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I published this blog post on 2 February, but held back from sharing it until my mother was safely home. Now that she has been discharged, I’d like to share it:
https://godspeed2u.vivaldi.net/2026/02/02/streets-of-fire-three-dekopon-and-my-rock-n-roll-mum/
My mother, who was hospitalised for a spinal compression fracture on 16 March, has been safely discharged. After 71 days of treatment and rehabilitation, she is finally back home. I am deeply proud of her perseverance and hard work.
Yesterday I visited my mum in hospital. With a social worker, her care manager, two nurses, and her occupational therapist, we talked through the support she’ll need at home for discharge. Watching so many professionals bring their care and expertise together so that an 82-year-old can spend her later years in calm and dignity was unexpectedly moving. It was a small meeting, but I came away feeling — quietly, but surely — that Japan’s future will be better.
(Tonight Is What It Means to Be Young)
Streets of Fire (1984)
Music produced by Jim Steinman
Closing theme: “Tonight Is What It Means to Be Young”
When my mother was transferred to a rehabilitation hospital on a cold day this January, I brought her a small present: three dekopon, her favourite citrus.
She looked at them, smiled, and told me to take one home.
Good things are never meant to be hoarded in her world — they are meant to be shared. That has always been her way: divide the last piece in two, make sure someone else eats first, quietly take the smaller share for herself.
That night, I peeled the dekopon at my kitchen table.
The first segment was absurdly sweet — bright, almost electric.
It tasted nothing like hospital corridors and paperwork. It tasted of all the years she had quietly kept our household running: the meals, the “have you eaten?”, the way she always pushed the best bit across the table to someone else.
Somewhere between the bitterness of the pith and the sweetness of the flesh, a line from Streets of Fire ran through my head: tonight is what it means to be young, and before you know it, it’s gone.
For someone in their twenties, “tonight” is a flash of neon — a single bright scene before the credits roll. For my 82-year-old mother, it has become something else: not a fleeting party, but a single point where all the years compress. Youth and age, gain and loss, all folded into one moment at a kitchen table with a piece of fruit.
And I realised: my 82-year-old mother is living inside a Jim Steinman song.
If you know the film Streets of Fire and its closing song, “Tonight Is What It Means to Be Young”, you’ll remember the world it paints: a city that feels permanently midnight, neon and rain on the streets, engines growling somewhere under the music, two people who have already taken more than their share of blows and still choose to walk back into the fire.
It is not a polite song.
The drums don’t ask permission; the modulation hits like a motorbike coming over the hill. The singer throws everything into a promise that is half love song, half battle cry.
We are surrounded, we’re exhausted, everything is stacked against us — and even so, tonight we are going to burn as if we were young and invincible.
That is exactly the kind of world my mother walks through.
On paper, there is nothing romantic about her situation.
At 82, she has lived with schizophrenia for more than 30 years and developed drug-induced Parkinsonism from the medication.
One eye is blind from age-related macular degeneration.
Her fingers are twisted and painful with Heberden’s nodes.
Part of her intestine has been removed after bowel obstruction.
Her right breast is gone after cancer.
Her spine is fragile from osteoporosis; this January she suffered her second compression fracture and lost more of her height.
Add high blood pressure, regular medication, and the long shadow of 3.11 — the Fukushima nuclear accident — with years of low-dose exposure in the background.
A true “department store of illnesses”. All those diagnoses stack up like walls of bone and scar and pain around her.
Our family home, which my parents worked so hard to buy, is also gone now — for reasons entirely separate from the earthquake, but painful all the same.
On the chart, she looks like someone who has every excuse to lie down and stay there.
Instead, on the very first day she arrived at the new clinic, she started walking practice.
Not a graceful stroll: the kind of raw, shaky first steps where you can see every gram of effort. The occupational therapist stands close by, and my mother grips the parallel bars as if they were the neck of an electric guitar.
She is not doing it because she believes some bright future is waiting for her. There is no promise of recovery, no guarantee that today’s effort will be rewarded in any measurable way. She walks because walking is the best thing she can do with the body she has, today. That is enough reason for her.
If you have seen the last scene of Streets of Fire, you’ll remember the band playing full power in a world that is still broken, still dangerous, but held back for a few minutes by sheer volume.
That is what her face looks like during rehab: not comfortable, not resigned, but absolutely committed to one more verse.
She also has a very clear reason.
There are two granddaughters — my nieces.
For the elder one, she spent years knitting a complex lace sweater by hand: the kind of pattern you can only manage when your hands are steady and your eyesight still co-operates. She started it when the girl was still an infant; this year, with her granddaughter in her final year of high school and about to graduate this spring, she finally managed to give it to her.
The younger granddaughter’s sweater is still unfinished.
“I can’t possibly die before I finish hers as well.”
In Steinman’s universe, heroes stand in the fire for someone they love, with guitars howling underneath and impossible promises on their tongues. They talk about dreams that are small and fragile and still somehow everything they have.
