What's in a name?

Some of you may be wondering what exactly the title of our blog is meant to convey. Allow me to explain.

Shortly after Jane and I knew that we would be moving overseas, we quickly came to the decision that the easiest way to communicate to everyone back in our homeland would be through some sort of internet media. E-mail, Skype, and Instant Messaging are all useful but carry some innate drawbacks that made them unrealistic considering the vast and varied friends and family that we have. The only logical solution was to create a blog that we could update easily and everyone could follow at their leisure.

But, what would we call our blog?

Surely, this was not a decision to be made lightly. It needed to be both clever and encompass what exactly this blog was going to be about.

We mulled over several names but they all had their own problems:

“We Are Godzilla, You Are Japan” - Too obscure a reference for most people to get

“Ninja Gaijin” - Far too nerdy and slightly un-PC

“Big In Japan” - Was already taken by every blogging network we attempted to join

Luckily, “ALTernative Lifestyle” occurred to me a short time later. And when I told Jane and she nearly spiked her cell phone in disgust, I knew that I had found the perfect title.

But what does it actually mean?

Well, the phrase carries some basic connotations. Typically, an “alternative lifestyle” refers to a way of life veering from the societal norm e.g. the counter-culture hippe movement of the 60’s. Now, we definitely aren’t espousing anything of the sort on this site. However, we certainly are living an alternative to our usual lives back in the United States. Just how different our way of life in the Land of the Rising Sun is will be elucidated in later posts.

But, the crux of our moniker is the capitalization of the first three letters.

If you are a foreigner working in Japan, chances are that your job title is that of Assistant Language Teacher, or ALT for short (alternatively, the term Assistant English Teacher is sometimes used, but AET doesn’t really work so let’s just ignore that). So, by combining the term “Alternative Lifestyle” and the acronym of the aforementioned occupation we come up with “ALTernative Lifestyle”.

As you can see, the title is both incredibly clever and sickeningly corny, and thus PERFECT.

-Ryan