English Diary 2026
0820 Good morning. Watching this morning's drama made me think, "Shima-ken isn't here! We've got to go to Hamamatsu!" If I remember correctly, it was also the first time in quite a while that I had heard such prominent string music in the background, perhaps since the days of fireworks, eels, and that husband who served as a gardener for the shogunate. Real life romance really is wonderful. Compared with today's era of matchmaking services and dating apps, where people can easily end up evaluating one another mainly in terms of money and other conditions, romances in the past sometimes seem to have possessed a certain resilience, the fortitude to face reality together and overcome difficulties. Then again, arranged marriages were perfectly normal in the old days. After that came the age of pop songs proclaiming something like, "It's summertime, I've got a slight fever, forget all those rules!" followed by the B-Virgin era, and eventually our...