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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,…
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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…
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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,…
My Old Pages
These are links to my old webpages, from back before I moved to a wordpress-powered blog. Back when I wrote the HTML by hand in a text editor. Yes, really. The formatting on some of the pages has broken a bit, and there are newer versions of some of the content in the current part of the site. Nothing here is maintained, nor likely to have anything done with it in the future.