Karaoke (pronounced kah-rah-OH-kay) is the famous Japanese tradition of getting up and singing in front of others. The word literally ...
I've written about how Japan's society often seems to follow behind the U.S. in many areas, usually running about a ...
What a difference an elongated vowel can make. Japanese is quite different from English, having had a totally unique developmental ...
Whenever I come back to the U.S., I like to cruise the grocery stores to see what new products have ...
Japan is a country that's very focused on education, and I've always observed that parents seem to put more energy ...
Japan is the land of the "boom," and you never know when some new thing is going to come out ...
First of all, we experienced some server trouble Sunday night for about an hour or so. I'd think of some ...
Last time I mentioned the magic words that may be responsible for much of the wa or harmony that Japan ...
I got a reminder that Japan is very much a part of the Pacific Ring of Fire yesterday when a ...
You can't think of Japan without also thinking of the country's tallest and most famous mountain, Mt. Fuji. An active ...
The other day I went to my son's school to watch the various end-of-year performances the students had prepared for ...
Japan is a very seasonal place, with specific things done only during the appropriate times of year. August is when ...
It was Thomas Paine -- a possible ancestor of mine, although I somehow doubt it -- who uttered the words, ...
We've been watching the extra-cold winter dumping lots of snow on the U.S. this year and feeling more than a ...
One thing I've heard from foreigners who have recently come to Japan -- and which I've probably uttered myself a ...
That old planet Earth, she just keeps on getting smaller and smaller, and it's a lot of fun to sit ...
It's funny how culture criss-crosses the globe, never stopping at such laughable things as national borders as it flows to ...
I sometimes find myself thinking back to my college days when I first started learning Japanese, and it never fails ...
When a foreigner comes to live in Japan, he or she is in for some changes. I remember my first ...
The subject of Japan's police is an interesting one. Japan's boys in blue are organized under the umbrella of the ...
People talk about convergence all the time, of things coming together in a more convenient form. Living in Japan, one ...
We have a rule at our house: in order to help our kids become bilingual, we only watch DVDs from ...
It's a boy! All Japan is currently cheering the news that Princess Kiko has given birth to a boy. The ...
First of all, we had a problem with our mail server, which caused Monday's emails to show up a day ...
