Minimalism - Online Income - ESL - Japan
My general observations from living in Japan.
With Japan’s hanami season underway, Mami and I thought we would take a stroll down the river to see what this year’s “cherry blossom viewing” season had to offer. While we were walking under the sakura, I told Mami a story I had heard from one of my students a couple of weeks ago. Apparently, K-chan was walking her dog in Gifu park when she saw a large group of […]
The year after my homestay, I came back to Japan with enough money to last me two weeks. I had nowhere to stay, hoping to just wing it until I got a job. I consider myself lucky that I found capsule hotels and youth hostels to stay at, though I was eventually kicked out of Higashiyama Youth Hostel in Nagoya for overstaying my welcome – I was living there, leaving […]
In my post about choosing a name for our son, I said that one reason for giving him my wife’s family name, i.e. a Japanese name, is because it would be more convenient. In this post, I’m going to write about my experiences of having a non-Japanese name in Japan. Informally, my name Nick is pretty hard for Japanese people to pronounce. They tend to say Ni-koo, or nikku in […]
When you move to a foreign country, the background chatter of your own native language – the sounds of people around you, TV or radio, is replaced with a droning stream of voices in a language foreign to your own. Having been in Japan for 10 years, I now understand a lot of what I hear, but I still have to “tune in” to the TV to understand what the […]
In part 1 of this series, you saw a video about dropping litter in bicycle baskets, and in part 2 I showed you a commercial aimed at stopping people from eating on trains. Both of these videos are part of an ongoing effort to improve manners in a country where you can pretty much get away with anything, because very few would dare tell you off. The following video, sadly […]
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 […]