FAQ
How we met
05/24/2010 FAQ
I’m British and my wife is Japanese. We are always being asked how we met. In 1998, I went back to England for the first time after leaving in 1991. The cheapest flight I could find was Hiroshima to London via Singapore. On the same day my wife left Japan to spend a year in England studying English. She also looked for the cheapest flight she could find, and ended up flying from Tokyo to London via Singapore. So, we ended up on the same flight from Singapore to London. It was a large aircraft with 3 seats, 4 seats, and 3 seats across. I was seated on the leftmost …
Why Fukuyama?
03/26/2010 FAQ
Why not? After deciding to spend a year in Japan, the next thing to do was look for somewhere to work. I soon received three offers of employment as an English teacher. A small town in Saga Prefecture (JET program) A small private school in Fukuyama A large private school in Tokyo As I new absolutely nothing about Japan at the time, I opened a map to look for the three locations. Saga Prefecture looked very green on the map, and I imagined somewhere with few buildings. Tokyo I knew as the capital, and I really didn’t want to spend my time in a large international city where I imagined …
Why Japan?
03/18/2010 FAQ
No real reason. At least, no reason that seems to satisfy the curiosity of those that keep asking me. I learned French at high school, and spent a year in a Greek university studying chemistry in Greek. So, by the time I graduated from university, I was fluent in two languages in addition to English. At the time, I had planned to join the British Foreign Office (FCO) as a diplomat. Since I had already visited most countries in Europe, I decided to go somewhere totally different. I didn’t think about where all that much. At that time, and probably still now, anybody from an English speaking country with a …
