Recent notes on some everyday Japanese words 空蝉 kuusemi means the temporal world or a worldly person. The literal meaning (and it also still has this sense) is a cast-off cicada-shell. Clearly the expression refers to the empty illusion of material existence. How telling then that the English dictionary-translation, without blinking, defines it as “the real world”. The modern West really does live, philosophically, in a world of its own! Here is one I just love. 空の玄関 sora no genkan is a regular expression meaning “airport”. Genkan, as you know, is the place where you remove your shoes before entering a Japanese house, and thus the transition area between the worlds of 外 soto (outside) and 家 uchi (inside), or as we would say, agora and hestia. An airport is thus the genkan between the land-world and the sky. What a charming expression, ne.