Tag: gaijin

There are, of course, many kinds of foreigners living in Japan, from English teachers to engineers to web designers and ...

There's a wacky trick that Japanese sometimes do with money: fold a 1000 yen bill so that Hideyo Noguchi, the ...

Every gaijin who decides to put down more permanent roots in Japan needs to strike a balance with his surroundings. ...

It's fun to dig around Japanese history for interesting tidbits to discover. Like William Adams, the Englishman who arrived in ...

Summer is here, which means attending festivals, shooting off fireworks with the kids, drinking mugi-cha (barley tea) and engaging in ...

Although the average Japanese person on the street might think there are a lot of foreigners living and working in ...

My daughter recently asked me if I could drive her to the nearby town of Oizumi so she could visit ...

Today is Ramune Day, marking the 137th anniversary of the famous Japanese soft drink's manufacture in Japan. A carbonated beverage ...

Back in my college days at SDSU we had a "Japan-America Friendship Club" that would organize events like beach side ...

I've written about how speaking a foreign language requires a special "other" sense, which the Japanese call kan (kahn). If ...

The most common word for "foreigner" in Japanese is gaijin, written with the characters for outside + person, although since ...

Japan's export-driven economy is in the doldrums because of the recession, but don't worry -- the Japanese government is ready ...

In Japanese, there's a whole subset of polite language called keigo which can be quite a challenge for foreigners to ...

Over the weekend I went up to Karuizawa, the charming town in the mountains of Nagano Prefecture that serves as ...

Although Japanese kitchens are well stocked with spoons, forks and knives, most meals in Japan are eaten with chopsticks. Children ...

Because my son goes to a special immersion school in which the curriculum follows the guidelines set down by the ...

Ask any gaijin living in Japan about dentists here and you'll probably hear a lot of complaints. I recently changed ...

Every language has dialects, and Japanese is no different. I've heard that since Japanese people are more likely to stay ...

All in all, Japan is a fairly easy country for an expat to live in: people are friendly and interested ...

As a person from a relatively young nation, at least compared to Japan's long history, I'm often floored by how ...

"You've been in Japan too long when the foreigner sitting across from you breaks the wa inside the train car, ...

It's been said that Japan is the only country in the world that cares what its foreigners think, and I'm ...

The word for "foreigner" in Japanese is gaijin, written with kanji meaning outside + person, making it essentially equal to ...

Here are some numbers on the 2.2 million foreigners who live in Japan and make up 1.63% of the overall ...