A really good, longtime friend came to my house the other day with these wonderful homemade dishes to celebrate my belated birthday.

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It was a belated birthday feast for her, too.

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What a fantastic time we spent together enjoying lots of tasty dishes and drinks!

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I don’t remember how many times I had this “good luck”, as she is such a warm person to her friends.

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And this time, I think, some people will notice a bottle of upscale saké on the table which was the most notable item among the gifts she brought.

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I just renewed my sense of great gratitude to her.

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The other photo shows a well-known birthday message, wishing for longevity and happiness.

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This morning I enjoyed being in the morning sunlight for the first time in many days after a long spell of rain.

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I really didn’t know the meaning of this phrase when I wrote this.  That is, I thought it was an optative sentence that simply expresses hopes for the future.

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However, I found out it actually means truly earnest prayers to gods being answered or your wishes being realized because you wished very fervently to deity.

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In short, I didn’t know it was a present perfect form.

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Still, it turned out to be someone’s favorite piece.

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The lady next-door who is a great gardener gave me these freshly picked tomatoes from her garden.

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Picking tomatoes/

Which may flick fingertips/

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Translation and calligraphy by Chio

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This year I wrote on more paper fans than before.

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Two of these are for a special exhibition of fans and the last one is for my cousin who always cares for my welfare from a distance.

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The photo shows one phrase from the subdivided solar terms for around the first week of July, which roughly means “heated air is around”.

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I have always hated the weather like this.  However, talking only about this year, I somewhat yearn for this kind of summerly weather.  For, these days, a series of terrible, huge downpours around the country caused enormous disasters.

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I only wish the continual rainstorms would come to an end soon.

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I practiced copying again my first teacher’s model he wrote for me years back.

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This phrase says “paying no attention to anything” and it is said to express elderly people’s attitude toward things around them.

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At first, I thought the reason he chose this as a material for his students’ practice was that it precisely expressed how he felt as an elderly teacher.

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However, as the years went by, I learned that as many as two thousand people belonged to the group of schools he led in many areas of Japan as its peak, which changed my thought.

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Although I have never been in that kind of position, I can easily imagine how hard it is to manage that large organization.

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It is a result of copying practice of my late teacher’s example.

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This is a haiku written by Matsuo Basho, one of the most representative Japanese haiku poets is probably the most famous haiku in the world.

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It depicts the sound of a frog leaping in an old pond.

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As it is written in a plain style portraying a smallest, the most commonplace event, it perversely has produced a vast number of interpretations.

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It is a result of copying practice of my late teacher’s example.

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