Month: November 2011

One of the more interesting aspects of Japan is the top-down nature of its society, how it's ostensibly structured in ...

Like the U.S. and Europe, Japan is a free market economy in which companies compete to offer the best products ...

There's no doubt about it: living in a foreign country for many years will change a person, something my father ...

The Internets have been buzzing with news that the word kawaii had been officially added to the Oxford English Dictionary, ...

Want to know how to fluster a Japanese person? Ask them to pronounce difficult English words, such as "jewelry," which ...

Exam season is nearing for my children, and they both spent several hours this weekend studying for the tests that ...

Sometimes it's fun to learn how concepts in one language are implemented in another. One word of Japanese I like ...

My son is quite a little scientist, reading books on physics and atomic theory for relaxation and occasionally wearing his ...

It's funny to observe how easily paradigm shifts can occur in the fast-paced world we live in. Looking at the ...

Today is a holiday in Japan, kinro kansha no hi or Labor Thanksgiving Day. While it sounds like a combination ...

One of the more interesting trends over the past decade or so has been the rise of serious fangirls, called ...

The Japanese language has not one but three writing systems: hiragana, a syllable-based system for expressing sounds and grammatical particles; ...

One of the more interesting things about living in Japan is getting used to using a "name stamp." While signatures ...

There are a few places in Japan that are really special to me. Visiting Nikko, the collection of temples and ...

I write often about Japan's love for kawaii (cute) culture, which has come to define the country as much as ...

I saw an interesting thread on Japan's ubiquitous BBS 2ch entitled, "Things Japanese people do abroad that mark them as ...

One of the best things about raising kids in Japan is shichi-go-san (literally "7, 5, 3"), a special time when ...

One of the best things about winter in Japan is sitting with your legs in the kotatsu, a low table ...

Last weekend I went to the local home center to pick up some parts for a speaker system I was ...

like Twitter and Facebook because I can toss out ideas to my readers and get instant feedback from them. I ...

A couple of updates ago I used the word "filial piety" (oya koko, pronounced oh-yah koh-koh) when discussing the signs ...

One word that's become quite well-known in anime- and Japan-centric circles is kawaii, which means cute, pretty, adorable, and in ...

The other day I was driving in my Mazda Miata (which is called a Roadster here in Japan, though for ...

Today is a very special day, one I've been waiting for for a long time: Pocky Day, 2011. The Japanese ...