Every Sunday we gather the week’s weird Japanese news and present it to you in our Sunday News column. It might not always be hard-hitting, but we hope that it still informs and entertains you. Enjoy! [Header image source]
Culture always seems to grow legs of its own. Regardless of how specific and niche you might think a culture is, it always finds a way to go where you least expect it. Except “Where you least expect it” always seems to be Japan. For such a supposedly homogenous culture, Japanese people seem to wholly [...]
One of Japan’s biggest culinary exports is Kobe beef, a high-end meat from purebred cows. Its quality is the stuff of legend. People say that the cows are massaged, played classical music, fed booze, and pampered in every way a cow possibly could be. Kobe beef has taken off outside of Japan in recent years. [...]
Every Sunday we gather the week’s weird Japanese news and present it to you in our Sunday News column. It might not always be hard-hitting, but we hope that it still informs and entertains you. Enjoy! [Header image source]
I like to listen to a lot of instrumental music. I know that a lot of people think that instrumentals are boring, and I can see where they’re coming from. But for me, instrumental music is great. Once the lyrics get out of the way, you can really zone out and get into the music [...]
Japan’s Emperor Akihito is the man. Not only because he and the Empress look like the most friendly, adorable old people to ever walk the planet, but also because he’s a bit of a trailblazer. You might not believe it from his harmless appearance, but during his lifetime Emperor Akihito has done a ton of [...]
If you’re learning Japanese, one of the first things you do is learn what your name is in Japanese. It’s great because it personalizes the language and gives you an identity in Japanese. But sometimes there’s a little confusion about how to write your name in Japanese. Let’s look at the right and wrong way [...]
Every Sunday we gather the week’s weird Japanese news and present it to you in our Sunday News column. It might not always be hard-hitting, but we hope that it still informs and entertains you. Enjoy! [Header image source.]
It’s no secret that Japan and Hawaii have a special relationship. There are a ton of people with Japanese ancestry living in Hawaii, it’s common vacation destination for many Japanese (my Japanese relatives took their honeymoon in Hawaii), and there’s lots of Japanese elements in Hawaiian culture. Spam musubi, anybody? But Japan’s impact on Hawaii [...]
What is “beautiful?” Depends who you ask! Beauty is a very subjective thing, and its definition changes wildly depending on who you ask. What’s ugly and hideous to one person is attractive and sexy to the next. There’s no better example of this than the Japanese yaeba phenomenon. Some people in Japan think that a [...]
