T H E S E A R E A F E W O F M Y F A V O U R I T E L I N K S I n C a s e O f J a p a n , C l i c k L i n k s Toronto JET Alumni Assoc. JET Manual - I am loathe to admit that anything good has come out of Toronto, but this manual was quite helpful when one is preparing to come over to The Japan for any length of time. Particulary as a JET. Which may seem obvious. BC JET Alumni Assoc. JET Handbook - slightly less useful than Toronto's. Likely due to excessive pot smoking. Teaching English In The Japan - A very basic run-down of how to come over to The Japan, get a job, and live in The Japan while doing aforementioned job. The "Happy Cow" Vegetarian Restaurant Listings for The Japan - Presumably, the "cow" is "happy" because you are not eating it. Japanese Vocabulary Quiz Action!- helpful, particulary if your browser can read hiragana, katakana and kanji! ESL Activities - a godsend for JETs, a.k.a. human "funhappyplaytime" idea-producing machines. Genki English - more ESL activities, these ones mostly designed to keep those adorable shogakko kids so preoccupied they forget all about "kancho'ing" you or punching you in the 'nards. Big Daikon - highlight is the discussion board that has assisted many a JET in sanity-retention. Liquid Room - one of the bigger, better, Tokyo live music venues. Or so I've heard; since shows there are usually 5500 yen and up (read: $70CDN. at minimum), I haven't exactly been a regular. Tokyo Veg - another vegetarian resource for the Tokyo-area plant-eating sissy-boy girly-man. Great place to interact with other malnourished/starving people! Tengu Natural Foods - I don't know what aging hippies do for dinero in The Japan, but they sure don't run hippie food co-ops 'cause there ain't none. Except for this mail-order service, which is basically where you are going to get all your food from if you are a vegemuhtarian in Japan and care about stuff like nutrition and don't want to, say, subsist entirely on inari-zushi, chocolate bars and lemon tea. Of course, the aging hippies what run this place appear to be gaijin, so the Japanese aging hippie mystery remains... Tokyo Vegetarian Guide - this puppy is more resource-based and less "on-line community"-esque than the Tokyo Veg site. Some interesting and useful stuff on here to bring up with any Japanese folk who expect you to be able to thoroughly explain why you don't eat dead animals although they know damn well you don't know enough Japanese to explain where your apartment is. Meaning basically every Japanese person. Hey, if you'd like to turn the tables on 'em, bring up stuff from this article on the history of vegetarianism in Japan and ask THEM to explain to YOU why they eat dead animals! HAH! JET Programme Blacklist - the site that dares to say, "abandon hope all ye who enter yon prefecture!" Oh look, there's my prefecture! Tokyo Vegetarian Restaurant Guide - very handy, especially since they list prices. Eating out in Tokyo can be, well, not-so-cheap, even if you are only eating plants. Tokyo Vegetarian and Health Food Restaurants - in Tokyo, you need three or four different websites listing the 30 or so vegetarian-friendly ("vegetarian-friendly" meaning there is at least one dish that doesn't not contain dead animal parts innit) restaurants out there. Metropolis - Tokyo's answer to The Mirror or the Village Voice or what have you. Except geared to the uber-wealthy yuppie and not nearly as interesting. But the classifieds are very handy! Let's Japan - Apparently, jaded and cynical gaijin english teachers in Japan felt that the Big Daikon discussion board wasn't sufficient enough, so they built a whole other 'site to vent on. MyLine - some sort of discount l.d. phone service. I know little to nothing about them, as I never make international calls (people that call their "friends" or "family" back "home" because they "miss" them are weak! Rollins out!). The Kanji Site - this is actually a wicked-excellent site with an wicked-excellent on-line kanji quiz that is wicked-excellent, not least because you don't need a kanji-capable web browser to use it. Also because the quizes are well organized according to what will be on specific Japanese gov't. Japanese proficiency exams! Yosh! Asahi Net - my ISP. No major complaints, and hella cheap now that I am cold-rocking ADSL! But BEWARE the NTT bills that can come with a dialup account my friends! I know from whence I speaketh! Dave's ESL Cafe - Dave was nice enough to put up and maintain this site of english-teaching job listings in Japan and lotsa other places, so I will forgo mocking his dorky picture, complete with Cosby-esque sweater. Puzzlemaker.com - if I had a dime for everytime a JTE asked me five minutes before their class to come up with some "fun activities," causing me to go to this crossword-and-word-search-puzzle-o-matic website to bail me out, I would not be able to spend it because the Japanese currency is different from American or Canadian currencies, and they have no dimes. Antiknock - the "Cheers" of Tokyo punk clubs. You can be gazillions of miles from home yet come to the punk show here and still see the same shit you would see going on back home - the tiny punk venue filled to 3x its capacity; the totally-drunk, puking, passed out kid; the kids at the front getting pissed off at the "moshers" slamming into them non-stop. Hey! Norm!