Aging Japanese pen heartfelt notes to heirs

Aging Japanese Pen Messages to Posterity
Heartfelt ‘Ending Notes’ Give Elderly a Voice in Traditionally Reticent Society

By Anthony Faiola, Washington Post Foreign Service, Monday, April 11, 2005; Page A13

TOKYO — Living alone in a tidy little house on the outskirts of Tokyo, 75-year-old Tomohiro Ishizuka spends hours dwelling on things unsaid. There are, he recalls, the stories he never told his two adult children — such as the horror of finding the charred remains of boyhood friends after the U.S. firebombing of Tokyo in 1945. And then there are stories half-told — such as the depth of his pain after the sudden death in 2002 of his wife of 45 years.
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Third Client

Last week we signed up our third client. Andy Thomson is a retired history teacher in Toronto. He is researching several subjects including his family lumber business, the Northern Ontario lake where it was situated, currently a family recreational compound, and an uncle who was an RCAF pilot during WWII.

Why install a blog on a family website?

A weblog, Web log or simply a blog, contains periodic posts on a common webpage. Often, the word blog is used to describe an online diary or journal. The weblog format of an online diary makes it possible for users without much experience to create, format, and post entries with ease. People write of their day-to-day experiences, complaints, poems, prose, and more, often allowing others to contribute, fulfilling to a certain extent the original view of the World Wide Web as a collaborative medium.
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Second Client

Today we landed our second client, the Moir family of Lindsay, Minden, and Toronto, Ontario.

Their Family Memories’ website will be at www.moir.ca.

They are especially interested in Family Memories’ video interviews with the senior members of the family.

Career blog

We have had our family website up for several weeks now, www.theforemans.ca. My family have asked that it be private so it is accessible only to family members. We are now 33 descendants of my monther and late father. The latest was born yesterday.

My 18 year old niece living in Victoria, BC posted to our main blog about her University of Victoria courses and mused about her career choices. This prompted us to create a Career Blog and to ask the older cousins, in their 30’s, to write about their careers as lawyers, accountants, entrepreneurs, business people, etc to help the younger ones with their career choices.

Welcome!

Hello Everyone,

I founded Family Memories to help families use the Internet to preserve family history, maintain strong family ties, and improve communications between family members who live far apart.

The Internet is a wonderful tool for decreasing distance. Families are able to almost replicate the way life was generations ago when most family members lived within easy visiting distance.
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