In March 1991, a student of the University of California, San Diego,
got homesick and sent a series of posts to rec.arts.anime describing her life at a Japanese high school.
In March 1991, a student of the University of California, San Diego,
got homesick and sent a series of posts to rec.arts.anime describing her life at a Japanese high school.
Her name was Maiko Covington, and she is now a research programmer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. You can find out more about her on her homepage.
Her posts became true Usenet classics, and, for a time at least, the most authentic if not the only source of information about their topic. When New York City introduced school uniforms in their elementary schools in 1999, PBS quoted Maiko Covington on school uniforms in Japan.
The posts were widely distributed as a single text file, including one reply to part V. This version is based on the original posts, as the author offers them for download on her homepage. Apart from replacing enumerations with their HTML equivalent, nothing is changed. Where her email adress appears in the text (only once), it is still the old, long defunct one, but linked to the one valid as of Summer 2002.
