About

This blog originally started out as a way of providing updates for family and friends. (And to satisfy certain narcissistic creative urges.) But it’s obviously reaching a much wider readership so I feel I should provide a bit of background information on who I am and what I’m doing.

I’m a 40-something Australian dad working from home as a translator, converting really interesting documents from Japanese into English, mainly for Japanese translation companies in Tokyo. My wife Eleni is a Japanese teacher, so we both have a professional interest in things Japanese. Our two children Ruby (12) and Felix (9) have attended Japanese Saturday school in Melbourne (Australia) since kindergarten, so the whole family speaks Japanese to varying degrees.

With all that Japanese going on, it seemed the obvious thing to do was to spend a couple of years in-country. For Eleni and I it is a natural extension of the five years we spent in Tokyo in the early 1990s, but for the kids, who have never lived here, it is an all-new experience.

OK that’s the brief version. If you want even more background, read on.

Back in 1990, Eleni had just finished a major in Japanese at university, including a 10-month exchange scholarship in 1988, and wanted to live in Japan for an extended period. Meanwhile I had just completed a teaching degree but was so traumatised by the experience that I abandoned the idea of a teaching career there and then. (Yes I admit it; I wimped out. Which is why I have the greatest respect for those teachers who actually have the guts to see it through.) So at that point, having no real plans for the future, I was happy to try something different and interesting.

Thus it was that Eleni and I moved to Tokyo in early 1991.

I studied hard for a couple of years and taught myself the language, then managed to land a job as a translator. After a while I was able to go freelance. Eleni did a multitude of jobs including rewriting, proofreading, teaching English to schoolchildren, teaching English to adults, marking exam papers, you name it. We travelled the length and breadth of Japan and had a fantastic time but by 1995, it felt like time to come home and raise a family in the leafy green suburbs of Melbourne. Luckily the internet had just taken off and I was able to convince my clients that I could use this new-fangled email thingy to send them work from Australia.

We spent the next seven years living a settled suburban life, producing offspring and contributing to the economy.

Then the travel bug set in. Given that I am blessed with the world’s most flexible job—in theory you can work anywhere if you’ve got a power point and a phone line—it was decided that the family should spend a year in Italy just for the fun of it, and off we went in late 2002. Our time in the land of the rising pizza started out as a complete disaster but ended up as one of the best experiences we’ve ever had (as lovingly recounted in my world-wide smash hit bestseller Italy? It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time).

We got back from Italy in early 2004 and spent another five years in Melbourne before succumbing once more to travel sickness. So, after many years of planning and a few delays along the way, here we finally are.

This time we get to experience a different side of Japan: living in the countryside, and with kids. We plan to stay for two years minimum, possibly more depending on how much everyone’s enjoying themselves. Who knows where we’ll go next? We probably should do the right thing and go back to Australia and see the kids through school, but after that I dare say we’ll be off again, and I dare say I’ll be writing a blog about it. Or whatever the technology is by then.

The topics that particularly interest me here in Japan at this stage of my life are schooling and parenting issues — and of course food — so I suspect that’s what I’ll be writing about most in this blog. Have a look through and if you enjoy reading the posts, feel free to leave a comment. Please. I love comments.