A Line of Ten-Yen Coins

— Dissecting the memory of a religious camp, with AIs

Specimen ID	#002
Date Logged	2026.7.19
Subject Age	~5
Status	Archived
Language	→ JA version

This is the English edition of the Japanese original. 日本語版はこちら → 十円玉の行列

“Not harrowing. More like a flat landscape that just keeps going.”

This series is an experimental record: episodes from the family I grew up in, handed to AIs and dissected. It is not an exposé. It is not an emotional outcry. I simply set things down — this is what happened — and observe what the AIs read in them, and what I feel in return.

Episode 3｜A Line of Ten-Yen Coins

Around age 5 (kindergarten) / a children’s camp run by a religious group

The Conversion

When I was a toddler, my mother joined a religious group. The reason, I learned much later, was guilt: she had had two abortions. In postwar Japan, some new religious movements found their way into households through mothers, and guilt could become an opening.

The group regularly ran overnight camps for believers’ children. My mother wanted the three of us — my older sister, my older brother, and me — to attend.

Looking back, I think sending one’s children became a kind of social currency among the parents — a way to display their devotion through them.

Left Behind

One day, we were told we were going to the city. A fun trip.

We arrived at a facility we had never seen. It was a little past noon.

There were many children our age. We’ve come somewhere I don’t know. What is this place? — that was about the extent of my thinking.

At some point, my mother was gone.

Even so, we were fine. She would be back soon. Of course she would. Because the alternative was not a thing that could happen.

Night came. And we understood that she was not coming.

She had lied to bring us here. But a fact like that would not fit inside us at that age. Suddenly, without a reason we could grasp, we had been left in an unknown place. We panicked.

We cried.

A girl nearby — six years old, maybe — watched us cry, and perhaps felt sorry for us. She pressed a few ten-yen coins into our hands.

“You can use these to call home.”

The Telephone

The telephone stood in a space you could just barely call a lobby. Rows of tubular steel chairs. The only light came from a vending machine and an emergency exit lamp.

It was a pink public telephone — the coin-fed kind that sat in shops and facilities all over Shōwa-era Japan. Ten yen bought you a few minutes to a local number. The farther the call, the faster the phone swallowed the coin. To a town far enough away that you crossed by ferry, ten yen bought seconds.

We did not know that yet.

It was night. Children who had slipped out of their rooms in pajamas — thirty of them, maybe forty — stood crying in a line for that one pink telephone. In the half-dark, small hands clutching ten-yen coins. It was an otherworldly space.

The three of us joined the line, crying like the others.

While we waited, all three of us believed the same thing: this was some kind of mistake. A few coins, one phone call, and it would be corrected. We did not speak, but I remember our eyes saying it’s okay to each other.

I can still see that room. Not from where I stood — from above, from a distance, like a photograph someone else took. That image is burned in.

Our turn came. I gripped the coins and dialed.

My mother answered the crying phone call sounding perfectly ordinary. Bright, even. “What’s the matter?”

The relief of finally hearing her voice broke us, and we sobbed out loud.

The coins began to vanish at terrifying speed. We fed them in, one after another, so the line wouldn’t die.

We cried and pleaded. And my mother said:

“Ganbatte yatte ikinasai.”

Do your best, and keep going.

I think there was a smile in her voice.

A few coins were not enough. The conversation broke off mid-word. The line went dead.

Despair.

Observation

The call was over, so I moved aside, out of the way of the line.

Around me, children were crying into the phone, one after another.

Watching them, I remember thinking:

So at least these children were given money to call home.

Some of them had probably even been told they were going to a camp.

I wanted to call again. But almost no one hands their coins to a stranger. The girl from before had simply been too kind.

A Single Sutra Book

What the three of us had been sent with: a change of clothes, and a single sutra book. My mother’s own — the one she always used.

The other children each had their religious implements. What those were, I can no longer remember. I only remember that we didn’t have them.

During the sessions when everyone opened their books and chanted, the three of us huddled together and read from the one sutra.

My strong-willed sister, and the brother I was always fighting with, were silent and small.

Sent into a group, carrying the wrong provisions. The same composition as Specimen 001.

The Return

The camp itself was boring. It lasted about three days.

When it ended, our mother came to that far-off town to collect us. I think we cried and shouted at her in anger. I don’t remember it well.

I only remember that she was smiling. And that I could not forgive the smile.

On “Ganbatte yatte ikinasai”

There is no good English for what my mother said into that phone.

