Happy New Year from J-List! In Japanese, the phrase is akemashite omedeto gozaimasu (ah-kay-mah-shtay oh-meh-deh-TOH go-ZA-EE-mahs), literally "congratulations on opening ...
Hello again from J-List, where the country is preparing to say goodbye to the current year and ring in the ...
Now that Christmas is past, Japan is getting ready for its own big season, Oshogatsu or New Year's Day, by ...
As an expat American living away from my home country, it's sometimes interesting to ask the Japanese people around me ...
I recently talked about how many Japanese professionals from businessmen to musicians to athletes seem to consider succeeding in the ...
There are a lot of good things about living in Japan. Good food, from sushi to sashimi to Indian curry. ...
Japan is a very rail-centric place compared to the U.S., and trains are a much larger part of society than ...
I caught a post on Slashdot the other day about a surge in high school dropouts in the U.S., and ...
By and large, an American expat living in Japan has two choices when it comes to celebrating Thanksgiving: completely forget ...
I get a lot of mail from people who'd like to live in Japan someday, and I do my best ...
Quick, do you know how many Great Lakes there are on North America? The answer is five. The reason I ...
No matter how long a person lives in Japan, there are always things that can bring on what expats here ...
Last night we went to a friend's house to have one of my favorite dishes, nabe (NAH-beh), a word that ...
Imagine if a food you ate every day were suddenly unavailable, say, hamburgers, just to pick an example. With no ...
A recent commercial featured a voice saying, nihon-jin wa urusai! which means that Japanese are loud and obnoxious and fussy. ...
When you come to a place like Japan, it's always best to check your cultural preconceptions at the door and ...
Japan is a land of conflicting themes, of high tech phones and glittering gadgets alongside abandoned pachinko parlors and that ...
Yesterday was time for my annual top-to-bottom physical, called Ningen Dock, a name that implies a human (ningen) "drydock" where ...
I've often thought that there are some really good ideas in Japan that the rest of the world could learn ...
Time was, people would go to the Akihabara (ah-ki-HAH-bah-rah, meaning "field of autumn leaves") area of Tokyo to buy some ...
As a student of a foreign language, I know that there's no "magic" way to learn, and even if you ...
The post-Koizumi era will soon be on us, now that Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe has officially been elected leader ...
Whenever my wife and I try a new restaurant we order aisu kohi, which we use to judge the dedication ...
Japan's fascination with businessman Takafumi Horie (whose nickname is "Horiemon" because someone thought he looks like the character Doraemon) continues ...
