Chinese Mexicans: Transpacific Migration and the Search for a Homeland, 1910-1960 by Julia Maria Schiavone Camacho (University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill)

A multitude of ironies pervade the history of the Chinese Mexicans, perhaps most strongly the reasons that helped to bring their ancestors to Mexico in the first place. Before he was toppled in the Mexican Revolution, President Porfirio Diaz held dictatorial power in his country from 1876 until 1910 with a brief hiatus and he advocated Chinese immigration. His reasons were highly pragmatic, not humanitarian. While the US was busily deporting their Chinese residents, Diaz saw them not only as a cheap labor source but as a way to “whiten” the complexion of his compatriots, many of whom were indigenous or mestizo (of mixed European and indigenous blood.) Himself a mestizo, Diaz knew well the handicaps that came from this background and believed dilution of this ethnic group would lead to greater acceptance of his country on the world stage.

With the onset of the Mexican Revolution in 1910 came a strong backlash against the Chinese residents,  who had flourished under Diaz’s program of giving them integration into Mexican society.  Chinese laborers had swiftly become merchants and businessmen, “the first petit bourgeois class.”. Many of them became fluent in Spanish and established families with Mexican women. Some became naturalized citizens of Mexico. They shared cultural similarities with their Mexican neighbors; the importance of extended family, the honoring of the dead, and a fluid approach toward monogamy were touchstones of both countries.

However the Chinese propensity toward “frugality and economic discipline” made them a target when the Revolution began. Under the banner of “They’re stealing our jobs. They’re stealing our women,” racist policies were launched by anti-Chinese activists. Violence erupted against not only the Chinese but against those Mexicans who were their friends. Although the courts at first supported the Chinese, anti-Chinese policies became law and the Chinese were vigorously expelled in the 1930’s, eerily mirroring modern-day US immigration policies against Mexican refugees.

But the Chinese in Mexico had not only established economic roots, their children had known only Mexico from birth and their wives were fully Mexican. The expulsion of these families was an uprooting that was abrupt and cruel. Once within China, men were reunited with the women they had taken as wives before their emigration to Mexico and the wives they brought them were viewed as concubines by Chinese society. The half-Mexican children were unaccepted by villagers; living without the local language and without status, the culture shock of the Mexican families was immense. The wives banded together and the more sophisticated of them began to appeal to Mexican diplomats in China and Hong Kong. They wanted to go home.

Laws at that time were based upon women taking the nationality of their husbands upon marriage and many of the Mexican wives became delighted that they had never been legally married. Still the process of repatriation was tortuous and lengthy. While women waited for a homeward passage, their children began to learn how to be Chinese, while being encouraged by their mothers to long for their old lives in Mexico.

Some of the families found more congenial homes in Macau and Hong Kong, which as colonies, were less xenophobic toward immigrants than villages in rural China. Although many of the colonies’ residents found refuge in the Catholic churches and in Macau’s Portuguese community and didn’t return in the first wave of repatriation, Mao’s victory made them uneasy and the specter of Communism during the Cold War helped to facilitate their return to Mexico. In 1960, after almost thirty years in Asia, 267 Chinese Mexicans came back to Mexico, with 70 more waiting for their turn. Even in the 1980’s, Chinese Mexicans were still coming home from China.

But they came back faced with the gulf of being “between cultures,” especially the children of the expulsion who were now adults. For years they had known Mexico only through the culture embodied within their mothers and in dim memories of their own. In China they had been seen as Mexicans, now back in their homeland they were Chinese. Even so, one man who had left Mexico when he was four and returned to his original hometown as an adult told Schiavone Camacho, “Mexico delights me. Navojoa delights me.” 

After a difficult readjustment on the part of both the repatriated and the Mexican government, the Chinese Mexicans have strengthened the position of mixed-race citizens in Mexico, thus defeating Diaz’s original hope that they would help to eliminate that category by turning Mexico white.

