Ichikawa

So, I spent the day in Ichikawa, which is where I'll be living for the next month. I took my current couchsurfing host, Josh, with me as well. It took about an hour to get to Ichikawa from Tsurumi, which is where Josh's house is located. Once in Ichikawa, we met up with a bunch of the girls from Wayo, who I know from my various summer programs at PSU's International Program. Rebecca, the assistant director of Wayo's International Program, hosted a party at her very nice apartment, where I'll be staying on Tuesday night. I move into my new place on Wednesday, and it's about a 5 minute drive from Rebecca's apartment, so that should work out very well. The party was fun. Rebecca and Akemi bought a ton of food, which the girls cooked for me and Josh...once again, everything was delicious. The Japanese apparently never eat bad food.

Regarding work, it looks like I should be able to cobble together an income through a variety of methods that will not make me particularly rich, but will provide steady wages even if I don't nail down a full time job right away. I have already lined up a gig editing web pages to make them look and sound American, and Rebecca suggested a number of interesting possibilities in addition to that. I had resigned myself to teaching English, which I would probably enjoy in the right situation, but things are looking not quite so cut and dried. I'm most interested in getting a gig DJing on the radio, right at the moment, and apparently Rebecca has a contact or two up her sleeve who could possibly make that happen. Rebecca has a vast number of contacts, so she is going to be an invaluable resource no matter where I end up working. The only problem with putting together lots of small lines of income is that I will eventually need sponsorship from a company for a working visa, and I would need a full time job for that.

I'm off to Chinatown in Yokohama today and we'll just see how all that goes. Being here has been a very welcome distraction from the sadness, but it's still easy for me to kick it up if I think about things too long. Time.

Out with the old, in with the new.

My name is Ryan. I grew up in the northeast corner of Iowa in a small college town called Decorah. Life there is idyllic for some and terribly difficult for others and everything in between for most. I fell into the "terribly difficult" category and fled to Portland, Oregon at the first available opportunity.

Fast forward 12 years: I've just finished my first college degree, a B.A. in Liberal Studies. I minored in physics and history, earned myself a pretty nifty GPA, and was exposed to many, many fascinating fields. I could have studied any of number of them more extensively, but was required by certain financial realities to graduate after 5 nice years of college. One of the subjects that interested me, and that I studied fairly intensively, was Japanese language and culture. Eventually, I began working with Japanese college students, usually groups of girls.

I knew that I wanted some time after my graduation to think about my next step in life, graduate school, and going to Japan seemed like the best possible option, especially now, given the failure of certain other options that seemed really impossibly ideal.

So. I have:
1) a one-way ticket to Japan.
2) a few grand in the bank.
3) a list of contacts who might help me find work.
4) a suit.
5) a passport.
6) sold all of my stuff.
7) dropped off my cat at the parents' house.
8) broken off a very wonderful relationship.

I'm leaving with a broken-but-mending heart and a nearly total lack of any idea of what my future in Japan will look like, or if I even have one beyond a few weeks or a month. For good or for bad, these are very exciting times. Stay tuned.