Nikko (日光)

Heather and I are thinking about going to Nikko this weekend. It's another three-day weekend, so I'm pretty excited. We're supposed to meet our friends up there. I don't know if it will happen or not, though; it's pretty late in the game to get started on this, and we're having trouble finding available accomodation. And it's a three day weekend. And this is the time of year where everyone goes out to the beautiful spots to see the changing leaves. We might be out of luck.

Nikko (日光) literally means the light of the sun. It is a popular tourist spot for Japanese that features many beautiful shrines and temples, and some absolutely gorgeous natural scenes. It was also the scene of the helicopter mishap on Mt. Nantai a couple months back! (see previous entry)

Changing subjects, Heather's Japanese exchange partner had a very interesting take on the difference between the sentence-ending particles "ne" (ね) and "yo" (よ). Up until I heard her explanation, I had always understood ne to mean, "isn't it?" For example, "it's hot today, isn't it?" Yo, conversely, I had taken to express exclamation. "It's hot today!"

Heather's exchange partner's explanation is much more sophisticated and nuanced. Ne, she explained, denotes a piece of information about which both parties - speaker and listener - are already aware, or at least this is the speaker's impression. Conversely the speaker would use yo when he or she believes what he is saying is new information to the listener. Fascinating - this explanation has changed my conception of the function of those particles a little bit.