This time I’d like to review a movie I just finished watching, “陽だまりの彼女”, which I would categorize as an offbeat romance. To start off with a linguistic note, the word 陽だまり is a little tricky to translate to English because there really isn’t a good match, at least using a single word. Here 陽 (hi) means… Read More »
Monocle is a magazine whose cover design has caught my eye now and then at the local bookstore, though usually when I leaf through it the topics don’t quite match my interests, with stuffy topics like world affairs. However, the cover of the most recent issue (#81) was a big picture of Doremon, the famous… Read More »
In a previous post I’ve talked about the NHK Japanese podcasts, which are freely available online for a variety of programs. I’ve jumped around listening to a few of these, but lately have really gotten into one called “Oogiri corner” (大喜利コーナー）that is billed as “The earliest in Japan” (日本一早い) and is part of the “Suppin”… Read More »
Recently I happened to stop by Kinokuniya, one of the better Japanese bookstores in San Jose. I wanted to buy a few things there to read, but since I had done practically no research before arriving I ended up picking up the first issue of Hiroya Oku’s “Dog House” base only on the cover art and some text which said something about robots… Read More »
A friend of mine told me he had heard of someone who was making an attempt to read one novel from each country in the world. This sounded like a pretty fun project, but of course my first instinct was to ask “so which novel was picked for Japan?” The answer to this question was… Read More »
I first heard about this movie a few months ago (it debuted last November in theaters) as a CG-animated film which was heavily influenced by Japanese culture. Being a fan of both CG and Japanese culture, I had to see it, although I waited until it came out on Blue Ray last month. The story… Read More »
As I’ve said in several other posts, Japanese dramas are a great source for learning conversation skills, including common expressions and vocabulary. However, depending on the drama, there will be more or less coverage of stuff that you would actually be able to use yourself. For example, a drama where the main character is a… Read More »
Though I am a big advocate of learning a foreign language using all possible resources, music is one part of Japanese culture I haven’t emphasized as much as manga, novels, or TV dramas. Although I’ve enjoyed songs from various Japanese genres, and there are few artists I’ve been into (Quruli, Utada Hikaru, Yui, etc.), recently… Read More »
We received “99 Tears” as a gift and since it was a relatively thin paperback book I decided to try it out. It’s a set of 12 short stories, each written by a different Japanese author. The settings and characters are all different, but they all share an emphasis on interpersonal relations, especially those with family.… Read More »
It’s no exaggeration to say I’m a huge fan of Japanese Ramen soup, so much that I’ve been considering writing an entire post on it. But this time I’ve decided to write a review of a ramen shop I went to recently in Hollywood, Florida, that was quite delicious. The store is called ‘GoBistro’, and to be… Read More »