One Ishikawa Follows Another Ishikawa

10/27/2014

One notorious Ishikawa, a samurai, is a staple of the Kabuki theater. Travis Ishikawa will forever be remembered as the wandering baseball samurai who smote a home run to win the pennant for the Giants.

Ishikawa means "Rocky River" in Japanese. I learned this the other day from my friend Yasumasa (Tra) Ishikawa in Tokyo, who calls himself "Tiger" in English.
We have covered Baseball Classics and World Cups and Summer Games in Beijing together. He is aware that an American named Travis Ishikawa is diligently playing left field in the World Series for the San Francisco Giants, whose colors and history are linked to the Tokyo Giants.
Travis Ishikawa is an itinerant first baseman who has bounced around from club to club, from majors to minors, but will forever be honored by Giants fans for hitting the three-run homer that won the pennant against St. Louis.
I did not know anything about him until the post-homer interview, when he thanked God, in an American accent, straight from the Seattle-Tacoma area.
"As family names it’s one of very popular names," my friend Tra-san wrote me from Tokyo, saying how his namesake's great-great grandfather has emigrated to Hawaii and on to the American mainland.
"There were many emigrants from Okinawa to Hawaii to get a job in banana or pineapple plantations before World War II. These first Japanese emigrant generation worked hard and they eager to let their children to get better educations," Tra-san wrote.
I also did not know that Ishikawa is one of the familiar names in Japan, with one branch stemming from a major samurai family. I also did not know there is a Ishikawa Prefecture, or region.
Ishikawa Goemon was known as a robber in the 16th Century, who was ultimately killed in boiling water. His character is a staple of Kabuki theater. There was also a famous poet named Ishikawa Jozan.
Tra Ishikawa and Travis Ishikawa have had their personal rocky rivers. Tra-san is using his English ability to drive foreign visitors around Tokyo. Not long ago, Ken Belson, my Times friend, who used to work in Japan, got into a cab and the driver said, in English, "I met you in Sapporo in 2002." That was for the England-Argentina match. I was there.
Travis Ishikawa played more games in Fresno in the minor leagues than in the major leagues this season. He almost quit. Now he chases fly balls, in an unfamiliar position, in the quaint little event we like to call the World Series.
Both men bring honor to a grand Japanese name.

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Measuring Covid Deaths, by David Leonhardt. July 17, 2023. NYT online.
The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal….

After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness.

The progress stems mostly from three factors:
First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot.
Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.)
Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year.
“Nearly every death is preventable,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. “We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.”

That is also true for most high-risk people, Jha pointed out, including older adults — like his parents, who are in their 80s — and people whose immune systems are compromised. “Even for most — not all but most —immuno-compromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” he said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immuno-compromised that vaccines don’t work.”

That excess deaths have fallen close to zero helps make this point: If Covid were still a dire threat to large numbers of people, that would show up in the data.

One point of confusion, I think, has been the way that many Americans — including we in the media — have talked about the immuno-compromised. They are a more diverse group than casual discussion often imagines.

Most immuno-compromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers. A much smaller group, such as people who have received kidney transplants or are undergoing active chemotherapy, face higher risks.

Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths.

The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions.

Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately
Republican and white.

Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic. (Here’s a Times guide to help you think about when to get your next booster shot.)
***

From the great Maureen Dowd:

As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop.
But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels."

--- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing.
***
"Putting out the paper," we called it.
Much more than nostalgia.
---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html

One Ishikawa Follows Another Ishikawa

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