Koho

So I'm writing one of my last koho articles today. The koho is a magazine for our city in which they distribute to everyone registered as a citizen receives. I normally write about pretty benign topics, but I've heard of some other people who are in my position writing about more meaty issues. Some people tend to write even more fluffy crap than I do. I think this is disappointing. Why castrate the foreigner to write about prosaic things like holidays in america? Sure it's important, and also probably rude to assume that some of the people way out here have any idea what halloween is. Still, they should allow people to write about what they want to. Fortunately for me, I never really considered this the place to write about my grievances or a place to grind my axe, and have always really enjoyed my little articles in Japanese (although they do a lot of editing to make my articles sound natural). I have other places to do that, more or less. So far it seems that what I've written about is pretty much been related to my hometown, Minneapolis. It's actually pretty odd writing about something like this because my hometown seems like such a mosaic of images now rather than a real place. Luckily i was aware of this when I went home last time. I wrote about my family's cabin in the north of the state in a way that couldn't match up with the reality of it. Not in a good or bad way, but just not the same, as I don't remember it clearly the way that it really is. Most of America kind of seems that way right now, kind of a mosaic of my ideas and images, rather than a real place. Not that I'm conflicted or anything like that. America and Japan are both great places, it's just that I am physically here, and so this part of my life seems more real to me that my life in the states right now.

Anyway, on topic, this month's koho article will be about the fourth of july. Ah, I'm such a hypocrite.