The TRAM (a.k.a. that zine I work on in Toyama) has a new issue out, one that I’m particularly proud of because of the quality of the material. This was also our first new issue since our long hiatus earlier this year, and it has a mix of stuff that I’ll sincerely recommend here.
Those outside the Toyama JET community will be most interested in Mind Your Mindset, an article about Growth Mindsets vs. Fixed Mindsets by recent JET alum Rikio Inouye that shows how opening up to personal growth can lead to greater happiness and success. I’d recommend anyone interested in improving their perspective and taking on new challenges check this one out.
I also put together another edition of my Let’s Talk About Japan Books! column, this one covering two nonfiction books about the JET Program itself. While Bruce Feiler’s Learning to Bow isn’t worth getting excited over (despite its popularity, I didn’t like the book all that much), the centerpiece is my review of a book called Importing Diversity: Inside Japan’s JET Program by David McConnell, a for-serious academic study about the early years of the JET Program. The book leaves no stone unturned when it comes to the problems faced by ALTs and is incredibly relevant to anyone currently working on or considering JET.
I’ll also say that pointing readers toward McConnell’s book is probably the closest I’ll ever come to publicly criticizing the Japanese government program that currently writes my paychecks ;-)
The Fall TRAM also has some excellent Japanese rock band reviews, a sci-fi story by writer/artist/musician/JET alum Logan McCarthy, and TONS of great artwork, including stills from a production by Japanese shadow puppeteer Jack Lee Randall. Check it out!
Thoughts on Editing a Cool Indie Zine
The TRAM (Toyama’s Random-Ass Magazine) is a publication of the Toyama AJET group, a kind of support network for the JET program. Past TRAMs featured creative work from the JET community, practical guides for living in Japan, and food/culture/activity recommendations around Toyama and other prefectures. I was impressed with the TRAM before I came to Toyama, and was interested in ways to expand its reach beyond the JET community—which is why we’ve been featuring more interviews with local businesses (some Japanese breweries, a screenprinter, an independent theater, etc.) and why I reached out to local foreigner artists Jack Lee Randall and Krissy Diggs about sharing some of their work.
I approach the TRAM like I approach any other collaborative project: involving more people means more ideas, more energy, and more people to spread the word. That’s how projects grow little by little, one social media share at a time ;-)
I co-edit the TRAM with Amy Ether, who did a TON of great artwork for the issue (including the cover!) and did the entire layout herself, and Tiana Steverson Pugh, who handled the JET Leavers section, co-edited, runs social media, and caught a bunch of typos I missed before publication. We’re a small team, and from the beginning we discovered that putting together a zine of this size and quality is a BIG job for just three people (which is partly what led to our long hiatus last spring).
To make matters worse, a lack of replacement JET teachers due to COVID immigration restrictions has left all three of us super busy this year, which means more stress and less time to work on a creative project like the TRAM. In an ideal world I’d be able to make the TRAM part of my regular work schedule (say, by teaching fewer classes so I’d have more time to work on it!), though it’s technically an extracurricular activity outside my regular job. (D’oh!)
Still, when I sat down with my boss to talk about my stress levels this fall I showed him a hard copy of the TRAM and listed it as one of the many activities that was making me busy. Though my boss didn’t mention TRAM specifically when he recognized that I’d been overworked this year, he did give me some more space at work, which certainly helped when working on this last issue ;-)
This issue I also found myself doing a lot of coordinating. I’d seen Rikio Inouye’s presentation about Growth Mindsets at last year’s Toyama teaching conference and was so impressed by it that I invited him to write an article about Growth Mindsets, which he gladly did. I also heard about shadow puppeteer Jack Lee Randall through a coworker and reached out to him through his website, which led to our running photos from one of his shows after the hiatus. We also had a set of Japanese interviews with sake brewers leftover from last year that never got translated, so I reached out to JET CIR Eric Jutila for translation help. No one on the TRAM team knew enough Japanese to tackle the translation, and finding someone who could (thanks, Eric!) was just one more organizational step in getting the interviews completed.
All in all, it was a lot of logistics, but it felt good reaching out to so many people and getting so much together for the issue. I much prefer the actual writing, of course, but the organizational end is pretty rewarding too ;-)