Throughout this year, I have included many friends from different parts of my life in this Giveaway project – friends in Scotland, Canada, England, the United States – but I sadly left out many dear friends in Japan. This isn’t because I don’t feel grateful to them for all they have done for me in my life. On the contrary, I carry a debt to Japan and my Japanese friends that I will never be able to repay. Rather, it’s because I communicate with most of them in Japanese and it would be too hard for me to write about them in Japanese – and impossible for my regular readers to read what I write. But today, before the year ended, I wanted to send a gift to one family in Japan who have been very special in my life and who, in many ways represent the immense kindness that I have felt from my Japanese friends since I first visited the country when I was 21.

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