yfritz's Journal, 15 Dec 22

My father has a pedometer app now. Yesterday he registered >6,000 steps.
Until recently he was ventilator dependent and wheelchair bound due to a near fatal illness, and it is still difficult for him to ambulate. I assisted him to Somei Cemetery in Tokyo yesterday, where the cremains of my mother and brother were interred alongside those of many other ancestral members. It is an old cemetery and the cobbled passages between the plots are quite uneven, but my father managed to navigate the area without falling. He was very pleased with this accomplishment and he started singing most innocently. We do not get along but I do secretly admire his tenacity to overcome obstacles in any given situations.
My father is a survivor of the Great Tokyo Air Raid (1945); during the chaos of the firebombing, he was separated from his mother and fell into the Sumida River where countless bodies were floating. He was a young child then. I don’t know if the memory of the night haunts him or not, rather, it seems that he recollects the inferno as the testament to his own resilience.

Wooden pails at a cemetery florist (Somei Cemetery, Tokyo)