A French artist, Florent Chavouet travelled to Manabeshima, known as a cat island in Japan and spent 2 months deeply involved with the locals with very little Japanese. He depicted all his experience and it´s amazing.

Have you recently started learning painting or any art and feel struggled by your slow progress? Don´t worry, you are on the right track. Listen what a Japanese wise man, Kenko Yoshida says in Tsurezuregusa.

The last weekend of June, Japan was a little noisy. Many people gathered to protest agains the government´s recent push to Japan involve in more war. At the same time, a book “Sensou no Tsukurikara (how to make a war)” came out. What´s happening to Japan?

How many kanji do you need to read Japanese newspaper? And how can you memorize so many kanji? See how Japanese people see kanji.

Taro Gomi (五味太郎) is a Tokyo born novelist for children, a poet and a composer of kids songs. He studied industrial design and used to work as a designer.

Shin-ichi Hoshi is a Japanese SF novelist and a king of short stories, who was once the president of Hoshi pharmaceutical company which his father left him.

The 7th of July is Tanabata (七夕/ the star festival) in Japan. We make decoration with colourful paper, loops, some patterns then the most important thing about Tanabata is you write your wishes to hang them from the bamboo leaves.

In Japanese, we use so many onomatopoeia. It almost works as adverb in our language and in my opinion, onomatopoeia is the key to make your Japanese more lively. Today I introduce some onomatopoeia using one of the greatest Japanese poets, Mado Michio.

This is a Shuntarou Tanizaki (谷崎俊太郎)´s poem which used to be a poem most of the Japanese school children would learn at school. He is one of the most well-known poet in Japan. One coffee company used his poem, Morning relay race for their ad while ago and became one of my favorites. It was a well made.

Basho was introduced to Haiku from Yoshitada. After the death of Yoshitada, he was even more into Haiku and at the age of 28, this future master of haiku dedicated his first haiku collection to Iga Tenmangu (伊賀天満宮) which is known as a Dios de literature and wisdom.