I’ve been trying to find a good, preferably animated, way of explaining the nuclear power station situation in Japan to kids (and I guess a few adults!)   Wikipedia has some good stuff but it’s a very high level. But now I just found this (click here if you are on email and can’t see it)…

In addition to the 5,000 readers of this blog there are nearly 4,000 teachers on my monthly newsletter that I write in Japanese. After the sad news from New Zealand last month I promised them all that this month I would be back to being “Genki” 元気　the Japanese word meaning for “fun”, “energetic” & “full…

Taking a lead from Margit’s excellent comment on yesterday’s post, today we’re back to usual with this week’s game from Mido Farid.  Hopefully tomorrow I’ll have some info on how you can send messages to the kids in Japan. Cha Cha Pizza 1.  Draw up a big pizza on the board. 2. Cut the pizza…

On Friday afternoon I was in the gym. Then, as what usually happens, automated earthquake alerts came up on all the TVs. This is quite normal and there were three other big earthquakes before last Friday and nobody was hurt. This time the magnitude, we don’t use Richter scale over here, came up as 8.4 so the…

Thank you to everyone who wrote in asking where I was in the Japan earthquake. Luckily I was on the other side of the country and both myself and the Genki English staff are all OK. Quite a few of our regular readers are in the affected area though so I hope you are all…