A Lie in a Letter

"If there are any aliens, time-travellers or espers in this class, now is your chance to tell me." 

I was sorting through some old photos and journal entries, and going through old drafts that never got posted to the blog, and there's plenty of things that take me way back to my days as a JET. (Sometimes I think maybe I ought to take all that content a little further than a blog, given the vast amount of stuff I wrote at the time, and publish it as a Japan-memoir of sorts, heh.)  

 

One of the things I brought home with me when I left Japan was a box of letters that resulted from the most entertaining and successful project I ever did with my students. I wish I could remember where I came up with the idea, but I opened it with line above, a little nod to The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi, which was super popular at the time - plenty of my students would pull out the Haruhi dance for a little fun. The project was called "A Lie in a Letter," and it was a creativity lesson I assigned to the ninensei, or second graders. (This would be the Grade 11 equivalent in Canada.) 

The basis of the lesson was that they had to write an "outrageous" story about themselves in the form of a letter to me, and I read some pretty incredible stories as I was helping students check their spelling and grammar. I had brought coloured paper, markers, stickers and envelopes, and set them loose for an entire 50-minute period to work on their outrageous letters. The principal, vice-principal and two Board of Education members actually came in during one of my classes that week and watched the first ten minutes of the lesson...stressful for both me and the students, but it went all right! They were quick to grasp new things, so they managed to get started without a hitch. 

The first time I did this lesson was also the first time I ever had to evict students from my classroom ten minutes after class ended because they were entirely too wrapped up in what they were doing. It was really satisfying to know that they were so invested in the project that they wanted to stick around and finish it during the lunch hour.

That first year, I took the whole pile of letters home with me on a visit to Canada, and I actually hand-wrote replies on the plane! It was such a big success that I couldn't wait to refine the concept a little bit and assign the same project to another group the following year.  The second time I assigned "A Lie in a Letter," I even brought a pile of 1-cent Canadian stamps back to Osaka for them to stick on the envelopes. I kept every single one of those letters until the day I left Japan, and packed a handful into the box I took home with me. They'll always make me laugh, and remind me of my fabulous ninensei students!

2024 Travelogue - Osaka

 

Breakfast at Komeda Coffee to start our day

The Japan trip to end all trips - that was the idea when my mom suggested going overseas to celebrate her 70th birthday. Japan was not her first choice, by any stretch of the imagination - I highly doubt it was her 2nd, 3rd, 4th or 5th choice, to be honest, but even though it was her birthday, somehow everyone else's enthusiasm for my suggestion won her over. And I'm honestly very glad it did, because when you have a mix of limited-mobility seniors and three adult kids with wildly different interests and energy levels, we were still able to pack a maximum level of experiences into the trip just by virtue of going to a country that one of us knew really, really well. It wasn't a relaxing vacation, but it was certainly unforgettable.

We hit the ground running after landing from a Vancouver stopover at Kansai International Airport, which even in May, was intolerably muggy for this family of east coasters. (Thank God we didn't go in August. Even I have flashbacks of the heat that hit me full in the face when I arrived in the country for my JET orientation.) I'd booked an airBNB near Dotonbori, because I wanted everything to be as walkable as possible for this first leg. I didn't know what peoples' energy levels would be like for going to the opposite sides of the city or further afield like Himeji or Nara, so I stuck with Nippombashi Station as a base, thinking it would make the exeunt easier when we left a few days later.

Rented an apartment on the banks of the Dotonbori River

Nothing had changed in the area, to my relief. It was more crowded than it used to be, and people were lined up for what I presume was the latest trendy spot to eat according to TikTok, but other than that it was the same old Dotonbori. We went out for kushikatsu (oops, should have saved that for when we got to Shinsekai) and had an early night the first night.

