Hello everyone and welcome to Learn Japanese Pod and you are listening to the Fun Friday edition and if you don't

know what the Fun Friday edition is it's where we temporarily put away our Japanese

textbooks and talk to interesting people doing fascinating things in Tokyo and Japan.

And today I am joined by Catherine Grownawa.

Welcome to the show, Catherine.

Thank you so much for having me.

And I thought it would be a great opportunity to interview you because you are a trainer and coach who's specializing cross-cultural

training and orienting foreigners who are coming to Japan and I think a lot of

our listeners are very interested in life in Japan, they're interested in Japanese culture,

and some of them are maybe interested in perhaps moving to Japan for work or for studying or even just for a holiday so I think

your cultural insights will be very very interesting now Catherine I must admit to you I Googled you and I know that you are part of a well you started an organization called Thrive Tokyo.

So can you tell me, like, what is Thrive Tokyo

and what exactly do you do?

Yes, so basically I started Thrive Tokyo several years ago and as you mentioned I do cross-cultural training so I help foreigners understand how to work with Japanese people. And I would say most of the

foreigners who I'm helping are people who don't really work in an environment

where they're communicating in Japanese 100% of the time.

So it's probably that Japanese people are speaking in English to them,

but there's a lot of nuances that are

lost in translation.

So sometimes direct translation is not really enough

to understand what someone means,

because the meaning behind the words are also really important.

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