Edokko

 Yikes, it's been a while! I'm so sorry not to have much to share these last few months - or rather, I have tons, but have been so caught up I haven't written any of it!

Last Monday, my second novel launched in paperback and as a Kindle Unlimited exclusive.

I began working on Edokko when I was newly back in Canada and truly felt the sting of leaving Japan behind. It's a joy to see it finally in print, and the publishing process brought me back to those early days (don't miss the cameo of the Japan Foundation's Japanese-Language Institute Kansai, where incoming Osaka JETs gathered for language lessons when we first arrived!) and the ups and downs of expat life. I still miss it very much.

Available now in paperback and ebook format

 

Lily Jennings is Going. To. Japan.

Sixteen and on top of the world, she's beyond excited to be setting off for an entire year as an exchange student in Tokyo. Fashion and fun are foremost on her mind as she arrives ready to meet her new host family and embark on a grand adventure, livestreaming all the way.

What Lily isn't expecting, however, is for her urban host family to cancel at the last moment and leave her hanging with nowhere to live. She's shipped off to the small town of Ajimu (sorry, where!?), a billion miles from anywhere cool and exciting, with a neurotic host sister, no chances for romance, straight-up-vile classmates and a microscopic community watching over her every move.

Too bad for the people of this small town—nothing's going to hold Lily back when she wants something!

Find it on Amazon or your favourite retailer via http://edokko.lorengreene.com!

Photo of the Day - Fire Alarm

Dotonbori Hotel, Osaka.
That's how small these rooms were!

Krispy Kreme Japan

One of my first impressions of Tokyo was courtesy of Krispy Kreme doughnuts. Rather, it was the Krispy Kreme doughnut frenzy personally witnessed at the Shinjuku Southern Terrace.

These people waited about 45-60 minutes for their doughnuts - in the rain!

When I arrived in Japan, there was only one Krispy Kreme, and it was incredibly popular, as you might expect - the Japanese have an appreciation for trying new things, particularly when they are famous, particularly when it comes to food. They also have an affinity for standing in line - I'm told that after waiting in a long line to try something, you are more likely to be appreciative of your purchase by the time you reach the head. By the time I reach the head of a long line, especially an outdoor one, I'm usually murderous, but I'm not Japanese, so I can't claim to understand this one.

At Tokyo Orientation, we received some information about the area around our hotel, including a map with a legend. Krispy Kreme was marked there, with a warning "First K.K. in Japan, very popular, expect a line." (They now have 27 locations, and counting!) Krispy Kreme had left Toronto some years before, and it had been a long time since I'd been able to have my favourite K.K. doughnut, the Chocolate Iced Kreme Filled, so I decided to head over there. I'd even read up on it on Wikipedia when I was trying to check out things to do in Tokyo - the store had been built almost a year before, so I figured the long lineups had probably petered out by now. 

Hot and fresh!

Well...they hadn't. Even though it was already eight o'clock in the evening, when I found the place, the queue had fifty or more people in it. We were handed menus and free doughnuts in line, at least, and the doughnut creation process was just inside the window for us to watch while we waited. I didn't realize it at the time, but I was very fortunate to have gotten inside the store within thirty minutes of joining the line. Unfortunately, the cream-filled chocolate iced variety are not available in Japan, but I got a half-dozen other exciting new kinds, including a most excellent lime-filled powdered dougnut.

The interesting Japan-only flavours are what kept me coming back each time I was in Shinjuku. Krispy Kreme Japan offers a fantastic seasonal menu that is always changing and is usually themed. (I couldn't get behind the coffee theme. Sorry, K.K.) Though I hated the fake-tasting fruit-filled doughnuts that used to come in a dozen from Tim Hortons, Krispy Kreme did these powdery little delights perfectly. If you happen to be lucky enough to be in Japan when Cassis or Lime flavours are on the rotation, don't miss them!

