Dawn celebrating Hatsumōde (the first shrine visit of the New Year) in January 2025 at the Miyajidake Shrine in New York Please introduce yourself and your connection to Japan. I first came up with the idea to live and work in Japan while I was doing a study abroad program in China at Beijing University in Beijing and Fudan University in Shanghai. My plan was to live and work for 3 years in Korea, Japan, and China, and then return to the United States to do a PhD in East Asia

Please introduce yourself and your connection to Japan. Have you noticed how much harder it is to learn Japanese once you're working full time? I built JapaneseCircle.com so JET alums and other professionals can make every learning hour count, improving their Japanese in outcome-oriented sprints. My interest in Japan started in third-grade social studies and hasn't let up in 30 years. A high school trip pushed me to study Japanese seriously, first in college, then a summer of

Roberto beneath a textile reproduction of Hokusai's The Great Wave off Kanagawa Please introduce yourself. Hello! My name is Roberto Gómez. I’m from Mexico and I moved to Boston in 2019. In 2021 I joined the JSB community and, since 2024, I host JSB's film club. What is your connection to Japan? As any average kid back in the 80’s, I watched several animated cartoons created by or produced by Japanese creators and studios. I wasn’t aware of this connection yet. Then, I attend

Please introduce yourself. I'm Ayuko Okuzawa, an exchange student at Northeastern University from the University of Tokyo. I'm participating in a one-year exchange program; I arrived in Boston last August and will return to Japan this April. My major at my home university is agriculture. I'm a senior affiliated with a lab where I focus on analyzing and predicting protein functions using machine learning. Reflecting this academic interest, I am also enthusiastic about computer

Could you please introduce yourself and tell us about your journey to Boston? My name is Tatsushi Izuta, but I usually go by Tachi . I chose the nickname simply because my first name is a tongue-twister for some Americans, and one of my ex-colleagues once threatened to call me “Sushi-man” otherwise! I was born and raised in Osaka and lived there until graduating from high school. I was keenly interested in studying English as a teenager and was fortunate enough to visit the U