Be Grateful

After catching an overnight train to Shanghai from Beijing when my mum and Brian had boarded their flight back to the UK, Jun and I spent the night of my birthday in a drink all you can club with her brother’s girlfriend playing a dice drinking game. Then we flew to Osaka, spent time with Orlando, Kahori and their girls and then went to Nara. A series of slow trains over about eleven hours got us to Tokyo late last night and we visited my friend Koji in hospital in Saitama Prefecture today.

Way before we’d come out here, Koji had said that he planned to take time off to take us places because last time (2002 for the World Cup) he’d been really tired what with working and his newly-arrived twins. Since that promise, Koji has had a motorcycle accident and is paralysed for life. He’ll never walk again but hopes to get back some feeling or use of arms or hands. I approached our meeting with a certain amount of dread.

Speculating on why that was is a little too self-indulgent given the nature of what has happened to Koji (putting aside the MRSA virus he caught after getting to the military hospital which is closest to where he had his accident), who put me at ease immediately we got there and is remarkably upbeat, taking strength from the words of those who have wished him well. We bought and fed him grapes and chatted about the mundane (my desire for a new camera lens, Watford’s trials (we lost at Swansea in the league on Sunday and won there the following Tuesday to reach the Carling Cup quarter-finals)) and the all-important: friends and friendship.

Many of his Essex University mates have rallied and those he saw once a year are now at his bedside of a weekend. In Jun Shimizu’s case, she is doing much more than that, even taking time off work to help Megumi (Koji’s wife) deal with those nasty financial issues that are overbearing in a state where health care is not free. Blame for the accident has been assigned by a witness to Koji and so his insurance company is refusing to pay. The government won’t help until he is certified as having a disability and that won’t happen till after months - as many as eighteen, possibly - of expensive rehabilitation.

Circumstances like these are supposed to make you grateful for what you have but I am reminded more of the most haunting words of the Band Aid single: “Tonight thank God it’s them instead of you.” This is a negative sort of gratitude rather than a real appreciation. Maybe it shows a lack of imagination on my part: an inability to see myself in his position and therefore value more highly the abilities most of us take for granted. But tonight, before I sleep, I am pondering the idea of what we mean when we say “be grateful”.