I'll Tell You I Love You When I'm Gone

[Mulboyne]

Washington Post: Aging Japanese Pen Messages to Posterity
Living alone in a tidy little house on the outskirts of Tokyo, 75-year-old Tomohiro Ishizuka spends hours dwelling on things unsaid. There are, he recalls, the stories he never told his two adult children -- such as the horror of finding the charred remains of boyhood friends after the U.S. firebombing of Tokyo in 1945. And then there are stories half-told -- such as the depth of his pain after the sudden death in 2002 of his wife of 45 years. In a society where the expression of innermost thoughts is considered awkward or self-indulgent, Ishizuka was never able to find the right moments to share such personal things with his family. So last month he joined the growing ranks of elderly Japanese who are writing down what they cannot manage to say..."It is easier for me to write it down so they can read it when I am gone," Ishizuka said of his grown children. "That way they will know what their father and mother were really like . . . and understand why we made the choices in life that we made."