Now their culinary history lives on, both in Asia and in Central America. In Hong Kong bakeries sell “Mexico buns,” introduced by the Mexican wives of expelled Chinese. In Mexico Chinese restaurants flourish. And in Mexican cities and towns, through their knowledge of two countries, “Chinese Mexicans have expanded the idea of Mexicanness.”`Janet Brown

Sweet Daruma : A Japan Satire by Janice Valerie Young (iUniverse)

Sweet Daruma is an irreverent story set in Japan as told through the eyes of Magda who leaves her native Canada and her globalization-protesting boyfriend to teach English conversation...or so she thinks. 

Magda is met at the airport by a man who calls himself September, his actual name being Jun which sounds like “June” in English. He changed his name because he felt Jun sounded too “trite”. Magda is whisked off to use her English abilities right away, but not at a conversation school. September takes her to a site on the Chuo Line and says there is man who is trying to commit Chuocide, suicide by getting hit by the Chuo Line railway. 

Magda discovers that she has joined the Anne of Grey Tokyo Emergency Response Team named after Lucy Maud Montgomery’s “Anne of Green Gables”, a book that is popular with many Japanese. From there, Magda meets the colorful characters she works with and has one zany adventure after another. How all these characters intertwine borders on the absurd.

Anne Lajeunesse is a fellow Canadian who “had been in Japan long enough to know that those who accused her of treating Japan as if it were a giant theme park for Westerners had obviously never lived in Japan”. She is the owner and creator of the Anne of Grey Tokyo Emergency Response Team. 

Kate is another Canadian who also works for the Anne of Grey Tokyo Emergency Response Team who tells Magda that one of the first things Magda should do is “Go out as soon as you can and get a vibrator” because she continues, “You won’t be having any sex during your time in Japan.” 

Magda must deal with the owner of a dry cleaner called Morimoto, a couple of wannabe Yakuzas, a pair of yamambas (a fashion trend set by Japanese high school girls in the mid-’90s where they applied dark tans and white lipstick), who are also amateur entrepreneurs selling their own urine, two militant English language school teachers and a mute, one-armed monkey named Kagemusha. 

Hirohisa is a former Christian who lives in the same building occupied by the Anne of Grey team and is also the owner of Kagemusha. He is currently designing stackable apartments that are shaped like a daruma, a hollow round doll that is often displayed for good luck or good fortune. It is an act committed by Hirohisa which sets off a series of events in which all the characters would cross paths. 

A satire is supposed to be humorous but the book reads more like an expat airing their grievances about everything they don’t like about Japan - the crowded trains, the gropers, the over-saturation of English conversation schools, enjo-kosai (teenage prostitution) and the like. It’s as if the writer wanted to exaggerate everything that is bad about Japan and weave it into a story. Sometimes it works but most of the time it falls flat. 

I really tried to enjoy this story but found many of the Japanese pop cultural references to be dated and obscure. The writing is simple and easy to understand but many of the situations are beyond absurd, rendering this satire into a piece of juvenile fiction a high student may have written for their creative writing class. ~Ernie Hoyt

Without You, There is No Us by Suki Kim (Broadway Books)

Imagine being “in a prison disguised as a campus,” constantly under guard and on guard, in the company of “thirty missionaries disguised as teachers,“ as “a writer disguised as a missionary disguised as a teacher.” Imagine living without freedom of movement, without the ability to call friends and family, without writing uncensored letters or emails, without heat in the winter or the privacy that comes with closing a bedroom door and knowing there is no surveillance waiting there. Imagine living this way for almost five months, teaching young men from the highest social class of their nation who have never used the Internet, rarely leave the campus and then only under tight supervision, who have been trained all of their lives to be unswerving soldiers in the service of their revered leader.

Suki Kim chooses this. Her life has been shadowed by North Korea from the time she can first remember. Living in Seoul until her family came to the US when she was fifteen, she grows up hearing stories of her mother’s older brother who was captured and taken to the north when the country was first divided and about her father’s teenage cousins, young nursing students who disappeared during the war and were never seen again. Division and separation is a common thread that is always present; unification of the country is a prevailing hope among Kim’s family and other members of the Korean diaspora. 

