Victory Manual

You know what I haven’t heard in the news lately? Anything about man-made global warming.
You know what I have heard a lot of in the news lately?
China freezing, having been hit with massive snow storms creating ration scarcity warnings, and rare snow-fall blanketing the Middle-East, particularly Jerusalem and Baghdad.
What else has been in the [...]

I’ve never really heard much about it in Japan, but in Korea people are obsessed with the IQ test. They’re also into EQ (Emotional Intelligence Quotient), but that’s a whole different beast to tangle with.
Whenever talking with someone who wholeheartedly believes in IQ results, I try to explain that the IQ test is largely [...]

There are some people out there who insist on studying individual kanji. Let me tell you why that’s a bad idea with the most basic example.
電 means ‘electricty’, and can be used in compounds like 電気 (electricty; light), 電器 (electronic[s]), 電波 (electro-magnetic wave, more commonly referring to mobile phone reception), etc.
卓 means ‘table’, and [...]

I was trying to think of a way to express in Japanese the phrase ‘in my element’, but I couldn’t off the top of my head so I decided to put it through eijiro to see what turned up.
Turns out there are several ways to express this, I guess each of which change depending on [...]

So we’re (wife and I) watching some Japanese dramas at the moment, and I even came across a site that has the scripts in Japanese available! Can’t ask for more than that!
The dramas we’re watching are 薔薇のない花屋 (The flower shop with no roses) and エジソンの母 (Edison’s mom).
薔薇のない花屋, as the title implies, is a heavier [...]

When does incorrect grammar become correct? It’s obviously not an announcement made on the evening news. I guess it just slowly permeates through society until it reaches the gigantic, barricaded textbook walls, and adamantly bashes at the gates until they finally barge.
I started thinking about this again lately as I’ve been lightly reading/studying [...]

Here’s what I want:
It works like a search engine, only instead of returning links with a brief description of the page contents, it extracts the entire sentence of the keyword(s) you input. Of course, the title of each page is still linked to the page so you can click it to see the sentence [...]

South Korean President-elect states he will not demand apology from Japan over historical confrontations. Former South Korean Presidents have been very vocal over demands for official apologies from Japan. Lee Myeong Bak is looking to change this, and I think he’s doing so from the stance of a businessman. He was elected [...]

The issue of “No Foreigner” policies that some landlords in Japan tack on to their rental ads is a hot topic. On the surface it looks downright racist, and in some cases it probably is, but there is another side to the issue that has only become very apparent to me recently, having had [...]

Among the non-Asian foreign community living in an East Asian country, there are heaps of remonstrations touching on discrimination. Whether it’s over the perceived notion that the media focuses its fire on foreign criminal activity, or the claim that “4 out of 5 landlords will not rent to a foreigner,” there is an abundance [...]