I have been hardcore neglecting this blog. More backlogs of stories to come, but a couple things for now:
I have employable job skills! (lolwut)
I went back to the states in November for the Boston Career Forum, the world's largest English/Japanese career forum. So I flew to 11 hours to Boston to interview with companies that also flew to Boston, even though their Tokyo offices are generally about 30-40 minutes from my apartment. Yeah. I had a hard time explaining that one.
BUT- a couple weeks after I got back, I got a full employment offer from Rakuten. Just accepted it right before the new year, so for the first time in 15 months I am not thinking about a job search, at all. Funny thing though: I still know very little about the concrete job details.
Fastest explanation of Rakuten is that its the Amazon of Japan, but it also has a lot of subsidiaries including travel, electronic money, investments, even wedding planning. When I start in October I'll have a month or two of training/evaluation and then they'll put me where the they think I'd be the best fit. Seems like this should work out well for somebody with an interest in everything but necessarily "tangible" job skills (oh hey, me!). But my various investigations into company atmosphere and happiness of current employees give me good vibes. (doesn't hurt that the pay is probably the most I could get as a new grad without going into finance and banking)
Did a lot of studying over the break, and most notably, I finished the exams on all 1945 of the Jōyō kanji (daily use characters), the characters required in primary/secondary education and generally used as a guideline of basic reading proficiency for newspapers and such.
Of course, the list was updated two years ago to now include 2136 characters. (jerk move, Ministry of Education). But when I originally set the goal to master all the Jōyō kanji, there were only 1945 at the time. So it still counts.
Third semester starts on Monday, reputed to be the hardest term academically. I'll be adding an Econ class, a business Japanese class, and a contemporary history class. The work so far seems challenging and interesting, and by this point we're using pretty much exclusively textbooks intended for native speakers.
To make this post more interesting, a mildly offensive (but still hilarious) example of how Japanese pop groups don't quite get how its insensitive to parody other cultures. T-ara, which is actually a korean pop group that also produces Japanese versions of their hits, dress up like Tiger Lily, and wave their palms over their mouths going "wowowowowowowo" as they dance around the teepees:
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