When it comes to forms of addressing a person while you’re in Japan, you’ll probably come across the –san suffix pretty often. The word –san is added to the end of a person’s name as a sign of respect. As you know, Japanese is classified as an extremely polite people in social and cultural context, especially with people they are not acquainted to. In the everyday life of Japanese people, the word –san is used as an addressing suffix added to a person family.
This is pretty similar to the English …

Japan is faced by another problem that literally may not sound much like a threat but reality couldn’t be much bitter. One thing for sure that it is one unique problem that is not faced by many countries – it’s Japan increasingly aging population or koreika shakai. It seems like the number of centenarians in Japan has doubled in the past six years to more than forty thousands people. That doesn’t add up yet the total increase of people above the age 60 years.

Japan has one of the world’s longest …

If a single Japanese man from, let say the Tokugawa era, were to travel through time into the future, he would probably shocked with horror look on his face to see what modern Japan has to offer, especially in terms of fashion. Japan can be named as one of the main trendsetters of fashion in the world. If you’re looking for a little weirdness, freakiness with much creativity, I suggest for you to go look for Japanese youngsters in the subway and along the streets of Harajuku, Shinjuku or Shibuya.
Sometimes, …

In Japan, there is a special name for what we knew as ‘mafia’ or gangsters. They are called the yakuza. Yakuza can be considered as Japan’s organized criminals, divided into about 2,500 families or clans with possibily about more than 100,000 members altogether. Despite of their notorious demeanor and violent nature, their existence are accepted by the police and the Japanese society. The principal or top yakuza family would have to be the Yamaguchi-gumi. Others are like Sumiyoshi-kai, Inagawa-kai and Toa-kai.
Tracking their origin, the history of Yakuza may have been …

For your point of information, and in case you didn’t know, in Japan, everything is paid using their own currency that is Yen (¥). The current economic development, as at July 2009 saw that the Japanese yen extending gains against the US dollar in the currency market, which means yen is slightly much more expensive as compared to the dollar.

The average current conversion on the Japanese yen to US dollar as at September 2009 is about:-
1 US Dollar = 93.05700 Japanese Yen
click here to get the latest conversion rate. …

In Japan, the knowledge of your blood type isn’t only necessary for emergency purposes alone. It is quite surprising that even in the japanese modern and high-tech society, this kind of pseudo-science still prevails. Ketsueki-gata or blood type personality is a popular means of match-making, in the employment fields and even in common socializing in Japan, of which often being taken advantage of, especially by business tycoons and entrepeneurs alike. Even the top seller books of year was series of blood personality books, songs with blood personality hint to it, …

For all the years that I’ve studied and through all the leisure reading on the facts of Japan, one thing stays in my mind as some sort of general knowledge; is how high is the population of Japan. More to say, is how packed the main cities could be. But I should also not to forget commenting about the post-mortem of a developed or near-developed countries, is the increasing number of people who are living life in small towns and village to pursue their dreams and a much modernized lifestyle …