Understanding Tohoku

This piece was recently picked by Japan Today. See it here: http://www.japantoday.com/category/opinions/view/understanding-tohoku I came to Japan in July 2011, about four months after the East Japan Earthquake. We had been warned that electricity use had been cut in an attempt to compensate for the shortages in the northeast, and the first obvious show of this …

School Festival Day

Every year, Japanese schools hold their school festivals. Each class decorates their classroom in some kind of theme – maid café, haunted house, carnival games – and clubs set up supplementary classrooms with the pictures they’ve painted, go boards, or evidence of volunteer efforts. The school courtyard becomes a marketplace of third-year student food stalls, …

Reward for an Effort

When I was about twelve years old, I started taking ballet lessons. I was on the advanced competition tap team at my studio, so I was also required to do ballet in order to help build fundamentals and technique. One of those, you have to know the rules before you can break them, kind of …