So, in my effort to learn more about Type 1 Diabetes in Japan, I have been volunteering for an organization called the Japan IDDM Network. They have been hard to reach (comparatively to JDRF at least), but they will soon be hosting an event where I live, and I’ll have a chance to help them out!
I have been browsing their website and came across an interesting manga (Japanese style comic) associated with Type One Diabetes.
For a bit of background on the manga, it was written by Keiko Yamada and released in January 2014. Searches in English haven’t revealed much about her, but I’ll update this as I get more information on her.
The manga focuses on the middle school life of a teenager recently diagnosed with Type one diabetes. It uses common manga tropes such as a person living on an small island. Although the manga doesn’t say specifically, it would appear that the setting is a small island in the Kyushu area of Japan. Other common tropes are love interests, and having to move away from home because of a lack of resources due to being on a small island.
I’ll refrain from sharing my thoughts on the manga (at least for the time being), or the thoughts of other Japanese people I have talked with about the manga. I would like to get some thoughts from the community here.
There are a lot of cultural and technological differences that are clear and present in this manga, as well as some obvious differences in language. As my doctor has repeatedly said, Japan is years, if not a decade behind the US in terms of diabetes care. I should also mention that Japan has one of the lowest occurrences of T1D in the world.
Anyway, I’d love to hear thoughts from people here. Don’t be shy to speak your mind!
I’ve been interested in Manga for quite a while, though more from the SF end. Even when you understand the right-left conventions and whatnot (sometimes the direction is more like a counter-clockwise circle!), the translations can be a little hard to follow, e.g., “We are a battery”? [scratches head] :-\
But I thought this was pretty well done in an earnest, after-school-special sort of way. The bit where the kid stops taking the injections seemed an apt way of conveying how severe the psychological difficulty can be, especially for a young person. Is this being published for a general audience or is it more narrowly targeted toward people affected by the disease in one way or another? I’m curious about the knowledge of T1 in Japan. Seems like the medical culture there is more Western than what I experienced in China. I stayed for some time in a rural area where awareness of T1 was virtually null.
Although probably heresy as one of Japanese ancestry, I know next to nothing about manga except that it never “caught” my interest. But a few thoughts about T1D and Japanese culture… It should not be a surprise that T1D (and probably T2D) is not common in Japan. Having said that, breast cancer among women was next to unheard of until the country’s diet became increasingly Westernized – then the incidence shot up. Even so, I believe it is still considered bad form to admit to illness, let alone discussing it; much better (dare I say, more honorable) to suffer in quiet silence than trouble another. In that regard, Ms. Yamada’s manga is trailblazing.
In the United States, according to the Joslins Diabetes Center, people of color are more likely to develop Type 2 diabetes than those of European/Causcasian descent – and people of Japanese descent tend to acquire the disease at the lowest body weight. This is certainly true of my family, which is riddled with Type 2s (no other Type 1 except me). Certainly this points to differences in diet.
But the real headscratcher is, of the 12 Type 1s I personally know, three of us are Japanese American. I think 85% of baseball players only dream of those odds…
I can attest as well, as a foreigner living in Japan, I occasionally shock people when I tell them I have little to no interest in manga or anime.
In reference to discussing type one diabetes in Japan, I have been talking to a few people using the Japanese social networking website known as Mixi. There are a few community groups set up focusing on type one diabetes, but since profiles are public and the groups that one enters are visible to any user, it’s impossible to discretely join these groups unless one makes a anonymous profile.
And so, there are many anonymous profiles in many of the T1D community groups. Reasons I can only guess…
