The Art of the Sword
By David Broughton Joining traditional arts clubs may seem like part of a quintessentially JET experience, but how folks end up in these opportunities can be a lot more up…
Blog category for various hobbies / interests. [Parent Category: The Mikan Blog]
Getting Your Japanese Driver’s License (Ehime Edition)
By Emily GuoThe number of congratulations (“おめでとう御座います”）I received - both from the license center staff and teachers who knew I was going through this process - shows that obtaining a…
Have you heard of Brass Band Camelia?
By Patrick Peh
Prelude
At the end of January we had Tsubaki “Matsuri” (meaning Festival), which is a massive festival held at Tsubaki Shrine, marking the coldest day this winter. But what I am going to write about here is not so much about the festival but about a concert band of the same name. In my final year of the JET program, I had the honor and privilege to perform with Brass Band Camellia in Masaki Culture Center. Previously, in Listen to the Japanese School Band I narrated the story of students playing their instruments in band. This time, I will write about their teachers who play their instruments in band.
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Vampires, Witches, Skeletons, Mesoamerican Gods and a Big Bloody Castle: An Introduction to Solo Journaling TTRPGs
By Jordan Rocke
G’day everyone! It’s “the blog editor didn’t want to bother everyone during the holidays and now has no content for the blog queued up” time! This time, I want to talk about something that has been getting me through a lot of dead deskwarming time: Solo Journaling RPGs.
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To Clean the Mirror: Why I Love Yokai
By Andrew Pappas
Monsters have always fascinated me. I used to be really afraid of them when I was a kid. My aunt and cousins like to retell the story about the time a witch mannequin at a shopping mall scared the heck out of me, so much that I refused to take another step and my mom had to take me back to the car. I was then again struck with terror that same day by a werewolf mannequin in a bowling alley till my uncle brought me over to it and pulled off the mask to reveal a cardboard cut-out of Elvira, the famous cult horror movie show hostess, and I saw there was nothing to be afraid of.
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Everyone is an Expert: My Love of Trivia
By Jordan Rocke
Hey！It’s been a bit quiet on the blog for a while, so I decided to do the thing I do whenever there’s a gap and write an article myself. I’ve edited this blog for so long that I get very anxious writing anything as I have to be my own editor, and lord knows I need a better editor than me to be readable.
Anyway, today I thought I’d talk about trivia, and why I adore it. Trivia is such a weird thing to describe, just a random series of facts about, by design, unrelated or barely related topics. I was obsessed with history as a kid (and still am now). This worked out for me, because my primary school teachers would use trivia quizzes as filler activities during pre-holiday periods (which is basically what I do with trivia games now too). I still remember knowing the inventor of penicillin in year 6, and being in the handful of kids who got prizes for their scores.
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Who Doesn’t Like A Good Story?: Game Mastering at the 2022 Ehime AJET TTRPG Conference
By Charles Marshall
While I love the life I’ve made for myself here, there’s definitely things that I miss having the ability to easily get involved with when I lived back in Alaska. And I’m sure that’s something a lot of us can relate to to some extent or other regardless of the hobby or passion. For me, it tends to be theatre, musicals and, most relevant to this article, table-top role-playing games, or TTRPGs for short.
(more…)What’s hotter than Paprika? A beginner’s guide to the Bands of the Rising Sun
By Killian Barry
Maybe it’s the language barrier, perhaps it’s misguided preconceptions, but I suspect my own limited exposure to and familiarity with Japanese music reflects the experience of a lot of us. Not content with this state of affairs, I used some of our recent free time to conduct a deep dive into the music scene here, past and present, mainstream and beyond. With deference to Spotify, YouTube and various blogs, what follows is a non-exhaustive, multi-genre introduction to a selection of contemporary Japanese acts deserving of your ears.
(more…)ALT Spring Showcase (Series 1)
Edited by Joshua Hill
About a week ago the Mikan blog reached out to Shikoku ALTs in an effort to accumulate photo submissions of personal art, creative projects for work or pleasure, or anything for that matter. Here are some awesome submissions from ALTs around Shikoku. If you are interested in submitting your photos or interesting work showcasing how you are spending your time during the current pandemic please email Joshua Hill, hillj18@hanover.edu to share with ALTs far and wide.
Sakura in the time of Koro-chan
So with the lurking COVID-19 (or as I like to affectionately call it, Koro-chan) sweeping the nation and by extension, the world, many of us ALTs (at least in the land of Mikans) are still reporting to work at our base schools.
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