Tag: kids

My daughter's been quite happy in school recently, after a trip she took with her class a few weeks ago ...

I remember back in the 1980s, when Japan's educational system was held up as a success story for other nations ...

There's a sad statistic that's on the rise in Japan these days: divorce. The combination of the country's rapidly aging ...

The most common word for "foreigner" in Japanese is gaijin, written using the characters for "outside" and "person." While ostensibly ...

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

One interesting concept I learned about soon after coming to Japan was jiko shokai, which just means "self introduction" but ...

I have a rather strange problem: I don't know my own kids. Or rather, I know the half that speaks ...

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

I write a lot about how Japan is a homogenous place where everyone considers themselves as having come from the ...

Every summer, we arrange to have our kids spend some time in the U.S. to help them learn English and ...

Big changes are in store for Japan's schools: the end of yutori kyoiku, translatable as "easy-does-it education," when Japan's Ministry ...

If you've listened to spoken Japanese at all you've probably heard the word desu, often pronounced with the last syllable ...

I mentioned last time that Japan has very few lawyers. It's true -- there's just one lawyer for every 7325 ...

Whenever I'm in the U.S., I find myself doing things in a slightly more Japanese way, just as I'm not ...

My wife and I are raising our kids to be bilingual in English and Japanese, and it's interesting to observe ...

Hello from Las Vegas, where my wife and I have come for some R&R without the kids, which is always ...

We're here at Anime Expo, the most excellent anime-themed annual event there is, with something like 40,000 other fans who ...

Japan has started a new initiative to fight fat using the buzzword metabo, short for metabolic syndrome, a polite way ...

It's still drizzling in Japan, as rainy season continues dumping an extra helping of precipitation on the Japanese islands. This ...

One interesting aspect of education in Japan is how students face competition in many forms which helps make them better ...

Are you ticklish? My kids certainly are, and I only have to move my hands towards them in a threatening ...

Many industrialized countries are battling falling birthrates, as human societies change and shift. The numbers of babies born per female ...

Sunday nights at our house is time for Chibi Maruko-chan (Little Maruko), one of the most popular anime shows in ...

Japan is a great country, with a lot to offer both short-term visitors and tourists as well as people like ...