One show I’ve been waiting for quite eagerly is the second season of Non Non Biyori (roughly translatable as “fine weather for enjoying a carefree day”), which I started watching over the weekend. It’s a slice-of-life series about a girl named Hotaru who moves from Tokyo to an extremely rural part of Japan, so rural that there’s only one classroom with five students of varying ages in it. The show celebrates the difference between city and country life, and makes a lot of jokes that are especially funny to me, since J-List is located in a small semi-rural city (population 200,000) and surrounded by towns and villages even more sparsely populated, where you’d need to walk 2 hours to get to the nearest convenience store. The idea of living in a place so far from civilization that there are only five students in the entire school this isn’t as unlikely as you’d think. J-List’s buyer of DVDs and “dolphin polishers” grew up in a nearby town that’s seen a huge decline in population since he was a boy, with three of its four elementary schools closed, and only 20 students left in the one remaining school. Those 20 students hold normal school events like sports day and graduation ceremonies, even with such a small number of children.
Summer in Japan is time for eating watermelon and drinking ice-cold ramune, and in my house, at least, for “aircon wars” between me and my wife. She wants to keep the air conditioning turned down quite low, while I’m not cool enough until I can see my breath when I exhale. It’s also when Japan’s trademark “salarymen” will shed their conservative sebiro