On Day 2, I took them to nearby Kuromon Market, which is a place I didn't spend nearly enough time at when I was living here. It was one of Emily's favourite spots in the city (no surprise, since she is such a proficient home cook). Then we went to Shinsekai and had lunch at an izakaya there. We saw Billiken, though we didn't go up the tower - it seems I will have to wait another few years before I eventually get to the observatory at either Tsutenkaku or Kyoto Tower. We also ran into a cool retro arcade in the shopping street on the way back to the subway station. 

 

 

This arcade was near Dobutsuen-Mae Station

From there we headed back uptown and saw the Umeda Sky Building, to which I'd never been. I didn't realize my mom was adverse to heights, so going up the escalators was an experience for her (oops). I also didn't realize there was no actual garden at the top of the building and that the Floating Garden Observatory was a misnomer. I had convinced her up there with the promise of a garden! (Double oops.) Still, we got a great view of Osaka, cloudy though it was. We finished off the Umeda visit with a quick trip to Yodobashi Camera, where I picked up some new headphones (when in Yodobashi, I just have to buy headphones) and then headed back to Namba for the evening. My parents wanted to check out KFC, but since the Namba location I knew from the 'curse of the Colonel' was no longer around, we ended up at Namba Parks for dinner, before returning to our little apartment.

Day 3 was set aside as a "day trip" day for whoever wanted to go further afield. My brother wanted very much to visit Nara, and I thought my stepfather would want to see Himeji, and I had been sent a video of the monorail at sunset at Ikoma Sanjo and I sort of wanted to check it out. In the end we did exactly none of those things; us three kids woke up at 8 am raring to go, and we ended up head to Universal Studios Japan. USJ wasn't originally on the itinerary, because a) I'm the only person who speaks Japanese, so the anime attractions aren't that interesting to my siblings and b) they removed the Back to the Future ride and I'm still salty about it. However, the idea of Super Nintendo World got brought up, and even though it wasn't possible to cheap out and use a Twilight Pass like I usually do at USJ, we decided to leave the parents in their beds and venture west. 

Yoshi's Adventure

My siblings and I are sort of an odd combo together. We have fun when we hang out, and we have some overlapping interests, but each of us is a totally different personality type. For me, with my recent physical problems, standing in a lineup for any reason made me not want to do the thing. (Especially if it's a LONG lineup.) But that's the theme park experience, and we were way too late to buy express passes to anything. As for my siblings, they were interested in Nintendo World but nothing else in the park. So we arrived, bought tickets using the birthday discount (May birthdays, yay!), registered for Nintendo World, and when we saw that our Nintendo Land entry was 3:30 PM and it was presently 9 in the morning, we promptly left to kill time elsewhere. XD; I would have liked to check out the Detective Conan cafe or maybe the Demon Slayer ride, but we were looking at 100+ minutes in line (and all in Japanese), and that wasn't doable for anybody. Instead, we went to DenDen Town to buy my brother a Super Famicom.

 

The lay of the land had changed a bit in DenDen Town, but not too much. More small shops boarded up, though whether they were just taking a holiday or had never come back post-pandemic, I couldn't tell. The relocation of Super Potato was unexpected, to me, and the prices there had skyrocketed. The days of grabbing a loose but functional retro game cartridge of a known title for 500 yen are basically over. The shops know that people are willing to pay for nostalgia properties, and we couldn't find a SuFami with all the components for less than 10,000 yen. A far cry from the one I bought my first week in the city, with all the trimmings, for 3500...!

 

We hit a lot of shops in the area before turning around, after lunch at CoCo Ichibanya, and heading back to USJ for our Nintendo World timed entry. We rented me a pushchair since I was way past the point of tolerating standing still for any length of time, and my brother wheeled me around the park. It was a bit inconvenient to manoeuvre, since it was SO crowded (guaranteed that everyone who'd entered earlier in the day was still there!) but it was a lifesaver, especially when we needed to line up for a ride. There wasn't time to ride multiples, so we went on the Yoshi's Adventure ride, but the real reason we were there was to take in the lay of the land, which did not disappoint.

