About this time last year, I attended the 50th anniversary conference of the Association of Foreign Women of Japanese (AFWJ) in Tokyo. After registering, I walked around and looked at some of the memorabilia on the tables placed in the registration room. There, I found an article about Joan Itoh, the founder of AFWJ. I didn’t read the article thoroughly, but saw that she had lived in Niigata, so approached the lovely, petite 80-something and introduced myself. We chatted for quite a while and I found out that she had even taught at my present workplace, back in the days when it was a 2-year women’s college. I gave her … Continue reading A Visit to the Northern Culture Museum