In Japan, where politeness in language is so important, suffixes are quite essential. What are suffixes? They’re words that come after other words—in this case, these suffixes are titles of address. A rough English equivalent could be the prefixes “Mr.,”…
If you’ve been teaching yourself Japanese with the grammar lessons on this site, you ought to have a firm grasp on basic counting in Japanese. You’ll need to know those numbers to be able to say the date in Japanese—but…
In Japan, a country in which professional matchmaking (called “omiai“) is still a viable method of meeting your fiance(e) (although a much less often used method than in the past), goukon is a popular method of meeting potential boyfriends or…
As we’ve previously covered, Japan conducts an annual whale hunting expedition despite the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling asking that they do not. Japan always insists the whaling is performed for the purposes of “research,” but a lot…
In the aftermath of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami and the subsequent earthquakes and nuclear power plant issues, the world has gotten a glimpse into the way that the Japanese deal with significant disasters. The fact that there have…
If you plan on spending time in Japan or around Japanese-speaking people, it’s better that you over prepare than under prepare. Knowing how to talk about your health problems with your host family or a physician can help you get…
On Friday, we discussed Osaka as “the nation’s kitchen.” Today we’ll talk instead about Osaka as the home of comedy. But first, we’ll take a closer look at Osaka–ben, or the Osakan dialect. Just like in the U.S., where an…
When it comes to seeing a movie in cinemas, you probably don’t think the experience differs much from country to country. However, seeing a movie in Japan is a bit different than seeing a movie in the US, for example—and…
Now we’re going to switch our focus over the next few weeks to New Year’s celebrations in Japan, as the New Year is a much more important holiday in Japanese culture than Christmas. For the basics of the New Year…
Baseball may be America’s pastime, but it seems like other sports such as football often take the spotlight away from the sport. In Japan, though, baseball has been the most popular league sport in the country for decades (although soccer…
This week, Japanese students and many Japanese businesspeople are sitting back, relaxing and enjoying their week off. The first week in May (actually April 29th to May 5th) is called “Golden Week” (ougon shuukan) in Japan because the close proximity…
So far we’ve covered a number of Japan’s most populated cities in this blog. For example, Tokyo, Japan’s most populated city, is home to about 13.01 million residents in only about 845 square miles of space. (That’s about 15,144 people…