I hadn’t even noticed this until a commenter pointed out that the name “Pokemon” must be based on borrowed words (namely “pocket” and “monster”) because all words in Japanese with a...
https://japanexplained.wordpress.com/2015/10/24/why-do-japanese-words-not-start-with-p/
My students swear no one does this, but I’ve both seen it and read about it, and finally find an explanation. According to a story on the originator of Japanese “Napolitan spaghetti” in ...
https://japanexplained.wordpress.com/2015/01/22/why-japanese-cook-pasta-first/
This seems such a natural reaction to difficult questions and impossible requests that the Japanese rarely notice that they use it, but it’s definitely more common here than in any other countr...
https://japanexplained.wordpress.com/2015/01/01/japanese-rubbing-back-of-heads/
… because “seven face bird” is an odd name even for as strange a creature as a turkey. According to a page on the topic on a Japanese site on word origins, it is because the neck looks like...
https://japanexplained.wordpress.com/2014/12/31/turkey-in-japanese/
I’d been wondering this for a while because many guides to foreign borrowings into Japanese list “miira” as coming from Portuguese, but the Portuguese for (Egyptian etc) mummy is “mumia�...
https://japanexplained.wordpress.com/2014/12/31/miira-japanese-for-mummy/
not rice, soup, spaghetti, etc… The most common explanation is that slurping makes noodles taste better because you can eat them hotter, the oyaji (older men) who slurp their soup, coffee and r...
https://japanexplained.wordpress.com/2014/12/28/japanese-slurping-noodles/
In the most extreme example of this, the woman who is in charge of the bins for our block of flats was standing almost next to a crow ripping apart rubbish bags to get at some food without doing ...
https://japanexplained.wordpress.com/2014/12/27/japanese-crows/
Countries tend to fall into two groups – ones like Britain and America where not giving excuses is seen as not being bothered to do so or being deliberately rude (like saying “I’m busy” t...
https://japanexplained.wordpress.com/2014/12/24/why-japanese-not-give-reasons/
Without specifically mentioning Japanese women, the December 2014 edition of the freebie Tokyo Families warns parents that pigeon toed feet could be a consequence of “W sitting” (similar to k...
https://japanexplained.wordpress.com/2014/12/18/pigeon-toed-japanese/
This was one that really puzzled me in my first couple of years in Japan and then I completely forgot about as it got older. According to Japanzine, it used to be used in longer phrases like “K...
https://japanexplained.wordpress.com/2014/12/14/why-konnichi-wa/