It has been almost two weeks since Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe suddenly resigned from office. A press conference was called suddenly, and everyone left the room more confused than when they went in. Abe was silent for over a week, and has only just come out earlier this week, saying effectively that his timing to step down was rubbish, and he for the first time apologised deeply to the nation. In the week after he quit, Abe admitted to hospital for extreme stress and fatigue. But what were the real reasons for his sudden and irresponsible departure, and what happened over his last couple of weeks? Continue Reading »

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Up until now we have never introduced any angles on picking up in Japan, or for that matter anything to do with romance in Japan in general (except that is, for our unfinished series on Japanese Love Hotels). This is for several reasons, the first being that most of us have been here for more than ten years, and picking up ladies in Japan seems to have become “second nature” - so much so that most of us ended up marrying one (or two!) of them. By no means does this mean that we claim to be pick-up machines, but it just didn’t seem to be a topic that needed airing amongst our mostly long term Japan resident readership. Despite running Stippy Friends (the best online deai spot to meet real Japanese girls), we thought that writing about the same would be slightly crass, and would turn people away from discovering our other more serious, and sometimes humorous perspectives on Japan. It seems we were wrong. Continue Reading »

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Would you buy a used car from this man? Which man? Well that’s a good question. (I probably wouldn’t buy one from either) In this instance, I mean the man on the left, Masahiro Origuchi (折口雅博), the infamous ex-President of Comsn (コムスン) - the company that, according to their English homepage, is “preserving the dignity and independence of the elderly” (link) when they are not screwing taxpayers by lining their pockets with illegal subsidies.

To be frank, I don’t know if I’d buy a used car from a guy with a smile like that, but want about a used plane? Continue Reading »

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Starting November 20, 2007, all foreign nationals landing in Japan will be required to submit to fingerprinting and having their picture taken. Yōkoso! Smile! You’re a terrorist suspect!

This controversial new procedure snuck its way into existence on May 24, 2006 when the Japanese Diet passed a law requiring all foreign nationals (with a few exceptions, such as children under 16, diplomats, and special-status permanent residents such as Zainichi Koreans) to submit biometric data to prove they’re not Osama bin Laden or one of his cronies. I’ll spare you the details; if you Continue Reading »

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Call me paranoid, but I’m really worried about what my wife eats these days. This is the fourth installment in a series about my personal experience of being pregnant in Japan (or perhaps I should say, of my wife being pregnant). Although I hope that some of the observations have value for gaijin of both sexes, I’m intentionally writing this series from my own perspective - a Gaijin Father / Japanese Mother. There is no topic better than pregnancy for old wives tales to prevail and it seems that the topic of food - what you can, can’t or shouldn’t eat - really takes the cake when it comes to misconceptions in not only Japan but every country in the world. Especially when it comes to Continue Reading »

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Kyoto is famous in Japan for many things, in the past for classic temples like Kinkakuji and Kiyomizu-dera and for being the capital of Japan from 794 until the Meiji Restoration in 1868. It is well-known more recently for things such as the Kyoto Protocol and Kyoto University. This week, Kyoto University became the first University in Japan to introduce a so-called “University Environment Tax”, sort of an emissions tax to attempt to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases within the University. Continue Reading »

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This is the third installment in a series about my personal experience of being pregnant in Japan (or perhaps I should say, of my wife being pregnant). Although I hope that some of the observations have value for gaijin of both sexes, I’m intentionally writing this series from my own perspective - a Gaijin Father / Japanese Mother. There is no topic better than pregnancy for old wives tales to prevail and I’ve been amazed by the seemingly endless views about pregnancy that differ between Japan and the West (where I’m from). While it is hard to argue that either view is right or wrong, I personally would have loved to have had a resource that taught me about both sides of the fence- hopes, expectations, taboo, you name it. That is the purpose of this series.

In the second installment I talked about my favorite reference books. I had hoped for a more balanced view of the world by buying a bunch of books on Amazon. I realized after about my 6^th book that ironically I was getting a biased view of the world in a way that I had completely unexpected. Continue Reading »

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This is part two of our writeup and perspective on IDNs, especially double byte Japanese domain names. See Part One (where we went into some detail of explaining the history of the technology surrounding IDNs) before reading on. Without going into too much more history or spurting out much more technical jargon, lets explore some day to day aspects of double byte domains, how they are (or rather aren’t) used, and why they just aren’t the glowing future of Japanese internet real estate that initially they may seem to be. Continue Reading »

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This is the second installment (find the first here) in a series about my personal experience of being pregnant in Japan (or perhaps I should say, of my wife being pregnant). Although I hope that some of the observations have value for gaijin of both sexes, I’m intentionally writing this series from my own perspective - a Gaijin Father / Japanese Mother. There is no topic better than pregnancy for old wives tales to prevail, and I’ve been amazed by the seemingly endless views about pregnancy that differ between Japan and the West (where I’m from). While it is hard to argue that Continue Reading »

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Double Byte IDNs: “Interesting, but Useless Eye-Candy”

Internationalized Domain Names, heard of them? Double byte web addresses. You know the ones - the 日本.jps and the 価格.coms - you must have seen them lurking somewhere? Yes, these are called IDNs, or Internationalized Domain Names.

Just how valuable are these “snatch up while you can” bargains that the registrars have been trying to flog to us for the last 4 or 5 years? How will these prestigious pieces of “Internet Real Estate” rear up in the next decade? Are they a potential Continue Reading »

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