My very first Toastmasters icebreaker speech

Icebreaker Speech presented to Mosman Toastmasters 1987
Guests and fellow toastmasters … My name is Charles Cave and I would like to introduce myself by giving you a portrayal of my job, my interests in Japan and music, and my penchant for being a perpetual student.

A Funny Place – Japan and Japlish

A speech delivered in a Toastmasters Area level contest in 1989.
Konnichiwa!
Have you ever been to Japan? It’s an incredibly funny place because they speak a strange dialect of English.
I went on a holiday to Japan with my wife and I knew it would be a funny place when I was going through customs. My wife [...]

Japlish – Version 1

This is the text of a speech I delivered to Mosman Toastmasters in 1989.  I was coached after this speech by Peter Fortune, a contest-winning Toastmaster, and produced a revised version of the same speech which I delivered at an Area Speech Contest
While Japan opens its trading doors to the West and we are penetrating [...]

Dark Water – J-Horror at its best

Dark Water is a Japanese horror film directed by Hideo Nakata and released in 2002. Its Japanese title is “Honogurai mizu no soko kara”
I borrowed the film from Stanton library and it looked like an interesting modern Japanese film. I watched the film by myself with the headphones on, and I haven’t been so scared [...]

Loop – Koji Suzuki (final book of the Ring trilogy)

This is the third book in the Ring trilogy. In the first book, Ring, the videotape was the vendetta of Sadako, a tragic girl who could not be sated with simple revenge. In the sequel Spiral, a mutating virus displaced the tape and came to threaten the entire diversity of life.
This third book is quite [...]

Spiral – by Koji Suzuki

Spiral by Koji Suzuki. Originally published in Japan as Rasen in 1995. English translation copyright 2004. Spiral is the second part of the Ring trilogy of novels by Koji Suzuki.
The story starts with Mitsuo Ando, a doctor who is performing an autopsy on the body of Professor Ryuji Takayama who had died of a sudden [...]

Ring – the novel

Ring by Koji Suzuki
Translated by Robert B. Rohmer and Glynne Wally
(Originally published in Japan as Ringu in 1991.)
My motivation for reading this book was seeing the film Ring (released in 1998) directed by Hideo Nakata.
Notes from the book dust-jacket: Kazuyaki Asakawa is a dedicated journalist who has worked his way up from local newsbeat reporter [...]

My name in Japanese

This is my name in Iapanese, written in the Katakana character set. Charles becomes “cha-ru-zu” and my surname of Cave is pronounced “Ke-bu”. I chose the name of Charuzu for my blog to highlight my interest in learning the Japanese language.