Kentaro Yoshinari

Do you know the word “esports”? Many competitions and events are held within Japan lately, so I think that some of you may have heard the word somewhere or other. Esports are competitions in the gaming world, in which contestants fight it out to determine the winner.

I am working to tell many people about these esports. I have talked about many different things up until now when communicating about them, but in a nutshell, this is what I say: “This community is a place where people with disabilities can be freed from these disabilities.”

I was born with spinal muscular atrophy. I have lived for twenty-seven years so far, but I have never kicked a football or put my feet on the ground and run. Even when the people around me were enjoying sports, it was taken for granted that I would watch; it took all my efforts to take part as a referee.

But how about with esports? If you can create an environment for playing these games, physical handicaps no longer affect you much.

If you are good at games, you can achieve results, and what is needed to produce those results is practice. Your efforts are returned in the form of results. Some people may think that this goes without saying, but in order to practice and make an effort, you need to stand on the starting line in the first place. With soccer or baseball, it was very difficult for me to stand on that line.

My activities to communicate the attractions of these esports have reached many people, and now there are more people working with similar intentions. Of course, I still intend to continue disseminating this message as much as I can, but I think that is a good time for me to think about how I want to live from now on.

I am thinking daily about whether I will be able to continue living as I am doing now in ten years’ time. At the moment, I am able to work remotely for a company, but I cannot imagine myself working in the same way ten years from now. Spinal muscular atrophy is a progressive disorder, so I will probably be physically weakened in ten years’ time. If I think back to how I was ten years ago, I become aware that the number of things that I cannot do has in fact increased.

I do not intend to stop working, but I think that I need to reflect a little more on how I do so. I think that “I need to add value to myself”. I understand that people grow weaker regardless of disability, but the speed at which I do so is far faster. Ten years from now, the kind of tasks that I am currently doing will probably take longer. It is difficult for me to continue with things that require speed. Of course, I am also unable to do tasks that involve a heavy physical burden.

Will there even be a job for someone like me in ten years’ time? Working from home is a working style that has permeated society, prompted by the spread of COVID-19, and thanks to this, there are more work options than before. However, I think that I will not be able to carry on in the current way. I need to add more value to myself.

This means that when I am working, I need clients to come to feel that they want to ask me to do the job, even if it takes a bit of time. For this to happen, I need some weapons. I am studying video editing and 3D computer graphics independently. At this stage, I do not yet have enough experience to call these my unique weapons. Even so, I need to aim for the future, not think that I can go on living the same way forever.