childhood memories

When I was four, I was attending a local YAMAHA music school. Apart from myself and my two childhood best friends who used to live in the same community, there were about seven other children in our class. Once a week, in the late afternoon, we would attend an hour-long group electone lesson together. One […]

When I was little, just like many other kids, I used to wet the bed. Even though I usually went to the bathroom just before sleeping, it still happened from time to time. In my dream, I would find a toilet in a convenient location, sit on it, and let go of all the tension

When I was about nine, there was a small shopping complex near our house that my family visited every Sunday for a weekly grocery. While my mother did the shopping in the grocery store, my father and I would hang out, usually first doing a small shopping at a 100 yen shop (a Japanese version

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