The Boshu dialect (房州弁).

I've posted this before on facebook, but somehow the topic of Chiba's dialects came up at work on Friday, and I decided I needed to repost this on my blog.

I was speaking with a coworker, and she mentioned how once when she was traveling in southern Chiba, she asked for directions and had NO idea what the person had told her because the dialect was insane. I mentioned my love for Boshu-ben ("Boshu dialect," aka southern Chiba's native dialect)...to which she replied she didn't even realize it was called that!

No no, I could not allow that! After some discussion about Boshu dialect, I remembered this quiz. I tried to show it to her but it was blocked, so I will satisfy myself by posting it here:


房州弁検定だっぺ｜けんてーごっこ
http://kentei.cc/k/556835

As with most dialects, there will be variations even within the same dialect. This quiz was made by someone from Kamogawa, so it might be somewhat different from how someone in say...Minamiboso or Otaki speaks. It is fun to check out anyway though. Searching for "房州弁" online will come up with all sorts of dictionaries and what not.

I got 9 out of 10... I still need some more work. :)


Slightly unrelated, but this topic got me longing for Kamogawa so I went over some of my old photos and came upon these:

Ahh...I really want to eat some mikan right now!

Around this time last year, I was finishing up my 2 year course on tourism/being a guide. This was from our practical,  where we led a tour around Kamogawa.

Then people picked mushrooms from here (the set of logs leaning against each other)...

And immediately roasted them on this charcoal grill, along with other goodies like fresh veggies and onigiri !

It was a pretty cool tour (although from the side of the people doing the planning, it really is a LOT of work). The theme was winter in the mountain countryside. I think there's this image of the countryside being bleak and full of nothingness in the winter - which is true, at the first glance, but if you look a lot harder, there are actually a lot of fun things to do!

Prepping the hay.

Hay? Yep - since it was the end of the year, we also made New Year's decorations, old school style! Back in the day, people (mainly farmers) made them from leftover hay, but most people nowadays buy them from the store.

We were making shimenawa (lit. "enclosing rope"; are said to mark off sacred spaces and ward off evil).  You have to take bunches of hay and twist them together. It sounds easy enough, but it's actually pretty difficult to do it nicely...and is really really tiring. It was a pretty new, cool experience though!

This was mine, minus the paper decorations that would make it complete. For my first time, supposedly it was actually pretty good - except that I was too naive when I was twisting the hay, apparently. Practice makes perfect, I guess?

This isn't mine, but what the final product with the paper decorations looks like. You can buy the paper decorations, but the guy who was teaching us how to make the shimenawa made this himself. Talk about living tradition!

Just one week till Christmas, then two weeks till New Years! Hope everyone is having a good December.