STATUS UPDATES

We're moving closer to our rainy season. Today we had a midday downpour so sudden that it came as a shock to the system. Now, as the day draws to a close, the sun has decided to come out and sh...

As I look at shots of the immense wreckage that Superstorm Sandy left behind on the Eastern Seaboard, I wonder how anyone knows where to start putting things right. I haven't the slightest idea...

Some time ago, I encountered a word so specific that it could only be Japanese:

野分 or 野分き (のわき: late autumn windstorm in the countryside, typically caused by a typhoon...

Last week I started following "moon trails." That is, a correspondent (whom I call the Man from Osaka) sent me a long, complicated email about the moon, and just about everything he said...

The moon returns night after night, and we never tire of the repetition. I'm hoping you'll feel the same way about three consecutive JOK Notebook entries about the moon!

When two ful...

A Japanophile acquaintance, David, stopped by my office last week, hoping to see the "nerve center" of Joy o' Kanji, as he put it! He brought me three kanji books, as well as Japanese...

When is a character not a character? Here's one example by the extremely talented artist Mariusz Szmerdt:

You know how it is. With too many great things in life, you keep saying, "Someday I'd love to do that" or "Eventually, I want to go there." And yet somehow you never take th...

Let's start with a quiz. What do you think the following could mean?

朝顔     morning + face

If my pre-shower and...

You know how some weeks have certain themes, where a particular type of thing keeps happening for no apparent reason? You sometimes hear, "Oh, Mercury is in retrograde," and although that...

While we fuss and fret over thousands of kanji, we take a few simple ones for granted, particularly 一 (one). It's perfectly pictographic, so much so that there's nothing to grab ahold of th...

Last weekend, when my language partner and I chatted about world affairs, I discovered this fun term in the dictionary:

井蛙の見 (せいあのけん: narrow perspective)    ...