After another school holiday trip to the pool, Emily got down to the serious business of studying about what she has managed to catch in her butterfly net today. She is getting much better at letting them go afterwards, especially the ones which have a short life span.

Sean has recently decided that the telly tubby our sculptor friend Davie Moore imported to Japan from Scotland 2 years ago should be rescued from the back of the toy cupboard to be his very demanding baby. He is so sweet with it (teaching it all the things about insects he is picking up from Emily, putting it to bed, etc.) that even I am getting quite fond of the strange little creature. (So Davie - I suppose you are forgiven for introducing the telly tubbies). (KT)

As Sean has not had any fever fits for more than a year Doctor Sakai gave him the all clear to start catching up on all the immunisations he has not had since he was a baby.

Sean was very brave and proudly showed off his cotton wool swab, in fact it was difficult to persuade him to let me take it off later as it was the only evidence of his heroism. (KT)

From morning roll call throughout exercises,dance routine, craft work, statue tag, etc, and lunch Sean played to the gallery, mostly the clown, with a few other roles such as the tragic hero to keep his audience interested. When I asked his teacher if he was just showing off because I was there she replied "No, he`s always like this. But don`t worry it`s quite fun, mostly".

One of Sean`s friends was very upset as her mother could not leave work to be there, so she spent most of the time sitting on my lap, and commented that it was like sitting on a sofa - so long and soft (her mother is not as tall as me, and is much slimmer!)

Later I took Emily and Sean to go and stay the night with the Kikuchi family (where they had great fun with the 4 Kikuchi boys) while we went to:

One of the muscians who played at the opening is British, so I had a good if brief chance for an English chat.

And then out for a less official welcome to Iwate Town with the 4 artists Guo Demao (China), Giorgie Cpajak (Yugoslavia), Hiroshi Koyama (Kyoto), and Masanori Sugisaki (Miyagi).

I had to try and drag up my 20 year out of use Italian to translate for Giorgie who speaks Italian, but no English or Japanese. While Guo has no Japanese and no English (and ofcourse no Italian) so communication is in Kanji (Chinese idiograms adopted by the Japanese several centuries ago)!! The combination of totally rusted Italian -Japanese, totally inadequate Kanji - Italian - Japanese has fried my brain.

Trying to communicate just with kanji is rather interesting as the basic concept of the idiograms are parallel in both Japanese and Chinese but the contexts and the readings are very different - so you end up having totally abstract conceptual conversations. (KT)

The almost daily routine is that Emily and her school friend Ikue, and Sean jump in the pool straight after school, once they start shivering they jump into a warm bath, and then cool off again with something from the freezer. (KT)