自己紹介 (self-introduction)

Hi!

If you are reading this page, you are probably wondering who I am, or maybe you already know who I am but are interested in how I would introduce myself.  Whoever you are, welcome!

...yes, it totally took me five months to put up a self-introduction page.  LIKE A BOSS.

About me:

I was homeschooled through high school, studied at Foothill College for three years, and then transferred to Brown University.  At Brown I wrote an honors thesis on how modern Shinto has adapted to technological and social changes, and how these adaptations fit into the debate surrounding its religiosity.  I graduated in May of 2011 with honors in East Asian Studies, and I'll be entering the Regional Studies: East Asia master's program at Harvard University in fall of 2012, so I guess my thesis must have been pretty okay.

I've been speaking Japanese for a little over five years, but it doesn't always show.  緊張したら、言葉が出ないからです。が、頑張ります!

I am a giant nerd, and I like combining my academic interests with my nerdery.  Internet shrines?  Basically the coolest.  Anime shrines?  Even better.  Computer exorcisms?  SIGN ME UP.

I tend to write blogs in the same manner that I speak, which is to say with lots of italics and CAPITAL LETTERS FOR EMPHASIS and digressions.  If you are looking for an extremely academic blog full of profound insights on the human condition, this is probably not the blog for you.  I will occasionally write academic posts (or semi-academic posts), but a lot of the time this blog is my place to be slightly spastic.
I do actually read all my comments (yes, all 8 of them), so if there's something you want to know more about, you can always leave a comment below and I'll try to write something about it...eventually.

About my Fulbright: 

I'm currently one of the nine 2011-2012 Fulbright Fellows to Japan.  The Japanese FF program places recent college graduates at universities around Japan and essentially pays for them to work on a research project of their choice and take classes at their university.

I've been placed in Nagoya at Nanzan University, where I'm studying the interactions and connections between shrines and local communities.  There isn't a whole lot of existing literature on the topic (well, actually, there's pretty much zero existing literature on the topic), which means that most of my research is fieldwork and interviews at shrines in my area.  Occasionally I get some mochi thrown at my head as well.

All opinions on this blog are mine and are not the opinions of the Fulbright Program or the US State Department, so if you disagree with something I say they are not at fault.  YAY.