My short story Everything for Sale was recently published in the podcast Secondhand Stories.
And of course by “published” I mean “read out loud,” but hey, same thing, right?
If you have a few minutes and want to listen to a story that will give you a good, slimy feeling, then check it out.
This week for my RocketNews24 W.T.F. Japan article, I wrote about the top five reasons sleeping on the floor Japanese-style is awesome
For me, Japan is synonymous with sleeping on the floor. I’ve slept on the floor in the northernmost Hokkaido, slept on the floor in the southernmost Okinawa, slept on the floor in the middle-area in Tokyo, and even now I currently sleep on the floor too.
Sleeping on the floor may seem incredible strange (and uncomfortable) to anyone who hasn’t tried it, but it’s actually quite nice. There’s no bulky beds, no crazy-expensive mattresses, and a bunch of other bonuses too.
I don’t want to give everything away, so if you’ve never slept on the floor before (or even if you have!), click below and maybe give it a try.
This week for my RocketNews24 W.T.F. Japan article, I wrote about the top five most hilarious Japanese euphemisms.
One thing that I’d like to start doing more of in the W.T.F. series is really bringing Japanese things to an English-speaking audience that they really have no other way of finding out about.
While articles like “top five strange Christmas things” and “top five ways to immigrate to Japan” are perfectly fine and interesting and helpful and all that stuff, they’re most compilations (hilariously and expertly-written compilations, of course!) of things that you can find if you looked them up in English.
I’ll still do article like those, but I’d like to do as many as possible on topics that are much more difficult to look up in English, such as this week’s topic on euphemisms.
What kind of things do Japanese people like to talk their way around? Are they similar to ones we have in English or completely different? There’s only one way to find out.
This week for my RocketNews24 W.T.F. Japan article, I wrote about the top five hand gestures that Japanese people don’t understand.
One of my favorite parts about different cultures interacting is when a person from one culture does something that is perfectly normal to them but completely foreign to the other. And nowhere else is this more apparent than in body language.
When your face, legs, or especially hands start doing something that the person you’re talking to has never seen before, then suddenly you’re exploring new cultural frontier.
It’s happened to me personally several times, so I thought it would be fun to write about the ones that come up the most often. The #1 item on the list comes up all the time, and it’s something that we take for granted so much in English that it’s hard to explain. But that’s exactly what makes it so fun to use.
If people like this article then perhaps I’ll have to do the obvious sequel at some point: Japanese hand gestures that we don’t understand. We’ll see how it goes!
This week for my RocketNews24 W.T.F. Japan article, I wrote about the top five most annoying sounds in Japan.
Some annoying sounds are universal. Nonstop crying babies and honking horns are enough to get most people’s blood boiling.
But there are some sounds that are unique to, or at least far more common in, certain countries. There’s a lot of sounds that I’ve only ever heard after coming to Japan, and while many of them are pleasant, there’s quite a few that I could’ve lived happily never hearing.
That’s why I decided to compile a list of the most annoying sounds I’ve heard in Japan. A lot of these are sounds that you pretty much don’t hear anywhere else in the world, so go ahead and enjoy some of the rare audial “delights.”
