Happy New Year! 明けましておめでとうございます🎍 I am pretty sure many of you ate quite a lot over the end-of-year/new year holiday (I did, anyway…) I happened to find the following short video; this is a nice park located in Hamilton, New Zealand. If you want (or need!) to take a walk, this would be a nice […]

Hi everybody! How have you been? I hope you have been copying okay with this unprecedented situation. The situation in New Zealand regarding COVID-19 has been getting better and better. We now can go to all sorts of places. As you might have heard, the Ukiyoe exhibition has been on in Auckland. You can only […]

It is under the COVID-19 lockdown in New Zealand. New Zealand uses its own the COVID-19 alert system, which has four levels. The current situation is Level 4 and this is the lockdown situation. We will be moving to Level 3 next Tuesday. The situation won’t change drastically but more people will be allowed to […]

We hear the COVID-19 related information everyday. It has been reported that five people had been contracted in New Zealand so far. I saw an article today describing what type of food each household should stock up in case for disaster (see the link below). We all hope we would not need to rely on […]

Japan experienced a huge earthquake and tsunami nine years ago today; yes, I am talking about the Great East Japan Earthquake. Nearly 50,000 people still live somewhere temporarily. Many people got together to mark the date today for the past years, but not this year – due to COVID-19 (people in Japan are strongly recommended […]

It is 29 February today; yes, we have this day every four years. This year is called a leap year in English. In Japanese, it is called uruu doshi (the first part ‘uruu’ should be pronounced three syllables like ‘u’ ‘ru’ ‘u’) 今日は2月29日です。4年に1回あります。この年を日本語で閏[うるう]年[どし]と言います。英語で、leap year です。