Well, that’s a tough question. For me, if someone put a gun to my head and asked me: “When’s the best time to visit Japan?” I’d easily say “winter” (and not because I hoped this psychopathic traveler / Tofugu reader holding a gun to my head would freeze to death). No, I truly think winter’s [...]
Sometimes we (myself included) need a reminder that time moves in mysterious ways, and that each and every person always has way too much of it whether they think they do or not. As Einstein said, “The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.” So the question is, how will [...]
We take it for granted nowadays that so much in our lives is standardized. Most places in the world recognize the Gregorian calendar, the metric system, etc., which makes it a lot easier to live our lives. But it wasn’t always that way; back in the days before the internet, TV, or even radio, things [...]
Not so long ago when I was in college, I took a class about Japanese culture and society. In one of our books, there was a graph about Japanese birth rates that looked like this: I saw the giant dip in birth rates in 1966 and was confused. I flipped around a couple of pages [...]
The Gregorian system is the internationally accepted calendar system. Japan officially adopted a variant of the Gregorian in 1873. Before the adoption, Japan primarily used a seven day calendar system lunisolar system for roughly 1200 years. Some of the elements of the system carried over to the Gregorian. Have you ever given thought about the [...]
Anyone who knows me well enough knows that I have a thing for watches. I have frittered away many hours on watch forums, Amazon, YouTube, and eBay looking at watches, deciding what watch brands are worth the money and which ones are pure crap. As I am not yet a rich man I cannot at [...]
Do you know what is probably the number one thing keeping people (and possibly you) from learning Japanese? Fear. Cold, dank, heart stopping, FEAR. Well, okay, maybe it’s not that bad. But it’s at least an underlying whispering thing that erodes your courage with time. In this post, I’m going to talk about this fear, [...]