My mother’s version is quieter, but it’s the same contract.
Her battlefield is a hospital corridor. Her weapon is a pair of knitting needles waiting for her at home. Her dream is modest — two sweaters, a clean kitchen, a grandson and granddaughters who know they were loved — and it is absolutely all she has, and all she needs.
No one would blame a woman with that history, at her age, for deciding to take it easy, to skip the pain of rehab and accept the wheelchair. She knows that. She walks anyway.
There is always a choice: make things worse, or make them a little better.
She keeps choosing “better”, one painful step at a time.
Our finances over the last couple of years would look, from the outside, like an opening shot from the film: a city where the lights are going out one by one.
Household income has fallen to roughly a quarter of what it was.
Both my mother and I have lost a great deal of weight — not as a lifestyle choice, but as a side effect of simply having less.
Even so, when she talks about the future, she does not use the language of despair. She speaks in the language of work to be finished.
From her point of view, the equation is simple:
if she can come home and take on as much of the housework as she used to, then I will have time to continue my research and writing, and if I can keep publishing, perhaps the world her granddaughters — and their children, and their descendants — inherit will be a little kinder than the one she grew up in.
She believes it — completely.
It is an outrageous belief, very much in the Steinman tradition: a ronin’s son in Fukushima, convinced that his equations can nudge the structure of the world by half a degree.
She believes it.
And because she believes it so fiercely, I have no choice but to try to live up to it.
Sitting by her bed, watching her practised determination, I find myself thinking that this — more than any theory — is what a non-fungible soul looks like. You cannot swap her out for another statistically similar woman and get the same story. The trajectory is unique.
What it really means to be young
I want my mother to spend her remaining years quietly, with a full heart and as little pain as possible. In my ideal version of the story, her late life would be peaceful: good books, small treats, time to nap in the afternoon sun.
The woman in front of me in the hospital bed was not peaceful at all.
Even on the ward, with monitors humming and curtains half closed, there was a hard light in her eyes. Her body is down to around 40 kg and still falling, but her heart is on fire.
A small woman in her eighties, 40 kg and falling, standing up in a hospital, determined to support her son who insists on nudging the structure of the world with his equations.
So this is what it really means to be young.
When I close my eyes, that one scene is sharper than any frame from Streets of Fire: no neon, no stage, no crowd. Just a small, scarred body forcing itself upright one more time, because someone she loves is still trying to push the world by half a degree and she refuses to let him do it alone. One day, the walls that pen her in — bone and muscle and pain — will finally come down; when they do, I suspect she’ll be moving faster than any dream.
So this is what it really means to be young.
https://godspeed2u.vivaldi.net/2026/02/02/streets-of-fire-three-dekopon-and-my-rock-n-roll-mum/
#Fukushima #FukushimaJustLife #JimSteinman #RockNRoll #Schizophrenia #StreetsOfFire
I was hungry, yes—but it’s been ages since I last had a freshly boiled egg, still warm in the shell.
It was so absurdly good that I polished off two without even thinking.
At last, the gas heater has arrived.
Compared with air-con, it isn’t merely warmer—it’s in a different league: proper, immediate heat.
Yes, gas costs more than electricity, but the flame has its own authority. Once you’ve felt this kind of warmth, there’s no going back.
At 14:57, I tried Apple Music Radio for the first time. The very first song it served up was Johnny Nash’s I Can See Clearly Now—immaculate timing, as though the universe had taken over the DJ booth.
It made me wonder: had I quietly crossed a small threshold without even noticing?
At 5:53 pm yesterday, **my mum—82, and living with #schizophrenia—**was taken to A&E (Accident & Emergency) and diagnosed with a spinal compression fracture.
We’re a household of two, and she has long been our quiet engine, keeping life moving so I can keep thinking; last year, especially, she carried more than her share.
All I ask now is a generous pause, a clean mending, and her coming home—in full colour.
Lunch was oshiruko.
For my mum, 82, I made it “soupy ohagi” style—glutinous rice instead of mochi—so New Year sweetness stays within reach when swallowing needs to be gentle.
And yes: it behaves beautifully with strong, bitter coffee.
Mikka Tororo (3 January) is a gentle New Year custom: tororo to settle the stomach after festive fare, and to invite a year that moves smoothly.
Tonight I made tororo soba for my mum, 82, who lives with #schizophrenia, as she keeps to a quiet spell of rest.
I grated the yam with one clear wish: long life, and a swift return to comfort and strength.
Simple food—quietly auspicious.
New Year’s aspirations — a short note for 2026.
First light, new steps.
🔗 Blog: https://godspeed2u.vivaldi.net/2025/01/02/new-years-aspirations/
Have a great new year.
March 11.
For those of us in #Fukushima, today is a day of remembrance. A day to mourn, to reflect, and to honor those lost. But it is also a day to ask hard questions about the future.
I have published a piece that demands we confront reality:
"54 Nuclear Reactors – Fire on Shaky Ground."
The choices we make now will echo for generations. The clock is already ticking.
