Tune In Tokyo:The Gaijin Diaries [Kindle Edition]

Tim Anderson (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

When Anderson decides his life in North Carolina is in a rut, he chooses to make a dramatic change and moves to Japan to teach English, as he chronicles in this hilarious, enlightening, and insightful memoir. Anderson is tall, white, and extremely gay—all things that distinguish him from the average person in Japan. His various adventures—accidentally stumbling into the adult area of Tokyo and learning that Japanese porn cuts out all the good parts; discovering the hard way the low standards some English academies have for their teachers; experiencing the joys of karaoke and experimental music—help Anderson begin to understand the differences between American and Japanese culture. A gifted writer, Anderson is sensitive to cultural differences, delightful in his irreverence, and astutely aware of himself and his particular perspective. His observations are often laugh-out-loud funny and will leave readers with the desire to travel and to keep turning the pages, wondering, by the end, where Anderson will travel to next.

From Booklist

“Aside from such classroom encounters and problems of his own with the Japanese language that vaguely recall David Sedaris’ Me Talk Pretty One Day (2000), Anderson regales his readers with tales of Japanese popular culture and his own social life…” –Booklist

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Product Details

• Format: Kindle Edition
• File Size: 639 KB
• Publisher: AmazonEncore (November 29, 2011)
• Sold by: Amazon Digital Services
• Language: English
• ASIN: B0050KIRE6
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• Lending: Enabled
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (60 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #8,276 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
  • #1 in Books > Gay & Lesbian > Travel
  • #1 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Biographies & Memoirs > Travel
  • #1 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Travel > Asia > Japan

More About the Author

Tim Anderson has done many amazing things in his short life. Well, two amazing things. Ok, one thing that he did twice. But he's got nothing on his older brother, who can play his teeth like a xylophone with his thumb.

Tim has been a waiter, a data entry clerk, a photocopier repairman, a freelance writer, a middle school teacher, and a depressed employee of the State of North Carolina. He hopes to one day be an underwear model/bookie. He is a graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill, where he was inducted into both Phi Beta Kappa and the Golden Key National Honor Society. These distinctions have yet to pay off.

Tim is an editor in New York and lives in Brooklyn with his boyfriend and his cat Stella. He blogs at seetimblog.blogspot.com and plays viola in the band simpleshapes. His favorite Southern state is Hawaii. Visit the Tune in Tokyo website at tuningintokyo.com.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

47 of 50 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Tuned Out But In Tokyo, October 14, 2011

By 

Miz Ellen "all the letters of my real name" (Bovine Universe) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Tune In Tokyo: The Gaijin Diaries (Paperback)

(What's this?)

The pleasure any reader will have in any travelogue depends on the personality of the author. Does he or she make a good travel companion? Tim Anderson is snarkily funny and doesn't complain. He plunges into the life of an English teacher in Tokyo with brio. Tokyo is one of my favorite cities and Anderson's narrative is often amusing. I'm not sorry I "visited" Tokyo again and glimpsed it again through his eyes. Tokyo is a fascinating city and Tim gives us all the surface glitz.

Don't expect great insights or to learn anything new about Japan.

I didn't mind that Tim was self-absorbed,ignorant and clueless at the beginning of the book. One travels to discover and learn. Or some of us do. But the typical chapter in this book will have Tim observing some typically Tokyo scene and then go off into some kind of fantasy riff as if the stuff happening in Tim's head was more real than what he was seeing. Worse, the fantasy seemed to shut off his natural curiosity about what he saw so he remained ignorant and was never driven to find out why.

At only one point did he come close to grasping an essential difference between Japan and America and that was in the chapter on karaoke. He notes that Americans hog the microphone playing the big star that they see in their heads. Then he talks about going out drunk with a group of Japanese who when one person sang would act like the back up singers/musical group. And he got into it--he liked being part of the group with everybody participating...but it didn't lead him to a better understanding of the importance of the group to the Japanese persona. At the end of the chapter he declares his intention of continuing to hog the microphone in the American Way. It's sort of funny, as by chapter 15, we're familiar with Tim's ego but since this the closest he's come to recognizing something outside of himself, it's also disappointing.

There are better books to find something out about Japan; some are more entertaining then this one. But Anderson has a gift for writing and for depicting arresting images whether they are fantastic montages or Tokyo street scenes. He can be irritating, obnoxious and clueless but he's not vicious. He's openly gay. That's more important to him than to me, but I feel compelled to mention it. I laughed several times reading this book and almost gave up reading it several times. I heartily recommend this book to fans of Tim Anderson.

19 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I Am Enjoying Much to Read This Book, June 25, 2010

By 

Joseph W. Marohl "jwmarohl" (Durham, NC United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Tune in Tokyo: The Gaijin Diaries (Paperback)

I haven't read a book through in one sitting in a long time. This one I did. A friend bought it for me to read on vacation, but I finished the book before I finished packing. It's a funny, charming memoir of one introverted gay Southern man's experiences teaching conversational English in Japan. It's written in a free-form "bloggy" style that keeps readers squarely in this guy's head the whole time, so don't expect a whole lot of history and cultural criticism of Japan. There's no story arc to speak of--the plot is episodic and impressionistic--and funny, laugh out loud funny. Nothing deep or particularly insightful here, but the writer's voice is friendly, conspiratorial, and addictive.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Amusing, Bawdy, Superficial, December 15, 2011

By 

Michael (SoCal) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Tune In Tokyo:The Gaijin Diaries (Kindle Edition)

This uneven sophomoric, memoir provides mostly amusing episodes from the author's sojourn in Japan teaching English to a wide variety of students of all ages. Most of the cultural insights are superficial consisting of what can be seen on the surface, along the lines of "I saw this and then this and then this, isn't that strange!"

Perhaps the author spent a tad too much of the time drinking, smoking weed, and popping mushrooms to offer the insights I held out for throughout my reading experience. But I was looking for something the author himself did not promise. Taken on its own terms, its an "okay" read, sure to bring some laughs.