Minimalism - Online Income - ESL - Japan
One of Mami’s favorite TV programs is the mystical and spiritual “Aura no Izumiâ€, featuring Hiroyuki Ehara and Akihiro Miwa. When I first started watching it, I was baffled by the old man dressed as a woman. Where I’m from, if a man grows his hair long, dresses in a skirt, and dons a load of make up, it’s usually in the name of comedy, for example Barry Humphries acting […]
I was talking to my mum on the phone about pregnancy in Japan lasting 10 months as opposed to nine. Neither of us had a clue as to how it could be different, but we laughed ourselves silly at the idea of an extra month for Japanese women. Thankfully, a quick Google search gave us the answer, so here’s a quote from Anna Hotline: It’s becoming more and more common […]
In my first post on English T-Shirts in Japan, you saw the “Honey Spunk” shirt. Here’s another classic, modelled by one of my seven-year-old students. What do you think? I explained the meaning to the class by kicking myself on the bum with my heel, and yelping “Ouch!”. I think they understood! If you like, you can find me on Twitter at @nick_ramsay. I’d love to hear from you!
If you’ve never seen a Japanese keyboard, you might wonder how on earth the Japanese type into their computers. With a language containing over 10,000 characters, you’d think a Japanese keyboard would have more buttons than the Starship Enterprise. In this article, I’m going to give a brief overview of the basics, so if you’ve just arrived in Japan you can stop banging your head against the computer screen and […]
One thing that bugs me about living in Japan is when you surf the internet, some websites, particularly the big ones like Microsoft and Google automatically default to the local language, which in my case is Japanese. This isn’t too much of a hassle as it’s relatively easy to locate the language settings and switch to the English version. Recently I decided to register at the iTunes store so I […]
A little while ago, Mami and I were at a home center looking for a new shower head, when we noticed that some of the new bathroom sinks had extendable taps! What I mean is that you could pull the tap, or faucet as some people call it, and it extends so far out that you can easily wash the sink – great for cleaning up dropped toothpaste! Well, a […]
Mr. H, my student and friend, has just left after coming to my house for coffee and dango on Easter Sunday. While he was here I showed him just what you can do with computers these days. If you’re new to this blog you won’t know that Mr. H is in his seventies and started to learn English a year ago with the goal of traveling around the world on […]
In my post Misleading Media, I talked about how I don’t watch the news anymore, but there was one story late last month that got my attention. It was the tragic death of Lindsay Ann Hawker, a 22-year old British girl who was an English teacher at NOVA. It was huge news in both Japan and the UK, and Japan Probe covered the story in the following posts: NOVA teacher […]