My father died last January. He was 90 years old and suffered from sudden pneumonia during my visit to my hometown, Fukuoka. I can’t say he was a diligent, tidy, and reliable person, but he was good at creating a cheerful atmosphere everywhere. He was born into a high social and financial standing. However, when he was in his twenties, he dropped out of university and eloped with an older woman of lower social and financial status. The marriage lasted only one year. After he got married to my mother and started his own company, he would lend his money without hesitation to others and often never got it back. My mother regretted marrying him.

Partly because I was raised hearing my mother’s complaints about him, I thought he was far from an ideal father, although I liked his cheerfulness. However, his last ten days at the hospital made me reconsider how I will spend the rest of my life. Are high social status or money determining factors when it comes to enjoying the final stages of our life?

Shortly after he was carried to the hospital at the end of last December, the doctor told our family he was dying. As my hometown is located in the countryside in Fukuoka, and at the time had only counted a small number of Covid-19 patients, only fifteen minutes were allowed per visitation. We immediately called his siblings and learned that most of his friends had passed away already, so we were only able to find one of his friends.

Even though he was dying and was kept alive by a ventilator, he was friendly and talked to everyone. However, sadly, most of his words were inaudible due to the apparatus. One of his grandchildren, who is a doctor, said in general it was very difficult for patients like him to talk because the blood oxygenation level was extremely low. During the last ten days of his life, his nine grandchildren, some of whom lived in Tokyo and some in Kyoto, returned to Fukuoka, so someone could visit him every day. They all loved the dying old man who was still joking with gestures on the bed.

According to the doctor, and due in part to Covid-19, this hospital had become a place for the dying, and patients rarely encountered visitors. Only my father’s bed was lively, and this created an atmosphere unusually cheerful for the hospital.

Through these ten days at the hospital, I realized that how we die is the same as how we live. Though he might have been sloppy, lazy, and gullible, my father treated everyone equally, regardless of their social and financial status. He never got angry at others, and tried to make everyone happy all the time, even at the end. Now I respect him so much and feel I want to spend my last days like him.

I believe how we die doesn’t depend on our financial condition or social status, but after all how we have treated people throughout our life. To this end, I renovated my house this summer and made a small corner where people can get together and have social gatherings. I hope I can cherish people and the time I spend with them for the rest of my life, and hopefully, die like my father.

Quiz.

Q1. Where is the author from?

a)    Kyoto

b)   Tokyo

c)    Fukuoka

Q2. What did the author’s mother think about her husband?

a)    He was not kind

b)   He was not talkative

c)    He was not a good husband

Q3. According to the essay, what makes our final days great?

a)    Money

b)   Jobs

c)    How we treat people

Scroll down for the answers

A1. c

A2. c

A3. c

If you were forced to choose between being consistent or speedy, what would be your choice? Now, many people might feel compelled to answer, “well, I would choose both.” But besides this being a cheat answer to the hypothetical question, you may want to think about the implications for this preference. In the end, rather than focusing on too many things at once, we should aim for being a dependable, rather than fast, person.

Of course, being able to consistently meet deadlines while also finishing tasks well before their deadlines would be great in your future workplace. However, the truth is that we don’t have unlimited time in such demanding environments. There are only so many hours in the day to complete seemingly never-ending work. The implication here is that by choosing to pursue both traits, we place equal importance on them. Why is this troublesome? Well, a professor once told me, “If everything is important, then nothing is important.” Indeed, when we choose everything equally, we are, in fact, choosing not to place higher importance on anything. Realistically, just as some work tasks should have higher priority than others, so too is there higher importance for the traits we decide to develop in ourselves. We must understand that not all attributes are created equally.

Now, going back to the question, I ask you once more, which of the two traits would you choose? To give you the answer, let me provide you with a real-world example. Before moving to Japan, I worked for a large corporation in the United States. Within this company, I worked closely with a diverse team of co-workers to complete deadlines together. My fellow workers came from various backgrounds and had many different preferences and work styles. Amongst them, there were people who preferred to power through tasks and finish them as soon as they were assigned. This may seem great, yet these people lacked the consistency to keep this up for long. Yes, some tasks were finished quickly, but others would go unnoticed for weeks at a time. Ultimately, I couldn’t trust these employees to follow through on tasks and had to keep reminding them to make sure that they would meet the deadlines. 

Next, there were other types of co-workers who were the opposite. I might have sent them an email and then not heard back from them for several days. For sure, this was not considered fast compared to the abovementioned workers who would respond within seconds. The difference here was that I could always count on these people to meet the deadlines despite completing things at a slower pace. Where they lacked in speed, they most certainly made it up in being dependable.

Overall, in your future workplace, you might first strive to portray every positive attribute at the same time. But once you come to the realization that we cannot always do things perfectly, you will adjust your priorities. When this day comes, I hope you will become the type of person that others can depend on.

Photo credit: nappy@pexels.com 

Quiz

Q1. What does 'if everything is important, then nothing is important' mean?

Q2. What does the author mean by the word ‘consistency,’ and what is the author’s opinion about it?

Q3. What does the author mean by the word ‘speed,’ and what is the author’s opinion about it?

Scroll down ↓ for the answers

A1. By placing equal importance on everything, we do not distinguish one thing from another. Therefore, our priorities are spread too thin, and ultimately, nothing becomes important.

A2. Consistency is when someone is dependable and always finishes a task in the end. The author believes that, while consistent people do not always complete tasks quickly, knowing that they will follow through on the task is better.

A3. Speed is when someone finishes a task quickly. The author believes that, while it is great to finish tasks speedily, many speedy people cannot continue this consistently and sometimes do not finish tasks.

