Despite the ambitious-sounding name, this is not really an attempt to find one or more explanations for everything in Japan. It’s more my personal collection- a collection of the questions about Japan that have popped into my head or I’ve heard or read in the last 5 years, with every explanation I have been able to find from the same three sources. I haven’t always written where the ideas come from, but they are more or less half mine and half from others. If you have any alternative explanations, the more the merrier!
Or an older attempt to explain the same thing:
This blog is mainly a collection of the questions I have had since I arrived in Japan four and a half years ago that I have found plausible, interesting and/ or amusing explanations to from reading, speaking to people or my own pondering- along with a few questions that other people have asked me.
The philosophy of JapanExplained is that any explanation is better than none (as it stops the “Are these people crazy?” response to cultural difference) and what’s more the more theories the better- as you could argue forever about which of two or more explanations is correct and that answers to arguments between two explanations (nature or nurture, grammar teaching or free conversation, discipline or freedom) generally turn out to be answered by “both”.
If you have your own questions or pet theories, please leave a comment after any entry.
Please also have a look at my other Japan themed blog QuoteJapan and my English-teaching-in-Japan-themed blog TEFLtastic
Maggie Hohle said,
February 5, 2008 at 7:49 pm
Hi there. Can I send you a press release about a book my publisher (mark batty publisher; I manage PR for them) is putting out? It’s called Face Food: The Visual Creativity of Japanese Bento Boxes. (the author means bento, not the boxes). Anyway, if you review books or would like to see a copy of this one, I could send you the Press Release. Just wondering how that’s done.
Look forward to hearing from you.
Maggie Kinser Hohle