School lunch and Africa
Miss Kawano remained as our teacher for three years. I was unhappy, and the stress and the damaged gut caused an eating disorder. We had a school lunch system that […]
Miss Kawano
My teacher at the 1st-grade was Miss Kawano. She was about a few years to her retirement, had no family, and lived alone. She was short with a round face […]
Hometown
I was born in 1977, four years after my sister and two years after the miscarried sibling. The town I grew up in had long been a farming town. But […]
Conjugal protocol
My sister once said to me upsettingly, “You despise the marriage system,” when I showed indifference to her upcoming matrimony. She was wrong. I scorned “people” who blindly pursued conjugal […]
Stigma
In 2003, a book of an essay was released and became a best-seller – “Makeinu no toboe,” written by Junko Sakai*. The literal translation is “a howling of a defeated […]
Sister – rage against sister
I went home for Christmas in 2015. By then, I had been living overseas for ten years. On Christmas morning, my sister and two nieces (9 and 7 years old), […]
Sister – smile
The hostess bars often ranked the girls based on the sales they brought to the house. Regular customers asked to be served by their favorite girls. The girls earned revenue […]
Sister – queen
Companies that used to hire college graduates of any qualities became selective in their recruitment. First, they hired male graduates from top schools. Then they picked male graduates of mid-level […]
Juliana’s Tokyo
The strong economy from the mid-’80s to the collapse of Nikkei in 1991 brought the transformation of young women in Japan. There was a social phenomenon that young women were […]
Sister – the job market
When my sister finished school, it was the mid-’90s. The Japanese economy had been declining. Companies went through lay-offs at an unprecedented level in the post-war economic growth period. Lifetime […]