Canned Coffee and Kimonos

Canned coffee and Kimonos is Tom Fitzmaurice’s memoir of the four years he spent living and teaching in Tokyo, the biggest city on Earth. A young man from England’s rural West Country, he was thrust into a new world for which he was completely unprepared and which he found utterly bewildering. Tom gives an insight into the life of an English teacher in this most fascinating of countries and how he found his feet teaching students aged two to ninety-one.From sitting in a robot restaurant watching a giant metal triceratops firing multicoloured laser beams, to the quietude of secluded and ancient mountain-top shrines on remote Japanese islands, this is a story of coming of age in a beguiling metropolis, of culture shock, faux pas, joy, hilarity, horror and the steepest of learning curves.Earthquakes, hedgehog cafes, bathing with the yakuza, love hotels, typhoons, geisha, nuclear fallout, fascists, festivals, temples, bullet trains, karaoke, samurai swords, sushi and sumo. This memoir has it all. A must for everyone interested in Japan. Read more