A New Approach for a New Year

As I mentioned in the previous post, living with Japanese, day-in and day-out for four years has changed my relationship with it.

I'm a lot less interested in trivia, and more concerned with whatever I'm gonna be expected to know how to say on that particular day.

I think we've had some interesting posts and provided some good conversation material, but with the exception of the KN^4 series, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that we were not giving you extremely useful stuff.

Disagree?

Well, thank you for that. But please direct your attention here and here... and here.

The Daily Yo-ji will retain its name, because we already have a readership (at least I hope we still do) and because I like it. We'll also continue to make posts that are aimed to promote Japanese learning. But to reflect the changes in our lives, we'll be changing our focus.

To that end, let me reintroduce myself.

My name is Bobby Judo. I came to Japan in 2006 with the JET Programme as an ALT, assisting English teachers.

I recently retired from ALTing to pursue my passion: cooking and eating food. I pay the bills by doing translation, waiting tables, organizing cooking classes and events, and by appearing on TV and in magazines. That kind of work is primarily as a gourmet reporter or "food expert" of some kind. I'll also occasionally do modeling or commercials, which usually only require that I look foreign and am willing to make an ass of myself... which I'm kind of bad at.

The upshot is that all of this stuff requires me to do a lot of prep work in the studying department. In the past few months, I've been inundated with a variety of new sets of vocabulary, different speaking platforms which require different modes of speech, and a behind the scenes look at media in Japan.

I hope you'll let me use this blog as a place to post about what I'm doing, and the Japanese that I have to know in order to be able to do it.

I think that I'll end up with a lot of posts about food, because that's a large part of my life, but trust me, the variety of words related to food textures, smells, tastes, and appearance are just as complex and interesting as Yojijukugo.

It also might get complainy at times, because it's going to be much more autobiographical, opinionated and honest. And honestly, sometimes I need to vent.

If I've made you at all curious, please take some time to check out my videos on YouTube,
and my Japanese cooking blog (which has stolen my attention for a while).

Expect the first new post here soon.
Until then, in the spirit of revival, refresh yourself with this post from the archives.

Please accept my apologies for having been gone so long, and if any of our regular readers are still out there, please give us a よろしく in the comments!

今後とも、どうぞよろしくお願いいたします！