Month: December 2009

  • Merry Christmas

    To everyone reading this blog who celebrates it.

  • Tea Party

    Last night, I went to a tea party. At least, that’s how the participants referred to it in English. Actually, I went to an extremely formal tea ceremony. The name of the type of ceremony is “Akatsuki no Chaji”, which means “Dawn Tea Ceremony”. The name is descriptively accurate; dawn is an important part of…

  • The Colour of Traffic Lights

    A notorious peculiarity in the Japanese language is that they think that the “go” light on traffic lights is blue. That is, the word that is normally translated as “blue” (ao) is used to describe the “go” light, rather than the word normally translated as “green” (midori). This is something that foreigners, particularly Western foreigners,…