The air smells like incense. It has almost every day for the last week. One of our neighbors died on Tuesday, so the family's house has been draped in mourning since then. It's a very haunting scene.

A black-and-white banner hangs above the front door to the home. A small stand holding two basins, one of water and one of salt (considered purifying agents), stands between the front door and a sheltered wooden sign announcing the name of the deceased, birth and death dates, and information about the proceedings. The name and dates also appear on signs on the nearest major road. The funerary accoutrements will remain in place for approximately seven days, the duration of the initial period of mourning. After that, they will come down, leaving the family to mourn in a less public manner — save for the smell of incense in the air.

My face has been feeling pretty gross over the last few days ― rather itchy and tight, like the skin is too dry. The fall flowers are blooming, so I'd been chalking the grossness up to allergies. Upon further consideration and a look at the tatami after I picked our futons up this morning, I think I've identified the culprit: mold.

You'd think that living in humid Maryland for eight years would have taught us everything we needed to know about controlling mold in our house, but no. That was only a basic education. Japan is so humid so much of the time that things take on moisture very easily and never really dry out. I've heard stories of people leaving their apartments in Tokyo for August vacations and returning to walls covered with mold. There are lines of desiccant products for all areas of your house, including the shoebox that sits in the genkan. We've got some charcoal, but we've never investigated any of the other products. Perhaps we should ― ever seen moldy shoes? I hadn't, until last week.

Mold is most disheartening to find in the tatami. It gets into the weave of the mats and can only be gotten out by lots of careful scrubbing (with the weave, please) with a rag or small brush and vinegar. Nothing makes me feel like Cinderlawyer quite as much as cleaning mold out of the tatami. There I sit, methodically wiping the mats, peering closely at each newly cleaned patch and watching the rag turn black as I go. Sadly, no cartoon mice entertain me during my labors.

Tomorrow, we deploy the charcoal.

Summer gives us one more reason to be skeptical of the weathermen. They are the ones who declare the opening and close of rainy season. The rainy season, tsuyu, is supposed to last from early-to-mid-June until mid-July throughout Japan (except Hokkaido). This year, the Japan Meteorological Agency declared tsuyu over in Tohoku on July 19.

Over, huh? Then why are we sitting inside, huddled in our warm dotera, on the third day of constant rain that we've had in the last two weeks? If the last two years are any measure, we get more rain after the rainy season than we do during. Both years, there have been smatterings of rain throughout tsuyu, usually in the form of brisk afternoon showers reminiscent of New Mexico's desert storms. It's only after the end of the rainy season is declared, however, that we get strong daylong downpours, sometimes two or three times a week. Sometimes, they last for twenty-four hours or longer.

Tomorrow's forecast is for rain; the day after is for rain "at times." We don't trust the weathermen to tell the truth about such things, but relying on our own experience, it seems that we're in for a damp couple of days.

Here's an interesting test of your language skills: how quickly, and through what means, can you deflect the solicitors?

Last year at this time, I had a very limited arsenal. Someone would come to the door wanting to talk me into something. All I could do was look uncomprehending and say, "I'm sorry, I don't understand." Again. And again. Sometimes, the solicitors would ask a few basic questions about where I was from and how long I'd been in Japan (testing?) before trying again to push their agenda, but we always ended up back at the Blank Look of Incomprehension and Gomennasai, wakarimasen. Inartful and more than a little embarrassing, but so it goes. I was new.

Now, I can tell them something that will get them to go away. Sometimes it's true, sometimes it's only almost true because I can't quite pull the proper word to mind. I'm also confident enough to be a little more forceful about it, which is not to say that I'm rude. Or that I can't have a laugh with a solicitor about it. A couple of weeks ago, a newspaper salesman came by with the the following spiel:

Newspaper Guy: Hi, I'm from Newspaper. You can't read the newspaper, can you?
SKD: That's true. I can't read the newspaper. I'm sorry.
NG: Where are you from?
SKD: America.
NG: How long have you been in Japan?
SKD: Oh, about a year.
NG: Your Japanese is very good.
SKD: Oh, it's really not so good. And I still can't read the newspaper.

