User:Toritaiyo

Hi All,

I don't realy know what to write here yet. But here goes...

My first travel to Japan was as an exchange student to Sophia University in Tokyo. I enjoyed it so much I ended up transferring from my home university to Sophia U. and graduated from there in 2006.

It was an amazing experience from the start and from the time I set foot in Japan I had a desire to share about Japan with others.

My fist website about Japan was thegaijinbook.com (now defunct) was started during my year as an exchange student. I hired a friend who's major was programming (actually cellphones, not websites) to do it for me. He didn't know a lot about how to make websites but he took the project as an opportunity to learn. Neither of us knew much about essentials like good webhosting (we were paying lycos $20/mo for hosting that did not allow php!) and I didn't know html. But waiting for him to create and then update my dream site was taking so long that I started jumping in and teaching myself html, css, and php (and later I played with different content management systems). I am still a horrible web developer but I hope to continue improving.

Currently I work with on a team of three (sometimes helped by a small fan-club of old school friends) that runs the website Nipponster.com and blog on Nipponster.com/blog.

With a healthy disregard for the impossible I hope to bring people together to organise and enhance all of the Japan-related content online.

Thanks for reading, Tori

p.s. feel free to contact me. I would love to talk to you.