SATOSHI SUGIYAMA
Staff writer

Hideyuki Sugita was exhausted as he scaled the rocky mountain pass in total darkness early one Friday in late August.

The 31-year-old former Keio University rugby standout was also overwhelmed with satisfaction — not merely because he was climbing Mount Fuji with old classmates, but more importantly because he was proving his disability would not stand in the way.

Defying heavy rain, gusty winds and freezing temperatures, he carefully trod each step with about 100 former teammates and friends making their way to the top of the 3,776-meter behemoth.

The expedition was a long time coming.

Twelve years ago, he and his teammates had planned to hike the mountain on the last day of a summer camp. But a practice game in August that year changed his life, leaving him paralyzed from the chest down. A doctor told him he would never walk again.

Though the mountaineering plan was scrapped, Sugita made a promise to his teammates: He’d walk again and take on the mountain with them. Five years passed. Ten years passed. At his classmates’ weddings, his friends would badger him about making the trip.

Thinking his window was closing as he turned 30 last year, he decided to finally deliver on his promise.

“Everyone kept asking me the same question,” Sugita said. “Gradually I came to understand that they were serious. It wasn’t me. It was the people around me.”

His friends visited him at the hospital but didn’t know what to say. Awkwardness hung over the meetings, prompting Sugita to ask them not to visit for the time being.

Fluctuating between optimism and despair, his desire to walk again remained the one constant.

Sugita’s mother, Asako, recalled an encounter she had with his doctor, Masaya Nakamura, a leading expert in regenerative medicine and the application of iPS cells in humans.

“(He) told Hideyuki, ‘Mr. Sugita, if you could wait three, no five years, you’d be able to walk again,’ ” she recalled. “ ‘We did experiments using iPS cells on mice and rats and they were successful. There’ll be a time when the cells can be applied to people, so you’ll be able to walk if you can wait five years.’

“Then, Hideyuki said, ‘Doctor, I can’t wait that long, so I’ll walk by myself,” she recalled. From that moment, his parents were convinced he would walk again.

Soon, feeling began to return to his legs. Astoundingly, about a month into his hospitalization, he was able to ever-so-slightly wiggle his right big toe. Then it was his left toe. Soon it was his right index finger. Calves and thighs twitched. He became able to roll over and sit upright in his bed.

“It’s like you died once and were born again,” he said.

After about three months in the hospital, he was relocated to a rehabilitation center in the suburbs, where he stayed for a year. By then, he had recovered to the point where he could sit up and use a wheelchair. Despite asking for space, his friends continued to visit.

But Sugita felt guilty: He was not recovering at the pace he desired.

Understanding that nothing would change if he were to simply remain in bed, he tried to walk in rehabilitation sessions. He wanted to share with his friends that he could again eat meals and get dressed on his own. Miraculously, he got to the point where he was able to take a few steps.

While waiting to gain readmission to Keio University, which was itself proving an arduous task, Sugita flew to the United States to take part in rehab work at a special gym in San Diego in autumn 2008, about a year after his injury. The trip was recommended by his trainers at J-Workout, Japan’s sole gym facility exclusively for people with spinal injuries.

When he returned a few weeks later, his father greeted him at Narita Airport. But after briefly stepping aside to take a business call, he was stunned by what he saw when he came back: His son was rising from his wheelchair and making his way to a nearby vending machine to buy juice.

With the aid of a pair of canes, he was walking again.

“I was shocked,” the elder Sugita recalled. “I told him, ‘Oh my God, you can walk!’ I was just so happy.”

In hindsight, Sugita doesn’t believe the doctors in Nagano erred in their diagnosis. Any doctor who saw his X-rays and MRI scans from back then would have concluded the outlook was bleak, he said.

But Masaki Tanino, president of J-Workout and a trainer who has known Sugita since his injury, had a different assessment. Although the injury was indeed grave, Tanino believed Sugita would be able to recover.

Tanino speculates the dire diagnosis derived from the difficulty in accurately evaluating such critical injuries soon after they occur, especially considering the quality of X-rays and MRI scans at that time.

While Sugita is not yet 100 percent — he still needs canes to walk and avoids crowded trains — he can hold chopsticks and feel warm and cold.

“I don’t think even a little bit that getting injured was a good thing,” Sugita said in March. “But because I was injured, I was able to understand the importance of family. I realized there are people out there who worry about me. I was able to be kind to people.”

After going back to school, Sugita graduated from Keio with a degree in policy management, with a year and a half delay. He joined Goldman Sachs in January 2013.

Despite the demanding workload, he was happy just to be self-reliant and gainfully employed — two things he feared he would never be able to do again.