Five very Japanese umbrellas to keep you dry

Unless you follow Japanese news you probably missed it, but April 7, 2022, was a sad day for anime lovers and particularly Japanese ones: it was the day Motoo Abiko, aka Fujiko A. Fujio, passed away ...

For any Japanese over 40, the realization that this year marks the 30th anniversary of Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon, the manga/anime industry’s most iconic teenage girl-oriented ...

Two and a half years ago, when the world was young and words like “Covid”, “pandemic” or “vaccination passport” weren’t part of everyone’s vocabulary, we published a post about a ...

I’m old enough to remember when Rubik’s Cube came out: it was in 1981 and suddenly everyone everywhere was talking about that amazing puzzle that put to test even the highest intelligence. Since ...

The history of their creator himself is not a rags-to-riches story but there is certainly something dramatic in the tale of the first instant ramen, the Nissin Chikin Ramen. A product of the ...

One of the things that amazes me in Japan is people’s weird relationship to shoes. This is a strange thing to say but I believe I’ve been here enough to have earned the right to not stand in awe ...

So the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, also known as the Tokyo 2021 Olympics, came and went and, as expected, were enjoyed by the people who wanted to be enjoyed and were ignored by those who didn’t care ...

We have now entered the final countdown until the second Tokyo Summer Olympics: there are just days left before the Games that, while actually happening in 2021, are still called “Tokyo 2020” to ...

It shouldn’t really surprise anyone with an interest in Japan: people here do pretty much everything their own way, so why wouldn’t they do the same with candles? Yes, there is such a thing as a ...

When I first wrote an article about masks in this blog in April 2020, I didn’t think masks would be still a thing one year later -- I mean, I knew they would still be a thing in Japan, as they ...

We have mentioned it before on this blog that one of the many things that surprise first- (and often second- and third-) time visitors to Japan is the coexistence of two religions, sometimes ...

The word “monsoon” is hardly ever used in Japan; the Japanese prefer for their rainy season the more poetic “tsuyu.” which means “plum rain” and actually comes from an 8th-century ...

The world of Japanese swords, collectively known as “katana” or “samurai swords,” is a complex one. It encompasses both the martial artists who study traditional swordsmanship either in its ...

Like many other aspects of Japanese culture, coffee became a thing in the islands back in the Edo period (1600-1863) and like many other aspects of Japanese culture that are not native, it had to go ...

As the platitude says, the Japanese Islands are like the Galapagos Islands: an ecosystem unlike anything else you will see anywhere else in the world. And even those of us who are tired of all the ...