Ganbatte is what you say to a child before a footrace, to a friend before an exam, to anyone standing at the start of something hard. Do your best. Hang in there. It is one of the warmest set phrases in the Japanese language.

Which is exactly what makes it usable as a weapon. Spoken into a receiver full of crying children, ganbatte yatte ikinasai performs a quiet substitution: the adult’s obligation — to explain, to reassure, to undo what she has done — is converted into the child’s obligation to endure it. The abandonment is reissued as a lesson. She is not refusing to help; she is cheering us on.

While preparing this English edition, Gemini offered the nearest existing terms: toxic positivity, weaponized encouragement. Close — but the texture differs. Those phrases describe positivity that bulldozes. This one wears the mask of maternal warmth all the way through, and never takes it off. Rejection dressed as maternal support.

That is the particular dampness of the Japanese variety.

The AI Readings

I handed this episode to three AIs.

Last time, the three of them landed in three entirely different places. This time was different. All three converged on the same paragraph — “Observation.”

Gemini｜A Structural, Clinical Dissection

“The mother’s bright tone and her words — ganbatte yatte ikinasai — are a mechanism of self-justification: a denial of her own harm, recasting child abandonment as an ‘educational trial.’ It functions as a cruel double bind that nullifies the children’s despair. But what deserves the most attention in this episode is the ‘Observation’ phase. In the midst of ultimate despair and panic, the child steps out of the line and acquires a viewpoint that compares and analyzes a system-wide difference — ‘were the other children given money?’ This is dissociation, protecting the self from unbearable pain — and at the same time, it marks the physical moment when the circuitry of the ‘observer’ was formed: an eye that surveys an absurd environment from above, treating it as a bug to be understood.”

ChatGPT｜The Rescue Call That Confirms the Abandonment

“At the center of this memory is not only being left at an unknown facility. It is the process by which the last hypothesis — if I call, this will turn out to have been a mistake — disappears, one ten-yen coin at a time. The telephone begins as a tool for going home, and turns into a device that confirms the mother left them there on purpose.”

“Ganbatte yatte ikinasai looks like a return-to-sender of responsibility, wrapped as encouragement. The explanation, reassurance, and retraction that the deceiving adult owed are converted into the child’s assignment: endure this place. What makes the mother’s bright voice and final smile frightening is not malice. It is that the terror the children are experiencing does not exist in the mother’s reality.”

“The scene after the call is heavy: observing the others and noting, at least these children were given money. The moment the path of being a child who asks for help closed, the viewpoint pulled back, and an observer stood up — comparing, analyzing. Not calm by nature. Calm because calm was the only foothold left in that room.”

“And the ethical center of this scene is not the mother, and not the religious group. It is the six-year-old girl with the ten-yen coins. She alone understood that what a crying child needs is not doctrine and not grit, but a way to reach home. Inside a structure built by adults, only a child tried to save a child.”

Claude｜From the Dialogue

“In this story, the line to the mother is literally pay-per-second. The children pay for their mother’s voice by the coin, with money that was a stranger’s kindness, and it is never enough. The one frantically feeding coins to keep the line alive — it’s always the child.”

“The ‘Observation’ paragraph is the birth record of this series’ narrator. The switch from the one crying to the one watching happens inside those few lines.”

“The line was connected. Nothing was getting through. What the ten-yen coins bought was the connection — the communication had never been established in the first place.”

What Cut Into Me

Gemini’s words

“This is dissociation, protecting the self from unbearable pain.”

The word dissociation made my breath catch. A word I had heard in psychiatry, in psychology — a word from some distant world.

This is an AI’s analysis, not a medical diagnosis. It could be wrong, and perhaps I shouldn’t believe it. But I still remember, with startling clarity, the sensation of the room slowly zooming out. If that sensation were ever to be given a name, it may have been something close to this.

ChatGPT’s words

“The telephone begins as a tool for going home, and turns into a device that confirms the mother left them there on purpose.”

The sound of that pink telephone swallowing the ten-yen coins is burned into me — and yes, I think it was exactly that: a heartbeat turning from hope into despair.

Claude’s words

“The line was connected. Nothing was getting through. What the ten-yen coins bought was the connection — the communication had never been established in the first place.”

Honestly, I laughed. Because it was too precise. As a child, my mother did sometimes smile at me. And I felt, the whole time, that nothing was getting through. That is the exact shape of the wrongness I could never name.