It wasn't until I got sick that I realized there around me have been many cancer (malignant tumor) patients. My honest impression is, "I didn't think there would be so many." The kanji characters expressing cancer (癌), malignancy (悪性), and patients (患者) are not of my favorite, but I cannot avoid it for this issuance. So, I would beg you readers to allow me to use them a little more frequently than in other issues.

First of all is my mother. Born in 1940, she is now 80 years old. About four years ago, she had stomach cancer and had it completely removed at the Cancer Institute in Tsukiji, Tokyo. At that time, my father was in a nursing home for the elderly, but they had been in quite a bad relationship with each other since I was a child, and mother told me not to tell her cancer to him at the home. I just followed her instruction. My mother is still pinning, saying, "I wonder if I will have another three years." The mother is in a family tree of cancer. For example, my granddad, who used to work as Vice Mayor of a certain prefecture's village, got it after he entered into 70 years old, and my grandma, who had been a midwife, got it when she turned into 90 years old.

Cancer was normally said to be inherited. It is attributed to mutations that occur in repetitions of cells' division. I am a layman of the field and would pass my back to medical doctors specialized in it, but looks like it is understood in a similar way. It made me realize when I called my Singapore doctor through a video conference on September 4, and when my doctor asked me about my family line quite persistently. While replying back to him over the screen with his voice sounded through the PC speakers, I rather remembered thinking, "my father is not a cancer family?", based on the questions what I was asked by the doctor. 

On the side of my father's line, all the four siblings are men, and my father was the eldest. He died out of a heart attack three years ago in the nursing home. It was the next day of his birthday, to which I regretted not being able to call to celebrate him in Japan from Singapore. 

The third brother died out of a complication of diabetes, who died even a few years earlier than my father. The second is still energetic in his 80s, and the fourth is now on his way to diabetes.

Many of my friends and acquaintances also have cancers. Among the people I met in Singapore, I have a Japanese friend in his late 40s, whose mother, Japanese living in Japan, has her cancer. Also, while I was in the Narita hospital, I contacted a good lawyer friend in Tokyo over the phone for a certain matter, and her mother got the cancer too. After finishing her important role in an association earlier this year, she said via email that she would look after her mom at her side. She just impressed me. All of them just confessed at my first confession. A third person, who should go anonymous here, is having the disease too. 

There are also many celebrities who got these. "YT" has had a brain tumor and got out of his hospital, and so does a British rock band member. Besides, "HK", "HD", and countless others...Ms. Fuua Kinjo of Okinawa, 10 years old now and to whom I donated the other day, is also fighting against her cancers.  

Today, I turned over the diary I kept in Narita, I found a few lines of mine dated August 9. "When I look at SmartNews, one story of cancer goes to a news every day, and it's so disappointing and depressing to me. Symptoms, treatment methods, and survival rates vary from person to person, but they are all edited rounded up. Or, does this mean it's increasing?"

Some days ago, I joined NPO "Brain Tumor Network". I went into the web site, and counted the number of hospitals for brain tumors in Japan. There are only, only, 170 hospitals nationwide that undertake treatment for the disease. I am being treated at the International University of Health and Welfare Hospitals (Narita, Mita) for brain (brain tumor) and gastrointestine (lung metastasis of colorectal cancer). Although my hospitals are not on the list of the networks, it's just a matter of time, I think. In any case, I hope that the recognition of brain tumors will rise up in public.

(The photo is of a trip to Coney Island, Singapore, made by my family of four and our good friend couple in the country, on April 30, 2016. This couple always give a huge hug to our children, and we very much owed and still owe to them with their help and support extended to our cancers in 2018 and 2019. I totally appreciate them. The photographer was me at the time in 2016, and my footwear was not in the image. To be continued.)