My name is Brennan Duff and I am from San Francisco, California. My interest in Japan and Japanese culture stems from early exposure to East Asian art from my family. We would go to Asian art museums and galleries around the Los Angeles area, and I found myself drawn to the imagery and culture on display. I continued to have my Asian influences in my own home thanks to my father working in the Japanese car industry and several pieces of Japanese art which my grandparents had collected in their global travels. 

As a member of the "Anime Generation" as my friends and I like to say, I grew up with Japanese cartoons on TV. Pokemon, Digimon, and Sailor Moon rocked my world on a weekly basis. This cartoon influence returned in bits and pieces most of my life until late middle school when my friend introduced me to Naruto. From then my reality was opened to what things I could enjoy from other parts of the world. Anime introduced me to Japanese folk tales, warriors of lore, and fed my childhood love of ninja and samurai. 

When college came along, I had no idea what I wanted to study, so I started off taking classes that sounded interesting to me. In my first term devoted entirely to East Asian studies, I found my interest in Japanese history from an Australian professor who had a dry sense of humor but no shortage of passion for the silly side of history. If you don't believe me, take a look at the Mongol hordes. From Fall term on I'd been hooked and thoroughly enjoyed all of my Japanese history studies. Spring term of my Junior year I spent studying abroad at Waseda University in Tokyo while living with a host family in Nerima. As I hope you will see in these blogs, I spent a lot of time with my friend "temple hopping" every weekend. We would choose an area where we had found ample temples and shrines, then visit with our Goshuinchô to collect the multitude of art. 

I finished college with a degree in History and spent the next year working and volunteering at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. I worked as an English teacher in the rural town of Minamiawaji in Hyogo Prefecture for five years. Weekends were spent traveling throughout the Kansai area and looking for new unknown locations outside of the cities. I have been apart of local tourism promotion campaigns, been a member of prefectural tourism experiments, and an advocate for traditional arts, crafts, and culture. I am now living and working in the Tokyo area.