Showing results by author "Hidemi Woods" in All Categories

A long time ago, when Japan had the feudal system, my family was a landlord of the area. It has come to a complete downfall over the years, but my family still clings to its past glory. For them, to succeed the family is critical. I’m firstborn and have no brother which meant that I was a successor and destined to spend the whole life in my hometown. But, music changed everything. To pursue a career in music, my hometown was too rural, and I had to move out. Back then, I was a college student, and moving to a city meant dropping out of school.

The Beginning of A Winter TripThe mountainous region where I live is in the depth of winter and it snows day after day. Now that the snow covering the ground has accumulated over my own height, I was having a sense of claustrophobia. That’s a cue for my annual three-day trip to the Tokyo metropolitan area that doesn’t have much snow.I set about arranging this year’s trip online. I successfully booked the room in a hotel of the Japanese luxury chain at a greatly economical rate by making the best use of coupons and their off-season promotion. The stay would come with preferential ...

the new Kyoto When I spent 40 minutes aboard the bullet train bound for Kyoto from Tokyo, an alarming notion popped into my head. “Did I miss Mt. Fuji?” It’s around this time that Mt. Fuji comes into view closely in the bullet train window. Somehow Mt. Fuji is a special mountain for Japanese people. It’s said that seeing the first sunrise of the year from the top of Mt. Fuji brings a happy new year. Many of them want to climb it once during their lifetime. They regard it as something holy and good luck. I myself try to see it every time I take a bullet train to Kyoto, and pray to it...

I got on the plane to Los Angeles and was taking breath in my seat when a flight attendant spilled orange juice all over my partner’s brand-new pants. They were his favorite pants that he would wear all the way to the end of this trip. His face looked both crying and laughing. The plane approached Los Angeles and the familiar sight of brownish, scorched-looking land came into my view. Good and bad memories flooded into my mind. Right before the touchdown, I saw the signature structure of two arches and the control tower of LAX. Totally unexpectedly and suddenly, a surprising feeling ...

When I left Europe and came back to Japan, I realized that my life would never be the same. Now I knew the world is so big and so many different people live in different ways. It seemed ridiculous to be obliged to live by an old custom or by what other people do which I didn’t want. I was told by my parents all my life to succeed the family and to live with them in their house by staying in my small town until I die. After the travel, it had become impossible for me to live in such a little world by following obsolete rules of our own. I also learned who my parents really were during the ...

My childhood diet was very healthy. That may be the reason why I was such a skinny kid, contrary to how I am today. I was born in a farmer’s family in Kyoto, an old city in Japan. My family used to be almost self-sufficient. We mainly ate the leftover vegetables of eggplant and spinach that weren’t fit to be sold at the market because of flaws. We also planted rice and other vegetables such as onions, potatoes, carrots, radishes, burdocks and green peppers, not for sale but exclusively for our daily meals. We kept barnyard fowls that provided fresh eggs every morning. Our breakfasts and...

Marriage in Japan I went out for lunch with my partner at a cafe the other day that stood across the train station in a Japanese desolate rural town where I live. To call it a cafe is a bit too fancy. It’s not the likes of Starbucks but rather a small old mom-and-pop diner that was built well over 30 years ago and remained as it was, which perfectly matched this old town itself. We sat at the table and overheard a conversation from the table next to us. Three old women in their eighties sat around the table by the window. “She has passed away, too.” “This could be the last time we ...

To keep being a dreamer living in Japan is as hard as to catch a fly in the air with chopsticks, and yet it’s not all impossible. The chain of events that you have never experienced in your life changes your routine days into chaos. While you can’t quite grasp the sudden change of circumstances, it throws you into confusion in which you continually need to make decisions and actions. You are sucked by mighty force against your will and can’t get out. It inevitably changes some point of your life, your way of life, and your inner self also. As a result, you become another person who is...

The house was built when I was nine years old at the place where our old house was torn down, because it was too old to live in. That old house was built about 100 years ago. My ancestors lived at exactly the same spot generation after generation for over 1000 years since my family used to be a landlord of the area. We are here for around 63 generations.

This podcast is short stories from her books. Hidemi Woods was born and raised in Kyoto, Japan. The awkward daily life of a singer songwriter and author, Hidemi Woods. Her life in Japan, music, family, childhood, and embarrassing everyday-experiences. www.hidemiwoods.com "My life is strewn with embarrassing mishaps and miserable failure. But in some cases, when I write about it and read it objectively, I can see the reason why it happened. As for the ones I still don’t know the reason, if you hear it and find it funny, that’s the enough reason for my clumsy experience. It duly pays off."

