AIZUCHI Japanese Listening Services is for Japanese people or native Japanese speakers who live in North America. Our service is especially for people who are facing End of Life, or people whose loved ones are facing End of Life.
One’s mother tongue is very important to anyone who lives in a foreign country, no matter how long they have lived there. Especially when you are facing End of Life, expressing your feelings freely in your own language can be a great relief. Language is not only for communication; it also carries memories and emotions.
At AIZUCHI Japanese listening Services, a hospice nurse with more than 20 years’ experience and a Buddhist chaplain are available to listen to you. You can tell us your stories, feelings, and emotions, and even cry without concern for the other end of the line. We will listen to you without judgement or prejudice, but only with understanding and sympathy.
We hope you will feel relieved, comforted, and encouraged after we have listened to you.
About Us
My name is Fuminobu Komura. I am a Buddhist priest and working as a hospital chaplain.
I had worked at a Japanese manufacturing company as an engineer for many years. I was born and raised in Japan where Buddhism is embedded in many areas of culture. I had been interested in Buddhism from my early childhood, but had no knowledge about its teachings. Twenty years ago I made up my mind to start studying Buddhism at an online college. When I learned that the core of The Buddha’s teaching is wisdom and love and compassion, I decided to make the practice of love and compassion my second career. I wanted to become a chaplain who is a professional of spiritual care.
About ten years ago, I retired from the engineering job and came to the U.S. together with my partner to study and get the training to become a chaplain. I enrolled in the graduate school of a Buddhist university in Colorado where we had lived before for several years. After earning Master of Divinity degree, I got trained at hospitals in the U.S. Now I am a staff chaplain at a hospital of Philadelphia, PA. During this training period, I got ordained as Priest of Japanese Tendai Buddhist School too.
A chaplain’s role is to stay beside the patients and the families who are experiencing spiritual or emotional sufferings, to listen attentively to them, and to acknowledge affirmatively (aizuchi) to support their hearts and minds. The patients who are in the terminal stage and the families who are caring them often experience spiritual suffering because the life and death do not necessarily go as they wish. My hope is to reduce their burdens even a little by offering compassionate presence and listening. I usually do not give them an advice to solve their problem unless specifically asked. My wish is that they find and realize an answer by themselves.
It is my Buddhist practice to open my heart and receive the other person’s emotions without judgment or preference. I would be grateful if I can support your hearts and minds through this attentive listening service of aizuchi.
With palms joined
Hello, my name is Nobuko Lapreziosa.
I have lived in the United States over 25 years, since I came to study homecare after working as a registered nurse in a university hospital in Japan. I studied oncology nursing in graduate school here and completed a Master of Science in Nursing (MSN). I have been working as a home hospice nurse ever since, over 20 years now. I live near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, with my husband, three children, and a dog.
The Japanese population in the greater Philadelphia area is not big; however, I have met Japanese hospice patients occasionally. They are always surprised to have a Japanese hospice nurse, and delighted to be able to talk with me in Japanese. Many children of 1st generation Japanese do not speak Japanese, even though they understand some.
It is difficult and awkward to talk about your health, especially when it is serious, with your friends, even in your own language. The idea of a Japanese listening service came to my mind when I met an elderly Japanese couple during the Covid19 pandemic.
The wife of the patient had no choice but to put her husband, who was near the end of his life, into a skilled nursing home, due to her own health issues. Unfortunately, visits were severely restricted at that time because of the pandemic. Phone calls and limited scheduled visits through a window were the only options for her to communicate with her husband. The husband had advanced dementia, but he responded to me when I talked to him in Japanese. They had two very supportive sons, but they did not speak Japanese, even though the couple have always conversed in Japanese. The wife expressed to me how much she appreciated that she was able to talk to me in Japanese, and that she felt like finally someone understood her true emotions.
As a hospice nurse, and an expert in End of Life Care, I have supported many people at that important time in their life, and their families. I have wanted to use my experience and expertise to support Japanese people who, like myself, are living in a foreign country. This wish led to the birth of AIZUCHI Japanese Listening Services. My goal is to provide opportunities to make people feel relieved and lightened by speaking with us.