Minimalism - Online Income - ESL - Japan
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 […]
If you live in the Chubu region, you’ve probably seen the TV commercials for Commufa Hikari, a product of Chubu Telecommunications. They run a pretty aggressive marketing campaign with door-to-door and telephone sales reps, and since I was not opposed to saving 2,000 yen on my phone bill, I agreed to take them up on their offer. A no-hassle changeover? At least I did at first. The problem is, although […]
A co-worker of mine has that book, You Know You’ve Been in Japan Too Long…, and from it I learned the true meaning of the name, Pikachu. What does Pikachu mean? Apparently it comes from the Japanese, pikapika, which means to glitter or sparkle, and chuchu, which is the sound a mouse supposedly makes in Japan. Put it together and you get Pikachu, meaning “sparkly mouse”, or more appropriately “electric […]
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 […]
It’s been a month since Mami last went to the maternity clinic, but she went back today for another check-up, and everything is fine. I wish I could have gone with her, but I can’t deny my students their weekly English class! Nevertheless, I got to see the latest video of Rikuto, the baby formerly known as “Peanut”. Since we found out that Peanut is a boy, it wasn’t hard […]