Tag: history

While many international companies have found success in Japan, including AFLAC, Michelin, Jack Daniels and Harley-Davidson, few have done as ...

My son and I had a blast up in northern Japan. Our first stop was the city of Sapporo, the ...

For the past few months I've been seeing those awesomely-designed advertisements promoting tourism in Japan's northern Tohoku region, damaged so ...

Last time I talked about Donald Keene, the Japanese scholar and translator who came to Japan and took Japanese citizenship, ...

J-List is based in Gunma, a prefecture said to be shaped like a crane in flight, located in the exact ...

Today is February 29th, which is possible because 2012 is a Leap Year. In Japanese, Leap Year is urudoshi, but ...

Tomorrow is Valentine's Day, when millions of Japanese males will wake up hoping to receive chocolate from their wives, girlfriends, ...

Because of the popularity of anime and manga, certain aspects of Japan's popular culture have spread across the globe, and ...

Japanese sentences are peppered with a variety of colorful English phrases, since adding foreign words to one's speech gives it ...

This Friday is Setsubun, a special Japanese day when fathers will put on paper masks and become an oni (devil ...

Akihabara is the area of Tokyo famous for its Electric Town shopping district and for being the international center of ...

It's funny the way some Japanese cultural icons spread to the outside world, eventually becoming famous symbols of Japan. Growing ...

One aspect of Japan I've always been impressed with is the way popular culture is closely tied to history in ...

I've just returned from a four-day trip to Taiwan with my family, our first visit to the mountainous nation that's ...

There are many benefits to being an American expat in Japan. When I go to concerts I'm usually tall enough ...

Kanji is the primary writing system used in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japan. In the case of Japanese, kanji ...

Over the weekend my family and I attended the Christmas Candlelight Service at my daughter's school, a mission-kei (kei meaning ...

Recently I wrote about some core differences in the way capitalism functions in Japan, for example how the distributors J-List ...

One thing I've noticed about the Japanese: they're very good at is appreciating nostalgia, and on any given day you're ...

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

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

I've written before about how anime is a very stylized world, where characters can have impossibly large and expressive eyes ...

The other day I decided my hair had grown long enough, and that it was time to go get it ...

It's not every day you see a historical discovery that makes you exclaim, "Wow, awesome!" But that's what happened yesterday, ...