When a California surfer turned teacher takes a second chance at marriage, he not only marries his bride's family but her nation, Japan. This story follows the trials and tribulations amid the culture shock of a middle-aged couple as well as the challenges facing a small foreign community working at an English immersion school in Numazu, Japan. After fifteen years of single life, former California surfer turned teacher, Will Mast, marries the coquettish Yumiko Hirota, an English teacher from Gotemba, Japan. Will takes a job at a prestigious English immersion school and quickly gets into trouble from his lack of knowledge of Japanese ways. Will commits one faux pas after another while eating at the family restaurant and attending a tea ceremony conducted by Yumiko's father, the tradition-loving, kendo-wielding master chef, Hirota Akihiro-san. At first seeming to be a simple tale of a cross-cultural marriage, one finds oneself immersed in the many layers of cultural interaction that America and Japan have faced, from Commodore Perry's Black Ships to the dropping of the bomb in Hiroshima. Weeks' first novel, Gaijin Teacher; Foreign Sensei, captures the courage, humor, embarrassments, idiosyncrasies, and tragedies of these special individuals as they interact with traditional Japanese culture.

When a California surfer turned teacher takes a second chance at marriage, he not only marries his bride's family but her nation, Japan. This story follows the trials and tribulations amid the culture shock of a middle-aged couple as well as the challenges facing a small foreign community working at an English immersion school in Numazu, Japan. After fifteen years of single life, former California surfer turned teacher, Will Mast, marries the coquettish Yumiko Hirota, an English teacher from Gotemba, Japan. Will takes a job at a prestigious English immersion school and quickly gets into trouble from his lack of knowledge of Japanese ways. Will commits one faux pas after another while eating at the family restaurant and attending a tea ceremony conducted by Yumiko's father, the tradition-loving, kendo-wielding master chef, Hirota Akihiro-san. At first seeming to be a simple tale of a cross-cultural marriage, one finds oneself immersed in the many layers of cultural interaction that America and Japan have faced, from Commodore Perry's Black Ships to the dropping of the bomb in Hiroshima. Weeks' first novel, Gaijin Teacher; Foreign Sensei, captures the courage, humor, embarrassments, idiosyncrasies, and tragedies of these special individuals as they interact with traditional Japanese culture.

A collection of outrageous and hilarious true anecdotes about the antics of English Teachers in Japan.

An American Family in Japan. The Fenter family travels from Springfield, Oregon in the summer of 1977 to Isahaya, Kyushu Japan to teach English at Chinzei Gakuin. The family of four: Kenneth 37, Lora 36, Philip 12, and Janelle 8 enter into a world where they are on display and unable to communicate. Gaijin! Gaijin! is a portrait of the people, customs, and traditions of contemporary Japan far from the bustle of of Tokyo.

In this postmodernist addition to diary studies in SLA and applied linguistics, an autoethnographic approach is used to highlight the mutually constitutive relationship of language acquisition, sociocultural contexts, and L2 identities. The personalized account of the author's Japanese as a second language development is skilfully interwoven with ethnographic details and introspective commentary.

This book examines the ethnic, gendered, and embodied 'hybrid' identities of 'half-Japanese' girls in Japan, colourfully narrated through their own voices. The girls struggle to positively construct their identities into positions of control over disempowering discourses of 'otherness', while also celebrating cultural capital as they negotiate their constructed identities of 'Japaneseness', 'whiteness' and 'halfness/doubleness'.