About Essential Japan Guide

Or an Unlikely Tale of How an American Midwesterner Developed a Website about Japan

Welcome to the Essential Japan Guide!

Hajimemashite! (Nice to meet you!). My name is Shane (that's me in the picture with a couple young friends I met not too long ago in Kyoto) and the Essential Japan Guide is a little website that I created in order to share with you my love of Japan.

I suppose it's only natural that I would eventually develop a website about Japan, considering that I've been fascinated with Japan for as long I can remember.

A Passion Begins to Take Shape

I vividly remember my first exposure to Japanese culture. This was around the age of age of seven, when my parents took me to what was at the time my hometown's only Japanese restaurant.

Although Cleveland, Ohio is about as far away from Japan as you can get, I remember being fascinated by the Japanese atmosphere inside that restaurant: the Zen-like shoji paper screens and tatami floors, the kimono-clad waitresses, the exotic yet tranquil shamisen music, and of course the artfully presented sushi and tempura.

After graduating high school, my interest in Japanese culture grew as I devoured books on Japanese Zen Buddhism and studied traditional Japanese ceramics and painting. While working and going to college part time, I dreamed of one day traveling to Japan and studying ceramic art.

A Purpose is Formed

This desire eventually inspired me to take a beginning Japanese language course at a local community college. Although I had no aptitude for learning languages whatsoever, having nearly flunked out of Spanish in high school, somehow my fascination for Japan overcame my linguistic deficiencies as I discovered that I absolutely LOVED learning the Japanese language.

It was while taking this Japanese language course that my life's purpose and direction became clear: I would study Japanese and then travel to and live in Japan! From that point forward my life began to change in ways that were both rapid and exciting. I immediately transferred to Ohio State University to major in Japanese, where I somehow secured a full scholarship, a Godsend for a broke college student!

Living My Dream

More opportunities began flowing toward me one after another. In my senior year, having completed four years of Japanese course work within a single calendar year thanks to a wonderful accelerated study program, I embarked on a one-year foreign exchange program, fully funded by Japan's Ministry of Education!, at Japan's Tsukuba University.

Tsukuba might as well have been heaven to me as my actual first experience in Japan was everything I imagined and more. During my first year in Japan, I developed many incredible friendships, traveled throughout Japan, climbed to the top of Mt. Fuji, and became a fluent speaker, reader, and writer of Japanese.

I returned to OSU as a grad student of Japanese linguistics and language education, but my real goal was to get back to Japan as soon as possible. I was able to do so on a graduate research fellowship, which this time brought me to Yokohama, Japan's second largest city, and what I consider to be my second home! Yokohama is also where I met a lovely Japanese woman who would later become my wife.

Following my research fellowship, I decided to remain in Japan, where I lived and worked as a Japanese translator and interpreter for about four more years while loving every minute of it!

The Joy and Freedom of Working from Home

Circumstances brought me back stateside to San Diego, CA for several years, but I continued to travel back to Japan each year. While living in San Diego, I worked as a freelance Japanese translator and interpreter, and discovered the many benefits and joy of working from home.

Working from home gives me the ability to work on my own schedule and pursue my other great passion, surfing, as well as the freedom and flexibility to continue to travel extensively to and live part of each year in Japan. The five-second commute from my bedroom to my home office is also a pretty nice perk!

Building the Essential Japan Guide: A New Challenge!

Over the years living in and traveling to Japan, I have taken many photos and made many notes about my favorite places, experiences, and observations about Japanese culture. A couple years ago I came up with the idea of creating a website to share my love of Japan and inspire other would-be Japan travelers.

There was just one small problem: I had no idea how to build a web site. Technologically challenged, I was clueless about Internet technology, and things like HTML and Photoshop might as well have been Chinese to me. However, as I learned way back when I embarked on my study of Japanese, where there is a will and an inspiration, there is always a way.

My Site Building Solution!

As I was trying to figure out a way to develop my website and share my passion for Japan despite having no clue how to do so, I stumbled upon the solution to my problem in the form of SBI.

SBI stands for Site Build It! and it is an all-inclusive site building service that gives you every single tool you need to turn any hobby, passion or skill into a viable online business.

SBI was just what I was looking for because it requires no programming skills or web design knowledge, no business and not even a product to sell. All you need to supply are your own brains, passion, and motivation! SBI has all the tools you need, and they take you by the hand and teach you step by step how to use everything. Perfect!

SBI even helps you find the perfect topic for your site if you don't have one of your own yet, shows you step-by-step to build your site, to get traffic to it, and then they even teach you how to make money with it, no matter what it is about!

This was exactly what I needed, and after thoroughly checking SBI out and confirming just how comprehensive the service is, I took the plunge and got busy building the Essential Japan Guide--the site that you are now visiting!

What's Your Passion?

Do you have something that you are passionate about and want to share with the rest of the world? Would you like to join me in creating a business doing what you love while pursuing your passion? Would you like to work from home like I do and have full freedom and control of your life?

If so, have a look at the SBI Video Tour.

Want to know more? Check this out: hundreds of successful SBI websites, built by normal people like you and me. All these sites are in the top 1% of the most successful sites on the Internet!. Want to read even more? Check out these amazing people who have built successful websites around their passions!

You can also see that there is an amazing variety of topics that passionate people have turned into profitable websites with SBI. What's your passion? Can you imagine turning that passion into a business doing something you love to do?

Conclusion

So that's the story of how a Midwestern boy with an unlikely love for Japan grew up to travel to and live in Japan, become fluent in the Japanese language, marry a beautiful Japanese woman, and develop a website about his passion that has evolved into a business that provides me a nice little income and allows me to further pursue my passion for Japan while working from home and doing what I love.

I absolutely LOVE the fact that my passion for Japan has evolved to the point where I now have the opportunity and ability to share my passion with others through this website.

I hope that my passion for Japan shines through to you as you explore the Essential Japan Guide, and I hope that one day soon you too will develop a site around your own passion so that you can share YOUR passion with me and the rest of the world!