"This air tastes delicious!"
That was the comment Rachel made as we walked to school this morning. It's not the first time I've heard the comment from a Japanese (or in Rachel's case, half Japanese) kid. The first time I heard it was in Amagasaki about a dozen years ago. I was walking from Amagasaki Station to the municipal gym to go workout and ended up chatting with a junior high school girl who was also on her way to work out. She was tiny, even for a Japanese girl, and she told me she was a synchronized swimmer. I'd never seen a girl her age working out at that gym; she told me she was training for a competition.
She asked me where I was from and I told her and she said her sister had been on a homestay around here. "The air there is delicious. I'd like to go someplace where the air is delicious," she said as we walked parallel to the train tracks past paint factories, pachinko parlors and machine shops.