Kim comes to adulthood with a feeling of homelessness, one that oddly disappears during her initial visits to the capital of North Korea, Pyongyang. From the privileged, cushioned viewpoint of being part of a delegation and then as a journalist, Kim is comforted by the “sense of recognition” that she finds there, the feeling that she’s in touch with her past. When she’s given the opportunity in 2011 to teach English in Pyongyang, at a university recently established by Korean evangelical Christians, she grabs it.

Kim enters as the spy that her employers and the North Korean government vigilantly guard themselves against. Gathering material for a book is her goal and she comes equipped with unobtrusive, easily concealed thumb drives on which she puts her notes. To her colleagues, she’s a good Christian girl and Kim, through the way she dresses and the way she speaks, maintains that illusion. Even when she encounters a man who had been her guide when she had first come to Pyongyang as a journalist, even when a reporter she had worked with shows up at the university on assignment and immediately recognizes her, even when the man she is in love with writes indiscreetly in his letters to her, Kim remains undetected.

What makes her dangerous charade bearable is her students.  She falls in love with them all, while always being aware that she must watch every word she speaks to them. Any deviation from the curriculum approved by “the counterparts,” English-speaking academics who scrutinize her lesson plans, can open cracks in the wall of isolation that’s been imposed on these young men and could possibly endanger their futures. Even the idea of showing a Harry Potter movie, something they’ve all heard of but have never come in contact with, is shot down as a danger, not by the counterparts but by the missionaries and  Kim comes to realize that slavish devotion to the Leader is quite similar to her fellow-teachers’ devotion to God.

“They’re beautiful” is her first impression of her students, which is rapidly followed by learning they’re all talented and well-practiced liars. They tell her about one man who managed to hack his university’s computer system and raised his grades in all of his courses. When this was discovered by the authorities, the student wasn’t disgraced  for his dishonesty but was rewarded for his expertise.

The Leader dies unexpectedly at the end of the semester when Kim is on the verge of going home. Overnight her students are transformed from begging her to return to ignoring that she’s still there. In their grief and uncertainty about the future, they’ve erased her--but she will soon betray them. Even though she’s changed their names in her stories about them, the confidences they have written to her in class assignments and that she discloses may well ruin their lives. Her book is both a horror thriller and a love story that ends badly, with Kim as the villain in the relationship. She’s the one who has cheated--and quite possibly has been destructive--for her own benefit, to advance her career.~Janet Brown

Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortensen and David Oliver Relin (Penguin)

Three Cups of Tea is the inspiring true story of a mountaineer turned humanitarian whose life work is educating the impoverished children of Northern Pakistan. His mission is “to promote peace...one school at a time.”

Greg Mortensen is a registered nurse and an experienced mountaineer. In 1993 he attempted to climb the world’s second highest mountain - K2, located in the Baltistan district of Northern Pakistan which borders Xinjiang, China. He decided to climb the mountain as a tribute to his youngest sister who died of a seizure before her twenty-third birthday. He planned to leave one of her possessions - a necklace, at the summit of the mountain. 

Mortensen never does make it to the summit and gets lost trying to return to base camp. He finds himself in a small village called Korphe, a place he has never heard of and doesn’t recall seeing it on any of the dozens of maps he had studied. It is here that Mortensen meets Haji Ali, the nurmadhar, the chief, who shows the lost mountaineer kindness and compassion. 

Haji Ali tells him the village has no school and shares a teacher with another village who comes to teach at the village three times a week. The rest of the week, the children are left on their own and practice their studies the teacher had given them. 

It is this revelation that sets Mortensen on a new goal. He says to Haji Ali, “I will build a school. I promise.” This man with no experience in fund-raising or how to go about building a school in a foreign country spends his time doing research and talking to people who may be able to help him. He works enough to make a fair sum of money to finance his trips back to Pakistan never once forgetting the promise he made to Haji Ali. 

