October 2022

When I was small, there were two things that always led me to a sense of panic. One was when I travelled by a bullet train with my parents. At the main train station in my hometown, bullet trains have special platforms separate from those of the local trains, and they are located at the […]

It was when I was four and staying at my maternal grandmother’s place for a few weeks. My grandmother was an active folk song singer in the local community, and she used to take part in the community’s senior folk song club. The group had a regular practice at a nearby meeting house, and one

In Japan, there is something called the Great Cleaning, a tradition where each family cleans their house thoroughly before the arrival of the new year. The cleaning usually takes place in December and lasts for several days. During this time, the floors are washed, the windows are cleaned, the ceilings and the fans are dusted,

The summer when I was seven, my first pajama party was hosted at my family’s new house in the suburb with my two childhood best friends. We were friends from our time in the community of tiny half-dilapidated apartments, and by that time, not only our mothers but also our fathers had become good friends.

Growing up, my family’s car was always a five-seater and so were my close friends’ family cars. As a child, wherever I went, the car I travelled in was almost always a five-seater. However, my maternal aunt’s husband had a car that was usually used as a five-seater but could turn into a seven-seater by

The autumn when I was five years old, my kindergarten teachers took us to a local sweet potato farm for a “harvest” experience. The whole kindergarten (it was a small one) rented a bus and travelled to the farm located somewhere in the outskirt of my hometown. What I remember about the farm is that

In his very short life, my little brother fell from a staircase twice. The first time was when he was one year old. We were visiting my paternal grandmother’s house, which had a steep staircase connecting the two floors of the house. One evening, we were all upstairs preparing the bedding for the night when

Growing up, my mother and I didn’t spend too much time in the kitchen together, and most of my current cooking skills I gained since I started living on my own as a college student. However, there is one lesson that my mother taught me back home that I constantly seem to practice in the

When I was a teenager and learning English as a second language back in Japan, one day, my father shared with me a story about one English test he had taken at secondary school that he had never forgot about. Located in a big urban city, the secondary school my father attended had a very

It was the spring when I had turned nine. One long weekend, my father’s good old friend from college time came to visit us with his children. One afternoon, we all went to a local hot spring to have a relaxing afternoon. My parents booked a room there, and after taking a good long bath,