Sam Baldwin
Far from the high-tech, high-rise of the super-cities, there lies another Japan. A Japan where snakes slither down school corridors, where bears prowl dark forests and where Westerners are still regarded as curious creatures. Welcome to the world of the ,inaka, â€“ the Japanese countryside.,Unhappily employed in the UK, Sam Baldwin decides to make a big change. Saying sayonara to laboratory life, he takes a job as an English teacher on the JET Programme in a small, rural Japanese town that no one â€“ the Japanese included â€“ has ever heard of.,Arriving in Fukui, where thereâ€™s â€˜little reason to lingerâ€™ according to the guidebook, at first he wonders why he left England. But as he slowly settles in to his unfamiliar new home, Sam befriends a colourful cast of locals and begins to discover the secrets of this little known region.,Helped by headmasters, housewives and Himalayan mountain climbers, he immerses himself in a Japan still clutching its pastoral past and uncovers a landscape of lonely lakes, rice fields and lush mountain forests. Joining a master drummerâ€™s taiko class, skiing over paddies and learning how to sharpen samurai swords, along the way Sam encounters farmers, fishermen and foreigners behaving badly.,Exploring Japanâ€™s culture and cuisine, as well as its wild places and wildlife, For Fukuiâ€™s Sake is an adventurous, humorous and sometimes poignant insight into the frustrations and fascinations that face an outsider living in small town, backcountry Japan.
Cultural,Japan,Travel,Nonfiction,Autobiography,Memoir,Asian Literature,Japanese Literature,Cultural,Asia,Biography Memoir,Humor,Biography,Cultural
For Fukui's Sake: Two Years In Rural Japan