This was the year of the Corona disaster. We couldn’t travel or go out, so we stayed indoors for a year.
The above phrase: I’ve been holed up in my room for months.
The past year of the Corona disaster has been a year of great change for our family. Gakuto (husband) has been working from home most of the time, Aguko (wife) and Kadota (son) have temporarily retreated to Japan, and Kadota’s school and cram school are now online.
This graph shows the number of new corona cases in the Netherlands in 2020 (https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus). As the number of infected people increased rapidly in the second and third waves, restaurants closed or opened only for takeout, and beauty salons and other stores continued to close.
Lower part of the verse
Kadota (Son) – Japanese Karuta Floating on the Water
I recited the Japanese Karuta.
The reason why I chose the Hyakunin Isshu as the subject of this year’s New Year’s card was because Kadota (my son) had learned the Hyakunin Isshu in his cram school studies. While attending an international school on a daily basis, he studied Japanese and arithmetic at the cram school to supplement his Japanese studies. Among them, learning Kanji and Japanese Karuta in Japanese was particularly difficult, but he grew a lot.
Aguko (Wife) – A child’s scribe in the language of the outside world.
I’ve translated it.
The two translated English picture books that I had been working on with publishers since the previous year have been published. I am now working on my next book.
Gacto (Husband) – Teach me how to act as a sai
I tried cooking.
With my family's temporary return to Japan and the closure of restaurants due to the Corona disaster, cooking for myself became the natural choice.
