Tanabata

Japanese kodomo!

Yesterday was Tanabata (七夕),. It would be ignorant of me to compare it to Halloween, but in practice they are quite similar - children go from house to house asking for candy, but instead of costumes they don kimonos, and instead of saying "trick or treat" they sing a song. In addition to the candy collecting people write wishes on colorful pieces of paper and hang them on bamboo!

My 2008 Halloween costume?

Monday's mandatory "special lecture", delivered by Dr. Thomson-Kinoshita of the University of New South Wales, was fantastic, for all the wrong reasons. The first part of the lecture (which was titled Enhancing your learning of Japanese) was full of theoretical academic language that most of us found too obvious, or in the case of the "language management framework," of no use at all. But in the second half she introduced some role play situations from which all of us reached the same conclusion - "oh my goodness I've offended EVERY JAPANESE PERSON I've spoken to in Japan".

For example, when saying leaving a conversation, we are supposed to first change the topic (the example we practiced, no joke: "By the way, how is your father doing? Is he well?"), signal that we want to go, and then say thank you at least 3 times. At least.

Manga heaven

Before going home I stopped by Book Off, a used bookstore chain in Goryokaku, in hopes of purchasing some cheap Doraemon manga. Unfortunately they didn't sell Doraemon, and eager to embarress myself in Japanese, I asked a store keeper what manga is currently popular with "10 year old" girls. I picked 10 year old, because only manga aimed at the younger crowd have furigana (Kanji pronounciation) next to the characters. I'll bet she saw right through me. I didn't end up getting anything - I'll probably just buy a Doraemon comic book from the train station. Tomorrow I'm going to ask Tai and my okaasan what famous Japanese children's books exist (books like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Giver, the Goosebumps series, etc, that all kids know about).

Yesterday's dinner: curry rice