Aaron Paulson

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The adventures of a modern-day goliard in Tokyo, Japan, and the rest of the world at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st.

New!

A psychogeographer explores the Greater Tokyo Area: the largest metropolitan region in the world!

Should You Take My Name? What happens when family trees graft two different cultures?

3.1: Is It Me, or Did the Earth Just Move? A first-hand account from Tokyo of the Great Tohoku Earthquake, Tsunami, and Nuclear Crisis

Blogs

tokyoaaron's blog: my "home base" blog, with updates to Big Sushi, Exit Booted, and more...

Big Sushi, Little Fishes: my blog on expat life in Japan

Exit Booted: travels outside of Japan.

Photography

This is my current photography site. Includes a link to my flickr.com page and a constantly updated RSS feed of my latest flickr posts.

photo galleries on blogger.com: some earlier film scans from Japan, Spain, and Portugal. Before going digital!

Essays

Home Alone at worldhum,.com. "While his wife taught at the local middle school, Aaron Paulson worked at home. To his Japanese neighbors, that made him one of the girls."

Where Am I Gonna Go Today? at salon.com. "The Internet is a great way to explore the world of teaching English overseas from the comfort of your desktop - and it may even land you a (real) job!"

Stories

Snow Country at The Blue Moon Review (no longer publishing). "On the first morning a skiff of ice appeared on the roadside puddles, the neighbors were under their cars, wrapping chains around the tires."

Travelogues

The Ogre, The Maiden, and The Monk on a solo photo trip through the Swiss Alps, the author encounters the memory of his former self

little snail, slowly slowly climb Mount Fuji a report of my successful climb of Fujisan in September of 2011. Guess who the little snail is?

"Stalking the Iriomote Gomi Cat,"  travelogue from the remote Yaeyama Islands in southern Japan (published by Travelogue.co.uk)

"Water and High Places:" sawanobori river climbing in Daisetsuzan NP, Hokkaido (originally published by Kyoto Journal; reprinted by Travelmag.co.uk)

copyright 1998-2012 by Aaron Paulson. tokyoaaron@yahoo.com.

Biography

"A traveler has a right to relate and embellish his adventures as he pleases, and it is very impolite to refuse that deference and applause they deserve." – Rudolph Erich Raspe, Travels of Baron Munchausen

“One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am—a reluctant enthusiast….a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards.” 
–Edward Abbey


Aaron "tokyoaaron" Paulson teaches, writes, and takes photographs from his home in western Tokyo. His work has been published online and in print, in such venues as salon.com, worldhum.com, transitionsabroad.com, Kyoto Journal, Tokyo Journal, and thebluemoon.com. An active blogger, tokyoaaron's recent adventures have taken him on Georgian Bay in a sea kayak, through the French and Swiss Alps, in and around the Greater Tokyo Area, and up Mount Fuji.
   
     

This rain-fed river
drowns stones and fallen branches,
rushing out to sea.
On a silver bicycle
you turned and gave me a wave.

     

Orange cat
asleep in my lap
as I write this,
he stretches out a paw, dreaming
the ocean of fish between us.

     

On The Streets of Montreal...
Chien perdu;
minna perdu.
Shoganai, shoganai, shoganai.

(translated from the original French and Japanese)
Lost dog;
everyone is lost.
It can't be helped, it can't be helped, it can't be helped.