{"id":1126,"date":"2009-04-01T07:48:03","date_gmt":"2009-04-01T14:48:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/2009\/04\/01\/off-to-japan"},"modified":"2009-04-01T08:09:54","modified_gmt":"2009-04-01T15:09:54","slug":"off-to-japan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/2009\/04\/01\/off-to-japan","title":{"rendered":"Off to Japan"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Tracie and I are leaving for Japan early Thursday morning for a much-needed vacation. This time I&#8217;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&#8217;m not forcing myself to do it. I probably will put up an entry now and then, but I&#8217;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&#8211;moments like the one I tried to describe <a href=\"http:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/2008\/05\/18\/wrap-up-the-maiko\">here<\/a>. I realized after the last trip that my attempts at broad coverage were leaving out the most interesting details. This time maybe I&#8217;ll try just writing about the details, even if these accounts prove to be oddly lacking in context. Or maybe I won&#8217;t write at all; this will be a vacation, after all, and I really need a vacation.<\/p>\n<p>I will post photos on my <a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/studionebula\/\" target=\"_blank\">flickr photostream<\/a>, but probably not right away. It depends on the quality of the network connection. We&#8217;re going first to Tokyo and then to Kyoto, and typically in Tokyo I&#8217;m reduced to using  re-paid dial-up access while in Kyoto I have free high-speed connectivity. I&#8217;ll post a note here when I start putting up photos.<\/p>\n<p>In case you&#8217;re wondering: no, I don&#8217;t speak Japanese. As much as I&#8217;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&#8217;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:<\/p>\n<p><object height=\"344\" width=\"425\"><param name=\"movie\" value=\"http:\/\/www.youtube-nocookie.com\/v\/1qS1kqhhebw&amp;hl=en&amp;fs=1\" \/><param name=\"allowFullScreen\" value=\"true\" \/><param name=\"allowscriptaccess\" value=\"always\" \/><embed src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube-nocookie.com\/v\/1qS1kqhhebw&amp;hl=en&amp;fs=1\" type=\"application\/x-shockwave-flash\" allowscriptaccess=\"always\" allowfullscreen=\"true\" width=\"425\" height=\"344\" \/><\/object><\/p>\n<p>(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 &#8220;alive&#8221;, using the Japanese pronunciation of &#8216;i&#8217;.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Tracie and I are leaving for Japan early Thursday morning for a much-needed vacation. This time I&#8217;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&#8217;m not forcing myself to do it. I probably will put&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/2009\/04\/01\/off-to-japan\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Off to Japan<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1126","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-studio-nebula","category-uncategorized","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1126","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1126"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1126\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1129,"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1126\/revisions\/1129"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1126"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1126"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1126"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}