The Month of March

A Japanese calendar that hangs on my office wall at home. It is simple and huge. You can see that the 20th is a holiday here called the vernal equinox. The holiday was established in 1948 as a day for "the admiration of nature and the love of living things." Before then, the vernal equinox was an imperial ancestor worship festival. Hmm. Anyway, it's a Friday and schools out. The smaller page-a-day calendar has a piece of famous Japanese fiction on it which you are supposed to read out loud to get a sense of the rhythm of the language. Reading aloud is now quite popular here.