Sharp Ears

Getting old might involve losing one’s faculties. My father was hard of hearing when he was old. On the other hand, my mother had good hearing, but she had Alzheimer’s disease.

Caregiving for an Alzheimer’s patient is very hard. It is especially hard when the patient and caregiver live together. Most caregivers don’t last beyond a few months. I had taken care of my mother for fourteen years. Of course it was not all happy days. Disputes were a part of caregiving.

One day, I was tired of my mother’s aimless talking, I climbed to the second floor and entered my room. And I said to myself, “Give it a rest!” Then my mother screamed from the ground floor, “What do you mean, ‘Give it a rest’?”

At least she had sharp ears.

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Picture by K.Nakano

Dishwashing Liquid

One day, when I was a kindergartener, a teacher said to us, “We will play at the pool tomorrow. You can bring your water gun.” 

I didn’t have a water gun, so I asked my mother to buy one. But she had another idea: “If you have an empty dishwashing liquid bottle, you can use it as a water gun.” 

The next day, everyone except me came with a water gun. I brought an empty dishwashing liquid bottle. 

There were fatal differences between the water guns and the bottle, for instance, their ranges. The bottle pushed water out over a very short range. The water guns launched water over a very long range. I was no match for the other kids. This is one of my bitter memories.

After that day, the teacher said that none of us would ever bring water guns again. We played at the pool without water guns. I didn’t know why. But now I wonder if it was because of us.

Perhaps the teachers saw a miserable child playing with a bottle instead of a water gun. They might have thought, “He must be from an economically poor family. His parents can’t afford a water gun. We have treated him unkindly. From now on, we will never use water guns.”

If that was the case, they were wrong. I am actually from a relatively rich family. My mother was a busy woman. She was an ideas woman too. She had no time to buy a water gun, so she came up with that idea. 

If that was what happened, I apologize to the teachers and kindergarteners. They had a pool, but for safety reasons, they couldn’t fill it with enough water. They could have only enough water to wet their toes. No one could swim in the pool. So asking the children to bring water guns was a nice way of letting them play safely. Without the water guns, the shallow pool was useless.

If you have little children, give them water guns.

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Picture by Kobito

Troll

In 1998, I was a student in California. At that time, free email accounts were highly accessible. Most people started having email accounts. People started to buy things online through Amazon.

In 1999, I returned to Japan. Most people didn’t have email accounts. Most people didn’t even know about Amazon. It took a few years for these same changes to occur in Japan. If something happened in the United States, the same thing would happen in Japan a few years later.

I met an American in Japan, and we become friends on Facebook. In 2016, those living in the United States had their presidential elections. This friend posted a short comment about the elections on Facebook. Immediately, an anonymous person posted objections to him. These objections were long passages. I was surprised by this anonymous person’s typing speed. I understood later that this was because of the “copy and paste” function.

I soon learned from a Japanese news program that this was a “political troll.” These elections were changing the United States. I thought that the same thing would happen in Japan in a few years.

In 2024, during a special election, a party obstructed a rival candidate’s speech on the streets. Tsubasa no To used a microphone and screamed negative comments in the middle of this candidate’s speech. We can call them “trolls,” but this was not online. It was not too primitive an incident either.

I would assume that Japan is a highly developed society with large advances in technology. Whenever something happens in the United States, the same thing would happen in Japan a few years later—but not necessarily in the same form.

Picture by Tuneyuki Kanata

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Diagnosis

The symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease hardly appear at the beginning. At the early stages, patients of this disease make the same mistakes as healthy people often do. In the case of Alzheimer’s disease, these mistakes gradually increase. In such a case, even a medical specialist can’t diagnose it decisively. It is simply difficult, and diagnosing a person with Alzheimer’s disease has a major effect on the patient and the people involved. In my mother’s case, most doctors avoided diagnosing her with Alzheimer’s disease. I felt that people began to say she had had the problem for a while —her trading partners, her coworkers, her friends, and her secretary, in that order.

I lived with my mother, but I hadn’t suspected that she had Alzheimer’s disease. She had always been a forgetful person since I was a child. At that time, we were tired because we needed to cover my grandmother’s caregiving. So I had assumed that my mother was simply tired. I observed that her forgetfulness increased but thought that this might be temporary.

That could be normalcy bias. People tend toward normalcy bias during disasters. When a disaster happens, some people often think, “This is still okay” or “ I will be okay” or “This time, it will be okay.” Then when it’s too late, these people can’t react correctly or can’t escape the situation. This mentality might even increase the damage of the disaster.

We met many doctors. It took about three years for us to find a doctor who diagnosed my mother with Alzheimer’s disease. I was surprised, but I still took an optimistic view of the situation. Back then, I didn’t have enough knowledge about Alzheimer’s disease. I believed I could continue my teaching job and acting on stage, but I needed to quit both a few years later.

One can say I lost a chance to escape from my mother’s Alzheimer’s disease. My mother had a lot of friends, and I had an elder brother. I had assumed they would help us, but actually, no one helped us. They had already escaped from us. Most of them even ignored us.

I missed the chance to escape this situation, but I fought my mother’s Alzheimer’s disease for over twenty years with my mother. I let her live out the rest of her natural life.

Sometimes I regret those twenty years—I wish I escaped like other people had—but I look on the bright side. At least I know who really cared about my mother. My mother’s address book has the names of over 1,500 people, but only about ten people worried about my mother and constantly contacted me. I will treasure these people for as long as I can.

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Picture by Taeko