Category: Japan
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Japanese Chocolate
Morinaga Salty Chocolate KitKat Triple Berry As I mentioned in a previous post, I’ve been seeing a lot of Salty Chocolate lately. I picked up the Morinaga Salty Chocolate candy the other day. I opened the box, expecting a standard candy bar, but instead I got about eight individually wrapped really small chocolate wafers. They […]
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The NHK Man pays a visit
Friday evening I came home from work to a hot apartment: it was raining all day so I had left the windows closed. When I do that my apartment warms up pretty quickly, mostly due to the refrigerator and computer I suppose. I put some rice on for dinner and opened up the windows but […]
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Saturday morning alarm
I was looking forward to getting a bit of extra sleep on Saturday night, but at about 8:45am this morning, there was a pretty big earthquake north of Tokyo (centered on Iwate, a low level 6 on the Japanese scale) which caused shaking down near Tokyo. It was very minor, not strong enough to move […]
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Notes from Marriage Week
As always I am a bit behind posting news to my blog. Sorry about that. If you couldn’t tell from my previous entries, I married my girlfriend L. three weeks ago. We didn’t have a wedding ceremony, but plan to have one next year in May. My family came to Japan to meet with L.’s […]
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One picture – Traditional Japanese Kimono and Hakama
Jana, L., David, Alana I don’t really have much time, because I have to pack still, and then get on a plane to go to Morocco for a conference, but I wanted to make a quick note of things. Yesterday I married L., and for the past week my family has been in Japan. We […]
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Licensed to drive: Making Japanese streets more dangerous
Delicious DMV Curry I can’t believe Japan gave me a Driver’s License About two months ago I started the process to convert my Texas Driver’s License into a Japanese Driver’s License. I expected it to take a long time, but actually things went more quickly than I expected. Preparing the documents took a while. You […]
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Updates around Jiyugaoka
Jiyugaoka New York Doughnut Plant Cherry Blossoms in Jiyugaoka Oimachi Line Express Trains I’ve been neglecting my blog lately. Work has been busy, I’m getting married, family is coming to visit, etc. etc.. These things happen all the time, and it is no reason to ignore your beloved blog. I spent a bit of time […]
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More earthquakes in Japan
So I’m a bit late on this — I meant to write something last night, but never got around to it — but there was a medium-sized earthquake two nights ago (Wednesday night.) Actually, it was early Thursday morning, at about 1:45am. I was in bed, somewhat asleep, when my dreams started to become strange […]
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The Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese and Japanese Blog Data
Today I went to a brief introduction talk about the plans to release a corpus of Japanese blog data for research use. The presentation was at the National Institute of Informatics, with a panel of Professor Toukura and Professor Oyama from NII, MAEKAWA Kikuo from The National Institute for Japanese Language, and a representative from […]
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Kafka by the Sea Part 1: Japanese Vocabulary in half a modern fiction novel
This is a post that I’ve been waiting to make for a long time. Every weekend, I spend about one or two hours reading Murakami Haruki’s “Kafka by the Sea” (村上春樹「海辺のカフカ」). I have been doing this for the past year, and finally today I finished the first book. Japanese books are often sold in two […]