Tag: history

Last time I talked about the new Japanese "lay jury" system, which aims to have citizen jurors take part in ...

Like most countries, Japan has its unsavory elements, including organized crime. Japan's version of the Italian mafia are the yakuza ...

I saw that Toshiba recently won a special award for its JW-10 Word Processor, a breakthrough product that allowed the ...

On Sunday we had ourselves an early (and partially Costco-enabled) Thanksgiving, since Thursday is rather a difficult day to take ...

I've written before about my wife's uncle, the World War II veteran who loves me since I'm the only one ...

America's election is almost here, and the whole world is watching, including the Japanese, who get regular reports from the ...

Today marks an interesting 10-year anniversary: the first legal performance of a Japanese song in South Korea, when singer Tomoe ...

Would you like to learn to speak Japanese fluently? If so then you want to become pera pera, an odd ...

One concept you eventually bump into when studying about Japan is nihonjinron (nee-HONE-JEEN-rone), a word which literally means "theories on ...

A nation is defined by several factors, including language, geography and politics, but also by its shared mythology. In America ...

One thing foreigners visiting Japan should be sure and try is "real" ramen. Thanks to its cheapness, virtually everyone in ...

Yesterday we went to visit my wife's uncle in the hospital. Making a hospital visit to a sick friend or ...

One thing that's fun about having kids is all the creative observations they make. Like the time my daughter saw ...

When you think of traditional images from the Edo Period, firemen probably don't immediately spring to mind. And yet for ...

You can pick almost any area to compare Japan with the U.S.: history, culture, sports -- or if you like, ...

Every visitor to Japan develops, I think, a special relationship with Kyoto, the beautiful city that was capital of Japan ...

Although anime has become a part of our world culture, watched by fans from all over the globe, the word ...

There are certain things that every self-respecting Japanese city will be sure to have. For example, a large central Culture ...

J-List's home prefecture of Gunma isn't as famous as Kyoto or Nara, but it can hold its own when it ...

They're known as Takeshima in Japan, Dokdo in Korea, and internationally as the Lincourt Rocks: two ridiculously small volcanic islands ...

When is a graveyard likely to be filled with tourists snapping pictures? When it's a gaijin bochi, or "foreigners' graveyard," ...

One of the stranger aspects of Japan's kanji-based writing system is the way many people lose some ability to write ...

If you ever come to Japan, be sure and visit Kamakura, a charming city located about 50 km south of ...

Because I only visit the U.S. once or twice a year, I'm always noticing things I might not otherwise. It's ...