What is the purpose of my life?

Yesterday and the day before, I spent an idyllic vacation day in Japan and realized how free and peaceful the country is.
I saw men and women of all ages, including foreigners, enjoying themselves on Shibuya Center Street. And tens of thousands of people from all over the country gathered for a festival in Kamakura.
Tens of thousands of people from all over the country gathered for the festival in Kamakura. A lot of people were having a good time.
If peace means the security of life, there is probably no other country in the world as free and peaceful as Japan.

In this age of instantaneous and direct information transmission, we know that many people are killed in distant countries on the same planet.
We can also understand the viewpoints and thoughts of each side.
In the Palestinian Gaza Strip, which is being invaded by Israel, there is hunger and looting, and the situation is chaotic.

Hamas is taking hostages and building a command center and other facilities under a hospital, which is the least vulnerable to attack in their own country.
They are human shields.
If I had been born as a human shield in a country surrounded by walls where I could only see the sky, what kind of person would I have become?
I would have to have the strength to try to live under any circumstances, but if things had gone on like this, I would have become a person with nothing but despair.

Right now, Ukraine and Palestine are killing each other.
The parties involved believe that violence is the only way to solve the situation, and that is why the situation has come to this.

There are people who are born only to oppose what logic alone cannot do, to oppose what is unreasonable.
But even for these people there is hope.
How can we make this hope real, but not take away the hope of others?
It is difficult to know what to think about human existence.

What goals should Japan move forward with in the future?

 

The world is in chaos and no one can predict the future.
In China, there seems to be a lot going on in the administration, and yesterday it was reported that former Premier Li Keqiang has died.
Wagner's Mr. Pulikozhin was also murdered, and all news of him has disappeared.
When people die, they become a thing of the past and are soon forgotten.

Japan's GDP is about to be overtaken by Germany to become the fourth largest economy in the world, and it will soon be overtaken by India to become the fifth largest economy.
I believe that Japan has become this way because of the stubborn policies of external pressure.
The most important of these policies is the two-day workweek.
Then the bubble economy burst with the Plaza Accord.

Japan has not been able to recover from the external pressure, and now the birthrate is declining and the Japanese people have lost the ability to have goals.

Many people have always had the mentality of being "king of the mountain," and although they talk about "all Japan," they are unable to actually cooperate with each other to challenge the world.

Even in the field of medicine, if all the data in Japan were consolidated, we would be able to compete with the rest of the world, but we are unable to do so.
No one will read a paper that is based on small data from only your own institution.
On the other hand, if we were to go "all-Japan", the next step would be to cooperate with the others, but only Mahira would do the sweat work.
There is nothing we can do about it.

External pressure + unique Japanese values = decline in national strength

How can we get out of this negative spiral?

People gather around smiling faces.

It was a bit of a relief to get through yesterday's lecture.
I changed the background music this morning from the classical music I had been listening to until the day before yesterday to Ed Sheeran.
It's a strange thing to say, but I can feel my mouth relaxing without a care in the world.
In other words, how grumpy I looked until yesterday.

People often tell me that my face gets scary when I get tense at work.
I don't think I'm like that, but since people keep telling me that, I guess it's true.
I know I need to be careful, but it's hard for me to know when I'm getting scared, and even when I do, I don't know if I look scared at that moment.

I have a one-hour lecture the week after next.
It's educational, so I just have to summarise the work I've done so far.
Let's get ready early so I don't look scared at the end.

To my wife every morning as I leave,
"Smile again today!"
She says to me, "Smile again today!
Every time I do, I turn up the corners of my mouth and make a "smiley face".
People are only attracted to real smiles, and no one will pay attention to a fake smile.
I often think that I want the people around me to be happy, but maybe it is my own problem that keeps me from being happy.

Eventually, I went straight to lecturing.

Today, I went to Fukuoka to give a lecture.
The other day, I visited Kokura and found it difficult to take the Shinkansen, so I flew instead (from
Fuji over the international terminal).
The plane was full and I was worried I might panic, but I focused on making slides for my presentation and managed to get through the short flight.
I grew impatient, but after reaching the venue and conversing with experienced clinicians and pathologists, I started to understand their perspective.
I grew impatient, but after reaching the venue and conversing with experienced clinicians and pathologists, I started to understand their perspective. I grew impatient, but after reaching the venue and conversing with experienced clinicians and pathologists, I started to understand their perspective. Suddenly, an idea clicked, and I made a few tweaks to my slides before delivering my speech.
Despite my groaning during the flight and persistent effort to come up with good ideas, none emerged by the end of the journey. The moderator kept the discussion lively, and many individuals contributed their thoughts.
After all the meetings finished, the sky glowed with the afterglow of the sunset.
Everyone spent the whole day enthusiastically listening, presenting and discussing.
Learning happens wherever we are,
even just by listening to questions and presentations we can learn a lot.
I consider it a privilege to converse with individuals who excelled in medical school and have impressive accomplishments.

That's okay.
The day was gorgeous, without a single cloud in the sky. The moon was stunning as well. However, I concluded it for the day as it was arduous.

Being naturally indolent, I rely on these individuals to propel me. Whilst travelling back home, I began working on a slide presentation.
I took a train to Haneda and then an underground train from Fukuoka Airport, which felt like a gateway to everywhere in a sense.

I am a little bit late for tomorrow's deadline.

Ideas, come on down!

A little cloudy.
Yesterday I got the flu vaccine, which is not as painful as the new coronavirus vaccine.
It's not a muscle shot, so that's not surprising, but it's still very different.

As usual, time is running out.
I have to give a small talk tomorrow, and I have to submit my slides for the talk in advance, which are due by the end of this week.
I had hoped that this week would be a bit of a mountain and I would be able to come up with something when the time came, but I have not been able to come up with any ideas.
I have woken up in the middle of the night many times in the past few days thinking about the content of my talk, but nothing has come to mind.

