Continuing on from last month’s Miso Green is part two of my friend Savo’s life story. It’s a really good one, so check out last month’s piece if you need to catch up.  I had another huge decline in my condition when I was 28…. I was swollen, feverish, and couldn’t even get…
        When my boyfriend, Chris, first arrived in Japan, he didn’t have a job in hand. He found one rather quickly—within about 6 weeks—but there were still a few months between his hiring and start dates, so he decided to sign up for WWOOF Japan and work on…
I’ve never watched cooking shows with any degree of commitment, but I often use Food Network’s website for recipes; since contributions are almost entirely made by professional chefs with strong reputations, they are more likely to taste decent when a schmuck like me attempts to replicate them. Their large staff of celebrity chefs all have…
There is a lot I could have written about in the last three months, but I’ve been sick and busy. Those are easy things to say to an editor who is, albeit very kindly, urging contributors to write so that she doesn’t have to put an entire magazine together on her own, but those aren’t…
This year, I served as a helper ALT at our anticipated/dreaded Yashiro orientation. I decided to volunteer to help in part because the preparations would give me something to do during the summer besides bum around on social networking, and in part because I recently quit drinking, and thought that the Beer Garden welcome party…
        The August issue is a great time to address the new arrivals to the JET program. Welcome! You have likely just settled into your apartment, perhaps with inherited items from your predecessor, but likely without much. It’s also likely that you don’t have a lot of money on…
For this month’s Miso Green, I’d like to divide my attention to two audiences: those that are leaving the JET program and those that are staying. Your upcoming summer battles are very different, but I believe that I have ideas for making them tolerable in minimally impactful ways. Part 1: Simple solutions for…
After a necessary hiatus last month, Miso Green is back! I had in fact written an article for the May issue— that I ultimately hated—about 100 yen shops. That article is still quite immature and will probably appear in another form in the coming months. Instead, I’d like to talk about something very personal—the way…
Once, a few years ago, another friend of the eco-friendly prerogative asked me which I would rather pay for, organic food or local food. My instant reaction was to say local. When comparing the carbon footprints of organic food that was transported from a far-off place to local food grown using non-natural fertilizers and insecticides,…