Minimalism - Online Income - ESL - Japan
The year after my homestay, I came back to Japan with enough money to last me two weeks. I had nowhere to stay, hoping to just wing it until I got a job. I consider myself lucky that I found capsule hotels and youth hostels to stay at, though I was eventually kicked out of Higashiyama Youth Hostel in Nagoya for overstaying my welcome – I was living there, leaving […]
I started writing this blog on September 23rd, 2006, with a post describing my arrival in Japan. Now, one hundred posts later, I thought I’d take a look back through the archives and point out some of my favorite articles which you may have missed. September 2006: What is Yakudoshi? I wrote this when we were looking for a house to buy. There were all kinds of problems at first, […]
In my post about choosing a name for our son, I said that one reason for giving him my wife’s family name, i.e. a Japanese name, is because it would be more convenient. In this post, I’m going to write about my experiences of having a non-Japanese name in Japan. Informally, my name Nick is pretty hard for Japanese people to pronounce. They tend to say Ni-koo, or nikku in […]
When you move to a foreign country, the background chatter of your own native language – the sounds of people around you, TV or radio, is replaced with a droning stream of voices in a language foreign to your own. Having been in Japan for 10 years, I now understand a lot of what I hear, but I still have to “tune in” to the TV to understand what the […]
It’s been a month since Mami last went to the maternity clinic, but she went back today for another check-up, and everything is fine. I wish I could have gone with her, but I can’t deny my students their weekly English class! Nevertheless, I got to see the latest video of Rikuto, the baby formerly known as “Peanut”. Since we found out that Peanut is a boy, it wasn’t hard […]
In part 1 of this series, you saw a video about dropping litter in bicycle baskets, and in part 2 I showed you a commercial aimed at stopping people from eating on trains. Both of these videos are part of an ongoing effort to improve manners in a country where you can pretty much get away with anything, because very few would dare tell you off. The following video, sadly […]
Last month I got a new computer, a Windows Vista PC with enough power to run Google Earth! I’ve been playing with Google Maps a lot lately, particularly after I discovered you can manually alter the zoom level to go in further than you thought possible, like this section of Africa in which you can clearly see a man with his camel. Google Earth is even more fun than playing […]
I used to use some old textbooks called Jack and Jill, in which the words ‘ugly’ and ‘pretty’ were represented by pictures of an ugly girl and a pretty girl. Jack and Jill was published back in the ’70s, but not much has changed in the book I’m using now, Hip Hip Hooray, in which pictures of pretty and ugly mice are used to teach the same words. There have […]