It’s easy to study a foreign language by cooping yourself up in your room and trying to memorize rules and words. But once you actually start using it, you realize that learning in isolation can only take you so far, and when actually speaking with natives you can really start learning the language. Traveling to… Read More »
I’ve just released a new album of 30 new solo piano songs, with my usual mix of classical/new age/jazz and whatever else strikes me when I am playing.
I recently traveled to Japan to train in Aikido with Sensei Tohei Shin’ichi and visited a few places including Tokyo and Sapporo. I wrote about my experiences in a previous post, and you can see around 60 pictures from this trip below. (Note: WordPress adjusted a bunch of the pictures so that you can’t see… Read More »
A bunch of artistic variations of the Japanese kanji character for “moon”, 月.
In this article I talk in detail about my experiences in Japan to Tokyo, Hakodate, and Sapporo during a two-week trip that included training with Shin’ichi Tohei Sensei, the head of the world Ki Society.
Shin’ichiro Watanabe (渡辺 信一郎) is a director is most known for his classic anime Cowboy Bebop (カウボーイビバップ), which is definitely one of my top ten favorites. He also did Samurai Champloo (サムライチャンプルー), another of my favorites. Both of these are great not just because their stories and characters, but their wonderful music. Recently I heard… Read More »
In this post I decided to do an analysis of around twenty phrases from Frieren Episode 1, giving my opinions on the quality of the translation and other translation options.
Edogawa Rampo（江戸川乱歩） is an author who took influence from Western culture and went on to make a huge impact in classic Japanese literature, especially in the genres of mystery and thriller fiction. Back in 2021 I published The Masquerade Ball (覆面の舞踏者), a story by Rampo about a mysterious party that is, considering the spectrum of… Read More »
This is my review of the first season of the Netflix-available Frieren, which happens to be one of my favorites of the last decade.
If you’ve studied Japanese for any amount of time, you’ve probably noticed that Japanese has many homophones, which are words that sound the same but have different meanings. Generally you can tell them apart from context (and there are also differences in intonation to help differentiate depending on the region, as well as kanji representation),… Read More »