When I am not at my computer, I am known by my pseudonym, Paul Seino… I’ve been wanting to start a blog for a while now, and I’ve finally decided to bite the bullet and make it happen. As it says above, I’m just a guy in Japan with a blog, and here I intend to share my own thoughts and feelings about various things that I encounter in everyday life here in Japan. I will also draw on some of my 15 years of experience here, and try to provide some information or other insights that may be useful, especially for those who are new to Japan or thinking of visiting or coming here to live.

First, a little about me. I was born and raised in Perth, Western Australia, and had the opportunity to travel overseas for the first time and come to Japan at the age of 19, as a missionary. I was here for 2 years, and met a lot of great people and had a lot of exciting experiences in the northern part of Honshu – the Tohoku area. After I went back to Australia, I met a beautiful half Japanese girl, and we were married soon after. After I completed my degree in Business we came to Japan.

The plan was to work here for a couple of years, to help pay for an MBA, and then to go back ‘home’ to Australia after 2-3 years, or 5 years at the most. 13 years later, I’m still here… I did complete the MBA, as well as a Masters of Information Systems, and was lucky enough after almost 5 years living in freezing Niigata, to find a job in Tokyo localizing web sites for a major investment bank. I worked there for about 2 years, before the bad economy of the early 2000’s saw my company scaling back on their internet development, costing me my job…

After being retrenched, I spent some time looking for a new job, but in the meantime began translating (something that I had done a little in Niigata and as part of my previous job) on a freelance basis, to help pay the bills. As time went by, this became my main source of income, and today I have about 10 years experience as a translator, and now specialize in legal and business related materials, from Japanese to English (feel free to contact me if you have any translation related queries – email).

In addition to 10 years of translating experience, I have also spent most of the last 15 years teaching English in one form or another. In Niigata, this was my main bread and butter, while I worked on my Masters degrees. Since moving to Tokyo, I have managed to find opportunities to teach, and while translating is my main job, I still enjoy teaching about 2-3 hours a week. These days its more of a hobby than a job, and a chance to get me out of the office. One of these days I’ll write a more detailed post about my teaching philosophy, but basically I use my classes more as discussion groups and motivational lectures, than as forums for teaching pure grammar etc. My focus is more on getting people to use what they have already got, and to develop communication techniques which can be used to convey their meaning even when they don’t happen to know the right words.

Now a little about the name of my blog. Every foreigner of course is familiar with the term ‘gaijin’ (外人). It is a term that is mostly used with familiarity and no ill feeling by many Japanese people, in relation to foreigners. But it is also a term that, by its very nature and definition, can place something of a barrier between ‘pure bred’ Japanese people and foreigners or ‘outsiders’ (外の人).

One of the things that I was most conscious of when I came to Japan was that I wanted to make Japanese friends as much as possible, and wanted to live as close to a Japanese style of life as possible. That doesn’t mean that I was anxious to live in the smallest apartment I could find, or that I don’t enjoy Western style food etc.  And of course, there are many things that I confront in every day life, which I don’t feel comfortable with, and when that happens I do try to explain my position, rather than just going along with the flow. I don’t see these as Japan vs Gaijin issues, but rather as human issues, where I am simply trying to find the best way to do things, regardless of how things may or may not have been done in the past. And I try to explain things in those terms when I deal with people on a day to day basis.

Part of this of course is about learning the language. If you are coming to Japan for the first time, or even if you have been here for a while, I stress with all of the energy of my soul that you learn the language as well as you can. This will open doors like nothing else. And don’t learn slang or special dialects. Learn the purest, most polite Japanese you can. Again, this will open doors, and will impress the people that you interact with like almost nothing else. There is no better way to be accepted into a society than to be able to communicate with peopl on an equal basis. There is also no other way to convince a person of anything, than to be able to communicate effectively, using their language.

I think this is a large part of the thought behind this blog, and its name. This is an attempt to share whatever I see and feel, in the hope that it may make life easier for someone else, somewhere along the line. Also, the name ‘guyjin’, stresses the fact that I consider myself ‘just a guy with a blog in Japan’. I don’t see myself as an outsider. After 15 years here, I am almost at the point where I have lived longer in Japan than I did in Australia. And recently I’ve been trying to condition myself to hear the word ‘guyjin’ whenever someone calls me a ‘gaijin’… (which isn’t that often anymore…)….

Living in another country has taught me a lot of things that I don’t think I would have learned any other way. It has shown me a lot about what it means to be an Australian, for example, because I’ve had to explain it to people, and I’ve had to sort through in my own mind what the differences and similarities were between our two cultures and peoples. What I have learned is that while traditions and cultures may differ on the surface, and the means of communication and expression certainly differ, the underlying emotions and feelings are all the same. And by tapping into emotions, feelings, and also intellect, any differences that may have arisen due to geographical separation and differing histories can for the most part be melted away. That is the message of this blog. Japanese or Australian, American or German, Indian or Brazilian, we are all just guyjins or galjins…..