A blog about Japan, dating, social skills, and travel. Aiming to provide well-balanced Japanese perspective.
When to Use Keigo (Honorific Speech): Hierarchy in Japanese Society
Have you ever been unsure whether you should use keigo (honorific speech) or not in Japan? I have. Growing up in Japan, I’ve always faced the uncertainty of speaking keigo. If you are a fluent Japanese speaker or serious Japanese learner, I think you will be able to relate to my experience. * I will refer […]
What Happens When You Fall in Love – How Romantic Love Works
I was in my second year at my Japanese high school. I was walking along a hot, summer street to school. There was something different that day. I was thinking about the previous night I had spent with the girl I was in love with. The sun, the sky, the asphalt road, the green trees, […]
Essential Japanese: Nanto-naku – Without Any Particular Reason – なんとなく
When I was in high school, I was almost never late. Well, that’s not exactly true – I was late from time to time. My school had a rule about being late: we had to fill out a form writing down the time and reason. After filling out the form, we had to find someone […]
Until that day, I had never thought 130 yens (about $1) could make such a difference. It was one of those hot Japanese summer days. I went to Yokohama for some shopping. Back in those days, I would go to Yokohama quite often because it was on the way to my high school. Yokohama was […]
That summer, we decided to make a thousand origami paper cranes. It was a collective project involving a few families: me (about six at the time), my brother, my mother, my friends, their parents—whoever had time made cranes, as many as possible. A thousand cranes was a lot: it would take about 20 man-hours. Every […]
Sho, a Japanese guy in his late twenties, met Lorie in Vancouver, Canada. Lorie was from France and she was studying there. Lorie, who was studying Japanese at the time, was interested in meeting Japanese people (and why not cute guys?) Soon after they met, they started dating. They had to go back to their […]
It is commonly believed that dating in Japan is easy for non-Asian (particularly white) men and hard for women. I came across a blog post by zoomingjapn, a German girl living in Japan, writing about dating in Japan as a foreigner. She expresses this view. She writes, ‘It is comparably easy for a western foreign man to […]
* In this article, I define ‘racism’ as discrimination based on race, ethnicity, colour, descent or nationality, following the UN Convention. Read the reference section for details. * Racism is a complex subject. I’m focusing on some of the aspects people usually don’t talk about online. Hair colour In the late 90s, dying hair became […]
Honestly, I wasn’t planning to make the article this long. I just thought I could point out some obvious statistics many journalists seem to be oblivious of. But as I looked into publicly available statistical data, I noticed that some of their inaccurate assumptions were potentially fatal. It all started with an article by the […]
Japanese Office Love – What Everyone was Doing behind My Back
It was during lunch when she told me the news. We were having lunch with two other colleagues in a casual French restaurant in Tokyo. ‘I am getting married,’ she said. ‘Umm, ok. To who?’ I asked. ‘It’s him.’ She told me the name of a colleague we both knew. ‘Alright.’ ‘Hey, you might be […]
