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Prospective Advertisors, Hello and Welcome! Oniko Goes to Japan has been on the web since August 1998 and has had many visitors, all interested in either the culture and history of Japan, or just the nitty-gritty of traveling to and within the land of the rising sun. Please don't mistake this website for a mere personal webpage.

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As an Anthropologist, I have read a lot of boring books about other cultures. The primary culprit in the dullness of these readings has been the authors' assumptions that their subject matter was interesting enough that the way they presented it didn't matter. But it does matter; a boring presentation can kill the interest of even the most ardent reader.
For this reason I chose to create an educational page about Japan that is based around diaries of my own trips to the country. This personal approach has advantages; it makes the readings more engaging by creating a sense of story within each separate travel diary, and presents the average American and European reader with a narrator they can identify with -- one that is just as confused by Japan's differences at first as the reader themselves would be -- so the reader learns about things along with the narrator.
Furthermore, the travel diaries are only half the website; in addition to these, and fully linked to within the text of each diary, are separate studies on various aspects of Japanese life and culture that need to be explained in fuller detail to readers. These studies are also available from a reference page that is linked to from the top of the website, so visitors can go straight to these studies without reading the travel diaries if they wish.
So Oniko Goes to Japan is not a personal webpage with an extremely limited audience and no specific focus; it is, in fact, an educational website about Japan that includes a wide and varied set of topics and that attracts a wide and varied audience. Thank you for your time and consideration.

-- Garth Haslam, aka "Oniko"
1-18-2003