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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
I hope you’ll forgive me for posting about something not related to Japan or Japanese, especially because this article will touch on three topics that are important to me (and related to this blog in one way or another)––science fiction, translation, and publishing. One of the perks of living in Portland, Oregon is the proximity… Read More »
Recently I was asked by Akylina of popular Literary Sisters blog if I had read anything interesting in 2018. I started drafting a response to her comment, but partway through realized I might as well make a short article about it while I was at it. This year since I was busy translating I didn’t… Read More »
As the year is about over, in this post I’d like to take a step back and talk about a few of the things I did in 2018. First, to give some context: In 2016 I did a little translation work as a side-job at Gengo, the online translation platform, and began to do translations… Read More »
After having just released an E-book, I decided to allow myself the pleasure of reading an English novel (generally, I am either doing translations or reading Japanese works). I choose “Summerland”, a book released in 2018 by Hannu Rajaniemi, who happens to be the author of “The Quantum Thief”, a SF novel that was released… Read More »
I’m very pleased to announce my latest book, “Tales of the Disturbed,” has just been released on Amazon. This book contains my translations of several short stories by the classic Japanese author Yoshio Toyoshima (1890-1955), all which are appearing the first time in English. Whereas my other books have all been about science fiction or… Read More »
In recent years I have been spending a good portion of my hobby time on Japanese-related stuff (studying, reading, translating), but before I got into Japanese I spent a lot of time playing a few musical instruments, particularly piano. While this post will be a little off-topic compared to my usual focus, I thought my… Read More »