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The other day, I joined Kakizome, or the first calligraphy writing at the beginning of new year, run by a sister of my friend’s who is a professional calligrapher (copyist). In Japan, whether you like it or not, everyone learns it at elementary school and jr. high school as compulsory subject. I remember it was part of the assignments we had to finish during winter vacation. Of course, Kakizome originally is done on the 2nd of January.

Calligraphy, piano, and abacus were 3 major culture lessons that most of kids wanted to have when I was a child. However I was busy learning Koto and I had no chance to learn them at all.

Now I think how wonderful it is to be able to write beautiful calligraphy while most of letters nowadays are written by computer.

This day, we were told to choose whatever words that we want to write.
Some people like to write resolutions or maybe their favorite words that fit into the small calligraphy paper. I didn’t come up with any good words then and so I decided to write the title of my blog wishing that it gets better and better.

I took a video how she wrote it as an example for me to follow.

I struggled from copying the example. It’s not easy as it looks! I was almost forgetting how difficult it was. ^ ^; Some letters look OK but some look…ugly?

I didn’t have time to try another one (3rd paper), but I had such a nice experience for the first time since jr. high school, I guess. I had Koto and calligraphy in the new year this year, which is pretty much “Japanese”.