mercedo's Journal: New Year Wreath

This is literally 'Rope For Killing Animals'. In Japanese it's - See this article.

We had been decorating with this 'rope for killing animals' in front of the door of our house from the first to fifteenth of January every year traditionally. This is similar to Christmas wreath in shape. We used to decorate it in front of every car, now it disappeared completely. I noticed this year about a half households already ceased to do it in their house this season of the year. Amazing. I hope this society is not only changing its shape superficially but substansially. This is a good example how our society is changing.

i find it ironic...

[kesuki]

that you want to hold onto such a tradition but would rather be speaking english ;)

but yes japan has been changing a lot, it's due largely to western influence... cultural exchange leads to movements for people to change to do what they feel is most acceptable for them...

can you imagine children and women taking up knives to fight invading soldiers in modern day japan? it was not long ago that that type of self sacrafice and pride in your nationality existed... change is happening faster and faster... an

Re:i find it ironic...

[mercedo]

More than 2000 years ago, we didn't have characters to literate our national language, and later when Chinese characters were introduced people started adopting them to transliterate our language. The atttempt never succeeded, and later it was succeeded partialy when we invented two phonetic characters.

Roman alphabet was introduced 16 century. I must say still it is very difficult to transliterate our language all in Roman alphabet, but definitely a lot of adaptations of phonetic words from English has bee