Minimalism - Online Income - ESL - Japan
Life for a Japanese teenager is supposedly harder than for anyone else. The pressure to study hard has driven many people over the edge, as demonstrated a couple of years ago when there were a spate of suicides among junior high school students in Japan. The Japan broadcasting corporation, NHK, has an educational channel filled with children’s programming every evening. Currently they are playing a song by Angela Aki which […]
It slipped me by this year, but on September 23rd, this blog turned two. That’s not long, but with the millions of blogs that don’t even last a year, it probably puts this site in the top 5% for blog longevity. What I’m lacking though is post longevity, as these blog posts are getting shorter and shorter.. Happy Birthday LC! Without you, I’d have no fans! 😛 If you like, […]
I went to renew my Japanese driving license and was rewarded with a gold license! What’s a gold license? A gold license is given out to people who don’t have any points on their current driving license. From what I’ve heard, this is an achievement usually limited to “paper” drivers – those who have a license but never actually drive! The card itself looks the same as a standard blue […]
My mum has been hassling me, quite rightly, for some photos and video of her grandson. Here are a couple of pictures after his accident with the lamp, and a video of him crawling, trying to walk and then trying to sleep. If you like, you can find me on Twitter at @nick_ramsay. I’d love to hear from you!
After staying up late last night to upgrade JapanSoc, I was woken abruptly this morning by a loud smash, a scream, crying, a further scream from my wife, and then the vision of Rikuto’s face covered in blood! An obstacle course Rikuto is getting squirmy, and by that I mean he can squeeze through or climb over all kinds of obstacles. I thought we had done a pretty good job […]
This month’s Japan Blog Matsuri theme is The Language of Japan, and I’ve been scratching my head all month over what to write. I haven’t studied Japanese for years now, and although I have a few amusing stories of miscommunication, nothing worthy of an entire blog post. So, I delved into the LongCountdown archives and submitted an article I wrote back in March 2007. It’s about the confusion that arises […]
So I bought myself Rikuto a train set. It’s not a patch on the beautiful Hornby railway set that my dad made me when I was a child, but Tomy’s Plarail is a lot safer, which is important when you buy a one-year-old boy a toy made for 3-year-olds! Plarail, or “Tomica World” as it’s known outside of Japan, is awesome. There’s a huge selection of trains from all over […]
The U.S media is often criticized for ignoring major news stories or covering them with obvious bias, and more people are becoming aware that this is because the media is owned by just five major corporations – General Electric, Time Warner, Viacom, The Walt Disney Co. and News Corporation. The media is an incredibly powerful tool for social control, so I’ve been wondering if a similar situation exists in Japan… […]