Category Archives: Aside
Free Japanese textbooks (for children with Japanese citizenship)
Many parents living in a country different from where they were born have a desire to teach their children about their home country’s culture and language. There is a plethora of resources online to study foreign languages, but for children often physical books are seen as the best type of media. However, there are not… Read More »
A bittersweet afternoon at Powell’s bookstore
Powell’s Books is considered to be the largest independent bookstore in the world, with their “City of Books” location in Portland containing over one million books across over 1.5 acres of space––a venerable labyrinth of books that is a must-see place for any book lover. With all the Japanese culture in Oregon, it’s no surprise… Read More »
Removing furigana markup from Japanese text
Sometimes when working with Japanese documents you may need to remove furigana (sometimes called ‘ruby’) from a block of text. For example, you may be taking furigana-marked source text from Aozora Bunko, but don’t want to include the furigana in some other media. I had this exact problem when working on an E-book of translated… Read More »
Training Aikido in a Japanese Dojo: An intriguing experience
Ever since I began training in the martial art of Ki Aikido (more formally known as 心身統一合氣道, shinshin touitsu aikido) in Oregon, I was always curious what it would like to train in a dojo in Japan where the training (稽古、keiko) was done in Japanese––though rather than merely a curiosity, I guess you could say… Read More »
A thoughtful discourse on literature with Japanese author Fuminori Nakamura (中村文則)
I’ve been an avid reader since I was young, but until high school I mostly read fantasy novels that would be considered popular fiction. In high school I was assigned to read a variety of books in various genres, but I think it’s safe to say a majority of them could be considered ‘literature’ in… Read More »
Hitori Saito (斎藤一人): entrepreneur, best-selling author, motivational speaker
In this post I’d like to discuss Hitori Saito(斎藤一人), a man who is somewhat famous in Japan these days. Hitori Saito is the entrepreneur behind Ginza Marukan (銀座まるかん), a successful cosmetics and health food business. He also has a large number of books (many available on Amazon Japan, what you could call 啓蒙書 or “enlightenment… Read More »
Finding Japanese Singles in Portland (or anywhere else)
The other day I got a comment from a reader asking about if I knew anywhere to meet Japanese singles in Portland. Although I don’t typically talk about this sort of topic, it is related enough to Japan/Japanese and I have some experience in this area myself, so I thought I would put down my… Read More »
Japanese restaurant review: Kuu of Portland
We recently heard from a friend about a new Japanese restaurant in download Portland called Kuu, which is a word that means “to eat” in Japanese (it has somewhat of a rough feel to it, so I recommend using the more common taberu in most situation). The restaurant opened at 11:00 a.m., and as we… Read More »
How I got over half a million hits in a year
The other day I happened to check my yearly views for 2018 and was surprised by the number: a little over 500,000. It’s been a while since I’ve written a post about blogging and statistics so I in this article I would like to talk about what helped me get this amount of traffic. Keep… Read More »