You can read about Japan for years and learn a lot about the country; but there’s something missing if you can’t hear and see those same things. That’s why I love documentaries about Japan so much. They give you a look into some of the most interesting things happening in Japan without having to buy [...]
When’s the last time you walked away from a movie hungry? It’s pretty rare for me. American movies about food seem to be few and far between, and the ones that are around are usually socially-conscious documentaries that bum me out more than anything. Japanese movies about food seem to do exactly the opposite. Most [...]
Every Sunday we gather the week’s weird and interesting Japanese news and present it to you in our Sunday News column. It might not always be hard-hitting news, but we hope that it still informs and entertains you. Enjoy!
There are lots of artforms that are uniquely Japanese, but maybe my favorite is giant monster movies. No country in the world can strap on a rubber suit and destroy miniature cities better than Japan. These monster movies, called kaijuu (怪獣) movies in Japan, are some of the most iconic in Japanese history. Besides the [...]
In the 60s, a Japanese song became incredibly popular not only in Japan but across the world. In Japan, it was called 上を向いて歩こう or roughly, “I Will Walk Looking Up.” It was an emotional song about the defeat of a popular Japanese protest movement against American military bases in Japan. But people in English-speaking countries [...]
Every Sunday we gather the week’s weird and interesting Japanese news and present it to you in our Sunday News column. It might not always be hard-hitting news, but we hope that it still informs and entertains you. Enjoy! [Header image source]
Earlier this week, Japan shattered the record for Tweets per second in a flurry of coordinated social media activity. Servers strained and the Fail Whale threatened to rear its ugly head, but Japanese Twitter users prevailed and sent out, at their peak, 11,000 Tweets a second. That’s nearly 700,000 Tweets per minute! What event was [...]
