Jay's Juicy Japan Junk Logo

On October 1, 1997, a naive young man nineteen years of age set off from his hometown of Houston, Texas for his first trip abroad. His purpose: to study the language, culture, people, economy, history, and various other aspects of Japan, a country with which he had been fascinated since his youth. He had no idea what to expect, having very little study in Japanese culture and history, and absolutely no knowledge of the language. Yet he was eager to learn, and learn he did. He also managed to go lots of great places, meet plenty of cool people, learn a lot of Japanese, and have the best experience of his life. I'm very fortunate to be that young man, and this website is here to share my experience with others.

Actually, there are several reasons this website exists. The first and foremost is to give people a look at Japan through pictures. I found that my greatest interest in Japan before actually going came from looking at pictures. Crowded subways and city streets, neon-lit stores on every corner, mountains throughout the countryside: these things all sounded so foreign yet so exciting to me, and the more pictures I saw, the more I wanted to go and experience these things for myself. Right before I left for Japan, I purchased a digital camera, the first real camera I had ever owned. I wanted to capture lots of pictures of this foreign land, pictures of my own. I ended up taking about 5,000 pictures during my stay, and about 500 more upon a return visit this past summer on my way to Taiwan. Realizing the potential some of these pictures possess to encourage other peoples' interest in Japan, I felt a website displaying pictures of my trips to various parts of Japan, as well as other selected pictures taken throughout my stay, would be a very worthwhile undertaking. Another reason for creating this website is to record my experience over there, as I didn't keep a journal and after only a year and a half, I've found that it is getting rather hard to recollect how a lot of things happened during the course of my stay. This may or may not be useful to other people, but I feel that an experience like this should not be left in the deep recesses of my head only to be forgotten somewhere down the winding road of life. I think it should be written down somewhere to look back upon fondly years later, and even if this doesn't benefit other people, it is certainly of great benefit to me. The final reason for creating this site about my experiences in Japan is that it will serve as the foundation for a web project on Asia that I've been planning for several years now. This project began with the simple idea of sharing pictures of my travels in Japan with others, but as I have now been many other places in Asia, and obviously taken MANY more pictures, the idea has evolved and now comprises several countries. I had planned to make the highlight of this site a trip to China I was going to take in the summer of 2000, but since I opted to stay in Houston that summer as I would be studying abroad in Hong Kong the following school year, plans for that portion of the site have been postponed. However, I'm still very interested in taking an extensive trip through China for research and pictures, and while I am in Hong Kong I might be able to make this trip if I can find the proper funding. For more info on this trip or on the China portion of this site, click here. These are the reasons I've chosen to invest so much time into making this website, although it hasn't been easy getting started.

There have been several attempts on my part over the past two years to make a website about my experience in Japan. The first attempt, undertaken in the summer of 1998 while still in Japan, actually culminated into a decent looking site that was well planned out, which I placed on a free Geocities homepage. I planned to write about all the various places I visited, the friends I made, the things I had come to love, and anything and everything else that fascinated me about Japan. I finished the original page and had links to at least 30 different pages I planned to make, but only one of these pages ever got finished. That page was a general introduction to Japan, which has been incorporated into the introduction I now have on this website. The problem was that I left Japan soon after I finished setting up the site, and I came back to the US only a few days before a new semester started here at school. Once I got bogged down with homework, projects, and the soccer team, I quickly gave up on the idea of ever completing my site. So I abandoned it. Twice since then I've tried to gather up enough time and energy to either work on the old website or create a completely new one, but both times I ended up investing my time in other pursuits.

Over the winter break of 1999-2000, a year and a half after leaving Japan, I decided to make a website for the JTW program I participated in during my stay in Japan. I finished it just as the new semester began, but I didn't want to stop there. So I decided to start from scratch and create a brand spanking new website, with hopes of including pictures and information from my three month stay in Taiwan and eventually adding more pictures from future trips to Asia. This is how eat.rice.edu got its start, and Jay's Juicy Japan Junk will remain an integral part of the site. By the way, in case you were wondering, I'm a big fan of alliteration, which is why I came up with Jay's Juicy Japan Junk. I actually used it first as the title of the massive e-mails I sent to my friends while in Japan, and I liked it enough to keep it as the title of this site. As to whether the stuff I have to offer here is actually junk, I leave that to you to decide.

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