Yokohama is where Mizuki attends a private girls’ junior and senior high school, living in a dormitory for six years rather than at home in Nagoya. The city marks a chosen distance from her family and the setting for a tightly organized school life whose practical routines later matter to her account of a stolen name tag.

Schooling Away from Home

Mizuki’s mother, who had graduated from the school, wanted one of her daughters to attend it. Although her older sister stayed in Nagoya and went to a local school, Mizuki was healthy and more independent, and agreed to go to Yokohama after elementary school. She found the prospect of traveling home by Shinkansen exciting. The trip took about two hours: she returned to Nagoya on Friday nights and went back to school on Sunday nights, so she did not feel especially lonely.

The school was a fairly liberal missionary institution. Mizuki made friends with other students who, like her, came from elsewhere and had mothers who had graduated from the school. She generally enjoyed her six years there, though she remembered the food as poor. Yokohama thus meant both separation from home and membership in a community formed around a shared connection to the school.

Dormitory Routines and the Name-Tag Board

Most students shared rooms, but seniors were assigned single rooms. As a senior, Mizuki also became the dormitory’s student representative. At the entrance stood a board holding a name tag for every resident, with each student’s name printed in black on one side and red on the other. Students turned the tag to red when they left and back to black when they returned; an overnight absence or longer leave meant the tag was removed altogether.

The board made the rhythms of the dormitory visible at a glance. Students took turns staffing the front desk, and when a call came for someone, the tag showed whether that person was in the building. A routine piece of administration therefore also made presence and absence legible, a detail that becomes important when Mizuki recounts the name tag that was not hers.

Yokohama in Mizuki’s Recollection

Mizuki’s account places Yokohama within a life shaped by movement between the dormitory and Nagoya: she left home for school, returned most weekends, and lived in a single room during her senior year. The city is not described through landmarks or a broad portrait of urban life. Its significance comes instead from the school and dormitory routines that organized her independence, friendships, and daily whereabouts.

That setting gives the name-tag episode a concrete social context. In the dormitory, a name was not only a personal label but also a practical signal used to track who was present, out, or away. Yokohama’s role in the story lies in this intersection of distance from home and institutional routine, where a small tag could carry both administrative information and personal meaning.