Most people retire when they finish their working life at the age of 60 or 65, but athletes retire earlier. Uno Shoma is a good example. He has just retired at the age of 26. He started competing in 2009, so his career lasted about 15 years. For most of his career, he had to compete with the great Hanyu Yuzuru. Uno seldom beat him, but he won the silver medal at the 2018 Winter Olympics and the bronze medal at the 2022 Winter Olympics. He is a great jumper, and his name is in the Guinness Book because he was the first skater to land a quadruple flip jump. What is he going to do from now on? He wants to concentrate on figure skating. The next time we see him will probably be at a show on ice.  (140 words)

In Japan, people usually clean their house thoroughly at the end of the year. They clean the parts of the house that usually don’t get cleaned regularly such as door screens, window sashes, and the space behind the refrigerator. This doesn’t happen in winter in North America and European countries. Instead, people wait until the weather gets warmer. That’s why it is called spring cleaning. People also change the clothes at this time of year. My sister is doing that right now. She is putting away the boots and sweaters and taking out the warm-weather clothes. The same thing happens in Japan. It’s called “koromogae.” My wife took out our summer clothes last month, and we are still trying to get rid of the things we no longer need. That is the most difficult part!     (135 words)

Usually, people have to go far north in winter to Alaska, Canada, or Scandinavia to see an aurora. You can also see auroras in New Zealand. The biggest sun storm in over 20 years occurred over the weekend, and it sent a lot of energy through space to the Earth. People could see auroras all over the world. The skies turned pink, purple, and green as far south as Florida in the U.S. and as far north as Queensland in Australia. We couldn’t see an aurora here in Nagoya, but the newspaper said that you could see one in Tohoku and in Hokkaido. My sister, who lives near Boston, sent me a photo of the aurora there. The sky was just beautiful! (122 words)

The beginning of May is the time to plant rice. Most fields were dry during the winter, but now they are wet. These wet fields are called paddies. Farmers drive tractors through the paddies so that the mud becomes soft. Then, they take small rice plants, which are called seedlings, and put them into rows. These days, most farmers put the seedlings on their tractors, and the tractors do the planting, but people used to do it by hand. I went into the countryside near Nagoya yesterday, and I saw a man planting in the old way. He was wearing boots and standing in the paddy. He took one seedling at a time and put it into the mud. It was beautiful to watch, but it looks like backbreaking work!   (130 words)