Tofugu.com – Wonky Japanese Language and Culture

In the last couple months, we’ve done two Flutterscape.com giveaways. This is the third, last, and by far best in the series. You’ve gotten your hands on Cupmen and Midori Otoko, but now it’s time for you to choose what you want to win from the awesome Japanese products site. Read more…

I’m guessing a lot of you know how to type in Japanese (hint: you don’t need a Japanese keyboard), but did you know about all the “hidden” special characters you can type out while you’re in Japanese input mode? You aren’t only limited to hiragana, katakana, romaji, and kanji. There are a score of other weird characters you can use to make your text a lot more interesting, you know? Here’s a lot of them (mostly the good ones) with an explanation of what they are and how to get them to show up! Read more…

As if Twitter itself wasn’t a big enough time waster, right? This is a Japanese flash game (so is this) that takes your Twitter icon and pits you against another Twitter icon. After you’ve chosen the opponents, Twitter icons are placed on the battlefield, and they break up into a bunch of tiny little pieces, which charge at each other and duke it out. What I learned from all this? The Tofugu Twitter icon is very, very weak. Read more…

P.S. Stick around to the end of this post, where you can win a sexy green USB man.

I bet a lot of you know all about “rock, paper, scissors,” the other way that Japanese people make decisions, but did you know about amidakuji? When you need to assign people or things to an equal number of outcomes, amidakuji is the best way to do it… plus, it kind of reminds me of all those pipes mario smokes has to walk through. Read more…

(Be sure to stick around to the end, where you can win some goodies from FlutterScape) In the past, I’ve written about a few ways you can buy things from Japan. Most of them have been so-so at best. Finally (seriously, it’s about time), someone’s come up with something that works pretty darn well (I’ll tell you about my experience in a bit), and that something is FlutterScape.

FlutterScape seems a little complicated at first, but really it’s quite simple. There are people in Japan going around to various stores taking pictures of things they want to sell. They don’t buy these things from the store until you buy them. Once you buy the item, they go to the store, get the item, and send it to FluttersScape HQ in Japan. Once FlutterScape gets it they forward the money along (or will send it back to you if the person never gets the item for you) and will send the item to you. Seems complicated, but all you really need to know is that you can safely buy something without much worry about getting screwed over very very easily. Read more…

Click the image above to get a closer view

Mmmm, fukubukuro. One of my favorite things about New Years in Japan. The idea behind fukubukuro is simple yet enticing. Stores put stuff in bags, put a price on it, and don’t tell you what’s in there. All you know is that you’re getting an awesome deal even though you may not get quite what you want. Sometimes you get more than you bargained for, sometimes you don’t. That’s why fukubukuro is fun.

I know it isn’t New Years right now, but as you know I’m moving in order to make Tofugu my full time job. I’ve also decided to simplify my life. I don’t want all this stuff anymore. I was going to sell it on Craigslist, but thought of something a little more exciting (in my mind, anyways). That’s why I’ll be selling Tofukubukuro, while supplies last, which are small (or large) boxes of my stuff. You don’t know what you’re going to get (click through to get more information on what you’ll probably get), everything’s the same price, and it’s a fun little gamble. Plus, the money is going someplace pretty good, I think, and you could get some neat things out of it. Read more…

Crazy stuff has been afoot. Turns out my lease in the very expensive San Francisco (we’re talking $1800 /month for a studio & parking!) apartment I’m living in is up soon, and it’s time to make some decisions. In a nutshell, I’ve decided to take this opportunity to move to a less expensive city (Portland, OR) and turn my focus on Tofugu & TextFugu, full time. How cool is that? Writing on the internets for a living… take that, realism. Read more…

Because it’s a Saturday, and because I just know you need the inspiration, I’ve put together twelve images that will surely inspire you to jump on the kanji train. Choo choo. Kanji train coming in for a landing (yeah, the kanji train flies). Using the absolutely awesome online voluntary sweatshop-wage labor tool Mechanical Turk, I’ve been able to procure some inspiration for you. What I did was simple: I put a job up, asking people to write something that was both inspirational and kanji-related, and then take a picture of themselves. Of course, that got all sorts of interesting, and very uninspiring results, but at the very least it should give you a case of the chuckles. Read more…

If you’ve been reading Tofugu for a while, you’ll know that I can’t pass up a good Godzilla story, especially one that contains haikus as well. GodzillaHaiku is a Tumbler Blog that simply contains images from Godzilla films and overlays them with haikus. Kind of feels like a cross between LOLcats and UnhappyHipster, but a lot more radioactive, if you catch my drift. Read more…

Only two or three more days before you can win these White Rabbit Press flash cards. If you missed it, at the end of this video I told you how to win them. Lucky for all of you, I’ll tell you how to win them right here in this post, as well. Read more…