Regular Contributors
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Roy (“Mutantfrog”) Berman is a graduate student at Kyoto University specializing in the colonial history of Asia, particularly Taiwan and the Philippines. He went to Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto (where he met Adamu), and now writes on current events, technology and history. He is also a photography nut, and has more lenses than many insects do. |
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Adam (“Adamu”) Richards is a translator at a financial services company in Tokyo. He went to high school in Kawanishi, Hyogo (where he met Joe) and to college at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto (where he met Roy). He writes about Japanese politics, culture and tabloid stories. |
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Joe Jones works at a financial institution in Tokyo as a corporate debt analyst and legal counsel, depending on the weather that day. He previously went to high school in Osaka (where he met Adamu) and worked in a Tokyo law firm after coming in through the back door of Japanese immigration. When he’s not buried in cases, he writes on law, transportation and history. |
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George Nathaniel Curzon, 1st Marquess Curzon of Kedleston is a late British Conservative statesman who was Viceroy of India and Foreign Secretary. Mutantfrog’s Curzon is an American lawyer resident in Japan who writes on politics and history. He also writes about global affairs at the Robert Kaplan fan blog Coming Anarchy. |
Irregular Contributors
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Saru is an economics, high art and trade policy wonk based in the US. He was originally a regular contributor to MFT, but his top-secret work commitments currently preclude him from blogging. |
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Benjamin Boas researches the anthropology of Japanese gambling, particularly the social role of mahjong in Japanese office culture. He blogs at MFT as well as on his own blog, Mahjong Fulbright. |
The basic back story
Roy started “The Mutant Frog Travelogue” a few years ago, back when he was studying abroad in Japan, just to keep family and friends up to date on what he was doing without having to send out mass emails and so on. “Mutant Frog” was his age-old online handle, so it was a natural choice for his little online journal.
At the time he was just hosting it on his university web space, (still online at www.eden.rutgers.edu/~royb, despite the fact that he can no longer log in and update it!) and using Blogger. He blogged off and on over there for a few months, but it was really nothing more than a livejournal style collection of occasional personal news and amusing news clippings, and he had already gotten bored and stopped updating.
Then, his friend Adam, who had been on the same study abroad program, asked him to help set up a blog devoted to translations of Japanese news articles. After Adam had been running his blog for a couple of months, Roy decided it would be fun to try again, so he put together a new blog at mutantfrog.com and began posting here.
Adam’s blog at the time was still using Blogger, and was hosted at an impossible to remember URL on Verizon, so the two decided to merge operations on the new blog. Adam’s first post was on January 15, 2005.
Eventually, Joe, who had met Adam through the Rotary study abroad program in high school and also had his own blog, joined Mutantfrog. His first post was on October 14, 2005. We were also briefly joined by a mysterious fourth member, who wrote anonymously as “Saru” for a few months before circumstances led him to stop public blogging.