Category: Japan
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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 […]
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The Asian Olympic Handball Controversy (and Doctor Who)
For the past few weeks when I check out the news I’ve been hearing about the Handball Controversy. First off, I didn’t know that handball was an olympic sport. I know there are lots of olympic sports that I don’t know much about, but I have never seen anything about handball in the US. That […]
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I lost my watermelon
I sometimes have conversations that go like this: D: It’s really cold tonight, so after dinner why don’t we take the train home instead of walking? R: Yeah, it’s really cold today. That’s a good idea. Oh but wait, hey hey, I lost my watermelon! D: You lost your watermelon? R: Yeah, I had it […]
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Happy Bags
Muji Happy Bag Muji Wool Jacket Two pairs of boxers One Indian Linen Bag Scarf and socks Every new year in Japan, retailers put together bags, call them Lucky Bags, Happy Bags, Grab Bags, what-have-you, but essentially they are a collection of goodies for a good price. I bought the 2008 Muji Happy Bag, and […]
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The Seven Gods of Happiness New Year Temple Tour
Seven Lucky Gods Stamps Fukurokujyu Ebisu, God of Wealth Bishtyamonten Daikokuten Ebisu Benzaiten Shinagawa Temple The Tokai Seven: like Ocean’s Eleven, but much older. And less criminal. They are both pretty lucky though. The Seven Gods of Happiness represent different types of good fortune, and for some reason in Shinagawa there are seven temples, each […]
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Osechi Ryori
Toshikoshi Soba Sukiyaki Sukiyaki with meat Ocean Food Mountain Food Mochi Soup Roast Beef for Dinner I feel obliged to say that the next few posts on my blog will be about the New Year in Japan. None of them will really have interesting observations that haven’t been made before, many times, by foreigners in […]
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The 2007 Japanese New Word / Buzzword / Hot Phrase Prize
I woke up this morning and was surprised to see on the news that there is a yearly Japanese new word / hot phrase prize awarded. It looks like this prize is sponsored by a publishing company, and has been awarded annually since 1984. You can check their yearly archive to see who won the […]
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Bad Omens
Today started off with a bad omen: I slept in for an entire hour. Usually I’m very good about getting up on time, but I was up a bit late last night. Even though I went home early (home by about 7:45pm) I logged on to some machines at work, and (slowly, while watching House) […]