Barrier Free Japan is hopefully off to Tokyo by the time this podcast episode drops, or in the language of Douglas Adams, ‘will and have been’ to Tokyo, weather permitting on Sunday 25th February 2024, to see the film about the late Mark Bookman.
Esports is being employed with the aim of preserving cognitive functions in elderly individuals and serving as a means of social exchange for those with disabilities. In the current fiscal year to March, the Tokyo metropolitan government has started a project to provide game lending services to facilities for disabled individuals in the Japanese capital.
Currently, about 120 nursing care facilities and facilities for the disabled across the nation have adopted the association’s esports system through monthly contracts. The system accommodates up to four players engaged in simultaneous gameplay, and a monthly competition fosters online interaction among participants.
Each year in Japan there are over 200,000 abortions. Every two weeks, a newborn infant dies of abandonment. And each year, more than 50 children lose their lives to physical abuse at the hands of their parents.
This is according to the nonprofit Migiwa, based in Nara Prefecture, western Japan.
Migiwa’s mission is to protect unwanted babies, acting as a mediator to help place them with new families through plenary adoption. Such cases often involve birth mothers choosing to give up their right to raise their child with a disability such as Down syndrome.
In Kiryu City, a business operator that operates a support facility for children with disabilities fraudulently lost over 2.5 million yen in benefits from the city and other organizations by pretending that the manager was working full-time. The prefecture’s designation was revoked as a result of an administrative penalty for receiving the benefits.
The prefecture will cancel the designation of this business operator on April 1st, meaning that the business operator will not be able to provide support for children with disabilities for five years thereafter.
A mentally disabled woman who was forced into prostitution was given a six-year prison term for fatally stabbing an elderly client she was trying to steal from at a Tokyo love hotel.
The Tokyo District Court on Feb. 20 convicted Haruka Fujii, 26, of injury resulting in the death of the 82-year-old customer in Tokyo’s Ikebukuro district in 2022.
Prosecutors had sought a nine-year prison sentence, but the court took into account Fujii’s mental condition that made her vulnerable to exploitation and prone to involuntary criminal activity.
NHK reports that life begins to return to normal in Ishikawa Prefecture after the earthquake on January 1st 2024 and it seems that Barrier Free Japan will get to go to Tokyo and see the film about Mark Bookman!
Roman Kashpur, one of two Ukrainians using a prosthetic leg who will participate in the March 3 event, said in an online interview that by running the race he wants to give injured Ukrainian soldiers the will to live again.
Recent reports made by Japan’s Ministry of Infrastructure, Land and Transport regarding the elderly and people with disabilities are arguably a kind of good news/bad news situation.
TokiAir, an airline that began service last month, posted information on its website for passengers. The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport, and Tourism (MLIT) pointed out that some expressions on the website could be misinterpreted as requiring disabled persons to be accompanied by an escort on a uniform basis. In response, the company changed the content and commented that it did not intend to discriminate.
A private library of more than 1,000 medical memoirs recently opened to the public in Osaka. The library is called “Tobyoki no Mori” (the forest of patients’ stories). It includes books by entertainers about their battles with cancer, memoirs of everyday people with intractable diseases such as Parkinson’s and books by people living with disabilities.
Barrier Free Japan