Ishiguro's Birth

On November 8th, 1954, the author Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, Japan. Shizuko Michida and Shizo Ishiguro are his parents. Ishiguro and his family continued to live in Nagasaki for the next 5 years of his life. The 1950s in Japan were very different. In the year 1945, Japan had surrendered to end World War II, so the years following were years of change and rebuilding. Even up to the year Ishiguro was born, Japan was still reconstructing. In the picture inserted at the bottom is a picture of him as a baby. You can see that the home he was born in is a traditional Japanese home. This specific home was a 3-generation home with his grandfather being the head of the family at the time. The famliy had been in the city of Nagasaki when a bomb dropped. Ishiguro went to kindergarten there in Nagasaki, also where he learned hiragana. Hiragana is one of the main writing systems used in Japan. At the age of 5 in April 1960, Ishiguro, his parents, and his oldest sister moved to Britain. They moved to England because of his father, who got a job there as an oceanographer with the British government. Kazuo would not return to Japan until 1989, when he was 35, but he always kept the Japanese culture and traditions alive and in memory. His early years in Japan and Britain after World War II have a connection to the the book in the aspect of mortality, progress and humanity. His move to Britain could have given him the outsider feeling that also plays a part in the book with them always getting treated differently.