What started out as a small promise to a man leads to the creation of the Central Asia Institute, which would help build more than fifty schools throughout Pakistan, many of them built especially for girls. Mortensen would also discover how business is conducted in Pakistan. Haji Ali tells him, “Here (in Pakistan and Afghanistan), we drink three dups of tea to do business; the first you are a stranger, the second you become a friend, and the third, you join our family, and for our family we are prepared to do anything - even die.”

Three Cups of Tea is credited to two authors, Greg Mortensen and David Oliver Relin, however the book is told in the third person through journalist Relin’s writing. Relin says, “I wrote the story. But Greg Mortensen lived it.” Once the story progresses, it appears as if Relin forgets his objectivity and almost deifies Mortensen into a man who can do no wrong. Many of the passages in the story may be irrelevant but the heart of the story stays with you long after you finish reading it. 

The journey from mountaineer to humanitarian is one that will inspire. Mortensen shows that by determination, one can accomplish anything, even build a school or two in one of the world’s most remote areas. With the rise of the madrassas (Islamic religious schools) teaching fundamentalist Islam and financed by a Arab shieks, Mortensen tries to raise his voice to tell people that the best way to fight terrorism is through education. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Fire Sacrifice by Susham Bedi (Heinemann)

The Fire Sacrifice is one of the first of six books selected by Heinemann Publishers for the introduction to their Asian Writers Series. The purpose is “to introduce English language readers to some of the interesting fiction written in languages that most will neither know nor study.”  The book was first published in Hindi in 1989 by Susham Bedi. It is also her first book. 

Guddo has left her native India and has spent the last ten years living in New York City. It is New Year’s Day. Guddo was brought up to believe that if the first day of the year is a happy one, there would be no major problems for the rest of the year, so she plans to perform the havan in her living room. The havan is “a ritual fire sacrifice, performed on auspicious occasions and for purification.” 

Guddo has invited a number of close relatives to her home - her two daughters and a son-in-law, her two sisters along with their children, and the husband of one of the sisters. This is the first time Guddo has had a chance to perform this sacrifice in the U.S. She feels as if this is the first time in ten years where she can sit and relax and not be concerned about anyone else’s trouble. 

As she reflects back on her life, she wonders if she made the right choices. She had a nice comfortable life in India. She and her husband had good jobs, servants to help around the house and friendly neighbors and relations. This idyllic life was shattered when her husband succumbs to a disease and the pharmacies in India do not have the medicine that will help him. Guddo becomes a widower and her life changes dramatically. 

Guddo’s two daughters are still in school and her son has not yet graduated high school. It is Guddo’s belief that she must continue to work and marry off her daughters and find her son a nice bride before she can give any thought to her own life. Her beliefs are steeped in the tradition of putting the family and children first. 

One of her sisters had emigrated to the U.S. seventeen years prior and suggested Guddo and her son should come and live here as well. For the average Indian family, the U.S. is looked upon as a land of wealth and opportunity. They believe that once they find a place to settle, life would be easy and carefree and getting a job would be a breeze. However, the reality is far from what Guddo imagines. 

The Fire Sacrifice gives a voice to the immigrant story of Indians as they seek success and fortune in a new world in the hopes of giving their children a better life while trying to keep a balance with their traditional Indian values. Those same children grow up more American than Indian and many of them reject or resent those Indian traditions. 

Leaving a life you know to live and work in a foreign country is not an easy task. There may be the language barrier, culture shock, and misunderstandings of certain cultural values. Bedi brings to light all the problems that face an immigrant in a new country. What you imagine and what is real can be painfully different. ~Ernie Hoyt

Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie (Riverhead Books)

The Greeks had a word for it, tragodia, tragedy. We have apps for it instead. Almost every day, brought to our screens by social media, another unspeakable sadness blazes into our collective consciousness, burns bright, and is promptly extinguished by the next one. We can’t keep up, let alone turn it into art that will bring us to action. We have no Sophocles. But we have Kamila Shamsie, who has taken Antigone and brought it into our own time, shockingly and unforgettably, in Home Fire.

