Lesson to be learned 昔練習で書いたオリジナルの創作

Buddha stopped off at a village and met a desperate woman whose son had died of a sickness some time before.

She loved him so much and couldn't forget the little six-year-old boy, so she had desperately been looking for a means to cure him from death and live with her again.

She approached Buddha as he ended his sermon among a crowd of villagers, and asked him how she could bring her son back from death. With an enigmatic smile, Buddha gave her an instruction:

"Go obtain a handful of a certain plant seed but from someone who has never lost any of his or her family members or relatives by death."

Believing in his words, full of hope, she set off visiting people to get the seed. After going around her village, she moved to a neighboring village one after another, asking all the people about the seed. She found some who had it but no one who didn't have an experience of death of their family or relatives. In the process of her exploration, she got to know many people with a lot of sorrow stories of the separation from their loved husbands, wives, sons, daughters, or parents.

After being exhausted of the search, she came to the conclusion that it would be impossible to achieve her task, yet she learned about something that she didn't know before, and realized that she didn't feel agony any longer.

With refreshed feelings and calmness, she recovered a gentle smile back on her face, and began to walk toward her village with not energetic but steady strides .

---------This story is based on a Buddhist anecdote, but may be very different from the original.

Interpreting practice draft in 2019 通訳練習の原稿

(1st panel)
The Sunpu castle town was founded in the Shizuoka plain which was a fan delta formed by the Abe river and the Warashina river. Because those rivers periodically caused floods in the surrounding area by its rapid current, Shogun Ieyasu tried to save the villages around the Sunpu castle from flood damages and set off flood prevention work. He summoned the Satsuma clan as workers for that construction project (Satsuma was an old province in Kagoshima, Kyushu which is an island located in the southwest of Japan). They built banks along the Abe river to change the flow direction into the present-day pattern so that floods didn’t affect the central part of Sunpu castle town. Those banks along the Abe river were called Satsuma Dote in Japanese (“dote” means bank) after the origin of the workers.
*These blue lines show the locations of the old Abe river streams. Some streams would diverge from the main toward the center of the city. The red lines represent Satsuma banks. As you can see, the banks prevent the river flow from coming to the center.

(2nd panel)
After the flood control work was completed, Ieyasu embarked on basic infrastructure construction in Sunpu area through which towns around the Sunpu castle were designed and built. That later led to the establishment of the Sunpu castle town and the beginning of Japan’s castle town history.
Castle towns were originally intended for defense to ensure the safety of mainkeep of a castle. The mainkeep was surrounded by multiple layered moats and walls. Neighbors surrounding a castle were extensions of these defensive structures, which is why the main street on this town map was designed to run zigzag through the town so that it could distract enemies in case they tried to attack the castle. Before the Edo period, castles were the centers of military and government administrations, but after conflicts among worriers in the war period were settled, castles rather became economic centers.
(3rd panel)
This is a map of the Sunpu castle town around 1800. Streets were neatly constructed in a grid so as to make the town structure highly organized and convenient for the residents. One of the reasons why the residential area was plotted this neatly would be that the government assigned each plot for the group of residents of the same social class. In the Edo period, Tokugawa government devised a social classification called Shi No Ko Sho, which classified the people into four social classes: "Shi" was samurai or worrier", “No" was farmer, "Ko" was artisan, "Sho" was merchant. So, the residents lived in an area of the town designated for their social class. Afterward, the Sunpu castle town plan became the model for the construction of other castle towns all across the country. They say that in order to design Edo city they referred to the structure of the Sunpu castle town.
(miniature replica)
This is the miniature replica of the Sunpu castle town. The structure of the town was characterized by irrigation canals as well as highly organized plotting of the residential area. Water was carried from the Abe river and Kujiragaike, a large pond in the suburban area, and was channeled to every part of the town. Water from the canals was not only used for agriculture but also used for many other purposes such as cleaning or fire prevention. Rich water resources must have contributed to the prosperity of the town while making the livelihood of the residents much easier and more comfortable in many aspects. Each district of the town was called after the major occupation of the residents who lived there. For instance, Gofukucho, which means in Japanese “town of cloths or kimono”, was where fabric dealers lived. Ryogaecho, which means “town of exchange” in Japanese, was where money was exchanged and so on. And most of those districts’ names at that time have been conserved even up to the present day. It’s safe to say that the principal structure of the central area of Shizuoka city of today was based on the Sunpu castle town at that time.

モニター仮説というのがあるらしい(英語コメント)

I mostly believe the input hypothesis is true. Today, I got to know another hypothesis advocated by Krashen, which is the monitor hypothesis. Looking at it, I speculate that in many cases language learners might pursue accuracy in their target language because of this monitoring function achieved through learning, whether it consists of grammar or syntactic knowledge or experiences in that language. In some cases, they might be so attached to the accuracy pursuit that some kinds of emotional obstacles emerge and prevent them from practicing the language because they hate making any mistakes.

日本語>英語 翻訳練習 0003 パプリカ

曲りくねり　はしゃいだ道
青葉の森で駆け回る
遊びまわり　日差しの街
誰かが呼んでいる

A winding road where we would frolick
Running around in a green forest
Playing around in a town bathed in sunlight
Someone is calling you

夏が来る　影が立つ　あなたに会いたい
見つけたのはいちばん星
明日も晴れるかな

Summer is coming, shadow is defined, I want to see you
I saw the first star
Is it going to be sunny tomorrow?

パプリカ　花が咲いたら
晴れた空に種を蒔こう
ハレルヤ　夢を描いたなら
心遊ばせあなたにとどけ

Paprika, when flowers bloom
Let’s sow seeds under the sunny sky
Hallelujah, when a dream is drawn
Hope you let it reach you