🤯 Japan, Explained
All 19 →The things that confuse every visitor, taken seriously enough to be genuinely funny. One story per page.
Slurping Is Not Rude. Your Silence Is the Insult.
Twenty adults inhaling noodles at industrial volume, and not one of them is embarrassed. You are the only person in the room…
Read →A Country With No Trash Cans and No Trash. Pick a Lane, Japan.
Day one you are impressed. Day three you are carrying a used coffee can around a major world capital like a small pet.
Read →The Loudest Country on Earth Goes Completely Silent at 8:14 a.m.
Shops shout. Trucks sing. Election vans exist. And then 200 people press into a metal tube and produce less sound than a…
Read →🗺 Ura-Japan
All 20 →Places worth the extra train ride, with maps, real access notes and the warnings guidebooks leave out.
Ikeshima: The Abandoned Coal Island You Are Actually Allowed to Walk Around
Everyone queues for Battleship Island. Nobody goes to the one where the shops are still standing and 100 people still live.
Read →Yamadera: 1,015 Steps Up a Cliff to the Most Famous Silence in Japan
A temple built into a rock face, and the spot where a 17th-century poet listened to cicadas and wrote the seventeen syllables…
Read →Shodoshima: Greece, Except the Soy Sauce Has Been Fermenting Since 1910
Olive groves, a sandbar that only exists at low tide, a valley of century-old soy sauce warehouses, and a gorge that goes…
Read →🗣 Talk Like a Local
All 20 →Real Japanese slang and Osaka dialect. One word per page, with audio, examples and how to misfire.
やばい — yabai
It means terrible. It also means incredible. It also means delicious, and "I am in serious trouble", and sometimes just "wow"…
Read →エモい — emoi
Nostalgic, beautiful and slightly painful, all at once, usually about something completely ordinary. There is no clean…
Read →微妙 — bimyou
It literally means "subtle" or "delicate". It actually means no. Learning this word is the moment you start understanding what…
Read →🔤 Japanglish
All 20 →English words that emigrated to Japan and got completely different jobs. Read what happened to your language.
マンション — manshon
Your Japanese colleague casually mentions she lives in a mansion. She has 42 square metres, one bedroom and a washing machine…
Read →ハイテンション — hai tenshon
In English, "high tension" means somebody is about to throw a chair. In Japanese it means somebody has had two coffees and is…
Read →コンセント — konsento
You will ask, in English, where the consent is. There will be a pause. That pause is the sound of an entire language shift…
Read →🔥 Viral Japan
All 19 →The stories that break the internet every few months, and the part that never makes the caption.
A Car Reversed Into a Level Crossing in Tokushima. Japan Has a Word for the People Who Were Standing There.
Two lines stopped on the busiest travel night of the year, a video with a bent guardrail in it, and a comment section that…
Read →Two Women Danced in the Floodwater at Soga Station. Japan Has a Word for That — and a Word for What Happened Next.
Eight dead, four thousand people sleeping on a station floor, the army called in before midnight. The thing the country…
Read →A Room Cost ¥120,000 the Night Chiba Went Under. Japan Has a Word for That.
Three million views before breakfast, and a country in complete agreement that the hotel should burn. The awkward part is that…
Read →Hang on — the rest of this site is in Japanese?
It is. JAPAN NOW is the English corner of 英会話学習ラボ, a site that teaches English to Japanese learners. Which means the other 600 pages are the exact mirror of this one: what Japanese people find impossible about your language, what they are taught, and where the misunderstandings actually begin. If this page was fun, that is the other half of the same joke.
Look at the Japanese side