Your Japanese word of the week is...

"otoshidama". It's a small pocket of money given to Japanese children at the start of the new year. Sound familiar?? =-)...... it's not entirely identical to Chinese red envelopes though, despite being decended from the same Chinese tradition according to Wikipedia. The envelopes are a much wider variety of colours and I've seen light blue or red and white envelopes handed out to children.

One other thing that the Japanese do at the start of the new year is "hatsumode" where they visit a temple to rid themselves of bad spirits and to pay their respects for a good year. This year, I joined the Shiramizu dojo which has their own hatsumode.

We walk from where the dojo is to a nearby temple in Satte city, which is right next to Sugito where I live. It's about a two hour walk and all 100 or so people that showed up this year wore their karate dogis......... over top at least a few layers of normal clothes. But still, it's fun to walk down one of the main roads of a big-ish city with everyone in their dogis and belts.

After going through the ritual and a short 10min practice, we headed off to the huge Asukaru Satte community centre. The same one where I played Santa just a few weeks earlier at the Shiramizu year-end training.

We had a short lunch and at 1pm, the actual practice started which, despite being pretty routine, was a touch on the rough side as it takes a bit longer than normal to work these joints back to speed after two weeks of....... non-speedy-ness.

At night, I headed off with Arakawa Sensei and his family to Richard Sensei's new house for a house warming potluck party. With his new baby, Ema!! She's wickedly cute and, at least for now, is the only mixed child I have ever seen with eyes that aren't brown. They're sort of grey-green. We always joke that Arakawa Sensei's sons and me and all the interns will have to fend off all the boys when she grows up and, if her eyes stay that colour, I think we'll have our work cut out for us.

But it was a fun night with lots of food and laughs. I don't want to always be "borrowing" pictures from Arakawa Sensei's blog so instead, you can find more pictures of the fun on his page. It is Japanese only though.....

Anyways, til next time.........