Category: Japan
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“Natsukashi”
[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, October 2019.] This morning, with the dying of this summer and noticing the shortening of the hours of light in the evening, I remembered that exactly two decades ago, I went with my newly-married wife to live in the city of Kyoto, in Japan. It became possibly…
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Que sera, seraren’t
[Photo: Edwin Pijpe] [This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, November 2019.] There are many surprises that foreigners in Japan will come across. One of the more notable ones relates to the idea of the future that is held by many Japanese people. A Japanese University professor (whose name unfortunately escapes me) made the basic…
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The Wind-Water Sickness
[This article was first published under the title “How do you get sick in Japan?” in Catalonia Today magazine, March 2016,] How do you get sick in Japan? According to one Japanese teacher that I once talked to, a Mr Shiroi, he caught a cold because the school that we both used…
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Globalization: “Freeters, combini and Uniqlo”
[A version of this article was first published in Kansai Scene magazine and was co-written with Anil Ramsingh.] How is globalization happening? The people of Japan have a strong sense of belonging. Group identity comes before individual identity and the most basic unit of society exists in ie and mura, which literally mean ‘house and…
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“A better job:” English language newspapers in Japan
[First published in the Australian Journalism Review, 2001.] userfiles/file/EnglishLanguageNewspapersInJapan.pdf
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The other driver of the bus
Traveling back from a freezing water-logged day of touch football in Hirakata today, (as the old English phrase goes) I had ‘occasion for thought.’ Watching a strange young man on the bus reminded me that I’ve noticed a high proportion of mentally disabled people in Japan, when compared to other countries I’ve…
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Japan’s untouchables
[A version of this article was first published in Kansai Scene magazine, 2002] THE PLIGHT OF THE BURAKU PEOPLE In Japan there is a minority people who have been outcasts for more than 200 years, yet they remain little-known in the rest of the world. KS contributing writer Brett Hetherington spoke with *Kohei, of the…