A Good Tradition

Today I was one of the twenty lucky foreign residents of the Kobe area to be chosen to take part in a workshop held at the Uchide ke jutaku (the Uchida family house.) This house was built around 260 years ago in the middle of the Edo period and is one of the few houses left in the Kobe area which has a thatched roof. The Uchida family house served as the head of three surrounding villages for generations.

During the day we cooked rice balls and miso soup using a kamado (a traditional Japanese cooking stove) and wrote our New Year's resolution in kanji doing shodo (Japanese calligraphy.) The main photo shows the main guide for the day. Extras are the calligraphy teacher, my calligraphy (depicting "run far" and "effort"), the kamado and the house.