My So-Called Japanese Life

My friend Joseph over at " Tame Goes Wild " has been studying Japanese at university for the past several years. It's a stagge...

When I first started working full-time at my former company (a Japanese office job that involved textbook making as well as teaching via cor...

It's time for U.S. residents residing in Japan to file their income tax forms. If you've filed before, you should have already been ...

You can get your own octopus dumpling cell phone strap from Strap-ya (image pinched from their web site here ). Despite the fact that only ...

On a daily basis, I hear my upstairs neighbors going about the business of their daily life. I hear them dropping things, slamming doors, an...

My apartment is pretty small, dark and airless so I have to leave the lights on in nearly every room to keep them lit sufficiently to work i...

Image pinched from the Charisma Man home page where one can order a comic book of the strips. Click this version to see a more readable siz...

When I was a child, I was sleeping over at my grandmother's house and had been relegated to the sofa for lack of any other space to slee...

This afternoon, I was biking to a local grocery store and riding quite slowly down the street. There was an old (Japanese) man, probably in ...

Back in my former company's former office, we had a tiny little kitchen that barely two people could squeeze into for food-related tasks...

Some of you may have noticed that I rarely type Japanese characters in my blog posts. Some of you may assume that I can't enter Japanese...

A police car drives past Koenji station and the flash highlights a curiously neon sign on its side. (I'd been meaning for quite some tim...

Yesterday one of my students attended a lesson with me after attending a funeral. She had a largish shopping bag with her which contained th...

While sitting on my bike at a pedestrian crosswalk, waiting for the little man to go from red man standing patiently at attention to change ...

"We provide a firstclass taste brought directly from the earth" claims my pastry. It makes me wonder if one of the ingredients mi...

About a month ago, I got a new student who is looking to increase her skill base in order to make a career change from a pharmaceutical indu...

Low fat milk (left) is cheaper than high fat milk but can resembled powdered milk taste-wise. The milk on the right is "ESL" or ...

(Part 1 is here ) A good indication of how mainstream some elements of Japanese culture are in the U.S. is reflected in sales like the one p...

In the comments section of one of my other posts , Michael asked me what I felt was Japan's cultural direction and/or contribution to t...

My family by blood consists of 4 people, my mother, father, and older sister. All of them have black or dark brown hair and brown eyes, but ...