Untranslated Japan

In Japan, a fifty-year-old wooden house may be valued at zero. This article explores how postwar housing policy, changing lifestyles, and the rise of akiya shaped this system, and why a growing number of people are now choosing to renovate kominka.

Many first-time visitors worry about being naked in a Japanese onsen. This article explores why most Japanese people don’t feel the same embarrassment, and how the onsen came to work so differently.

Why does Japan feel so easy to be in? The answer may have less to do with safety than you think. A cultural essay on predictability, uncertainty, and everyday life.

AI is dismantling Japan’s language barrier faster than anyone predicted. But what happens to a culture when the wall that shaped it begins to disappear?

Snow arrives in Aomori in November and does not leave until April. Everything that came from this place carries the mark of that fact.

In a world racing toward automation, Japan kept something back — craft, ritual, and the quiet discipline of doing things by hand. This is what that choice looks like now.

A cultural guide to the real world of geiko and maiko — tracing how a Western fantasy replaced a living profession of music, dance, discipline, and tradition.

A cultural guide to Gunkanjima — beyond the ruins, through the memories of former residents who knew the island as home.