The concept of the disease has not settled down, and the introduction of genetic analysis has made the story of a few years ago even more complicated.
The points of discussion are now mixing gross and microscopic findings with genetic information, and the question is what is most important for diagnosis.

Gross findings, including imaging findings, are most important for direct access to the lesion, especially for surgical treatment.
However, the microscopic findings that we pathologists observe and diagnose are necessary to consider the development and progression of the disease, and in the past, the combination of gross and microscopic findings was sufficient to identify most diseases.
However, with the advent of genetic analysis, this trend has changed drastically.
Even if the disease looks the same to the naked eye and microscopically, the pathogenesis of the disease may differ depending on the type of genetic abnormality.
Even if the treatment is the same and the findings are the same, it means that we do not know what will happen in the future.

I was just summarizing what I'm going to talk about and my thoughts started to fall a little bit, so I'm going to stop writing today's blog and start working on tomorrow's slides.

It's me or society that I have to think about.

 It seems that the Palestinian and Israeli issues have not been able to find a common ground, but we must not forget that the lives of the people there are being cut short every day.
I do not know what to think or send out from the safety of Japan, but I have to think about something along with the Ukrainian issue.
I don't care where a citizen like me stands, but I don't think it will be much different for the Japanese government.
It is no wonder that even the U.S. has no effective measures to take.

Even if we separate Palestinians from Jews, armed groups from ordinary people, armed forces from oil, and so on, it is almost impossible to rejoin the threads once they are unraveled.
Nevertheless, we need to think about it, or rather, people need to think about it.

While great things are happening in the world, we are also troubled by trivial things.
A mere prick of a rose thorn on the tip of our finger can make us feel helplessly painful and even desperate.
Then, for example, whether or not to vaccinate a child is a big deal, and from someone else's point of view, it is just a matter of doing what you want.

We are given a limited amount of time, and we have to live within that time, thinking about food, clothing, shelter, and this and that.
If we stop doing that, even if it is a problem that comes back to us, the value of our existence as human beings becomes much lighter.

Eye of the pathologist

 

 As I was leaving work after half a day's work, I saw a clump of white clover growing next to the driveway to the office.
Suddenly, I remembered seeing on television that there was a person who was a master at finding four-leaf clovers.
Come to think of it, I am a pathologist, so I thought it would be easier than I thought to recognize a four-leaf clover, and when I put my face a little closer to it, it was easy to find.
I don't know the trick, but I guess I have a pathologist's eye, or something like that, and somewhere I'm unconsciously doing something in common with finding tumor cells in my usual microscope work.

Yesterday there was a reunion of the pathology department in Tokyo.
I (Ken Koro) am a graduate of a certain medical university and went from there to the pathology department of another university.
There was a wonderful professor who trained me in pathology when I was a student, and I wanted to become his disciple, but he was then an assistant professor (now known as an associate professor, and later became a professor in another university) and could not take care of me until I graduated, so he said he would introduce me to the pathology department of his former school, and I went there. So I went to his school's pathology department.

The pathology department I was introduced to is a prestigious and traditional department, and although I thought it was an inappropriate place to be from the time I entered until now, I have known it for more than 30 years.
This year, for the first time in a long time, they held a face-to-face reunion, so I attended.
I had not seen them for a while because of the Corona disaster, but some of the teachers have passed away, and those who retired have aged considerably.
On the other hand, a junior professor who is one year younger than me has become a professor in some university, and I feel like I am the only one who has not aged well.

Anyway, while I was standing around chatting with people I had never met before, including teachers I was indebted to and young people I had never seen before, or just exchanged nods with, I was thinking about something superfluous: the feeling of distance is something that will never change with time.
After the meeting, we had a drink and talked about this and that with the people we often drink with.
I asked them to listen to some of my complaints, which was quite helpful as we talked about how to avoid the same kind of relationship problems that everyone else has.
Although we are all alone, it is a blessing to have friends who listen to our complaints.
Pathologists are not alone.

It's already past mid-October, or so I've noticed, and now it's already 2023!

 

 Yesterday I received the seventh dose of the new Corona vaccine.
Like last time (May), it was the Omicron strain XBB.1.5.
After all, I didn't get the disease even without wearing a mask, so it may be unnecessary, but I have no cost to bear and no right to be causal about it.
As usual, my left shoulder is still sore and heavy overnight, but that's the way it is.
I also have a flu shot, but I will get it next week.

I was surprised to see that it was already mid to late October, but when I looked at the calendar, the number 2023 jumped out at me.
The year is 2023 and it is already towards the end of the year.
As someone who considers "2001: A Space Odyssey" to be the greatest science fiction movie ever made, I even think that I may have lived a little too long to be more than 20 years past the year that was set.

I have heard that the speed at which we perceive time can be compared to age times time.
In other words, a one-year-old is moving at only one kilometer per hour, but at age 20 he is moving at 20 kilometers per hour, and at age 60 he is moving at 60 kilometers per hour.
If I were 90 years old, I would be walking at 90 kilometers per hour, so maybe every day will go by in the blink of an eye.
In another 10 years, I will also be running at 70 kilometers per hour, which will be much more comfortable.
But what will I be running for?

Those of us who lived in the Age of the Rising Right, when one new thing after another appeared before our eyes, may have wanted to live as long as possible, thinking that something exciting would happen in the future, but it is difficult to look forward to a future in which AI will rule the world.
Now that even marriage and child-rearing have become obscure necessities for humanity, what should we strive for and be motivated by?

No matter how fast we run, we may grow old before we know it without ever finding that goal.