First post.

The purpose of this site is so I feel more compelled to write longer and more thought-out entries about my stay here in Japan. LiveJournal is nice for little single-paragraph random blurbs, but I figured that if I actually went out and made my own site I may actually write about things more in-depth.

Perhaps I’d better start from the beginning.

A Seed is Planted
While growing up my family moved quite a bit. We averaged about one city every two or so years, so I’ve lived in many cities in multiple states and was never at a school for more than a few grades. When I was 15 and in high school we moved once again, and my Junior year started at my third high school.

While signing up for classes I initially was going to continue on with my studying French. After all I had taken it for a year and didn’t see the point of starting a new language, this is despite the fact that it didn’t really interest me. While speaking with my counselor, it came up that this high school offered Japanese-language courses. Now at this time I didn’t really give a damn about Japanese, I was just sick of French and learning a non-European language sounded pretty cool. Anyway, that moment where I decided to leave French and pick up Japanese was one of those points in life where I can look back and precisely point out where my life changed.

While in this Japanese class I was introduced to, well, Japan. As I previously hadn’t really given a damn past knowing that some cool video games came from over there, I was happily ignorant. This class changed that perception. Of course, meeting a bunch of otaku-in-the-making clouded that a bit.

Sidenote: From this time until the watching of my first anime series took two years. I didn’t watch another anime series until four years after that one (i.e., now).

One day in class my teacher brought up something called “The JET Programme”, which is where the Japanese government brings over English-speaking foreigners to assist in English education there. Hey, that sounds cool. I wanted to live in a different country post-college, and that sounded like the perfect opportunity. I kept it in the back of my head for the next five years.

Within those five years I graduated high school, elected to take Japanese as my required foreign language in college, and got up to my senior year of college. Now it was time for The Application.

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