Midori Kadowaki

Staff member and trainer at the social welfare corporation Bussi-En’s GOTCHA! WELLNESS gym. Born in Saitama City, Saitama Prefecture, in 1992. She has severe congenital sensorineural hearing loss. After attending local elementary and junior high schools and a prefectural senior high school, she studied health care and sport science at Toyo University. While studying there, she represented Japan in the 100m and the 4 x 100m relay at the 22nd Summer Deaflympics. After graduation, she went on to carry out research into deaf sports in the graduate school of Tsukuba University. Since completing her research, while working as a deaf studies assistant at Tsukuba University of Technology, she has been active in promoting deaf athletics as a board member of the Japan Deaf Athletics Association, and is also involved with activities by the Japanese Federation of the Deaf to raise awareness of the Deaflympics. 

After I started wearing a hearing aid at age 2, my daily life was no different to those of the people around me. However, at the same time that I began going to kindergarten, I practiced pronunciation and learned how to read and write at a support facility. Pronunciation practice took place in a small room, face-to-face with the speech therapist, and involved practicing vocalizing over and over, while confirming and copying the position and movements of the tongue and the shape of the mouth. I wholeheartedly wished to be able to speak well, and so I still clearly remember how hard I worked at this, without giving up. When I was in the second grade of elementary school, we moved to Surabaya in Indonesia due to my father’s work, and I studied at a Japanese school there for about four years. There was a lot of interaction with local schools, and I cannot forget how happy I was when I talked with friends from these local schools in my poor Indonesian and was understood. I returned to Japan in the sixth grade of elementary school, but when I moved up to junior school, relationships with my friends became more problematic. My athletics club practices, into which I threw myself heart and soul, were the one bright spot at this time. I was given the opportunity to take part in the national disabled sports contest, and interacted with people with different disabilities for the first time, as well as experiencing the warmth of the volunteers who made the contest go well. It made me feel that if involvement with other people through sport were this fun, I would like a job related to sport in the future.

When I was in my first year at university, I was scouted by the Japan Deaf Athletics Association and chosen to represent Japan at the World Deaf Athletics Championships. The next year, I was lucky enough to take part in the Deaflympic Games. This was the first time for me to set foot inside the world of the deaf (of sign language). As I had worked so wholeheartedly until then to become like hearing people and use verbal language, I felt conflicted at the thought that all this effort might come to nothing. While I was an athlete on the national team, I met athletics comrades in the same circumstances for the first time, and wanted to talk with them. As a result, I gradually came to accept sign language. However, outside deaf sports situations, when I said that I did not think of sign language as my first language, I was dismissed with responses like “You’re not deaf, you’re hard of hearing”, or “You have a weak deaf identity”. I had my doubts about this discrimination between hard of hearing and deaf people, even though we shared an inability to hear, and there was a period when I worried about whether I had to be “Deaf”  just because I could not hear. The number of local governments which have introduced ordinances promoting sign language is growing, and society’s understanding of hearing impairments is gradually moving forward. I think that things would be much easier if sign language were understood everywhere. However, I do not want to create a barrier between myself and others because they feel that we cannot make friends unless they learn sign language; so I have to come to think that there are occasions when verbal language is necessary, and that I want to have several means of communicating.

My former boss at the fitness club where I had a part-time job as a student provided me with the introduction that enabled me to get my current job at WELLNESS gym. When I was a student, I had an ambition to become a gym instructor, and applied for part-time jobs with three companies. However, I failed the initial document screening because of my hearing impairment. I felt a sense of despair that I might be unable to do what I wanted to do just because I could not hear; but I did not give up, and decided to try one more company... Finally, they gave me a job. Thinking back on this experience now, I feel that it was fate, because it led to my job at Bussi-En. There are a gym and a pool in this complex, which also contains a spa and a restaurant. People with various different backgrounds come to exercise there, including both the general public and users of welfare services. It is an environment in which it is taken for granted that people will think about each other and meet one another halfway, irrespective of whether or not they have a disability, so for me, with my experiences of being mixed in together with all kinds of people since I was in elementary school, it is an extremely comfortable space. The barrier between me and my customers created by the masks worn since the spread of COVID-19 is tough, and I can become negative and feel that I do not want to go out onto the gym floor; however, when I do go out, I am saved by the understanding of those around me, who lower their masks so that I can see their mouths as they speak. I approach my job with the attitude that I want to work for the sake of people like these. I work with each individual in the gym each day, hoping that the spirit of “being mixed in together” will spread out from Ishikawa Prefecture across the whole country.