Unique Japan

After enduring a slew of hot summer nights with sleep so hard to come by, it was refreshing to wake up to a cool autumn breeze this morning. The end of summer is approaching. Kids at the park are enjoying their last week of summer vacation and soaking up the late summer sun.

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What sort of traits come to your mind when you think of Japanese people? Polite, reserved, detail-oriented, serious, perfectionist, nerd? How about hard working? Well, let me rephrase it: workaholics? Yes, Japanese people are known as workaholics. Subways at seven in the evening are filled, not with people going home, but with those heading back to their offices. Workers become restless around midnight when trains stop running for the night. Fortunately, some large corporations offer cab coupons for employees who miss the last train. So what do these workaholics do when they’re not working for 16 days?

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Typically on Children’s day (Kodomo No Hi) we display carp fish banners called koinobori and we sing a song for this fish family. Here is the song and its translation:

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Every year, my husband and I spend quite a bit of time trying to decide what to give our mothers for Mother’s Day. Unfortunately, we usually use our best gift ideas on their birthdays, and our mothers both have particular tastes that we don’t always understand. We don’t live close enough to know what they might immediately desire as a gift, and they have everything they need; literally, everything. The only thing left for us to do is to look for some gift ideas online. So presented here are the top three Mother’s day gift ideas in Japan.

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