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I grew up in a dictatorship in East Africa.

I had a world of people raising me; it was like a little village.

When I was living in the Dominican Republic, the local kids became a part of my family.

I grew up in a very large, poor family.

As I grew up, I was continually to suffer hardships in different realms of life - in my family, in my relationship to Japanese society and in my way of living at large in the latter half of the twentieth century.

Soviet regime in a way deprived me from my childhood in my homeland, because my father was in military, and after the Yalta agreement he was sent to teach in military academy in Riga, and I was born then.

I accommodated practically all of the liberation movements, including those of Latin America.

My dad had been born in Mexico and his family had to leave during the Mexican revolution.

Your economic and social development is linked to the kind of regime you have.

I grew up in Colombo but was lucky enough to spend a lot of time in the countryside as well. Although there was considerable turbulence, even in the 1950s, it did not throw a shadow on my consciousness.