Happy New Year! 明けましておめでとうございます！

Hope you had fantastic Christmas and New Year’s celebrations with your beloved ones! If you are interested, you can check out what I was up to during the holidays on my Twitter.

As the Heisei Period is coming to a close in less than 3 months in Japan, I am feeling this groundless hope for a new beginning! I can already feel that this year will be AMAZING!!!

It’s already been 10 days into 2019, and I guess it’s about time to disclose my Rakugo resolutions for this year!

As I tend to be unrealistic about my goals (& I almost always don’t reach them…), I have decided to set realistic goals that are reachable yet not too easy this year.

Here are my resolutions for 2019!

• Do 50 performances minimum: As I am traveling most of January, I have 11 months to accomplish this. Due to my health, this might be a bit challenging but doable!
• Learn 12 new Rakugo stories minimum (1 of which has to be my original story)
• Learn 30 new Kobanashi (short stories/ one-liners)
• Finish 1st draft of my Rakugo book: It’s been about 70% done for a very long time…
• Wellington tour: If you are a Wellingtonian, please host me!
• Improve “small talk” skills: This is probably the most embarrassing goal to share here, but I really suck at small talks. If you know me well, I am an enthusiastic conversationalist when it comes to “big topics” (ex. politics, philosophy, or even meaning of life), but I am very poor at the initial stage of relationship building. My Rakugo career would probably go further if I mastered this skill, which I really should have learned when I was a teenager.

Now I have shared these publicly. There’s no going back!

Have an AMAZING year, everybody!