memory archive – day 9.1

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The memory archive has been on pause for five days. As I said in my previous post, I have to stick to my principles and make up for it. For the coming five days, I will therefore pick two items per day.
I’ll start off again with a major object that has been invading our living room.
It’s a pretty big outdoor, plastic play slide that was a generous gift when our son was a baby. It never looked nice in our living room  but our kids and anyone visiting us under the age of 7 loved it instantly. We’ve owned it for three years now which definitely feels long enough. To avoid any tears and desperate pleads for keeping it I will get rid of it secretly when the kids are at school.

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memory archive – day 6

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This is a dead bonsai tree. It’s a Japanese maple and a very special birthday present I got 2.5 years ago. We called the tree ‘ki-chan’ which means something along the lines of ‘little tree’ (‘ki’ means tree; the -chan is usually added at the end of a child’s name). Ki-chan was 25 years old when we got it. That’s not really old age for a bonsai but for us it felt ancient.

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memory archive – day 3

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This is an Ema, a Japanese wooden wishing plaque. You usually buy those at Shinto shrines, write a wish on the back and hang it up at a dedicated space. This one we bought beginning of 2016 – the zodiac year of the monkey – at a shrine close to Ueno Park. We liked the design so much that we took the plaque home with us, wrote our wish on the back and hung it on one of the trees in our garden. Continue reading “memory archive – day 3”

memory archive – day 1

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A pretty bad picture of some nasty items. These are fridge magnets; advertising for a Tokyo plumbing company. When we found the first one of this collection in our letterbox we thought it was hilarious; a prime example of the other typical Japanese design aesthetics: make it loud and make sure that even the smallest bit of information that might be of relevance is on there; a migraine-trigger. Continue reading “memory archive – day 1”