History
Everything started in 1889 when Fusajiro Yamauchi began producing Japanese playing cards called Hanafuda; apart from Hanafuda cards he also imported some western games, mixed ideas and set up two stores, one in Kyoto and one in Osaka. Playing cards were a novelty for Japanese people and were very succesful at the time. Fusajiro Yamauchi [...]
Melonpan pan is one of my favorite Japanese sweets. Melopan are sweet bread with the shape of half melon, the texture inside is like bread and on the surface it is crispy. Originally melopan did not have melon flavor, the name came just from the shape and the wrinkled surface that reminds that of a [...]
Manchukuo, was a puppet state controlled by Japan since 1932 until the end of the war. It was used by the last emperor of China as a refugee, this is explained very well in the movie The Last Emperor. It was also used by Japan to try to invade the rest of China. Last weekend [...]
I got this Akechi Mitsuhide figure. It’s a replica made from the original Akehi Mitsuhide’s armor which you can see at Tokyo’s National Museum. Akechi Mitsuhide was a samurai who became a legend because he killed Oda Nobunaga, one of the most important daimyo (Feudal lord) from the sixteenth century. Akechi Mitsuhide was one of [...]
I was thinking that “in the red” (English), “赤字 – red characters” (Chinese and Japanese) and “números rojos – red numbers” (Spanish); are all similar expressions which have “red” in common and they are all referred to the same concept: budget deficit. It’s interesting ¿Why most of the cultures associate the red color with negative [...]
I found this tag in a shop. Since 1945 until 1952 all products that where exported from Japan to the United States of America had to have a tag with the sentence “Made in occupied Japan” written. Noways when you find something with this tag it’s like a “warranty” that the stuff you are buying [...]
“Hibakusha” (被爆者: being exposed, bomb, person) is a Japanese word that means “nuclear bomb victim”. In this category of “hibakusha” there is the people who where within two kilometers from the hypocenter at Hiroshima or Nagasaki, those who where within five kilometers from the hypocenters sometime during the next two weeks from the explosion, and [...]
There are many places where in the old times shells were used as currency. India and China used them during thousands of years and their shell-coins gradually entered the Japanese islands. It is interesting that even nowadays there is a Japanese and Chinese character that means “shell” but if you add strokes to it the [...]
