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The Colour of Traffic Lights
A notorious peculiarity in the Japanese language is that they think that the “go” light on traffic lights is blue. That is, the word that is normally translated as “blue” (ao) is used to describe the “go” light, rather than the word normally translated as “green” (midori). This is something that foreigners, particularly Western foreigners,…
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Visa Extension
I got my visa extension today. This is just another three years on the spousal visa; still no news on permanent residence. There wasn’t really much doubt that I’d get the extension, since I clearly meet the requirements, but it’s still nice to actually have the visa in my passport and the record on my…
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Shinto Controversies Course — 10th Lecture
Today was the last of this year’s Shinto lectures at Kokugakuin. The theme was the origins of Yoshida Shinto, particularly the activities of Kanetomo Yoshida. (Kanetomo is his given name.) Right at the beginning of the lecture, Professor Okada said that he didn’t generally like to criticise historical figures, because you shouldn’t speak ill of…
My Old Pages
These are links to my old webpages, from back before I moved to a wordpress-powered blog. Back when I wrote the HTML by hand in a text editor. Yes, really. The formatting on some of the pages has broken a bit, and there are newer versions of some of the content in the current part of the site. Nothing here is maintained, nor likely to have anything done with it in the future.