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The consumption tax increase next April will hit every household in Japan hard, with many people's financial future hanging on whether their wages rise enough to offset the impact of the hike, experts say.
Every parent is all too familiar with The Tantrum. The screaming, the flailing arms, the angry head butting — and the timing (normally in the most inconvenient public place possible).
International events undermine Japan's democracy. Shame on the International Olympic Committee for being a party to it.
Tucked away behind the main museums in Ueno, the Tokyo University Art Museum may not be on most people’s radar, but it is definitely one of the city’s top museums in terms of curatorial quality. Whenever I go there, I am always delighted by ...
Francisco Liriano showed up at PNC Park on Tuesday afternoon in a suit with his suitcase packed for a trip St. Louis. The message reverberated through the Pittsburgh Pirates clubhouse. After 21 years away from the playoffs, it was time for the best story ...
For Peter Backhaus's latest contributions to The Japan Times, see below:
One of the ultra-fascinating facets of Japanese is its super-large arsenal of intensifying prefixes that provide an otherwise neutral expression with some emphatic edge. The best-known (and least spectacular) of them is dai (大), which usually translates as “big.” When something went really well, ...
Stop me if you’ve heard this one. Two men aged around 50 enter a sushi restaurant. One orders a raincoat, the other a garage. What looks like the beginning of a “Monty Python” sketch is in fact the stuff of a most typical oyaji ...
Beauty must be a bilingual thing. At least that’s the impression one gets from looking at signs outside hairdressers, beauty parlors and similar types of businesses in Japan.
The man from next door says it. My mother-in-law says it. The guy in the grocery store says it. The nurse on TV says it. Seems like everyone says Yoisho! (よいしょ!) It’s one of those expressions that appear to be a common part of ...
Road traffic in Japan is a complicated affair. Apart from those narrow, crooked streets that sometimes end without warning, you have to get used to unclear right-of-way rules and the national fetish for backward parking.
If there’s one thing to be sure of in Japan these days, it’s that by the end of the year you will have a prime minister different from the one you started out with. This year was the sixth year in succession to follow ...
“Which new words would you like to see added to the dictionary?” A couple of months ago the publishing house Taishukan put this generous question to Japanese high school and junior high school students. The students, among other oddities, suggested the terms nodaru (野田る), ...
It started with an email from a 20-year-old college student called Emi, who told me she was looking for a Showa umare no dansei (昭和生まれの男性, a man born in Showa, i.e., born before 1989). Next was Norika, a bored housewife in her early thirties ...
As it is every September, people in Japan are looking forward to keirō no hi, the coming national holiday dedicated to the older members of the population. Respect for the Aged Day provides an annual opportunity to visit one’s elderly relatives, get involved in ...
Waiting at the railroad crossing, I couldn’t help but overhear the animated conversation that the two students standing behind me were having. Despite having studied Japanese for more than 10 years, I didn’t have a clue what they were talking about. What on earth ...
Heed this safety warning: “Caution! Don’t lean on the gate. The gate would fall down when lean on it. It occurs you trouble.” Having eluded the gate, then follow this health instruction: “The Italian word pomodoro means golden fruit. Tomatoes have vitamin, carotene, potash, ...