By Billy Hammond (Copyright AELS) I arrived in Japan for my English conversation school teaching job with only a suitcase and a gym bag. Naturally, I couldn’t pack many clothes in that amount of luggage, which also contained a large kanji dictionary, two Japanese-English dictionaries and the text the school said they were using (it turned out that they weren’t using it, other than for advertising, but that’s another story). Having very few clothes meant that I had to make use of a launderette quite frequently. My 4 ½ mat room didn’t have a bath, and it certainly didn’t have a washing machine! I would bundle up my dirty laundry and take it to the nearby launderette a little before 6:00am to wait for it to open. A very old woman, probably in her 80s, was always there and […]
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