I've been studying Japanese since early 1996, when, on a whim, I picked up a book on Japanese and another on German at the library. I decided German wasn't my cup of tea, but Japanese was one fascinating thing after another. In mid-1998, I first traveled to Japan, and have been here pretty much ever since, in Shizuoka City, Shizuoka Prefecture. I now am happily paying off the mortgage on my house on the side of a hill that would have a great view of Suruga Bay if it weren't for the row of houses in front of it (from the second floor, I can see a speck of the bay through the trees).
My earliest edits to Wikipedia were Shizuoka-related, and the first article I created was Sunpu, which was soon turned into a redirect, and is now a disambiguation page.