This podcast is narration works of short stories from the books Hidemi Woods wrote. And her talking about them. Hidemi Woods was born and raised in Kyoto, Japan. A singer-songwriter and an author. Her stories and talking are about life in Japan, music, family, childhood, and embarrassing everyday-experiences.

A dream I wish to have in the night most often isn’t about dating a Hollywood star or making a great hit song. It’s not about my parents saying to me with tears, “We were wrong. We’re sorry”, either. It’s about numbers. I once saw a woman on TV who won four million dollars by the lottery with the numbers she had seen in her dream. Shortly after that, I myself saw numbers in my dream and began to buy a lottery ticket with those numbers.

I spent my schooldays from junior high to college at a Catholic school not for religious reasons but for my mother’s vanity. She wanted me to attend the most prestigious school in Kyoto in order to brag about it. With no religious background, I encountered quite a few unfamiliar events at school that held Catholic ceremonies regularly. The school often celebrated the Mass, which was an entirely new and different culture to me and I hadn’t the slightest idea what they were doing. Christian students sat in the front row with white lace veils on their heads at the assembly hall. The priest...

Loneliness Is My Norm The nearest grocery store from my home is a 25-minute walk away. That small local store carried a sale on eggs at one dollar for ten. I walked there with my partner to get them. Since my town is so small and rural, there are usually almost no pedestrians on the streets. Except that cars are passing by sparsely, I hardly see anybody. But on our way back home from the grocery store, I saw a woman standing by a field and watching wild flowers. It was rare to see someone on the street. As I was getting closer, I perceived her looking at me with her face filled with a big ...

A Slipper Battle About ten months ago, a middle-aged woman complained to me about my slippers at the communal spa of my apartment building. She wanted me to take them off and stay barefoot in the locker room because everyone except for me was barefooted there as a custom. I refused as being barefoot wasn’t an official rule and I felt much more comfortable and more hygienic with slippers on. I was kind enough to explain to her that wearing slippers was more hygienic on the public floor than barefoot. It’s totally logical, but she didn’t accept anyway because her point was to keep up ...

Memoirs and essays of a girl who was born as the 63rd successor of a landlord’s 1000-year-long family in Kyoto that was the most traditional and formal city in Japan. How her family and people in her community strived through conflict between Japanese old ways of life according to ancient customs and waves of a new era is depicted with full of humor and pathos along with the girl’s feelings into coming of age. Japanese original seasonal events and what and why Japanese people think in particular ways are also explained in the course. In the end, what her family had really inherited and ...

Japan experienced the biggest earthquake in its history. When it occurred, I was in the room upstairs of my apartment. At first, I felt faint quivers and went downstairs just in case it grew stronger and I needed to escape outside. As soon as I reached the foot of the stairs, it showed its main force. The building began to shake violently and I held the LCD monitor with my right hand and the toaster with my left hand without thinking. The shaking got even stronger and it was hard to stay standing. As a native of Japan, I was supposed to be accustomed to an earthquake since we have one quite...

Hidemi Woods was born and raised in Kyoto, Japan. Singer, songwriter and author. A Rich World Requiring No Wealth The most luxurious hotel in my small, rustic town is not far from my apartment. I visited there again the other day, not to stay the night but to use the club lounge. The club lounge is exclusive to a member of the hotel’s loyalty program. The members can use it free of charge. The hotel has a regular lounge for its guests which menu has heart-stopping prices. Nonetheless, it was alive with customers who came to ski on the skiing slopes adjacent to the hotel. At the entrance, ...

A Ribbon with A Bell One day in my childhood, a family of stray cats appeared in the front yard of our house in Kyoto, Japan where I was born and grew up. I was raised by my grandparents and my grandfather had cherished several hundreds of chrysanthemum pots in the yard in those days. The yard was practically a sea of chrysanthemums. For that reason, the apparent house rule existed, which was not to keep a dog. I had never had a pet. The cats family stood in the middle of the ragged path between the front door and the gate. There were four cats, one was big and others were very small ...

The Beginning of My Life After I was graduated from a Catholic high school in Kyoto, Japan, I went overseas for the first time in my life as a family trip around Europe during spring break right before starting college. The culture shock I experienced there seemed to alter my brain. It took control of me and began to inflict cracks everywhere on common practice of the small hamlet of Kyoto that I was born and grew up in. One of the things I realized in Europe was that so many different people lived by so many different ways of their own. It had been always that way and not worth mentioning,...