Walking Tour

Posted by in Culture on 07. Jan, 2007 | 1 Comment

A flash movie called “Walking Tour” promotes “the will to live” or, “life is beautiful”, in the face of the numerous suicide incidents in Japan over the last year. Warning, it’s gigantic. The text is all in Japanese, but the language is simple, so if you know a bit of Japanese give it a try! [...]

Popular Japanese from 2006 – Ina Bauer

Posted by in Humor, Language on 05. Jan, 2007 | 3 Comments

One of the new Japanese slang that became popular in 2006 was the phrase 「イナバウア〜」. The phrase “Ina Bauer” refers to the back-bending figure skating move invented by the German skater of the same name. This phrase 「イナバウア〜」became popular in Japan due to Shizuka Arakawa, the Japanese figure skater who took a gold medal in [...]

Greggman Leaves Japan

Posted by in About on 05. Jan, 2007 | 1 Comment

Greggman is going to leave Japan this year. He is a good guy and has been a successful game programmer over here for quite some time. For anyone interested in making games in Japan, his blog is the blog to read. Sad that he’s going, but everyone has to move on sometime! – Harvey

Year of the Boar

Posted by in Culture, Osaka on 02. Jan, 2007 | 5 Comments

It’s the year of the boar! These were on display at ohatsutenjin お初天神 in Osaka. Happy New Year everyone! I’ll be sure JapanNewbie isn’t a bore in 2007! (haha, get it? boar? bore? FUNNY.) – Harvey

Animal Crackers

Posted by in Humor on 01. Jan, 2007 | 5 Comments

Let’s learn English with animal crackers! Look a rooster! It’s on my dic…tionary! Seriously though, you can learn a lot of animal words from Japanese snack boxes. I didn’t know that 「おっとせい」was “furseal” in Japanese. The things you don’t learn on 1-kyuu (JLPT). BTW Next year is the year of the boar! – Harvey

  • Photos on flickr