Japanese Culture
What Happens in Japan, Month by Month
Sixteen national holidays, three weeks when the country stops, and a festival nearly every month. What each one is, when prices jump, and what closes.
Japan Know How archive
Category: Japanese Culture
Etiquette, festivals, seasons, superstitions and the small rules nobody writes down: how to hold chopsticks, when to bow, why gift wrapping is a whole grammar of its own. Context for the questions that start with a tool and end with wanting to know why.
Japanese Culture
Lucky and Unlucky Numbers in Japan
Four sounds like death and nine like suffering, so Japanese quietly says yon and kyu instead. Eight is lucky for the opposite kind of reason - the shape of the character.
Japanese Culture
Japanese Gift Giving: Occasions, Wrapping and Taboos
Omiyage, temiyage, ochugen, oseibo, and two kinds of envelope that mean opposite things. New notes for a wedding, old notes for a funeral - and why the knot decides.
Japanese Culture
Bowing in Japan: The Three Angles Explained
Eshaku, keirei and saikeirei - fifteen, thirty and forty-five degrees. A visitor spends almost the whole trip inside the first one, and here is when that stops being true.
Japanese Culture
Japanese Festivals by Season: A Year-Round Guide
Hanami in spring, Gion and Obon in summer, autumn leaves and Jidai Matsuri, then New Year. The festival year laid out, with the two weeks when everyone is travelling at once.
Japanese Culture
Japanese Etiquette for Visitors: What Actually Matters
Japanese etiquette splits into rules of form, which nobody minds you getting wrong, and rules of boundary, which everybody notices. Only one of those lists is worth learning.