Warning: After reading this article you may be so overwhelmed by the amount of awesome in Hiroshima that you’ll never want to leave. So, if you’re hoping to travel outside Japan, or even to other areas of Japan, we recommend reading this article after you’ve already taken those trips.

This May I took a long overdue vacation home to America. Having lived in Japan for five of the last six years, I expected some level of reverse culture shock. I knew this meant feeling like a foreigner in your own country, but I had no idea just what that meant or how it would feel.

This is the second part of a two-part series about how the Japanese government’s most recent update to its English education guidelines could change the way English is taught in Japan’s schools, and what those changes could mean to ALTs.

Steven Horowitz, founder of JetWit.com, brings us this important message about the uncertain future of the JET Programme. It seems that the JET Programme is in danger of being cut back or even eliminated. Please read and let’s discuss what we can do!

There’s a lot of outlets for blame if you’re bad with your money, but that game won’t get you any where with your money. If you’re ignorant with your wallet and expenses, you’ll always be playing catch up. Instead, fix the money leaks in your wallet and use that money to pay off credit card debt, fund your next weekend excursion, start an emergency fund, or store away for a future dream house. Let’s look at two common money leaks for people abroad when it comes to credit cards.

In JET a lot of emphasis is given to instruction in the classroom, but this doesn’t always give us a deeper look at the underpinnings behind student behaviors. As teachers, it helps if we remember that students are going through an eventful time in their life, and think about how we can encourage students as people in addition to helping them better speak English. How do we do that? I’d like to discuss some basic psychological theory that can help us to understand student behavior during adolescence, and offer ideas about classroom approaches based on this understanding.

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.

Dan Moeller tells us why he thinks America has a few things to learn from Japan when it comes to school lunches and health education.

Toukasan, a.k.a. the Yukata Festival, will arrive in Hiroshima city June 4 and continue through the weekend. The Yukata Festival is the perfect opportunity to show off your yukata along with thousands of other people downtown. But are you ready? For those of you who aren’t sure exactly how to put on your yukata, Monica has put together this helpful step-by-step guide and video.

Are you hoping to make a trip home this summer, but suffering from sticker shock looking at international plane fares for August? Thinking about biting the bullet and putting the purchase on your credit card? If you think it’s expensive now, wait ’til you see how much it really ads up to when you add it to the debt already on a credit card. Austin crunches the numbers for us, and gives us some handy tips to save money so you can afford that plane ticket home this summer – and pay for it up front.