Gaijin Tonic

I’ve been reading “Japrocksampler” by Julian Cope (the eccentric singer, writer and acid-frazzled archaeologist.) It’s an enjoyable history of Japan’s unheralded rock mavericks, groundbreaking musicians who absorbed American rock n’ roll in the postwar years, and fed it through a filter of Japanese thought, culture and experience, to make something entirely new and weird.

Some of the records mentioned, from the likes of Brain Police and Flower Travellin’ Band (pictured on the book cover, riding motorbikes in the nude) sound utterly mental, and I’m eager to get down to the record shop and pick some of them up (even though they’re fairly obscure, even in Japan.)
You probably won’t have heard of most of these guys. TV and radio in Japan have rarely given exposure to independent or alternative artists, and even now only give airtime to those signed to a handful of major labels and agencies. And yet, if your explore the underground clubs of Koenji or Shimokitazawa, you would have a good chance of seeing some astonishing and unique musicians.
Japrocksampler is a good introduction to Japanese rock and roll, and is greatly helped by Cope’s enthusiastic, hyperbolic writing style.
He’s even started a website about obscure Japanese music which you can check out here.

It’s the book everyone’s talking about! It’s flying off the shelves! It’s written by me (under one of my pen names, Rex Chesney). My magnificent book about the antics of English teachers in Japan is still on sale here.
“Sensei-tional” is a handful of eye-popping, jaw-dropping true stories involving sex, drugs and…er… grammar, all lavishly illustrated.

Here’s the blurb from the back of the book:

“The vast majority of English teachers in Japan are horny and hedonistic travellers, desperate to delay their adulthood by drinking as much as is humanly possible and shagging anything with a pulse.”

Outrageous, grotesque, and frequently hilarious, “Sensei-tional” is a collection of true tales about the misadventures of language teachers in the Land of the Rising Sun.

Rex Chesney has been teaching in Tokyo for several years and here he compiles the most jaw-dropping anecdotes he has heard from his colleagues or experienced himself. Stories of drunkenness, debauchery and ineptitude, with a cast of gangsters, stalkers, transsexuals and hyperactive five-year-olds.
When you are an English teacher in Japan, anything can happen.

You can check it out and read the first ten pages here!

Thanks to all those who have already bought it!
If any Bloggers want to review it, email me and I might be able to send you a PDF file.