“Anyone can learn to read fluently in Japanese” In this episode we start to explore a promising territory that has been tempting us for a long time: extensive reading in languages other than English. We look at ER in Japanese with the guidance of Dr. Mitsue Tabata-Sandom, who has been using extensive reading to teach Japanese to her university students in New Zealand for many years, and who has also carried out a number of most interesting research studies on ER in Japanese. She gave us a long interview that will constitute the bulk of this and the following episode. In this first part of the interview she tells us about the particularities of the Japanese writing system and its relationship with extensive reading. She also tells us about her experiences as an author of Japanese graded readers.