Category: Thoughts

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Episode 83 – Snow Country

It’s been a long time in the making, but we’re finally reviewing one of Japan’s most famous novels: Kawabata Yasunari’s, “Snow Country”. As one of Terrance’s absolute favorite books and only recently read by Christopher, we discuss the finer points of the novel, its context, and what we make of the imagery and plot.

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Episode 82 – Takao-san

Join Terrance and Christopher with dualing audio as they journey to the summit of Mount Takao, a small mountain just west of Tokyo.

This sound-seeing (sound scene) tour includes some lively discussion on Japanese films, accents, future nature sabbaticals, and disaster scenarios. What more could you ask for?

View of Mt Fuji from Top of Mount Takao

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Episode 81 – Tim Puts the Pieces Together with Musby

On this episode Terrance sits down with a Kobe friend, Tim Andersen to talk about his startup Musby. They catch up a little and go over their common background of being halfies growing up in Japan. They talk Musby’s goal of bringing language learning together with other interests – it really is a great idea and can’t wait to see what it develops into. Find out more at Musby

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Episode 80 – Todd Always Stands His Ground

It’s Finding Japan’s 80th show! Terrance is joined in celebration with his friend and veteran Japan raconteur Todd Rucynski. Todd’s been in Japan for a long time has done everything from the good ol’ gaijin mainstay of teaching English to owning video stores (wuh?) to appearing on Japanese TV. They sat down at his secret office on a secret university campus to talk about what got him to Japan and some adventures since arriving more than 20 years ago. Note: The conversation was pretty long and Todd and Terrance could’ve kept going, so we’re sure there will be more, whether you all want it or not.

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Episode 79 – Three Moves Ahead with Shaka Haynes

It’s been awhile but we’re excited about this episode. Terrance’s guest is the always hungry, always charismatic Shaka Haynes. Shaka works with Terrance at the world famous fruit shop. More importantly, he’s making moves in the world of entertainment bringing his experience producing and promoting artists to the Japan scene. They talk about how he “found Japan” and his current experiences and future plans. Plus, they take an interesting detour and Shaka makes his case for why Boston is the most American of cities.

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Episode 78 – I Ain’t Ever Been To Jail

This is a very personal and special episode in which Terrance talks about his experiences in the Japanese slammer. Many of you may know what happened but just to make things clear, the matter is settled, he’s ok, he doesn’t have a record, and technically it was detention, not imprisonment.

Chris Rock has a joke about low expectation boasting. “I ain’t ever been to jail.” “You ain’t supposed to go to jail, you low expectation having…” Sadly, he can no longer laugh at this joke. He’s been to jail and here is the story.

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Episode 77 – The Finding Continues

It’s been awhile but the Godfather of Finding Japan, Chris, is back in the land! Chris and Terrance have teamed up to continue bringing our discoveries and observations of this sometimes mystifying, almost always interesting country. In this episode we get you caught up with what’s been going on with our lives, as well as where we plan on taking the show.

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