 

Sunset at Super Nintendo World

The mini-games were a ton of fun, too, and we bought a wristband to get the full experience. By the time everything was winding down for the night (it was still spring, so late closure hadn't begun for the season yet) there was just barely enough time to hit one other attraction before the park closed for the evening. My brother indulged me and went to the My Hero Acadamia show despite not having the first clue what was going on. That was very sweet of him, I thought, since he had to be tired from running around all day and also pushing me! After that, though, it was time to say goodbye, go home and pack up - after a quick stop for ramen at a hole-in-the-wall place near Nippombashi Station. The next day we planned to head to Kyoto and make that our base for the following week.

 

 

Returning to Kansai

 

View from Umeda Sky Garden (with the Gate Tower Building in the background!)

After quite a few long years away, I just came back from my first trip to West Japan in about six years. This was the first time I'd been to the Kansai Region in a long time, and my first time there with family. My fam didn't come visit me for the years I was living in Osaka - my mom is the very definition of a nervous traveller. It took a lot of convincing to finally get her to go, but now that both of my parents are retired, we'd been urging them to travel while they were still relatively healthy. And so, I planned and executed as perfect a 2-week Japan vacation as I could manage, starting in Osaka, of course.

It was so satisfying showing them all the things I love about the Kansai area. I was a little selfish in cutting Tokyo time SO short that they barely saw any of it at all (1 day in Atami, 3 days in Tokyo), but there's so much to see and do just in Osaka and Kyoto alone (never mind all the great places I would have loved to take them in Nara, Wakayama, Shiga, Kobe, et al) that even the week and a half spent there wasn't enough.

Not much had changed, in the places we went, except of course for the extreme number of tourists. On one level, I hate contributing to the overtourism problem. We skipped most places like Kinkakuji, Gion and Kyomizudera that would have been staples to take guests to ten years ago, in the pre-Instagram world. I tried to go off the beaten path when I could. When I saw the chaos of people at Fushimi Inari (when I lived there, there was never any significant number of people on the hiking trails, no matter what time of day we visited), I had tried to prepare myself for the fact that it had become one of the #1 destinations in Kyoto, but it was still mind-boggling to see. The days of using Fushimi Inari's trails as a way to get your daily exercise in (yes, I tried this in 2008 or so, since Keihan Fushimi was just a hop, skip and a jump away from my home station) are long gone. I did get up at 7 AM and hit the trail for old time's sake, and I mostly avoided the crowds, but I had to turn back at the pond, since we were due to move on to our next destination that morning. On that same day, I encountered my first extreme shinkansen delay - the eastbound Tokaido was 30 minutes late leaving Kyoto. Couldn't believe that happened on the day of my parents' very first and only shinkansen trip.

I have a lot to say about the trip, but not enough space to say it all in one post, so I'll divide it into a few entries. I hope you'll enjoy them.

'Kotatsu' as the #1 query?

 

 

 Now that's the kind of content I like to see! Though maybe not in August. Let's dial it back a few months.

The Japan Foundation Toronto Library is Digital

Huge news for Torontonians looking to stay connected to Japan!

Kobo and Libby
working in harmony to help me devour books

The Japan Foundation, Toronto launched a brand-new digital library last month via Overdrive, the popular library-lending app.

Since the pandemic has closed their physical JFT location, this is huge news for library lovers. It goes without saying that without regular borrowers, the library could find itself in a serious dilemma, and pivoting to a digital platform in the meantime is a great move. (Unfortunately for me as an author, Edokko is a Kindle exclusive, so you won't find it in the JFT catalogue - but maybe they'll pick up Meet You By Hachiko at some point, who knows!?)

Considering that they started from zero, I'm impressed at the collection that's been put together so far - as of this writing, just shy of 500 books, with a good mix of fiction and non-fiction, manga, and Japanese-language materials. Kudos to the library staff for their hard work, here!

JFT library card holders can borrow instantly by visiting JFT OverDrive and logging in with their library card number and PIN (last four-digits of phone number). If you're new to the Japan Foundation Toronto or haven't been in in a while, the staff will need to help you renew your card first, but it's easy and quick, and so worth it.

