childhood memories

In Japan, every August, there is a three-day festivity called bon. According to what I was taught, it is an occasion when our ancestors’ spirits come to visit us to spend the three days with us, and people celebrate it with a special dance festival in each local community. This dance is called bon odori […]

It was when I was about nine years old. One evening, our house phone rang. When I answered the phone, it was my father. “Dad, where are you?” I asked him excitedly. I used to look forward to my father’s return from work. “I’m in downtown. Can I talk to your mother please?” My father

When I was in Grade 5 and 6, I had a teacher who loved telling stories to us. Every morning, before we started our classes, he would tell us some interesting story that he had read in the newspaper or seen on TV. One day, we got news that a bear was seen in our

This is a story that I heard from my aunt long time ago. When my aunt was little, her father was ill and in order to support the family, she and her elder brother used to help their mother with the field work and housework. On top of the heavy workload, the family finance was

Throughout my childhood I loved playing with my dolls. It was one of my favourite activities in the world, and whenever I wasn’t playing with my friends, I was found sitting with my dolls, engaged in a long, emotional drama with them. I always improvised the story, and as I went along with each new

One of the strangest, and yet clearest memories from my early childhood took place in the kitchen of my family’s tiny half-dilapidated apartment. I was two or three at the time, and I was very fond of drinking milk. When my parents and I sat for dinner, there was always a 1L milk package placed

It was in the month of May when I was nine years old. My father’s close friend from college time came to visit us with his four children over the long weekend. The day when they arrived was a beautiful sunny day, and my mother drove all of us to a park on the riverside

Throughout my childhood, I had two best friends that I always hung out with. Especially when we all lived in the same community of tiny half-dilapidated apartments, we saw each other and played together every day. Our friendship was very caring in nature and unique in the sense that we almost never competed against each

When I was a child, I loved reading books. More precisely, I loved living the books. What this meant was that I often got so absorbed in my reading that I started to live my daily life feeling as if I were the hero or heroin of the story I was reading. When I was

Throughout my childhood, I was very fond of drawing, and like many other kids, I daily drew many things with my colour pens and crayons. When I was in kindergarten and crazy about Sailor Moon TV series, my drawing revolved a lot around Sailor Moon characters, and when my little brother passed away just before