Waterwalker #2
The Intersection of My Sister's Death and My Birth
My sister, Mayumi, just two and a half, was unusually talkative, likely influenced by our older brother, Ken-ichi, who was two years her senior. She'd gently stroke my mother's pregnant belly, saying, "Hey, come out soon," as if eagerly awaiting my arrival.
With a four-year-old and a two-year-old to care for, my mother's pregnancy slowed her movements in those final weeks. On the early afternoon of August 5, 1951, Mayumi was alone outside our front door. Ken-ichi had gone elsewhere.
My sister, Mayumi, just two and a half, was unusually talkative, likely influenced by our older brother, Ken-ichi, who was two years her senior. She'd gently stroke my mother's pregnant belly, saying, "Hey, come out soon," as if eagerly awaiting my arrival.
With a four-year-old and a two-year-old to care for, my mother's pregnancy slowed her movements in those final weeks. On the early afternoon of August 5, 1951, Mayumi was alone outside our front door. Ken-ichi had gone elsewhere.
The neighbor's mother called out to Mayumi, "Mayumi-chan, come to my house. I made a lot of delicious manjus (steam bread with sweat been paste)" She nodded, happily accepting the invitation, and indulged in the manjus she'd never tasted before.
Barely an hour after she came home, Mayumi vomited in the eight-tatami room. My mother quickly cleaned it up, initially thinking Mayumi had simply overeaten. But when the vomiting continued, she grew concerned. Food poisoning crossed her mind, but her advanced pregnancy limited her mobility.
Back then, when a child fell ill, my father would carry them on his back, racing to the hospital a kilometer away. But on that Sunday, he was away for work. My mother, in her final month of pregnancy, couldn't carry Mayumi. Fear gripped her as she tried to comfort her child, but the relentless vomiting and Mayumi's cries of agony overwhelmed her.
She kept saying, “Mother, help me, help me.” In 1951, telephones were a luxury, found only in the homes of the wealthy, or in shops and businesses. Our house sat atop a steep hill, and the nearest store with a red telephone was 400 meters down. But with her pregnancy hindering her movement, Ken-ichi gone, and Mayumi's condition worsening, my mother was helpless.
Mayumi passed away around eight that night. Her death was so swift, my mother couldn't comprehend it, leaving her in utter despair. She and Ken-ichi sat in silence beside Mayumi's body. Ken-ichi's guilt for leaving her alone that day still haunts him.
Born with a mental disability and color blindness.
When I started elementary school, I disliked my teacher and struggled to connect with my classmates. As a result, I didn't want to go to school.
One day, I got into under a desk, crawled across the floor, opened the vent door under a wooden wall, and walked out of the classroom to play by myself. A boy in my class alerted the teacher to my escape. I dug up a frog that was hibernating in the soil by the pond near the school grounds, placed it on my palm, and watched it. The teacher found me and scolded me so severely that I cried out loud.
Bored with the teacher's incomprehensible lesson, I asked myself, “Why do I have to go to school?” I wondered if everyone could understand what the teacher was saying. Next day, the teacher told my parents, “I think Tomio's intelligence quotient is probably around 80. There is no special class for retarded children in our elementary school. He is likely to be bullied by other children with higher intelligence quotients, so please watch him carefully. Of course, I will also pay attention to Tomio-chan.”
This was blurted out to me by my mother when I turned 40, and I realized vaguely at the time, “Well, I was a retarded child,” but I also developed a sense of resistance to it at the same time.
During my first-grade art class, I went outside and drew the woods surrounding my elementary school. Later, my teacher, who lived near our house, came over with my drawing. "Tomio-chan uses colors strangely," she told my parents. "This yellow, I think it's supposed to be a bamboo grove. And the flowers, they should be pink, but he painted them gray. Maybe Tomio-chan has some kind of mental problem."
I was home and overheard their conversation, but I didn't understand what she meant by "a mental problem." My parents had always struggled with my behavior and speech, and they suspected I was mentally challenged. They didn't know how to respond to the teacher.
After she left, my mother gave me a brutal coloring lesson. She placed twenty-four crayons on the tatami mat, their names hidden. I had to arrange them to match the color names written on the crayon container. I kept making mistakes, and each time, my mother pinched my cheeks in frustration. When I still failed, she pinched the soft skin of my inner thigh with such force that I cried out in agony, rolling on the tatami mats. But my mother dismissed my pain as an act of defiance. "Stop lying," she yelled. "Why do you rebel? Do it again!" No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't do it. It wasn't rebellion; it was colorblindness. I was born colorblind due to a gene I inherited from my mother.
