Or from different angle:
You will not find a Starbucks within 12 miles of this town. Nor will your cellular phone's reception ever creep beyond one half a bar. Now, I am definitely not averse to getting away from the information sphere once in awhile and basking in a few hours of ignorance of what the rest of the world is doing. The real problem can be summed up in three words: unintelligible local dialect. If my spouse is not by my side constantly to translate from local Japanese to standard Japanese, I have no clue what my in-laws are saying to me. Often my spouse doesn't understand either. Honestly, I think they confer beforehand and switch up the dialect for each of our visits to keep us from ever figuring it out. It's worse than those parts in Trainspotting where the Scottish accents get so out of control they added subtitles in deference to non-Scottish audiences.
So, I took a longer-than-necessary stroll after fulfilling my grave-visiting duties. Ostensibly to enjoy the fresh air, of which we in sooth get plenty being from a fairly rural city ourselves. It was actually rather enjoyable. I found some pretty flowers which I had no hope of identifying:
and a scene that I believe is a good, spontaneous example of the Japanese idea of "mono no aware," or an object that evokes a kind of aesthetic empathy:
So I guess the moral of this pointless post is, if you ever find yourself married to a Japanese native and getting dragged off three times a year (obon + vernal and autumnal equinoxes) to their remote rural hometown where the local dialect is completely impenetrable to visit the family tomb, I strongly recommend you take a book.
