Quick links from our Japan Day Salon.
You will not have to take notes when you hear something interesting, know it will be waiting for you here.
FOUR YEARS EARLIER...
Within a few months after our first date, we were reading together The Log of The Sea of Cortez by Dr. Ed Ricketts and John Steinbeck. Ed was a marine biologist whose business was Pacific Biological Laboratories, 800 Cannery Row, Montery California. Science teachers (like me), university teachers and researchers would order biological specimens from labs like Doc's. Steinbeck spent a great deal of time in "Doc's Lab". We stopped there on one of our earliest road trips. Doc took Steinbeck on a long specimen collecting trip a long boat trip down the coast line of Baja California. Before they left they sat down and wrote their "First Principles"for traveling together on a tiny boat for a long period of time. Why this long paragraph?
Patricia and I would soon be off on our first trip together (to Japan) where we'd share a tiny space at the APA Hotel in Shinjuku Tokyo while on an 11,000 mile journey.
Ask Patricia when we sat together to write our own First Principles that would guide us along our life's journey and to our Shinto wedding four years in the future. Our four guiding principles: Honor, respect, nurturing inner growth, and loving one the other.
THREE YEARS BEFORE OUR TRADITIONAL SHINTO WEDDING those principles would find their way engraved onto Patricia's engagement ring, forged in fire, and folded to produce a "wood grain" pattern in gold, similar to the wood grain pattern found when forging a fine Samurai sword.
FIRST PRINCIPLES engraved inside
1. How To Get Married in Japan (or celebrate your 20th, 30th, 40th anniversary in Traditional Japanese style).
3. Wedding Diary .... We meet our Shinto Priest.
4. Travel Tip #1 of 34 (at the very bottom, click on NEWER POST for Travel Tip 2, and so on.
第一原理 First Principles Daiichigenri
名誉 Honor Meiyo (May yo)
尊敬 Respect Sonkei (Son kay)
育む Nurture Inner Growth Hagukumu
愛 Love One the Other Ai (eye e)
