Category Archives: The Mikan

To Clean the Mirror: Why I Love Yokai

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By Andrew Pappas

Monsters have always fascinated me. I used to be really afraid of them when I was a kid. My aunt and cousins like to retell the story about the time a witch mannequin at a shopping mall scared the heck out of me, so much that I refused to take another step and my mom had to take me back to the car. I was then again struck with terror that same day by a werewolf mannequin in a bowling alley till my uncle brought me over to it and pulled off the mask to reveal a cardboard cut-out of Elvira, the famous cult horror movie show hostess, and I saw there was nothing to be afraid of.

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Everyone is an Expert: My Love of Trivia

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By Jordan Rocke

Hey！It’s been a bit quiet on the blog for a while, so I decided to do the thing I do whenever there’s a gap and write an article myself. I’ve edited this blog for so long that I get very anxious writing anything as I have to be my own editor, and lord knows I need a better editor than me to be readable.

Anyway, today I thought I’d talk about trivia, and why I adore it. Trivia is such a weird thing to describe, just a random series of facts about, by design, unrelated or barely related topics. I was obsessed with history as a kid (and still am now). This worked out for me, because my primary school teachers would use trivia quizzes as filler activities during pre-holiday periods (which is basically what I do with trivia games now too). I still remember knowing the inventor of penicillin in year 6, and being in the handful of kids who got prizes for their scores.

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Ehime JETs Online: Justin and JTravels

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By Justin Woodard

Hey everyone! Quick editor’s note: This is the first in (hopefully) a series of articles focused on current and former Ehime JETs, and the media they create. I mainly want to focus on blogs and Youtube channels, but basically anything local JETs create is fair game! If you are or were an Ehime JET and would like to share your blog, channel or etc with us, please get in touch at themikanblog@gmail.com.

On a bright and sunny day during a pandemic filled Golden Week, I hopped on my bike and started riding to a beautiful little shrine in a small suburb just outside of Matsuyama called Hojo. I had my phone in hand and a goal in my head that started back before I came to Japan. One day as I was sitting in my college fraternity watching the “Abroad in Japan” channel on YouTube, I thought to myself that it would be a lot of fun to go around Japan filming the places I get to visit, just like the sarcastic British guy I was watching. Now there could also be a sarcastic American guy making YouTube videos. Fast forward two years and I’m on my bike pedaling past rice fields and old homes until I arrived at my favorite shrine in Hojo. As I was parking my bike, I realized I didn’t have any plans for what I was going to talk about in my first video, so I improvised, as all good YouTubers do. I started talking about the proper way to enter and exit a shrine as well as the dos and don’ts while praying so as not to offend the gods of Shintoism.

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Who Doesn’t Like A Good Story?: Game Mastering at the 2022 Ehime AJET TTRPG Conference

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By Charles Marshall

While I love the life I’ve made for myself here, there’s definitely things that I miss having the ability to easily get involved with when I lived back in Alaska. And I’m sure that’s something a lot of us can relate to to some extent or other regardless of the hobby or passion. For me, it tends to be theatre, musicals and, most relevant to this article, table-top role-playing games, or TTRPGs for short.

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Unbeaten Paths: Nanyo 2021 (Happy New Year Edition)

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Welcome to 2022, everyone! Hopefully it’ll mark a much easier year for folks to actually get into Japan than the rest of the 2020s so far. This is the last entry for this set, but considering we still have folks due to arrive who were delayed by the Omicron shutdown, I’m sure there’ll be another set of Unbeaten Paths published before the end of the year.

Anyway, on to our beloved rural southern third, Nanyo! As with before, we also have some introductions from new JETs in the last Unbeaten Paths, located here. On to the new folks!

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Unbeaten Paths: Chuyo 2021 (Actually Here Edition)

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Edited by Jordan Rocke

Welcome back, everyone! Here’s part 2, looking at the closest thing you’ll find to a city in Ehime: Chuyo. As with last time, you can find a decent number of 2021 Chuyo JET intros in our previous Chuyo installment, located here. If you’re in the mood for more intros after this, check out our previous installment from Toyo, located here. Now here’s the intros!

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