One benefit of staying in a ryokan is that you get both dinner and breakfast, so after sleeping in almost until the last minute, I was awakened by softlykarou with exactly enough time to make it to breakfast after a quick shower. And such a breakfast:


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Thursday we had a friend over to watch Revolutionary Girl Utena, and then after she left I got a bit overwhelmed by my upcoming schedule and the fact that the pants I ordered arrived and didn't fit, and I ended up lying down in a dark room for fifteen minutes while softlykarou did some work in the kitchen.
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I wrote a few months back about whether I actually hate LARPing, and since then I've signed up for drydem's Scion LARP starting in April. softlykarou and I are playing scions of Izanami and Izanagi, respectively, since we've lived in Japan, know some Japanese, and otherwise are at least moderate qualified to do so. I was a bit reticent about this, because there's ( Read more... )

I came on this article about the depopulation of Japan's countryside yesterday, even to the point of relatives moving their ancestors' remains to the cities where they have all moved to find work. The main part that drew my attention is the mention that the author lives on an island in the 瀬戸内海 (setonaikai, "Seto Inland Sea") the sea between three ( Read more... )

Mibu no Hanadaue Field
壬生の花田植 (Mibu no Hanadaue, "The rice-field-planting of Mibu," like it says in that link) is held every year in Chiyoda, and has been for over five hundred years. I wrote about it the first time we went, when a student in our English class at the community center invited us to go. There's an account of the festival and what I ( Read more... )

Shopping Center Thanks
Thanks was built back when the City University of New York had a branch in Chiyoda, and it managed to survive the closure of that university four years later by being the place where the surrounding even smaller towns, like Oasa or Geihoku, came to get goods. We went there a lot, because while it was primarily a grocery store ( Read more... )

The Corner StoreWe didn't realize what this was for probably the first year that we lived in Chiyoda. It looks like it's called きもの ("kimono"), so we thought it was a clothing store or something, but it's actually きもと ("kimoto") with a stylized と. It wasn't until much later that we went and realized it was a grocery store with mostly packaged stuff ( Read more... )

Walking Path
This is shown from pretty near our house. If you turn the view around and go down the road a ways, you'll be able to see it on the left. And you should probably turn the view around at least a bit, because this section of road's pictures were taken in fall and the trees are great. The momiji especially are spectacularThis is the road ( Read more... )

I've wanted to make a post like this for a while, but I've always been stymied before because I didn't think of using my phone to take pictures everywhere until about halfway through my time living in Japan, and even then I didn't typically take pictures of daily life. Everything you do all the time seems ordinary even if other people wouldn't ( Read more... )

Checking back through my archives, it doesn't look like I've told this story. I was listening to Raindancer by Erutan (or katethegreat19, which is the name I originally found her by on OC ReMix, though the fantastic The Rose General) and the lyrics reminded me of the last enkai we went to with softlykarou's co-workers ( Read more... )