Careers with the Yamasa Institute - if you are interested in working in Japan, please check the careers page in the Network. Work opportunities are mostly related to internships, teaching and web development. We are looking for native speakers of Japanese with teaching qualifications and experience, or people with language skills (good Japanese and English plus native level in one or more of Korean, Chinese, Spanish or German) and web skills. Combinations of all the above especially welcome. Please read the careers page for contact details.

Winter: the ski season will be starting soon. Declan will be organising a ski trip early next year - full details in the next newsletter. If you are interested and need early confirmation of dates etc. please contact him at declan@yamasa.org - otherwise please check the next newsletter. If you are in Okazaki on December 22nd, then please come to the Christmas Party to warm up - Aoi Hall from 12pm. Feel free to come and see the school, meet the staff and talk to students if you are thinking of studying at Yamasa.

The Japanese Language Proficiency Test was Sunday December 3rd - congratulations to everyone who went, commiserations to everyone who went, as applicable. Commiserations to those of you who never went because you were too tired and slept until someone phoned you after the listening test but didn't phone you when they didn't see you on the train to Nagoya. How any people can that be...? Well, there's always next year, they say.

Finally, photos. The student network section has a slowly growing number of photos from trips, Discovery tours, donations and so on. If you have any contributions, please feel free to send them in. There will be a competition for photo of the month, with a Bronze Pass discount for the best photo of each month. Passes will be redeemable at any time during the year following date of issue. The best photo submitted between now and the end of February will have the Bronze Pass changed to a Gold Pass. Please send contributions/entries as email attachments, format jpg, gif or bmp, resolution 300dpi and 600 pixels at least, original digital camera files or scanned photos preferred. Send all files to newsletter@yamasa.org.

So, stories, photos, homepages - send them in. Read the guidelines first:  http://www.yamasa.org/acjs/network/english/contributions.html.

Enjoy the winter in your heated Yamasa Apartments you lucky people (I know I am enjoying it in a traditional Japanese house without heating near Toyohashi...oh, do I complain too much?).