The Persians have a saying that cannot be well translated but it is along the lines 'the higher and bigger a tree is and the more leaves or fruits it carries, the lower its branches hang.'
Essentially this implies that the more successful and established a truly great person is, the more humble and less arrogant or flashy he becomes. To me and colleagues I asked about Prof. Akio Morita (Akio), he is a great and strong Sequoia tree, whose branches still hang close to the earth.

It is with great disappointment to learn that my dear friend, Prof. Akio Morita (=Akio), despite his juvenile phenotype, is not 55, but a tick older and about to retire from Neurosurgery Chairmanship.

Akio can look back on an exceptional neurosurgical career, both on a surgical and academic level:

Among many important milestones, he is among the very few colleagues, who completed numerous clinical residence associates/fellowships at extremely prestigious North America and European Neurosurgery programs, e.g., at Mayo Clinic Rochester (Director; Prof. T M Sundt Jr.) or the Department of Neurosurgery, George Washington University (Director; Prof. LN. Sekhar). Learning from the Giants and Masters in our field, Akio was enabled to grow early on in his career and ultimately join the circle of international Neurosurgery masters in 2013 as Professor and Chairman at the Department of Neurological Surgery at Nippon Medical School, Toyo, Japan.

Akio's most outstanding academic achievement was the successful planning, initiation, and completion of the Unruptured Cerebral Aneurysm Study in Japan, which was published 2012 in the New England Journal Medicine. This unheard-of achievement for a (Japanese) Neurosurgeon is the ultimate result of extremely hard work, scientific excellence, endurance, and a lot of diplomacy. Essentially, this study falsified the notion that anterior circulation aneurysms smaller than 7mm do not rupture and highlighted for the first time the relevance of aneurysm morphology for the subsequent risk of rupture. This landmark study put Akio Morita and colleagues on the international plenary stage of the cerebrovascular community - an achievement that very few neurosurgeons, let alone from countries outside the US have made in their career. In 2019 he was elected as Dean of the Graduate School of Medicine, Nippon Medical School.

I personally had the pleasure to collaborate with Akio since 2012 in international aneurysm research, initially via email/telephone and later in person at the International Stroke Conferences. In 2012, I was a young neurosurgery faculty and cerebrovascular scientist and strived to collaborate with the international aneurysm community to establish consensus for the management of the disease we all struggled to understand. The aim was to highlight to the community that aneurysm rupture risk is about more than aneurysm size and location- a scientific goal that Akio and I always shared. When I approached Akio for collaboration in the Unruptured Intracranial Aneurysm Treatment Score (UIATS) project, he immediately embraced the endeavor and helped me to plan and complete my first academic Himalaya climb. I will never forget how friendly, unarrogant, humble, constructive, actively helpful and supportive he had been since the first minute of our contact. These traits separate him distinctly from many equally (or less) successful people in Medicine and made him back then an idol for me and other young colleagues, on a neurosurgical, academic, and humane level!

I need to emphasize, that despite all of this and his amazing career and the required sacrifices on every level, Akio also managed to live a happy familial life and enjoy his family whenever he could.

For all these reasons, I am somewhat sad to learn that Akio is already retiring, since I had never realized that this very disciplined yet funny and social person, is really 20 years older than me - he never treated me as being young or junior. 65 is the new 55. So, for the next decade(s), I wish Akio a decent transition into more peaceful waters, some new adventures and challenges, a healthy and happy life, and nice journeys in the world with his beloved ones. Akio, you set the bar very high, but I and our common friends will continue the scientific journey we shared and will do our best to further elucidate the appropriate management of unruptured intracranial aneurysms based on the ideas and concepts we had always shared.

Maybe a small final advice: If you haven't already, it's time to get new and more trendy glasses - your former ones made you really look like the wise and old Professor, that you have become. I am happy to go shopping for them with you and show you the German whine country adjacent to Mannheim!

Sincerely yours and with utmost respect and friendship,

Prof. Morita at the International Subarachnoid Hemorrhage Conference, Amsterdam 2019.