“Acupuncture rouses our spirit and soul,” says my mentor. What wonderful words they are!

In “Rempu’s Tamatebako (treasure box),” now being serially published in Sankei Kansai
Newspaper, Professor Hoka of the medical study institute of Kyushu University graduate school holds dialogue sessions with my mentor Rempu Fujimoto. Let me introduce some highlights of their conversation for the worth of each word we read.

In the December 18th issue of the paper, a prostate cancer patient’s experience of excruciating pain was introduced. The cancer had metastasized to the bone. In fact, I had once met this patient when I was participating in the training session at my mentor’s clinic. When I happened to talk with this patient alone in a booth, he said something which I will never be able to forget: “An acupuncture needle prick took the pain away. Can you believe it?” I thought these words came out of the depth of his soul, reflecting his joy and tenderness. What he said awoke me to the fact that my mentor’s acupuncture treatment had reached the core of the patient’s spirit and soul.

Dr. Hoka, who I mentioned above, is a topnotch researcher in Western medicine, anesthesiology and the field of resuscitation. It moves me to know that such a distinguished medical specialist is so much impressed by my mentor who is equipped with superb expertise in Eastern medicine.

The dialogue between the two presents a ray of great hope and moves my heart and soul.

When I think of a particular patient, he or she calls me soon later. Giving a thought to somebody invites an “accidental” encounter with that somebody. This occurs to us quite often in our daily lives. The word “telepathy” means supposed communication of thoughts or ideas by means other than the known senses. It is said to have derived from Zen Buddhism, referring to transmitting its teachings from the mind of mentor to that of disciple.

I received a phone call last month from somebody. Her name did not ring a bell at first. Listening to her voice helped me remember who she was. The caller was a close senior friend of my friend. The last time we had seen each other was when we and some others had dinner together about eight years ago. Then I stopped hearing from her. She obviously had no knowledge at all about what I was doing as acupuncturist and where. On the phone, she told me that when she was struggling at the nadir of her hard life, I came up in her mind. She had looked for and found my address and phone number to contact me.

This is what she told me. Her husband’s multiple liver cancer had metastasized to the sacrum and he now was unable to walk. His doctor had declared how much longer he was expected to live, and advised him to leave the hospital and go home. Upon hearing this, I lost no time in rushing to the hospital. After listening to me in the hospital bed for a while, he decided to return to his home and get my acupuncture treatment, which I am now giving him on the basis of the advice given by my mentor, Mr. Rempu Fujimoto.

She and her husband are pleased that the treatment seems to be working. They place absolute trust in me. So much so that I owe them absolute gratitude in return. For the patient as well as for myself, the fact that we have thus encountered has a significant meaning. We must fight on together, giving everything to overcome the difficult situation. Our battle has just started.

Over the last weekend, I was at a university in Hachi-oji, Tokyo, for the schooling class in my correspondence course. This is my usual place where I do the “resetting” of my life. I met with many of my old friends there surrounded by the beautiful green on the campus.　Chatting with them gave me a complete cure from the traveling exhaustion.

The people in various age groups mixed together and met after class and exchanged candid talks, laughed or cried, as the case might be, and derived comfort and joy from each other. I sincerely thank them for that.

During a two-day class of “Education History of Japan,” a woman born in 1929 gave us a talk about her experience of World War II. In her talk, she mentioned what she described as something more horrible than war itself, or attacks by the enemy. Her story went like this:

Her father was rather short in stature and was ineligible to be inducted into the military. But instead he was doing his best on the home-front, helping the people in the community.

While conducting a bucket brigade to stop the fire of the airraided houses day after day, he casually said, “What’s the use of fighting like this?” indicating his adamant opposition to the war. His words reached the ear of the Special Higher Police. He was arrested and taken to the police headquarters with his friends.

The woman, reminiscing about the incident, continued, “My father returned with a friend on his back, who was already dead. A consequence of torture.” Her clear voice and seeking spirit at such an advanced age moved me so much that tears welled up in my eyes.

We also heard a younger woman who described a scene of conversation with a Korean friend while studying abroad in Korea. “Hating each other won’t help us or give any solution. The only way is for us to help each other internationally, opening the way for new generations…,” she quoted a Korean friend. “These words propelled me to determine to dedicate my life to the establishment of a true Korean-Japanese friendship,” she continued.

