tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-75153884366490406692023-07-14T18:28:11.530-07:00A blog about the Japanese language and other things about Japan.Mobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15161753402719384337noreply@blogger.comBlogger23125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7515388436649040669.post-11423121722916483622015-02-16T22:17:00.000-08:002015-02-16T22:34:50.107-08:00

Do you read and speak Japanese? Do you like to read? Are you eager to learn new things? Do you like the sound of your voice? Or maybe you grimace at hearing the sound of your recorded voice, as I used to, and still do from time to time. Either way, read on because you just might enjoy reading Japanese texts for LibriVox. The page for the LibriVox audiobook of Natsume Soseki's Kokoro on

Mobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15161753402719384337noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7515388436649040669.post-37857857571077714352014-02-19T22:15:00.000-08:002014-02-19T22:37:13.384-08:00

I know of two Japanese films which are in the public domain. One of them is Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon (羅生門), and the other one is Kaneto Shindo's Children of Hiroshima (原爆の子). The title Rashomon probably registers recognition to many readers interested in Japan, while Children of Hiroshima is probably lesser known, although there is a good chance that the film's subject can be correctly guessed

Mobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15161753402719384337noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7515388436649040669.post-240709702697139262013-10-30T00:04:00.000-07:002013-10-30T23:35:46.295-07:00

So I'm learning Japanese, right? Right. And there are times, when I'm trying to read or write Japanese, when I have a quick question and I wish there were someone sitting right next to me who could answer that question right away. I imagine that English language learners often have similar kinds of experiences and wishes. So, in an effort to be of use and to give something back, I'm doing a

Mobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15161753402719384337noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7515388436649040669.post-72096555686557138002013-09-22T00:07:00.000-07:002013-09-22T00:25:57.412-07:00

The US Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) has a YouTube account. A while ago, I found a series of programs from 2009 that they produced about Japan's Edo period. If you're interested in Japan, I think these videos are a good general introduction to that time in Japan's history, a period covering over 200 years, when the Tokugawa shoguns ruled and Japan closed its doors shut to the rest of the

Mobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15161753402719384337noreply@blogger.com0Tokyo, Japan35.6894875 139.6917063999999321.7112815 119.03740939999993 49.6676935 160.34600339999992tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7515388436649040669.post-37959287594494494532013-09-15T00:03:00.000-07:002013-09-16T04:36:37.388-07:00

News reports have it that sales of the Japanese manga Barefoot Gen (はだしのゲン) have soared ever since the manga series that deals with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima floated to the top of Japanese news headlines this past August, buoyed by reports that Shimane Prefecture's Matsue City education board had requested elementary and junior high school libraries to restrict access to the manga, a

Mobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15161753402719384337noreply@blogger.com1Hiroshima, Hiroshima Prefecture, Japan34.3852029 132.4552926999999733.966231900000004 131.80984569999998 34.8041739 133.10073969999996tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7515388436649040669.post-83733734509428679402013-09-09T20:00:00.000-07:002013-09-15T02:06:49.142-07:00

Having previously devoted some blog space to this topic and having developed an interest in it, I thought I'd make a quick survey of how Japan commemorated the 90th anniversary of the Great Kantō Earthquake (関東大震災), a catastrophic, magnitude 7.9 earthquake which struck the Kantō region of Japan just before noon on September 1, 1923. It is not mere coincidence that Japan also observes its

Mobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15161753402719384337noreply@blogger.com0Tokyo, Japan35.6894875 139.6917063999999321.7112815 119.03740939999993 49.6676935 160.34600339999992tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7515388436649040669.post-6734107053027940322013-09-03T18:23:00.000-07:002013-09-06T08:52:12.218-07:00

In two recent blog posts, I wrote about the topic of Japanese woodblock prints. One post was about Utagawa Hiroshige's bestselling ukiyo-e print series, The Fifty-Three Stations of the Tōkaidō (東海道五十三次), and the other post was about the woodblock prints in the Taishō Shinsai Gashū (大正震災画集), which is a collection of prints depicting scenes pertaining to the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923. In

Mobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15161753402719384337noreply@blogger.com0Tokyo, Japan35.6894875 139.6917063999999321.7112815 119.03740939999993 49.6676935 160.34600339999992tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7515388436649040669.post-81535474214067764942013-08-28T16:43:00.000-07:002013-08-30T21:05:51.219-07:00

