When you move to Japan, one of the first things you realize is how woefully unprepared you are for the experience. Naturally, there’s the language to deal with, its never-ending foreign words and phrases coming at you...
Author - Tim Odagiri
Tim Odagiri
Japan is the Adult in the Room
The nations of the world recently have been behaving like a bunch of cranky kids, refusing to play well together despite having ample toys. Consider the United States, scribbling on everyone else’s coloring books with...
Does Japan Have Too Many People?
Anyone who cares about Japan and its people knows that it is going through some demographic turbulence right now. A large baby-boom population entering its twilight years is clashing with those in their twenties and...
Do Foreign Residents in Japan Have an Obligation to Fit In?
I participate in a variety of online groups where foreigners living in Japan mingle to discuss their experiences. Recently, in one such group, a foreign resident posted an anecdote about his work environment. His boss...
Increasing Japan’s Birthrate Through Better English
There is a very amusing skit by the late Japanese comedian Shimura Ken where he plays a befuddled high school English teacher assigned to a class full of native English speakers. When these clearly American students...
Why Isn’t Japan Political?
I moved to Japan in part to get away from all the politics. America, in its modern incarnation, is politics on steroids. The old adage, “All politics is local,” was once linked primarily to elections, a reminder to...
Japan and the Gender Gap Information Gap
As I was browsing through some online news reports last week, I learned that Japan is an oppressive patriarchal hellscape. It’s just so sad, and so unexpected. I mean, you wouldn’t know it from wandering around the...
The Burger Kingification of Japan
Japan is great at standardizing things. Whether it is Just-In-Time manufacturing processes in an automobile factory or the shuffling of paperwork at city hall, organizations in Japan are adept at creating and adhering...
That Time Some Guy Said, “You’re Not Japan’s Emperor, I Am!”
You history buffs out there might recall that the mid-1940s was a busy time for Japan. With the empire’s defeat at the end of World War II, the Allied victors were in a position to make sweeping changes to the country’s...
The Sad, Sad Tale of a Major Japanese Bank
Once upon a time, there was a young American boy who grew up to become a handsome prince. Oh wait, this isn’t a fairy tale. That young boy actually turned into a middle-aged computer programmer with a face for radio...
