Happy New Year from Japan! Last night we had to forgo our usual tradition of Chinese food and watching the ball drop at Times square for Japanese food and watching Japanese boy bands sing in the New year fromTokyo. Five minutes into 2008 our friend, and my student, Masako, picked us up to go to a traditional new year celebration at the local shrine. Just down the road from our house, the shrine we've ridden by many times on our bikes had been transformed into a subdued celebration of around 100 people. Lanterns and fires dimly lit up the area, as [View Full Entry]

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Ima nanji desu ka? Christmas desu. What time is it? It’s Christmas. Ok, I think that’s pretty close. We’re always practicing! Christmas just isn’t the same so far from family. You don’t miss the other stuff here - just family. But, we’re doing our best to revel in the Japanese Christmas season, which consists of everything overwhelming and unnecessary about Christmas and none of the other things, ie: celebrating Christ’s birth. But, even John Lennon’s “Happy X-mas (War is Over)” and Wham!’s “Last Christmas” dro [View Full Entry]

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Jessie and I set out for Kyoto early last Saturday morning with our friends Hiromi and Takahisa Fukasawa. The Fukasawas are my students. We meet once or twice a week at their house for a lesson that is supposed to take an hour, but usually lasts longer because we goof off too much. They’re in their fifties - he’s a dentist and she’s a sixth-grade teacher. The leather of their Audi’s back seat was certainly better at 7 a.m. than the bus fabric we would have been sitting on during our six-hour bus ride. And instead of six hours, it took [View Full Entry]

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Jessie and I really like camping. Well, I like to camp. So I was looking forward to the prospect of camping in another country - a country where mountains, streams, wild monkeys and really neat foliage are commonplace. Japan seemed like a nice place to explore, because it’s small in size, so you’re never far from civilization, but at the same time mountains, amongst which few people live, cover the majority of the country - especially in our area. I had done a little poking around online before we left the States, and it seemed like there might be camping opportunities [View Full Entry]

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The Thanksgiving holiday has come and gone, but the memories of this year’s events will definitely live on. As with most of the “American things” we do here in Japan, celebrating Thanksgiving was not easy. Thanksgiving is not celebrated in Japan, of course, and not many people know when or what it is. November 23 is a Japanese National holiday, translated as Thanksgiving Labor Day. They added the Thanksgiving in there, but it really has nothing to do with Thanksgiving. It is more like our American Labor Day. Greg absolutely loves Thanksgiving - it is his favorite holiday. Be [View Full Entry]

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The leaves here in Minami Alps are finally starting to change colors. The trees are still full with their red, green and yellow leaves, with just a few brown on the ground - unlike in Wisconsin and Iowa where, by late November, most of the trees are already bare. After an unseasonably warm summer, we are now hoping for a warm winter. No one on the main island in Japan has central heat, including us, so our house has started to get very cold, especially at night and in the morning. I am not accustomed to being cold so often, so [View Full Entry]

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Jessie celebrated her birthday on the 29th, and what could have become a sad reminder of her being away from her family and friends turned out to be a wonderful experience and further proof that we are making some great friends here in Japan. My tutees, Yoko, Maki and Shizu, along with our good friend Jason, threw Jessie a surprise birthday party last week. The celebration was thoughtfully planned, with cheesecake, KFC and other goodies, as well as the streamers and balloons befitting a birthday party. The six of us just sat around at Yoko's house and talked. But our friends [View Full Entry]

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We are a novelty here. For that reason, people stop by our house, bring us places and are generally interested in us simply because we're Americans. Never before have we made so many friends and acquaintences in one place. Some of them want to practice their English with us, some want to practice their pick-up lines on Jessie, but others have given us hope that after a year in another country, we will return to the States having made real friends, who genuinely cared about getting to know us and who took the effort to bring us inside the otherwise inpenetrably [View Full Entry]

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We boarded a bus headed for Tokyo at 5:26 p.m. last Friday, ready for our first big adventure here in Japan. We were on the bus two hours, then transferred trains a couple of times before stopping in Ueno, Tokyo where we stayed the night in the cheapest hostel in Tokyo (so we were told). Greg and I shared a 10’x 6’ tatami room with a futon mat, blanket and two pillows. There were communal showers and bathrooms in the hall that you could tell were cleaned, but used often. It wasn’t the worst experience, but I didn’t feel the cleanest [View Full Entry]

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It’s school festival time in Japan! This means two things; one, the students are very busy and two, English conversation teachers are not. Last Monday my school kicked of its festivities with what they called Cultural Festival. It was a day of student choral performances, followed by a student talent show. Unlike in the United States where the students have a choice to join chorus or not, the students at KJH must perform in this event. Each grade performed a song as well as each of the 18 classes. The groups were accompanied on the piano and conducted by fellow classmates. [View Full Entry]

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