For me, the timing of the Overdrive launch couldn't be better, as we've almost fully packed up for a move, and all my books are currently in boxes. My Kobo Libre has been saving me with access to tons of ebooks via the Toronto Public Library, and the minute I saw the JFT had gone live with theirs, I immediately headed over on the Android app Libby to get hooked up and browse the selection. My only regret is that I can only borrow five books at a time, and I'm continually running up against that 5-book limit and having to return things I didn't actually get to read yet in favour of the holds I wanted more. 😂 What to read next!?⁠

⁠I still prefer the real-paper feel, but pandemic + moving has finally gotten me aboard the ebook train. How many of you read ebooks as well as physical...?⁠

Edokko

 Yikes, it's been a while! I'm so sorry not to have much to share these last few months - or rather, I have tons, but have been so caught up I haven't written any of it!

Last Monday, my second novel launched in paperback and as a Kindle Unlimited exclusive.

I began working on Edokko when I was newly back in Canada and truly felt the sting of leaving Japan behind. It's a joy to see it finally in print, and the publishing process brought me back to those early days (don't miss the cameo of the Japan Foundation's Japanese-Language Institute Kansai, where incoming Osaka JETs gathered for language lessons when we first arrived!) and the ups and downs of expat life. I still miss it very much.

Available now in paperback and ebook format

 

Lily Jennings is Going. To. Japan.

Sixteen and on top of the world, she's beyond excited to be setting off for an entire year as an exchange student in Tokyo. Fashion and fun are foremost on her mind as she arrives ready to meet her new host family and embark on a grand adventure, livestreaming all the way.

What Lily isn't expecting, however, is for her urban host family to cancel at the last moment and leave her hanging with nowhere to live. She's shipped off to the small town of Ajimu (sorry, where!?), a billion miles from anywhere cool and exciting, with a neurotic host sister, no chances for romance, straight-up-vile classmates and a microscopic community watching over her every move.

Too bad for the people of this small town—nothing's going to hold Lily back when she wants something!

Find it on Amazon or your favourite retailer via http://edokko.lorengreene.com!

Pandemic Melon Pan

An acceptable substitute, given the situation

Hello blog, it’s been awhile!

Like most of you, I’ve had little chance to be out and about in town recently, even though I’ve heard about new Japanese restaurants opening up, places closing down, changing hours, etc.

One thing I have noticed, in my neighbourhood at least, is the plethora of options for Japanese food available via delivery services that I had absolutely no idea existed. Normally I’m a bit meh on these apps, because I know a lot of them don’t give a fair cut to the restaurants, and when possible I want to support the restaurant directly. However, in the time of COVID, that’s harder than it used to be. Especially here in Toronto, where we’re under a state of emergency and all dine in options are completely closed.

I want to hope that the restaurants getting on board with DD or UE is helping spread the word that those restaurants exist and therefore are doing them at least a bit of service. I know I’ve found a couple new options in the neighbourhood and beyond that I never knew were even here.

Which brings me to the focus of today’s post!

A couple of weeks ago I started having intense cravings for melon pan. It’s been quite a while since I could get back to my regular source (....Japan), but my baking attempts in the past have also failed. I really just wanted to buy some and be done with it. I used up all my creative cooking/baking karma with the Dalgona phase (and subsequently a lot of Vietnamese egg coffees, steam milks and Thai iced tea batches) back at the beginning of the pandemic.

Muahaha, bring those tasty baked goods right to my door

In Toronto, traditional melon pan is harder to come by, and the only place I could think of that had it was Nakamura Bakery at J-Town in Markham. I thought to myself, well, I’m not willing to drive an hour for melon pan; not today, anyway. But surely something else more local must have popped up in the last 5 years!? Surely someone is making melon pan closer to downtown by this point!?

So I turned to the food delivery apps.

