Editorial & Columns
Cultural Viewpoints
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Cultural Conundrums / Well, That’s Rather Different! Mapping Maa’s Communicative Maneuvers
I’m surrounded by maa-ers of various ilk. My husband, a research chemist, favors the “Maa, ...” pref...
July 6, 2023
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Cultural Conundrums / Slouching Toward Self-aggrandizement: Understated Japanese Boasting
Self-aggrandizement is rare in Japan, perhaps because family members won’t let you get away with eve...
June 1, 2023
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Older, Female and Hikikomori: Japan’s Newly Precarious Population
“You know why I do all this?” Kawagoe-san looked around her living room. Seat cushions and colorful...
May 18, 2023
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What we talk about when we talk about sushi: Cultural shorthand of iconic food
Last month, I took a short trip to the U.S. and went to a sushi restaurant with some family members....
May 4, 2023
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Beyond the Paper Screen / ChatGPT, or Not ChatGPT: an Anthropologist’s Soliloquy
Anthropology emerged in the 19th century as an academic discipline for the study of diverse beliefs,...
April 20, 2023
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Beyond the Paper Screen / Buying Tomato Plants Might be Just the Thing to End a Long, Dreary Winter
A trip to Costco is an event in itself. In my very first visit to one of their gigantic wholesale st...
March 16, 2023
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The Pinnacle of Ordinary: ‘Futsuu’ as a Favored, Flexible Framework
Ordinarily, I would never have expected to write about the word “futsuu” (ordinary) three times in t...
March 2, 2023
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New Images of a Hero: Any Anguished Teenager and a Middle-aged Bureaucrat
By Sawa Kurotani / Special to The Japan News [posttime] JST, [postdate] A persistent cold that ...
February 16, 2023
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When ‘You’ is Askew: Analyzing the Ambiguities of ‘Anata’
A website that provides advice to Japanese learners describes “anata” as “the most dangerous word in...
February 2, 2023
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Neighbors at a Distance Have Their Own Advantage
I live in California, in a subdivision of tract homes that was developed in the late 1980s. Back the...
January 19, 2023
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Alice in Japan: A wonderland of cultural adaptation
When I was in elementary school, my class staged “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.” I remember very...
January 11, 2023
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Decision-making grows more complicated in a violent, unreasonable world
Imagine, for a moment, being a faculty member at a small residential college away from the big city....
December 15, 2022
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Kids and gifts: Cultural differences in displaying and articulating emotions
A recent article in The New York Times was titled, “Please Don’t Make Me Open That Gift in Public.” ...
December 1, 2022
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The 20 years it took me to find American writer Zora Neale Hurston
I met Zora for the first time, I think, in the second year of my PhD program. I didn’t really “meet”...
November 18, 2022
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Autobiographical memories, ‘linguacultures’ and words in specific languages
Some years ago, I was at a party with a Japanese woman, whom I’ll call “Yoko.” As an adult, Yoko had...
November 10, 2022
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