Off to Japan

Tracie and I are leaving for Japan early Thursday morning for a much-needed vacation. This time I’m not committing to blogging regularly, or even at all. On our last excursion, blogging started to feel more like a burden than a pleasure, so this time I’m not forcing myself to do it. I probably will put up an entry now and then, but I’m certainly not going to do the sort of daily summaries that I did (or tried to do) last year. I have it in mind that I might try to write about the small, wondrous moments that make visiting Japan so magical–moments like the one I tried to describe here. I realized after the last trip that my attempts at broad coverage were leaving out the most interesting details. This time maybe I’ll try just writing about the details, even if these accounts prove to be oddly lacking in context. Or maybe I won’t write at all; this will be a vacation, after all, and I really need a vacation.

I will post photos on my flickr photostream, but probably not right away. It depends on the quality of the network connection. We’re going first to Tokyo and then to Kyoto, and typically in Tokyo I’m reduced to using re-paid dial-up access while in Kyoto I have free high-speed connectivity. I’ll post a note here when I start putting up photos.

In case you’re wondering: no, I don’t speak Japanese. As much as I’d love to be able to read and speak Japanese, learning to do so seems an insurmountable task, particularly since rote memorization is not one of my strengths. In some ways I don’t even want to learn the language because it would take some of the mystery out of visiting the country. For instance, if I knew Japanese, I might be able to understand what this silly video is actually about, and that understanding would definitely take some of the fun out of it:

(On the other hand, I think that this song might have been commissioned for Dance Dance Revolution and hence may not mean much of anything. I do love how the singer says “alive”, using the Japanese pronunciation of ‘i’.)