The Novella Life of Illuscia Nester Himawari

In the 70’s my uncle applied for a job teaching English in Japan. My family says he came back a physical and mental wreck. I finally got him to tell me what happened. This is his story in his words… Back then the Japanese government was just starting to bring people over to teach English. I applied, but never heard anything back, moved on. A few months later I get a call from some guy saying he works for a Japanese recruiting agency and that they desperately need a teacher for some rural town; says he got my info from the government. I was happy as hell and accepted, the next month I’m on a plane to Japan. (By the way, I didn’t speak Japanese.) I knew it was going to be rural, but when I got there my stomach sank. The town, or should I say village, was literally on the side of a mountain. It was named “Inaka” and maybe 500 people lived there. Forget advanced technology or salarymen, I’m talking about farmers, rice patties, dirt roads, traditional houses. Place looked like it was out of...

by reddit user dotasmurf768 I sipped my now cold coffee, just praying something interesting would happen. This is typical of most workdays, except today, it actually happened. Its still fresh in my head, this man walked up, with the swagger of a millionaire and spoke to me in some unfamiliar language like I was supposed to know what the hell he was saying. I figured it was German or some other aggressive language, because that’s what it sounded like; so I notified my manager because I was not about to deal with this shit this early in the day… I simply don’t get paid enough. After five minutes of my manager talking with his hands, people started getting frustrated and moving to other lanes. I nugged my manager letting him know how long this was dragging on and he signaled that he understood. We lightly guided the man by the arm to our questioning room because we couldn’t get him to give us some form of identification. He struggled, as I would suspect most people would; th...