Month: December 2016

This week for my RocketNews24 W.T.F. Japan article, I wrote about top five Japanese winter foods.

Back in October I did the top 5 Japanese autumn foods which people seemed to like, so it was only natural to follow that one up with a sequel.

Interestingly enough, for me personally the #5 item on the list is my favorite, and the #1 item on the list is my least favorite. I don’t want to spoil what they are, but I could probably eat #5 every day, and I dread being served #1 on a certain day of the year.

But hey, enough with the vague references to food!

Read the article here.

This week for my RocketNews24 W.T.F. Japan article, I wrote about top five strange things Japanese people do for Christmas.

Christmas in Japan is an odd combination of odd and familiar. On the one hand you go to shopping malls and grocery stores and Christmas music is playing on the speakers and there are bright holidays decorations everywhere, but then at the same time… you have the really weird things that made my list.

I don’t want to spoil some of the craziest things that happen here on Christmas, but suffice to say that if your first thought when reading this was “Wait, Japanese people celebrate Christmas?” then you may definitely want to give this one a read.

Read the article here.

This week for my RocketNews24 W.T.F. Japan article, I wrote about top five offensive Japanese insults.

Coming after last week’s top five strange ways to be polite, it only seemed right to do a full 180 and talk about how to be rude with some Japanese insults!

A few months ago I looked at the top five most offensive Japanese swear words, and people seemed to like it. Luckily there were still plenty of terrible words left over ready to be brought to the attention of the internet, so I jumped on the chance.

Originally this article was supposed to be a true sequel to the original and be “top five MORE offensive Japanese swear words.” But after my editor looked it over, we deduced that some of the items in the list strayed a bit far from “swear” territory and into just “not-so-nice slang” territory. I had to rewrite it a bit, but I think it’s a lot stronger now, and I’m looking forward to writing that “not-so-nice slang” article someday in the future.

The reason I really like the rewrite is mostly because of the #1 item on the list. What is it? Check it out to see.

Read the article here.

This week for my RocketNews24 W.T.F. Japan article, I wrote about top five strangest ways to be polite in Japan.

One of my favorite differences to examine between cultures is what is considered polite and rude. It’s always fascinating to discover that something you’ve been raised to do is considered rude in another culture, or how something that seems common sense polite to another culture seems bizarre to you.

For someone raised in the West, Japan abounds with these kinds of cultural differences. It was a lot of fun to think up the list of top five things, and there was a lot of shuffling and cutting that had to be done, though the number one item stayed firmly locked in its place the entire time.

What is it? Well there’s only one way to find out!

Read the article here.

This week for my RocketNews24 W.T.F. Japan article, I wrote about top five most insane kanji place names in Japan.

I wrote an article a few months ago about the top five myths of learning Japanese, and (spoiler alert!) learning how to read Japanese kanji was number one on that list. In my opinion learning how to read Japanese isn’t too much harder than learning how to read English.

English spelling has tons of exceptions and irregularities that sometimes make it seem more like a hieroglyphic writing system itself than an alphabetic one (I’m looking at you “colonel,” “indict,” and “mnemonic”).

But then there’s place name kanji. All bets are out the window when it comes to kanji used to spell place names (and people’s names too for that matter, but that’s for a different time). You could know every single reading a kanji has, and there’s a good chance you’ll still be completely wrong when it comes to pronouncing it correctly when used in a place name.

So that’s why this week I picked out some of the most insane kanji place names all over Japan that I could find. Even if you don’t know how to read Japanese at all, I think I wrote it in a way that will at least show how ridiculous some of these are. Enjoy!

Read the article here.