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...

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 ...

My previous post was a caveat for the answer I'm about to give to this question that I was asked in the comments section of a former po...

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...

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...

(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 ...

Quite some time ago, my husband did a language exchange with a Japanese woman in her mid 20s. This is a "classic" arrangement that...

Yesterday evening while I was doing some late evening shopping at a local 99 yen shop, I saw a fellow do something which I've always fel...

Two young women chat in the station in their kimono on adulthood day. Each culture has its ages where milestones are reached. In the U.S., t...

There are some things I have never done in Japan. If you're thinking things like go to an onsen and allow the locals to oogle my pasty n...

Anpanman is a popular cartoon character in Japan, particularly among the age range that spans from the diaper-wearing to the not-quite-inte...

A fellow who works at a restaurant just finished tossing waste water onto the street in front of the establishment. One thing you can't ...