Minimalism - Online Income - ESL - Japan
In part 1 of this Japanese Manners series, I showed you a public service announcement to encourage people not to drop litter. In this country, people would rather turn a blind eye than tell a stranger off for doing something they shouldn’t. This next video isn’t the final version that made it to TV, but the message is the same. The glossed-up final cut was shown in commercial breaks during […]
In England, if you’re talking in a movie theater, there’s a good chance the person behind you will tell you to ‘shut it’. If you drop litter in the street, someone might pick it up and throw it back at you. If you’re eating, drinking, walking, smoking, or even peeing in a place you shouldn’t, someone is likely to call you up for it. Half way around the world however, […]
We all know that the Japanese have one of the longest life expectancies in the world. Peter McGarry suggests that a combination of the right diet and lifestyle is the reason why the Japanese live so long, listing things such as fish, soybeans, wheat and walking as important factors. However, in a country which has one of the highest rates of tobacco consumption, it is still an amazing statistic. One […]
When I first came to Japan, I couldn’t speak the language at all. I had bought a phrase book and tape which I listened to a few times, but never got much out of. I remember pulling out the book and asking a ticket clerk what time the next train for Nagoya was, but he kept telling me the time now. It wasn’t till much later that I realized that […]
To celebrate Mami’s pregnancy, we went out for yakiniku with her mum, sister and her husband. Yakiniku restaurants are big business in Japan, and are often so crowded you have to wait ages to get a seat, as we did on Sunday. Once seated though, we got to experience the next step in restaurant technology by ordering from a computerized menu. The menu looks like an oversized gameboy with a […]
When I first started this blog back in September, I planned to write about Japanese news stories rarely seen abroad, and that’s exactly what I did. I wrote posts such as Woman hurls dog from sixth-floor apartment and Car ploughs into 33 nursery school children. However, as you would have seen from my recent posts, I rarely mention the news anymore, because quite frankly I found it all rather depressing. […]
When I first came to Japan in 1997, the big chain school I worked at recommended all its teachers to open a bank account at Tokai Bank because of its proximity to the head office and the fact that the ATMs had English guidance. Soon after though, Tokai merged with Sanwa Bank and all the ATMs were replaced with the later bank’s Japanese-only machines. This caused long queues and much […]
To the rest of the world he’s known as Prince Harry, but in Japan, they call him Henry. And silly me, I was quick to point out their mistake until I decided to write about it. Being British myself, you would expect me to know that Prince Harry’s real name is Prince Henry of Wales, and the Japanese were right all along. Thank you Wikipedia for correcting me. You have […]