Minimalism - Online Income - ESL - Japan
My general observations from living in Japan.
My little neighborhood here in Japan has pretty much been in existence for twenty years. I came across an old aerial photo of the housing estate on which I live during its construction in 1989. You can clearly see the baseball ground there, and there’s a small hospital, too, which still stands today. Beyond that, in Heisei 1, everything had been cleared away to make room for factories and houses. […]
This is probably a really geeky topic, but if we’re honest with ourselves, we all have a favorite font. Maybe it’s the font you use when you write email, or the font you usually pick for a Word document. At some point, we have all chosen a typeface that looks good and feels good. Indeed, your font is a fashion statement for the web. Vista introduces a new generation of […]
Mami and I braved the wind to show Ricky some cherry blossoms. Not many of the trees had fully bloomed, and Rikuto wasn’t too impressed, but any excuse for another family video! 🙂 I do apologize for the music. It originally had a different soundtrack with one of my favorite tunes. I was even going to offer cash prizes to those of you could name the song! Unfortunately, Mami didn’t […]
You’ve all seen photos of spaghetti junctions and double-decker expressways cutting through urban Japan, but on a recent trip out into the mountains, I came across what can only be described as a “whirly-whirly” road. The purpose of this extravagant helter skelter of a street is to get you high enough to drive over the mountain it perches on. The problem is, it makes you so dizzy you’re quite likely […]
Yesterday, I made the trip to the dentist for the first time in over 8 years, and right now, I’m recovering from having a wisdom tooth pulled out. Incidentally the last time I went to the dentist I also had a wisdom tooth out. Fortunately on both occasions, I had a top tooth removed, which I’ve heard is less painful than having the bottom ones out. The horror of a […]
The year 2010 marks the 1,300th anniversary of Heijo-kyo, the capital city of Japan for much of the Nara period (710-794), and home to the remains of the Imperial Palace, now a UNESCO World Heritage site. The city of Nara has big plans to celebrate this anniversary, with 12-13 million people expected to attend the events, which will cost an estimated 10 billion yen according to the Yomiuri. It seems […]
The paint is still wet on JapanSoc, but I’ve managed to get another new website online. This time, I’ve picked the little covered topic of oshibori origami, or what I like to call oshiborigami. I’m talking about making animals, food and other exotic items from those wet hand towels you’re given in Japanese restaurants. OshiboriArt.com is a fun tutorial site with videos and photos to show each step of the […]
What would happen if you combined Google Maps, Wikipedia, and personal experiences of English speakers in Japan?This is a question that Kiyotaka Maruyama decided to answer by creating Japan-Hopper.com, an interactive website that lets you use English to search for a place in Japan, and then either read a related Wikipedia entry or a review from someone who actually went to the place you searched for. In the media Reading […]