Looking back, the bottom of my life was several years in the mid-80’s when I left my hometown and came to live in Tokyo where I was struggling for success as a musician. While I was working part-time for a living, I was making songs, looking for band members, doing…

A Long Way to Freedom hr670 I have started a video Podcast. A complex about looks resides in me always, all my life. When I was a child, my mother used to say, “If only you don’t have a nose like that,” by shading my nose with her hand. She…

I am stingy. I switch off the lights, turn off a faucet, and shut the refrigerator door as soon as I finish using them. I mend holey socks and replace loose elastic strings on pajama pants instead of buying new ones. Whether at home or at a restaurant, I never…

I haven’t seen my parents for about five years now. When I saw them last time, they were in their late seventies and my mother told me an episode for a giggle. It goes as follows. During a recent trip my parents took, they went along the highway beside a…

There are many things that used to be common and have become obsolete now. In Japan where I was born and grew up, an analog calculator called ‘soroban’, a Japanese abacus, had been so popular and seen everywhere when I was a child. Almost every store and household had one…

I started taking piano lessons at the age of four and had continued on and off until I was fourteen years old. Yet, not a single classical piece exists that I can play properly. There are several clear reasons for that. To begin with, the motive for the lesson was…

What I remember as the happiest memory in my childhood is the day that my parents took my younger sister and me to the confectionery factory for a guided tour when I was about seven or eight years old. Theme parks hadn’t arrived in Japan yet and even a factory…

It was 1983 when the theme park which host is the mouse opened in Japan for the first time outside the U.S. Two years after it opened, I left my hometown and began to live by myself in Tokyo to pursue my career as a musician. My partner was the…

When I left my hometown for Tokyo and started living by myself there in the mid 80’s, quite a few second-run theaters for movies still remained. Those theaters showed two or three films at the price of one new film. The best experience of mine was when I saw ‘Top…