Chasing a dream (1)
June 25, 2002 Masashi Shigemori
Since retiring as executive vice-president of the Hino Motors, Ltd. in June of last year , I have been preparing for my life long dream of working with my wife as a volunteer for physically challenged (P.C.) people in the United States. However, after retiring from the company, I did not make much progress. In such circumstances, what I did is as follow:
Since then, one year has passed. During this period, my wife and I have traveled to the States twice to research the present situation. We enjoyed walking in the City of Berkeley, visiting the English school that we plan to study English at. While we were relaxing in a cafe near the university, drinking coffee, we felt excitement that we would soon be to live in this city.
-- Presently I have successfully lost 5 kiilograms and I feel less tired than before. I hope I can live in the U.S. without going to the hospital because the medical expenses are far more expensive than Japanese medical insurance.
--I studied word processing and e-mail opeerations .
--I attended a seminar that explained proccedures to establish NPO, and I visited the Tokyo Metropolitan Office to inquire about the NPO establishing procedure. Consequently, I found that if the NPO is established as a corporation and it’s fund is covered by the membership fees or donations, the tax is exempt. However, in order to apply to the NPO, there will be too much paper work to obtain permission with the Government. Then, little by little I started preparation of mass applications using my word processor.
We have so many things to do to accomplish our goal, so I took the first step. I bought my ticket to the States, departing on 1st July and prepared an apartment to rent for 90 days on tourist visas. Unfortunately my wife stayed in Japan because we have an old dog, named "Chibikuro", and she have to take care of him. The apartment I rented was the same one as my son rented thirteen years ago, and surprisingly the same room he stayed in. Once we started the procedure, many things started to come together.
I have separated this essay into three parts. This is the first part and I mentioned our present situation. In the second and third parts, I will write about life in the US.
My wife and I got to know each other in the same office and got married. My wife's name is Kazuko. I had a lot of hard work to do in the company with overtime and all-night work, but I had a happy life with my wife. Our first son, Isamu, was born in 1968. He had severe cerebral palsy due to a difficult delivery. When he became one year old, he could not turn over or crawl. The doctor told us that we had to take care of him for a long time. My wife was deeply depressed.
She decided it was her duty to help our son to walk. She worked hard and did her best for him. Because I saw her struggling with our son, I talked to her about changing from the engine development section to a section which I would be given more spare time. However, she told me that she wanted me to show our son my hard working attitude. So I didn’t change sections.
Isamu had a severe physical disability, but mentally he was normal and had a strong will. He strongly desired to enter a normal elementary school, and he did. At that time it was very rare for a severely handicapped child to enter a normal elementary school, so an NHK news program featured him in an article. Everyday my wife carried him on her back to the school and she always stayed next to him in the class. At his first school sports day, when the footrace was started, his start line was one fourth of the other children. However, he fell many times and crawled toward the goal. Of course he finished last, but I was very impressed. He was encouraged by the audience and was received with warm and loud applause.
When he entered middle and high school, we wrote a notice of promises to the school that if our son had any physical injury at the school, the school had no responsibility for the accident. My wife always supported him in middle and high schools.
When he entered school, he recklessly tried to enter the backpacking club and he became a member so that he could enjoy the feeling of mountain climbing. He was eventually carried on the back of my wife and his teachers to the top of the mountains. When he wanted to enter the university to study the computer, there were no universities that accepted a severely physical disabled student. Therefore he was compelled to enter the department of commercial science. After graduating from the university, he went to the US to study to enter the department of computer science, University of California at Berkeley (UCB). First, he entered the English intensive course at the UCB extension. Thirteen years have passed since he visited the U.S., and now he is working as a software engineer in Silicon Valley.
I praise him for his effort, and in spite of his disability of movement and his speech impediment, he did it all by himself. The U.S. gave him a chance to succeed in his desire. He received support, both moral and material, from the U.S. In March of this year, my son appeared on an ABC TV program, as the guest who had realized the American dream.
In the last ten years, we have had the desire to establish a dormitory for P.C. Japanese people in the City of Berkeley, so they can have the rich experience of American society.
When this essay is published, I will have the same experience as my son first did thirteen years ago. I will write about my son's experience in the U.S., and my first visit to the U.S.
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