trialization and Westernizing of Japanese society. So although hereditary factors may well contribute to the problem, there are clearly other factors which influence people’s eyesight as well.

Even in the modern world the number of cases of myopia is significantly lower in rural areas than among the more highly educated professional population. In fact, the higher your education, the higher your risk of becoming nearsighted. The statistics look something like this:

    * Age or level of education—Percentage suffering myopia
    * At birth—less than 1 percent
    * Ages 5 to 9—8 percent
    * End of primary school—20 percent
    * End of secondary school—40 percent
    * End of university—80 percent

But this development can be stopped, as I discovered in my own eye clinic. In the afternoons, when parents would pick up their children from school, I found myself stuck with little to do. I decided to make up for my lost time with an experiment. We had a special eye therapy room where we worked with children who suffered from learning difficulties because of their visual impairment. I decided to go there in the afternoons and take off my glasses, just to see what would happen. The first day, I sat down, put down my glasses on the table next to me and looked around for a while. Everything seemed to be in order. But as I sat there, suddenly my right arm reached out for my glasses and put them back on! It happened before I even realized it. Before I knew it, I was back in my consulting room, going about my usual affairs.

The next two days the same thing happened. Each day I would enter the room and take off my glasses, only to put them back on within minutes without even noticing it. After a few days I started to notice an uneasy, tense feeling, apparently just before I was about to reach out for my glasses, so I tried to wait and see what would happen after this feeling of discomfort set in. My tension turned to fear, which in turn triggered other emotions: grief, anger, or a sense of loss of control. The longer I took off my glasses, the more these emotions came to the surface, but they would instantly disappear when I put my glasses back on. Trying to figure out what was the logic behind all this, I wondered if perhaps my glasses functioned as a way of altering my emotional state, as alcohol does in an alcoholic. At that moment I realized how addictive glasses really are.

One day, after I had taken off my glasses for about fifteen minutes, I wondered how the removal of a couple of mere corrective lenses could produce such powerful emotions. But then it struck me that I was looking at it the wrong way round. My glasses were like a mask for my awareness of those unpleasant feelings, feelings which must be aspects

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