This article is a part of series of articles about my 2017 trip to Hawaii. Please see the table of contents that contains links to other chapters. Why Hawaii? After much discussion we settled on Hawaii not just because of the Japanese culture there, but also because it was significantly closer to us (in Portland,… Read More »
Hawaii Travelogue: a Japan away from Japan This year, I decided to go with my family on vacation to Hawaii, where we stayed for around a week in Waikiki, one of the biggest tourist areas (観光地) of Honolulu, on the island of Oahu. As someone who has a spent a large part of the last… Read More »
The other day when browsing Kinokuniya’s Beaverton store (near Portland, Oregon), a book titled “その日本語、大人はカチンときます！” (“That Japanese is offensive!”) caught my interest so I decided to try it out. It was published in 2016 by 青春出版社 (Seishun Publishing Company), edited by ビジネス文章力研究所 (Business Bunshoryoku Kenkujo), and is a little under 200 pages. (Note: the title technically literally says… Read More »
When studying Japanese, especially if you don’t live in Japan, there are always blind spots which can develop in your learning depending on what materials and methods you use to study. One area that I’ve found difficult is slang, because many of the materials I use (especially books and TV dramas) tend to not use… Read More »
Yesterday in WWDC, Apple’s yearly developer conference, there was a brief mention of their oldest attendant, Masako Wamakiya (若宮正子), who actually has her own iPhone application in the Apple mobile app store. Masako, at 82, decided she wanted to create apps that senior citizens after she retired from her job at a bank. The app… Read More »
Recently I posted a review of the book “Poverty Lessons” by Toru Kazama, which is biography of the actor’s life, focusing on his difficult times in poverty and what he learned as a result of that. As a translation exercise and to give a little exposure of this great book to English-speaking audiences, I’ve decided to translate… Read More »
When I read for pleasure in either Japanese or English, I tend to go with fiction, and the book reviews I post on this blog reflect that pretty well. But over time, I’ve still read my share of non-fiction books, including those about stock investing, technology, and science. There is one genre, however, which I’ve never… Read More »
When I discovered the book “Convenience Store Woman” (Japanese title “コンビニ人間”) by Sayaka Murata had won the 155th Akutagawa prize (arguably the biggest prize for Japanese literature), I decided to check it out myself. I purposefully stayed away from reviews or information about the book, and all I really knew was the book was about a woman who… Read More »
[Update: As it seems a proper English translation of this book has been released, I have removed my translation from this page. I am leaving the rest of the page just for historical reasons.] On the blog Shosetsu Ninja, Yeti reviews Japanese books, and he has recently also started putting up a few translations of… Read More »
These days rather than reading Japanese novels, each which can still take me quite a long time to finish, I’ve been reading a literary magazine called 小説幻冬 (“Shousetsu Gento”, where “shousetsu” means ‘novel’ or ‘short story’) published by 幻冬社 (Gentosha). [Gotta love the name “幻冬”, which is made up for the characters for “mysterious” and… Read More »