What happens when you throw thousands of fresh-faced foreign graduates into a system and a country known for bureaucracy, insularity, and inflexibility? You get something that eventually became The JET Programme as we know it today.

For those living in Hiroshima prefecture, it is hard not to know the deep and profound affect August 6, 1945, had on the Japanese ethos. If you are like many who live here, you have probably been to the Peace Memorial Museum in downtown Hiroshima and seen the graphic images and personal accounts of the victims. These exhibits show a gruesome snapshot of the bomb’s destruction that is impossible to forget. Beyond these tragic exhibits, though, one place I turned for an even deeper look at the bomb’s effects was, believe it or not, a manga.

While this phrasebook’s 14 chapters and introduction offer a whole array of useful phrases organized thematically from “Chapter 1: What’s Up?” to “Chapter 8: Curses and Insults,” to “Chapter 13: Lovers’ Language,” it is often necessary to thumb through several pages of phrases you don’t need in order to find the one you are looking for. There is no index, and the chapter headings are fairly vague, such that, to find a fairly common phrase like すけべ (vulgar, lewd) you might have to search through the chapter on insults, and possibly “Chapter 4: Say What?” before finding it in the chapter on street fighting. (Yes, there is a chapter dedicated to street fighting.) With all of the above criticism in mind, however, I would strongly urge that the next phrasebook you purchase be from the Making Out In… series.

The Wide Island View would like to give warm congratulations to Jason Letts, a second-year ALT based in Shobara, on his new ebook, Powerless, available at www.powerlessbooks.com. The book is the first part in a fantasy-adventure series that Jason penned in his free time when he wasn’t busy clowning around with his elementary school English students. What amazing, wondrous things we can accomplish without the evil lure of the Internet, ね?… The story is centered around a character named Mira, a superhero not quite like any of the superheros we’re all familiar with.

Learning kanji is one of the most challenging aspects of gaining fluency in Japanese because a certain amount of kanji learning must be achieved through rote memorization. It is only through extended, focused contact with the kanji that they will become an intelligible, useful, and interesting part of your life in Japan. Indeed, once kanji are mastered to a certain extent, they can enlighten your study of other aspects of Japanese, especially vocabulary. It is with such an understanding of the central importance of kanji to Japanese language learning that James Heisig set out to craft a succinct method for memorizing the meaning and writing of all of the kanji. Volume 1 deals exclusively with those kanji known as joyo, or general-use kanji. Heisig’s method is more than impressive, it’s elegant. And it works.

David Mitchell’s long soujourn in Japan practically jumps off the pages of his books. Unlike many Western writers who have come to Japan and written about it from a skewed, almost naive perspective, his writing is deeply informed about this country, full of inside knowledge and refreshingly clear-eyed observations.

John Dower’s Embracing Defeat may seem like a daunting read at first glance. It won a Pulitzer Prize and a US National Book Award. It’s about the occupation of Japan. It’s close to 700 pages long. So it’s not exactly light-reading in both senses of the word. But those expecting a dry, academic re-telling (as I was), are in for a surprise. The strength of this fascinating book is that Dower focuses on individual stories of the occupation. Meticulously researched (150 of those pages are notes and an index), he has culled through an amazing amount of research material to give both Japanese and American perspectives on the occupation of Japan by Allied Forces that lasted from 1945 to 1952.

For a brief moment in college, I considered being an economics major because it seemed practical. However, when I saw the fat textbooks filled with numbers and jargon that would have put me to sleep after five minutes, I immediately changed my mind and took some classes on Latin America instead. I vowed I would never look at another econ book again but then I came across Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner.