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Well, the long marathon of building Mystique #15 is finally over - I finished up the final printing batch on Saturday. Yesterday was a lazy day of 'fill-in' work - I washed and cleaned all my brushes, spent rather more time down in the river than I perhaps should have, and then in the evening, started digging through my books and prints trying to come up with an interesting idea for #16.

Numbers 17 and 18 (the last two prints in the set) were decided long ago, so this will be the 'last chance' for including anything that I feel shouldn't be missed in this survey of traditional Japanese making.

So having said that, some of you may be a tad surprised when you see what it will be ...

More about this later, of course!

Having brought up two children (mostly) here in Japan, I am pretty much familiar with most of the major differences in the way that children are raised here as compared with the (basically British) methods I am personally inclined to favour.

Dealing with mild illness is one of the places where the two cultures really do differ a lot. From my own point of view, it is completely normal for any person's 'condition' to vary slightly from day to day. We're up; we're down. There's a normal range within which there is no reason to worry about being 'healthy'. But to a Japanese mother (and the staff at the day-care center), even so much as a single degree of 'fever' is a signal to shut down the normal routine, cancel everything, and head for the doctor's office.

And many daycares and kindergartens take this so seriously that they check the temperature of each child at the time that the mother is dropping them off. One degree over 'normal' and the kid is refused entry and sent back with the mother.

You can see where I am going with this ...

Yep. I haven't seen printer Tsushima-san now for ten days, not since we had the baren-tying lesson. At that time, I prepared some paper for her to begin a batch of the Peony print, but I long ago had to pull it all out of the deck, dry it off, and wait for her to give me a call and let me know . . .
[Long item has been trimmed at this point. The full blog entry can be viewed here]