I always encourage my friends to visit.  I like having visitors and I think it’s even more important to do so here in such a small town.  Nik, my predecessor, told me that he never got many visitors to Saroma.  This left me less than optimistic about friends visiting me, here in this far-flung remnant [...]

Saroma, while surrounded by mountains, isn’t dwarfed by them as is Palmer or other towns in Hokkaido.  Saroma sort of melts into the softly rolling, forested mountains, many of which are small and gently sloping enough to be farm fields.  There is one mountain at the very southern edge of Saroma that is a decent [...]

Last month my girlfriend gave me a comic book.  It was a surprising departure from the Japanese comic books I had come in contact with before.  This one didn’t have any robots, explosions, buxom beauties or astonishing obscenity.  It dealt with Japanese linguistics and foreigners to Japan, like me, who study Japanese. It was titled [...]