Facebook has grown at a tremendous rate in Japan over the past four years, jumping from just over 200,000 users in 2008 to more than 6 million by the end of 2011. In the process, Japan has generated one of the social network’s highest ...

Japanese comedy gets a bad rap. Foreigners either knock it for being too silly and too focused on slapstick or too pun-based and difficult to understand. The Japanese sense of humor is most definitely different from its Anglophone counterparts. Some things, however, are so ...

Japanese is chock full of procedural phrases that sound incredibly awkward when translated too literally into English. While many of these may seem unnecessary, they are critical to speaking more natural, fluent Japanese. Even the most basic phrases in Japanese are sometimes far more ...

English grammarians like to abide by ironclad rules: Don’t split infinitives! Don’t splice sentences together with commas! Use the active voice! In the case of the latter, the English rule does a disservice to students of Japanese as the passive voice is used much ...

Before I left Japan in May, I planned a pub crawl in Tokyo’s Shibuya district with some friends. My friend Brian had to work until 7 p.m., so I first went for ramen with a couple of Japanese friends. One spoke English but the ...

When I was in elementary school, a certain comma was the bane of my existence. No, not the serial comma. I learned (and later unlearned) that one relatively easily. It wasn’t the comma before “too,” either. Nor was it the one between multiple adjectives ...

1Q84 Book 3, by Haruki Murakami. Shinchosha, 2010, 602 pp., ¥1,900 (hardcover) In May 2009, Haruki Murakami released “1Q84″ to tremendous sales and mostly positive domestic reviews. The novel, released initially in two parts, follows two, 29-year-old Tokyoites as they are pulled into an ...

Japanese is often considered an indirect and ambiguous language, and that’s because it is. The national character, too, often appears passive and indirect to non-Japanese. As a result, it can be tempting for newcomers to take a lead from Frank Sinatra and do things ...

The English translation of the manga “Death Note” by Tsugumi Ōba has sold millions of copies around the world — with barely a mention anywhere of the glaring translation error in the title and throughout the work: “Death Note” should in fact be “Death ...