The next few entries will be a scrambled attempt at catching everyone up on what it is I’ve been doing here in Japan. I’ll start out as general as possible and try to slowly work towards more specific events or points of interest.

The original title of this essay was “My Life in Japan…in 3 words,” but my editor felt that “So fucking bored.” was not a sufficient journal entry. So, today we start out with an entry succinctly subtitled “The past six months of my life since I left America to live in Japan while working on the JET Programme, in less than 500 words.”

So, let’s get to it. In July 2004, after a five month application process, I was accepted into the JET Programme, an educational exchange that brings college graduates from English-speaking countries around the world to Japan. The program relocates the participant to the center of a rice field [Note: purportedly, some JETs live in cities, but I have rarely seen such so called “cities” in Japan], sets the participant up with about 12 hours of work a week and an embarrassing salary (embarrassing because we don’t have to work for it… hah!), and then retreats into the fog of Japanese bureaucracy before the participant has time to wonder where the forks are.