Minimalism - Online Income - ESL - Japan
My general observations from living in Japan.
When I was at university, I played on the Korfball team. It didn’t quite have the wow factor of football, basketball or rugby, but I was proud to be a starting member for the Essex first team, even though we were awful! Nick, what in the world is korfball? Korfball is the world’s only true mixed gender team sport with the rules laid down so that both men and women […]
After a hectic week of changing servers, I deserve a And that’s what I got when I went into the Family Mart convenience store and saw only the 4th major western chocolate bar I’ve ever seen in Japan. We’ve had Snickers, Kit-Kat, and Aero, and now Time Out! Woot! Imagine only having a choice of three chocolate bars? Thank goodness we now have four! 😛 If you like, you can […]
Three times a week, when Mami goes to her part-time job, I watch over Rikuto. Now, I know our 1-year-old son would be quite happy to watch YouTube all day, but that’s not going to happen. Instead, I try to take him to some of the sightseeing places around town. We’ve already done a lot in Kakamigahara, so today we headed south and crossed into Aichi prefecture where we would […]
Rather than sit in front of the TV all day while keeping an eye on Rikuto, I decided to take him to the Kakamigahara Aerospace museum instead. Kakamigahara is home to the Gifu Self-Defense Force Air Base and the Kawasaki Aerospace Division, so perhaps to make up for the noise of fighter jets flying overhead, the public are treated to a museum dedicated to flying machines. The museum was better […]
Life for a Japanese teenager is supposedly harder than for anyone else. The pressure to study hard has driven many people over the edge, as demonstrated a couple of years ago when there were a spate of suicides among junior high school students in Japan. The Japan broadcasting corporation, NHK, has an educational channel filled with children’s programming every evening. Currently they are playing a song by Angela Aki which […]
I went to renew my Japanese driving license and was rewarded with a gold license! What’s a gold license? A gold license is given out to people who don’t have any points on their current driving license. From what I’ve heard, this is an achievement usually limited to “paper” drivers – those who have a license but never actually drive! The card itself looks the same as a standard blue […]
This month’s Japan Blog Matsuri theme is The Language of Japan, and I’ve been scratching my head all month over what to write. I haven’t studied Japanese for years now, and although I have a few amusing stories of miscommunication, nothing worthy of an entire blog post. So, I delved into the LongCountdown archives and submitted an article I wrote back in March 2007. It’s about the confusion that arises […]
So I bought myself Rikuto a train set. It’s not a patch on the beautiful Hornby railway set that my dad made me when I was a child, but Tomy’s Plarail is a lot safer, which is important when you buy a one-year-old boy a toy made for 3-year-olds! Plarail, or “Tomica World” as it’s known outside of Japan, is awesome. There’s a huge selection of trains from all over […]