Tag: Life in Japan

If you've watched more than a few anime series, you'll know that clubs are an important part of life in ...

It's interesting, the subtle things you can pick up from anime, which go beyond the story you're watching. I recently ...

Japan is entering Golden Week, a semi-accidental clustering of holidays that received its unique name from movie theatre operators trying ...

One unexpected aspect of expat life in Japan is making friends with gaijin -- the word the Japanese use for ...

Things I like about winter in Japan: wearing my hanten kimono coat while enjoying a dinner of nabe with the ...

Outside my office at J-List, a fire truck has just driven by, just like it does every evening this time ...

One thing about Japan: they love vending machines. There are more of them here than any other country on Earth ...

Cell phones have been a big part of life in Japan ever since they went mainstream in the mid 1990s, ...

One interesting area of life in Japan is weddings, and Japanese really take the subject of getting married seriously. One ...

Just as Americans are accustomed to thinking of our country as a union of semi-soverign states, each with its own ...

What would you do in a world without lawyers? Well, for all intents and purposes that that's the reality of ...

One of the challenges of getting used to my new life in Japan was the total lack of street names, ...

Life in Japan is quite different from back home in the States, and there were many things I needed to ...

At J-List, we like to encourage interest in learning Japanese, since it's such a rewarding language to study whether you're ...

You've been in Japan too long when you get a nihongo ga jozu ("you speak Japanese very well") and feel ...

The other day my wife gave me a treat for dessert: a delicious slice of honeydew melon. It wasn't just ...

Being an anime fan means more than just enjoying pretty moe girls and watching robots battle each other: it's a ...

I've always enjoyed the sounds of Japan, from the calming bong-bong-bong made by train crossings to sounds that mark the ...

One of the more enjoyable aspects of living in Japan is discovering strange English, which is literally everywhere since the ...

You've been in Japan too long when you get a nihongo ga jozu and feel really insulted. It's an odd ...

One of the cardinal rules for gaijin coming to Japan is, try your best to make it over here as ...

I wrote before about how, in the complex world of obsessive otaku culture in Japan, there are (for example) fans ...

One of the most important concepts in daily life in Japan is shinyo (SHIN-yo), which means "trust," and when Japanese ...

When I came to live in Japan back during the first Bush Presidency, I brought many things with me, including ...