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how many leica forum members in Japan?


john sypal

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Equally interesting would be to know what all these Leica-totting gaijin are doing in Japan. As many of you may have gleaned, I'm a professor (linguistics and culture studies) at a small liberal arts college.

 

I'm guessing that Steve West's "day job" is as a studio/advertising photographer in Tokyo. How did you get that gig?

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Hi All! I am located in Harajuku. Been here in Japan for three and a half years. I have a strange existence here. Work for a Japanese non-profit, a bit like the Rotary Club, editing their English correspondence. I have plenty of money to live well in Tokyo, and go abroad a few times a year, but never seem able to travel around Japan, much like as in Don Carroll's case.

 

If anyone wants to meet, feel free to contact me, I have plenty of free time, and if you want to grab a coffee or a bite to eat, or a beer, drop me an email at "batmanghelidj at yahoo dot com"

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Sounds great!

 

How about a Saturday in Mid Feburary? Maybe the Saturday the 19th, Shinjuku perhaps? I want to see Claude's yellow M4 in person...

 

I am 25, and working at a private jr/sr high near Kita-Matsudo station on the joban/chiyoda line. Today is the entrance exam test for the high school and there are a few hundred nervous kids waiting out in the courtyard.. I saw one kid studying in AMPM across the street while he was getting a bottle of juice before I came to work today-

 

my email- jvsypal At Yahoo dottu komu

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I am so envious of you guys! I was in Japan, oh, 20 years ago, teaching English at a small private language school in Ikeda, south of Nishinomiya. I lived in the small village of Yamamoto, north of Kobe. There was a fantastic tiny temple with a waterfall at the end of a path from the village towards the mountains. My girlfriend and I were the only gaijin in the village at the time, except for the owner of the language school. (Oxford English Language School) I loved Japan! Unfortunately I came back to Canada when my girlfriend became homesick after 1 year. A few years later, I married another girl whose ancestry is Japanese. Needless to say, I scored big points the first time I met her parents and said, "Ita da ki masu" at the beginning of dinner. I have been to too few places in this world, but Japan is somewhere I'd go back to, even before visiting places I've never been to. Kampai, my friends!
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OK, I think the 19th should be ok, but let me check.

 

As for any of you that are getting fired up about Japan, let me give you the scoop. It is extremely easy and at the same time very challenging to live in Japan. If you are a native English speaker, and you went to University and graduated, you can pretty much automatically get a job teaching English. The visa is sponsored by the company that hires you.

 

There are two ways to get your visa. You can come here, armed with a resume and a copy of your Uni diploma. Then you can wander around and try and get hired by the company of your choice. The other way is to get hired stateside, or out of Japan, by one of the big Japanese schools. Once they have issued you with a visa, you can use that visa to work anywhere. If the company tells you you cannot, they are lying. Based on this, you can quit the company that sponsored your visa, and find work elsewhere if you like. It's good to have this option, in case the company that hired you is funky, or you find a much better opportunity.

 

Believe it or not, if you are a native English speaker, you are very much in demand here. The Japanese may be wizards with cars, optics, engineering and other scientific endeavors, but, no insult intended, they are at the back of the class, when it comes to foreign language aquisition. It is astonishing that the Japanese, who must rank as one of the most intelligent of races, are complete spastics when it comes to teaching English. The Japanese are excellent learners, but for some reason (nationalism?) they sabotage all efforts to teach English here.

 

Anyway, it's easy to come over here that way, or if you are from a variety of countries, and under a certain age, 25-30, depending on the country, you can come over for a year with a working holiday. This visa is available for most first world countries except the USA.

 

The pluses to living in Japan are as follows:

 

1. You might be a slob, that no woman would touch with a ten foot pole, in your own country, but you will be looked on as a kind of Tom Cruise figure here by many women, and be a kind of star in your own right. A zero is a hero in Japan.

2. There is virtually no crime here. Having said that, I have heard of people being beaten to death by the yakuza (foreigners), and the perps getting off scott free.

3. The food, transportation, and other facilities are really good. So is the beer. And they have cool eating and drinking establishments everywhere.

 

The down side is:

 

1. You will learn what a black man feels like in the United States. Japan is the one country in the world where white people are second class citizens. No way around this one. The upside to this is that you are not expected to adhere to all of the insane rules that govern all aspects of life in Japan. These can only be learned by growing up here, and foreigners have a get of jail free card, to be exempt from these.

 

2. Everything is small here, including your apartment, and your bath. On the other hand, if you are an American executive none of the above apply to you. You will live in a palace that is larger than a football field, and you can swagger around like a colonial overlord.

 

3. Forget about owning a car. Especially in central Tokyo, unless you like to pay $500 a month for a parking space, and then pay $15 toll fees every ten miles on the highways. Of course the upside to this is that if you are a fatass American that is used to driving your SUV down to the cornerstore for your sixpack and pizza, you will miraculously lose 15 lbs in your first month here, it's called walking!

 

4. This one is the one that has had me stumped. Learning Japanese. Along with finding out what it is like be a minority, you can also experience the joys of being an illiterate idiot. You are now so stupid you can't read a single sign, newspaper, or even little kid's comic. I have picked up a degree of spoken Japanese, due to the fact that my s.o. speaks not a lick of English. I have been forced to learn the language. As for writing and reading, imagine learning Egyptian hieroglyphics. Now imagine some sadists, coming up with a language that is a thousand times harder.

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Another comment on Japanese:

 

It's really true about how hard and impractical Japanese is. English is far superior, that is why everyone speaks English, and the Anglo Saxons conquered the world. And I am no Euro-centric racist. I despise Anglo Saxon hegemony as much as the next guy. However, English is much easier than Japanese. You have 26 basic symbols in English that a 5 year old can learn in an afternoon. From there you can go on to form words like "big," "bird," "philiosphy," and "camera." In Japanese you need to learn the equivalent of the type of secret code that was used in WW II by the Germans to talk to their spies with.

 

Kanji...............I suppose if I ever learn it, I can tell you what its advantages are, but not now..........

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Everything Claude says is twice as true in Tokyo and only half true outside of

the major cities. : ) Many of these same things are true of expats anywhere

in the world and not exclusive to life in Japan -- this is now my 6th country as

an expat.

 

As for becoming an instant babe-magnet the moment you step off the plane,

well...as they say: "the odds are good, but the goods are odd."

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Claude and his ilk are what some of us derisively call "Professional Gaijins." Most of what

he wrote is incorrect. Not that you couldn't find individual cases to support his views, but

those kinds of generalizations make me sick. They are racist, not in the most malicious

sense, but out of ignorance.

 

There is a small industry built up around professional gaijins. It includes bad books and

articles puporting to explain the "mysteries of Japan." It includes all the awful language

schools where people with no teaching skills peddle language classes. There are

foreigners doing good work here, and then there is this class of second-rate parasites and

losers who understand little about Japan, but are quite ready to tell you all about it.

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