Questions from new readers, long-term Gaiurai, anxious would-be expats, and the occasional Japanese journalist trying to start a fight. Direct answers in the same voice as everything else here. No PR varnish.
A satirical blog from Tokyo for the foreign resident who has finished pretending. The foreign-resident support group nobody asked for, written in the register most of us only use in the third bar at 11pm. We are deeply fond of Japan. We are also exhausted, contemptuous of its institutions, and done being polite about the fucking fax machine. Both of those things are true and the second one is what this site is for.
Satire. Observational satire, written by a long-term foreign resident, aimed at the patterns — cultural rituals, social archetypes, corporate behaviours, customs, institutions, the change-counting ceremony at the konbini, the cockblock dynamic in Shimbashi, the salaryman face-down on the last Yamanote, the bureaucracy that produced all of it. We do not name real individuals and we do not break news. If you came here looking for a news source, the Japan Times is excellent and updated daily.
No. If we hated Japan we would have left a decade ago, like the sensible people did. We are still here, on year ten and beyond, paying the residence tax and renewing the card and standing in the ward office at 9.04am on a Tuesday. The complaining is participation, not exit. The fury is the bill the love has run up. Read the Manifesto before assuming otherwise.
It is now. A portmanteau of gaijin and samurai, pronounced gai-you-rye. Our private name for the long-term foreign resident who has stopped apologising for existing in this country. Half outsider, half retainer to a place that mostly does not know they exist and mostly does not care to find out.
A British long-term Tokyo resident. The byline is "The Angry Gaijin" because the rants are universal, the fax machine does not care which one of us is shouting at it, and the specific identity is not the point. The voice is. The grievances are. The years are.
Long enough that the answer to that question is itself part of the joke. The masthead at the top of the homepage updates the count automatically. So whatever it says today is the truth as of today.
Yes. Including the dialect of Japanese the textbooks never teach you — the one you need to actively disagree with people in. The one you need to tell a landlord no, a bank clerk no, a manager no, and an immigration officer that you understood the question the first time. See Manifesto 05 — Honne Forever.
Because we still need to renew the fucking visa. The day this becomes a memoir with a cover photo is the day the writer has either left the country, retired, or finally agreed to do tatemae again — and at that point the site will no longer exist, so the question will be moot.
Yes. Send it here. Bullet points, a half-formed paragraph of fury, a specific moment you cannot stop thinking about — we will work from anything that has a real, observable detail in it. Generic "Japan is weird" submissions go in the bin. We need the ward office, the exact form number, the time of day, the colour of the cabinet.
Only if you ask us to. Default is anonymous. If you have named your landlord, your manager, your in-laws, or anyone else who has not asked to be in a satirical blog, we will change it. We have never doxxed a private individual. We are not going to start.
Not yet. When this site is making enough money to pay anyone, contributors will be the first on the list. Right now the only money this site spends is on the Anthropic API bill, a small Cloudflare R2 storage tab, and the domain. The fury, sadly, is unpaid labour.
Usually within two weeks if we are going to use it. If we are, you will get an email first. If we are not, you will hear nothing, and we are sorry about that — we read every submission but we cannot reply to every single one. Volume issue, not contempt issue.
Email legal@angrygaijin.com. We remove on request within 14 days, no questions asked, no guilt-trip in the reply. The entire point of this site is that nobody gets pressured into staying in something they no longer want to be in. We will not be the exception to our own rule.
Some drafts are written by Claude using a tightly-controlled voice prompt, then heavily edited by a human Gaiurai. The brief, the angle, the lived experiences, the punchlines, the politics, the contempt — those are all ours. The model is a fast typist with good instincts and a working knowledge of British anger. It is not the author. Every article on this site has been read, line-edited and signed off by a real human before it goes live.
No.
The voice prompt explicitly bans em dashes, the word "delve", the phrase "navigate the landscape", LinkedIn cheer, American spelling, and the standard both-sides-it hedging move that machine writing falls into the second you let it. It mandates British register, varied sentence length, specific named details, a per-paragraph profanity floor from paragraph two onwards, and open contempt for institutions. The first draft gets us 70% of the way. The editing pass does the rest.
Yes, on anything observable. Train statistics, ward-office processes, immigration rules, currency figures, names of real institutions. The opinions are opinions. The numbers are numbers. If we get a number wrong, email editor@angrygaijin.com and we will correct it. Politely. With our teeth showing.
Because some pieces are mildly piqued ("Rage 1, charming observational") and some are forming-a-militia ("Rage 5, we will get a complaint about this one"). The reader gets to dose themselves before clicking in. We are a courteous host. Just not about the rest of it.
There is a form in the sidebar of most pages. We send roughly one email a fortnight. No tracking pixels. No third-party analytics. We will not sell your email address to a wedding-photo company in Osaka. We have nothing else to sell either. The newsletter is the newsletter.
Because it is funnier than a weather widget. The number is hand-set on the Manifesto page based on the editor's current mood. It is not a real index. There is no methodology. There is no rage tribunal. There is, however, a definite spike every time the bank app goes down at 5pm on a Tuesday.
Yes. Email editor@angrygaijin.com first so we can give you a clean source file and credit you properly. Bonus marks if the translation makes the rage land harder in Japanese than it does in English. We are aware this is an extremely high bar.
Excerpts up to 200 words with a link back: fine, no permission needed. Full pieces: email editor@angrygaijin.com and we will probably say yes if the venue is the right shape. The venue is not always the right shape.
Email press@angrygaijin.com. We will give you a quote. The quote will be in flawless keigo. You will not enjoy it.
Yes, with full eyes open. The honeymoon ends around year three and the country you actually move to is the one you encounter after that. The country you move to is bureaucratic, slow to admit error, expensive in small specific ways, and entirely worth it on a good Wednesday. Read the Manifesto before you book the flight, not after. Read the 4 Phases of Japan twice.
No. You get better at it. Same outcome, different chair, lower resting heart rate.
We say so every other Tuesday and then we do not. The trains are too good. The food is too good. The friendships are real. The bureaucracy will outlive us all and we have decided we are fine with that on the grand scale, just not on Tuesday afternoons.
Pick a category in the archive. We have written about most of it. If we have not, submit it and we will. The list is long. The pipeline is full. The fury is, unfortunately, renewable.
Tips, complaints, character references, polite refusals, Japanese diplomatic threats — Angry Gaijin reads every message that arrives.