Japanese passive-aggressive tutting is a national discipline performed by old men in stations. Here's what happens when you turn round and ask one of them why he's doing it.
The nihongo jouzu compliment lands the second any foreigner produces a single Japanese sound. Here is what thirteen years of being told your Japanese is very good after saying 'konnichiwa' actually does to a person.
You're having a perfectly decent conversation with a Japanese woman on a night out, and then he appears. The Japanese cockblock is real, it is systematic, and it deserves a proper autopsy.
Ten years of living here and I've made my peace with a lot. The queuing theatre. The plastic bags. The fax machines. But the indicator — the humble, legally mandated, two-second flick of the wrist — apparently remains optional.
The 2,000-yen note is legal tender printed by a sovereign nation, and yet the Japanese cash economy treats it like a counterfeit handed over by a deranged tourist. A field report on the most polite refusal of your own money you will ever experience.
Japan fans cleaning up litter at the World Cup again, and the internet melting down about it again. The Japanese stadium clean-up tradition is a performance, and you absolute mugs keep buying the ticket.
Booking a Japanese doctor's appointment is impossible. Instead you take a paper ticket, lose a morning to the waiting room lottery, and pay across three separate queues to learn you have the cold you described on arrival.
Every typhoon in Japan gets a multi-day media build-up like a national emergency, then arrives in Tokyo as light fucking drizzle. A field report on the country's favourite ritual of collective weather panic.
Half gaijin, half samurai, all out of patience. The fury is the bill the love has run up. Send us your worst day at the ward office. Read the Manifesto →