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On even months moving forward, in the interest of saving myself some time that I can bank for other projects (like writing reviews of Murakami, etc.), I’ll be finding something from my blog archive to look at.

I got really lucky and stumbled on a couple of posts about Yahoo Chiebukuro, but the real discovery was a contributor’s definition of 幸い (saiwai, happy/pleased). This gave me the opportunity to get into one of the most useful sentences in the Japanese business world that I would guess is the most frequent way of making a polite request in Japanese. I won’t spoil it here. Go give it a read.

I will note one other very nice usage for 幸い. One of the other definitions is “lucky,” and the standard sentence structure with this meaning is 幸いなことに X (Saiwai na koto ni X, Luckily/Fortunately, X).

I went looking for usage examples on Twitter, as I have often in the past, but this month I found that the search function has degraded significantly. I don’t use Twitter anymore, but I maintain my account there (on private) so I can access one of the largest corpuses of Japanese language in existence. It was especially effective at tracking down usage examples because quote searches were super reliable, but that’s no longer the case. Searches aren’t turning up quoted text any longer, although other users on BlueSky reported varying results.

One user did share that you can use Google to search on Twitter by adding “site:x.com” to a search and then adding the quoted material. This appears to work! Even if it makes combing through the results much more difficult and time consuming.

At any rate, I turned up this nice example from shogi player Katō Hifumi who passed away earlier this year but posted this back in 2017 (when he was 77), noting that he feels fortunate not to have felt any effect of getting older:

And here’s a lighter example of a Threads user fortunate to find less damage than expected from some rainy weather:

Back in December 2023 I did a quick look at how all the social media platforms handle searching for Japanese text. Sad to see Twitter degrade so far, but 幸いなことに Google-kun can lend us a hand.