Today I had my first day of lessons at Yamasa, the Japanese language school I’m attending in Okazaki, Japan. I’ve been placed in the beginner class, so the lesson was mainly spent on learning hiragana, the most common of the three Japanese writing systems. I knew it already, and the rest of the class seemed to as well, so we enjoyed a relatively relaxing start to our studies. We also introduced ourselves to each other. Everyone seems pretty nice and excited to be there. There are students from America, Brazil, China, Germany, Italy, Thailand and Vietnam: a good mix. Mr. Yokozawa, our teacher for today (he’s rotating with two others), was positive and energetic.

There’s no homework due this week, according to the detailed schedule posted on the classroom wall, so I had time after class to go to the big shopping centre up the road and continue my apartment-furnishing odyssey. That’s how I’ve spent most of the preceding week – either on Amazon ordering large items that I don’t want to have to take home on the bus, or at Daiso or Muji buying a load of small items that I don’t want packaged in individual cardboard boxes. (I’ve just learned that you have to take cardboard boxes to a recycling collection centre yourself, which is problematic because I currently have eleventy billion of them crammed into the space above my fridge.) Fortunately the flat is now well and truly approaching livable status, so there’s less and less of this kind of thing to do.

Last weekend there was a cherry blossom festival at a park a few kilometres away. I went on Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon to take some photos, which you can see below. This park actually contains Okazaki Castle, the birthplace and base of one of the most important figures in Japanese history, which is cool, but it’s not pictured below because I couldn’t find a good angle to photograph it from.

A nighttime view of people on the Shinkyō Bridge at Okazaki Castle, with illuminated cherry blossoms.

A small boat with passengers travelling down the canal alongside Okazaki Castle Park around sunset, surrounded by cherry blossoms.

People crossing the Shinkyō Bridge at Okazaki Castle before sunset, with cherry blossoms in foreground and background.

I hadn’t seen the cherry blossoms in bloom on my previous trips to Japan, so it’s been nice to experience that for the first time. They’re all over the place, from historical parks to carparks. It’s been a week since full bloom at this point, so they’re starting to shed, and even that’s quite beautiful: little roundish pink and white petals floating through the air and carpeting the ground.

The start of school, shopping and the cherry blossoms: probably the three most salient things of my short time in Japan so far. I could go on in much more detail but it’s getting late and I need to make both tonight’s dinner and tomorrow’s lunch. I’ll hopefully write again in a week or sooner; let me know if there’s anything you want to hear about.