Blogs from Kamijima, Ochi, Ehime, Japan, Asia - page 5

If you recall, one of my junior high school students won the regional (Ehime Prefecture) English speech competition a couple of months ago. This means that she was able to go to the national speech competition in Tokyo last week. Actually, the full name of the competition was, “His Imperial Highness Prince Takamado Trophy 58th All Japan Inter-Middle School English Oratorical Contest.” The title is a bit ridiculous, I know. Prince Takamado actually died this past summer, so the contest is now hosted by his wife, Princess Takamado (from Japan’s royal family), and is sponsored by the Yomiuri Shinbun (one of the biggest international newspapers). The Yomiuri Shinbun paid my student’s way to Tokyo, and the English teacher I work with at the junior high school was also getting her way paid by our board of ... read more

Travel in style! thats what I said. Kyoto is exactly as I expected it. And that is not meant in a arrogant sarcastic way. I expected it to be out of control beautiful and it was. I decided at the last minute to get a shinkansen to Kyoto for a weekend of cultural stuff and to meet with Denis. We (well, he, being the tour guide and that) choose the busiest tourist weekend of the year here but for good reason and to be honest when you live on a island it becomes quite novel to see loads of blatant tourists, and in fact a massive amount of foreigners like myself. To be honest I had been looking for an excuse to take a Shinkansen (bullet train) and although £200 in 24 hours will sound like ... read more

This past weekend I finally got off the island for the first time in about a month. I was definitely starting to get a case of the island fever, so I decided to go mountain climbing on the tallest mountain in Western Japan, Ishizuchi-san. It’s almost 2,000 meters high which is only about half the height of Mt. Fuji. However, the hiking on this mountain was just as difficult, if not more difficult than Mt. Fuji. Mt. Fuji was terrifying because I climbed it at night, and feeling like you’re up in an airplane in the dark with nothing to protect you is not a very comforting feeling. But the trails on Mt. Fuji are actually fairly manageable. The trails on Mt. Ishizuchi, however, were at times not even trails at all. I am used to ... read more

The last Halloween I spent in Japan when I was studying in Osaka was a bit depressing. Once the month of October begins, Halloween trinkets and other paraphernalia start showing up in all the shops and super markets. Seeing all this Halloween stuff everywhere kind of gets your hopes up that maybe they do celebrate the holiday after all in Japan. But then October 31st comes and goes, and nothing happens. Halloween exists in this country just as a commercial ploy. So, this Halloween, I decided to change all that and spread the Halloween love all over the island of Yuge. I started as soon as the month of October began. I taught Halloween vocabulary in all of my classes from preschool to adults. I brought the “Halloween Mystery Box” to my elementary school every week. ... read more

First: I tried posting a video here, so please click on the icon and see if it worked out. Another weekend of fall harvest festivals is over. Last weekend's festival was just in my small neighborhood, but this weekend, two of the much bigger neighborhoods (if you can even say there is a big neighborhood) on Yuge had their festivals. So, of course the festivals were more extravagant, and of course there was more danjiri carrying and sake drinking! The festivities started on Friday evening at the big shrine on the main beach on Yuge (Matsubara beach). After I was done with work at the junior high school at 5:00pm, I quickly rode my bike to the ferry port and took a ferry to a neighboring island. Last week I was walking around on this neighboring ... read more