Japanese people dish on things foreigners told them that they’d never realized before about their home country.
countries
What could be hard about taking a pee in Poland? Where are you likely to see camel racing with robotic jockeys? Answers to these and more below!
Amerika. Itaria. Kanada. The majority of countries are known in Japan by names that sound vaguely similar to their native monikers. So why on earth do the Japanese call the UK ‘Igirisu‘?
You know how in English you can take pretty much any noun and make it a verb—derivation for the cunning linguists out there—by adding to to the front? For example, how the search engine Google has become to google, as in, “Why the hell are you asking me? Go google it, you twit!”
Well, you can do the same thing in Japanese by adding –ru or a handful of other suffixes to the end of a word, and some Japanese net users recently had some fun with this by turning country names into some very non-PC verbs.
Have a look at our geopolitical dictionary and see how your country fared.
In 2013, a grand total of 10,363,904 foreign tourists visited Japan! That number surpasses the goal of the Visit Japan Campaign, which began in 2003 with a goal to increase the number of overseas visitors to 10 million.
The Japanese language version of popular travel planning and information website TripAdvisor was quite excited by this news, and recently produced their own visual graphic detailing some fun facts about foreign tourists in the Land of the Rising Sun during 2013. Can you guess which country most of the visitors came from, or which country had the highest percentage jump in visitors? How about the most popular tourist destinations for foreigners traveling in Japan? Find out all that and more after the jump.
Google operates hundreds of domain names for different regions around the world, from Australia (google.com.au) to Zimbabwe (google.co.zw). And searching for the same keyword throws up different results depending on which country Google thinks you’re in.
So what happens when you search “Japan” in different countries’ Google Image Search? To find out, a curious Japanese netizen did exactly that. The image results reveal a little bit about how each country sees Japan – some just might surprise you!
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Yoshinoya adds first-ever chain-wide ramen with new beef and pork-broth noodle hot pot meals
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We followed Tokyo’s mystery walking map and ended up creating our own bar-hopping adventure
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Japan’s oldest largetooth sawfish in captivity back on display in Mie Prefecture
You can now visit a recreation of Evangelion’s Tokyo-3 and live there in miniature form in【Pics】
One of Japan’s rarest sweets is a sell-out hit that looks and tastes like frost
Ruru Cafe Shibuya wows customers by serving coffee and sweets on unique water tables
Studio Ghibli answers Spirited Away fan questions, reveals exciting facts and trivia behind the film
Japanese elementary school backpacks made from ballistic nylon now being offered in Japan【Photos】
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