for the electric power company who had things around the house like gloves for handling high-tension lines, and my mother had been in the science club at her girls' school and she taught me things like how to prepare slides for the microscope. Typically, the present they chose for my fifth birthday was a picture book about insects, and soon after that I had become a picture book freak. It was then that I formed the habit of visually memorizing everything in the world. Like other little kids, I wanted all the toys and plastic models that were available, but one day my mother said she wouldn't buy toys for me any more and instead she gave me a craft book and tools. On weekends my father would join me in making toys. I was entranced by the process of improving the hand-operated toys in the books and fitting them with motors. 《Craftbook》 is the book of notes I made in those days. It contains my own ideas for toys, and sketches and descriptions of inventions I saw on television or somewhere else. It was a sort of manual for my personal use, and the cover is filled with pictures of the components that excited me the most - motors, switches, propellers, light bulbs.In the upper grades of primary school I started drawing in the margins of my textbooks and became absorbed in making sets of moving pictures - flipbooks. At first I just added a line to each drawing, then I put in things like the moon moving around the earth, and then a good friend and I tried to outdo each other's simple line drawings of the three stages of pitching form, based on a TV animation show about magical baseball players. In middle school I started drawing my own manga and flipbooks with characters I invented changing into other characters. I was also interested in ham radio and listeners' clubs. I set up a mini-radio station sending signals over the FM band, I carried a cassette machine around and recorded all kinds of sounds, I collected scripts from TV programs and changed them into different stories. When I think about it, all the elements of the creative activities in my adult life began back then.