As a student who does an internship it Thailand for half a year, I’m looking for an option to further my studies in the Japanese language.

Unfortunately, the Japan Foundation in Asok only offers language courses which cater to Thai students. Do you know any good address for Japanese-English lessons? I would also be interested in meeting Japanese native speakers in order to be taught by them.

Yours sincerely,
Fabian

The way the use of the Thai language in business signs is policed is another interesting issue that keeps coming up in my conversation with foreign business owners in Bangkok. I heard about an increasing presence of Japanese retirees in Chiang Mai, too. NHK recently featured a Japanese man in his fifties and his family who moved to Chiang Mai so that they could provide a proper care to their elderly family members by hiring a few locals as house helpers and renting a large enough house for the family. They said they couldn’t dream of being able to do this in Japan, obviously for the financial reason. Have you heard that Chiang Mai University just hosted a Japanese speech contest in which hundreds of Thai secondary school students participated? I’d be interested in looking at the ways in which the Japanese eldercare tourism intersects with the spread of Japanese and local economy in Chiang Mai.

Thanks, Lockie:-) I’m looking forward to hearing what you have to say about the analysis by Peter Backhaus. Recently I read an interesting paper by Sachiyo Fujita-Round about multilingual landscape of Shinookubo in Shinjyuku (Korean is pervasive, but other languages are also everywhere), which is part of Yukinori Watanabe’s project on Korean residents in Shinjyuku (funded by the Toyota Foundation). I only have a hard copy at the moment, but I will pass it onto you once I have an e-copy.