Great figures who went through “Living with a long illness”

Figures who went through this

• Kitasato Shibasaburo — The Man Who Wouldn't Listen

  "Being a doctor or a monk is no work for a grown man with arms and legs." That, it is said, was how a young man felt when he entered a medical school only as a trick. Later he snapped at his bosses, cut down his own teacher's theory, and quit with all his staff when his institute was moved to a government office. What was the one piece of advice this man who never listened finally kept?

• 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.

• Nakahama Manjiro — The Man Who Became Japanese with Chopsticks

  "We could not understand anything about them, except that they were hungry." That is how an American captain described a drifting boy in his logbook. Ten years later the boy came home having forgotten Japanese, and was accepted as Japanese because he could use two chopsticks. The life of the man known as John Manjiro, a samurai who stayed a sailor to the end.

• 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.

• Takamura Chieko — The Woman Who Could Not Show Her Work

  "There is no sky in Tokyo," she sighed. As a young woman she would hardly bring her paintings even to the man who would become her husband, and after one rejection she stopped entering exhibitions. On her last day, that same woman put into her husband's hands the paper pictures she had gathered together herself.

• Tsuda Umeko — Her Own Country's Language

  My hands and feet are tied. I cannot hear, and I cannot speak. A seventeen-year-old girl wrote this from inside her own family's house, in the country where she was born. The life of the woman now on Japan's new 5,000-yen bill, who kept searching for a place to belong.