In the continuing quest to improve my Japanese reading skills and experience various facets of Japanese culture, I’ve been reading different types of books over the last few years. The genres range from children’s picture books to classics like Ningen Shikkaku. My latest challenge was the book “オレたちバブル入行組” (Oretachi baburu nyuukougumi) by Jun Ikeido (池井戸潤), which began serialization… Read More »
My family and I had a great time on our 15-day vacation to Japan this August, and I really enjoyed writing so many posts about it. Although it’s possible to get a page linking to a bunch of blog posts using keywords (like this), for ease of use I think an old-fashioned table of contents… Read More »
Studying a foreign language never gets old because you always have new things to learn. In Japanese, once you put in the time and effort to learn the grammar and a good chunk of the Kanji characters, you’ll get to a point where you can start reading native-level Japanese little by little. But there will always… Read More »
On our recent trip to Japan we took over 2000 pictures, the majority on a brand new Olympus TG-4 Tough we purchased just for this occasion. I’ve went through them and selected my top 40 favorites.
Watching Japan’s countryside rush by outside the window of a fast-moving train always mesmerizes me. There is a natural, peaceful beauty to the expansive fields of green, interspersed with homes bearing bright-colored roofs in shades of orange and blue. The land is fairly flat, so in some places you can see far into the distance, as things… Read More »
One thing I feel makes Japanese culture unique is their service mindset (called サービス精神), which manifests as attention to detail, thoroughness, and politeness with dealing with customers. I touched on this topic in several other articles of this series, for example the ANA Stewardesses. When responding to a customer, you can see their respect reflected in… Read More »
For the last two days of our 2015 Japan trip, we decided on staying in a hotel in Narita. Though Narita isn’t exactly known for it’s sightseeing, being only 10-15 minutes away from the Narita airport is extremely convenient. The hotel we stayed in, Narita View Hotel (成田ビューホテル), also had shuttle service to the Airport… Read More »
Having only travelled to Japan a handful of times, each only a week or two, I am usually hesitant to make any general claims about their culture. After all, there is always a wide distribution of traits in the people of any country. For example, just because I happened to know a few Japanese guys who were… Read More »
I can remember the days when I first heard about this thing called “sushi” from a friend and gathered up the strength to try some after considerable effort. In the 20 or so years since then, I’ve tried many other types of Japanese cuisine and grown to love nearly all of them (Natto is one… Read More »
On our recent trip to Japan we stayed a few days in Souma (相馬市) which resides in Fukushima prefecture (福島県) in northeast Japan, a few hours from Tokyo by speed train. Souma (sometimes written as Soma) is a relatively small city with a population of roughly 35,000 people, considered as a castle town (城下町) in the Edo period.… Read More »