Your Japanese word of the week is...

... gonna be hard, since it'll be the last one of '08 heh..... anyway, it's

"-nakereba naranai"

The dash represents any verb you'd like to put in there (well, some require slight conjugation changes) or, as I found out, adjectives...... let's try this one....

"Ikenakereba naranai"

Iku = to go

Ikenai = to not go/can't go

-kereba = ones of the ways of saying "if"

Ikenakereba = If one does not go

naru = to become (I mentioned this before I think)

naranai = can't/won't become

So "Ikenakereba naranai" is, essentially, "If one doesn't go, nothing will come out of it". Or, in a manner that's slightly easier to understand, "One can't NOT go". Or, in a manner that's even easier to understand, "One MUST go".

Yes, you read that right. It's a double negative expressing just how important something is.

The reason it's so hard to understand is that, in English, it's been taught for so long that double negatives are usually a grammatical no-no that when you hear it for the first (and, like, 30th) time, deciphering it in your head takes so long that whatever you should've been doing has already passed.

Anyways, feel free to digest that over the New Year...... I know I have been for the past, like, 6 months haha.....

Besides that, since the last time I wrote, quite a bit has happened.

There was a Shiramizu year end party.

I visited the Meiji-Jingu Shrine (again) with some friends.

And I saw the Shinjuku Illuminations, one of many in and around Tokyo.

And then just meeting up with lots of friends I haven't seen in a while.

Tonight it'll be New Year's in Tokyo so hopefully I'll have a story as interesting as the one last year........ perhaps more heh...

And on January 2-4, I'll be in Kyoto.

So I hope everyone has a safe and happy New Year's and I'll catch you in '09!

-Lawrence