Category: Japan
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My feeling about Japanese comedy
I saw a great post over at the (sadly) now defunct Japanmanship blog about Japanese comedy teams. It explains how I feel about Japanese comedy almost completely, along with some nice diagrams. A funny read and worth checking out.
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A School Uniform and a Machine Gun
A while ago I downloaded the Japanese drama セーラー服と機関銃 (A School Uniform and a Machine Gun) and I’ve finally gotten around to watching the first episode. Sometimes Japanese dramas can be really hit and miss, but this one looks kind of interesting. I’ve decided to write a brief summary of the episodes as I watch […]
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Fumie Hiratai’s closing party / Viola performance
A friend of mine, Fumie Hiratai (平体文枝), is an artist and recently had a show at a very interesting book shop, the Morioka Bookstore. It is a cute little book store in an art building (the Inoue Building in Kayabacho) that has a bunch of old photo books and other random art focused books. There […]
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Namja Town
Namja Town Cat Namco beer! Ice Cream City All my Namjatown pictures All Flickr Namjatown pictures On Wednesday, I had a day off from work on Wednesday, so I met up with Risa and we went to Namja Town. Namja Town is a strange place in Ikebukuro, Tokyo that is essentially a food-based theme park […]
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Cherry Blossoms in Shinjuku Gyoen
Shinjuku Gyoen Sakura Photoset On Sunday, April 1st, the weather suddenly became beautiful, despite earlier predictions of rain. My friend Risa and I decided on the spur-of-the-moment to head over to the Shinjuku Gyoen National Park (新宿御苑) for some Cherry Blossom Viewing. It is hard to think of anything more traditionally Japanese than a good […]
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Sakura on the walk home
The other day, while walking home from Jiyugaoka, I was struck by how pretty the Sakura were on the main shopping street. I snapped a few pictures, and of course since the weather was nice there were lots of people lined up for Crepes at the cute little crepe stand. There were also some nice […]
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Ishiyama-dera
Dragon’s Hole Pond Entire Ishiyama-dera photo set on Flickr.com After the Japanese Natural Language Processing Conference, I had a few hours before returning to Tokyo, so I went to the nearby Ishiyama temple, which is said to be where the Japanese author Murasaki began writing the Tale of Genji. It is a really beautiful temple, […]
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Review of Wataya Risa’s “Keritai Senaka” / 綿矢リサの「蹴りたい背中」
Winner of 2003 Akutagawa Prize Wikipedia page on Wataya Risa Excerpt of translation by Morgan G. A few weeks ago, I finished reading Wataya Risa’s second novel, 『蹴りたい背中』 (“The back I wanna kick”). For me, it was a minor milestone: it was the first Japanese novel that I have read in Japanese. I’ve studied the […]
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Maid Cafés in Japan
Pinafore Maid Cafe The witch bar unattico-sttrega January 15th 社会研究調査 As part of a societal cultural research learning field trip, Benkei and I went with a friend of his to the Pinafore Maid Cafe. We went on a Wednesday evening, in the rain. This actually turned out to be pretty important, but more on that […]
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Nationalism / Isolationalism in Japan and perception of foreign crime
I read a few blogs, and an interesting post over on What Japan Thinks about a survey on crime in Japan (and how foreigners are a large contributing factor) pointed me to another very interesting post over on Debito.org on a Japanese magazine about foreigner crime. It is definitely worth taking a look at both […]