Gaijin Teacher Foreign Sensei

When a California surfer turned teacher takes a second chance at marriage, he not only marries his bride's family but her nation, Japan. This story follows the trials and tribulations amid the culture shock of a middle-aged couple as well as the challenges facing a small foreign community working at an English immersion school in Numazu, Japan. After fifteen years of single life, former California surfer turned teacher, Will Mast, marries the coquettish Yumiko Hirota, an English teacher from Gotemba, Japan. Will takes a job at a prestigious English immersion school and quickly gets into trouble from his lack of knowledge of Japanese ways. Will commits one faux pas after another while eating at the family restaurant and attending a tea ceremony conducted by Yumiko's father, the tradition-loving, kendo-wielding master chef, Hirota Akihiro-san. At first seeming to be a simple tale of a cross-cultural marriage, one finds oneself immersed in the many layers of cultural interaction that America and Japan have faced, from Commodore Perry's Black Ships to the dropping of the bomb in Hiroshima. Weeks' first novel, Gaijin Teacher; Foreign Sensei, captures the courage, humor, embarrassments, idiosyncrasies, and tragedies of these special individuals as they interact with traditional Japanese culture.

When a California surfer turned teacher takes a second chance at marriage, he not only marries his bride's family but her nation, Japan. This story follows the trials and tribulations amid the culture shock of a middle-aged couple as well as the challenges facing a small foreign community working at an English immersion school in Numazu, Japan. After fifteen years of single life, former California surfer turned teacher, Will Mast, marries the coquettish Yumiko Hirota, an English teacher from Gotemba, Japan. Will takes a job at a prestigious English immersion school and quickly gets into trouble from his lack of knowledge of Japanese ways. Will commits one faux pas after another while eating at the family restaurant and attending a tea ceremony conducted by Yumiko's father, the tradition-loving, kendo-wielding master chef, Hirota Akihiro-san. At first seeming to be a simple tale of a cross-cultural marriage, one finds oneself immersed in the many layers of cultural interaction that America and Japan have faced, from Commodore Perry's Black Ships to the dropping of the bomb in Hiroshima. Weeks' first novel, Gaijin Teacher; Foreign Sensei, captures the courage, humor, embarrassments, idiosyncrasies, and tragedies of these special individuals as they interact with traditional Japanese culture.

A collection of outrageous and hilarious true anecdotes about the antics of English Teachers in Japan.

This multidisciplinary collection examines the connections between education, migration and translation across school and higher education sectors, and a broad range of socio-geographical contexts. Organised around the themes of knowledge, language, mobility, and practice, it brings together studies from around the world to offer a timely critique of existing practices that privilege some ways of knowing and communicating over others. With attention to issues of internationalisation, forced migration, minorities and indigenous education, this volume asks how the dominance of English in education might be challenged, how educational contexts that privilege bi- and multi-lingualism might be re-imagined, what we might learn from existing educational practices that privilege minority or indigenous languages, and how we might exercise ‘linguistic hospitality’ in a world marked by high levels of forced migration and educational mobility. As such, it will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in education, migration and intercultural communication.

An American Family in Japan. The Fenter family travels from Springfield, Oregon in the summer of 1977 to Isahaya, Kyushu Japan to teach English at Chinzei Gakuin. The family of four: Kenneth 37, Lora 36, Philip 12, and Janelle 8 enter into a world where they are on display and unable to communicate. Gaijin! Gaijin! is a portrait of the people, customs, and traditions of contemporary Japan far from the bustle of of Tokyo.

In this postmodernist addition to diary studies in SLA and applied linguistics, an autoethnographic approach is used to highlight the mutually constitutive relationship of language acquisition, sociocultural contexts, and L2 identities. The personalized account of the author's Japanese as a second language development is skilfully interwoven with ethnographic details and introspective commentary.

This book examines the ethnic, gendered, and embodied 'hybrid' identities of 'half-Japanese' girls in Japan, colourfully narrated through their own voices. The girls struggle to positively construct their identities into positions of control over disempowering discourses of 'otherness', while also celebrating cultural capital as they negotiate their constructed identities of 'Japaneseness', 'whiteness' and 'halfness/doubleness'.

Ransom, Jay McInerney's second novel, belongs to the distinguished tradition of novels about exile. Living in Kyoto, the ancient capital of Japan, Christopher Ransom seeks a purity and simplicity he could not find at home, and tries to exorcise the terror he encountered earlier in his travels—a blur of violence and death at the Khyber Pass.Ransom has managed to regain control, chiefly through the rigors of karate. Supporting himself by teaching English to eager Japanese businessmen, he finds company with impresario Miles Ryder and fellow expatriates whose headquarters is Buffalo Rome, a blues-bar that satisfies the hearty local appetite for Americana and accommodates the drifters pouring through Asia in the years immediately after the fall of Vietnam.Increasingly, Ransom and his circle are threatened, by everything they thought they had left behind, in a sequence of events whose consequences Ransom can forestall but cannot change.Jay McInerney details the pattern of adventure and disillusionment that leads Christopher Ransom toward an inevitable reckoning with his fate—in a novel of grand scale and serious implications.