Japanese with anime voice: episode80
Hello, I’m Sachi.
It’s June 21, the summer solstice in Japan! It is the day of the year when daytime is the longest and nighttime is the shortest! Isn’t it nice to have long daylight hours? I feel so blessed when the daytime is long. However…it is the Tsuyu season, so even though it is the summer solstice, the actual daylight hours are often shorter than in the winter. Shorter than winter…what does that mean when it’s the summer solstice?
In the summer, when I Skype with my American friends, it is so bright outside that I wonder what time it is. When I ask her, she says it is 20:00 at night. Even on the summer solstice in Japan, it is not that bright at 8:00 p.m. So I think it’s nice. When I went to Hawaii, it was so bright even at 7 p.m. that I lost all sense of time. But the longer daytime is great because you can enjoy yourself that much more.
Another thing I would like to experience, even just once in my life, is that the sun never sets. In Japanese, it is called 白夜 (byakuya), written as white night, and I wonder what it is like to be a 白夜 (byakuya). The sun is out all the time, right? It’s so strange. But it looks so beautiful. I would love to go there.
Sometimes I think, like a fool, that if I fly toward the sun, it will be daytime forever. I’d like to experience it being daytime forever. I wonder what that would be like. Well, I think I would probably fall asleep right away.
I used to like nights, but now I prefer mornings. It feels good to be active in the morning. But lately I’m so sleepy that I can’t get up at all at 6:00 a.m. When I was young, I was a night owl with plenty of energy, and I liked to stay up late even though I was tired from working during the day. Now I am definitely a morning person. And it’s called 早起きは三文の徳 (Hayaoki ha sanmon no toku). Do you know it? It is a Japanese proverb. “三文 (sanmon)” was a unit of money in the Edo period (1603-1867), and in today’s value, it is said to be about 90 yen. In today’s value, it might be about that much. However, “文 (mon)” was the lowest denomination of money in those days, so it is as small as 3 yen in today’s terms. It means that getting up early in the morning is good for your health, and you will be able to work and study more efficiently. It means that even though it is only a small 三文 (sanmon), there is virtue in it. If you dig deeper, you can see that good health means that you don’t have to spend money on medicine or illness, and if you work, you can earn money, and if you study, you can expect to increase your income.
There is a four-hour difference between getting up at 6:00 a.m. and getting up at 10:00 a.m. and starting activities. My morning activity starts with laundry, and if I can get the laundry done early, I can use the rest of the day to do what I want to do. So, even if I am sleepy, I still have to get up early in the morning. If you hang your laundry outside earlier, it will dry faster.
That’s why I prefer mornings. But that’s only until around 11 o’clock. By 12:00 or 13:00, for some reason, I feel like the day is over. It’s only been half a day. Especially in winter and spring, when the daylight hours are short, I don’t like the sunlight around 3:00 p.m., because it seems to signal the end of the day. In summer, it is still bright at around 5:00 p.m., which is fine. In winter and spring, the evening sun is a bit darker than in summer. In winter, it is still dark even if you wake up early.
Even stranger, every day, until about 10:00 a.m. in the morning, it feels longer than it feels. Even when I think it has been quite a while, it is still before 9:00 in the morning. But from 10:00 to 12:00, for some reason, time passes in the blink of an eye. And from 12:00 to 3:00 p.m, time seems to pass more slowly, and after 3:00 p.m, I realize that it is 5:00 p.m. What is this sense of time? It’s like that every day. The time interval doesn’t change much from day to day. I always feel that time passes more slowly until about 10:00 a.m. What is this? Is someone manipulating my time axis? Do you all have something like that? My mom seems to have a different sense of time depending on the day. I have a fixed time every day. Someone is definitely manipulating my time. Who is it?
