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...

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...