はじめまして！

Hi, my name is Keiko(恵子).  I am a new Japanese blogger for Transparent Language. I am really excited to be here!  Since this is my first blog post, let me first introduce myself.  I was born and raised in Gifu(岐阜), Japan.  I moved to U.S after graduating from high school. Since then I’ve lived in Georgia, South Carolina, Florida, and currently live in Portland, Oregon with my husband and two boys, 7 & 9 years old.

I travel to Japan once a year during the summer for my boys to attend local Japanese elementary school in my home town.  (In Japan, summer break does not start until the end of July for school children.) This has been a great experience for my boys as they get to experience Japanese school life, and at the same time they get to spend some time with their grandparents and relatives.

In this first blog, I thought I would share with you some information about my hometown, Gifu.  Gifu is a prefecture, located in the Chubu region of central Japan. According to a Wikipedia, the population was 2,101,969 as of September 2007.

To give you a better idea, I found the following Youtube video about Gifu.

The river you see in this video is Nagara River(Nagara-gawa, 長良川), and the castle is called “Gifu Castle”(Gifu-Jo,岐阜城).  The castle is a fun place to visit as it is now a museum. You will see many of the old Samurai swords and Ninja stars displayed throughout the museum.

In my upcoming blogs, I would like to cover variety of topics, such as Japanese food/cooking, animation/manga, music, history, and so on. In the mean time,  if you would like to see what are the hottest things happening in Japan, check out this web site, ” Trends in Japan”.  http://web-japan.org/trends/index.html.  Also, if you would just like to know more about Japan, this site offers a comprehensive view of Japanese culture, nature, science and technology, and tourism etc. http://web-japan.org/jvt/index.html in streaming format.

I will be looking forward to sharing with you more about Japan in my future blogs! Stay tuned!

これからどうぞ、よろしくお願いします。