Global Top > About This Project
AIM: To do what I have done for China and Japan for all the countries of the world—along with some topics and subjects that relate to all countries or are important in understanding the world—in my lifetime. With each country I try to find facts and details in a range of categories and subcategories that give insight and understanding into what a country, its people and its environment are all about. I have already done the work for a lot of other countries it will just take some time to finish them and put them in Internet form.
BRIEF APOLOGY: I want to apologize for the small errors and editing mistakes such as left out words, misplaced punctuation, forgotten plurals, spell check mistakes and the like. I am currently a one man show, producing a huge volume of material and editing it myself, and this means some small mistakes slip through. Sorry. I stand by the accuracy of text, with occasional misspelled names, mistyped numbers and statements that have not be properly qualified. If you find a mistake or something that seems a little amiss please let me know.
LEGITIMACY: I am not professor or an expert on the subjects I write but I have done a fair amount of reading about them. I try to use good sources (see below) and have been doing what I am doing—collecting and organizing information and facts— for several years now and have developed some skill at doing that. The text is written in more of a travel guide, magazine or newspaper style than an academic style. I don’t have footnotes and bibliographies but I do name sources when I think a source offers a unique insight and quote a variety of people. When a source is not listed the information can be taken to be a generally accepted fact (often seen in at least two different places) or has been arrived at through observation (direct or second hand through other sources) or by common sense.
TEXT SOURCES: I have used mostly print sources such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Daily Yomiuri (a Japanese newspaper), Times of London, International Herald Tribune, National Geographic, Smithsonian magazine, The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report, Sports Illustrated, Atlantic Monthly, Natural History, Archeology magazine, Reuters, AP, AFP, information from national tourist offices, tourist brochures I have picked up from places I have visited, Lonely Planet Guides, other travel guides, Compton’s Encyclopedia and various books and other publications.
The books I have used have tended to be ones that have information I can apply to several countries such books about world religions, animals, funeral customs, marriage customs, eyewitness history accounts, the Encyclopedia of World Cultures, The Rough Guide to World Music, Paul Theroux travel books, Daniel Boorstin history books, regional customs and manners books by Nancy Braganti and Elizabeth Devine, The World Almanac, The Guinness Book of World records, and art and history books for regions such as the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Europe.
IMAGE SOURCES: Most of the stuff I either: 1) snatch off the Internet and then e-mail the source and ask if it is okay to use; 2) take from some place like Wikipedia, in which the “fair use” principal applies; or 3) take it from a tourist office or company in which I help promote the place or company the picture is from.
METHODOLOGY: When I started this project in the 1990s I was living in the Washington D.C. area and called every embassy and national tourist office and asked them to send all the information they had—and started with that. Now I collect the newspapers, magazines and books that I listed above and every few months, spend an entire day cutting them up and putting them in piles based on country or region and put the piles into boxes with previous piles, ending up with huge piles of articles. The ones for China and Japan, when added all together, were probably two meters high. When I write about a country I divide the piles into culture, economics, government, history, etc. and pick out and write about facts I think are interesting or informative. The information you see in my website has been chosen after sifting through a lot of information. The process is almost more of an act of labor than of writing—but I find it interesting and putting it on the web, I guess, is my way of being productive.
ABOUT ME: I am a teacher and writer currently living in Saga, Japan. I was born in the Mojave Desert in California and brought up mostly in Reston Virginia, in the Washington D.C. suburbs. I graduated from Wesleyan University in 1979 and later took courses to be a high school teacher.
I have never really had a real job. After college I lived in London and wrote about rock music and had some pieces published in the Washington Post, the NME, The Face and other publications. After that I wrote a guide about sports in the Washington D.C. area, worked construction for a while, did a stint as bike messenger in D.C. but mostly I have worked overseas as an English teacher—at an elementary school in Istanbul, language institutes and a university in South Korea, a freelancer in Barcelona and for the last 10 years or so running my own little informal school in Japan. Now, being an English teacher like this is not a very high status job but it does allow one to travel around and has given me ample free time to pursue the website project that you see here.
I have always liked traveling on my own. When I was 16 I through-hiked the 3,300-kilomter-long Appalachian Trail in the eastern United States. When I was my late 20s, 30s and 40s I traveled a lot outside the U.S. My trips have included long bicycle trips in South America, Africa and Asia and a half dozen trips to China. One of the motivations for doing this website is to provide the kind of information I wish I had when I was traveling. These days I have a young daughter and worry about here getting hurt or coming down with a strange disease so I don’t travel much to off-the-beaten-track places I like to go.
I will expand this section soon.
If you have any questions or comments please e-mail me at ajhays98@yahoo.com
Thanks for your interest, Jeff Hays