Happy Halloween! ^o^  First, enjoy a picture that is a digital reproduction of the doodles I draw on the chalkboard to explain how to go trick-or-treating:

When you go trick-or-treating, you become almost as large as the houses.

Anyway, now that Task Booklet 3 of the Japanese Linguistics and Pedagogy Course has been submitted and is presumably on its way to Tokyo with an October 30th postmark, I can post one of the poems I did for one of the tasks.  The task was to write some haiku or tanka.  For the free topic, I choose to write a tanka I call 「博多のハロウィン」 (“Hakata’s Halloween”), which was inspired by Halloween, the fact that there actually is a Halloween parade in Hakata, and the chapter on dialects. I’m not completely sure this is correct Japanese nor correct use of Hakata dialect. ^o^;

ハロウィンじゃ

飴を買わんと

行かんばい

微笑んでおる

幽霊のため

(In romaji): harowin ja / ame wo kawan to / ikan bai / hohoendeoru / yuurei no tame

Translation:

It’s Halloween

You have to buy candy

For smiling ghosts

Well, I like it at least.  But I usually do laugh at my own jokes. ^o^;

EDIT (November 22): I’ve gotten the Task Booklet back, and my poem has a big swirl on it, meaning it was okay!  ^_^b (Unlike Task no. 5 which has all sorts of red “calligraphy” on it. ^o^;;;)

I didn’t go to the Halloween parade because the night of the 30th I went to a Halloween party, whose grand finale was a 2-hour karaoke session that started at 2AM! XD

I hope everyone gets what they want from the Great Pumpkin, and don’t forget to do something nice for the Great Pumpkin as well! \^o^/