🔗 Read here: https://godspeed2u.vivaldi.net/2025/03/11/54-nuclear-reactors-fire-on-shaky-ground/
#FukushimaJustLife | Sun. 9 Mar.
Yesterday, every choice seemed to misfire, the gears slipping, never quite catching. But a new day turns the page, offering the quiet promise of a reset.
The swiftest remedy? My mum’s smile. Wanting to see that unmistakable glow, I stopped by #Dennys, picking up her favourite meal. The moment she saw it, her face lit up—soft, radiant, effortless joy.
A simple gesture, yet enough to set the world right again. And with that, the day begins anew.
#FukushimaJustLife | Wed. 5–6 Mar.
#Fukushima City wore chic shades of British grey—clouds swirling in a pewter sky, drizzle softly blurring streetlamps, like a scene from classic cinema. Snow lingered quietly, whispering of yesterday. Yet even this grey felt celebratory.
On 5th March, after eight years, I reclaimed full independence. Mum and I raised a toast with sparkling wine from the local shop—tasting of freedom, hope, and trust.
#BeyondTheDoorstep | Mon. 3 Mar.
Hinamatsuri night, where the sky stretched wide, flecked with drifting clouds, painted in quiet strokes across the darkness. Below, city lights shimmered like distant constellations, mirroring the hush of evening. The air carried winter’s last whispers, yet under this vast expanse, all felt light.
My mum and I stood still, embracing the moment. A fleeting harmony—where winter bows, and spring begins.
Plates Full, Spirits Steady
Life’s a fine balance, and mine is a full spread. Meal records will be snapshots with titles, but everything is logged.
Behind the scenes:
🎩 Business & tax matters
🚀 New ventures
💻 Ubuntu setup
📦 Moving house
🏥 Hospital visits (Mum & me)
🗂 Admin tasks
🍃 Mum’s wellness
🌿 Allergy survival
📸 Meal logs & blog updates
Pacing differently but keeping the rhythm. More soon—stay tuned.
#Lectin-free #Snack | Tue. 25 Feb.
With the glorious Dekopon now in season, my mum, ever the enthusiast for this citrus delight, found her way back to the kitchen. Its fresh sweetness breathed new life, effortlessly lifting her spirits. In the face of the chill, a little citrus magic worked wonders. Why simply endure when you can flourish? A simple yet powerful reminder that the best things come in zesty packages.
#FukushimaJustLife #LectinFreeDiet #Diet #Food #schizophrenia
#Lectin-free #Snack | Sun. 23 Feb.
Post-workout hunger struck with the inevitability of a Shakespearean tragedy. The solution? The ever-reliable duo—almonds and dark chocolate—an effortless fix to keep things composed until I made it home.
#Fukushima City at 7 PM was cool and overcast at 4.7°C, with a light 2m/s northwesterly breeze. No rain, just a steady, composed atmosphere—perfectly in tune with the moment.
#Lectin-free #Snack | Sat. 22 Feb.
8 PM in #Fukushima—2°C, crisp and invigorating. The kind of evening that calls for something effortless yet impeccable.
A timeless duo: almonds and dark chocolate chips. Subtle, sophisticated, and never out of place. A quiet indulgence that turns a simple walk home into a moment of understated luxury.
#Lectin-free #Snack | Tue.18 Feb.
In the gentle warmth of the gym, I savoured almonds and dark chocolate—an understated yet exquisite pairing. Beyond the glass, #Fukushima’s winter scene unfolded like an artist’s masterpiece, snow settling with effortless grace. With each bite, the contrast between the cosy indoors and the crisp elegance outside felt almost poetic. A perfect pause before stepping into the serene beauty of the season.
#Fukushima City was enveloped in a soft snowstorm, as if the world had slowed down for a moment. Everything felt calm, like nature was taking a pause before the evening's change. But just when you thought it was all serene, snow made a dramatic entrance. My mum, who has #schizophrenia, is always prepared and had everything in check. As for me, with muscle soreness and nerve pain, I was ready for a rest, yet the weather kept me alert and engaged. ❄️ #FukushimaJustLife
15 Feb – Blue Skies, Clear Minds
Not a cloud in sight.
Just crisp air, sunshine, and a view that makes you pause.
After days of chaos—wild winds, freezing temps, and my mum (who has #schizophrenia) dealing with a disrupted circadian rhythm—today feels like a reset.
The warmth, the stillness, and a solid 9+ hours of sleep worked wonders.
Mum’s in her best mood yet, and I’m just soaking in this rare moment of peace.
Here’s to more days like this.
Yesterday’s #BeyondTheDoorstep
From the heart of #Fukushima City, the Zao mountain range, blanketed in snow, stretched into the distance. What once seemed like an ordinary view now feels final, knowing it’ll be the last winter scene I see here. After over a decade without a PC or smartphone, being able to capture memories with my iPhone feels bittersweet, evoking a sense of nostalgia, as though echoing Ariwara no Narihira’s poetry.