I was born in 1930 ( The year when the Great Depression began and the so-called 15 Years War that Japan had waged began) as the last child of a big family of 8 siblings. My given name Toshikazu is said to mean " One more boy!" As an infant I nearly died of enteritis. While my father held me in his laps reading a newspaper, I licked poison paint on a toy. I suffered from continuous vomiting and diarrhea. Our family doctor had already given up, but my eldest brother insisted to make me sip water. According to my mother, I drank a whole kettle of water. Thus I survived. When I was about three years old, I suffered from a rather serious case of measles which got into my eyes and made me practically blind. As the result a kind of veil over the pupil of my right eye could not be completely removed which had left a kind of cataract effect over my right eye. Because of this I suffered much during the War time. We were forced to learn how to shoot rifles and I had an inevitable difficulty of aiming a gun at the target, for my sight was blurred because of the veil over the pupil of my right eye. The military officer stationed at our middle school kept yelling at me. Anyhow I could not pass the entrance examination to the Navy Academy because of this physical handicap. Maybe I can interpret this a kind of kairos-type experience in my early years.

When I was in the first year at a middle school near our home, I heard of a unique education at a rather famous middle school at the city of Suwa in Nagano prefecture, one of our neighboring prefectures. I took a special examination to be transferred to this school. I succeeded.
Sure enough Suwa Middle School was a unique school! In those days the Japanese Ministry of Education, being bullied by ultra rightist militarists, labeled English language as an enemy language and was trying to discourage young people to study English. Our principal, however, encouraged us to study English and mathematics, reasoning that we could not win unless we knew about our enemies. He argued that without studying their own language we could never learn our enemies.
There were several teachers who openly criticized Japanese militarism and the emperor system. One army officer who was stationed at our school quoted some passages from such works as C. Bronte's "Jane Eyre", Emily Bronte's "Wuthering Heights", and N. HaｗThorn's "The Scarlet Letter" and asked the students if they had felt that all Americans and British people were "fiends and demons", as were taught by militarists. Needless to say, we could not feel that way after we had heard all these moving sections from those books. The officer admonished us that peoples all over the world are not so different. Our school was turned into "Tama Army Institute for Technology" and many young scientists were working there. Some of them taught us about American political system called "democracy" and how American presidents were elected, etc. And some of them even prophesized the imminent defeat of our nation! Even though I was afraid of these people, I somehow felt that what they had told us was convincing.
On the very day when Japan had surrendered, one of those young officers came to our home wearing a traditional Japanese kimono and congratulated us on the defeat of our nation! I believe that these encounters were truly great kairoi for me.

When a division of American Occupation Forces marched into our region, I made up my mind to visit the commander in chief and ask some questions. I wrote down some twelve questions in English. Some of them went as follows: What do you intend to do in Japan? What is your major goal? Why did you drop such horrible bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? How long do you want to occupy Japan? It must have been quite comical to see a fifteen years old boy trying to ask an American commander such questions. To my great surprise he allowed me to see him and listened rather seriously to my questions. I was really surprised that he seemed to have understood what I was trying to say in English! And he even tried to tell me his own ideas. But to my great disappointment I could not understand what he was trying to say to me. However, he was kind enough to write down his answers for me and to send me back home by a jeep. This encounter encouraged me to study English conversation. I started to study English conversation under a young Nisei lady. Since then, several young GIs visited me at home quite often. I taught them Judo and they taught me lots of things about America.
Through the following years we learned many things over the radio and newspaper, particularly what the Japanese army and navy had done in China and other Asian nations. The content of our education changed radically and many serious political events took place. Thus we felt that we should develop our own critical mind and accumulate our knowledge in many fields.
A year and half later I decided to follow the steps of my brothers and chose medicine as my career and got in a medical college in Tokyo. I met two quite impressive professors who taught us German language. Both of them were members of a Christian group called "Non-church movement" (Mu-kyokai). Through them I learned Christianity for the first time in my life. They also taught us such thinkers as Uchimura Kanzo (the founder of Mu-Kyokai movement), Goethe, Martin Luther, K. Hilty, Schleiermacher, Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, and others.