12 Habits I Learned from Japan That Did Not Help Me Back Home

12 Habits I Learned from Japan that Did Not Help Me Back Home 1)      It’s okay not to pay your bills on time, and not doing so results in no, or next to no, consequences 2)      Always run the yellow light, and most of the time run the red 3)      All You Can Eat doesn’t …

Japan: Christmas 2013

This year, Christmas was different. It held no tree, no stockings, no exchange of presents, no French toast, and no card games. What it held, instead, was a heavily frosted strawberry cake, a ferry ride, noodles dipped in sauce, the world’s largest wooden spatula, and an underwater shrine. That’s what happens when you take a …

Snow is a Cheat

For the last two years, the snow in Akita has begun on the first weekend in December. I have come to depend on this fact as fact and something to depend on. Not so this year. Everyone had been telling me that this autumn had been unusually warm, but that winter was supposed to bring …

Rakugo Culture

Every year my school partakes in some kind of cultural event. Last year it was visiting the Lake Tazawa drama troupe, which I didn’t get to see; the year before that was attending a performance by Malta, a saxophonist famous in the 80’s and 90’s, whom I did get to see. This year was a …

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, …

Premature Endings

The leaves are just starting to turn here in Akita, and with that comes the full onset and impact of my last year in Japan. I try and absorb as much of the beauty of the passing seasons as I can, even the dreaded winter, because I know this is the last autumn, the last …

The Muddling of Group Dynamics

It’s been a hot, rainy summer. My two-year Japanniverary has come and gone, and I am full on into my third and final year in Akita. It’s bittersweet, really – summer is the time when many of the ALTs who have been my friends and co-ex-patriots for the last year or two years have returned …