Want to eat like a big kid, only with more grace and style? This restaurant in Kyoto offers a “Kids’ Special – for Adults”! Naturally we had to go and scoff—er, try—it for ourselves…
Evie Nyan
Born and raised in the UK, Evie escaped to Tokyo as an exchange student six years ago. Since then, she has been a Co-ordinator for International Relations in Kyoto, a translator of electronic manuals in Osaka, and a video game translator in London. Her hobbies include scouring second hand software shops for unlocalised retro games, drinking umeshu, and napping under the kotatsu. Her dream is to open a combination English teashop/bookshop/cat cafe in Tokyo.
Posted by Evie Nyan (Page 7)
Have you heard of Japanese illustrator and social media sticker creator Kanahei yet? She’s behind one of the most popular sticker collections on the LINE app, and now her cute critters are set to adorn dishes in their very own theme cafe in Tokyo!
Beyond silly mistakes like wearing toilet slippers on tatami or forgetting to add “san” to someone’s name, what other things do foreigners unknowingly do to reduce their chances of living happily in Japan?
Our favourite family of Munchkin cats (and a dog!) do battle with a motorised duelling Yoda in this adorable video!
An amazing scale model artist has created a rideable steampunk mecha for a Sylvanian Family doll, out of… a tub of chewing gum?!
Drunken revellers, rejoice! This festive season you can snooze past your train stop all you like—the rescue bus has got you covered!
Our reporter recently got his uvula lasered off to attempt to cure his chronic snoring. Did it work?
Our reporters made pigs of themselves at Marugo, a pork cutlet restaurant featured in the 2016 Tokyo Michelin Guide.
When a reporter for popular social news site BuzzFeed ate at Ramen Jiro recently, Japan’s netizens had plenty to say about it!
In terms of pronunciation Japanese is surprisingly easy to get to grips with, but some words can be real tongue-tanglers! Here are 10 of the worst!
According to Twitter in Japan, there are four main “personality types” when it comes to girlfriends: cat, dog, gorilla or penguin. Say what?!
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In Japan, a recent trending Twitter hashtag, #don’tbelievegirlswhentheysay has people talking. Do any of these sound familiar to you?
Working at RocketNews24 sort of desensitizes you to craziness, but even we were surprised when we found out our two new coworkers are gigantic eight-foot-tall teddy bears. Things just got weirder as we heard the story of how they found their way to our office, but hey, it’s not like we mind having two new cuddly heartthrobs to share our workspace with!
Despite Japan’s relative safety, abundance of delicious food, fascinating culture, and friendly people, the country still lags behind as a tourist destination for foreign travellers. So the upcoming 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games are the perfect opportunity for Japan to show off its famed omotenashi hospitality to the droves of foreign visitors who’ll be pouring into Tokyo to spectate.
As foreigners who’ve been living in Japan for a while, we think we might have some pretty good ideas about certain things Japan could do in order to make things a little easier on this influx of foreign guests…
Speakers of certain languages sometimes get a leg-up when learning Japanese. For example, Japanese includes Chinese characters, which means Chinese speakers can often get the gist of a text even if they don’t understand the grammar. Similarly, Korean speakers might find that Japanese grammar is kinda similar to theirs. And we native English speakers get a huge helping hand from the hundreds of English loan words that have been adopted into modern Japanese.
But sometimes, these loan words aren’t really our friends at all. Instead, they’re what’s known as false friends – words that sound similar in two languages yet have a completely different meaning. In co-opting English words into Japanese, sometimes our crafty Nihonjin pals have assigned our words to things that actually mean something totally different. It’s almost like they’re trying to trick us!
Join us for a quick primer on some Japanese loanwords you might have heard before, and what they really mean!
During our Women in Japan series, we discussed some of the powerful reasons to be a woman in Japan. From a Westernised viewpoint, it’s sometimes hard to accept the fact that, while Japan is still very much a patriarchal society, many women (not all, but many) here don’t actually want to be out there smashing glass ceilings and “leaning in” at the office when instead they could be doing things that women were traditionally appreciated for in Japan, namely cooking, housekeeping and raising the kids.
If you’re still in doubt as to exactly what Japanese women think of the gender gap in their country, this informative street interview video from YouTuber Yuta Aoki should provide some answers.
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