It’s tax time once again! This year, the filing deadline for national income taxes in Japan has shifted from mid-March to April 15. Be sure to thank your local coronavirus. Naturally, I waited until this weekend to...
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...
William Shakespeare has long been recognized as one of the most important—perhaps the most important—contributor to English literature. But in America’s current “cancel culture” that has set its sights on influencers...
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...
My very first earthquake happened in Los Angeles back in the late 1980s, a rather frightening affair. I mean, the while house was moving, despite it being attached to California and the rest of the contiguous forty...
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 essayist Charles Dudley Warner famously quipped, “Everybody complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” That changes today. While I can’t fix your crazy weather, I can at least help you identify...