Month: November 2013

We hope everyone in the U.S. enjoyed a warm and pleasant Thanksgiving with family and friends. It's not a holiday ...

We're currently finishing up some construction on the land behind J-List, erecting a concrete wall to keep rainwater from running ...

Every year the Oxford English Dictionary chooses to bless a few new words by adding them to its hallowed pages, ...

China has caused an international stir by unilaterally declaring a chunk of the East China Sea as its exclusive "Air ...

The other day I watched Pacific Rim, a movie I'd not managed to catch in theaters due to my convention ...

The anime industry has certainly gone through changes over the years. You could break it down into different eras, perhaps ...

Last time I talked about how my Japanese wife didn't want to visit the Mt. Fuji area in part because ...

I took a couple of days off this week to travel with an Italian friend of mine to Hakone, a ...

One of the cuter -- or possibly creepier -- things that Japanese girls do is refer to themselves in the ...

Like many people in Japan, I am a 風呂人 furo-bito, or a person who likes taking baths in natural hot ...

One of the more welcome developments in the anime world has been the return of Sailor Moon merchandise after an ...

There are some things you say when you live in Japan that you'd certainly never utter back home. For example, ...

Maid cafes have become one of the more famous images of modern Japan, and when foreigners visit Akihabara they'll often ...

There's a lot of food to love in Japan, from sushi and sashimi to large nabe (pot dishes) like sukiyaki ...

I often talk about the various unique aspects of the Japanese language, in part because I just think languages are ...

"The distance from Earth to space is the same as from Tokyo to Hakone, about 50 miles/80 km." This was ...

A couple of updates ago I wrote about the word 常識 joshiki, meaning 'common sense,' and how one of the ...

In Japan there are certain jobs that best performed by gaijin, a word that means foreigner, though in practice it ...

I've been watching an anime about naval ships represented by super-cute moe girls. You may think I've gotten my hands ...

Grammatically, Japanese is quite interesting, seemingly unrelated to all other languages, though one theory suggests a link to languages like ...

The Japanese are masters when it comes to committing information to memory, like the man who memorized pi to 100,000 ...

When you come to a country like Japan, it's normal that you'll give up some things you might be used ...

I caught an interesting show on Japanese TV the other day called 子供に聞かせたい Kodomo ni Kikasetai! or "I Want to ...

Somewhere in Japan there's a computer that runs an algorithm for generating "harem" anime stories, which I believe was used ...