My elementary school teacher in the 1950s had no knowledge of colorblindness and relied on subjective judgment. My teacher had such a hard time with me. She assumed that my mind was the cause of my retardation and that I was lying to annoy my parents because of what I told honestly. The teacher's subjectivity had a strong influence on my parents.
The training session lasted about a week. It was nothing but torture for me. In hindsight, it was both mental and physical abuse. After a week, my mother was disappointed that I kept failing at the color guessing exercise, so she finally pinched my inner thighs as hard as she could and said to me strongly, “You're hopeless. You're no longer good enough. Do what you want! I was in so much pain that I rolled around on the tatami mats again, sobbing and terrified, thinking, “I'm going to be thrown away.”
After this incident, I was afraid that my mother would hate me. I had to do something to prevent her from kicking me out of the house. But I didn't know what to do. This seemed to bother my mother, and she would scold me severely for even the most trivial things. My fear that she might abandon me was so strong that no matter how much she scolded me, I never left her side.
Since that time, I think that the desire to somehow be liked by my mother has been applied to other people, leading to a sense of wanting to be liked by others and not to be disliked, which could have led me to trust people more easily.
When I was in fourth grade, my homeroom teacher brought the Ishihara color blindness test chart to class and tested each of us. That's when I first learned I was red-green colorblind, or had red-green color vision deficiency.
The teacher was awful. Because I couldn't read the chart correctly, she asked a few of my male classmates with normal vision, "Can you guys read this chart?" They had no problem.
Then, they said, "Can't you read this easy chart, Tomio-chan?" and started laughing. The teacher joined in, saying, "That's right. Tomio-chan is colorblind." Hearing her, they jeered, loudly proclaiming, "Ah huh, Tomio is a helpless colorblind."
The teacher left me there and went back to the teachers' room with the test chart. She also came to our house and told my parents I was red-green colorblind.
My father went to the city library and discovered that color blindness is genetic. He learned that while he was normal, my mother, who appeared to have normal vision, carried the gene. He blamed her for my condition.
Later, my mother told me, "You know, Tomio, before you were born, you chose me to be your mother. So, your color blindness was your choice." She tried to absolve herself of responsibility.
With a four-year-old and a two-year-old to care for, my mother's pregnancy slowed her movements in those final weeks. On the early afternoon of August 5, 1951, Mayumi was alone outside our front door. Ken-ichi had gone elsewhere.
My sister, Mayumi, just two and a half, was unusually talkative, likely influenced by our older brother, Ken-ichi, who was two years her senior. She'd gently stroke my mother's pregnant belly, saying, "Hey, come out soon," as if eagerly awaiting my arrival.
With a four-year-old and a two-year-old to care for, my mother's pregnancy slowed her movements in those final weeks. On the early afternoon of August 5, 1951, Mayumi was alone outside our front door. Ken-ichi had gone elsewhere.
The neighbor's mother called out to Mayumi, "Mayumi-chan, come to my house. I made a lot of delicious manjus (steam bread with sweat been paste)" She nodded, happily accepting the invitation, and indulged in the manjus she'd never tasted before.
Barely an hour after she came home, Mayumi vomited in the eight-tatami room. My mother quickly cleaned it up, initially thinking Mayumi had simply overeaten. But when the vomiting continued, she grew concerned. Food poisoning crossed her mind, but her advanced pregnancy limited her mobility.
Back then, when a child fell ill, my father would carry them on his back, racing to the hospital a kilometer away. But on that Sunday, he was away for work. My mother, in her final month of pregnancy, couldn't carry Mayumi. Fear gripped her as she tried to comfort her child, but the relentless vomiting and Mayumi's cries of agony overwhelmed her.
She kept saying, “Mother, help me, help me.” In 1951, telephones were a luxury, found only in the homes of the wealthy, or in shops and businesses. Our house sat atop a steep hill, and the nearest store with a red telephone was 400 meters down. But with her pregnancy hindering her movement, Ken-ichi gone, and Mayumi's condition worsening, my mother was helpless.
Born with a mental disability and color blindness.