I did a couple of searches for Japanese food, and a couple of searches for melon pan, and I didn’t really find the traditional type that I was looking for, but I found something else of interest. Not too long ago in Baldwin Village (and two other locations), a new shop called Hattendo appeared selling cream pan, originally from Hiroshima. I’d seen their shop in Japan a couple of times; I used to walk by one when I was passing through Yokohama station. But I’d never actually tried their bread. I thought, well, they have cream pan with a melon pan top on it, and black sesame lattes, and they deliver to my house, so let’s give it a go. Ooh! Seasonal flavours!!

Turns out they don't really photograph too well, though

Hattendo’s “melon pan” is a pretty distant cousin of traditional melon pan - what I was really getting was cream pan with a melon pan top, so the interior was unlike melon pan at all. However, it did scratch that itch a little for me. And it definitely opened my eyes to the fact that there are a lot of good Japanese options that have surfaced in Toronto over the past few years.

Since melon pan day, we’ve also ordered in from Little Pebbles, a Japanese bakery in Kensington market, and I have several tasty looking izakaya dinner options marked for the next time we order in. There’s also a new ramen shop in the west end (an area that is sorely lacking in ramen at this point) called Musoshin, and they make shokupan! haven’t tried it yet, but looking forward to getting out there sometime and checking them out. Must be tough to open during this pandemic, so they probably need all the props they can get.

So the next time you’re craving Japanese food in Toronto, even if you want to go pick it up yourself to support the businesses, the delivery apps are actually excellent resources to find out what’s new around town.

In fact, I just discovered that I can get mochi donuts delivered to my house. Be right back...

Meet You By Hachiko

Now available in stores

What would you do if your best friend lived half a world away—and suddenly vanished?

Loner Grace Ryan feels completely invisible. Awkward and shy, she can't seem to get ahead in her studies, social circle, or new relationship with her childhood best friend. But discovering Tokyo street fashion ignites her creativity and leads her into an unlikely online friendship with a Japanese high schooler.

Beautiful and fashionable Kana eats, sleeps and breathes English in order to pass her university entrance exam, but she's tired of sacrificing her own happiness for everyone else's high expectations. Kana finds a friend and conversation partner in Grace, relieved to distract herself with someone else's problems for a change.

Just when things are finally going right, Grace's best friend abandons her, her relationship falls apart, and Kana disappears without saying goodbye. Fearing for her friend's safety, Grace boards a flight to Japan... only to realize that she is completely unprepared for the bright lights and confusing streets of the real Tokyo.

Finding one lost girl among twelve million is much more than she bargained for.

Meet You By Hachiko is now available to purchase online in paperback and ebook formats, or contact your favourite independent bookstore to support local! 

 

Goodreads reviews for Meet You By Hachiko

Reviews from Goodreads.com

Can I Learn Japanese As An ALT?

Tokyo is a foreigner-friendly city -
but that doesn't mean everything is in English

You might already know that the December iteration of this year's Japanese Language Proficiency Test (aka the JLPT) was cancelled. It would have been an ideal year for me to test, to be honest, since until a short while ago when I started working on my writing full-time, I had a lot of time on my hands. I did a couple of months of Japanese lessons over Zoom, went full-tilt into watching Kansai-based J-dramas to help get my dialect back after 4 years of speaking 東京方言 at work, broke out all my materials last seen at the time of passing N3 in 2015. 

There was a time when I really thought I would come back from Japan completely fluent in Japanese. That would have been nice!

It does actually work for some people, especially those out in the sticks. Or if you're naturally gifted with languages! At one point I thought I was, because I'm very good at imitating correct pronunciation, and I even started my BA with a linguistics minor. Big surprise when I discovered my language talent was only for pronunciation and I am more than useless when it comes to grammar.

