While showing reruns is the bread and butter of those little watched cable channels, recently, the subscribers of channel #739 have recently been lucky enough to re-live some wonderful memories from the golden age of Japanese broadcasting. You can almost feel in your bones the passion that the average Japanese housewife must have had to [...]

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けがのこうみょう (kegano koumyou) * “J-WOTD” = “Japanese Word of the Day” A “lucky mistake“, or “to come out of a mistake unscathed“. (Literally “Great feat from an injury”) Once again, I heard this at work today. We had quite a serious mishap a few weeks ago, but we found it and fixed it before our [...]

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The Japanese Government has a system where foreigners leaving Japan, who have been paying into the pension system, can receive back a portion of these payments. This is known as a “National Pension Payment Rebate”, or a “Lump-sum Withdrawal Payment”. After all those hard years slugging it out working in the far east, you deserve [...]

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Less than one hour ago, Softbank Mobile‘s charistmatic CEO, Masayoshi Son, just completed an unexpected (予想外) press conference at the New Ohtani. Just as stippy.com reported last week, Mobile Number Portability (MNP) is starting this week in Japan and promises to upset the comfortable duopoly of DoCoMo and Au. Stippy.com recevied a lot of email [...]

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Mao Asada was a phenomenon last winter, coming from relative obscurity to win the ISU (International Skating Union) Grand Prix Final. However, despite being the best on the adult circuit the ISU rules said she was too young (15 years old at the time) to compete at the Olympics, robbing her of the chance of [...]

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てんはにぶつをあたえず (tenha nibutsuwo ataezu) * “J-WOTD” = “Japanese Word of the Day” Rather than being a “J-Word of the Day”, this is a great ことわざ that I heard today. It is a strange one, and would normally instinctively go against the grain for most foreigners. It literally means,

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Mr. Koji Omi, the new Finance Minister of Japan in the Abe government, judging first from the fact that he’s not a graduate of the University of Tokyo, that has heretofore supplied Japan with the bureaucrats that begat the deflation of the late ’90s and early ’00s, we might have a good thing. From his [...]

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It has been more than a week since the first “Only in Japan” video, apologies for that. This week (keeping the weekly thing going notwithstanding), we would like to bring the second in the series, aptly named “Magic Hand” (マジックハンド）. Have you ever been so lucky to be involved with such a hand? We believe [...]

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Yes, I did the unthinkable – I left Japan. Took the wife and kid with me out to Oz, leaving only fond memories and my stippy mates behind (Well actually a pet rabbit too, but he never did much except jump around and shit everywhere anyways). After nine years in Japan, it certainly isn’t easy [...]

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Have you noticed that everywhere you go now, you see ads for mobile phones? Over the last month Au, Softbank Mobile and DoCoMo have slowly rolled out aggressive new advertising strategies and more new handset models at once than have ever been seen before. So why the sudden focus on improving their brand image? On [...]

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