Cross-cultural communication （116）　

116) My Microcosm of Different Cultures in My Bag
Ever since I became a doctor, I have always been interested in bags. However, I was not interested in designer bags. I was interested in bags that were popular at the time and had a large capacity. When I went on a trip to Hawaii with my colleagues during my residency in Japan, I bought a large leather attache case that was popular at the time, and had “T. Kido, MD” printed in gold on it. After the hard leather square attache cases (like the one Tora-san of ‘Otoko wa tshuraiyo’ carries) went out of fashion, I bought a number of large bags made of cloth or leather. Then, in 2019, a few years after I quit my job and started working as the medical director of a nursing home and a commissioned occupational medicine doctor, I started using a large backpack-style bag. I like backpacks because they leave my hands free, make it easier to maintain my balance, and are safe and comfortable.

Perhaps you may have already guessed the reason, but the purpose of using a large bag is to be able to put as many books as possible into it, including non-medical books I'm reading and documents I need for work, so that I can look things up or read books I like whenever and wherever I want.
As of the end of 2021, my favorite bag (backpack) contains two paperback books in English and French, one paperback book in Japanese, two electronic dictionaries, documents related to nursing home and occupational medicine, a manuscript I'm working on, and a medical kit for overseas airline crew (because you never know when you'll get a call to go on-call), etc., for a total weight of 5kg.

You might be wondering where and when I read all those books. I read them on the train to work and in the spare time I have when I'm traveling between the companies I visit as doctor of the occupational medicine which is one and a half days a week. On average, I have two hours a day to read, so I can finish a Japanese paperback book in a few days to a week. The foreign books I was reading in the summer of 2021 were ‘La Peste ‘by Albert Camus and ‘Einstein's War’ by Matthew Stanley, a professor of the history of science.

La Peste is a bestseller in Japan in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, but the original work is quite difficult to understand, although there is also the assumption that it was written by a Nobel Prize-winning author. I started reading it in February 2021 and finally finished it in October. French books (especially Camus) require me to look up about 20 words per page in my electronic dictionary, so it takes a lot of energy and time to read. So I've decided to read when I have at least half an hour free. That's why it took me nine months to finish La Peste.

Einstein’s War is written in English, so I can read it at about three times the speed of French. I read it at the eat-in area of the Family Mart convenience store near the nursing home, taking about 15 minutes before work four times a week. Of course, I don't understand relativity, but the main theme of this book is how he made his outlandish theories known to the world during the First World War, and even I, who am not familiar with physics, found it interesting to read. I wrote that I have two electronic dictionaries. One has French (French-Japanese, Japanese-French, English-French, French-English), and the other has English-Japanese, Japanese-English, as well as a medical dictionary and information on prescription drugs called “Today's Treatment Drugs”. The drug information is necessary to check the generic names of foreign-language drugs when visiting foreign crew members of airlines.

Once a month or so, I have a half-day free time on the day I have an occupational medicine visit. On days like this, I add my favorite MacBook to my backpack. If I go into a cafe with WIFI, it turns into a cross-cultural library. In this way, I spend a few hours reading French or English books with an electronic dictionary and internet information, and if I get tired of that, I continue writing my manuscript on my MacBook.
By the way, I often get asked in various places what's in my heavy backpack, or why a doctor would need such a heavy load. Sometimes I answer seriously, but most of the time I just say “I'm carrying 5kg dumbbells for training” to get a laugh.

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