Introduction

Dear friends, lovers and other strangers,

As some of you might already know, in less than a week from now I will be living in Osaka, Japan.
I will attend Osaka University for five months and study Japanese language and culture.
Over the past couple of months I have told a lot of people about my upcoming journey.
There was one reaction that almost everybody had in common; everyone would have some anecdote
or story about Japan that would involve something that we in the Netherlands experience as strange.
For example I’ve heard things about underwear already used by girls being for sale, salary men going out to party that sleep in some corner of the club and go back to work again, and that Japanese people allegedly eat dolphin-blowhole.

Every time that someone would tell me such a story they would look at me for confirmation. Of course I might know a little bit more about Japan because I’m going there and I did some googling. However I don’t know either whether all these weird things you hear about Japan are true or false.

Some people, upon telling them I’m going to Japan for 5 months, also asked me whether I was going to keep a blog or not and I wasn’t really sure about that yet. I didn’t really want to write the standard travel-blog. But now I had this great idea:

During my stay in Japan everyone can ask me about the strange things in Japan and I will seek out whether it is true or false. I’ll be your little overseas detective reporting back via this blog. You can ask me questions on Facebook or with a comment underneath.

Looking forward to your questions!

Love,
Anna