Reading Japanese news—or trying to, I should say—is my main method of learning Japanese these days. As I watched the usual flurry of kanji in Japanese news feeds last week and many words whiz by without being recognized, one small news item that went under the radar caught my eye. The Mainichi news article itself was as short as a blip. The article's title is: 『原爆資料館:「平和監視時計」１９回目のリセット 』

Mobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15161753402719384337noreply@blogger.com0Hiroshima, Hiroshima Prefecture, Japan34.3852029 132.4552926999999733.966231900000004 131.80984569999998 34.8041739 133.10073969999996tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7515388436649040669.post-17838314523586784452013-08-24T02:32:00.000-07:002013-09-11T02:56:04.448-07:00

Figure 1: Nihonbashi, the terminus of the Tōkaidō road in Edo, as depicted by Utagawa Hiroshige in the Hōeidō edition of The Fifty-Three Stations of the Tōkaidō [1]. Click on the image to enlarge. For a large part of the Edo period (江戸時代, 1603-1868), after the Battle of Osaka in 1615, it was a time of relative peace and stability for a unified Japan under the tight rule of the Tokugawa

Mobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15161753402719384337noreply@blogger.com0Tokyo, Japan35.6894875 139.6917063999999321.7112815 119.03740939999993 49.6676935 160.34600339999992tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7515388436649040669.post-51673801816126049172013-08-19T03:31:00.000-07:002013-09-04T15:04:25.459-07:00

On September 1, 2013, Japan will commemorate the 90th anniversary of the Great Kantō Earthquake. Many will perhaps look to images as a means of connecting to a past that they never experienced, images like the 4.6-meter-long panoramic photo of earthquake evacuees which will be on display next month in Tokyo. We turn to images because they are effective; they are a viable link which enables us

Mobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15161753402719384337noreply@blogger.com0Yokohama, Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan35.4437078 139.638025635.0297998 138.9925786 35.8576158 140.28347259999998tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7515388436649040669.post-51903592629855671082013-08-15T15:34:00.000-07:002013-08-15T18:46:13.965-07:00

As promised, here is the second and last part of an article about Japanese hiragana and katakana. In the first part of this article, I gave a brief introduction to Japanese kana, followed by a detailed description of the book Let's Learn Hiragana by Yasuko Kosaka Mitamura. In this second installment, I will describe the companion book, Let's Learn Katakana, written by the same author. I will

Mobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15161753402719384337noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7515388436649040669.post-72459233454662128362013-08-11T15:53:00.001-07:002013-08-17T05:56:00.304-07:00

The Japanese language makes use of three writing systems: kanji, hiragana, and katakana. Kanji are Chinese characters, while hiragana and katakana—collectively called kana—are symbols which were derived from kanji, and are original to the Japanese language. There are 46 basic hiragana symbols, and 46 basic katakana symbols. Besides these basic symbols, there are also the modifications and

Mobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15161753402719384337noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7515388436649040669.post-77318194870579263452013-08-09T18:49:00.000-07:002013-08-15T18:51:52.871-07:00

About a month ago, I saw a short article on the Asahi Shimbun about Diamond Fuji (ダイヤモンド富士). I had never heard of the term Diamond Fuji before. The article had a very pretty accompanying photo of the rising sun—a big orb of deep, radiant yellow and orange glowing in the early morning air—just cresting Mt. Fuji, whose peak was just about symmetrically silhouetted against the sun's disk from the

Mobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15161753402719384337noreply@blogger.com0Mount Fuji, Japan35.3605555 138.727777699999939.8385209999999965 97.419183699999934 60.882589999999993 -179.9636283000001tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7515388436649040669.post-91159664511439719692012-09-21T02:02:00.000-07:002012-09-22T03:34:54.716-07:00

The other day, the Asahi Shimbun published on their website a photo of a spectacular rainbow bridge seen over Tokyo. According to the blurb, the rainbow was visible just before sunset on September 19. There had been some rain in the afternoon, but when the sun broke through the clouds and shone on the eastern sky, Tokyoites were treated to an optical delight. 「東の空に、大きな橋がかけられたように虹が現れた」と書いてありました

Mobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15161753402719384337noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7515388436649040669.post-58313976935229703712012-09-20T20:43:00.000-07:002013-08-10T20:46:35.110-07:00

