Dealing with that foreign language that you keep hearing in #Japan: #English.

The popular auction site Mercari is asking me lots of probing questions. Is it, perchance, a clandestine branch of the Japanese government?

Japan, it turns out, has lots of paperwork. Citizens are somehow able to jet right past the formalities, be they printed forms in...

Japan imposes a six-month waiting period on foreign resident bank accounts. Nihon Plus You’s new white paper explains the reasons why...

If you have spent any length of time in Japan, you have encountered name stamps, those handheld seals used to mark documents. Embossing a...

Japan’s identity as a culture and a society is unique in this world, thanks in part to its remote island location. When combined with the...

Cheese tastes great in a wide variety of foods. But did you know it also works with immigration policies? Well, it does, thanks to that m...

On November 12, 2023, the Deep in Japan podcast released its two-hour interview with Tim Odagiri, Director of Nihon Plus You.

A few weeks ago, I had a chance to visit Hiroshima, my first trip to that sprawling port city in Western Japan. As I gazed at a cloudbank...

On October 25, 2023, Maya Matsuoka and Tim Sullivan from Japan Expert Insights interviewed Nihon Plus You’s director, Tim Odagiri, about...

Someone asked me a few days ago what my secret is for learning Japanese. Obviously, this conversation took place in English. If we had be...

This week, the entertainment behemoth Johnny and Associates will change its name to “Smile-Up.” If you haven’t been following the news, t...

When you move to Japan, one of the first things you realize is how woefully unprepared you are for the experience. Naturally, there’s the...

The nations of the world recently have been behaving like a bunch of cranky kids, refusing to play well together despite having ample toy...

Anyone who cares about Japan and its people knows that it is going through some demographic turbulence right now. A large baby-boom popul...

I participate in a variety of online groups where foreigners living in Japan mingle to discuss their experiences. Recently, in one such g...

There is a very amusing skit by the late Japanese comedian Shimura Ken where he plays a befuddled high school English teacher assigned to...

I moved to Japan in part to get away from all the politics. America, in its modern incarnation, is politics on steroids. The old adage, “...

As I was browsing through some online news reports last week, I learned that Japan is an oppressive patriarchal hellscape. It’s just so s...

Japan is great at standardizing things. Whether it is Just-In-Time manufacturing processes in an automobile factory or the shuffling of p...