I had a harder time convincing him that a subscription would be lost on us than I would have at the same time last year. It's a nice measure of how far I've come, though, to know that the Blank Look of Incomprehension is there as a fallback, rather than a default when communicating.

Last Friday night, our ward held its Bon Odori. Bon Odori, or the Bon Dance, is a community event associated with Obon. According to Buddhist custom, Obon is the time when the spirits of the deceased return to visit their families' household altars. Bon Odori is a joyful dance that commemorates the ancestors' sacrifices, and traditionally involves people dressing in yukata and dancing around a stand built especially for the festival musicians. This was our first time to participate in the event, so we dressed up in yukata and went out to join the dancing.

As it turned out, only a few adults wore traditional clothing ― mostly, children wore them (so cute!). The children seemed pretty excited by us, cheering us on as we circled the drummers with the rest of the dancers. We'd strategically positioned ourselves behind a woman who'd clearly been dancing these dances for decades, so we were able to catch on reasonably quickly. Some of the dances were easier than others, with the Kitakami dance being one of the easy ones. As we understand it, the music and movements of each community's dance tend to represent the activities and traditions for which it is known. We can only deduce that whatever goes on in Morioka is really hard, because the dance that originated there was the most difficult.

Early in the evening, one of the ward leaders came over to chat with us, ending with a request that we stay until the end. We had already intended to, but his request made us feel a little suspicious, possibly because he was one of the guys who sprang the yakudoshi speech on me. We learned the reason when, at the end of the evening, we won the prize for "Naisu Fuufu" ("Nice Couple"). Even more than the dancing, the announcement caused the children to cheer wildly. As they waved and shouted congratulations at us, we were touched by their infectious joy. The celebration reminded us how grateful we are to be part of this community.

We received new checks from our bank in America today. Much to my dismay, after numerous communications in writing with the bank, my name is misspelled on them. I'm used to this sort of thing, after thirty-three years of it. I'm certainly not used to having my name be the easy one to spell, but in Japan, it is.

Like Spanish, Japanese has only five vowel sounds and no 'th' sound (setting aside Castilian pronunciations of the /s/ sound). Unlike Spanish, Japanese also has no /v/ sound. They've tried to create one in the katakana syllabary, but it's quite inelegant: vocalize the 'u' sound as 'vu,' and stick whatever vowel you need onto it to make the correct sound. As a result, our last name of Davis, so easy and common in English, has no 'standard' construction in Japanese. Depending on which document you look at, our surname could be pronounced Dehvuisu, Devuisu, or Deibisu. The latter is most in keeping with Japanese pronunciation.

Likewise, Matthew's given name has been up for debate. He prefers Masshu, but almost no one does it that way. He usually ends up being Mashuu.

As for me, there's really only one construction to use: Sutefuanii. Lucky for me, like Spanish, Japanese doesn't have that pesky 'ph' combination to muck things up. Sure, there are more u's involved than in English, and an extra syllable or two, but I'll take the extra stuff in my name over the 'ph' any day.

Last week, we finally had some time for an overnight stay at a hot spring. We'd originally planned to go to the northern Iwate coast, but a recent earthquake had damaged the area, and we felt it was best not to go get in the way of the cleanup efforts. Instead, we headed inland, to an onsen in the mountains of Akita Prefecture.

Checking the maps, there were basically three routes we could take to cross the central mountain range to our destination. The expressway is by far the quickest way, but it's pretty straight and has lots of tunnels. The scenery is nice, but not great. The other routes offered narrow twisty roads that climb high into the mountains for spectacular views. We weren't in a hurry, so we chose the tiniest, windiest road on the map and set out.

Making that plan, we didn't think about the fact that seven weeks earlier there had been a major earthquake — and we were looking at going right through the heart of the damaged area. As we neared our first-choice road, we saw the signs: "Route 342 Closed".

