Life is overcoming.（真に生きるとは、じぶんが変わること）
真の人生は克服にある。
克服ということばは居心地がよくない。でも、それは真実。
世の中には、教えがあふれているけれど、じぶんが変わるの助けは少ない。
でも、人は乗りこえないと生きられない。
克服とはじぶんが変化すること。変化は内側で起こる。
じぶんの姿は鏡に映すからわかる。
じぶんの力は親身の交わりの中で育つ。ひとりじゃないんだ。
Life is overcoming.
The word may not sound comfortable.
But it is true—brutally so.
There is too much teaching,
but too little help for overcoming your life.
And yet, overcoming remains essential to life.
Even so, you’re not alone.
Today, I lived that truth again.
Six months ago, my son and my mother made a promise to each other. He would return in time. She would stay alive until then.
It was a moment of mutual agency—
genuine, unguarded, almost innocent.
Given her condition, it even sounded adventurous.
Her days were no longer promised.
I wanted to believe that hope empowers life.
At the same time, I had to hold myself back from hoping too much, knowing her heart was fragile, and that every moment was already liminal.
But today—
As soon as my son returned from the U.S., he sat by my mother’s bedside and said,
“Yaya, we made it.”
My mother responded with a smile.
Despite her dysarthria, she managed to vocalize a question.
“How is your AI going, Riu?”
“Ah, I named it KurageSan,” he said.
“We’ve just made the press release.
I’ve been helping Dad overcome the creation challenges.”
She laughed softly and said,
“Nice.”
It felt like a liberation—
from something that had lived in me for a long time,
subconsciously, since my teenage years.
An overcoming.
When I was young, my father became paralyzed and developed severe dysarthria.
At the same time, my hope of pursuing the science of language in the U.S. was cut short.
Until his passing, we communicated through a hiragana letter board, guiding his hand letter by letter,
and through the smallest signals—
breath, fingers, eye movements, and subtle gestures.
Living beside him taught me something irreversible.
Meaning does not live only in words.
It lives in rhythm, timing, posture, breath,
and in the subtle contexts around spoken language.
From the pain of wanting to help but being unable to,
a quiet wish took root in me:
to make voice visible, and to engage with it.
My father often mentored me with a Zen saying:
If the form stands true, the shadow will reflect it as it is. (形端影直)
Nothing is hidden; everything is manifested. (遍界不曾蔵)
Years later, while leading global engineering for mobile and smartphone creation, those words returned with new clarity.
Technology works only when there is explicit input.
Humans can only input what they are aware of.
That question has never left me.
Unlearning ingrained habits is essential.
Still, the most complex challenge is practice itself—
learning how to overcome what we are unaware of.
Creating a mirror that visualizes the invisible and supports self-agency has been my enduring endeavor.
My son, the chief data scientist, appears in the final part of the press release—overcoming the challenge of creating Empathetic AI.
Back in those years with my father, I once dreamed of becoming what my son is today.
This, too, is overcoming.
Not because he became who he is,
but because I changed—and got help.
Life is overcoming—together.
Overcoming is your inner change.
The change is yours to make.
But you’re not alone.
Agency grows in relation—and through practice.
For those who may be interested, I’ve shared the press release rewritten in English:
Press Release: SomniQ
The original press release in Japanese:
認知プロセスを〈見える化〉。〈人×AI〉共創で進化する英語学習システム「エンパシーム英語耳°トレイル」（アプリ&ダッシュボード）をリリース
Empatheme®ーA co-creative ecosystem that nurtures human agency.(自身の力を育む共創の〈しくみ化〉へ)
出典・参照：以下のエンパレットなど