Unseen Japan

Japan's a bit notorious for its uneven chore distribution between men and women, and Fukushima City is trying something slightly unusual to get families to share housework: turning it into a game. The city launched a pilot project on September 18 that ask

Japan has endured a long-running phenomenon known as "customer harassment," or abuse of store and municipal employees by customers and citizens. Up until now, Japanese companies had no legal obligation to protect their employees from irate customers. That

Soni, a tiny village on the Nara-Mie border, has a tourism problem that doesn't fit the usual overtourism story. To start, the village has about 1,200 residents. Last year, roughly 380,000 people visited, most heading for the Soni Plateau (曽爾高原, Soni Kōge

More and more, Japanese-language requirements are being added to more residence statuses. As a result, people need proof of proficiency; naturally, they flock to the Japanese-Language Proficiency Test (JLPT) to get it. However, this has resulted in demand

Breakups are hard. But who has it harder: the person doing the dumping, or the one being dumped? For some Japanese people, ending a relationship is so difficult that they're paying breakup proxies (お別れ代行; owakare daikō) to do it for them. The services are

For a while, I've been seeing theories popping up to explain Japan's supposed love for AI. Most of them involve Shinto, particularly the native religion's belief in animism, the polytheistic principle that gods dwell in even seemingly inanimate objects. T

A Nippon TV news crew recently spent a day at Tokyo Station International Clinic, following foreigners who needed medical attention in the middle of their Japan trips. The cases were about as glamorous as you'd expect for a trip to the doctor: a swollen i

Salmon is the most popular topping at Japan's conveyor-belt sushi restaurants, and it has been for 15 years straight. Which is kinda funny when you consider that raw salmon was not really part of the Japanese diet before the 1980s. The reason for the chan

If you're learning how to read Japanese, it's probably kanji's dual reading system, on'yomi and kun'yomi, that's slowing you down. On'yomi (音読み) is a reading derived from the Chinese pronunciation of a kanji, while kun'yomi (訓読み) is the native Japanese wo

Icks, red flags, and deal breakers: everyone has them. Social media is flooded with people sharing their turn-offs, from bad posture to saying "hashtag" out loud (as in, "Hashtag tired" after a long day at work). Usually, the posts are funny and harmless.