A travel journal of an English teacher in the undiscovered Shikoku island town of Niihama, where humans are outnumbered by oranges 5-1.
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A travel journal of an English teacher in the undiscovered Shikoku island town of Niihama, where humans are outnumbered by oranges 5-1.
About this project
A Gaijin's Guide to Getting Lost in Japan
My name is Owain. I am an English teacher in the city of Niihama on the Japanese island of Shikoku. For 5 years I have kept a blog. I'm like a modern day Robinson Crusoe, surviving and thriving in a harsh environment, where strawberry filled donuts are a thing of wonder and suspicion and building a log raft to escape is but a foolish dream (you may as well just take the ferry that leaves regularly from the nearby port).
Within this book I hope to give a chronological, if not always grammatically accurate account of my life as a teacher and foreigner and also a guide to anyone who is interested in reading about the real Japan.
Examples from the blog
"Last weekend yoko and I woke up at 4 in the morning to catch the toudo festival on Oshima island. They stack up these giant termite nests made of wood and bamboo, with flags on the top and then set alight to them at around 6 in the morning. Its spectacular to look at, and fires sure are appreciated on a cold and rainy January morning. There were TV crew there from NHK, the biggest TV station in Japan, so the opportunities were their to be interviewed, if I looked foreign enough. Unfortunately it wasn`t to be and instead they filmed an old lady who had wondered down from the mountains with a big slab of rice cake. It`s the tradition to get some of the ash from the fires and put it into your rice cake before eating it. To sum up, it was a festival where you have to wake up at 4 oclock, stand in the rain and freezing winds and eat bits of soot from the floor, which was apparently organised to promote good health."
"Stress, the number one killer of people who have it and no other symptoms. The work ethic in Japan is ridiculous. I`ve been working so hard that I haven`t even had time to make great music. I heard that stress and exhaustion effects your ability to be creative, but I think stress effects people in various different ways. The question thats on everyones lips is how to deal with it. Some people exercise, others start new hobbies, but personally I find that constant throbbing headaches, stomaches, a permanently red face and recurring nightmares that wake me at 4 in the morning is really working out good for me."
"I met a new life during the week. One of my friends recently gave birth to a baby girl. She`s really cute, and she vomits if you hold her hand. It`s interesting how the body changes at times. After giving birth my friends feet have ballooned out massively so that she is actually now swimming in her own skin. Apparently theyll be back to normal within a couple of days. Anyway the baby is the cutest little thing. She has a head the size of a tennis ball. It`s like comparing the sun to the moon. I could fit her head 20 million times into my own. I sometimes try to put my fist into my mouth. If I had her fists I could probably keep them both in my cheeks like a squirrel and continue conversation. That is the naivety of youth I suppose. She`ll never know how good she`s got it till its gone. I quite like sticking some kind of morale to my ramblings right at the end of the paragraph recently. It`s a trick I picked up when I was writing articles for local magazines. I have no idea where I`m heading to when I start writing these things but if I write some kind of final thought it makes people think that I had that in mind from the start. But I guess when you ramble through life, eventually you`re gonna hit a main road. I just made that up!! It`s bloody brilliant!!"
Where possible I will include photos taken at the time of each blog entry, but I will also include the fantastic illustrations of a local artist and personal friend Ai.
Thank you for your support
Risks and challenges
The blog is already written. Further work must be done to introduce and give context to it with the photos and artwork to get it published. I can write quite fast. So long as I have enough freetime and I don't get writers block, I think I can complete it in no time. My brother is an award winning writer and my father has written and published three books and they have agreed to help me complete this.
I think there will be a market for this book from people with an interest in japan and people who are considering living here, and im hoping to turn a few travelers heads from the obvious tourist traps to the rural delights that places like Niihama have to offer. I have received positive feedback from publishers, but in the event that I must publish this myself I am thinking of going with xlibris for publishing and the cheapest package to achieve my goals is roughly £2000.
FAQ
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Rewards
Funding period
- (30 days)