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very interesting, and kudos to you for delving into this topic. I find Japanese culture both intriguing and impenetrable. I ahve grown to like Manga and anime too.

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I agree about the impenetrability and intriguing qualities. As I was rummaging around this rabbit hole, I kept on thinking, "Oh! If I were only, say, thirty years younger I could actually study this!" Japanese, Chinese, Korean languages are a great mystery to me. Their ideograms themselves are both a delight and a complete cipher.

Terry, I very much enjoyed your verse the other day. The couplets were wonderful, and most of them seemed to read effortlessly. I hope you do more. I thought of your epistolary exchanges with Rebecca, too. I had a colleague back in the 1990s who was a great poet and oboeist (don't see that combination much!). He and I restricted our email exchanges to an Oriental verse form called tanka. It was humorous to do business with the restraints of verse.

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