Ch.5: The Blue Notebook

Ch.5: The Blue Notebook

November 2016. A high wall in the Minato district of Tokyo. Behind it: a Chinese embassy compound, Chinese sovereign territory, where a Taiwanese citizen with no recognized passport could apply for a thin dark-blue travel booklet that the mainland issues to people whose country, from Beijing's point of view, does not exist. The night before I flew to Shanghai, I wrote a will. Nothing dramatic — a short list on a sheet of paper. I folded it into a desk drawer and did not tell anyone it was there. In this episode: the taibaozheng travel permit, Taiwan-China relations from a small business owner's view, J Group, the first flight into mainland China. Contact: medicalsupporter.org [https://medicalsupporter.org] | shingihou.com [https://shingihou.com] | service@shingihou.com [service@shingihou.com] ⚠️ Personal reflections only. Not medical practice, diagnosis, or treatment advice. Please consult your physician. Names have been changed.

Ch.4: The Room with the Tower

A business does not fail all at once — it fails the way a tap closes, a quarter turn at a time. By autumn 2015 a competitor had opened up near Kurume and the patients were going to him. For four months my revenue was close to zero. Then a private clinic in Tokyo entered the picture, with a window that framed the orange glow of a city tower at night. And then, on a single phone call in October 2016, that hope ended too. In this episode: Tokyo, a private clinic, fusion-cell therapy, the night a clinic shut down, what happens to patients waiting in line when the line breaks. Contact: medicalsupporter.org [https://medicalsupporter.org] | shingihou.com [https://shingihou.com] | service@shingihou.com [service@shingihou.com] ⚠️ Personal reflections only. Not medical practice, diagnosis, or treatment advice. Details have been changed.

Ch.3: The Rice Shop

August 2015, Fukuoka Legal Affairs Bureau, ticket number 47. Inside a manila folder on my lap was a name in three characters of black ink — Shingihou — a name my grandfather's rice shop in Yilan had carried through the 1920s and which had waited fifty years to be used again. The visa for a foreign founder in Japan required ¥5 million in paid-up capital. I did not have it. This chapter is about the four months I spent finding it. In this episode: Shingihou, founding a company in Japan as a foreigner, the keiei kanri visa, family heritage. Contact: medicalsupporter.org [https://medicalsupporter.org] | shingihou.com [https://shingihou.com] | service@shingihou.com [service@shingihou.com] ⚠️ Personal reflections only. Not medical practice, diagnosis, or treatment advice. Please consult your physician. Names have been changed.

Ch.2: The Passenger Seat

After the first patient died, the phone did not stop. By spring 2015 my number was circulating inside a quiet word-of-mouth network of Taiwanese families whose physicians had told them there is nothing more we can do here. I drove a twenty-year-old Honda kei-car on the expressway to Kurume, and a different stranger sat in the passenger seat each week. Construction bosses, civil servants, men whose work happened in the gray corridor between legal and illegal. Cancer did not care which. In this episode: Kurume, the patient ride, what cancer makes equal, the strange democracy of a consultation room. Contact: medicalsupporter.org [https://medicalsupporter.org] | shingihou.com [https://shingihou.com] | service@shingihou.com [service@shingihou.com] ⚠️ Personal reflections only. Not medical practice, diagnosis, or treatment advice. Please consult your physician. Names have been changed.

Ch.1: The Call

July 2014. A Wednesday afternoon in a Waseda materials lab on the industrial northern edge of Kyushu. The phone rang with a Taiwan country code. The man on the line said his father had been told there was nothing more to do, that someone had found a cancer vaccine trial at Kurume University, and that the family needed an interpreter. I had never done medical interpretation. I said yes. I needed the money — that was the whole of it. In this episode: the first phone call, Kurume University, materials engineering, becoming an interpreter by accident. Contact: medicalsupporter.org [https://medicalsupporter.org] | shingihou.com [https://shingihou.com] | service@shingihou.com [service@shingihou.com] ⚠️ Personal reflections only. Not medical practice, diagnosis, or treatment advice. Please consult your physician. Names have been changed.