Quirky Japan Blog

If you’ve ever been to a Japanese garden, you’ve may have seen these little rocks wrapped in ropes in various places. What are they?  Decorations? Stuff left by lazy workers? If I saw the rock in the middle of this path, there’s a good chance I’d just obliviously keep walking. Actually, though, this is a  [...]

The Fukagawa Matsuri (officially the Fukagawa Hachimangu Matsuri) is one of Tokyo’s “Big Three” festivals, but seems to be a lot less well-known than Asakusa’s Sanja Matsuri and the Kanda Matsuri. Its a mikoshi festival, and its gimmick is that people throw water on the mikoshi carriers to cool them down. This year I went [...]

On August 7 this month, I found a huge bunch of about 15 bananas for only 120 yen at my local supermarket. Looking around, I noticed a sign saying that Aug. 8 was “Banana no hi” (Banana Day). This is a kind of Japanese wordplay involving numbers where the numbers’ sounds are used to make [...]

This is the annual festival at my son’s preschool and was held on July 17. I thought it was kind of strange to have an Obon festival in July because the Obon holidays are in July, but apparently, the festival gets celebrated at different times in Japan. In Tokyo and Tohoku (northern Japan), it’s celebrated [...]

Tokyo is one of the world’s most expensive cities, and rents can be astronomical, but if you’re a little bit careful in deciding where you live, it can also be surprisingly cheap. This chart　is from the homepage of a Japanese real-estate agent called Homes Chintai that shows the average rents for various apartment sizes throughout [...]

The Boso no mura is a fantastic blend of history, nature, and beautiful architecture in Chiba, near Narita Airport. It doesn’t seem to get many visitors, which is really a shame because it’s a really worthwhile tourist spot – very educational, entertaining, and great for photography. The main attraction is this re-created samurai town. The [...]

I’ve always been fascinated with Japan’s bubble economy. I think it’s because I came to Japan in 1993, just after Japan’s famous economic bubble burst. I was constantly hearing stories about people getting 10,000 yen an hour for teaching English, GOD (Gaijin on Display) jobs where all you had to do was show up at [...]

I don’t usually recommend Ueno as a tourist destination (the zoo is just cruel, the museums are stodgy, Ameyoko-cho is charmless, and the park is ugly), but at the end of July and early-August when the lotuses are in bloom, the Shinobazu Pond in the lower section of the park is actually quite nice. The [...]

An urawaza is a helpful hint or secret technique for doing something. I recently found this interesting site, the Urawaza/Ura Jyouhou Blog (in Japanese only) which has some uniquely Japanese ones. How to stand stably on the train without a strap! If you stand on a bus or train without the strap, most people spread [...]

This little shop in Ueno’s Ameyoko-cho market district sells rubber celebrity masks. They only cost 2,000 yen or so and would certainly make a unique souvenir of Japan. It’s call the Ueno-ya, and the masks page is here. Hatoyama Yukio Antonio Inoki Kinnikuman Kuidaore Clown Eyeball Ozawa Ichiro Asashoryu Buddha Anime character (This one costs [...]