As a child growing up in mountainous Yamanashi Prefecture in the 1970s, artist Shojono Tomo had an irrational fear of using the brakes on her bicycle — though none whatsoever about riding just as fast as she could.
"I would either purposely crash into a wall or my friends would form a wall and try to stop me safely," she recounts now as if such means were an unremarkable alternative to simply pulling the two levers on her handlebars.
"One day though, I couldn't find a wall," she continues, "and when I hit a hill in a certain way I flew through the air like E.T." Tomo and the bicycle wound up high off the ground, entangled in the grapevines that make the Yamanashi countryside famous for its wine. "My poor mother thought 'my baby is crazy.' "
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