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I've just published a short Kindle book about the cataract surgery I had on both eyes at 66: Cataract Surgery-A Memoir: Double cataract surgery in Osaka, Japan — by a 66-year-old living between Japan and the UK (the author name on the cover, Haruto Minami, is my pen name). It isn't a medical guide — it's a candid, first-person record of how I, a UK-based pensioner, chose a surgeon and a lens, and paid for the operation privately in Osaka, costs included (just under ¥1.3 million for both eyes). It's the same kind of record I always write here: what I actually did in my own life after taking a hint from a book. Today I'd like to introduce what's inside.
The day I was told my glasses couldn't be made
It started with something very ordinary. I simply went to the local optician's to have a new pair of glasses made. What came back was: please get a prescription from an eye clinic first.
My vision had a whitish haze to it even with glasses on. Covering one eye and then the other, the difference was obvious. Streetlights blurred into two or three. I had all these symptoms, and I had decided they were the sort of thing a change of lenses would fix. I'd been doing exactly that for nearly fifty-five years, ever since I first put on glasses at twelve or thirteen.
For someone who had never once been to a doctor, this came completely out of the blue. Old age, I learned, can arrive at the door of daily life quite suddenly, and in a form you weren't looking out for.
What's in the book — a year told in five chapters
Chapter one covers choosing the clinic. I ordered five books on cataracts and read them, which gave me the shape of the operation and the types of lens available. But neither the books nor the clinic websites could tell me the one thing I most wanted to know: what the surgeon himself was actually like. I was about to hand over the sense that matters most to me after life itself, and I couldn't bring myself to decide. Stuck, I turned in the end to YouTube. A doctor speaking in his own words on screen was a far more trustworthy basis for judgement than a count of review stars. That's how I came to ask Dr Keizo Watanabe of Minami Osaka Eye Clinic, in Kumatori, Osaka Prefecture. What decided it was the transparency — surgical numbers, costs and equipment, all published openly.
Chapter two is the three weeks before the operation. I treated that period as time to get my body in order. For the lens I chose Alcon's Vivity Toric — not by comparing specifications in a catalogue, but by asking myself which distance I spend the most hours a day looking at. The answer was a computer screen. In parallel I worked on bringing my blood pressure down, and went through every supplement and Chinese herbal formula I was taking, checking one by one which had to be stopped before surgery.
Chapter three is the day itself. The anaesthetic is eye drops, so you can talk with the surgeon throughout. I could faintly make out the sound of my own lens being broken up. In the moment my body tensed, I found myself silently thanking that lens for all the worlds it had shown me. If writing down that one passage were the only thing the book achieved, it would have been worth doing.
Chapter four is the three months after. Eye drops, food, lighting, sleep, which side to sleep on. The surgery ends, and then begins the business of writing your own owner's manual for a new pair of eyes, one page at a time.
Chapter five is what came afterwards. Three months on I returned to the UK and began getting acquainted with glare — a new characteristic of my eyes. Driving at night, working in the garden, sitting at the computer. It took several months of choosing the right glasses for each.
I've been as honest as I can about the money
The part of the book I worked hardest on is the costs.
The toric Vivity lens I chose came to ¥451,000 (including tax) per eye under Japan's selected-treatment system. I paid privately in full, so with the surgery, consultations and medication, both eyes came to just under ¥1.3 million. I did think it was expensive. For a pensioner, it isn't a light sum.
What let me decide to pay it was this thought. These eyes are the companions that will go on showing me the view, the screen and my wife's face, from waking each morning until I sleep at night. Seen that way, isn't this an investment in the rest of my life?
Getting free of money worries isn't only a matter of saving, I think. It's also knowing accurately, in advance, what costs what — and then paying it because it holds up against your own values. Once I'd been through those steps, the same figure stopped being anxiety and became something I was at peace with. That's why the book gives the amounts, the breakdown, and even what the same lens would typically cost in the UK (roughly ¥1.53–1.92 million for both eyes). Without a life that moves between Japan and Britain, those are numbers I'd never have been able to compare.
Three steps: look it up, understand it, then check with the doctor
This is the pattern running through the whole book.
Read, ask AI, understand the reasoning. But leave the final judgement to the doctor, always. Even when your own research says there's nothing to worry about, declare everything you're taking at the pre-operative consultation. Keeping to that order is what gave me the most peace of mind.
