August 2007 Archives

    When I was a kid, we got more snow.  We could play the snowball fight with my friends and make a snowman.  Recently we seldom have a big snow around here, occasionally perhaps every four or five years, we have a little snow.  In summer we had a shower of summer almost everyday, but now there is a few shower of summer because we have all asphalt roads in the city, we can not have an evaporation because rain water does not soak into the soil.  Instead of traditional weather we get some strange weather every year.

    This summer we are having a very hot days.  Two years ago, we had a lot of typhoon and they started to hit Kyushu very early time in May, it usually starts to hit Kyushu in July most of the time.  Also last year we had a lot of rain, so the price of the vegetable soared.  Then this year, we had many clear days in rain season but once it rained, it was heavy.

    When we think about weather, we have to think about the global warming. Many people know about the word, but most of them do not know the system of it.  Some people know a few reason of this, some people know only one reason.  We have to keep eye on our life and consider what we can do. It is difficult to change our life into simple like old days, but we can try to reduce to make the reason of global warming.

    Most countries have their own traditional events and we talk about them, they tend to be seen from only one side. Also if the events themselves are slightly different we sometimes can not talk about them.

    For instance, Obon is one of the most famous Japanese traditional events in summer and many people talk about Obon, but indeed, some people do not know what Obon is. Because of very traditional events, every regions has it's own way of dealing with Obon, and I do not know much of them.

    In Kyushu, there are some famous event as Obon festival, one of them, in Nagasaki, is called Shoronagashi. In this ceremony, they put a candle in a small paper boat and lit it up, then float it on a river. I'm not sure what they do in the other areas as Shoronagashi, they are usually aired on TV every year but most of them do not mention much about why they do this or where come it from but impress people just by their beautiful scenes.

    My parents are not buddhists, so I didn't have such event in my family therefore I only know about very normal common sense things. If you want to be an "international person", you should study a lot about Japan. People think, because you are Japanese, you suppose to know about Japanese traditional events well.