Minimalism - Online Income - ESL - Japan
I woke up this morning to find an email from one of my best childhood friends – talk about a pleasant surprise! We last made contact about ten years ago, so it was great to hear from him. It got me thinking about how people maintain long-distance friendships. When I first came to Japan on a homestay, my great Scottish aunt asked me to track down her pen-pal, Kubo Hide-san, […]
I’m living in my sixth apartment in Japan so I’m a bit of an expert on neighborhood noise. Here’s my list of the seven most annoying noises I’ve had to live with over the last nine years. 7. The food trucks. Late in the evening these guys come round with music blaring from their little trucks, hoping you’ll rush out of your apartment to buy whatever delicacy they’re selling. Not […]
One of my students is an elementary school teacher, and she loves talking about her job. Saturday was Dreamwork Day at her school so she was a bit tired by the time she came to class. “Dreamwork Day? Sounds fun!” I said, but then she explained that all the teachers had to clean the school to give the students a dream… erm… yeah, a clean school should encourage children to […]
In What is Yakudoshi? I told you that Mami and I were looking for a house and being a foreigner, I might encounter some problems with getting a mortgage. This post is an update on that. Assuming I wouldn’t be able to get a loan from a Japanese bank because I don’t yet have permanent residency, we took a break from house hunting for a while. However, we still got […]
I’m sure most of us at one time or another have stayed up all night studying for a test or preparing for an important event the next day. It’s 5:40 in the morning, you’ve got all your work done and can finally go home for a few hours kip before the big day starts. Then, just when you least expect it, somebody jumps on you from the tenth floor of a […]
One of the best things about teaching in Japan is the omiyage, souvenirs that Japanese people feel obligated to buy for everyone they know! This, of course, includes teachers. The most common kind of omiyage is cookies or rice crackers. Barely a week goes by without one of my students bringing a box of biscuits to class from some remote village, Disneyland or a trip overseas. Today I was given a […]
In Part 1 I talked about how the gomi (rubbish) rules had changed and that everything had to be separated and put out on fixed days between 6 and 8am. However, being unable to wake up at that crazy time of day, I often threw things out the night before. This was fine until the gomi patrol caught me. The gomi station where I had to throw out my rubbish […]
When I first came to Japan, rubbish disposal was as simple as dumping everything in a bag and putting in the street to be collected later in the week. Now, I’m not just talking about kitchen scraps here, I mean anything that people didn’t want, including TVs, refrigerators and all sorts. The bubble economy had burst but people were in the habit of buying the latest technology and throwing out […]