Misc.

Blog

About Lost in Japan

History
The Lost in Japan website began in late 2003 as lostinjapan.net, a site dedicated to showing the life of a JET Program Participant. Photos were displayed in a web gallery each month for 3 years.

After some unfortunate actions by my web host which rendered the gallery unusable, I became very lazy and motivated at the same time. After about 10 hours of trying to troubleshoot my gallery, I decided enough was enough and I wanted a new direction for my site. It was about that time that I was beginning to learn the basics of PHP / MySQL programming. At that time I was using livejournal for blogging, but wanted to create a separate and information-filled site about my escapades in Japan. Thus, lostinjapan.com was born around October 2006.

I still continue to tweak on my gallery at times, so perhaps one day my 2,000+ photos of Japan will be available for everyone to see. In the meantime, I will continue to update this site when the mood strikes me, as I learn more about programming, and as I gain more confidence in my creativity.

Site Improvements in the Works

Spam Protection
I seem to have a spam problem, so I will work on a better challenge question. I don't like the idea of challenge questions in general, but if I didn't implement some kind of post security, I would have about 3,000+ bot-generated comments on this site by now.

Entry Categories
I will add keywords to my blog entries soon. This is for the one or two people who have stumbled onto this site as well as to collect my thoughts for a current book project. *crosses fingers*

About Kimberly

Childhood - University
I, Kim, was born in the small town of Joplin, Missouri. Even though my mother's friend was Japanese, it wasn't until college that I tried my first sushi - spider roll. I knew so little about Japanese food that I assumed it might really be made from spider! I found the Vanderbilt Anime Club and was elected president because there were no other candidates. Through V-SLAM I made some new friends and began on the path for Japan.

Coming to Japan
When my university days were over, I decided to come to Japan for many of the wrong reasons. My friends and I were anime-worshippers at the time, and I thought it would be great to see Japan and for them to visit me and see it themselves. After arriving, I realized that they weren't in a position to visit me. It was a really rough first year, but I stuck it out. I began soul searching, trying to figure out what the heck I was going to do when I left the JET Program. It was then that the idea of "Lost in Japan" was born. It describes how desperate I felt to be alone, how confused I was by all the choices I faced about my future, and also the relief I felt to be so immersed by such a different culture. In the end I found that I was happy that I came to Japan, but I have yet to become un-lost.

Contact

Please see the contact page if you would like to contact me.

Photos