Introduction

Pardon me for starting the Introduction with my private concerns, but I would like to write a little about my childhood. It was the 1950s. I grew up in a country town, a short distance from the center of Kōchi prefecture in Japan. My hometown was only some 10 kilometers away from the central city, Kōchi-city (which used to be a castle town), but in those days I needed to cross a mountain by bus to get there. The castle town was very far, psychologically, and my hometown was isolated from the outside. This created a small, closed world, at least to me as a child.