For Fukui’s Sake - Two years in rural Japan

A Japan where snakes slither down school corridors, where bears prowl dark forests and where Westerners are still regarded as curious creatures. Welcome to the world of the "inaka" – the Japanese countryside.

Unhappily employed in the UK, Sam Baldwin decides to make a big change. Saying sayonara to laboratory life, he takes a job as an English teacher on the JET Program in a small, rural Japanese town that no one – the Japanese included – has ever heard of.

Arriving in Fukui, where there’s "little reason to linger," according to the guidebook, at first he wonders why he left England. But as he slowly settles in to his unfamiliar new home, Sam befriends a colorful cast of locals and begins to discover the secrets of this little known region.

Helped by headmasters, housewives and Himalayan mountain climbers, he immerses himself in a Japan still clutching its pastoral past and uncovers a landscape of lonely lakes, rice fields and lush mountain forests. Joining a master drummer’s taiko class, skiing over paddies and learning how to sharpen samurai swords, along the way Sam encounters farmers, fishermen and foreigners behaving badly.

Exploring Japan’s culture and cuisine, as well as its wild places and wildlife, "For Fukui’s Sake" is an adventurous, humorous and sometimes poignant insight into the frustrations and fascinations that face an outsider living in small town, back-country Japan.

"For Fukui's Sake" is available now from Amazon. For more info, visit http://ForFukuisSake.com

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