The boy who, in childhood, would hold a single stamp and gaze at it endlessly has, before he knew it, spent more than half a century with stamps, engraving many memories into his mind and arriving at the present day. Just as the phrase from a public-interest advertisement once seen on television said, “A book read in childhood remains a lifelong source of emotion,” the precious memories I have felt through stamp collecting have remained with me as treasured recollections to this day.
Yet amid the rapid development of civilisation, the memory of receiving a letter, reading it again and again, and cherishing even the single stamp postmarked on the envelope has long since yielded its place to the mobile phone, which has become a necessity for everyone. Likewise, in the 1960s and 1970s, most children and young people could proudly say that their hobby was stamp collecting, but today that has changed into games and other activities using the latest electronic devices.