There's an inaccurate belief that if you move to another country to live, you will magically pick up the language via exposure, and it's a great way to become fluent. Well, unfortunately for me, there is no magic osmosis method of learning Japanese. That isn't to say that I don't think immersion is the best way - it absolutely is. I very frequently tell potential exchange students how useful a method immersion is to learn. However, the city JET experience (and, as you well know, ESID!) frequently does not lend itself well to this. There's too much opportunity to just stay in your native language, especially now when we have Google Translate at our fingertips. Every day, I went to work; in my classroom, we used English 98% of the time. Spoke English in the English Department, spoke English after school at English Club, went home to read books in English to combat homesickness, and either hung out with my English-speaking JET neighbour or chatted in English online with my friends back home. 

It was not quite what I envisioned when I moved to Japan.

It goes without saying that I did try. I socialized with my Japanese friends, took aikido classes in Japanese, went out with my co-workers, sang karaoke, attended conversation classes or struggled through translations in my spare time. I like Japanese. I wanted to learn it - I wouldn't have even been there if not for starting my linguistics minor with that first Japanese class. What I actually needed was study, and lots of dedication, and that was tough. I did all my own lesson plans and we did not use Japanese in the classroom

Hit those books!

It shouldn't have been such a big a shock to me, but I was incredibly disappointed when I got home from Japan and immediately failed N3 of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test. I knew I hadn't worked hard enough. Not enough study, not enough reading, not enough repetition, and most importantly, I had assumed that I would just pick things up. I certainly did - but I didn't have enough grammatical foundation and reading skills to build on. 

I had the interest and drive, and I had 2.5 years of university classes under my belt before I arrived. If I'd received a placement in, say, Shikoku rather than Osaka (not that I would ever have given up my precious placement!), I would probably have achieved my goals with fewer distractions. Most JETs request urban placements, and Tokyo, Osaka and Kyoto are right at the top. If you receive such an assignment, however, and you do want to become fluent, you need to have an incredible drive to learn in a limited amount of time. The former ALTs I know who are N1 or N2 fluent started out as country JETs, went to Japan on a student exchange program, or stayed on in Japan after finishing their placement - or all three!

So can you learn Japanese while teaching English in Japan as an ALT? The short answer is yes; you're in a prime position to pick up at least N5 level just by existing there for a year. If you want to become fluent, however, you need to work for it, as with anything - remember that it won't just come to you!

Hachiko Paperback Is Coming

Well, it's been a tumultuous 8 months, and with the absolute tanking of my industry, yours truly is back at her computer full-time. 

Doing what? Well...I've decided to turn all my attention to my writing, going forward. 

I never expected this, after more than a decade away from my freelancing career, but in that decade I happen to have completed or partially-written 4 novels (two of them Japan-centric), so it felt like the universe was giving me a boost. A boost in which I am stuck in my apartment with 800+ COVID cases popping up in Ontario daily, no job, and the very helpful support of my partner telling me he'd rather I not be working in any job where I have to leave the house. So here's a trial period; for the next eight months, working on these novels is my job. Taking them from unfinished to finished, and doing all the necessary polishing and marketing, is my main focus right now, starting with Meet You By Hachiko. 

So what's new? Well, after 8 months on the Kindle Store, Hachiko is finally getting a paperback copy!

There were definitely points in time when I honestly didn't think this book would ever be on anyone's bookshelf. It was originally a project in my free time leading up to Christmas 2009. I thought that a story about two teen girls, Canadian and Japanese, bonding over their interest in early-2000s Harajuku street style was a touch too niche for most mainstream North American publishers, and teen fiction is well out of the usual scope for the Japan-centric publishers. 

Thanks to progress, though, of the kind I never could have imagined in 2009, here we finally are! Within the next six weeks, the paperback will be on Amazon. After that, who knows what's next!? You can find it on Amazon Canada, or Amazon.com. 

 Expect this blog to be coming back in some capacity as well, when I need a break from the editing drudgery. 

 It's a tough time to be missing Japan (when I was last there, in no way did I ever think I would be away from it this long!) and blogging about that probably isn't going to help much, but maybe I can make it a little easier on those of you who are missing it, too. 

 Thanks for sticking with me!