Where I've been all day

I spent the day at the Japanese equivalent of the Library of Congress - there are advantages to living just outside of Tokyo - and found a huge amount of material with the help of my friend Akiko, who is also studying the Burakumin. Unfortunately, since it's all in Japanese (most of it classical Japanese, which is significantly different than the spoken language and still quite alien to me even after two years of classes in it), it's going to take me piles of time to get through it all.

For the last half hour, this is what I've been doing:



The marked section is a single sentence, stretching across half a page. This isn't unusual, either. Japanese lends itself to sentences in the narrative style of a five-year-old - "and then... and then... and then..." I actually read an entire seventeenth-century essay once that consisted of a single, two page run-on sentence.