And You Shall Receive
Wow. I’m impressed. I wrote about the new Onmaku Festival poster last week, and I believe I mentioned that I’d love to procure one. And if I didn’t, I meant to. 
Well, guess what? I got 2 and a sticker! I went to the website, and used the contact form to send an email in Japanese asking about it. I was as polite as possible, but my honorifics-fu is very weak. So I may have created some new grammatical constructions. But in any event, they understood my question and mailed me 2 posters and a sticker for free! How awesome is that? I am really excited. One is on my wall, and the other is being kept pristine to be taken back to America.
The experience went so well that I decided to try it again. I went to the website for the Go Shimanami! tourism campaign and found the contact form. I copied the email address and found the one for my local tourism board. I sent a similar message to both of them about a really sweet poster that I saw up in the ferry ticket office. They called me at school to confirm which poster I meant, and I told them I’d take a picture of it and send it back. I did so, and they sent me 2 copies of that poster too! I’m really happy about it. I’m very grateful to these two groups for basically hearing out a random foreigner’s selfish inquiries and making it happen when it’s not anywhere in their job descriptions and it cost them the shipping! I’m bowled over, you might say. And I have some sweet posters to show for it. They’ll be killer memoirs. 
