Society
Gakuranman has translated into English a report published every year by the magazine Trendy which ranks the products and trends that conquered Japan during the year. Moreover it tries to predict what will be trendy in the coming year; however it usually fails when trying to forecast the future. This is the ranking of what [...]
Hosei University has published a list of prefectures in Japan ranked by their “happiness level”. To find out the “happiness” of each region they have taken into account the lifestyle, work environment, security and general health of the population. The number one is Fukui, a quite poor province compared to the rest of the country. [...]
It’s Golden Week time in Japan, one of the longest holiday periods here after the year’s end and obon (in August). Golden Week was introduced short after the end of Second World War as a measure to fuel consumption. Nowadays it is chosen by most of the Japanese people to travel (the holidays at the [...]
The title and contents of this post are inspired by Ken Mogi’s original article “The importance of being diverse” In today’s society, more and more globalized, sometimes we forget how important is every single one of us, as an individual, so that the harmony around us remains stable. We think that we are a small [...]
Japanese people love flowers. Japanese language is very rich in vocabulary related to flowers and they have many hobbies like ikebana (flower arrangement) dedicated to the world of flowers. There are many parks and gardens that have sections exclusively dedicated to flower cultivation. Last week I went to one of the largest ones in Tokyo, [...]
Some days ago a 26 year old Japanese guy bought 33 million yen (290,000 EUR/400,000 USD) of oil futures and 3 days later he had 322 million yen (4 million USD/2,85 million EUR) in his pocket thanks to the abrupt rise of oil prices caused by the Libyan crisis. A little bit of luck that [...]
The government of Japan has just published its latest GDP data confirming officially what everybody else already knew, China is the second largest economy in the World by GDP. The GDP of Japan contracted by 0.3% in the last semester of 2010; however 2010 was not a really bad year because as a whole the [...]
In Japan, demonstrations are not something very usual; during my first years in Japan I almost didn’t see any. However, as of lately, the Japanese economy is getting worse and worse, there are more and more Japanese people without a job; there’s also problems with the pensions, with China about the Senkaku islands, etc. and [...]
