His name was Yasu. He was a public servant, a modest occupation that suited his quiet demeanour. Yasu was softly spoken; he would always pause and think before saying anything, something that I found rare in this world. To me, …
Meagan Sneddon Articles.
I’m sitting here listening to the rain and wondering where everyone is. It’s so silent. My tiny village seems to be deserted. It’s just the rain quietly tapping on the roof, asking if I’m alone. It’s a Friday afternoon, a …
I move house a lot. To be precise, at least once every two years. Since I hit eighteen and became an adult, I’ve been constantly on the move, floating from city to city, house to house, chasing the horizon and …
Let’s talk about honorifics. As a native English speaker, I’ve always struggled with honorifics (keigo). Not with using them, really – using honorifics is basically just memorizing the sentence patterns, like any other phrase – but with physically using them, …
It would get dark at 4pm in early winter, so I would sit on the train, rugged up in all my layers and feeling sleepy from the heated seats and soothing rock of the train, back and forth. All around …
Tokyo is an awfully isolating city. Feelings of loneliness, disconnection and numbness go hand in hand. There’s something incredibly romantic and fascinating about the loneliness that Tokyo inspires, especially in the colder months. From late autumn to early spring in …
Japanese people are always seeking agreement or consensus. They avoid any kind of confrontation, regardless of how minor.
The first year I lived in Japan, I was in a tiny shoebox of a student dorm adjacent to the university campus.
I have a love-hate relationship with Tokyo. I love the energy of it, the weird mix of people and the odd mismatch of worn-down salarymen tired of life and strange, quirky nonconformists, lining up patiently for the peak-hour train. Everything …
I used to write a lot when I was a student. I would write, travel, think, dream, write. I had so much time and so many blank notebooks, so many pens to bleed ink to the end, so many musings …