Tag: W.T.F. Japan

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.

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.

Read the article here.

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.

Read the article here.

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!

Read the article here.

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.”

Read the article here.

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.