Tag: family

Soon after arriving in Japan, I walked to a Seven Eleven to buy some onigiri, those triangle-shaped rice balls that ...

Before I came to live in Japan more than two decades ago, my family used to host Japanese homestay students, ...

Microsoft has released a new OS, and in Japan that means new moe characters will be used to market the ...

Stereotypes are bad because they cause us to make assumptions about people from other countries before we've gotten to know ...

Over the weekend Mrs. J-List and I took a drive up to Nikko for a relaxing dip in an onsen. ...

I saw that Japanese cellphone company Softbank is making a major investment into Sprint, the third largest cellular operator in ...

I often write about Japan's falling birth rate since it's one of the more visible challenges the country is facing ...

It's funny how smell has the power to capture memories like nothing else. Every summer we burn Japanese mosquito coils ...

You probably know that the Japanese word for "cute" is kawaii, an adjective that's been in use since the Heian ...

One thing about the Japanese written language is that there's a strange "duality" present, with many words having two valid ...

It's funny how wrong perceptions of other countries and languages can sometimes be, like the time I was asked if ...

Over the weekend we got a new car, a Mazda CX-5. It's a fun and sporty small SUV that seemed ...

Yesterday I took a trip to Tokyo to take advantage of Obon, when half the city leaves for their home ...

Last time I talked about Obon, the Japanese Buddhist holiday in which families welcome the souls of departed family members ...

We're right in the middle of Obon (pronounced "oh, bone"), an important four-day Buddhist holiday during which Japanese return to ...

It's fun to pay attention to the visual memes that show up in anime series. For example, if a boy ...

Hello again. I've hopped over to the East Coast to visit with family and do some fun sightseeing with my ...

The roles of men and women in Japan can be quite different from in the West, for example the general ...

Wherever you're from in the world. there's a good chance that your blood contains contributions from different national groups -- ...

Japan is blessed in many ways, including having the longest life expectancy in the world. Today the Japanese Health Ministry ...

If you've read a few novels by James Clavell, you might come away with the impression that Japanese are highly ...

I often think the themes in anime and games must be potentially confusing to some viewers, even when everything is ...

One surprising aspect of the Japanese is how superstitious they are, and there's a long list of "traditional folk beliefs" ...

Last time I talked about the international coverage of the impending "extinction" of the Japanese people, which will happen a ...