Every year there is a scarecrow festival in Satomi, which used to be a town in its own right and is now part of Hitachi-ōta City. I have been to the festival many times over the past decade or so and last autumn, not only did the festival go ahead (I assume they considered cancelling it due to the Covid situation) but there were some very interesting scarecrows on show. These included a Gundam: Naomi Osaka: A dragon: Anpanman’s superhero…
I have two very important things to share with you. First, some of my writing appears in the above anthology, which is available now on Amazon and published by the very nice people at Camphor Press. Second — and of far greater importance — after years of writing/typing under the pen/keyboard name of Muzuhashi, I can reveal for the first time on these pages that my real name is Tom Gibb. Just to set the record straight, I am not,…
A few years ago a good friend of mine asked me to contribute to a Facebook project she had devised called My Journey to Work. At the time I commuted by bicycle every weekday, rain or shine, and as it happened, was in the middle of a stint at the furthest of the five schools at which I work (at the moment I am commuting to the closest, which is within walking distance). The journey of eleven kilometres took around…
With just twelve official followers, Jesus would never have succeeded as a messiah had he been born into the Twitter generation. Not that I want to equate myself with the son of God, but that was approximately the number I attracted during my brief flirtation with Twitter in the early 2010s. I like to think, however, that one or two of my tweets were either funny, informative, or both, so despite a complete absence of public demand, I have collected…
This was originally written as a guest post for my good friend James at ALT Insider and is re-posted here with his permission. As James has so eloquently described on ALT Insider before, there are basically three types of ALT: 1) JET ALTs 2) Dispatch company ALTs 3) Direct hire ALTs. 1) Getting a place on the JET program requires that you complete eight book-length essays, twelve interviews, and twenty-five workshops over the course of three years, before being made…
This was originally written as a guest post for my good friend James at ALT Insider, and is re-posted here with his permission. A while ago, Gaijin Pot ran a very honest and revealing article called Dealing With Depression In Japan, and while moving here may seem more like a holiday than real life, in fact – and for reasons I shall explain later – I would argue that you’re probably more likely to fall victim to mental illness while…
This was originally written as a guest post for my good friend James at ALT Insider, and is re-posted here with his permission. Some of you may be aware of this police dashcam video of Tiger Woods, which was taken when he was found asleep in his car and given a series of tests to assess whether he was intoxicated. As it turned out, Woods hadn’t been drinking that night, but a toxicology report detailed five different types of medication…
This was originally written as a guest post for my good friend James at ALT Insider, and is re-posted here with his permission. My battle with insomnia and depression had dragged on for the best part of nine months, and it was with no particular optimism that I followed the recommendation – from a fellow sufferer of both – to try something called Sleepio. Developed by a team of experts in the field of sleep problems, as well as being…
This was originally written as a guest post for my good friend James at ALT Insider, and is re-posted here with his permission. While my insomnia and subsequent depression were triggered by a combination of factors – moving house, my daughter throwing up in the middle of the night, the kanji test, our upcoming trip to the UK, dissatisfaction with my job as an ALT, the conflict of interest that arose from trying to work my way into translating while…
This was originally written as a guest post for my good friend James at ALT Insider, and is re-posted here with his permission. Particularly when you’ve just become an ALT, being thrust with only the bare minimum of training into a Japanese state school can be thoroughly disorientating. You won’t be informed of many things in advance, so the purpose of this post is to tell you what is likely to take place during the course of a typical school…