When I started elementary school, I disliked my teacher and struggled to connect with my classmates. As a result, I didn't want to go to school.
One day, I got into under a desk, crawled across the floor, opened the vent door under a wooden wall, and walked out of the classroom to play by myself. A boy in my class alerted the teacher to my escape. I dug up a frog that was hibernating in the soil by the pond near the school grounds, placed it on my palm, and watched it. The teacher found me and scolded me so severely that I cried out loud.
Bored with the teacher's incomprehensible lesson, I asked myself, “Why do I have to go to school?” I wondered if everyone could understand what the teacher was saying. Next day, the teacher told my parents, “I think Tomio's intelligence quotient is probably around 80. There is no special class for retarded children in our elementary school. He is likely to be bullied by other children with higher intelligence quotients, so please watch him carefully. Of course, I will also pay attention to Tomio-chan.”
This was blurted out to me by my mother when I turned 40, and I realized vaguely at the time, “Well, I was a retarded child,” but I also developed a sense of resistance to it at the same time.
During my first-grade art class, I went outside and drew the woods surrounding my elementary school. Later, my teacher, who lived near our house, came over with my drawing. "Tomio-chan uses colors strangely," she told my parents. "This yellow, I think it's supposed to be a bamboo grove. And the flowers, they should be pink, but he painted them gray. Maybe Tomio-chan has some kind of mental problem."
I was home and overheard their conversation, but I didn't understand what she meant by "a mental problem." My parents had always struggled with my behavior and speech, and they suspected I was mentally challenged. They didn't know how to respond to the teacher.
After she left, my mother gave me a brutal coloring lesson. She placed twenty-four crayons on the tatami mat, their names hidden. I had to arrange them to match the color names written on the crayon container. I kept making mistakes, and each time, my mother pinched my cheeks in frustration. When I still failed, she pinched the soft skin of my inner thigh with such force that I cried out in agony, rolling on the tatami mats. But my mother dismissed my pain as an act of defiance. "Stop lying," she yelled. "Why do you rebel? Do it again!" No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't do it. It wasn't rebellion; it was colorblindness. I was born colorblind due to a gene I inherited from my mother.
My elementary school teacher in the 1950s had no knowledge of colorblindness and relied on subjective judgment. My teacher had such a hard time with me. She assumed that my mind was the cause of my retardation and that I was lying to annoy my parents because of what I told honestly. The teacher's subjectivity had a strong influence on my parents.
The training session lasted about a week. It was nothing but torture for me. In hindsight, it was both mental and physical abuse. After a week, my mother was disappointed that I kept failing at the color guessing exercise, so she finally pinched my inner thighs as hard as she could and said to me strongly, “You're hopeless. You're no longer good enough. Do what you want! I was in so much pain that I rolled around on the tatami mats again, sobbing and terrified, thinking, “I'm going to be thrown away.”
After this incident, I was afraid that my mother would hate me. I had to do something to prevent her from kicking me out of the house. But I didn't know what to do. This seemed to bother my mother, and she would scold me severely for even the most trivial things. My fear that she might abandon me was so strong that no matter how much she scolded me, I never left her side.
Since that time, I think that the desire to somehow be liked by my mother has been applied to other people, leading to a sense of wanting to be liked by others and not to be disliked, which could have led me to trust people more easily.
When I was in fourth grade, my homeroom teacher brought the Ishihara color blindness test chart to class and tested each of us. That's when I first learned I was red-green colorblind, or had red-green color vision deficiency.
The teacher was awful. Because I couldn't read the chart correctly, she asked a few of my male classmates with normal vision, "Can you guys read this chart?" They had no problem.
Then, they said, "Can't you read this easy chart, Tomio-chan?" and started laughing. The teacher joined in, saying, "That's right. Tomio-chan is colorblind." Hearing her, they jeered, loudly proclaiming, "Ah huh, Tomio is a helpless colorblind."
The teacher left me there and went back to the teachers' room with the test chart. She also came to our house and told my parents I was red-green colorblind.
My father went to the city library and discovered that color blindness is genetic. He learned that while he was normal, my mother, who appeared to have normal vision, carried the gene. He blamed her for my condition.
Later, my mother told me, "You know, Tomio, before you were born, you chose me to be your mother. So, your color blindness was your choice." She tried to absolve herself of responsibility.
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