The Namamugi Incident was a samurai assault on foreign nationals in Japan on September 14, 1862, which resulted in the bombardment of Kagoshima in 1863, during the Late Tokugawa shogunate. It started out with a samurai attack on British nationals, ended up with the British engaging war on a province of Japan and has an interesting side piece on how the Japanese national flag was adopted.
From the makers of I Have A Bad Case Of Diarrhea comes an English lesson on how to beg for your life to be spared when confronted by two bandana-wearing gaijin bandits.
This is an episode from Zuiikin’ English (英会話体操), a Japanese television series originally aired in 1992 by Fuji Television. The series combines English language lessons with gymnastic exercise programs.
Novelist, technologist, photographer and resident of Japan, Michael Werneburg, discusses the frustrations of living with a foreign name in Japan. This guest post is an expansion of an article on his own website that details his struggles with living with a foreign name in an English-speaking country.
Katakana Blues
My surname is “Werneburg”, and the name just doesn’t work in Japanese. It originates in the forested heart of Germany where its pronunciation is obvious even if it is by no means an everyday name. But Germany’s rolling hills and rolling r’s are a long way from Japan, and it’s here that the import—like an invader species—causes some chaos.
The first problem for foreigners like me is that the Japanese language has a range of sounds that is more limited than in our European languages. Whereas English has some twenty vowels and twenty-four consonants, Japanese has only five vowel sounds and nineteen consonant sounds. Further restricting the pronunciation in Japanese is the use of a syllabary rather than an alphabet. These syllables combine a consonant and a vowel together, so that when you want to use a consonant you have to follow it with a vowel sound that fits one of the available syllables. The ‘n’ sound sometimes stands alone, but the rest must always incorporate a vowel.
Novelist, technologist, photographer and resident of Japan, 
scott j
C Ohara
Chris
Japan Australia
Jay Dee
emuu
lina
freedomwv
Fidel
Haikugirl
