Tag Archives: kindness

By Billy Hammond (Copyright AELS) March 24, 2020 13-year old Hime Takimoto saw the long lines of people in front of drugstores waiting for surgical masks that had already sold out and noticed the profiteering going on in selling them on auction and flea market sites on the Net. She decided to do something about it and asked her mom to withdraw her savings. She took her savings and purchased fabric and mask-making materials and began to sew. She managed to make 612 cloth masks and attached handwritten messages to each one expressing her hopes that they would be of some help. She took her hand-sewn masks and gave them to Mayor Nagasaki of Yamanashi Prefecture, who gratefully accepted them and promised to distribute them to elderly and children’s institutions. The photo in the Japanese article shows her donating her […]

By Billy Hammond (Copyright AELS) I arrived in Japan for my English conversation school teaching job with only a suitcase and a gym bag. Naturally, I couldn’t pack many clothes in that amount of luggage, which also contained a large kanji dictionary, two Japanese-English dictionaries and the text the school said they were using (it turned out that they weren’t using it, other than for advertising, but that’s another story).   Having very few clothes meant that I had to make use of a launderette quite frequently. My 4 ½ mat room didn’t have a bath, and it certainly didn’t have a washing machine! I would bundle up my dirty laundry and take it to the nearby launderette a little before 6:00am to wait for it to open. A very old woman, probably in her 80s, was always there and […]