Greetings to you, dear readers. After an extended sabbatical, I’ve migrated Muzuhashi to WordPress. Unfortunately, this has led to the disappearance of most of the photos. They are still in the system somewhere, and I will be reinstating as many as I can over the coming months. In the meantime, enjoy the new look and as always, suggestions, comments, and cash donations are most welcome.
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. 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…
Way back in January 2011, one of the very first posts on this blog was about the writer Alan Booth, who lived here for more than two decades, produced two of the most well known and well liked travel books about Japan, and sadly passed away at the age of just 46. Little did I know at the time, but that post would become by far the most popular that I ever wrote – on a very small scale indeed,…
Alan Booth moved to Japan in his twenties and lived here for more than half his life, until his untimely demise from cancer at the age of 46. On the face of it he would appear to have written just two books, and one of them was published posthumously, so there must be scope for a further collection of his journalism and travel writing, of which there was sufficient for him to earn a living (he doesn’t appear to have…
A couple of weeks ago I had a moment of enlightenment, or satori (悟り), as they say in Japanese. At the time I was sitting on a mossy rock, next to a pool of water, in a forest, on a mountaintop, on a cold, damp night, in the pitch dark, and with a plastic bottle in my hand. If you’re wondering how such an unlikely set of circumstances led to a transcendental experience, allow me to explain. Ask most of…