Happy New Year from Haikugirl’s Japan!

Happy New Year! 明けましておめでとうございます。 So it’s 2017 already and I haven’t been around for a while. It’s been over a month since I blogged and I won’t lie, I feel a bit bad for that. I’ve been very busy over the last month. I spent nearly 3 weeks travelling in Indo-China, then it was Christmas and New Year – time flies when you’re having fun!

2016 was a quiet year for Haikugirl’s Japan, which has now been running for 9 years and 7 months! I only posted 63 times, which is quite a lot less than in previous years (2015 was 111, 2014 was 147). I’ve done a lot of thinking about blogging recently and how it fits into my life now. I started Haikugirl’s Japan back in May 2007 to share my love for Japan and to talk about my plans to move to Japan in 2008. It then became a blog about living in Japan from 2008 to 2011, and since I returned to the UK it has been a blog about Japanese culture here in the UK and my occasional returns to Japan.

Over the last year I’ve found it harder and harder to find interesting things to write about, and to find the time to write good posts. What I don’t want to happen is for blogging here to ever become a chore. I blog because I love it, not because I have to or because I ought to. So, for that reason, I have decided this year to just post whenever I want to. That could mean I get really inspired one week or I do something related to Japan that I want to write about and I might post multiple posts in a day or weekend, but it could also mean a month or two go by without a post.

I’m not going anywhere though. Haikugirl’s Japan will very much remain an active blog – just slightly less active than it has been. Hopefully at some point in the next year or two I will have the chance to return to Japan again, and the I will have lots of things to write about! In the meantime, I’ll post when I have something to say, perhaps when I watch a good movie about Japan, or when I read a good book. Sometimes I’ll cook something Japanese and I’ll share a recipe, or maybe I’ll go to a Japanese restaurant and I’ll write about that. In May I’ll be celebrating TEN years of Haikugirl’s Japan, so I shall have to have a think about how to mark that occasion with a post.

This is the year of the rooster (tori / 酉) (hence the rooster above, which I found in Ise back in 2009), and as it happens that means it’s my year. Apparently roosters are efficient and confident, thrive on challenge and change, and they are hardworking. I certainly intend to work hard this year and make it a year to remember!

Thank you to all of you who still read and comment. I hope you’ll stick around and keep reading! 今年もよろしくお願いします。