Living with low vision · Iwate Prefecture, Japan
“I walk to the harbour on my own now. My wife says I go too often”
For two years after glaucoma took most of his sight, Sasaki Kenji did not leave the house without his wife. Fourteen lessons with a white cane changed that.
Sasaki Kenji fished out of a small harbour on the Iwate coast for fifty years. He is seventy-nine. Glaucoma, which damages the optic nerve slowly and without pain, had been narrowing his sight for a decade before he noticed, and by the time he did, there was little left at the edges. Today he sees through what he describes as a drinking straw, and that is getting narrower too.
For two years he barely left the house except with his wife, Michiko, holding her arm. “I had walked to that harbour every day of my life,” he says. “Then I could not cross the road to it. I felt like a parcel.”
The home visit
In the spring of 2025 the Tōhoku Low Vision Network, which the Foundation funds to visit older people at home across rural Iwate and Miyagi, sent a mobility instructor to the Sasakis’ house. Abe Natsuki has taught long cane skills for twenty years. She began, Mr Sasaki says, by asking him where he wanted to go.
“I said the harbour. She said, then we will learn the way to the harbour.”
A long cane is not a walking stick. It is swept in an arc in front of the walker, touching the ground at each side, to find kerbs, steps, poles and the edges of paths before the walker reaches them. Learning to use it well takes time, and learning a route takes more: the number of steps between landmarks, the sound of a junction, the change of surface where the pavement meets the sea wall.
The first time, I thought everyone was looking at me. Then I realised I could not see whether they were, so I stopped worrying about it.
Fourteen lessons
Ms Abe came fourteen times over four months. The route to the harbour is 1.2 kilometres, with two road crossings, a set of steps the town rebuilt after 2011 and a stretch along the new sea wall where the pavement narrows. They walked it together, then with Ms Abe a few steps behind, then with Ms Abe across the road, watching. In August she assessed him as able to walk it alone.
He now walks to the harbour most mornings, sits on the bench by the fish market and talks to whoever is there. On wet days Michiko still walks with him. “I walk to the harbour on my own now,” he says. “My wife says I go too often.” Michiko, who was listening, says he comes back smelling of fish, like before.
What it costs
Fourteen home visits by a qualified instructor, a cane and the travel cost the Foundation ¥186,000. Mr Sasaki will need more lessons as his sight narrows, and the network will provide them. There are fewer than a thousand qualified mobility instructors in Japan, a country with more than a million people with low vision, and most of them work in cities. The network is training six more, with the Foundation’s funding, in Morioka.