April 2022

In the winter of the year when I was about to enter primary school, every major store in my hometown started to display school bags for the soon-to-be first graders. The moment my mother saw the first display of the year, she called her mother immediately. “The school bag display has started. You must come […]

Shortly after I saw my friend’s red school bag and learned about its structural details, I had another encounter with my dream school bag. At my local music school, I had a friend who was a year older than me, and she one day came to our group class directly from primary school wearing her

In Japan, primary school students across the country go to school with a special kind of school bag called randoseru. It’s a solid box-shaped bag with two straps and a beautiful smooth lid. I don’t exactly remember when I saw this type of school bag for the first time, but it happened the year before

Throughout my primary and middle school days, I went to schools in my neighbourhood. For the nine years, every morning, I would walk to school with my friends, with the school bag on my back. chatting about what was going to happen at school that day. Even though I wasn’t usually forgetful, from time to

It was when I was eight or nine. One day, I accompanied my mother on her trip to a bank in the city centre. Banks in Japan close at 3 pm, and when we went to the branch, people were already starting to prepare for the closing. As I waited for my mother to complete

Around the time when I entered kindergarten, along with many other girls, I became very interested in long hair. My hair was not long at the time, but at my kindergarten, I would carefully observe other girls’ and teachers’ long hair styles and think to myself what hairstyle I wanted for myself when my hair

When I was in primary school, a few times a year, my father’s college friend, who lived near Tokyo area, came to visit us for a long weekend. He had three daughters close to my age, and we used to play together whenever we had the chance to meet. Both my father and his friend

When I was about five, there was a very large earthquake in South region of Japan and many people lost their lives as a consequence of this earthquake. My hometown was located far North and was not directly affected by the earthquake, but everybody was shocked by the news. At the time, I was too

When I was seven or eight, during the time when I went through a lazy phase of my life, I developed a habit of holding my urine. This happened because I was too lazy to go to bathroom when my body gave me its first signal. As a consequence, I was often found frantically running

It was when I was five and my family lived in the tiny half-dilapidated apartment. In the tiny kitchen of the tiny apartment, there was a wooden dining table where we used to eat all our meals and snacks. Though it was a very basic plain table with four legs, it was the first table