Victory Manual

As a foreigner in Japan who currently teaches English, it’s impossible to avoid having an opinion on a policy of mandatory second-language education. Deas from rockinginhakata.com commented on bilingualism (particularly of English and Spanish in the States), but I want to take one step back, towards second-language education in a general scope.
In terms of [...]

The audacity of hope a foreigner trying to apply for a credit card in Japan, whose hope is ultimately shattered by a rejection letter!
I want to buy a house in Japan; maybe not tomorrow, but someday. In order to buy a house I need credit. It can’t be any credit, though. No [...]

Here’s a rather ironic example sentence that I came across in the Dictionary of Intermediate Japanese Grammar:
私は日本語が話せるどころか、一度も勉強したことがありません。
Translation:
I am far from being able to speak Japanese; I haven’t studied it at all.
That’s a pretty complicated sentence for an absolute beginner with no experience studying the language to be saying in Japanese. It reminded me of [...]

Curiosity lead me to hunt down some numbers for my personal interest in mining statistics.
Considering a liberal estimate of 14 million Jews world-wide, and a world population of 6,707,035,007 as of July 1st, 2008, that means the world is only .2% Jewish. Out of the 574 Nobel Prize Laureates, 160 are Jews, meaning that [...]

Let me tell you a little bit about what made Kublai Kahn such an impressive leader, even by our modern standards.
Kublai Kahn united China, in spite of being a foreigner, and despite that his own country was in civil unrest at the time. Furthermore, he was tolerant of the Chinese culture and did not [...]

Who’s making news in Japan?
Rockinginhakata.com’s Deas hit a little bit on the issue of balanced coverage in Japanese media of the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election a couple of weeks ago, and it sparked my curiosity.
I ran each name of the three major candidates through Japanese news sites to see how many hits they came out [...]

My wife brought up an interesting point while we were talking about nationalism in Asia. I like hearing her take on things as she’s a Korean living in Japan studying alongside Chinese. She feels that, based on China’s long history of power in Asia, many Chinese today still consider Korea and Japan as [...]

Personal experience, especially when it’s limited, can lead a person to a counterfactual conclusion. This is true in all areas of life, and particularly true for people living in a foreign culture.
In my own social involvement within the foreign community of bloggers (and commenters) who live in Japan, I’ve read countless overgeneralizations, downright stereotypes, [...]

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 [...]