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Memories

Images of Japanese summer are seen everywhere: elementary school kids doing "rajio taiso" (exercises broadcast on the radio every morning at school), watermelons, baseball games on TV, beer and "edamame" (boiled green soybeans), etc. Since I moved to Tokyo, these images appears frequently on TV and on the sides of buses, in newspapers, etc. But are these images real?
When you're little, you take it for granted that everything you and your family do is the way everyone else does it, too. Everyone eats fried eggs with fermented soy beans on it, everyone has their own rice bowl, their own miso soup bowl, and their own chopsticks, everyone takes care NOT to eat "mochi" (rice cake) on New Years day, etc. But then I grew up and came to Tokyo, and the reality I knew changed; TV brainwashes you about what a "typical" Japanese person does.
I read that the human brain has a very strange function: if you're continuously told that you did something you actually didn't do, your brain starts creating such memories and eventually you accept such memories as fact, and you believe that you really did do it. Maybe this has happened to me. I feel very comfortable with the image of edamame and beer -- but if I remember hard, I realize that back home we never ate edamame while drinking beer. In fact, we didn't really eat green soybeans at all, but rather boiled fava beans. And we certainly didn't eat fava beans with a beer in hand.

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