There were other ways across the mountains, so we weren't worried. We consulted with the toll collector, who indicated he thought our second choice road would be open. So we backtracked a bit and took some side roads up into the mountains.

As predicted, the scenery was spectacular. As not predicted, it also became more sinister.



Well, we were still better off than this guy.



But, we did have to drive around some severe road damage.



Despite the damage, we were making good time and had almost reached the road we wanted to take, when we came to a crossroads. There was no need to check the map, though — every route except the one we came in on was closed. We consulted with some construction workers to find out how to get to Route 398. "You know 398 is closed, don't you?" they asked. "You should take the expressway."

Sigh. So we headed back to the expressway, back to Kitakami, and across the mountains. After we left the expressway on the other side of the mountains, we had plenty more amazing scenery.



And we had clear sailing on our chosen route into the mountains, all the way up until we were a few short kilometers from our destination and came across yet another "Road Closed" sign. More backtracking, more consultation with locals, and another half hour of driving, and we eventually made it to our destination.

The return trip was somewhat less eventful — by then, we knew what areas to avoid — but we did find a place where the narrow mountain road, walled in by the mountain on one side and a steep drop on the other, took a hairpin turn at the bottom of a hill. They need guardrails for safety, but I guess they don't want drivers getting overconfident.



Happily, our brakes were in fine condition and we made it home safe, sound, and ready for our next adventure — whatever it may be!

Every time I go over to my koto teacher's house, she has a new ikebana arrangement in the entryway. They are always composed from flowers in her beautiful, rather traditional garden. This week's arrangement featured a white lily. I didn't know the Japanese word for lily, so I asked her. She told me, then explained that the purple flowers in the arrangement were cosmos, a fall flower.

Wait, what? A fall flower? But it's only the end of July! Yes, she said, it's a fall flower, one that is around for a long time, from late summer through autumn.

Tohoku is known for having short summers and long, harsh winters, so it makes sense that the transitional flowers show up earlier than in other parts of Japan. Even so, July seems a bit early for the harbingers of autumn. Looking on the bright side, though, after seven summers in Washington and one here, the prospect of not having August weather is quite welcome.

Until last night, things had settled down for us, geologically speaking. The aftershocks from the Iwate-Miyagi earthquake had pretty much stopped. Small tremors occurred occasionally, but nothing really out of the ordinary ― a shindo 3 here, a shindo 2 there.

Until last night, when the glasses started rattling and the ceiling lights started bouncing, the prelude to a whooshing roar as our second big earthquake intensified. The quake registered as a 6.8 on the Richter scale, with its epicenter about 65 km from here, east of Morioka. Areas close to the epicenter had landslides and some fires; Kitakami escaped relatively unscathed once again. JR East didn't resume train service until about 1:45 pm, but people who needed to travel simply found other ways, and we went on with our lives.

There are two attitudes frequently associated with the Japanese people. One is ganbaru ― perseverance, or striving to do one's best. It is expressed in many ways: as a spirited cry during a sporting event, as an exhortation from one classmate to another struggling with an answer, as a soft bit of encouragement from a mother to an injured child. The other is shou ga nai ― there is nothing to be done, or there is no help for it. It is an attitude of acceptance that there are things over which we have no control, and all we can do is let the chips fall where they may.

Over the millennia during which the Japanese formed these attitudes, the earthquakes must have played a role. What, after all, can you do about the earth moving, splitting and collapsing as it does? You can give up, which at best makes you a quivering mound of fear every time the house creaks and at worst leaves you with a life and community possibly in ruins. It doesn't prevent the quakes from happening. You must persevere. You must go on. And you must do so with every expectation that the earth will awaken again. When Mother Earth needs to let off some stress by shifting plates around ― there is nothing to be done. You can only accept that it will happen, and persevere when it does.

After dinner on Saturday night, Matthew and one of our companions played a friendly game of shogi, a Japanese variant of chess. The rest of us drank and cheered them on.



Matthew emerged victorious after a long endgame. Next time, we'll play an all-American game: Monopoly.