I was born and grew up in a small town in Yokohama. There were still many empty spaces and fields in the neighborhood when I was a kid. My daily routine after elementary school was, to drop off my school bag, get together with the neighborhood kids and go play around in those bare spaces and fields. My house had a small backyard space behind it, so we often played "Kan-Keri" and "Menko" there. Until around the time I entered elementary school, the neighboring streets hadn't been paved and I remember them turning into mud slides every time it rained. Even after they were paved, there were so few cars, so we played stepping stones and Ken-Ken with lines drawn by rouseki (wax chalk) on the street.

We also played the game called "nandemo asobi (everything goes)". The game we played was decided by the winner of janken (paper, rocks, scissors) chosen from ten or so games. I don't remember any of the selections except the one called "Peeling Apple". One just stands straight and the other traces his or her body in a circle with his fingertip starting at the top of the head like peeling an apple. If the standing kid laughed from tickling, he lost. Gee, I can't remember what was so exciting about this stupid game, but it was popular and we played it often.

TV broadcast started in 1953 in Japan, but the price of a TV set was prohibitively high and out of reach for most households. The first time I saw a TV was a public TV set placed in an empty space in the middle of a nearby market street. I think it was a pro-wrestling program with Rikidouzan. The dentist in front of my home had a TV set earlier than other neighbors and, luckily, their kid was one of my friends, so I could enjoy "Little Rascals" and "Kurama-Tengu",at his place.

          By the way, it was in 1962 when my parents bought a TV, and the first thing we saw when we           turned it on, was the news of the Kennedy assassination.

Before the TV became more popular, we often had Kami-Shibai coming around.

          Kani-Shibai were traveling storytellers. Children gathered around them as they told a story with           a set of illustrated boards and some instruments. They made their income from candies they           sold to their audience.

We always bought a pair of thin, round pink waffers (we called it senbei, but it's not the usual rice cracker senbei) and Mizuame paste. Originally, the paste was transparent, but became a white goo after being kneaded between two small wooden sticks, We spread the white gue between the two pieces of senbei, and watched the program while nibbling it. I have no memory of the programs I saw, but can remember the taste of the pink senbei/Mizuame combination quite clearly. At nearby Dagashi-ya (cheap candy store), we ate squid legs colored by chemicals which made our mouth turn red inside and out afterwards, and sucked red and green Japanese gelatin contained in a glass tube like a small test tube. I don't know how our stomache could cope with them.

On weekends and holidays, we stretched our territory to Soujiji temple or Mitsuike Park, both 20~30 minutes away by foot, where we could expand our adventure without reserve, especially Soujiji. It was our most favorite, indispensable playground. As the head temple of Soudou-school of Buddhism, it has a great expanse of ground with dense fields, and there was copses surrounding the many Buddhist architectures. We chased insects in the field, played hide-and-seek in the woods, and climbed and slid down the dirt slopes behind them. By the time we returned, our cloths were totally covered by dirt and we had countless scratches on our arms and legs, but I have no memory getting scolded by my parents because of that. All I got was a treatment of Aka-chin (mercurochrome).

          Speaking of Aka-chin, I fell from a bicycle when I was in the second grade and got half of my           face pretty much scraped on a paved street. As usual, my mother treated the scratches with           Aka-chin. Imagine the shocked faces of classmates and the teacher when I showed up to class           with half of my face in perfect crimson red.

At the end of the long approach from the entrance of Soujiji was a hollow with a pond with an aged wooden arch bridge. We caught pollywogs and crayfish there. There must have been many monks at the temple, but we hardly saw them. So we even struck inside the main temple once in a while, but never did any mischief because of the solemn atmosphere that was apparent even to us ignorant kids.

Not many of us had an in-house bath at that time, so the public bath practically next to my house was another playground for us. It opened at 3 pm everyday. We went in the early hours, usually as a group of 3 or 4, when it was still pretty empty, and romped about with crude handmade boats, water pistols and such. We were diving into the large hot water tub and splashing hot water to each other as if it's a pool, but I can't recall any occasion that we were scolded for it. I remember our neighbor, an old man who was around 80 at that time, going to this public bath everyday exactly at 3 pm, totally naked except Fundoshi (traditional Japanese under pants) all year around, with a towel and soap in a small metal bowl in hand. Special events such as Shoubu (iris) bath on May 5 (national children's day) and Yuzu (a kind of citron) bath on the day of winter solstice were also celebrated there. The bare space behind the bath house was piled high with wood used to boil the water. We went wild there, building secret hideouts and played Chanbara (swards-man play) using wooden sticks, etc., but again, nobody complained, scolded, or even warned us about it.

          My oldest visual memory is that of my mother with the lid of a soap dish in hand, chasing a           floating poop in the large bath tub of the public bath, and there's no doubt I had sole           responsibility for what happened

Probably because there weren't many institutions in those days, there were many mentally-challenged kids in the neighborhood. A couple of doors down from my house lived a family with 4 mentally-challenged kids. The youngest of them must have been 3~4 years older than me, and I'm pretty sure none of them went to any school. The second youngest had always sat in front of his house all day, all year around, grinning to people passing by. Another one, Y-chan, was a daughter of a cheap candy wholesaler near my house, about a year or two older than me. I learned later on that her brain was damaged by polio when she was a baby. She was always kept tied on a leash to the pillar in the back of the store front, flapping arms, kicking legs, and shrieking meaningless garbles. She was a terror for us, and it was a quite bit of racket when the tie got loose once in a while and she came out on the street. It was a kind of cruel act, but we teased those who were physically touched by her calling "Engacho" that meant something unclean like you had caught an epidemic. I cried hysterically once when I was caught and hugged by her. Then again, we received no warnings or scolding from adults on our behavior.

It is a wonder that I can recall all the names and faces of those who played together, and what kind of adventures we shared, even after about half a century. I can't even remember my other classmates, or what I learned in class.

Today, there's no empty space left in the area where I spent my childhood. It was filled with small houses or used as parking lots. My parents built a tiny apartment in the backyard when I was in middle school, then my brother turned the entire property into one larger house for my parents and his family. It is still that way today. Soujiji, around the time I was in high school, paved all approaches and dirt roads when they built the new main temple, and filled up the pond to turn it into a large parking lot. The surrounding fields and woods were completely developed into housing and large apartments, and I can't find any vestige of my adventurous days. The public bath next door held out until 2 years ago (2009), but finally gave out to be an apartment complex. Those mentally-challenged kids must have been sent to institutions by the time I graduate the high school and I haven't seen them since.

Every time I remember my childhood days, it always comes with the distinct smell of the season, especially that of early summer and autumn. Later, I encountered one of Takashi Okai's waka (Japanese poem);

"Shigeriyuku uzuki satsuki no sawasawa to ao kakiwakete ikite aegite"
April, May, sound of growing greens, pushing them through, living and panting

The first thing I remembered was the overwhelming smell of weeds in the field of Soujiji. In autumn, the particular smell of rotting fallen leaves filled your nostrils in the woods. And the wonderful scent of Shobu-yu and Yuzu-yu. Thinking back, it almost feels like all my life was a simple downhill spiral with those childhood days as its summit.

I wonder if we still have those seasonal smells left in Japanese urban areas. The nearby nature where kids can play around carefree have disappeared almost completely. Now, kids play video games frantically in a more supervised environment. I do not have an opinion about whether it's good or bad, but I wonder if they will have similar memories of the childhood glory days, and feel kind of sorry for them.


in front of my old house (mid '50s)