Category: Japan
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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 […]
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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 […]