Great figures who went through “Life-threatening illness”

Figures who went through this

• Date Masamune — The Man Who Played Tough to the End

  "If you make a statue of me after I die, make both eyes right." Ashamed of his one blind eye, this man sent a robe to the mother who is said to have poisoned him. When his head was on the line, he brought up that eye himself. The last thing he left his daughter was a reply that stopped after one line.

• Higuchi Ichiyo — The Woman Who Said the Roadside Was Fine

  "My whole life will be torn and torn again, until I fall by the roadside as a beggar." At twenty-one, she said this to a man she visited under a false name. She asked for loans and was turned down, she cursed in her diary, and she did not believe it when people called her a genius: the twenty-four years of Higuchi Ichiyo.

• Hirooka Asako — The Woman Who Never Leaned on Anyone

  At about twelve, she was forbidden to read. She held up the house she married into, went down into a coal mine, and joined the people building a university for women. On Christmas Day at sixty-two, she asked to be placed among the children being baptized.

• Hitomi Kinue — Aloof? I Never Could Be

  "When I lose, what kind of face will the people of Japan have when they look at me?" At nineteen, setting out alone for Sweden, that was what frightened her most. The story of the first Japanese woman to win an Olympic medal, who could never stay aloof.

• Ishikawa Takuboku — The Honest Liar

  "Back then I told lots of lies," he wrote in one of his own poems. He missed his own wedding, lived on loans from friends, and kept his family waiting. Then he began to write only plain words. His way of living, though, stayed the same to the end.

• Kano Jigoro — The Man Who Never Said "I'm Tired"

  "How do you do that move?" Every time he asked, the young man got thrown instead of answered. He was small, hated losing, and left the whole household to his wife. Even on a ship at seventy-seven, it is said, he answered that it did not hurt. The life of the father of judo.

• Masaoka Shiki — The Greedy Invalid

  "My sickbed of six feet: this is my world." He sent his friend the bill for the eel, was turned down by the pupil he chose, and screamed when it hurt. Even so, five days before he died, he looked at his garden that morning and cheered on a natto seller. The story of a greedy haiku poet.

• Mori Ogai — The Man Who Wanted to Be Taken Seriously

  A twenty-four-year-old army doctor turned down a dance at a masked ball: "I am a foreigner. I cannot dance." Two and a half years later, a woman followed him from Germany to Japan. The story of a man who got truly angry about how others saw him, and who in the end turned down every title.

• Ogino Ginko — The Woman Who Opened the Door and Walked Out

  "I submitted my application again, and again it was turned down." Four times, a woman was refused a place in the exam for doctors, only because she was a woman. When the door finally opened, she would one day walk out of it on her own. The earnest, hard-to-sum-up life of the first woman in Japan to pass the exam and become a doctor.

• Okuma Shigenobu — The Man Who Said He Didn't Mind Losing It

  "The leg I should have cut off decades ago, and I managed to keep it until that day." A man who lost his right leg to a bomb said this. He called being thrown out of school a happiness, said even the illness that nearly killed him was not useless, and said even a lost leg was no great loss. This is the story of his brave front, and of the people who held it up.