| 7:31am | Strange English Product Names | | | | The other day I went into a store and saw an advertisement for a chair that used bags of compressed air to massage your body. What caught my eye wasn't the design of the chair, but the weird English name they'd given it: PLIM UP. It's a good example of how the Japanese love to get creative with English... | | |
| 7:30am | My Trip to Aomori | | | | Tomorrow I'm going on a bit of a vacation to northern Japan with my son, a fun trip that we're taking now since next summer he'll be a jukensei or test student, and will be doing little except for studying for his high school entrance exams. We'll be taking one of those overnight busses all the way up... |
| 7:29am | Cool Products Wednesday, August 26, 2009 | | | | Here are today's "really cool products" that I've picked out for you, out of the 30+ new items we've added to the J-List and JBOX.com sites today. Note that some products may be "not safe for work" but that all links will allow you to redirect yourself either to the J-List or JBOX.com websites. To see... | | |
| 10:31am | Japan [hearts] Mayonnaise | | | | There are certain things the Japanese just seem to really like for reasons that are difficult for foreigners to understand. Like the Carpenters, whose music seems to be far more popular here than in the U.S. Or Colombo, whose crime-solving gruffness is popular enough that he can still be seen regularly... |
| 10:30am | Japan and France | | | | This week J-List's own Tomo, the employee who keeps our site well stocked with interesting DVDs, Hello Kitty shoulder massagers and microwave potato chip makers, is taking a week off and heading to Paris, France. It's his honeymoon, and he wanted to take his new wife (who happens to be from near the... | | |
| 10:29am | Japanese Election and Manifesto Update | | | | The Japanese election season is in full swing, with the two major parties -- the currently ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and the upstart Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) -- campaigning hard to try to win enough votes to form the next government. Unlike the U.S. with its two-party system, several... |
| 10:27am | Cool Products Monday, August 24, 2009 | | | | Here are today's "really cool products" that I've picked out for you, out of the 30+ new items we've added to the J-List and JBOX.com sites today. Note that some products may be "not safe for work" but that all links will allow you to redirect yourself either to the J-List or JBOX.com websites. To see... | | |
| 11:07am | Japanese Abbreviations | | | | The Japanese love to abbreviate long, hard to pronounce words. Whether its lopping off some kanji to change Tokyo Daigaku (Tokyo University) into the more manageable "Todai" or coining shortened terms like konkatsu, the "wedding activities" that are so popular with single people too busy to find potential... |
| 11:06am | Nihongo ga Jozu! You speak Japanese very well! | | | | You've been in Japan too long when you get a nihongo ga jozu ("you speak Japanese very well") and feel mildly insulted. This happened to me the other day: I was at one of the onsen hot springs around my house -- amazingly, there are three of them within a 5 km radius of J-List -- talking with the lady... |
| 11:06am | Yako-bus, the Overnight Busses of Japan | | | | Right now my wife and daughter are down in Kyoto, visiting a friend on the Sea of Japan side the country. There are many choices for traveling around Japan -- by car, by speedy Shinkansen train, or even the cheap-but-slow "Youth 18" train tickets I mentioned a few weeks ago, which let you travel as far... |
| 10:58am | Cool Products Friday, August 21, 2009 | | | | Here are today's "really cool products" that I've picked out for you, out of the 30+ new items we've added to the J-List and JBOX.com sites today. Note that some products may be "not safe for work" but that all links will allow you to redirect yourself either to the J-List or JBOX.com websites. To see... | | |
| 11:03am | Japanese Gestures | | | | I read an article on BBC's news site about a study of facial expressions around the world, which essentially found that expressions aren't necessarily universal, and might be interpreted differently depending on a person's cultural background. While I don't remember having any confusion over reading... |
| 11:02am | Mr. James, the McDonald's Hawking Gaijin Parody | | | | McDonald's Japan is currently running a bizarre promotion using a caricature of an American named Mr. James, who hails from Ohio and is living in Tokyo with his daughter Jennifer. The advertising campaign is promoting McDonald's All Stars, four premium hamburgers that will be available through November,... |
| 11:01am | Cute Japanese Girls and the Third Person | | | | One of the cuter -- or possibly creepier -- things that Japanese girls do is refer to themselves in the third person. A good example of this in anime is the character Fuko from Clannad After Story, who says "Fuko" in reference to herself despite disliking it when people treat her like a child, which... | | |
| 10:58am | Cool Products Wednesday, August 19, 2009 | | | | Here are today's "really cool products" that I've picked out for you, out of the 30+ new items we've added to the J-List and JBOX.com sites today. Note that some products may be "not safe for work" but that all links will allow you to redirect yourself either to the J-List or JBOX.com websites. To see... | | |
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