Minimalism - Online Income - ESL - Japan
My general observations from living in Japan.
On May 29th, Japanese Mori Riyo was crowned Miss Universe, the first winner from Japan since 1959. While Mori is most definitely beautiful, I can’t help but feel that she’s not the most beautiful woman in the world (my mum is!) , and it seems most people share my view. Even the bookies gave her only a 150-1 chance of winning. Although I still see Miss Universe as a beauty […]
I’ve had a busy evening changing over from the ready-made template on LongCountdown to one of my own custom designs, which you may have seen on my other blog, Nice4Rice. I hope you like the new look. It’s all part of sprucing up the blog for the birth of little Rikuto at the end of July. I’ve been slack of late with writing new blog entries. I think I’m suffering […]
In my last post, Double without you, I talked about how the Japanese may need to go back to basics and re-learn English from simple ABCs. What they lack in English skills however, you would think they’d make up for in mathematics, right? Well, I’m not so sure… When you walk around the backstreets of Japan’s sprawling cities, you’ll see bars and restaurants with opening hours displayed in their windows […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]