Japanese football fan culture has a fascinating quirk: the national team only exists when it wins. Lose, and the entire tournament is quietly erased from history. A field report on selective national pride.
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.
Understanding tatemae vs honne is the single most important bit of cultural knowledge you can have in Japan. It is the difference between living here and being managed here.
Why does Japanese food culture treat British food like a war crime when nobody here has actually eaten any of it? A rant about the smuggest culinary inferiority complex on earth.
Japan's four seasons obsession is a national delusion dressed up as poetry. No, mate, you did not invent autumn. The rest of the planet also has weather.
Inside the Japanese paperless office that prints a digital document, stamps it with a hanko, scans it back into a PDF and emails it to the person who sent it. Performed modernity wrapped around an Edo-period workflow.
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 →