Beautiful twins, orphans, cared for by their older sister--the boy runs away to the unexpected emotional support of a dangerous path his father followed long ago, the girl studies English law, “knowing everything about her rights,” until the loss of her brother shows her how fragile those rights can become, erased by one rapid decision.

At first this novel seems almost like chick-lit, with an overlay of contemporary political realities. Then Shamsie turns her kaleidoscope to another character, then another, and the picture expands and deepens. A sister who is burdened by becoming a maternal substitute far too young, the brother who is seduced by the history and fraternity of jihad, his twin sister who finds a way to help him but discovers this may destroy her own happiness, the young man who gives her his future, the father who holds the fates of all four, encoiling them with his own ambition--through them, the puzzle pieces come together.

From America, where citizens emblazons “their political beliefs on bumper stickers” to England, where a boy feels he’s without a country until his father’s destiny claims him, to a deserted park in Pakistan where a young man and woman hold each other, waiting for the flames--the different facets blend into a whole. The truth sears. The moral righteousness of power becomes a scar that is inescapable and indelible.

“The personal is the political,” but it’s even more true is the political is personal, although it’s convenient to pretend it isn’t. The brilliant sister, the passionate teenage twins, the man who defies his family, the father who loses everything--all unite in a horrible “butterfly effect” that reechoes headlines and click-bait topic sentences that are easy to ignore. What we’ve overlooked on Twitter becomes a story which keeps us from turning away. 

If an old woman didn’t have a fondness for M&Ms, if a boy hadn’t taken a job in a neighborhood grocery, if a girl hadn’t said to a man in a railway carriage, “Do you live alone? Take me there,” if a politician hadn’t ignored the corpse of one of his countrymen, this particular tragedy might never have happened. Perhaps the ending would truly have been “two lovers in a park, sun-dappled, beautiful, and at peace.”

Only a skilled writer can keep contemporary issues within the realm of art, rather than wandering off into propaganda. Now more than ever, these writers are essential. By bringing humanity to what seems inhuman, by illustrating the cruelty of what’s perceived as justice, by showing how love in its many forms can be the greatest danger, Kamila Shamsie has given life to myth, a novel’s power to an ancient drama, and a terrible knowledge and understanding to everyone who reads her book.~Janet Brown

Ghost Train to the Eastern Star by Paul Theroux (Houghton Mifflin)

Grouchy Old Paul, the curmudgeon who constantly tops bestseller lists, is a man I stopped reading long ago. I grew weary of his world view that reeked of ugliness and assumptions, wondering why he left home if every place he saw only sparked more visions of the coming apocalypse. He was like a secular preacher howling constantly about the Book of Revelations.

But Covid-19 has made desperate readers of us all and in desperation I purchased a cheap download of Ghost Train to the Eastern Star. It stayed untouched on my kobo until finally, in even greater desperation, I began to read it--and to my immense surprise, enjoyed it. 

This rail journey through Asia is a personal odyssey, retracing the train tracks that led Theroux to fame thirty-three years earlier in The Great Railway Bazaar. No longer a young man with a crumbling marriage, Theroux divulges the unhappy background that pervaded his former journey, admitting that his travel writing is the only autobiography he will probably  ever write.

“Travel for me,” he says, “is a way of living my life,” and is “one of the laziest ways of passing time.” Theroux is far from lazy on his journeys. He may be one of the world’s indefatigable note-takers, recording the details of conversations, meals, and his assessments of people he sees along the way that verge upon the novelistic. His descriptions of landscapes and of cities are precise and sensuous as he glides past them in a railway carriage. This is a man who never stops working. Lazy? Not at all.

