Captain Cassidy and her Evil Ex moved to northern Japan in the 1990s. This is the story of how she and Biff crashed and burned—and what she learned from the experience.
As I look back at my experience living abroad, brief as it was, one thing that really springs out at me is how secular Japan was. It might have Shinto shrines in its shopping arcades and monasteries sprinkled around its urban residential neighborhoods, its television might have the occasional spiritual Read more…
Jazz played on the stereo, the notes mingling with nickel-sized snowflakes blowing in through the open windows. I was at a party, one of the first I’d ever attended. I knelt at the coffee table, an unexpected orange in my hands, while a Japanese girl I didn’t know knelt beside Read more…
Today we’re going to talk about that startling moment when I realized that I applied very different standards of critical evaluation to my own religion compared to other religions–a moment that, ironically, could only happen for me when plunked down in a culture that totally didn’t care about Christianity. John Read more…
Today, on Mother’s Day, let me show you what real love feels like to experience. And let me show you how it differs from what toxic Christians have redefined as love.
When I was younger, I always had a very complicated relationship with food, and moving to a very foreign country brought that relationship into sharp focus. It’s very true that the last place in an immigrant’s house to assimilate is the pantry, and this old saying applies equally to an Read more…
You know, I wasn’t very old when I moved to Japan with my preacher husband Biff–24. I was in the middle of deconverting from Christianity, and I know that being part of the right-wingiest of far right wings of that religion had sheltered me to a large extent. And one Read more…
I was finally in Sapporo, Japan, and in the earliest days of the trip. It had been a really long, hellish, topsy-turvy day. But now we were approaching the tail end of it; as my mom would have put it, we were “getting on toward.” Now I lay almost entirely Read more…
It’s hard for me now to even think about all the different ways that I was a fish out of water when my preacher husband Biff and I moved to Japan to teach English. You’d be hard-pressed to find some additional ways than the ones I went through all at once. Not for nothing do people call what I experienced culture shock.
I once had an apartment in Sapporo… Sorry, I share with Betty White an unreasonable fondness for the movie Out of Africa. But that’s how I always think about my short time in Japan–this huge journey to another land, a journey that taught me quite a bit but which was, Read more…