I realized that my yearning to go abroad stemmed from my immersion in American pop music when I was in junior high school, so I listened to hit songs from that time on YouTube. PPM's songs have touched my heart even now. The world was so small back then.
I almost locked myself in my room because I had nowhere to go. Especially during the winter, when I didn't go skiing, I absorbed the music to the fullest. My room had a low ceiling and was dark, like an attic, but it wasn't small.
I think that because I was alone and comfortably cooped up in my own world, I distanced myself from the movements of the world. At that time, the world was supposed to be undergoing turbulent events such as the Vietnam War, the May Revolution in Paris, and the Chinese Cultural Revolution, but the local towns were not affected at all. I was too young to receive these external movements and had no knowledge to understand the information.
During the summer vacation of my third year of junior high school, I was in a local city and grew up in a family of craftsmen, so I had no choice but to stoically study and not accept the invitations of delinquent boys.
My father worked hard without Sundays, so I was left with a laissez-faire policy. I think I bought a thick study guide for the five major subjects during summer vacation and studied every day. Perhaps as a result of my efforts, my grades continued to improve, and my choice of high school was revised upward. Then, I took the entrance exam for the school of my choice, which allows students to be in the top three of their class, and was accepted.
