Tag: manga

I write a lot about the Japanese concepts of senpai, an upperclassman in a school or a senior in an ...

It's funny how the Internet can bring out the best and the worst in people, and all of us seem ...

We're done with the first day of Anime Expo, and have spent the day meeting and greetings thousands of J-List ...

Japan's archeology world is buzzing after evidence that an ancient burial mound near Nara may have contained Queen Himiko, the ...

If you watch anime in Japanese at all, one word you will probably become aware of quickly is suki which ...

The most common word for "foreigner" in Japanese is gaijin, written with the characters for outside + person, although since ...

There are many things that American houses have which their Japanese counterparts lack, and vice-versa. A Japanese home will generally ...

One interesting aspect of Japan is its closer cultural relationship to its nearby neighbor, China, the ultimate origin of practically ...

Words carry different meanings to different people. For example, the most common word for steamed white rice in Japanese is ...

I remember reading through old Saint Seiya manga back in college, wondering why they always write the blood type of ...

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

Japanese films (houga) are a unique genre of cinema that I'm fascinated with, and whenever I watch one I'm captivated ...

It seems there's no aspect of Japan that can't be made more kawaii. Whether it's a big, faceless bank adopting ...

Japanese animation is fun for people from all over the world because the stories appeal to us even though we ...

There's an interesting category of vocabulary words made up of four kanji characters, which probably represents a grammatical construction left ...

Moé (pronounced mo-EH) is one of the primary concepts driving much of the anime world today, essentially occupying an entire ...

Each year the organization that publishes the Standardized Kanji Test announces the "kanji of the year," the single character that ...

Today's interesting word of Japanese is guuzen (GOO-zen), which means "coincidence." I don't know why, but there seems to be ...

In Japanese politics, as elsewhere, certain words or phrases get permanently attached to politicians. When Shinzo Abe came into office ...

Naturally, the Japanese that's taught in textbooks isn't always the most natural-sounding, and I remember being frustrated by some of ...

Japan is in a state of shock over the death of a pregnant mother after she was turned away from ...

We never think about idioms in our own language, but to non-native speakers, learning the meanings of phrases like "to ...

I love getting a haircut in Japan. The barber shop I use rents space inside a lobby of a large ...

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