Throwback Thursday: One Year in Beppu

 

I’ve gotten really behind with posting again, and I apologise for that. I’ve never been good at sticking to a routine, no matter how hard I try. But I’ve been wanting to make a post for a while about how I’ve now completed my first year in Japan!

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Hi No Umi Festival

Last weekend was Beppu’s biggest summer festival – the Hi No Umi (translating roughly to ‘sea of fire’) Festival. It takes place every year at the end of July, and has festival stands selling food and toys, music and dance performances, and the main event – fireworks!

Throwback Thursday: Beppu’s African Safari

One of the things I was most surprised to find that Beppu had in the surrounding area when I got here was the African Safari. Although it’s located a bit further away from the central city area, it’s still a popular tourist spot and a good way to spend half a day or so, plus you can get there by bus from Beppu Station.

But the best thing about it? You can feed the animals!!

Throwback Thursday: April “Ido”

After sakura season comes “ido” season, which I experienced for the first time this year.

“Ido” means ‘change’, which is a fitting word to describe April, as both the fiscal year and the school year actually start in April, unlike back home where the school year starts in September. This is why in a lot of anime or manga, at graduation or school entrance time for the characters, there’ll be cherry blossoms everywhere, rather than autumn leaves.

So, April is a month of new beginnings for both children and adults, with children starting a new school year, or depending on their age, starting at a new school entirely, and for adults, a lot of companies have their new employees (especially newly-graduated new employees) start in April. For the already established employees, there’s “jinji ido” (人事異動),  which can be translated as the “personnel reshuffle” or “staff reassignment”.

Throwback Thursday: Sakura in Beppu

Sorry for the lack of posts recently, I returned home for a week to visit my family so that prevented me from writing for 2 weeks and then the last two weeks have just been very busy. I’ll try to catch up and get back to the regular schedule~

This week’s Throwback Thursday is about sakura (cherry blossom) season, a much anticipated time of year in Japan and a time when everything is cloaked in a beautiful layer of pink.

Throwback Thursday: Going to the Opticians in Japan

Since coming to Japan, I’d noticed that my eyes felt a lot more tired than usual. I wasn’t sure whether this was due to my slightly unideal sleep schedule, the fluorescent lights at work, or using computers too long now that I have an office job for the first time. But after half a year here, I’d decided it was time to try to do something about it.

Throwback Thursday: Christmas in Beppu

I’m finally getting to the end of last year’s planned posts! I was going to post about a course I went on as part of work-related training, but as I don’t have access to the info I need right now and also since I posted about CIR stuff last week, this week’s post will be about how I spent my first ever Christmas away from home (as even on my year abroad I went home for Christmas).

Throwback Thursday: Tokyo Mid Year Conference for CIRs

I feel like I haven’t done a proper CIR-related post in a while, so I thought I’d write about the mid-year conference all the 1st-3rd year CIRs have to go to in Tokyo every year. I’m not sure if the ALTs have a similar thing to this, so I’ll just be focusing on the CIR one.

Basically, this is a 3-day conference of powerpoints and workshops by guest speakers, some of whom are previous CIRs. The conference as a whole is a good opportunity to both find out about all the different things CIRs can do in their placements, but also to get advice from and network with your fellow CIRs.

Throwback Thursday: Shrine Illuminations

Although I’ve already written about one illumination event that I went to, I thought I’d write my experience of another one as around Bonfire Night (5th November) there was an illumination by teamLab at Usa Shrine, the shrine I talked about visiting before.

Throwback Thursday: Halloween

I’m gradually getting through my backed up post ideas from last year and now we’re finally at Halloween! I’ve always loved Halloween, and any excuse to dress up really, but Halloween’s the big one so I wanted to do something really fun. I’d say that from what I’ve seen, a lot of Japan seems to celebrate Halloween, either by having big Halloween parties in the local community or just in local nightclubs, or by having Halloween themed English lessons (mostly thanks to all of the ALTs over here who love sharing their own countries’ events with their students). Since I don’t teach, however, I mostly shared my Halloween spirit with other foreigners, which was still really fun.