In Japan, each Shinkansen (bullet train) station has stores selling gift items with a theme that combines the Shinkansen and some local speciality. One of the official specialities in Gifu Prefecture is cormorant fishing, leading to the inevitable consequences:
What I love here is the absolute blind adherence to the pattern: this is a Shinkansen […]
When I was studying Japanese, a good part of that work was pretty arbitrary: kanji are practically random, vocabulary is essentially arbitrary (although neither of those are quite true, it takes quite a bit of investment before they begin to bear fruit). Rote memorization wasn’t only the cornerstone of my efforts; it was the […]
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