My family and I are big fans of Studio Ghibli films and have seen a good portion of them (roughly half of their 20 films). A few classics like Totoro and Spirited Away we’ve seen several times. For some time I was eager to see their 2013 animated film “The Wind Rises” (風立ちぬ), but wasn’t… Read More »
In a previous post I had briefly mentioned the site Booklive.jp, but I wanted to talk in more detail about what this site has to offer. Booklive.jp is a website which sells Japanese E-books (電子書籍, “denshi shoseki”) from a wide variety of genres, including magazines, manga, business books, and adult material. While the layout of the… Read More »
In our trip to Japan this year, we visited many bookstores throughout the country. I love Japanese bookstores not only because I can see what is popular in literary Japan, but also because it’s fun to read the covers and backs of a bunch of books and figure out what type of book each is.… Read More »
A few weeks back when I had written an article about translation, someone had posted a comment about the site Gengo.com, which is a web-based human translation service. “Gengo” (言語) means “language” in Japanese, and the company is in fact located in Tokyo. The concept of the site is pretty straightforward: Those who need text translated can work… Read More »
One thing that makes mastering a foreign language tricky is how the vocabulary, grammar, and even pronunciation can change depending on the environment and situation. For example, watching an cartoon targeting children and a comedy show broadcast on TV will be extremely different experiences. For Japanese, assuming you have a good foundation in grammar, if you watch… Read More »
“Candy Candy” is a Japanese historical Shoujo (girls) manga written by Keiko Nagita (名木田 恵子) which was originally published in the magazine “Nakayoshi” serially from 1975 to 1979. It was quite popular, and spawned an anime, theatrical show, and several novels. To give an idea of the popularity, around 12 million copies were printed in total for the… Read More »
Tuttle Publishing offered me the opportunity to provide an early review of Florent Chavouet’s travel guide, titled “Manabeshima Island Japan”, and I jumped at the chance. After all, the book wasn’t coming out until Dec 1, 2015, and it’s funny subtitle of “One island, two months, one minicar, sixty crabs, eight bites, and fifty shots of shochu” had… Read More »
Thanks to the Internet, a person studying a foreign language without a formal study program can look up answers to the many questions they will surely have along the way. One place where your typical internet searching doesn’t work too well is matters of pronunciation, since it’s hard to convey sounds using just text. There… Read More »
Hal, an animated Japanese film from 2013 directed by Ryōtarō Makihara, is the second of two movies we recently purchased. The first was Patema Inverted, which I reviewed here. These movies were so totally different in almost every way. This movie begins with a terrible plane accident that results in the death of Hal (more… Read More »
I decided to buy this movie after seeing the preview for Patema Inverted on Amazon Prime. I hadn’t seen an anime movie in a little while, and it looked to have great potential. Unfortunately, this movie was a pretty big letdown. The premise of this movie is a bit hokey, if not comedical: It’s boy-meets-girl… Read More »