David Chart's Blog

Category: Japan

  • Accepted as Japanese

    Can immigrants to Japan ever be accepted as Japanese? If you read the English-language internet on the topic, you will find a lot of people saying that it is impossible. That’s not what I’ve found. A few weeks ago, I was at a rare in-office meeting at one of the groups I work with. The…

  • 2019 Survey of Foreigners in Kawasaki

    About ten years ago, I applied to join the Kawasaki City Representative Assembly for Foreign Residents. My goal was to get the city to carry out a survey of its foreign residents, to find about the problems they were experiencing, in particular the experience of racism. At that point, there was no good data on…

  • New Book: An Introduction to Shinto

    I have just published An Introduction to Shinto, a book based on the first two years or so of essays for my Mimusubi Patreon. It is available as a Kindle e-book from Amazon, from any of the various national Amazons. (The link is to the US site, because I think most potential readers are in…

  • Mimusubi Patreon Special Offer

    Note: The special offer is over now, but this post is still up as a historical record. You can find out what is happening with Mimusubi on the Mimusubi website, or the Mimusbi Patreon. To celebrate the release of the video about Shinto that I helped Greg Lam of Life Where I’m From to make,…

  • The Empty Seat Revisited

    When Baye McNeil writes about the empty seat phenomenon in Japan, the aversion that Japanese people have to sitting next to him on public transport, or, indeed, anywhere, he gets a lot of responses. Many of those responses are from people — white, black, male, female — who have the same experience. Many others, however,…

  • Japanese While White

    I naturalised as a Japanese citizen almost two years ago, and so when I travel abroad, I travel on a Japanese passport. This is interesting. My first overseas trip was to the UK, where, for the first time, I had to join the queue for non-EU people. After a really, really long wait, I got…

  • Reflections on Teaching English in Japan

    I am David Chart, and I am an English teacher. I have been teaching English in Japan since early 2004, so for about fourteen years now. Unlike many English teachers here, I have never taught English in an institutional setting. It has always been one-on-one, or possibly one-on-two, and I have always been freelance. Thus,…

  • Mimusubi

    This blog has been somewhat neglected of late, because most of my online writing has been connected to Mimusubi, and my essays about Shinto. That project has now been running for a year, and I’ve written nine essays. I’m currently working on the next one, which will be about Yasukuni Jinja. If that sounds like…

  • Loco in Japan

    A while back, when I wrote an article about racial categories in Japan, I got a response from Baye McNeil, the author of the Loco in Yokohama blog, and the two books that I will be reviewing in this blog post. That response led to me reading his books, which are primarily about his experiences…

  • Experiences of Racism in Japan

    It has recently been reported that the Ministry of Justice is to survey 18,500 foreign residents to ask about their experiences of racism and discrimination. A lot of the reports are describing this as “unprecedented”, but while it is larger scale than the Kawasaki survey, and apparently focused on racism, the Kawasaki survey is a…