In five years of studying Japanese, I have always written my name in katakana, the phonetic syllabary used to write foreign words.  Sean was ショーン (shoun) and Holland was ホーランド (hourando).  In college, I never thought much of this. Outside of Japanese class and a few visits to Japan, I never wrote my name in [...]

It’s a new word.  But I didn’t create it.  The Japanese did. I’ve been having problems with my taxes since I moved to Saroma.  For some reason the tax exemption that I receive as a resident foreigner didn’t transfer from the tax office I was using last year.  Apparently I had to request an entirely [...]

I need to write a lot of things spanning from December through the winter to March.  I’ve worked myself into this idea that I can’t write unless I have an unlimited amount of free time to write into, that somehow I can’t write a blog post over a few one-hour sessions on weeknights.  I treasure [...]