Miracle Apples

Chapter 3

Kimura was born in Iwaki-chō, Nakatsugaru District, in Aomori Prefecture, in August 1949. His family name was not Kimura. He was the second son of a family called Mikami, who had been farmers for generations. Not particularly wealthy, they nevertheless owned a considerable area of farmland and, as they had a reasonable cash income from the apple orchards, he has no memory of the family having any difficulties in making a living. This was a time when bananas were still a very expensive fruit. Apples were the typical fruit, and their price was stable. Amongst local Tsugaru famers, apple trees were regarded as money-making. If you cultivated apples, with the family all working hard, you could make a fairly comfortable living.

However, his grandfather was old-fashioned, and it seems Kimura would be scolded by him if he studied at home as a child. Study and similar activities were regarded as luxuries, and if a farmer’s children did that sort of thing they would certainly be told off. A firmly rooted belief remained in farming communities in those days that if their children aspired to going to a university in a big city, it would mean them having to sell their land. So any studying happened during the night, after parents had gone to bed.

He was never bought a study desk, and was sure to be discovered if he switched a torch on at night. Placing an apple box beside the window and studying by the reflected light from the snow on the window, his mother would secretly bring him a candle. He clearly remembers standing three candles up, as a single candle would cast a shadow from his hand.

‘I’d be told off by my teachers at school if I didn’t study. So I was caught between my grandfather and my teachers.’

Kimura laughs when he talks about it, but he probably didn’t mind studying. His best subjects were arithmetic and science. He was also brilliant at art for his age. So good that his teacher told him off when he painted landscape ink painting on paper meant for sliding screens. The picture went on to win gold prize in a competition, but his teacher always doubted that Kimura had done it on his own. He was sure an adult had helped him.

The thing he loved above all when he was boy was machines. Like any ordinary child, he played with toys when he was young. But the way he played with them was a little different. As a young schoolboy, he begged his grandpa to buy him a toy robot. By the time they got home the robot had been transformed. He’d taken it to pieces on the bus on the way. Whatever the toy, be it a car, a plane, or even something like a clock, he’d take it to pieces whilst the grown-ups weren’t watching. He turned a deaf ear when scolded. Toys were not toys to him; they were devices for understanding how things moved or gave off sparks. There was nothing that gave him greater pleasure when he was boy than figuring out how machines worked.

The 50’s and 60’s, his childhood years, would have influenced him. The television, the refrigerator, and the washing machine, were considered the Holy Trinity of domestic appliances. Mechanical civilization was taking hold in a Japan which was bouncing back from the shock of defeat in the war.

It was in 1946, just three years before Kimura was born, that Masaru Ibuka established the forerunner of the Sony Corporation, the Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation, and Sōichirō Honda established the Honda Technical Research Institute. At the start of the 50s, Honda started production of its first motorcycle, the Honda Dream D-Type, and the Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation started selling a succession of new devices including tape recorders and transistor radios. These new machines symbolized an affluent lifestyle, and embodied people’s aspirations.

Of course, they were a mere dream as far as most ordinary folk were concerned, and hardly the sort of thing children got their hands on. But children’s games always mirror the times. Kids today are obsessed with the Internet. Children in those days were obsessed with machines. It is a child’s nature, when they come across a mystery, to try and unravel its secrets. Taking to pieces machines they are most familiar with, notably wind-up robots and cars, seemed to be their destiny. Having said that, there can’t have been many like him, children who rather than playing with a toy would immediately take them to bits …