My series of Japanese fairy tales, “Classic Japanese Fairy Tales”, is one of my favorite projects because each of Mimei Ogawa’s stories manages to pack a significant message in a small, easy-to-understand form. This makes everything from story selection, translation, and editing a real joy, and these attributes also make these stories useful for those… Read More »
I translated the second part of Kenji Miyazawa’s famous story “Matasaburo of the Wind”, which happens to be the same story referred to in the song “Matasaburo” by the rock band Yorushika.
Books on Asia was kind enough to post an excerpt of one of the stories from my recent book: “Days & Nights: Stories of classic Japanese women’s literature”, which contains my translations of Hayashi Fumiko’s fiction works.
I review “Prime Japan”, as documentary series about Japan that is available free on Amazon Prime.
When learning a foreign language, it’s generally a good idea to learn some proverbs, what we call “kotowaza” (諺) in Japanese. It’s not just because they are a fun way to learn new words in context, but also because proverbs can express meaningful ideas in a concise form that often reflects that country’s history and… Read More »
I’m proud to announce Arigatai Book’s first paperback release: a collection of stories by Hayashi Fumiko, now available for purchase on Amazon.
My friend and collaborator Kaimai Mizuhiro (開米瑞浩) is working on an project that I think will be interesting to those studying Japanese, so I’ll talk about it a little here. Kaimai has a bunch of books out, and a common thread throughout them is how to communicate effectively (both verbally and with diagrams) in a… Read More »
I’m very happy to announce I’ve formally established “Arigatai Books”, a publisher focused on Japanese literature and other related material. In this post I’ll go over some of my reasons to create a publisher and introduce our new website.
In this post I give over 50 introductory phrases, with translations. that can be used as starting blocks to build Japanese sentences.
You probably know that the Japanese word “sono” means “that”, but in this article I will talk about an alternate way it can be used.