The bounty: four dozen doughnuts that we
divided up between us for omiyage

The next time I was in Tokyo, for Tokyo Game Show 2007, I thought I would bring back Krispy Kreme as omiyage (souveniers) for my co-workers back in Osaka. However, this time the line was four times as long. When we came back later that night, we were lucky to get away with an hour-long wait.

The funny thing is, every time I passed the Shinjuku Southern Terrace over the next three years, the queue was out the door - and sometimes stretching halfway back to the Takashimaya building. Yet when we visited their brand-new Shibuya location less than a month after its grand opening, there was almost no lineup at all - at ten a.m. on a Saturday! 

I suppose that even now, doughnuts are just not acceptable breakfast food in Japan!

Urusei Yatsura

The book, which I haven't seen in years,
goes for $60+ on Amazon nowadays.
Oh.

About ten years ago I picked up a manga called Lum: Urusei Yatsura as reading material in a comic shop while on a trip to Halifax. It was literally the best deal on the shelf (back in the day when Japanese comics were not even 1/10th as mainstream as they are now!); 400 pages for $15 dollars. We were in for a long ride back to St. John's, so it was perfect.

I remember not being sold on Lum at the time. It was a little too wacky for me, and the "collection" nature of the book made it hard to follow at times. Still, as I was going through my photos from orientation to post on Tadaimatte, I remembered something that made me smile: on my first day in Osaka, while staying at the Dotonbori Hotel, the only thing on television that night was Urusei Yatsura. I walked in halfway through, so I didn't really get what was going on, but it was a relief to me to find something familiar to watch once it became too late to go outside in the unfamiliar city. The movie was Only You - you can check out the trailer below.

While I was thinking back to that, I decided to give Urusei Yatsura another try by watching the films, and over the past week or two have been doing that and finding that I'm enjoying the series considerably more. I'd developed a distinct taste for Takahashi Rumiko's vintage collections  long ago (Maison Ikkoku is my favourite manga) and while Urusei Yatsura is not her best work, it is still funny and lighthearted. It does contain many of the elements that I love about Ikkoku, a series that came a short while later, and clearly after learning a few lessons about the direction she wanted to take her work.

I know many people enjoyed the more well-known Inuyasha, but in my opinion, 'slice of life' stories are what Takahashi Rumiko does best. I'd definitely like to see her return to this sort of project someday.

Only You

Anime and Manga

Don't really have many photos of anime-ish stuff in Japan, but here's an amazing birthday
cake with a Dragon Ball character on it that Emily got me for my birthday in 2009. Fantastic.

When I first started taking Japanese classes, I'll admit that it was interest in anime that got me there, and not the other way around. From junior high school on, I was a devout fan of the Japanese animated shows that were on television here in Canada, starting with Astro Boy and progressing to Sailor Moon, Samurai Pizza Cats, The Wizard of Oz, Dragon Ball and others. It was after I started going to the local anime society in 10th grade that I got really interested in watching shows in their native Japanese, with English subtitles.

I did a fair amount of growing up between then and when I left for Japan; I had begun to move on to other things by the time I graduated, as I had so many hobbies that I rarely had time watch anime. (I still read manga, when I can afford it.) Fans, I'm sure, would probably consider it an incredible waste that I went to Japan after this had happened!

I clearly remember a conversation I had with my vice-principal and my go-between in the car as we left Osaka Orientation, and they asked if I liked manga. This was the first time I had met either of them and I wanted to make a good impression; didn't want to look like what some JETs referred to as an "akiba-boy/akiba-girl," someone who only came to Japan for the chance to go to Akihabara and buy toys. At the same time, I couldn't exactly lie, so I replied "sometimes," and they asked what series I liked.

Scrambling for one that wasn't too associated with 12-year-olds, I replied that I liked Hikaru no Go (a series I hadn't read in many years), and then had to field questions for the next five minutes on the plot of Hikaru no Go and whether I could play Go and so on. Oops.

