Taking a break

Going to try to take a bit of a break (or at least not be as active) from social media. See you in August.

‘Japan Says Western Pop? No, Thanks, Don’t Do It’

I have been invited to give a presentation at the British Association for Teachers of Japanese annual conference in September 2022. I will be speaking about ‘Western’ pop acts in Japan. In 1995, Guy De Launey’s article ‘Not-so-big in Japan: Western pop music in the Japanese market’ was published. It sought to explain some of…

Book Review: “Impossible” by Sarah Lotz

Doing a review for this book that does it just is, well… impossible. How I would love to stop my review there, but Amazon and other sites require a certain number of words, so I will endeavour to say more. One of the challenges with doing a review for Impossible (also know as The Impossible…

Paris Syndrome is Real

Last week I took a two-day trip to Paris for research. This post is my final post relating to the trip (after the posts my visit to the National Library of France (Bibliothèque nationale de France), my visit to the Concorde Memorials, my visit to the Paris Catacombs and Photographing Planes at Paris Charles De…

Photographing Planes at Paris Charles De Gaulle Airport

Last week I took a two-day trip to Paris for research. I have already done posts about the elements that were related to my research in some way – my visit to the National Library of France (Bibliothèque nationale de France), my visit to the Concorde Memorials, and my visit to the Paris Catacombs. The…

Reflecting on a Research Trip to Paris: The Paris Catacombs

Last week I took a two-day trip to Paris for research. There were a number of elements to the trip, and I am going to do a series of posts relating to each of them and this is the third (after the one about my visit to the National Library of France (Bibliothèque nationale de…

Reflecting on a Research Trip to Paris: The Concorde Memorials

Last week I took a two-day trip to Paris for research. There were a number of elements to the trip, and I am going to do a series of posts relating to each of them and this is the second (after the one about my visit to the National Library of France (Bibliothèque nationale de…

Reflecting on a Research Trip to Paris: National Library of France

Last week I took a two-day trip to Paris for research. There were a number of elements to the trip, and I am going to do a series of posts relating to each of them. The first part of my trip was to visit the National Library of France (Bibliothèque nationale de France) to do…

Webinar: The Threat of Nuclear War: Four Decades After “The Day After”

By chance yesterday I saw a post on Facebook about a webinar being held later that day about the 1983 movie “The Day After“. Thanks to it being held late afternoon in the US, I was able to attend (in the UK) before going to bed… although the topic isn’t really “bedtime reading/viewing”. The full…

Favourite Places in Japan: Seto Ohashi

Continuing with my posts about my favourite places in Japan, I’m going to write a bit about Seto Ohashi (瀬戸大橋). Technically, I’m not sure whether it’s really a favourite place of mine, but it seemed easiest to place it with the other such posts. For, rather than a favourite place per se, it’s a place…

Photographing the Shinkansen: Higashi-Hiroshima

As I have posted about before, when it comes to photographing the shinkansen, I prefer not to take pictures at stations. There are times – particularly when you are travelling on a stopping-service – when it is convenient to do so, getting a shot of a passing train (pictures of stopped trains tend to be…

Book Review: “The Man Burned By Winter” by Pete Zacharias

I got this book as part of Amazon Firsts, where you get a free book a month or so before the main release. This is the first of a new series involving the protagonist and it may be one series that I continue to read. The first thing to say about this book is that…