Japan Book Review Rural Reflections

Japan Book Review: Rural Reflections: What Provincial Life in Japan Taught Me in 1990-2001

Rural Reflections: What Provincial Life in Japan Taught Me in 1990-2001

ISBN: 979-8-9925344-1-2
McNay-Garwood Publishing, Tokyo, 2025
233 pp; paperback

Marshall Hughes taught English at Japanese public schools for more than 25 years as well as at educational institutions in South Korea, China and Cambodia. Hughes has a background in professional sports journalism and he has been publishing a large number of book reviews in various online publications including the legendary Japan Visitor as well as currently on the Goods from Japan site - the site on which you are reading right now.

Hughes grew up in the Bay Area, California and spent a good part of the 1980s in Hawaii, working as sports journalist.

Rural Reflections: What Provincial Life in Japan Taught Me in 1990-2001

Feeling restless after too many years playing golf on a public court at his favorite Hawaiian beach, Hughes applied at the JET Programme (Japan Exchange and Teaching Programme), looking for new experiences across the Pacific.

Hughes was hired for his first stint as JET Assistance Language Teacher (ALT) in 1990.

JET ALTs are often placed in quite rural areas and that's exactly where Hughes was sent. He started out in a small town named Yaita in Tochigi Prefecture, a long ride on local trains north of Tokyo.

In Rural Reflections, the recently retired Hughes details the first 11 years of his living and teaching in the Japanese countryside.

After his initial year in Yaita, Hughes continued his work at middle and high schools in a number of small towns in Ibaraki Prefecture. All those towns, including Yaita are still far off the tourist path today. Back in the 1990s, they were absolute backwaters. Surrounded by large rice paddies and with some unremarkable hills beyond them, those towns offered little attractions.

Tokyo fashion items of the time like T-Shirts featuring ridiculously nonsensical English slogans printed on their front certainly made it to those small towns. But that was about it in terms of modern influences.

Hughes' job as Assistant Language Teacher consisted of supporting Japanese English language teachers with their work. Those Japanese teachers had in most cases a rather poor command of English. Hughes's job was to introduce some real native English to the classroom.

His book details how that worked out in practice in rural Japan. In anecdotical style, Hughes recounts a great number of experiences in that field, some very funny, some rather sad.

Hughes' life as assistant teacher in the countryside was rarely exciting. In the book, he does however provide a great deal of interesting observations of how his life, his school work, his relations to the Japanese teachers, to his students etc. played out.

From the banality of school board meetings often led by clueless officials to the large number of rather awkward / strange / boneheaded Japanese teachers he had to work with to both talented and rebellious students, the book provides a lot of anecdotes that bring those years in the Japanese boondocks vividly back to life.

Hughes is clearly very fond of his memories of those days. Some of those memories may have actually been rather troublesome in the day, like him getting excluded from various school ceremonies simply because as a foreigner he was thought not to fit into the picture by some Japanese officials.

With the distance of the years, Hughes more or less amusingly notes those incidents as peculiarities of Japanese rural life back in the 1990s.

By now, even the tiniest towns in the Japanese countryside try to snatch their slice of pie off the booming foreign tourist industry. There will always be some sort of attraction... the ruins of an old samurai castle or something.

But what actually living in such a town as a foreigner would be like, those e-bike tours arranged by the local tourism promotion office don't reveal.

Marshall Hughes' book fills you in on that. Though he talks about the 1990s, many things may not have changed much since then. Except that everyone is staring at his smartphone now, even in the deepest of the boondocks.

Review by Johannes Schonherr.

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