Mittsume ga Tooru figure.
Tezuka Osamu, creator of this series as well as classics
like Astro Boy, is said to be "the father of manga."

Still, when I was there, the mere exposure to so much animated goodness had me back into it on a smaller scale. This is mostly thanks to the SkyPerfect satellite service - on my first month in Osaka, all the JETs did a weekend of seminars at a local language institute to help speed us along on our journey to Daily Life In Japan. We had a fair amount of down-time and I hadn't made any close friends yet, so I spent a lot of it in my room watching TV. There were two channels that showed a ton of nostalgic shows that I hadn't seen in years - Pocket Monsters (the original version of Pokemon), Ranma 1/2, Dragon Ball Z and the like. The channels were Animax and Kids' Station, and they showed anime both new and old, 24/7. I decided then and there that I was buying a satellite dish. Soon, SkyPerfect TV was streaming gems to me like Maison Ikkoku, Cat's Eye, Minky Momo, KochiKame, Touch, Nodame Cantobile, Sailor Moon, Kaiketsu Zorori, Dokonjō Gaeru, Detective Conan and Lupin III.

For a long time, I was so relieved to hear "easy" Japanese that I understood, I left the television on 24/7, hoping it would sink into me by osmosis.

This phase passed, and soon I was probably paying way more for my satellite service than was worth it for the amount of TV watching I was doing. The honeymoon phase of struggling through manga in Japanese was also over, but it was nice having the option. On a lazy rainy day, it was good to just be able to turn on the television and know that there was probably something on worth watching - even if that something was marketed at 12-year-olds.

Orientation in Tokyo

One of the things about the JET programme that separates it from other teach-abroad organizations is that when you go, you go very well prepared. Each consulate handles its own departure guidelines, but I understand that most of them hold a number of events to help you prepare. Toronto JETs had the luxury of multiple Q&A sessions, a Japanese crash course, a 3-day pre-departure seminar, and a final pre-departure orientation, all before leaving Toronto! I lost out, as my hometown was more than three hours flight from Toronto, and I couldn't possibly hope to take advantage of anything but the final orientation. Luckily for me, on arrival, we spent three days in Tokyo doing yet more seminars, lectures and being fed more information than we could possibly hope to retain.

The Keio Plaza Hotel in Shinjuku

The Keio Plaza Hotel is a gorgeous, high-class hotel in the heart of Shinjuku. I'd like to tell you that I had the time of my life at Tokyo Orientation, which is regarded by many JETs as a free vacation in the capital. Not so much for me - I was so jet-lagged I barely remember a thing. I can't sleep sitting up, so the 13 hours from Toronto to Tokyo was pretty difficult. 

In Tokyo I roomed with a girl who was on her way to Chiba prefecture, but we hardly saw each other. I couldn't sleep on arrival, so I fell asleep in the assembly the following morning (!), got permission to skip afternoon lectures to return to bed (!!), where, of course, I still could not sleep. My first true experience with jet lag. I went for a walk before dinner and got thoroughly lost in Shinjuku. That night, I passed on a nomihoudai (all you can drink) with the other Osaka JETs so I could rest....but, of course, I couldn't...guess who ended up nodding off in lectures the following day as well. I think my combined total for the entire weekend up until then was less than five hours of sleep. My internal clock just could not get in sync with Tokyo's. 

I had to pass on a Canadian embassy welcoming event that evening. I caught an hour's nap, decided to cut my losses and went to Krispy Kreme. This was clearly the best idea I could have ever had - I got a full night's rest for the first time since I'd arrived in Japan.

So when I think back to my memory of Tokyo Orientation - it's just not there. All I remember is the zombie haze of wearing a suit and sitting in a conference room, then laying in bed, then buying a power strip at Yodobashi Camera so I could plug in my grounded laptop. Then suddenly I was on the bullet train, off to Osaka.

I think I missed out...!