I caught this amazingly talented guy on an NHK special yesterday and was totally blown away. Get ready to hear the ukelele as you probably have never heard it before.

Magibon
Magibon is an internet personality on the video-sharing website YouTube.
As of August 8, 2008, Magibon leads YouTube Japan’s All time top list. Magibon is also a member of the Youtube Partner Program.
Magibon has been invited and flown to Japan by a Japanese Internet TV Station GYAO for a media appearance. She has been interviewed twice […]

Benjamin Fulford

Languages are interesting because each one has its own unique features.
For example, double negatives like “I didn’t see nothing” are considered incorrect in English, although they’re perfectly permissible in Spanish. If you’ve watched some anime in Japanese or had dinner with a Japanese family, you may have noticed the word that’s spoken before eating, […]

Yesterday I lost my wallet (which contained cash, two credit cards, two bank ATM cards, an electronic highway toll card, my gaijin card, my driver’s license, my health insurance card, and more) while on the way to Tokyo by train. Except for a prepaid train pass, all I had to my name when I got […]

My wife is hooked on Kandora, short for Kankoku dorama or South Korean soap operas, and it seems every time I walk through the living room she’s got another one on the TV.
When I ask her what’s so interesting about the shows, she gets very animated. “Oh, they’re nothing like Japanese dramas,” she says. […]

It’s funny how so many of the foods eaten by the Japanese on a daily basis aren’t very Japanese at all.
Sure, people here eat plenty of things that are associated closely with Japan, like soba and udon noodles, sushi and sashimi, or donburi (”big bowl”) dishes like gyudon (beef bowl) or oyakodon, the “parent […]

If you have ever wondered what the notorious American-turned-Japanese (but still very much ugly gaijin) Debito Arudo actually looks like and sounds like, wonder no more for here he is, doing what he does best. . . bitching about Japan.

Via Matt at Occidentalism.

I have a rather strange problem: I don’t know my own kids. Or rather, I know the half that speaks Japanese, that works diligently on homework and reads books or plays video games in Japanese.
The English-speaking side of my children is something I’m less familiar with, for the main reason that my kids are […]

Here’s a trilogy of videos on Japanese beer - one on beer vending machines in Kyoto, another one on a draft beer vending machine in Tokyo, and a final one on historical beers - beers with labels of famous people in Japanese history with short bios.
This first video is from BusanKevin in Kyoto talking about […]

Humor is a very cultural thing, and it’s fun to analyze the things people from different countries consider amusing — jokes about the lack of education or hygiene among people in a certain region, visual or slapstick forms of humor, orifice-related jokes and so on.
Often, we can’t comprehend the things that people in one […]

When is a graveyard likely to be filled with tourists snapping pictures?
When it’s a gaijin bochi, or “foreigners’ graveyard,” which you can see in several old Japanese cities that have had Westerners living there for a long time, like Yokohama, Kobe and Hakodate.
Japanese burial rites involve cremation and placing the bones and ashes […]

Norimitsu Onishi of the New York Times is back with another interesting article, this time on foreign workers in Japan. One thing I have noticed in my time in Japan is the consternation many Japanese feel towards foreigners. My wife trains foreign workers (largely in Japanese language and culture) who are employed by Japanese companies […]

I was invited to a barbecue earlier in O-bon week. But not at my friend’s own house, at a relative’s place. And having never been there before, it took some finding.
If you’ve never been to Japan before, it may surprise you to know that roads have no names, and houses have no street […]

Soma Nomaoi is a samurai festival in the northern Japan area of Fukushima. It’s a 3-day festival with parades, horse races, mock battles, and wild horse catching.
This is a vlog account of the festival. I plan to get around and making a more in-depth one sometime in the future.
The cicadas are freaking loud in the […]

It’s funny how how tenuous the meanings of seemingly basic words can be. In English, the word “friend” is pretty straightforward, meaning someone you are somewhat well acquainted or friendly with.
Most of my English-speaking “friends” are close in age to me, but I certainly could have a friend who was 25, or 45, or […]

I had planned to use the following photo for a story the other day that I eventually had to spike, but this thing is just to good not to share.

From Quirky Japan Photos.

A recent exchange about the meat content of processed food products reminded me of my first encounter with a Japanese hot dog back around 1969.
This was a time when imported food products were basically unavailable, and prohibitively expensive when they were. So imagine my surprise when one day shopping I came across a pack […]

As a follow up to the questions about plagiarism that we raised in our post here, I received a reply from James, who runs Japan Probe.
James is currently on vacation and he tells us that he wrote the article in question on August 9th, and put it into an auto post queue to […]

Ran across some strange happenings in webdom the other day, something that really has us scratching our heads over here at the International JAPUNDIT Media Complex.
Over on Otaku International, there is a post dated August 11, 2008 titled Apparantly some Foreigners are more Japanese than Japanese People, which contains the passage:
The first foreign featured is […]