One month after Prime Minister Suga Yoshihide set a goal of one million COVID-19 vaccine injections per day, Japan still shows lackluster success at inoculating the general public. One success of sorts came...
A few months ago, I posted an article that practically gushed over how well Japan was dealing with COVID-19. Although the points raised there are still legitimate, Japan’s slow rollout of the available vaccines has been...
Episodes 17 through 20 of the AmaoJapan podcast are now available. As with other episodes, these new releases all review recent stories as found on various news web sites in Japan. Here are some of the newsworthy topics...
If you have been studying Japanese for more than a year or two, it is likely that you, like me, have your very own Japanese Language Learning Shelf of Shame. Mine is large, so large I could hide behind it. But the time...
An interesting notice appeared in this Monday’s edition of The Japan Times, the largest English-language newspaper in Japan. Under the headline, “A message to our readers,” the publisher announced a small but meaningful...
Japan has a lot of holidays, thirteen official ones to be exact—going up to fourteen next year! Four of them already took place earlier this year, including the Emperor’s Birthday and Coming of Age Day. There are also...
Ten years ago, on March 11, 2011, a magnitude 9.0 earthquake off the northeast coast of Japan triggered a tsunami that devastated a large swath of the country’s Tōhoku region. As people were still trying to grapple with...
It was just over one year ago that the coronavirus pandemic became the top story on the nightly news—every single night. Japan got a head start on most of the world with the arrival of the Diamond Princess cruise ship...
February 23 is the emperor’s birthday, a national holiday in Japan. Well, at least that’s the case this time around. As a holiday, it keeps jumping all over the calendar. Something to do with the 126 Japanese emperors...
The Jōmon, the hunter-gatherer civilization that populated parts of the main Japanese islands for most of its prehistory, had by 300BC almost completely disappeared from the archipelago. Life was always difficult in the...
Tim Patrick
Jeanette May Fukao
