Sunday, February 25, 2007

Getting ready for the Doll Festival


In most of all Japanese families, we celebrate the day of March 3rd as the Doll Festival by setting up a display of traditional Japanese dolls called "Ohinasama". It's a historical culture of ours ever since 300 years before to pray for girls' good health and happiness throughout their lives keeping away from the bad evils. People had believed that those dolls were to take girls' places in carrying away every bad evil.

I have a daughter who has just turned to 20 years old. Even now, though she is away from home for her university , I make it a rule to set up her "Ohinasama" at home which her grandmother gave her for her first Doll Festival twenty years ago.

Dolls are carefully put into a wooden box for almost 12 months except a month or shorter than a month before the arrival of the first day of spring in the lunatic calendar.

It's such an exciting moment for girls and their families to open the box , set them up on the display with some spring flowers arrangements and some special sweets.

Wednesday, February 21, 2007

Where should I start ?

I've been writing my blog at another site for years in English. As I've been updating my blog, I' ve reallized that that site was not really adequate for writing in English. It is basically programmed for the Japanese language. As the english sentences go to the end at the right margin, the words are cut halfway and the rest of the letters go on to the next line. I handled this by arranging the tugs on the sheet. This hasn't cleared every thing yet. Whenever I wanted to change the template, the same trouble came up to me. So I'v just lost my interest in updating my blog then.
Well, since I want to write in English, why not using the English blog site. Then I won't have any troubles in styles and my site won't get garbled. So I arrived at this Blogger a couple years ago and still was not able to give up on my another site. Today I 'm back again hoping I will be able to stay writiing on this blog as I used to in my old one.
Just for my own interest, here is my blog in english which I had been working on so long.