A 57-year-old man with dyslexia. He started delivering newspapers in the fourth grade and had the experience of being praised for learning to deliver newspapers to homes quickly and accurately. After high school, he joined the Japanese Self-Defense Forces. He later became a teacher and at that time made public that he had a reading disability. He also served as a member of the study council on the positioning of digital textbooks for the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, and others. Currently, while working as a school janitor at an elementary school, he consults with concerned parties, parents, teachers, welfare establishments, and administrators, as well as holding teacher training courses at universities.

Kouyama Tadashi

People with dyslexia characteristics may see letters as distorted or black objects scattered on the paper. People see things in different ways, but in any case, they have difficulty processing text.

Because of these characteristics, I have not been good at reading textbooks since I was a child, and it took me a long time to understand the contents. As a result, I was often misunderstood by others, was spoken ill of, and I blamed myself for my inadequacies many times.

One day in elementary school, something like this happened. The teacher instructed us to read the handouts silently during Japanese class. I was not good at reading, but I tried to read it somehow by holding down the letters one by one with my index finger. However, I could not get it into my head at all.

While everyone was reading quietly, the teacher who was looking around stopped and said, "Kouyama-kun, are you still reading here?" The teacher's voice echoed in the classroom, and it drew the gaze of my friends. "What are you doing?" "I'm on my second reading." I heard voices making fun of me from all over the place. I was so frustrated that my fingers trembled as I followed the letters, and before I knew it, tears were flowing down my face.

I wanted to read the textbook smoothly just like everyone else, so I tried to divide the sentences like "separate writing (separating words in Japanese with lines)". However, no matter how many times I tried, I could not put them in the correct position. While repeating the rewriting, I finally added diagonal lines and completed the word separation. However, the teacher who saw my textbook warned me, "Kouyama-kun, why are you scribbling on your textbook?" I felt so miserable that I couldn’t read smoothly, and my teacher didn’t recognize that I had tried so hard and devise a way to read them.

Gradually, I became desperate and repeatedly committed violent acts during my junior and senior high school years. Before I knew it, there was a distance between me and my friends, and I felt the loneliness of not being understood by anyone.

Even so, some people recognized my own inner goodness. I got tired of being in the classroom after being warned by the teacher, and as I was walking around the school, the school janitor greeted me with a smile, "Oh, there you are again?” This is how I began to help him with his work.

After graduating from high school, I joined the Japanese Self-Defense Forces. During the training, I realized that I could disassemble and reassemble machines faster and more accurately than anyone else no matter how complex they were. In addition to that, I was good at teaching my subordinates the structures of the machines in an easy-to-understand manner. So, after training, I attended a junior college at night to become a junior high school technology teacher and I began to feel a strong desire to instill confidence and pride in my children.

When I became a teacher, I spent my days constantly dealing with letters, and have been working hard with the desire to " make school a place where no child suffers as I did!" Then, I announced I had dyslexia and began to raise awareness of it. I gave lectures nationwide and appeared on TV and radio. In that context, I felt that continuing to voice the opinions of those who would benefit from such considerations would lead to the creation of a more mature society. And what came to my mind was the idea of creating a society where even if I could be born again, I would like to live with this characteristic one more time!”

I believe the experiences that made me who I am are:

(1) Experience that allowed me to be admitted to what I like, to be particular about, and not to suffer (2) Experience that I felt that I could improve by sharing others’ thoughts and feelings rather than excluding the existence of different positions (3) Breaking free from normal -the moment I got out of the mindset that I'm not good enough, that I need to change. I feel that you are not just fine because of the way you are, but because of who you are.