I've been infected with the urge to make another round of tweaks to the design of this blog. I think I'm satisfied with the design for now. I'm usually looking for ways to make text easier to read while keeping the design simple and the page load time to a minimum. I'm a big fan of narrow layout for text—I think a narrow width makes text easier to read, like a newspaper column. I think

Mobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15161753402719384337noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7515388436649040669.post-24457025977226361912012-09-16T23:19:00.000-07:002012-09-21T19:51:55.061-07:00

One idea I'm considering for some posts on this blog is writing short English texts for the benefit of people who are learning English. As someone who is trying to learn Japanese, one problem I encountered in the early days of my studies is deciding on what Japanese material to read to get my reading comprehension off the ground, and how and where to get a hold of those materials. I found that,

Mobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15161753402719384337noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7515388436649040669.post-1125001905142072312012-09-15T23:08:00.000-07:002012-09-20T19:17:12.928-07:00

Yesterday I viewed my own blog for the first time in probably more than a year. And they say there's no privacy on the interwebs. I read my old posts, all six of them. Took me about two minutes (I'm a slow reader). I found that the links were still working so I visited a couple of them. I was happy to see that The #jishin_e Daily is still going strong and being maintained. And so is

Mobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15161753402719384337noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7515388436649040669.post-67083111717002926192011-05-25T01:20:00.000-07:002013-09-06T08:35:33.978-07:00

Woodcut print by Japanese artist Unpō depicting the destruction in the Ueno area of Tokyo due to the Great Kantō Earthquake. The May 2011 issue of the Smithsonian magazine included an interesting article by Joshua Hammer about the Great Kanto Earthquake of September 1, 1923, then considered to be the worst natural disaster to hit Japan. The article describes how earthquake, tsunami, and

Mobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15161753402719384337noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7515388436649040669.post-72296947269599742092011-05-24T20:07:00.000-07:002013-04-10T16:17:49.792-07:00

A hashtag I follow on Twitter to keep up-to-date on information relating to the Great Tohoku Earthquake is #jishin_e. Today I read a tweet which said "Read The #jishin_e Daily." If that's what it sounded like, then I was intrigued, so I clicked on the link on the tweet. Sure enough, the link took me to an online newspaper called The #jishin_e Daily. I think this format is terrific—it's a

Mobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15161753402719384337noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7515388436649040669.post-89065649957832189922011-05-23T01:50:00.000-07:002013-04-10T16:15:40.813-07:00

I cannot think of cherry blossom trees without thinking of Japan. Although I've never been there, I've seen gorgeous pictures taken during Japan's sakura season. I'm always enchanted when I see those kinds of pictures, as if I'm seeing images of a magical world. The Polaroid photo above was not taken in Japan but near where I live (taken during spring of last year). We have cherry blossom

Mobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15161753402719384337noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7515388436649040669.post-69144372544685484662011-05-22T23:38:00.000-07:002013-08-09T22:46:06.412-07:00

I've updated this blog's Japanese language resources page. It's a page where I plan to maintain a list of useful resources for learning Japanese. You can find a link to the Japanese page on the menu at the top of this blog. This is only a start to this list, starting with a few books that I've personally found to be useful in my Japanese learning adventure. But I'll be updating the list with

Mobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15161753402719384337noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7515388436649040669.post-24520994797525804152011-05-22T23:28:00.000-07:002013-08-10T20:53:13.180-07:00

I've just added a Contact page for this blog, which provides a form which can be used to send me an email message. You can find the Contact page link on the menu at the top of the blog, right below the blog header. The form is powered by Foxyform, a free service which provides a fast and easy way to set up a secure and private contact form which can be embedded in websites. Setting it up was a

Mobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15161753402719384337noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7515388436649040669.post-74921879576204907612011-05-22T00:25:00.000-07:002012-09-16T19:00:35.030-07:00

Welcome, to you and me.  ようこそ (youkoso), in Japanese. I think I've been able to tweak the blogger template to a point that I can tolerate. So I can now look forward to focusing on writing posts for this new blog. I still have some final tweaks to do, but it's in a good enough shape to start writing. I've written a few things in the About page to get started, and I'll probably be updating that

Mobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15161753402719384337noreply@blogger.com0