About a year ago, I engineered a session for a bluegrass band in Nagoya, Meito Junction. It’s finally coming out – a lovely collection of Sunday hymns in a bluegrass vocal harmony style.
You can order it from: http://kunaki.com/Sales.asp?PID=PX00ZCYZFC

Or find out more at the Meito Junction website.

Up to my head in Beppu

It’s an amazing relaxing feeling to be buried up to your head in hot sand.

I loved this. I have a song called The Train which describes the route from Tokyo to Nagoya.

Shinkansen ver.2 from daihei shibata on Vimeo.

Here are links to two interesting EFL journals which offer a wide range of humanistic approaches. Both are freely available online and the archives contain some excellent material.

The Journal of the Imagination in Language Learning
http://www.njcu.edu/cill/journal-index.html

Humanizing Language Teaching
http://www.hltmag.co.uk/

Yesterday, I did a introduction to NLP talk at Sietar, Nagoya.

Thanks to everyone who came along and participated so fully to make it a lovely session.

Thanks to everyone who came along to the Perceptia Press booth at the PanSig conference in Osaka.

I just got back from a conference in Malaysia (MICELT) in early May which was very good. I was giving a plenary talk on the topic “Supporting L2 Creativity.” Thanks to everyone at the conference for their wonderful response to the talk.

I played at the after-party for the Nagoya Charity Walkathon at Shooters, Fushimi on May 23. There were lots of fun musicians playing. See The Obvious Circus for details.

This Sunday evening (May 30), I’ll be playing at Shooters, Nagoya. Andrew Scott is going to be playing half of the night and it looks like it’s going to be a really fun one. We’re also going to have some special guests including Sarah, Maria and Tomo Shagger. Hope to see you there.

• July 11 (Sunday): Sonic Sunday afternoon at Red Rock
• July 16 (Friday): Charity Event at Hard Rock Cafe, Nagoya from 7pm