During the day today I did some reading practice using a political leaflet that was dropped in our mailbox. It was easy to read, but it did have some new words for me to learn. The picture on the back showed the politician making a speech, and as is common in Japan he held a bunch of microphones clumsily taped together.
It is interesting to me because my first impression was that it looked pretty jury-rigged and cheesy. Doesn’t he want to make a good impression? But here in Japan, they apparently see it differently. They see it more like this – the guy is so popular that he has lots of news organizations clamoring for his speech. This politician is very humble and will accept the burden of holding all these microphones – and humility is a big deal here. A politician holding one microphone is small time . One exception to this rule is apparently if it is a speech specifically for TV, or if it is at a podium speaking to a group of seated people. Then, one microphone is OK.
Anyway, one of the reasons that I love living in Japan is that I find stuff like this fascinating, and spend probably a little too much time trying to figure it all out.
Today I had the normal three classes for Thursday, and they were pretty quiet and uneventful. During my middle class one of the boy students, Junki, had his grandmother drop by with a big heavy box. It was more ä¸å…ƒ for me. Later I opened it and it turned out to be 30 mini-cans of soda – Coke, Sprite and Grape Fanta. I split it up with Nozaki sensei, and now we’re in soda for a while.
It was a very laid back evening. Kuniko had made up somen noodles and bought some tataki-style sashimi. It was a cold dinner that tasted great during the hot weather.
