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 […]

Don’t get me wrong, the English like to apologise more often than necessary too. If you step on someone’s foot in a crowd, chances are that they‘ll apologise to you. If you get in someone’s way, and do the side-stepping dance, you’ll probably end up both apologising to each other. The English […]

Japan through the eyes of a drifter camped in a shantytown near one of Tokyo’s trendiest areas.

Thanks to Xeni Jardin.

Japan is a great country, with a lot to offer both short-term visitors and tourists as well as people like me, who like the place so much we put down permanent roots. But still, Japan is far from perfect, and there are various sources of stress for gaijin living here, for example (if your language […]

or yet another entry in my long series of crap that no one reads
in response to the horrible stabbing spree in akihabara, tokyo, japan a few weeks ago the japanese national police agency has once again shown why policy changes proposed during the height of public panic and tragedy have such a reputation for being […]

One of the most baffling things to me about Japanese society is the work culture. I can’t understand how “salary men” prioritize their jobs over their families. Of course, if everyone else is doing it, no one can step out of line or risk getting fired but if the expectation of working until 8 or 9 or […]

Like most countries, the keitai (mobile phone) has become a huge part of life in Japan, and for the younger generation, cell phones seem to be supplanting the personal computer as the primary Internet device of choice.
The newest trend is young people using their phones to access sites called purofu ( “prof,” from the […]

It’s official! Osaka prefecture has been declared the sexual assault capital of Japan according to statistics maintained by Japan’s National Police Agency.
According to the data, last year one in every 4,200 female residents of Osaka was raped or otherwise sexually assaulted. This compares to one in every 4,600 in Tokyo.
The Osaka rate is […]

In the mid-1960s when I was a Tokyo-based trade journalist I wrote that a growing number of Americans were being influenced by positive elements in Japan’s traditional culture and were approaching the cultural sophistication that the Japanese had reached by the 10th century.
In that instance I was referring to the arts, crafts, food, poetry, literature, […]

What Japan Thinks has a report on an Internet survey about what Japanese people think are the greatest attributes of Japan and the Japanese people.
The top 10 responses. . .
1. A sense of the four seasons
2. Diligence
3. Kindness
4. Rich food culture
5. Ability to create cutting-edge technology
[…]

After the dreadful knife attack in Akihabara last week, it was discovered that the killer had announced his intent on an internet message board, but his threat was not taken seriously.
Well anything in that vein is being taken very seriously now. On Monday, police made two unconnected arrests of idiots posting online death threats.
Yo […]

Japan’s defeat in World War II was a huge emotional blow to the country which is still felt today. Although more than sixty years have passed, the subject of the war is still in many ways “taboo,” and not discussed very often outside of certain specific situations. (Kind of reminds me of growing up in […]

You probably don’t think about Douglas MacArthur very much, but to the Japanese, he’s quite a figure.
As Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in the Pacific, he battled the Japanese throughout the region, and his was the hand that officially received the surrender on the USS Missouri, ending the war. But to the Japanese, […]

The New York Times has an interesting article on whistle-blowing* in Japan.  The article contends that until recently whistle-blowing was unheard of in Japan for a variety of reasons including strong loyalty between employees and employers and a culture of not making waves.
The first high-profile instance of a corporate whistle-blower was in 2000, when an employee at Mitsubishi […]

The government in China reportedly is modifying the country’s birth control policy in Sichuan because of all the children lost in the recent tragic earthquake there. Because of China’s tough birth control policies, many of the young school students who died in the quake were only children.
Wang Xuegui is a 34-year-old villager who lived in […]

The same Washington Post reporter who gave us Jero earlier in the week (Blaine Harden) is reporting on the Japanese labor shortage due to the greying of Japan and a hesitancy to increase immigration to deal with the problem.
Now Japan faces a fundamental threat to its future — demographic decline that experts say will delete 70 percent of its […]

One concept you encounter quite a lot in Japan is sekinin, meaning responsibility or duty.
While the James Clavell cliches of Japanese who are bound by the bushido-esque code of honor aren’t very accurate when applied to the country today, I have noticed that the idea of sekinin o toru, or taking responsibility for something, […]

in an apparent chemistry experiment gone awesome, a 14 year old girl managed to not only to give herself considerable trouble breathing, but forced an evacuation of her apartment complex. according to police this is only an isolated incident in a series of similar experimentation through out the nation. driven to recreating this […]

Travelling by train turned out to be more lucrative than a visit to a pachinko parlour for some commuters last week, it was revealed yesterday.
Commuters at Hisayaodori, Nagoya “got back 10,000-yen and 5,000-yen bills as change instead of 1,000-yen bills after a station employee mistakenly put the wrong notes in a subway ticket vending machine […]

CNN.com/Asia has a report claiming that business women in Japan are paying up to $50,000 a night to spend time with hosts that CNN referst to as “geisha guys.”
TOKYO, Japan (CNN) — At first glance, the man and woman at the nightclub look like any other couple on a date. He flirts and pours […]