It’s easy to forget sometimes that Japanese culture can, in some ways, be so different from our own. We’re all pretty much the same in the ways that really count, but the small differences still seem kind of weird. Take the stars, for instance. We all see a lot of the same things when we [...]
The Senkaku Island dispute has been blowing up again lately and the media is all ablaze with anti-Japanese protests in China. Japanese businesses are being vandalized, Japanese cars destroyed, and all sorts of crazy nonsense has been going down over there lately. So why are the Senkaku Islands so important to these countries and who [...]
There are dragons of all different shapes and sizes. There’s the big, European dragons with their hulking bodies, expansive wing span, and fire breath, and then there are the Asian style dragons which are a good bit different. And then we have the Japanese dragon, a unique dragon that many would recognize as being an [...]
Any keen fisher(wo)men among our readers? Nowadays just about every phone is also a camera and a camcorder, so keeping a record of your latest catch is a trivial matter – and of course you’d want to, if only to avoid having to insist “I swear it was this big!” to disbelieving friends and family. [...]
The Final Fantasy series is probably my favorite series of games ever. Well, used to be anyway. 2012 marks the 25th anniversary of the Final Fantasy franchise (complete with box set goodies) and they’ve sure come a long way and gone through a lot of changes. A while ago I wrote a bit about the [...]
Japan owes a lot to China, there’s no doubt about that. Almost all Japanese kanji were adopted from Chinese characters. Even hiragana and katakana are just random modified bits of Chinese characters. Image sources: 1, 2 Buddhism, although it has begun to diminish somewhat, is still the second most popular religion in Japan, and it [...]
Imagine this: You leave work at 3 am yet again, glumly thinking I’m going to become another karoshi statistic. The nearest capsule hotel is just a half-hour walk away, but you’re knackered and you know a shortcut: straight through an unlit park. It’s dark and you can barely see past your own nose, but you [...]
