After many years of weekly piano lessons and many years of resting, I felt both nostalgic and renewed to start learning koto. Koto is an 13-string instrument which similar counterparts in Chinese traditional music. I remember days in my childhood when I worshiped the beautiful performances of fingers brushing over strings, so during every practice, I enter a dream-like blissful state. As much as I love the instrument, the charm of the weekly practices is also because of the wonderful people I get to share this experience with.

The koto classroom’s homely layout reflects in the family like welcome of the teacher and students. Well, I say students, but many are retired people who spend all afternoon and evening practicing and hanging out. Besides koto, there are samisen and shakuhachi. Every time I arrive at the classroom, we would wait for the current repertoire to end before we eat snacks, usually omiyage from all over Japan, and drink tea while chatting about current life happenings. Through our conversations, I have learned many trivia about Japanese household supplies and food names. My Japanese language skills have also improved vastly. Everyone in the classroom speaks in a heavy Kansai-ben. While I can barely distinguish the exact words, I have grown to be able to observe the various tones and guess (mostly correctly!) the meaning. However, I have also learned that over text, when I lose the visual hints, I can no longer as successfully figure out Kansai-ben.