Minimalism - Online Income - ESL - Japan
Mr. H, my student and friend, has just left after coming to my house for coffee and dango on Easter Sunday. While he was here I showed him just what you can do with computers these days. If you’re new to this blog you won’t know that Mr. H is in his seventies and started to learn English a year ago with the goal of traveling around the world on […]
In my post Misleading Media, I talked about how I don’t watch the news anymore, but there was one story late last month that got my attention. It was the tragic death of Lindsay Ann Hawker, a 22-year old British girl who was an English teacher at NOVA. It was huge news in both Japan and the UK, and Japan Probe covered the story in the following posts: NOVA teacher […]
I’m back in the classroom this week for a new school year, and my students are a year older than they were last month. During my week off, I kept myself busy working on my new technology blog Nice4Rice.com, which sees me, as Spud Oregon, reviewing tech-related websites and giving blog owners a chance to get free links by giving ‘rice’. On the subject of blogging, my article on High-tech […]
With Japan’s hanami season underway, Mami and I thought we would take a stroll down the river to see what this year’s “cherry blossom viewing” season had to offer. While we were walking under the sakura, I told Mami a story I had heard from one of my students a couple of weeks ago. Apparently, K-chan was walking her dog in Gifu park when she saw a large group of […]
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 […]