David Chart's Blog

Author: David Chart

  • Road to Philadelphia

    Torg was a roleplaying game released about thirty years ago in which earth was invaded by different realities, different genres of roleplaying game, and you played characters from these different realities who all worked together to fight the invaders. Thus, fantasy wizards worked with cyberpunk hackers and two-fisted pulp detectives to defeat dinosaur-riding lizardmen. It…

  • The Empty Seat Revisited

    When Baye McNeil writes about the empty seat phenomenon in Japan, the aversion that Japanese people have to sitting next to him on public transport, or, indeed, anywhere, he gets a lot of responses. Many of those responses are from people — white, black, male, female — who have the same experience. Many others, however,…

  • Japanese While White

    I naturalised as a Japanese citizen almost two years ago, and so when I travel abroad, I travel on a Japanese passport. This is interesting. My first overseas trip was to the UK, where, for the first time, I had to join the queue for non-EU people. After a really, really long wait, I got…

  • Reflections on Teaching English in Japan

    I am David Chart, and I am an English teacher. I have been teaching English in Japan since early 2004, so for about fourteen years now. Unlike many English teachers here, I have never taught English in an institutional setting. It has always been one-on-one, or possibly one-on-two, and I have always been freelance. Thus,…

  • Mimusubi

    This blog has been somewhat neglected of late, because most of my online writing has been connected to Mimusubi, and my essays about Shinto. That project has now been running for a year, and I’ve written nine essays. I’m currently working on the next one, which will be about Yasukuni Jinja. If that sounds like…

  • Loco in Japan

    A while back, when I wrote an article about racial categories in Japan, I got a response from Baye McNeil, the author of the Loco in Yokohama blog, and the two books that I will be reviewing in this blog post. That response led to me reading his books, which are primarily about his experiences…

  • Problems Again

    I just had some very strange problems on my blog. There was an extra 4GB of data in my account, in “Other”, which I could not delete, which made it impossible for me to receive email or update the blog. My emails to customer support didn’t get a response, so I’ve migrated everything to a…

  • Blog Hacked

    My blog was hacked last night. I’ve restored from the most recent backup, which was from Sunday, so I don’t think I’ve lost anything. I’ve also taken the opportunity to do a bit more security hardening, although I don’t know where the weakness was. Fortunately, I’m using the Wordfence plugin, which is what alerted me…

  • Corellon Larethian

    I have just published a short, new roleplaying book. Corellon Larethian is the chief deity of the elves in the Forgotten Realms setting for Dungeons and Dragons. The Forgotten Realms setting was released when I was a teenager, and I have loved it ever since. In a lot of ways, it is the classic RPG…

  • Experiences of Racism in Japan

    It has recently been reported that the Ministry of Justice is to survey 18,500 foreign residents to ask about their experiences of racism and discrimination. A lot of the reports are describing this as “unprecedented”, but while it is larger scale than the Kawasaki survey, and apparently focused on racism, the Kawasaki survey is a…