I hope that everyone had a blessed New Year. My wife and I went to stay a few days with her parents. We had a lot of excellent homemade Japanese food. I enjoyed spending some time getting to know my brother-in-law, his wife, and their daughter, Yuki. (My brother-in-law asked me to teach her some English. She learned a few new words. It was fun.)
We also enjoyed a Japanese New Year tradition where families watch a large music battle between Japan's music groups. The groups are divided into two teams, red and white teams, and sing their most popular songs. Viewers cast votes via their cell phones or a special function on their TVs. The team with the most votes gets the broadcaster's (NHK-Japan's version of the BBC) banner. It is all for fun and the groups were really good.
I will now address the writers out there. Have you ever written a book and managed to get it published only to have it get very few sales and almost no interest from even close friends? You feel as though you wasted your time and published a piece of trash.
Well, that happened with my short story collection, "Rocket Ships, Cherry Blossoms, and Epiphanies." I got it published in 2005. It has only sold about 15 copies that I know about. A few friends read it and enjoyed it, but not much else.
The owner of a small English school that I work for suggested that we use one of the stories, "Dancing Among the Cherry Blossoms," for an advanced English class. I was thrilled and we used the story over a period of three months. The students were women in their fifties and sixties. We just finished the story last week, and the women said that they loved it. They were really touched by it.
I was very happy because the story involved a lot of Japanese culture. They said that I had gotten the culture right.
So after many years of feeling like the book was not much appreciated, it was a joy to be enjoyed.
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