Category Archives: fun links

Fun Link Friday: Samurai Tradition in Modern Photography

Posted on June 30, 2017 by Paula

All over Japan, cities, towns, and villages seek to capture their traditions in a variety of ways. Whether it is promoting the local food, celebrating a local festival, or just remembering the deep traditions and past that are a part … Continue reading →

Posted in culture, fun links | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Fun Link Friday: From Mud to Kimono

Posted on June 23, 2017 by Paula

How do some of the most beautiful and valuable kimono get made? The BBC Arts series Handmade in Japan recently traced this process from start to finish at the island of Amami Oshima, which is famous for producing a specific and … Continue reading →

Posted in culture, fun links | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Fun Link Friday: Pigeon Heels

Posted on June 9, 2017 by LM

If you haven’t seen the Pigeon Heels posts going around in English-language media semi-uncredited, you’re in for a treat. Here are the original Japanese posts by Keiko Otsuhata (as known as Keiko Ohata), who created a pair of shoes that looked like … Continue reading →

Posted in culture, fun links | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Fun Link Friday: Australian Pirates in Early Modern Japan?

Posted on June 2, 2017 by Paula

A quickie fun link this week, as I’m off at the Japanese Text-Mining workshop in Georgia! The Guardian just posted an article this past weekend announcing that fresh translations of a samurai account from the nineteenth century have provided more … Continue reading →

Posted in announcements, culture, fun links | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Fun Link Friday: The Secrets of Soy Sauce

Posted on May 19, 2017 by Paula

Though it can be found in various forms across Asia, soy sauce is easily one of the most iconic elements of Japanese cooking. With a long and diverse history, some families have maintained secret recipes for hundreds of years and regional variations bring … Continue reading →

Posted in culture, fun links | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Fun Link Friday: Learning Kanji through Poop

Posted on May 12, 2017 by Paula

With the growing ubiquity of technology, Japanese and Chinese societies fret over “character amnesia“– the loss of knowledge of kanji in the younger generation, the generation who don’t have nearly the same need to memorize written characters as those for whom … Continue reading →

Posted in culture, fun links | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Fun Link Friday: Far Outliers

Posted on April 28, 2017 by Travis

The blog Far Outliers describes itself as “Exploring migrants, exiles, expatriates, and out-of-the-way peoples, places, and times, mostly in the Asia-Pacific region.” Posts on the blog range widely, covering lots of really interesting and, indeed, “far outlying” topics, from a … Continue reading →

Posted in blogs, culture, fun links | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Fun Link Friday: 100 Years of Japanese Animation

Posted on April 14, 2017 by Paula

This has been making it around the internet in the last couple weeks, so perhaps everyone has already come across it, but the Smithsonian and a number of other outlets have reported on the fantastic Japanese Animated Film Classics (日本アニメーション映画クラシック) site. This project, … Continue reading →

Posted in culture, fun links, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Fun Link Friday: Japan’s Railway Pointing System

Posted on April 7, 2017 by Paula

If you’ve ever been in Japan and aren’t a train buff, you might wonder what’s up with the neatly dressed railway workers with white gloves, standing at various points of the platform and calling out to one another, pointing to … Continue reading →

Posted in culture, fun links | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Fun Link Friday: Kyoto University Graduation Cosplay

Posted on March 31, 2017 by Travis

It’s graduation season here in Japan, and here at the University of Tokyo, I’ve been seeing people day after day walking around in graduation robes, beautiful kimono, or slick suits, taking selfies or family photos in front of the iconic … Continue reading →

Posted in culture, fun links | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment