Hello and welcome to my web site. My name is Burton Foreman. Friends, neighbors and associates usually just call me Burt. I'm a author of a new book that is out, "Tracy Barton and the Ninja Secret Formulas". You can read more about this book and another by clicking on the Author link on the left.

I am also composer of classical music. I lived in Japan for many, many years where I taught English in a university. For the first five years I lived with a Japanese family. It was there I learned the language and its history.

My vivacious, widowed Japanese mother, whom I later wrote a novel about, had been a middle school history teacher. After dinner it was she and I who enacted scenes of ancient Japanese heroes, the lives of famous samurai with a broom as a sword and, above all, the antics of Ninja, our faces covered with a tea towel, jumping from one room to the other...all to the amusement of my Japanese brothers.

The result was two lampshades broken and a couple of shattered brooms. It was hilarious, to say the least! But that is how I came to know Japan and its culture. And quite thoroughly, I think I can say, thanks to Tsumano Otsuka, my Japanese mother.

All the while I continued to compose music and write novels and short stories.