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 →Every Few Months, a Photo of a Sleeping Japanese Man Breaks the Internet
A salaryman unconscious on a station floor, briefcase placed neatly beside him, wallet visible. The comments split into…
Read →A Train Company Apologised for Leaving 20 Seconds Early. It Was Not a Joke.
Not twenty minutes. Twenty seconds. And the statement was completely sincere, which is the part that broke everybody.
Read →The Stray Cat Who Was Promoted to Station Master and Saved an Entire Railway
She got a hat. She got an office. She got roughly 1.1 billion yen of economic impact and, eventually, a shrine.
Read →400 Kit Kat Flavours Is Not Japan Being Random. It Is Japan Being Ruthless.
Wasabi. Sake. Baked potato. Cough drop. Every one is a real product, and every one is a business decision made by an adult.
Read →The Taxi Door Opens Itself. Touch It and Watch a Calm Man Panic.
It swings open before your hand reaches it, and shuts itself once you're in. A fresh twelve-second video of a tourist…
Read →Nobody in Japan Will Tell You to Take Your Feet Off the Chair. Then Somebody Kicks It.
A photo from a café in Tokyo Station went round Japanese X this week: shoes up on the furniture, a polite request in English, a…
Read →"This Tap Water Is Able to Drink." Everyone Laughing at It Missed by One Adjective.
One laminated card by a guesthouse sink, six million views inside a day, and a comment section confidently blaming Japanese…
Read →You Filmed Yourself Panicking at a Japanese Toilet. You Are the Reason the Buttons Look Like That Now.
There is a whole genre of video of a tourist facing a wall of unlabelled buttons in a Japanese bathroom, guessing wrong, and…
Read →A Bear Walked Into a Supermarket and Stepped on the Avocados. The Real Story Is Who Wasn't There to Stop It.
A black bear crossed a car park, let itself in through the automatic doors, and quietly wrecked the fruit section of a…
Read →Japan Built a Giant Black Wall to Hide Mount Fuji. It Was Never Really About the View.
A convenience store went viral for standing directly under a volcano. A small lakeside town's answer was a 20-metre curtain —…
Read →A Comic Book Set a Date for Japan's Next Megaquake. Airlines Believed It More Than Japan Did.
A secondhand copy of a 1999 dream diary was reselling for ten times its cover price in Hong Kong. Airlines quietly thinned out…
Read →Tourists Now Fly to Japan to Collect Photos of Drain Covers. A Bureaucrat Planned That in 1985.
Twenty-three million trading cards have been handed out since 2016, and not one of them can be bought. Every single one is a…
Read →A Teenager Licked a Soy Sauce Bottle. By the Next Afternoon It Had Cost a Sushi Chain $120 Million.
Eleven seconds of phone footage from a restaurant in Gifu Prefecture wiped ¥16 billion off a company's market value in two days…
Read →A Bullet Train Gets Fully Cleaned in Seven Minutes. Tourists Now Fly In Just to Film It.
Twenty-two people, one train the length of a football pitch, and a stopwatch that does not care how tired anyone is. Then…
Read →Every October, Shibuya's Mayor Asks the World Not to Come. The Numbers Say It Is Working.
One flipped delivery truck put Tokyo's coolest crossing on the international news in 2018. Every year since, the ward's actual…
Read →A Convenience Store Video Showed a Man Being Forced to Kneel in 2014. The Law Against It Finally Takes Effect Next Week.
The footage that gave Japan the word カスハラ was not leaked by the victim — the men who made a store manager grovel over…
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