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The story
Singer Aki Wada (76) attended a disease-awareness event at KITTE Marunouchi in Tokyo on October 8 and revealed that she has bolts from an artificial joint in her hip and holds a Class 4 disability certificate. She says she was diagnosed with osteoarthritis of the hip after an injury sustained while training in 2022, and has since undergone hip replacement surgery twice. On 5ch, alongside wordplay riffing on the word “bolt,” the thread filled up with personal stories about family members’ hip replacements, disability certificate grades, and the perks they come with — reactions split over how to read the standards behind a Class 4 disability rating.
Aki Wada: “I have bolts in my hip. I also hold a Class 4 disability certificate” — reveals two hip replacement surgeries
Singer Aki Wada (76) attended a press event on the 8th at KITTE Marunouchi in Tokyo for the disease-awareness project “Exhibition: Continuing a Life of Walking,” hosted by Zimmer Violet. “As we live through an era where people can expect to live to 100, I want people to first think about living a life where they can walk on their own two feet,” she said.
Wada said that in September 2022 she felt a sudden sharp pain while strengthening her core doing “Tilapis” (likely a mangled rendering of “Pilates” in the original report), and was diagnosed with a torn iliac muscle in her hip — after which it also came out that she had osteoarthritis of the hip.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
Yeah… this is bad.
Why's that? Because it was only on one side?
Apparently it mostly just gets him half-price highway tolls and discounts at museums and galleries, but he says the highway toll discount really helps.
It's one on the left and one on the right, two total — of course that works.
You can actually get it done twice on the same leg.
Implants have a rough lifespan, so doctors work backward from that to time the surgery.
I've got Tyson Gay in me (another top sprinter, like Usain Bolt).
They'd ride a bike and even go swimming sometimes.
The rehab was apparently brutal — they said the physical therapist was a demon about it.
But they also said someone who had surgery around the same time and slacked off on rehab didn't recover nearly as well even after leaving the hospital.
But unfortunately, if you're only on the national pension (kokumin nenkin), you don't get it.
Even a rich person who doesn't do any real physical work can wreck their body like this — just shows how fragile humans are.
Usually that's the first thing to go.
You can buy medical equipment at a discount.
It takes some paperwork, but medicine, equipment, and consumables all get cheaper.
Background and Key Points of This Topic
Under Japan’s Act on Welfare for Physically Disabled Persons, anyone who undergoes a hip joint replacement is, as a rule, certified at Class 4 regardless of whether it actually impairs their daily life. That’s why the thread saw both the view that this amounts to “basically the same treatment as an able-bodied person” and the view that the grade alone doesn’t capture how serious the disability really is. Because the certificate is only issued upon application, comments like “my family member had the same surgery but doesn’t have one” may reflect differences in whether someone actually applied, or whether the surgery was on one hip or both. Discounts on medical costs and highway tolls came up as benefits of holding the certificate, but the thread didn’t get into how the scope of those benefits differs by grade.
*This article is compiled from excerpts and a summary of the 5ch (Entertainment/Sports News+) thread “[Celebrity] Aki Wada: “I have bolts in my hip. I also hold a Class 4 disability certificate” — reveals two hip replacement surgeries.”
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