March 2022

When I was in kindergarten, one of my classmates visited a dairy farm with her family and brought back a small gift for each of us (we were a small class). It was a keyholder of a copper bell with a cute painting of a cow in white and pink. When I showed it to […]

Much of my memory starts when I was three years old, but there is one piece of memory I recall from the time when I was two. That summer, my eldest cousin visited my family in our half-dilapidated apartment for the first time. My cousin used to live in my grandmother’s house, and I had

In the spring when I was ten, my father took the family to England for ten days on his business trip. It was my first trip overseas, and I was very excited. But even more excited was my mother, who had once studied and lived in the country for several years before I was born.

When I was between the age of seven and ten, my parents used to take me to sledding during the winter season. Within an hour drive from our new home in the suburb, there was a small mountain called Mt. Izumigatake, which was high enough to carry sufficient snow for mountain skiing in winter. Neither

It was another ordinary morning at a tiny half-dilapidated apartment. I was five and my little brother was two. Invited by the sunny weather outside, we went out on a casual morning exploration just by ourselves. We walked down the staircase and stepped outside of our building. I took my brother to a large rusted

I remember it was when I was about four. The busy day was over. We had finished supper, taken bath, brushed our teeth, and the only remaining task of the day was to go to bed and sleep. According to my memory, my mother and I were the only ones in the living room of

In the early summer when I was four, my family visited a famous amusement park in the mountainous North Kanto region. It was the one and only time we went there since the park was quite far away from our hometown. My family rarely visited amusement parks, and after the long drive, I couldn’t have

In Japan, from primary schools to high schools, the school buildings are cleaned by students after classes. Each class is divided into groups of five or six, and these groups take on different cleaning responsibilities each week. One week, a group is in charge of their own classroom, the next week, a corridor, then the

It was when I was about four year old. One sunny cold winter day, my mother was taking out the laundry to our balcony as usual. She left the balcony door open, and the cold morning air was coming inside. On the floor, there was a bag of laundry clips that she was going to

When I was small, I used to take bath with one of my parents. Some days with my mother and some days with my father (it’s a very common practice in Japan). My mother was very practical and didn’t allow me to play in the bathtub much, but my father did, and I always looked