This is the third installment in a series about my personal experience of being pregnant in Japan (or perhaps I should say, of my wife being pregnant). There is no topic better than pregnancy for old wives tales to prevail and it seems that the topic of food – what you can, can’t or shouldn’t eat – really takes the cake when it comes to misconceptions in not only Japan but every country in the world.

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This is the third installment in a series about my personal experience of being pregnant in Japan (or perhaps I should say, of my wife being pregnant). Although I hope that some of the observations have value for gaijin of both sexes, I’m intentionally writing this series from my own perspective – a Gaijin Father in Japan.

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This is the second installment (find the first here) in a series about my personal experience of being pregnant in Japan (or perhaps I should say, of my wife being pregnant). Although I hope that some of the observations have value for gaijin of both sexes, I’m intentionally writing this series from my own perspective [...]

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Getting pregnant in Japan – I’ve found the entire experience of to be an eye-opening one in terms of Japanese culture. Who would have thought that best practices about pregnancy could be so different from one country to another.

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Why doesn’t Japan have daylight saving time (DST), or “summer time”? Japan has never embraced daylight saving time, and the Government had introduced a farcical experiment which is likely to convince themselves to shelf the ideal for another political cycle.

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With our poem about Leaving Japan, we had quite a few comments from readers who previously lived – or currently live – in Japan, and what they love or hated about the place. In fact, some of the comments were longer than the article as many people expressed reasons for their deep attachments with Japan [...]

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The final part of Stippy.com’s “Prison in Japan” series. We have had a lot of feedback about this ten part journal of one gaijin who spent 22 nights in the lockup, for one bad night out. Probably it served him right, yes, but he shared the experience for the rest of us to think about.

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Part 9 of Stippy.com’s Prison in Japan series

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This is stippy’s eighth part in a ten part series (see also parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7) about one foreigner’s experience of being put in a Japanese prison (留置場 or “ryuchijyo”, a prison for locking up people for as long as 23 days until they are convicted, or cleared of a [...]

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Apparently 1 in 20 of Japanese weddings last year included at least one foreigner. As a recent addition to this growing group, I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about what it means to be married to a Japanese person. Pre-marital counseling is all about preventing one of those “this isn’t the (wo)man I thought I married” style shocks, half a year into your marriage. Not only does it give you a great chance to express your fears and hopes to your partner in a supporting atmosphere, it also enables you to learn a lot about some of the stranger expectations that your partner might have for you in your new life together.

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