I just had my first interview to teach English in Japan and figured I would give a rundown for anyone curious about what it consisted of.  To start things off, I had to submit an application online which was then followed by a pretty simple phone interview.  After managing to get through the first step [...]

Baseball (野球 or yakyu in Japanese) has been played in Japan since around 1872 when it was introduced by an American expatriate named Horace Wilson.  In 1878, the first baseball team was established called the Shimbashi Athletic Club, but it wasn’t until a team within Tokyo University was established that the sport really took off.
Professional [...]

Tatami mats are a traditional form of Japanese flooring made from a core of rice straw covered with woven strands of rush straw.  This second type of straw is from a type of grassy plant that grows near water and is used to give the tatami (畳) mats a soft but durable cover.  The layer [...]

A Death Note is a notebook that allows its owner to kill anyone whose face they have seen by simply writing the person’s name down in the notebook.  The manga with this name was first published in December of 2003 in Weekly Shonen Jump and came to a conclusion in this format in May of [...]

The term gaijin (外人) shows up a lot when looking at information about Japan in English.  The term is composed of the characters for outside and person and can be roughly translated to mean outside person or foreigner.  As the term has come to take on some negative connotations, it is sometimes appended with the [...]

One of the creepiest things I have seen at Pink Tentacle is the pictures of the alien-like creations hanging in a fish market in Japan.  These aliens are actually the body of a ray or skate that are modified to look like the corpse of an alien, devil, angel, or dragon and then dried (sometimes [...]

Okuribito (おくりびと) can be translated to mean a person who sends someone off.  In the film with this name, translated as Departures in English, Daigo Kobayashi loses his job playing cello in an orchestra and decides to move back to his home town in Yamagata.  While searching the newspaper for a new job he finds [...]

While most people have probably heard of Japanese organized crime under the name of Yakuza (ヤクザ), the police refer to them with a term that means violence group (暴力団) and they refer to themselves with a term that means chivalrous organization (任侠団体).  Their history can be tied back to the middle of the Edo Period [...]

One of the most beautiful (and relaxing) things to do while in Japan is visit a Japanese hot spring.  An onsen (温泉 in Japanese kanji) is a natural spring of water that is geothermally heated.  With the volcanic geography of Japan, geothermal heat is plentiful and leads to a country full of onsen in beautiful [...]

In addition to being the masters of many forms of seafood, Japan also happens to be home to one of the most sought after types of beef in the world – Kobe beef.  This type of beef (神戸ビーフ in Japanese) comes from the Wagyu breed of cattle in the Hyogo Prefecture of Japan.  It is [...]

The word karate in Japanese is made up of the character 空 (kara) meaning empty and the character 手 (te) meaning hand.  This martial art can be traced back to a string of islands southwest of Kyushu called the Ryukyu Islands (or Okinawa).  It initially came to these islands from China around 1392 as Chinese [...]

The Japanese hanging scrolls with silk fabric are called kakemono (掛物), which basically means hanging thing.  It is usually displayed in the tokonoma (床の間) area of a home that is used in part as a place to appreciate these scrolls in addition to arrangements of different types of flowers and bonsai.  Another common use is [...]

The oldest school of ikebana (生け花 in Japanese) in Japan can trace its roots back to a priest of the Rokkakudo Temple in Kyoto roughly five hundred years ago.  A specific priest that lived by a lake was skilled enough in arranging flowers that others sought him out for instruction.  The lake he lived near [...]

Looking at the tiny apartments in the closet world of Tokyo brought up a term that caught my eye – parasite single (パラサイトシングル).  The transcription from English to Japanese katakana does not always carry the same meaning in Japanese, but this seems like a pretty harsh label for people still living at home.
A parasite single [...]

There are many different types of home in Japan, ranging from traditional to very modern.  Within the islands are some very different types of geography and living conditions that have led to varying housing requirements.  In large cities such as Tokyo, the incredibly high cost of land mixed with the small living spaces currently available [...]

Sumo wrestling is one aspect of Japanese culture that most of us outside of Japan probably know about, but have never been lucky enough to see.  It is a tradition with centuries of history in Japan as a trial of strength in combat and within the imperial court.  It has roots in Shinto rituals and [...]

Although there are references to paper folding in Japan dating back to 1680, apparently it wasn’t until the early 1900s that origami took off as an art form.  Artists such as Akira Yoshizawa, who lived from 1911 to 2005, brought the craft to the complex art it has become today.  Unfortunately, because of the decomposable [...]

Looking into different things about Japan has brought up many references to its world of fashion.  I didn’t realize how developed this culture was and there are some pretty amazing things about it.
I started with this Wikipedia article about Japanese street fashion, which is the word used to describe customized outfits that use aspects of [...]

The term samurai originally comes from the Japanese word saburau, which mean to serve nobility.  This word, a verb, was changed to saburai as the term took on different connotations and eventually came to mean the same thing as bushi (武士).  These warriors lived their lives by a set of written rules called the Bushido and [...]

Japan is certainly not an exception to the current state of the economy, but despite the money problems it is still home to the second largest economy in the world (by nominal GDP).  As someone who has been searching for a job in Japan only to be met by constant reminders about the depressing state [...]