While Japanese grammar is somewhat simple, it does have differences from English that can make it tricky to master. Also, Japanese has a bunch of abbreviations that are used in casual language that can be tricky to understand if you are not familiar with them. In this post I want to talk about “jan” (じゃん),… Read More »
Recently I visited Lloyd Center in Portland, only to discover the entire mall was being shut down. It was good timing though since Barnes & Noble was one of the stores still open, and they were doing a pretty heavy discount on a large part of their stock, so we ended up buying around 10… Read More »
The weather was wonerful today, feeling just like summer, so we decided to take a trip to the Portland Japanese Garden for the first time in a few months. With many of the flowers blooming, we had a great time and took a handful of pictures. Here are some of the ones we took.
I’m prod to the announce my latest book, “Unarranged: A musical memoir about influences and improvisation”, now available for purchase.
The first season of One Piece’s live action adaptation was released on Netflix in 2023, and it was by far one of the best adaptations in many respects: story, characters, music, even acting. Of course it was built on a popular manga and anime series, but with hundreds of episodes of that, it must be… Read More »
This is my review of the novel “Silent Singer”, written by renowed Japanese author Yoko Ogawa. I’ve also included a short translation of one part of the book.
Rental Family is a movie released in 2025 that stars Brendan Frasier as a man living in Japan with an interesting occupation: playing a role as a fake family member for various clientelle. The premise sounded interesting and a friend recommended the movie (not to mention it got a bunch of good reviews) so I… Read More »
Besides having an interest in the details of Japanese itself (grammar, vocab, culture, etc.), I frequently think about effective ways to learn those aspects of Japanese. That includes not just for individuals studying the language as a hobby, but for those trying to raise one or more children as biligual, or at least reasonably fluent,… Read More »
I train and sometimes help teach a style of Aikido––a Japanese martial art––called Ki-Aikido (more formally “Shinshin Touitsu Aikido” 心身統一合氣道) that has a strong emphasis on applying lessons learned on the mat in real life. If you want to get a summary about this style of martial art before going through this article, check out… Read More »
Having been an avid reader since I was young, my reading speed in English seems to be relatively fast. Not to the extreme extent to break any record, but I was generally able to read a novel of average length––say around 300 pages––in a handful of days (and in one case in a single day).… Read More »