There were traps I didn't expect. A herbal oil I'd bought on a trip to Thailand: when I casually looked up the ingredients, it turned out to contain menthol and eucalyptus oil at high concentrations, and the vapour could irritate the eyes. Not only what you swallow, but what you put on your skin and what you breathe in as a scent, can reach the eye. Without looking it up, I'd never have noticed.
A doctor who puts information out openly, and a patient who also does his own reading. Goodness, perhaps, lies in that sort of unglamorous, accumulated honesty — that was the thought I found myself turning over, not as a reporter but as someone going through it in his own body.
The body still answers, at any age
In mid-January, when I started preparing, my blood pressure was hovering around 150/95. Not a number I could put a good face on.
So I stopped drinking, took up regular sauna visits, made organic tomato juice a daily habit, and kept on with the Chinese herbal formula I'd been taking. I added morning and evening blood pressure readings to my routine. Three weeks later, the reading on the day before surgery was 116/79.
Every one of those things is unremarkable in itself. Even so, I hadn't expected the accumulation to show up so plainly in the numbers. At 66, the body still answers. I think that was the first time I understood "healthy life expectancy" as something I felt rather than a statistic. The surgery turned out to be an excellent excuse to overhaul the whole of daily life.
Reading old age a second time
I won't forget the moment the eye patch came off the day after surgery. Only one eye, and yet the poster on the wall and the faces of the staff were sharp. It brought home how little I had actually been seeing.
And oddly, that field of view felt familiar. Perhaps, I imagined, it resembles the world I saw as a small boy, before I ever wore glasses.
I had assumed old age was only ever a matter of losing things. It seems that isn't quite so. Some things can be got back. But past what you recover, glare is waiting as a new problem to be lived with. The surgery wasn't a finish line; it was the start of a long relationship with my eyes. Perhaps ageing is exactly that: an editing job that never quite ends.
At the end of that January, with everything else given over to preparation, I took myself off to Tobihino in Nara to see the shikayose, the deer-calling. When the natural horn sounds across the winter-bare woods, the deer come running out from among the trees, one and then another. My eyes still had a thin haze over them that morning. Would this scene look brighter once the surgery was done, I wondered. That half-day, set down in the middle of the tension, was I think the most fully "in the present" I have been.
Who I hope might read it
- Anyone who has just been told they have cataracts and is anxious about what comes next
- Anyone weighing up monofocal, multifocal or EDOF lenses
- Anyone who wants to know what it actually costs, in concrete figures
- Anyone living abroad who is considering having the surgery in Japan
- Anyone accompanying a family member through it
My motivation for writing was to leave behind the kind of information that isn't in medical textbooks or government leaflets. Not statistical averages, but what one ordinary person actually looked up, actually paid, and was actually confused by.
If someone standing where I stood — told that their vision can't be corrected any further, and rather at a loss — opens this book somewhere and thinks, "someone else has walked this road," then writing it was worth doing.
In closing — seeing is living in the present
I can see each separate petal on the roses in the garden now. I can see the fine down on the tomatoes in the greenhouse. The sea of cloud below the plane on the way back to Britain was whiter and more sharply drawn than before.
Memory and stamina are both declining at my age, but you can go on editing your life by writing it down. Finishing this book is what made me feel that. If you'd like to, I'd be glad if you picked it up.
Please note that this book is one individual's personal account and is not a substitute for medical advice. Decisions about treatment, lens choice and the use of supplements should always be discussed with your own doctor.
(This site is a participant in the Amazon.co.uk Associates Programme, an affiliate advertising programme. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.)
Other books you might like
You're welcome to take a look.
EAST TO WEST: The Heart of Haiku, the Light of Scripture
A quiet essay moving between the language of haiku and the light of Scripture. A book in which Japanese poetic sensibility and the world of the Bible turn out to echo one another in unexpected places. This was my father-in-law's final work.
View on AmazonSushi Business in Britain: the complete four-volume series
A novel series following thirty-five years in the British sushi trade, from apprentice to factory manager to a small sushi school.
View on AmazonThe specific products mentioned here — eye drops, lighting, glasses and so on — are collected on this page, along with why I chose them and how they've worked out in practice.
About the author (Haruto Minami)
Haruto Minami is my pen name. Born in Hokkaido in 1960, I studied Western medicine for five years at a national university medical school. I have worked in business in the UK for over thirty years, and alongside that took a degree in acupuncture and a postgraduate diploma in oriental herbal medicine at British universities, running an Oriental medicine clinic. I retired at 65. I now divide the year between Japan in winter and the UK for the rest of the seasons, and write the bilingual blog adventures-after60.com on travel, home gardening and healthy longevity.
