Anyone who knows anything about Japan has heard of seppuku or seen it in a samurai film. Seppuku was a ritualized form of suicide and a judicial sentence handed down to men and women of the samurai class. The ritual began on the battlefield with the first recorded case performed by Minamoto Tametomo after his…
Category: Culture
The Declining Population of Japan
By 2060, Japan will have a population of 86.7 million, from today’s population of 125 million (Yamaguchi, 2022). The population will also grow older. This trend has been going on since the 1970s, when experts first began to write about the decline (Date, 2007). Why is this a problem? After all, fewer people means more…
Japanese Winter Poems
I love winter. The cold may be uncomfortable, but it is the night of the year. It calls us to stop and rest and reflect. Although, as the climate shifts, I’ve seen less of winter than I had in the past. Winter used to begin as early as late October in my hometown. Now winter…
Understanding the Fairy Tale “The Lady Who Loved Insects”
The Lady Who Loved Insects is a charming short story set in the Heian period. The story follows a young noble woman who has intellectual interests, such as studying insects, in a society where women were supposed to be wives and sometimes poets. The Lady Who Loved Insects can be found in The Riverside Middle…
Facelift and Code Tweaks
After some work, I’ve finished a much-needed layout change and tweaked a lot of background code. Hopefully, it will make JP load faster for mobile readers. Google recently started downranking websites that violate their CoreVitals framework. JP failed the framework test. The tweaks have JP around 90-95% compliant now, up from around 70%. It will…
JAXA, The Japanese NASA
JAXA, or The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, formed in 2003 with the mergers of the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science, the National Aerospace Laboratory, and the National Space Development Agency of Japan. The new agency began with the launch of several observational satellites and the ambitious Hayabusa mission. Hayabusa’s goal was to study Itokawa,…