I have come to the conclusion that Japanese, when all is said and done, is not properly translatable into English. As proof I offer the bilingual news with the simultaneous translators. The latest example was a press release from an organization of travel agencies and tourist bureaus. Their complaint: that Golden Week travel was down because of the three days of work that interrupt it in the middle. I've been wracking my brain all day trying to come up with a way to say that in English that doesn't make you sound like a complete moron, and I just can't do it. My conclusion: it can only be done in Japanese. Only in Japanese is it possible to say something so breathtakingly obvious with so many precedents as if you had just thought of it. And I mean thought hard about it. In fact, I would venture that only in Japanese is it even possible to talk about Golden Week without coming to the conclusion that it is the worst farce of a "holiday" to ever blight the calendar. Conversations about it at my school amount to a kind of doublespeak where everyone gets excited and asks each other what their Golden Week plans are, and then everyone says they will be at work or asleep-the same as last year and every other year. And me, I'm some sort of aberration, a complete inscrutable because I want to go somewhere and do something. There must be something about Japanese that disconnects reasons from reasonability.

In fact, the very words "Golden Week" are a dreadful misnomer. Sure, there is a week's worth of vacation spread around in there, but they don't actually make a week any more than separate shots of gin, vermouth, and olives make a martini. They should rename it "Some Assembly Required Week," or maybe just "Lead Week," since nobody can really turn that into gold either.

And for those of you super geniuses out there (I'm told they measure that by the number of grocery list items you can keep in your head at one time) who think you can speak intelligibly about Golden Week, I have another little challenge for you: the prices. Try this little experiment: call your friends or family back home and invite them to Japan during their next vacation. Then try to tell them in some way that will not cause objection that everything will cost double. Then tell them that they will have to sit on the floor of all airplanes, busses, and trains because they will be too full. If they're still on board after that, you better check their pupils, and maybe have yourself a hit from whatever pills they're popping.

This is not to say that I had a bad golden week. Not at all. I had a great time because I have already learned that if you do not drive, ride on a train or bus or plane, go anyplace warm, see anything famous or even remotely attractive, camp in a campground, stay in a hotel, or eat in a restaurant, you can avoid the cognitive dissonance that inevitably comes from confusing a vacation with being politely squeezed dry and shooed away while the next chump assumes the position. Also, do not go fishing.