Lighten Up!

After more than a year of not blogging, I have decided that part of the problem is that I need to lighten up! The longer I live here in Japan the more I realise that I can only ever have an understanding of this beautiful and contradictory country from the outside and that my impressions are forever based in my foreignism. I so don't want to propagate misinformation due to my only surface-understandings of the people and the things I see around me and when the culture is so deep, rich and complex it seems as if I could only ever dip a toe into the surface of it while the depths range far below. So rather than worrying about not getting things right, I'll give my dipped-toe impressions of this place I love so much and hope that I'm not too far off the mark!