When I Was a Boy in Japan

A series of personal sketches recounts a boyhood shaped by family rituals, village and city schooling, seasonal festivals, toys and small adventures. Vignettes describe domestic meals, traditional instruction alongside English lessons, classroom discipline, summer swims, ancestral observances, and neighborhood pastimes, while occasional anecdotes touch on trades, markets, and local fêtes. An accompanying child companion widens the narrative scope, and the chapters combine informal memoir, moral tales, and cultural detail into a portrait of everyday youthful experience illustrated with photographs and episodic scenes.