Have you ever tried to learn a foreign language so hard, that it influences and moulds your speech pattern in your native tongue? That you moved to a foreign land to learn that foreign language, consequently your English vocabulary becomes restricted to the more common words, just so people around you could understand?

Such is the story of Spring Day (Comedian, not the weather), a fluent Japanese speaker who lived in Japan for over 16 years and who started learning this language at the age of 13. Spring tells the random nature of her life story how she ended up in Japan, how she became a comedy performer in both Japanese and English in Tokyo, and why she decided to leave after she realised her identity would always be an outsider （外人, gaijin） in Japan

Spring now happily calls London and the UK home. She was featured on Live at the Apollo on TV, one of the highest achievements comedians in the UK can have. In this episode, Spring recounts the tales in Midwestern America where she used to call home and left behind, becoming the minority American who has a passport and travel abroad, and her long and complex, entangled history with the land of Nihon (and all the obscure observations of this island nation that are no longer her comedy materials)

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Follow Spring on Instagram

https://www.instagram.com/springdaycomedian/

Follow your host Kuan-wen on Instagram

https://www.instagram.com/kuanwencomedy/

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01:12 Intro

03:28 Leaving behind her identity as an outsider （外人, gaijin）in Japan

05:14 “Just the right level of passive-aggressiveness” in the UK - compared to Japan and the US

07:58 Do American comedians have an “accent” for British audiences?

09:08 Spring’s aversion to American centralism

12:22 Immigrants? Expats?

14:02 How fluent is Spring in Japanese now?

16:05 A mid-western American accent influenced by Japanese and British expats

18:56 Why Spring moved to Japan and started performing comedy in Tokyo?

21:18 Spring’s accent when speaking Japanese

23:39 The foreign loaned words in Japanese making it harder for English speakers

26:56 Performing stand up in Japanese and why some of Spring’s jokes couldn’t translate

29:50 How Spring’s time in Japan shaped her stand up and her speech pattern

31:41 Onomatopoeia （オノマトペ） in Japanese

34:24 All the dark sadness and tragedy in Japanese Rakugo（落語, “fallen words”）, folk music and literature

35:58 The tales of two Kansas Cities in Kansas and in Missouri

37:49 Spring’s Mid-western accent

39:36 A stage character of a rural American?

41:57 Living on the same street with serial killers

43:59 Caricatures/characters of rural Americans

47:06 Some of Spring’d weird experiences in Japan that became her comedy materials

50:47 Transition to the UK and finding out who she is outside Japan

53:10 London is now home

55:04 Spring’s social media

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