When Theroux’s happy, his words glisten. When he’s miserable, he can make the skin on a reader’s eyeballs crawl. A man who has little love for Tokyo or New York, he is passionate about Istanbul, a city that is “grand and reimagined,” “a water world,” a city with the soul of a village.” His account of neighboring Turkmenistan, on the other hand, borders on the surrealist absurdity of nightmares, with its leader who renamed the months of the year and days of the week in a way that locals find impossible to remember.

His trip is punctuated by a literary pilgrimage, visiting Orhan Pamuk and Eli Shafek in Istanbul, Haruki Murakami in Tokyo, Pico Iyer in Kyoto, and in Siberia following the ghostly footsteps of writers who had been imprisoned in the Gulag Archipelago. But perhaps the most insightful conversation he has is with an IT manager in an Indian call center, who says the only way to solve that country’s population problem is through education, because without that, the only diversion people have is sexual intercourse.

Theroux’s preoccupations are not those of the usual traveler. Art, politics, and food are topics that he passes over rather quickly. Instead the man is a connoisseur of snow, “smutty and discolored in Hungary,” “the heavily upholstered world of deep snow” in rural Japan, “the icy-bright trees” and “trackless snow” that gave the appropriate solemnity to “the only intact gulag prison remaining in Russia.”

He is also a man who seeks out pornography as “the quickest insight into the culture and inner life of a nation,” and rates it on a demanding scale in almost any place where he spends more than a few hours. From the “grubby stuff” featuring “very fat people” in Hungary to Singapore’s Orchard Towers with four floors of women for sale, Theroux painstakingly investigates these cultures. When Murakami takes him on a tour of Tokyo, they end up at Pop Life, “six stories of porno.” 

As a solitary traveler, Theroux is far from the invisible figure of ghostliness that his age might confer upon him, a fate that he has anticipated. Even in Hanoi, he’s persistently offered female companionship and he seems to find it rather praiseworthy that he resists. But what attracts the most attention is that he travels alone and by train, when he could obviously be whisked about on a plane.

“Memory is a ghost train,” Theroux says and he is a master of recording and transmitting his memories. Only on a train are memories made so rapidly, seen through a pane of glass and then fading into the distance, captured in a conversation with another passenger who will never be seen again, pulling into a city that can be left on a whim. Paul Theroux has made this sort of travel into an art form, a niche of literature that belongs securely to him. There are no imitators, only Grouchy Old Paul, his notebook in hand, measuring and recording the loneliness of the long distance traveler.~Janet Brown

Almost Home : The Asian Search of a Geographic Trollop by Janet Brown (ThingsAsian Press)

Back in 1995, Janet Brown left her home and family and went to live in Bangkok, Thailand. She fell in love with the country and decided that was where she was going to spend the remainder of her life. However, blood-ties were stronger than the love of a new country and she found herself moving back and forth between the States and Thailand during the six years she called Bangkok her home. Bangkok “puzzled, infuriated, delighted, and engaged me as no other spot had ever before.”

Between the years 2001 and 2008, Janet lived in the U.S. but lived her life as she did when living in Bangkok. “I cooked jasmine rice and noodles with Thai chili peppers and fish sauce. I listened to Thai music, I rented Thai DVDs, I read the Thai-English newspapers on my computer.” If she had enough money to go on vacation, she would go to Thailand. 

Almost Home is Janet’s continual search for where she can settle down, with Bangkok at the top of the list. Now at sixty, she “packed two suitcases and came home, to a city where I knew I’d remain for the rest of my life.”  Unfortunately, Janet says the Bangkok she came back to wasn’t the same. The times have changed and so has her city. The political situation was making living in Bangkok a dangerous prospect. Perhaps it was time to search for a new home. 

In Hong Kong, Janet found a place she would return to again and again- - Chungking Mansions in Kowloon. The place is a community in and of itself. It also has a bad reputation for being dangerous and full of drugs, but for Janet, she took to the mansions like a duck takes to water. Still, it wasn’t some place she would think of as a permanent home. 

