Haiku Contest Update – The Japanese Have A Word For That – My Other Toilet’s Also A Toto
Haiku Contest Update
Doris’ first attempt at a haiku was:
Early morning start
Navigators assembling
Skippy holding court.
Skippy is our chief mechanic, shown here at the “out control” in the hotel where we each wait to get our time cards stamped – one per minute, to space the cars out on the road. However the lines above do not obey the other rules of haiku (other than the 5,7,5 syllable format) because they should reflect a moment in time, a change in understanding, an inflexion point.
More consideration is required, so this morning when we were running along eerily empty – although beautifully-engineered roads on the west coast of Hokkaido:
Towns and roads empty.
Fearing we might have ignored
Tsunami warning.
The Japanese Have A Word For That
There is a popular game of finding concepts that don’t have particular words in English. One example is the act of sucking in cold air to try and cool food in your mouth which is too hot, I forget which language does have a word for that (see comments below I hope). Anyway, today’s Japanese word is “komorebi” which means sunlight filtering through the trees. The Japanese do particularly beautiful woods, with little rivers running through them over rocks in a way that would feature on a thousand religious cards (“let your journey through life be like a stream through a forest” etc).
My Other Toilet’s Also A Toto
We have mentioned that Toto seem to have cleaned up (sorry) on toilet provision, and they are seeking to defend their position by constantly introducing more features (a race to the bottom?)
Once you have saturated the market you need to create more demand, so they have invented additional items, which I have to say look jolly thoughtful for parents with small children, such as the Small Child Parking Seat, the Trainee Urinal for Small Boys, and the Mother and Baby Combo.
