Month: February 2017

This week for my RocketNews24 W.T.F. Japan article, I wrote about the top five Japanese words with cool ancient origin stories.

Everyone loves a good etymology, but the ones I find the most interesting aren’t just words passively being passed around from one language to another as it happens to often – I like the ones where there’s some kind of action.

Every language has cool word stories like that, even English with words like “clue” or “jumbo” that have pasts you wouldn’t expect out of them, and I wanted to showcase some Japanese ones this week.

There are of course plenty of other cool Japanese words out there with great etymologies, so if people like this one then maybe we’ll see some more in the future!

Read the article here.

This week for my RocketNews24 W.T.F. Japan article, I wrote about the top five ways to get rid of the annoying door-to-door NHK guy.

The NHK guy is the annoyance feared above all others in Japan: he’s the door-to-door “salesman” who tries to get you to sign a contract with NHK, the Japanese public broadcasting service, so that you will pay them money every month.

Even though the NHK guys (and NHK themselves) claim that paying this fee is mandatory for all TV owners, nothing ever happens to those who don’t pay, so it’s usually a fairly awkward encounter to say the least.

This article was inspired by my recent visit by the NHK guy. I used one of the methods on this list with him… which do you think it was?

Read the article here.

This week for my RocketNews24 W.T.F. Japan article, I wrote about the top five craziest things about the Japanese medical system.

It should be noted that this includes both crazy awesome and just plain crazy things, since the Japanese medical system is full of both sides of the spectrum.

Despite only having lived in Japan for only a small part of my life, I’ve had a lot of experience with the medical system. Myself and my wife have both undergone everything from small checkups at clinics to big procedures at hospitals.

I can’t really say any more without starting to spoil things, so go ahead and take a look to see how things are done differently – for better and for worse – over here in Japan.

Read the article here.

This week for my RocketNews24 W.T.F. Japan article, I wrote about the top five most ridiculous kanji handwriting shortcuts, also known as ryakuji.

In English we have a whole bunch of handwriting shortcuts that would baffle people who only have a basic knowledge of the language. There are abbreviations of words (“gov” for government, “veg” for vegetables), abbreviations for phrases (“FYI” for “for your information,” “etc” for “et cetera” which is a whole other can of worms in itself), and even things like ” to repeat a phrase down a list, or using numbers instead of words (“4” for “for,” “2” for “to”), and more.

And it’s no different in Japanese. Since writing complex kanji can take some time, there are a lot of shortcuts that some people take when writing them that are not technically “correct Japanese.”

But when have correct things ever been interesting? So let’s take a look at the wild world of “incorrect” Japanese shortcut-kanji: ryakuji!

Read the article here.