Beijing was “beyond any easy pigeonholing of ancient traditions contrasted with modern luxury. It was a place that took everything that had happened within it for the past three thousand years and jammed it all together to make a hybrid city, huge and impossible to duplicate anywhere else.”  

However, Beijing didn’t quite have the hold on Janet as Bangkok does and she finds herself returning to her old haunting grounds. On her return to Bangkok, the political situation hadn’t improved and this time, there was a series of bombings. She knew she had to get away and took a short trip to Penang in Malaysia. Penang was quite a contrast from Bangkok and Janet found it to her liking….so she moved there.

Unfortunately, Penang was not as idyllic as Janet first imagined as she had to contend with bedbugs, listen to a cacophony of music and worst yet, being asked a series of personal questions in English where it got to the point of annoyance. After two months, Janet, who thought she could make her home anywhere, realized she made a big mistake and took the next train back to Thailand. 

Does Janet eventually find her home? Janet has traveled and lived in different countries in Asia, but something more than countries and newfound friends draws her to what she really considers home….and that would be living near her children who are now grown men. Janet says, “Although I’ve found my anchor among the people whom I love more than anybody in the world, wherever I am, I’m always almost home.” ~Ernie Hoyt

An Indiana Hoosier in Lord Tsugaru's Court by Todd Jay Leonard (iUniverse)

An Indiana Hoosier in Lord Tsugaru’s Court is a play on the title of the Mark Twain book, “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court”. However, author Todd Jay Leonard has not timeslipped to feudal Japan, it only seems like he has because he makes his home in rural Japan. Compared to living in Tokyo, you might as well be in King Arthur’s Court as Leonard feels “as though I have indeed been transported in a time machine to a different era and place.”

This book is actually a sequel to his other collection of essays about Japan titled “Letters Home - Musings of an Expatriate Living in Japan”. Both books started out as a column Leonard wrote for his hometown’s local newspaper, the Shelbyville News based in Shelbyville, Indiana. Thanks to the many readers of his column, Leonard set out to compile, revise, and edit many of his articles about his Japan as he saw it through his own eyes. 

Leonard has spent the last thirty years living in Hirosaki City in Aomori Prefecture, Japan’s northernmost Prefecture of Honshu Island. He had his first exposure to Japan when he was an elementary school student. One of his teachers who taught art at his school was Japanese. Leonard says he was intrigued by her - “She left her home and family - everything she knew and was familiar and dear to her - to come to my little town to teach American kids art.”

As a seventeen year old high school student, Leonard spent the summer in Tokyo on an exchange program and became even more fascinated by the country and its people, customs, and culture. As an undergraduate student at Purdue University, Leonard majored in Japanese history. 

In 1989, Leonard was offered a job to live and work in Hirosaki as an Assistant Language Teacher (ALT) on the Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Program. He worked as an ALT for two and half years when he was offered an associate professorship at a local university where he has taught for over ten years. He currently teaches at Fukuoka University in Kyushu, located in the southern part of Japan. 

Leonard’s book is divided into five sections. He starts off by telling us his top ten list of things Japanese. A subjective list of ten things that he loves and admires about Japan. This is followed by “Rites of Passage” where he talks about the customs and traditions of different life events. Next he focuses on “Japanese Festivals and Celebrations”. The fourth part is “political, educational, and social issues” facing Japan today and finally, “Cultural and Societal Miscellany” where he talks about a number of topics related to daily life of living in the country. 

As an expat living in rural Japan myself, I can relate to a lot of what Leonard says. I even agree with most of his list about things Japanese - the cleanliness and politeness of taxis and taxi drivers, public transportation whose timing is so precise you can set your watch to it, and a personal favorite of mine - no tipping. He does mention one of the major disadvantages of living in “snow country” and that is its harsh winters where some days are filled with the never-ending task of shoveling snow. 

This book is great as a general introduction to Japan and offers a bit more on what it’s like to live in a foreign country and learning about the cultural differences between Japan and the U.S. Perhaps even you will become a Japanophile after reading this. ~Ernie Hoyt