Those two schooling days in Tokyo made me think about the education in Japan and where it should go. Learning opens new ways of our thinking. Education has an extremely close relationship with the work that I am pursuing now.

Politics exists for the happiness of good citizens. Medical service exists to save the people from physical suffering. What outrages me, however, is that something exactly opposite is happening in our society today.

During the recent holiday period, I visited Naoshima Island in Kagawa Prefecture for its Chichu Art Museum in the building designed by Mr. Tadao Ando, the world-famous architect. It is a fantastic island with its rows of houses and back alleys of old, untouched mountain forests, colorful flowers, and so on and so forth. A woman who used to work at my clinic once was fascinated by the island atmosphere, fell in love with it and opened her own acupuncture clinic there, carrying on her work vivaciously.

The Inland Sea of Japan (Seto-naikai) is filled with quiet beauty and time there seems to flow just as quietly and at ease. Lots of young people tour the area, which seems to energize their spirit. The remarkable coexistence of stillness and dynamism, and the harmony between human beings and nature etched an unquenchable impression of the island in my memory. It was a fantastic moment of encounter!

Then today, I had an opportunity to listen to a lecture by my mentor Mr. Rempu Fujimoto. During the lecture, he spoke about the profound meaning of “Mui-Shizen” and “Rentatsu-Shizen,” two noted phrases of Chinese origin referring respectively to the “state of abandoning artifice and just being oneself, doing nothing and taking things as they come” and the “process of accumulated training and discipline aimed at the goal of achieving the coveted skills.” The point of the lecture was that the former was the ultimate result of the latter.

The process of our training as acupuncturists consists on the one hand of the acquisition of the skill to handle the needle, and on the other hand, reaching the state of the mind qualifying us to use the needle. He said in his lecture that we must always try to rectify and straighten out our mind’s propensity. He emphasized that we should “enjoy” making the effort with enthusiasm.

The place of training is none other than the place where we live, which we are not allowed to run away from. “Simply because we are not able to run away from the environment we live in, we have genuine training and discipline there,” he said. I wholeheartedly agree with him. Hearing him say so was a profound moment of excitement to me, too.

His lecture propelled me to a new level of determination to forge ahead toward the state of “Mui-shizen.” As I think of the profound lecture by my mentor, fresh eagerness rises in my heart and soul to share with my patients the excitement of practicing acupuncture.

Some days ago, I read a book titled “The Spirit of Medicine – The Life of Dr. Osler” written by Dr. Shigeaki Hinohara, whom I deeply respect (published by Iwanami Shoten). William Osler (1849 – 1919), a Canadian physician, was a pioneer in modern medical care as well as an educator in the field. His writing “A Way of Life” is well known together with his other addresses and his words are eternally etched in many minds. I myself keep a copy as my desk companion.

I often think that a distinguished physician has a prodigious talent to bring out the innate goodness of human nature. Such a physician is capable of changing the atmosphere of any place where people gather. William Osler was one such individual. In the book I introduced above, there is a passage to the effect that “when he enters a sickroom to see his patients, the atmosphere of the room changes all of a sudden as the patients relax and feel like entrusting their bodies and souls to him….”

The same thing can be said about Mr. Rempu Fujimoto, my mentor. The atmosphere of the room quickly changes as he comes in, causing a comfortable feeling of tension, which makes us feel happy. A strange analogy between the two. Their commonality is that both are filled with a high-level sense of mission. Transcending the realms of Western and Oriental medicine, their common power to sense the innate goodness of human nature drives away the obstacle of malice and opens the way for the vital energy and blood to flow.

A passage in the book by Dr. Hinohara quotes Osler as saying that effective treatment of a patient does not demand medication alone, which is only a part of the treatment, while there are many other things that should be considered such as the patient’s psychology and the environment in which the patient is placed. He also says that Osler had always insisted that the medical world was committing a serious mistake of impeding the natural progress of healing by excessive use of medicines.

Thus, an alarm was sounded by a Western medical doctor against excessive use of medicines, the same idea based on Oriental medicine, even as long as 100 years ago today.

I myself as a professional clinician must think again about what is the most important matter in treating my patients.