A friend found this journal by accident the other day when we were mucking around on Google, and it reminded me that I haven't posted here in a very long time. I spent some time afterwards wondering why. I finally realised the answer when I thought back to why I created this journal in the first place. It was for two reasons - for me, to record the memories and experiences of my new life here in Japan, and for you, to keep you up to date with what I was doing and what life in Japan is like. What I realised by thinking back is that the first reason is not really relevant to me any more. Basically, my life here in Japan is no longer 'new'. Having lived here for two and a half years now I am pretty much settled, and although I continued to be amazed, confused, surprised and amused almost every day by the things that go on around me, I don't really have much motivation to *write* about it. It's a case of the unusual becoming the usual, I suppose.

That naturally lead me on to think about what to do with this website. It basically have two options, the first of which is to just leave it as it is. That doesn't seem like much fun for anyone, and like a waste of my prepaid domain name! The other option, then, is to try to find something else to do that is more relevant to me and something that I actually want to keep updated. Luckily for me, I had already found the answer when I was trying to work out why I didn't feel like updating any more, and went back to read this journal from the beginning.

When I did that, I realised that amongst the mumble jumble of words in my monolithic posts that were my attempt at dealing with living in a foreign country for the first time, I tended to spend a lot of time talking about a certain few topics. Sure, each topic was spread over lots of posts and combined with other topics and all the stories of the things I was doing and so on, but they were all definitely there. Some of those topics in particular popped up a lot, and I decided that I liked three of them. So, I had my answer - I'm going to change this blog to focus on those three areas. Think of it as a commentary ON Japan, instead of about my life IN Japan. I'll still maintain this journal about my life here and post in it when I feel like it, but the main pages are now going to cover Japan (culture, work, myths, good & bad etc.), Japanese (learning resources & techniques, my own discoveries, interesting Japanese) and Media (other random cool stuff).

Or at least, that's the plan. I've got to update the code that runs this website in order to do it, and although I made it highly modular and did a decent job with code comments when I first wrote it, the code itself is over 3 years old and I haven't programmed much since then. Hmmm, I guess it's going to be a long term goal?! Still, it's something I really want to do, as it seems almost like a natural evolution of this journal. When I first came to Japan I was really naive and got excited about everything, cramming whatever was in my head at the time into a post. Let's face it, it was a bit of a mess! Now I've had some pretty decent experience with Japan and Japanese, and I feel that it's the right time for me to start writing about those things in particular, individually.

Well, that's about all! I'm still working on the code and I have no idea when it'll be done, but I just wanted to let you all know that I'm still here and that I'm still thinking about this journal. Hopefully there'll be an updated version of ninjagaijin.net and a bunch more posts up here soon :)