of an operation at Children’s Hospital in Denver, the 6 months of followup care there, the transportation of Hideyuki and his family and the hiring of a Japanese-English medical interpreter – me. (From the day of the transplant operation to the day of his return to Japan, I helped translate the communication between the hospital staff and the Hibari family.)

In the article, Hideyuki says, “This transplant operation was the defining moment in my life which I will never forget. I am well aware of how much I owe my life to this operation.”

The transplant took place in February of 2006. After 6 months of followup care, the Hibaris returned to Japan in August. The following year, Hideyuki entered Kokugakukan High School. After graduation, he was hired full-time by Akita Bank.

“I enjoyed high school and now I have a good job. Although I don’t expect to become a superstar, I know I can do what I can everyday and repay my supporters by being a productive member of the community,” Hikeyuki notes. He adds, “To those who face the challenge of a transplant operation now, I want to encourage them with my knowledge that could only come with personal experience.”

The newspaper article is cheerful and optomistic but I know how much hardship the Hibari family endured to get to this point. When I was first hired as the medical interpreter here, I was worried about all the technical medical jargon I would need to translate but as it turned out, that was not the biggest challenge. When I lived in Japan (altogether about 10 years), there were occasions when I came into contact with the medical system there. My son dislocated an elbow, a friend went in for back surgery and I considered having a baby in a Japanese hospital. Although they’ve got an excellent health care system, there were more than a few times I was very surprised. There is a lot we take for granted and never realize unless we go outside of the country. So I knew medical care was one of those highly culturally sensitive areas.

Hideyuki’s story is a one of a Japanese family grateful to advances in American medical practices but there’s also alot I learned from the experience. While American parents are dedicated to their child’s health, I was impressed at how Hideyuki’s mother and father and older brother, as well as the community back home, all stood by Hideyuki during his entire 6 month ordeal in Denver. The Japanese have a national healthcare system but when this hole appeared in their coverage, they took action. The Japanese community in their hometown quickly mobilized resources to help save Hideyuki’s life and they continue to watch over this young man.

I expect I’ll continue to hear about Hideyuki over the future.

Too many of us have stopped reading and subsist on a poor diet of superficial movies, ipod music and flashy art. And all too often, we are not taught how to read and write well. I was trying to find a way to show how words, at their best, can convey emotions and passion across hundreds of years and many miles. Here is a poem written over 300 years ago and it still makes men desire, women swoon and people fall in love.

I just ran across this video while browsing through the YouTube community and wondered how relevant writing skills are for people today as I prepare for a writing class I’ll teach at the local community college.

On one of these sites online, I ran across and interesting essay. Did you know that Robert Louis Stevenson wrote on the Web in 1905? He really did. And he has some interesting comments on how writing fits into social media with it’s cacophony of sights, sounds and movement. Here is an excerpt from his book titled: The Art of Writing and Other Essays published in 1905. I add my own comments in italics…

The Web – Mr. Stevenson used this word to describe the relationship of writing to the other arts of his time. – Literature or writing, although it stands apart by reason of the great destiny and general use of its medium in the affairs of men – that is business, work and legal matters, is yet an art like other arts. Arts are anything created by people – including social media.

Of these we may distinguish two great classes: those arts, like sculpture, painting, acting, which are representative, or, as used to be said very clumsily, imitative – social media seems to fall into this category. In other words, people create an imitation of what they see, hear and feel around them; and those, like architecture, music, and the dance, which are self-sufficient, and merely presentative. This would include writing. If an alien ran into a “presentative” creation, he would need a human to explain what it means.

Each class, in right of this distinction, obeys principles apart; yet both may claim a common ground of existence, and it may be said with sufficient justice that the motive and end of any art whatever is to make a pattern; a pattern, it may be, of colours, of sounds, of changing attitudes - in other words, ideas. Social media fits in here!, geometrical figures, or imitative lines; but still a pattern. Mr. Stevenson notes that even if an art is imitative, it is not random. Someone has to choose what elements of reality to focus on – thus creating the pattern.

That is the plane on which these sisters meet; it is by this that they are arts; and if it be well they should at times forget their childish origin, addressing their intelligence to virile tasks, and performing unconsciously that necessary function of their life, to make a pattern, it is still imperative that the pattern shall be made. So Mr. Stevenson knew there was no point to claiming writing was any better or worse than the other arts but he pinpointed the goal of all of these related arts. They must all make sense of the world, make a “pattern” or a recognizable series of ideas – not just noise. And that requires intelligence, skill and work.