If you ever learn to speak Japanese, please refrain from having conversations in Japanese in front of people who don't speak it. My cousins, whose mother is from Japan, are visiting, and they do this to me a lot. Their mother tells them not to, that it is rude, but they are so used to a mish-mash of Japanese and English that I think they often don't realize what they're doing. Unfortunately, their mother's accent is so heavy that she might as well be speaking Japanese to me. She tells Sachi, Mari and Yuri that they're being rude, but it sounds sort of like "lude" to me. Which, in a different spelling, could mean something which my cousins are definitely not.

Family is interesting. These cousins and their parents are not at all religious. As far as I know, the only times these kids have ever gone to church are when my parents and I or our grandparents took them at Christmas when we were all little kids. My uncle was raised Catholic, but he hasn't gone to church since he left home. I don't know if my aunt was raised in a religious home or not. She doesn't talk about it. From the sense of morality that the girls have (they're all in their mid-late teens), you might think they were raised to be God-fearing kids. Maybe it's just that strict Japanese upbringing. They're very modest in dress and speech, charitable (or altruistic at least), and have a high sense of right and wrong.

It was particularly of interest to me that three of us were watching a news report about some kids conceived through artificial insemination using dontated sperm. They'd gone to look for the men who donated half their DNA. After about five minutes, we all agreed that it was disgusting and weird, and changed the channel. So here are some kids whose father is a doctor, they hear about medical procedures all the time, and have had no religious upbringing at all. But they know, without being told, that making a baby in a labratory is wrong. Well, yay for natural law.