Japan has a wide variety of insects. The hot humid summers and the less frequent use of agricultural insecticides means that insects thrive in Japan. Japanese culture and the Japanese education system encourage an interest in bugs and insects that many other countries do not support. In summer in Japan, you can easily walk into a DIY store or sometimes supermarkets to buy either goods for catching insects or live stag beetles of various types. One-hundred-yen stores bring their stock of nets, cages, insect food and accessories to the front of the store for a summer of insect-hunting. While you might be able to find some of the same goods in some Walmart stores or similar big-box stores, keeping insects as pets is much less common outside Japan. Most people buy bug spray in the summer rather than bug nets and bug food. If you want to buy live insects, you often have to go to specialty pet stores, where they sell live insects as food for snakes and reptiles.

The bug hunting obsession has caught on with my children too. Every rainy season as the muggy humid conditions shift to sweltering heat, signalling the start of summer, my kids bring out the big encyclopaedia of insects. The pages with life-size pictures of stag beetles are well thumbed and adorned with sticky notes. They sit together and plan which ones they are going to catch. However, each year we end up buying beetles from a store or visiting the “Kabuto Mushi House” near Hiezan. They have yet to catch anything in real life, but this year might prove to be different.

By luck, as my son was closing the window a young stag beetle flew into the bug screen on the window. Becoming trapped between the window and the bug screen, the beetle was easily caught by my son. This sudden new information that they could catch beetles at the back of the house encouraged them even more. They needed more information and before I could say anything they had booked us all on a bug hunting training session at the local nature reserve. My wife who hates all types of insects agreed after much argument and persuasion, so we headed out one evening for a very dark nature reserve.

Walking slowly around the nature reserve led by the guide, we learned how to make banana traps to attract stag beetles. Old bananas are fermented and then inserted into a semi-permeable tube, such as pantyhose. The fermented bananas then very slowly ooze out of the tube, which is tied to a tree. Stag beetles love the smell of the banana pulp and fly to the tree. Landing on the tree, the beetles suck out the banana pulp. You can then easily catch them. The guide showed us several stag beetles that were feasting on their dinner of fermented bananas.

So, the bug hunting obsession is renewed again in our house. The kids are armed with new bug cages, nets, bug food, very old and smelly bananas, and a handful of old pantyhose taken from my wife’s sock drawer. My wife will soon find out why the kids are stuffing her pantyhose with smelly old bananas and hanging them outside the kitchen door. Hopefully, she won’t be too upset about the pantyhose, although I think she might be upset if they attract too many bugs.

Photo Credit: Cervus@pexels.com

Quiz

Q1. What is more common in Japan than other countries? 

Eating bugs

Using spray to kill bugs

Keeping insects as pets

Q2. What is an "agricultural insecticide''?

A type of bug

A spray to attract insects

A chemical used by farmers to kill insects. 

Q3. What do you need to trap stag beetles?

Fermented bananas and pantyhose

A net covered in honey

A cage

Scroll down ↓ for the answers

A1. c

A2. c

A3. a

Q1. According to the article, what pictures are usually on boys' clothes?

Robots and spaceships

Vehicles and dinosaurs

Trees and flowers

Q2. Did the author's mother respect the author's views on children's clothing?

Yes, she did

No, she didn’t

She didn’t give an opinion

Q3. What were the sandals the author bought for her daughter like?

Pink with white polka dots

Pink with green polka dots

Pink and white stripes

Scroll down ↓ for the answers

A1. b

A2. a

A3. a

I’m from a small city called Lichfield in the middle of the UK. It has a long history, but probably the most famous person from there is Dr Samuel Johnson (1709-1784). He wrote a dictionary that the Oxford English Dictionary – and all following English dictionaries were and, are modelled on. I once had coffee in Dr Johnson’s house, but that’s a story for another time…

In Japan, I have lived in Osaka, Shizuoka and Aichi prefectures and a few years ago I moved to Kyoto. I do not live in the city centre, but I do not live in the countryside either – kind of on the edge. Of course, with this being Kyoto, there are many beautiful temples and places of interest, but I like nature. 

The town I live in is quiet and there are many trees and mountains nearby. Also, there is a small stream near my house and that is the most interesting. There are river crabs and crayfish in it and occasionally there are frogs too. I sometimes see birds or weasels fishing in it, and I’ve even had a raccoon come up and sniff my shoe while by this stream. 

Perhaps the best time by this stream is in June – that is when the fireflies come out. Although I’ve lived in Japan a long time and I lived in Mishima, Shizuoka (which has a firefly festival), I had never seen fireflies until moving to this area last year. In June, I can now sit outside my front door and watch them every night for a week. They are fascinating and move gracefully like I imagine Tinker-Bell would do. 

This year I spent every night of the firefly season (sometimes until 3am) watching and photographing these wonderful creatures. Of the, probably, hundreds of photos I took, I may have got one or two that were kind of not too bad. However, I was happy with that and felt privileged to see them again this year. 

They are beautiful predators – yes, they are hunters. And, they have lived for nearly a hundred million years, but worldwide populations of fireflies are declining and that is mostly because of us. We are destroying their environment. I see this in my stream, as people throw their bottles, cans or cigarette ends into this precious ecosystem. 

This stream died before and the local residents cleaned it and made it a safe place for all these animals to live once again. There is hope that we can keep it safe and clean for all of the amazing animals. And if it can happen in one small place in Kyoto, it can spread to more places.

Photo Credit: The Author

Quiz

Q1. When was Johnson born?

1784

1794

1709

Q2. How many places do we know the writer has lived? 

5

4

2

Q3. What is causing the decline in firefly populations 

Us (humans)

Drought

An increase in predators

Scroll down ↓ for the answers

A1. c

A2. a

A3. a