I'd say my best memory was climbing Mt. Fuji, and the worst memory was... trying to fit my feet into the free giveaway slippers at Japanese schools.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I love Mount Fuji and I think it is my love of the mountains in Japan that led me to seek other mountains around the world.
My first memory in the world is my gym teacher ripping my mother's necklace off her neck and throwing it out the window and her running downstairs to go after it. I have no memory before that. I was 4. My father had a lot of girlfriends and my mother had a lot of boyfriends.
The Olympics: not one of my better memories.
I've scored many goals that I've liked, but I think the best memory I have is the one against Korea in the 2010 World Cup.
The actual, original 'Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,' I have vague memories of because I was pretty small, but I loved, loved, loved it. I have only those weird, visceral little-kid memories: I remember the extreme flat, two dimensional green that was their skin or the weird pizza with no sauce - it was just like yellow, drippy cheese.
I loved climbing because of the freedom, and having time and space. I remember coming off Everest for the last time, thinking of Dad and wishing that he could have seen what I saw. He would have loved it.
Perhaps the two greatest moments of my life were standing on the moon and being outside of the room when my granddaughter was born! We tend not to remember the worst.
When it comes to memories of that iconic type, memories that are burned into you, I have maybe ten or so from my childhood. I'm a bad rememberer of situations. I forget almost everything as soon as it happens.
My childhood memories include a time when the government confiscated my family's possessions and exiled us to a camp in the B.C. Interior, just because my grandparents were from Japan.
I remember perfectly my first trip to New York, when I was on the bridge between Brooklyn and Manhattan, when I saw the skyscrapers. It was like an incredible dream.