Japan: Remembering those who passed away

Last Wednesday evening, as I was busy preparing for my trip to Japan, I got a frantic text from our dear friend and colleague, Cebu Daily News Publisher Eileen Mangubat informing me that CDN columnist Job Tabada suffered a heart attack last Monday. Job was with the media group in Taipei the other weekend and when we met him at the airport, he told us that he came from the Heart Center for a checkup. I thought that he was given a clean bill of health but throughout the trip, he did look quite haggard. I had a bad feeling when Eileen texted me that Job suffered a heart attack. He never made it.

At my hotel in Shinjuku I read in our local news through the internet that Job Tabada died last Friday. My condolences to his family. Cebu media has lost a good man, who has been with us for most of his life, from RPN-9, SunStar Daily to The Freeman and finally with CDN. May we request the pious reader to please pray for the repose of his soul.

Indeed, these are times when death knocks on the doors of our friends, it comes in pairs. As we were also leaving for Japan, I also learned from my uncle Dr. Alfredo Segura in Benecia, California that last Nov.18, his elder brother (younger brother of my mother) Engr. Eduardo Segura passed away after a massive stroke in St. Louis, Missouri. He is survived by his wife Adelaida (from Ocaña, Carcar) Alegarbes Segura and son Paul and wife Lynn and their grandchildren.

Tio Ed as we fondly called him was one uncle whom I idolized in my youth. After he graduated in CIT, he worked as a hydraulics engineer in Boeing Aircraft Corp. in Seattle when the Boeing 707 was being developed. He then moved to St. Louis, Missouri to work for McDonnell Douglas. In 1972 when we first visited the US, we stayed with him and it was there that I learned that he was working for the hydraulics systems of the F-15 Strike Eagle, America’s most formidable air superiority combat aircraft. He had clearance to tour us to the McDonnell facility where I got my first glimpse of the F-15, when most people thought that the F-4 Phantom II would stay longer as America’s main strike fighter.

He eventually retired from McDonnell just as his old company Boeing Aircraft Company bought out McDonnell Aircraft Company. Now his only son Paul works in the same company. Tio Ed was cremated and his ashes will be brought to Cebu for burial beside our maternal grandma Encarnacion Segura perhaps early next year. May we request the pious reader to pray for the repose of his soul. 

Yesterday was the late Max Soliven’s 2nd death anniversary. His life-size statue across the Aristocrat Hotel in Roxas Blvd. was formally unveiled. Ironically, I was in the Narita area where Sir Max succumbed to pneumonia (at the Narita Red Cross Hospital) for the interment of the ashes of Sachiko Kono, mother of my brother-in-law Yuki Kono, husband of my sister Adela A. Kono.

When she arrived in Cebu ten years ago, Sachiko Kono (we called her Okasan) asked to be converted to Catholicism and was baptized by Msgr. Cristobal Garcia as Rosa Sienna Kono. Okasan’s conversion gave a truism to the Biblical story of Ruth, where Ruth told her mother-in-law, “Where you shall go, I shall go, where you will live, there I shall live; your people shall be my people; your God shall be my God too!”

Okasan was stricken with throat cancer a year ago and was expected to last for three months. Thankfully, our cousin Dr. Don Eduard Rosello put a stent in her throat that allowed her to live for a year more. She passed away very peacefully last Oct.9 with us surrounding her deathbed at Cebu Doctors Hospital.

While we buried half her ashes in our family plot in Cempark, she also requested that her other half be buried with her husband Goro Kono and daughter Rika in Narita Memorial Park. That’s what we did for most of the day, staying at the Airport Hotel in Narita, as it was only a few kilometers away from the airport.

Call it luck or divine providence that my sister Adela had a very good friend, a priest in the name of Fr. Joseph “Jack” Sarate, OSM from Sambag 1 who has been in Japan for the last eight years. He was invited by the Bishop of Saitama Prefecture Diocese where he works in the parish of Omiya Catholic Church. Adela asked him to say Holy Mass at the Narita Memorial Park. It turned out that while Okasan lived an obscure life, her interment in Narita made history as the first Holy Mass ever held in that cemetery. Incidentally, I also asked Fr. Jack to say Holy Mass for Max Soliven’s 2nd death anniversary. At least with that mass said in Japan, his soul would finally find rest.