The picture was taken on May the first, the day after the 3rd ceremony of him having gone to the other side of this world. My mom and I went to the highest hill of the island to farm, and this year we were so lucky it was all nice and dry because it had been raining in the past two years in a row.
I am not even sure if I could complete my father's story in just one entry, but one thing for sure I could say is that our relationship was wild until right before he passed away. You may ask how much, and I would say it was enough me breaking his leg with my Judo move and him hitting my head with his fist right after he got his leg broken. (2022/01/05 addition: and his ribs, I heard from my mother.)
I remember the flash right in front of my head when he did it. Damn dad.
Quite honestly, I thought he hated me (I believed he really did at the time) and that I had to kill him in order to be alive.
Recently, I talked with my mom about it and she told me that my father and I were too much alike, and he sometimes became too emotional when it comes to me. He was all cool with my brother because he could step back, that's what my mom said.
After the fight we almost never had talked with each other, but only once he talked to me and asked me a favor except for one other time later, and it was after I graduated the high school miraculously. I was thinking to study some more for another year to go to the better college I wanted to go because the college I could go was the least I wanted to go.
This was the first time my father asked me a favor to go to the college I passed accidentally.
(Picture: After me cutting the grasses, my mom chased me farming the land with an tractor. She used to ask my father or my uncle who gave me a ray the other day when she needed to use tractor, but right after my father passed away, she asked me to tell her how to use it by herself, and voila, she became able to ride one. She challenges new things even in the age of 67, and now she's pretty content with riding it by herself.)
During the college, my father and I barely talked to each other, and I was about to graduate. Right after the graduation ceremony, I was preparing for the party when I got a phone call from my mom. She was so upset that she couldn't make any sense to me, and it took me almost 20 minutes to figure what she was trying to tell me (She used to be a nurse who even used to grab patients' heart directly when she was working at the emergency room, so I have never seen her so upset). She said, my father puked black blood in the morning, and was told that he had a lung cancer which was in the terminal state.
He took a medical examination a half year before we found out his cancer, so this meant that the cancer invaded his 3 fifth of his lungs in half a year. The doctor sentenced 95% of death probability in the next half year. He was like, fighting with a pawn against a rook and queen.
I called my brother and ordered to move out from his apartment and go home right away.
Three days later, we both went home and were announced that he was not going to take any cure for his cancer from his own mouth. Three relative families then gathered to say farewell a little early of his death by visiting several hot springs around the town.
(Picture: It's the next morning of farming, but the field after cultivation. The tractor had a trouble so I did the half of it, but she says she is going to plant some red beans and stuff. She said red beans are really no fuss, so they fit to the elders in the island, plus she already came up with a marketing idea to sell.)
We stayed one of the hot spring spots we visited and had a party after bathing, and after a bit while I found a Go board in the place. I asked my father if he could play and he replied that he never played but he could. I thought it could be a revenge match to beat him up in a peaceful way ever, so I drank a glass of water to sober up and played against him with all of my knowledge, but it turned out he occupied 3 fourth of the board and defeated me completely.
I asked him how he learned to play without playing, and he answered "when I stayed in hotels on business trips (he used to trip half the time for his job), I woke up at 4 o'clock in the morning and had nothing to do, so I read every single article on papers but I still had some more time to kill. So, I traced moves of Go on the paper and that's how I learned." So he was saying he learned from just watching the diagram like below pic.
When I think about him, he was incredibly smart. I myself have somewhat confident on my intelligence, but after his death he became someone I could never get over with.
Actually it took him for 4 years to graduate from junior high (in Japan, it's normally 3 years). The reason was that he used to help dragnet fish boats when the net got caught in the bottom of the sea in about 15 meter depth. He went to the bottom with holding an anchor, and one of the relatives who used to do the same thing said "blood used to come out of our ears".
After the junior high, he went to a marine technical school, and graduated as a top student. Then he became a sailor in Nihon Yusen, one of the biggest companies in Japan at the time. He indeed was a top student, but my grandpa had to go to the school to apologize for his mischief for several times. My grandpa brought sea urchin bottles every time he went, but his mischief was like "to help junior students who got beaten up by the senior from quitting the school all by himself, he escaped from the school involving all 2 younger grades of students". My grandpa almost never brag about anything, but he looked so honored when he was saying about this tale.
When he was a sailor, he went all around the world, and sometimes he had to run away from mafias with 10 thousand dollars which he got from gambling in his belly band (it's the pic below underneath the Easter eggs. The brothers of the family have each for them in difference color, and now my father's is mine.). My mom used to say that he spent all the money as soon as he earned at the time.
The other story that I can brag about my father's smartness goes like this. He met my mom in Tokyo and my brother was born in Tokyo. He said it's unbearable to leave the first born because the child (my brother) was so cute, so he quit the job as a sailor and changed his jobs several time. He finally became an electrician near the hometown, and he took all the licenses he could take in the field. He was one of only 10 people who had them all in our entire country.
