Fifty-year people? Fifty-year life?

Human life lasts only 50 years.
Contrast human life with the life of the human world.
It’s like a dream and illusion.

This is a stanza from “Atsumori”, a Kowakamai program Oda Nobunaga enjoyed performing. Nobunaga is said to have danced it the night before the Battle of Okehazama. The “Fifty-year life” expresses the contrast between our era and earlier eras when longevity was hard to achieve. But the original meaning was different, so any comparison is mistaken: “50 years in the human world is as fleeting as an illusion compared to the flow of heaven”. However, the term “Fifty-year life” aptly describes the short and fleeting quality of the lives of people of the past compared to our lives today. The oldest public data shows us that the average life expectancy of a newborn from 1891-1898 was 42.8 years for men and 44.3 years for women.(*1) It wasn’t be changed until 1947 when both men and women passed the 50-year mark.
There are many special birthdays in Japan. On a person’s 60th birthday, for example, we celebrate the return to the year of the person’s birth in the Chinese Zodiac. We celebrate a person’s 70th birthday as the “Koki”, the rarely achieved milestone of living to that age. In an age when medicine lagged far behind what we know today, longevity was incredibly prized. In present-day Japan, a country famous for its long lifespans, 82.9% of men and 91.7% of women can expect to survive to age 70.(*2) When we aim for special birthdays at ages such as 100 and 108, we express our wish to value the joys of life.

End mills, contributing to medicine in all sorts of ways.

Average Japanese lifespans have hit a new record, according to an announcement released on March 2017. Yet as long as people suffer from diseases or wounds, medicine will have room to advance. Innovation in medical equipment is responsible for an increased level of diagnostic precision and treatment techniques. Take MRIs, for example. NS TOOL’s end mills have enabled the high-precision machining of electronics parts, which in turn enables the regularization of the magnetic fields generated in MRIs. Images with vastly higher resolutions have been realized, leading to diagnostic imaging with greater certainty. Moreover, Our products have also contributed to medical breakthroughs in various other ways. For example, we can redesign endoscopes that more easily navigate through the body. We can also mold “boluses” to adjust beam impact distances to match the shapes of patients’ lesions in heavy particle beam chemotherapy.
The WHO has defined health as “a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity”. People have rich social connections to their friends, families, and acquaintances; only when their bodies, minds, and environments are at peace can we call them “healthy”. Many of the people nearby the sick or wounded worry on their behalf. We can even say that the healing of one person brings “health” to everyone. To protect people’s relationships and bonds linked by smiles, NS TOOL hones its end mills and supports Japan’s medical sites from behind the scenes.
*1 Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare - Annual Trends in Average Lifespan according to the Complete Life Table
*2 Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare - 2015 Abridged Life Table