Eleanor Goldsmith comments

When I was single I dabbled in the tea ceremony, and fellow dabblers and the sensei would find any excuse to dress me up in a kimono, usually the most elaborate one they could find.

Kimono is the international dress uniform of tea ceremony, irrespective of nationality.

(Good to see you're keeping well, Cleo - hope the family are all well, too. I used to post here under the name of Zaichik (I think - or possibly Zaika) in my Niigata days, before I moved to NZ and got a job that kept me too busy to read JT articles!)

Toshiko is quite right about 青 being used for both blue and green in Japanese (c/f 青梅 and 青じそ, green ume plums and green shiso leaves, respectively), so Aomori would be more accurately translated as Green Forest.

As an ex-resident of New Lagoon, I have to confess complete bafflement at the eternal force blizzard - 永力雪? - translation - definitely looks like someone got very confused. 新 is one of the more basic characters, after all, and I'd have thought that even people with a relatively low level of kanji comprehension ability would know that it means new. It defeats the (admittedly pretty trivial in the first place) object of the exercise if you're going to just throw Nelson out of the window and make up a meaning.

Incidentally, when I found out I was being posted to Niigata on JET, my first thought was "Damn, now I have to learn how to write that pesky 潟 character!" Niigata turns out to have quite a lot of lagoons/wetlands, including one or two registered under the Ramsar Convention.