When my brother was in the high school, my father was working on a license and I remember him asking my brother to teach him Pythagorean theorem. I got really surprised by him asking a favor to his child, because he was really severe to us.
(Picture: Me wood chopping. My mom wanted me to chop a tree she got from removing a tree which was leaning to our house. It's tiring, so just one for a day.)
However, the farewell party was not persuasive enough to give him up for my mom. She asked my brother and me to search for remedies to cure his cancer. My brother just became a doctor and I could search the Internet a little at the time, and we found chitosan and bracket fungus. She then persuaded my father to drink 15 tablets at each meal. I guess my father couldn't deny her feelings, but it would have been really painful to drink that much of medicine after meal.
A half year later, a pleasant surprise happened and his cancer once disappeared. I don't know if the remedies actually work or not, but I saw X-ray picture myself. I couldn't find a spot on his lung.
Although, the death never loosen the prey once captured so easily. Three months after that, my father once again was sentenced death in half a year. I guess it was a curse of the doctor who got humiliated by his recovery without any conventional medical treatment.
He was probably glad right when the cancer was gone once. He decided to do whatever it takes to cure this time. He took radiation therapy and chemotherapy, and finally agreed to take the cancer away surgically.
My brother was allowed to attend the surgery because of his doctor license. He told me that my father was cut in half from his neck to the belly and 3 fifth of his lungs were removed, and the surgery succeeded.
When he came back conscious, the nurse at the time asked him what his dream was, and he answered "I wanna be a fisherman". The nurse laughed at him nihilistically, probably because she thought he would never make it.
A while later the surgery, he quit his job but got a deal to let the company use his name for monthly payment so that the company could retain the criteria to receive orders from the country. And, he got a ship (not a boat!) for 80 thousand US dollars with the money he got from selling the house in a city we used to live and went back to the island, and he started fishing.
My mother used to say his lung capacity was 8 liters, just because there was no way to measure more than that. He lost the 3 fifth of his lung, but it only meant he still had around 3 liters or possibly more. I don't know if the measurement works like that, but he surely had enough strength to be a fisherman for over the next 10 years, on and off when he almost died and my mom brought him back using her nursing experiences and all of her willpower. His method of making fishing gear actually works very well and fishermen in the island still use it.
While he went through all this, I was away from home for so long, almost enough to forget about my father, and it was when my mom called. About a half year before that day, she called me up when he was about to die and I said to her "call me when he's completely dead", but this time, she was crying and asked me "please say the final farewell to your father while he is still conscious".
With about 5 years of absence from home, I didn't know if I could express myself well before him and I was all prepared for a fight. When he saw my face, he went "he hasn't changed at all, you see dear? He hasn't changed at all!" with the biggest smile I never saw before in my entire life, and his smile broke the switch of my eyes and tears and roars came out against my will.
At the time I first wrote this story in Japanese, I still couldn't stop crying. And this was the second and last time he asked me a favor, "Could you take my ship?". I have been in Tokyo and couldn't decide right away, and I had to decline the offer on this point, saying not all families could find the patriarch. Smiling sadly to me, he gave me some orders after his death and I was almost dehydrated for just three hours, then I came back to Tokyo.
An year later, when I went back home with the bad news at 5 o'clock in the morning, I was a little relieved seeing his tranquil face.
When I went back home this April, my mom told me that right after I left, which is an year before his death, she said to him "dear, I can live by myself. I can handle", and he was so glad like he never did. That's my father, and I heard from my mom he used to say "I did everything I wanted".
(Picture: Me hitting the tree with an ax. I learned that the impact from hitting something really hard is a good workout to my forearm. I think I can use that in some ways.)
I said to my mom that I want to eat fresh salmon with the lettuce she made, and she made the dinner in the picture. Chicken with bamboo shoots she gathered from somewhere really was good with alcohol as well. The little white things right behind the beer are bums with red bean jam. They are so small and fit to little plates for Buddhist ceremony.
My brother built his doctor's office with 3 million U.S. dollar liabilities around his wife's home and there's no way he could make it back to home, so I became the 4th patriarch. Well, this family started off from the branch one, why not the second son takes it.
Two days after my father's death, his ceremony was on my birthday. I felt something hatched in me. When I talked to the carpenter uncle, I said "my father was always right" and he went "you two are so..." and couldn't finish the sentence, with tears.
In the future, when I go to the other side, I wonder what kind of expression I can make on my face when I meet him. The day I am writing this article, I saw a dream of my father's death ceremony. I don't know if it was because I went back home for the third ceremony, but the fortune tells us it's the implication of independence from parents. But I wonder what I could be independent from. When I meet him, I would just kneel before him and apologize, for I couldn't achieve anything before he died even though I am so alike him, and for I couldn't take his ship.
For the rest of my life at some point, I would try to buy a ship and name "ship name the second" after my father's ship. The name was taken from my mom's name and his first grand son's. Let's say I get one, is it just for my self-satisfaction? I don't want to think that way.
