How The Name Mnemonic Research Institute Came to Be

My parents made friends as naturally as breathing.
I’d come home and find some uncle or auntie I’d never met, deep in conversation with them. Growing up in a house like that, being surrounded by people felt normal to me — and I loved that normal.

The summer I started university, I’d invite about twenty people over every weekend for a barbecue, and we’d talk about our lives until morning.
These days, I volunteer on rice paddies back home.
The reason I keep volunteering is simple: the people who show up are wonderful.

That’s how much I love being around people.

Even though I must have seen their face again and again.
Even though they’re supposed to matter to me.
We talked late into the night, I gave them a ride, we shared our dreams over coffee — and still.

When I run into that person again out of nowhere, sometimes I have no idea what their name is, or even whether we’ve met before.
Someone will say, "So-and-so wanted to see you," and I have absolutely no idea who they mean. My mind just goes blank.

I love being around people, but the moment a name is involved, the part of me that’s worst at this comes out.
This has been my struggle for as long as I can remember.
It’s genuinely, deeply hard.

My class had only eleven students — a very small class.
We saw each other’s faces every day and argued passionately in every lesson.
Even so, it took me six months to learn everyone’s name.

That was the first time I realized I was bad at remembering names.

After that, I started jotting down names and tags for everyone I met.
"[Name] / woman / 20s / from Setagaya / engineer / likes dogs"
Something like that.

But once I joined five clubs in university, my notes passed 200 people within two months.
I’d forget where I’d written something, or couldn’t search for it.
It became too much of a hassle, and I gradually stopped using it.

While searching for a research topic rooted in the difficulties I’d felt over the years, I learned about a condition called "prosopagnosia" — trouble telling faces apart and connecting faces with names.

That said, I didn’t assume right away that I had it myself. Papers and accounts online often described more severe symptoms, and compared with those, my own struggles felt like they weren’t a big deal.

The turning point came when I decided I wanted to hear first-hand accounts from people with prosopagnosia, and interviewed several of them.
As I listened to a handful of people, story after story came up that felt eerily close to my own — the anxiety of not being able to remember faces, the tension of meeting someone new, the awkwardness of not recognizing someone.
That’s when I thought, "maybe I have prosopagnosia too," and I found a clinic in Tokyo where I could be properly assessed.

Honestly, when I received the diagnosis, the first thing I felt was relief.
I learned that the struggle I’d been carrying had a reason behind it — that it wasn’t simply a lack of effort or attention on my part — and something in me felt a little lighter.

A difficulty I’d never been able to explain properly finally had a name.
I realized, for the first time, just how much lighter it can make you feel simply to know what’s really going on.

At the same time, there is currently no medication or established treatment that cures prosopagnosia itself, and research and public understanding of it remain limited.

I’m an engineer.
Even if I can’t treat this medically, technology might be able to make up, even a little, for the difficulty of remembering faces and names.

That’s the thinking behind founding The Name Mnemonic Research Institute.

I want to tell anyone who has struggled the same way with remembering faces and names: you’re not alone.
And I want to keep thinking, together with people who live with this, researchers, and engineers, about ways to ease the burden of remembering someone.

Right now, alongside publishing information on this website, I’m developing an app that lets people record names, tags, and past conversations tied to each person they meet.

If you’re carrying a similar struggle.
Or if you’d like to think through this challenge together with us.
Please, feel free to reach out.