It seems like you’re all getting the news in my life several weeks late. I only get around to writing these letters when I both feel like it and when I have time to goof off at my junior high school.

In the past month, I’ve made a couple new Japanese friends. They’re two ladies about my age (22 and 24) who come to a weekly group in Maebashi called the Global Café to practice their English. It’s a pretty good deal for me. I get paid ¥2,000 ($17) to talk English to people who are almost fluent, pretty interesting, and well traveled, for an hour and a half. Three weeks ago on Friday, I made dinner plans with one of the girls I met. She was going to pick me up at the Denny’s parking lot at 7pm.

Around 7pm I started out from my apartment. A fenced concrete ditch about three feet deep runs by a small road passing next to my apartment. It goes underground through a tube when it crosses the highway to the back of my apartment. As I crossed the ditch I heard a high-pitched meowing. I called my friend on my keitai to tell her I would be about 5 minutes later. I went back to my apartment but couldn’t find my flashlight. I went back to the ditch. “Kitty?,” I called. More meowing. I walked to the Denny’s parking lot to get my friend and tell her what was happening. We went to the neighborhood Sekichu where I bought a new bike light (my last one got stolen). When we got back to the ditch, the cat was no longer meowing. I shined the light down there, but couldn’t see anything. Maybe it had gone through the tube? Maybe it had never been in the ditch to begin with, but on the bank, and was ok. There was nothing I could do. (more…)