This book will be released in March 2025.
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WITH A FOREWORD BY LORD GREGORY MOSTYN
Since the first ‘Welch’ sailor set foot on Japanese shores in the seventeenth century to the present-day presence of high-tech Japanese companies in the Valleys, Wales and Japan are two nations with deeply entwined roots.
Captured in this groundbreaking book is a chorus of modern-day Welsh migrants to Japan. There is Catharine who, in 1965, followed her Japanese husband to an ‘out of kilter’ house in the seaside town of Zushi; Jac, the ‘capitalist ski bum’, who guides tourists through the bear-infested wilds of snowy Hokkaidō, while on a volcanic island in the Seto Inland Sea, Simon clears jungle vines to develop his vegan farm.
There are also actors, writers, teachers, an ex-bouncer turned martial artist, a filmmaker, a games localiser, and many more. There are even Japanese fans who promote Welsh culture in their homeland. Together they form a polyphonic group portrait based on oral-history techniques, mixing travel writing, character study and reportage, while proving an ear for natural speech.
Fresh, engaging, with a strong sense of space and place, but above all, a knack for crafting a life story, this volume of documentary literature presents universal themes of work, adventure, reinvention and survival. Here are people discovering and negotiating the land, the life and the culture of Japan, and putting down ‘transplantable roots’.
INCLUDES 45 B&W IMAGES
'Fantastic group portrait of people and place' – Nick Bradley, author of The Cat and the City
‘Pitch-perfect series of dispatches from Japan, each chapter an invitation into a different life – not to mention the fascinating interludes that intersperse each of the interviews. Enlightening and engaging at every turn.’ – Andrew Kenrick, editor, Hinterland
Susan Karen Burton is an oral historian with an interest in creative nonfiction. She was born in Scotland, raised in New Zealand and spent most of her working life in Japan. There, like many of the interviewees in this book, she began her career as a Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Programme assistant language teacher (ALT) in Hamamatsu, Shizuoka prefecture. She was later a Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) scholar at Tsuda Juku University in Tōkyō. After gaining her doctorate in history from the University of Sussex, she lectured in Japanese universities for ten years before returning to the UK to do a second PhD, this time in creative and critical writing at the University of East Anglia. She won the New Welsh Writing Awards 2020 Rheidol Prize for Prose with a Welsh Theme or Setting for an early chapter from this book, ‘The Transplantable Roots of Catharine Huws Nagashima’.