I wasn’t even going to bother writing about this. But my mom has been bugging (haha get it) me for weeks-WEEKS-to mention it, and I (regrettably) have more to write about the subject as of last night at 2am.
When I moved into my apartment, I didn’t know that after the gas man had left [...]

Heres another all picture post. A few views of downtown Osaka right near the consulate:

Can you spot the consulate? Its the gray building dead center. Look for the blue police vans parked in front.

Heres a quick geography review. This is a map of Japan:

Notice towards the center of the country, theres Osaka. It’s got a little line over the ‘o’ because technically, you should pronounce it with a long ‘o’ sound, like Oosaka. Anyway, there is where I am living right now. I live [...]

So I have been keeping pretty busy here in Japan land. I slept for about 13 hours straight this past weekend after running to Kyoto and back three days in a row working the press conference at the G8 Foreign Ministers Meeting. It was exhausting but an amazing experience! Anyway, the emails [...]

If for some reason a person that I don’t know has somehow stumbled across this post, then maybe I could understand the confusion. But for anyone that knows me, well, I don’t really have to explain Sirotan to you. Its a cute white seal character sold by a Japanese store called Mother Garden. [...]

Well this actually took place the first weekend I was in Japan (May 31/June 1), but I decided to abandon the idea of backdating all my posts because it got a little bit too complex. Three years ago when I was studying at JCMU, I participated in an event at Kyoto Women’s University. [...]

In early November of 2007, I applied to a Department of State summer internship program. I knew that for the summer of 2008 I needed to participate in some sort of internship program involving Japanese studies, not only because it would help me get a feel for what kind of job I wanted to [...]

You might have heard on the news that there were some strong earthquakes in Japan on Saturday. Luckily they hit in a largely rural area in northern Japan, so the damage has been pretty minimal and so far there are only six recorded deaths. Osaka is in the southwestern area of Japan, over [...]

When I lived in Japan the first time, one of the things that JCMU provided for all the dorm-dwellers was a rice cooker in every room. While I thought it was broken for the first few uses (turns out I was using the wrong button, easy to do when they are in Japanese and [...]

No, I’m exaggerating. My apartment is very reasonably sized for what I’m paying (about $600 a month) and is fine for one person. In total it is 7.5 mats-mats being a tatami mat, a traditional floor covering, which are 90×180cm (or about 1.62 square meters) in size each-or around 120 square feet total. [...]