Makiko Itoh : Not a nameless cat.

As I've already mentioned online somewhere, my father died in late November. His memorial service will be held in February, at the church he attended. I wrote up a short biography for the pastors at the church to refer to in their eulogy (or whatever it is called that is read out at a memorial service) and I thought I'd post it here too, as a sort of closure. It is admittedly the 'good' version of my father's life, and leaves out a lot, but it is what I think is most fitting.

I am not well. There's no getting around it.

Just a personal tribute.

Radiation and me, and you.

I do not currently own a television set - or rather, I own a physical TV, but we still have to get it hooked up. This means that I can easily avoid the 24 hour news channels and such, which today I'm sure are being flooded with news of the 10th anniversary of 9/11. (It's also the 6 month anniversary of the March 11 earthquake in Japan.)

Still, it's hard to avoid all mention of 9/11 as long as I'm hanging out online, which is mostly what I have the energy for at the moment. And the phrase I keep hearing again and again is "Never forget". I'd like to know, what exactly are we not supposed to forget?

I've been debating with myself for a while whether I should make this public knowledge, but I've decided to go ahead...because you might see something is up anyway. It's hard to write about food, when food is such a part of your health and body. Besides...it's not like a dirty secret. It's part of what I am, in early September 2011.

A local TV station in Japan makes a stupid mistake onscreen.

It's all a matter of roots.

One story that suddenly got picked up in the last couple of days by the overseas, not-in-Japan media in the last couple of days is the case of the town of Minamisoma or Minami Soma, a small city in Fukushima prefecture located about 25km from the Fukushima No. 1 power plant. It says quite a lot about the inability of these media sources to keep up with current events in Japan.

The past two weeks plus since March 11 have been unbearingly intense. I've not been getting enough sleep, because I'm still so pent up that I have trouble relaxing enough to really relax. I seem to be sleeping on the shallow surface, always alert to something going on. This has surely affected my mood adversely.

For this and other reasons, I've decided to stop my continuous stream of Twitter updates.