Brother Annie

So it occured to me recently just how little I actually talk about my school, which was sort of the point of this blog originally. Shows how much I care about the place. Just kidding. Maybe.
As many of you know, I’m no longer living with a host family, and instead I’ve moved into the Seminar [...]

Last week was not a good week for me, and I could feel the laziness bleeding over to this week. On Monday I was very reluctant to go to my Issues in Contemporary Japanese Society class, but I went, begrudgingly. And it’s a good thing I did.
We watched a Japanese documentary called the The Great [...]

Sakura season is coming to an end here in the Kansai region, which makes me a little sad, but I captured the blossoms on film, so I’ll tell you guys more about this in the video I’ll be making soon about spring flowers in Japan.

What I’d like to discuss today is a very common form [...]

I finally got the text widget to work, so UW is finally up and running. You can check it out by looking several pixels to your right.
Also, below said widget, is another widget which I stole from Google, made by my favorite Japanese-English dictionary: Jisho.org
For those of you studying Japanese, you should really check it [...]

I may have accidentally posted that last one instead of hitting “Save Draft”. Let’s try this again.
I’d like to tell you guys briefly about a feature on my blog which I’ve just added called

It’s exactly what it sounds like. My loathing of Kansai Gaidai’s homemade textbooks has finally driven me mad, for a variety of [...]

I’d like to tell you guys briefly about a feature on my blog which I’ve just added called

It’s exactly what it sounds like. My loathing of Kansai Gaidai’s homemade textbooks has finally driven me mad, for a variety of reasons, one of which being the number of useless words in our vocabulary lists. The other reasons [...]

If you haven’t tried the dessert I’m about to tell you about, you have to promise to do so. Meet mochi:

I don’t really know if the Japanese can claim to have any another traditional dessert. If you know of anything other than anko (red bean paste) and/or mochi, please let me know. This stuff was invented way [...]

Friday the 26th was one of the most interesting nights I’ve had in Japan. Me, Jace and two other friends of ours headed out to a place called Jin’s Place (or something). I’d seen the place before, since it was right by the gates to Kansai Gaidai, but I’d never gone in. The place looks [...]

Even though Nara was on our list of places to go, the boys ended up heading off to Hiroshima after we arrived back in the Kansai area, and I stayed in good ole Hirakata. But before I get ahead of myself, I have to tell you about Nagano and the snow monkeys.
When we arrived in [...]

Because there is no bridge or land mass which connects Honshu, Japan’s main island, to Hokkaido, we took a four hour long ferry ride to our frigid destination. From Aomori we rode to Hakodate, at the southern most tip of Hokkaido. The ferry ride was really fun, and we had a lot of room to [...]