First, two more pictures of my Itsukushima/Miyajima’s Otorii:
Secondly, I’m interested in your opinion my beloved regular readers (all 20 of you).
I’ve been wondering something for the past few days. It was triggered by a few discussions I had recently (along the lines of friends asking: “David, you have this great blog about Japan, but why don’t you blog about France?” – I added “great”) as well as the fact that these days, summer being here, I’ve been visiting some of the places I love above all in my home area (South West France), watching them with a different eye this time as it may be the last time I see most of them in a very long time (chances that I move to Japan in 2012 are not equal to zero anymore).
So, I’ve started wondering too: Why don’t I blog about France? “Ogijima.com style”, that is not about the famous and cliché things (says he while posting two pictures of Miyajima’s Otorii), but about those great and amazing places not many foreigners know about (if you don’t include the Brits, the Belgians and the Dutch as they know French South West very well)?
I’m still thinking about it.
Right now, I see three options :
- Start blogging about French places, here, on this blog. I’m reluctant to do it though, because I feel that the theme of this blog won’t be as clear, and regular readers (yes, you guys) read it for Japan, they may not care about France. In other words, this blog could lose its “soul” (do blogs have souls?), not being about Shikoku and Kagawa anymore but being about “Places David likes” (because if I include France, I could also include my trips to other countries too)
- Start a new blog, just about France. The good: I won’t mix apples and oranges. The bad: I’m not sure I have enough time for a new blog, I write too many already, and updates on this blog here may become less frequent (while my current goal is to try to make them more frequent, I have so many posts from my French blog to bring here, not mentioning the ones that haven’t been written yet, months worth of posts). The question: What should I call it anyway?
- Nevermind. I should forget it. While it’s not necessarily a bad idea, I should start a new blog, and focus more on this one and write on it more often, not less often.
What option should I choose? 1, 2 or 3 (unless you have a fourth one I haven’t thought about)
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I choose fourth one focused on comparing between Japan and France.
That is why you know both Japanese things and French things well.
As for me, I want to start two new blogs written by Japanese and Spanish but I don’t have enough time to start them like you.
Thanks for you feedback.
While it’s a good idea, it would be a completely different blog from what I’ve been doing here. And seriously, I don’t know Japanese culture well enough to do that just yet.
However, it’s true that I sometimes do that on my French blog, when I encounter Japanese behaviors that I find strange or amusing or else.
I should try to do it here more too.
But those are things I’m keeping for (much) later, as when/if I move to Japan, I’m sure I will have plenty of examples to work with. 🙂
option 2
What if you just took turns? You could write about France one week ( I like France too!) and Japan the next. I think it would be confusing if you wrote about both countries in the same post (unless you were making a comparison), but there was ‘Japan week’ and ‘France week’, or whatever regular time division you chose, say France on Thursdays, then that might work really well. That way the blog could still keep its soul, I think.
In any case, I love hearing about the Seto Naikai, so I hope you will go on blogging about it for a long time to come.
No, no, writing about both France and Japan in the same post was never an option (unless I’m comparing things. I do it more on my French blog than here, as here people may not already know about French culture and of course, when I do such comparisons, French culture is the “home culture” and Japan, the “foreign culture”).
That being said, whenever I move to Japan, I’m sure you’ll see a lot of those comparisons (Japanese vs French vs US culture).
Right now, I’m heading towards a blog about France, as I don’t think it’s a very good idea to mix things up too much, this blog would definitely be a completely different thing if I talked about France in it. Especially because of the difference in point of view. Here I’m the learner of Japanese culture, in a blog about France, I would be the teacher of French culture.
The major questions now is do I have time to regularly write a blog about France without having to write less often here? I don’t have the answer to that question yet.
I forgot: I don’t plan to ever stop talking about Seto Naikai, actually my hope for the future is to be more and more involved in preserving and promoting Seto Naikai’s culture. 🙂