16. Anything can come in a can.
Along with your general canned foodstuffs like tuna, corned beef and sardines, you can also buy some other funky things:
Bread and muffins
(Bread in cans has been traditionally marketed as ‘emergency supplies’ to keep in your ‘in case of earthquake’ kit.)
Whale
(It’s a pricey product costing around $50 for this 120g can.)
Insects
(Includes such protein-packed favourites as bee larvae, locusts and silkworm larvae.)
Ramen noodles
(Comes in soy sauce and miso soup flavours and there is a cold version for summer too.)
Curry and rice
Oden (vegetables, egg, deep-fried fish paste sticks etc. simmered in soup)
I’m guessing the love of putting things in cans comes from the popularity of vending machines and considering there are over 5.2 million vending machines in Japan, that’s a lot of canned-goods love.
(Not everything coming out of a vending machine is a can though – sometimes it’s sushi.)
17. The language is easy, but excruciatingly difficult at the same time.
Compared to English, Japanese is a very structured language and the pronunciation is much easier. Japanese only has five vowel sounds compared to the 11-20 that English has (depending on your accent) . If you see the letter ‘a’ in Japanese, you know it’s pronounced as ‘ah’ as in ‘cup’ not the variety of sounds it can have in English like ‘apple’, ‘about’ and ‘cup’.
There are also lots of handy phrases and words in Japanese that convey a whole range of ideas in a compact package:
doumo – means hi, nice to see you again, good to talk to you again, thanks.
natsukashii - describes a feeling of missing something, something that gives you fond memories and sometimes makes you homesick
yoroshiku onegai shimasu – means it’s a pleasure to meet you and I hope you will be nice to me in our future business dealings and I look forward to building a relationship with you
Having said that, Japanese also has one of the most complex writing systems on the planet which requires you to master three separate writing systems and the honourific/humble levels of language mean that you must know whether the person you are speaking to is higher or lower than you in the ‘food chain’ so you don’t embarrass yourself so badly you need a sword to fall on.
Japanese is also a very contextual language and often there is no subject in a sentence, so if you say, ‘atsui ne’ theoretically it can mean ‘It’s hot today’, ‘This room is hot’ or ‘I’m hot’. It’s up to the listener to decide what the speaker is referring to. There are also a huge range of regional dialects within Japan and in some areas, the dialect spoken is almost totally incomprehensible to someone speaking the standard Tokyo dialect.
Learning Japanese takes some serious blood, sweat and tears, but once you get a grip on it, it’s so much fun.
18. Fashion fads are scary.
Here are a few of the fashion fads over the past few years:
Yamanba/Ganguro – Wild mountain hags/Solarium-sizzled faces
(Characterised by really dark skin, white lips and eye-liner and funky hair.)
Gothic Lolita
(Characterised by lots of frills and a black and white colour scheme.)
Kogyaru – High-school girls

(Half the time you don’t know if they actually are school students or if they’re just wearing the uniform for fun…)
Shibuya Gyaru – Shibuya girls
(Characterized by big hair, loud voices and five-inch acrylic nails.)
19. It’s okay to seriously decorate things.
Mobile phones
Trucks
(Even more impressive when you see this coming towards you in your rear-vision mirror at night on a dark, lonely highway.)
Newly opening shops/restaurants
Fingernails
Funerals
(Is it just me, or do these decorations seem to say, ‘You’re dead, let’s disco!!)




































































