Japanese Culture and Traditions– category –

Have you ever seen "jewelry ice?" It is completely different from drift ice, made of not sea water but fresh water, and so, it's highly transparent like a diamond. River water turns into ice on the surface at river mouth, and the ice pieces, before getting washed ashore, drift in the sea for a while, get rounded off, and are more brightly polished. According to Wikipedia, this natural phenomenon occurs only along the coast of a small town in Hokkaido even in all the wide world.

Do you know Theodore Levitt? He is a legendary marketer, well-known for his saying "Sell the hole, not the drill." He argued "People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill; they want a quarter-inch hole." His point is that we marketers should focus not on products or services themselves but rather on the purposes people want to achieve by using the products or services.

Many Japanese people have misunderstood or even don't know the spirit of Christmas. Due to the misunderstanding or ignorance, I think we celebrate Christmas in a unique and funny way, like rushing to Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants on Christmas Eve.

Why Are People Attracted to Handmade Products? Do we want to sacrifice others for better quality? In fact, it's not only for quality. We need something else, like meaning or stories behind things.

The king of mashrooms in Japan is definitely pine mushrooms, Matsutake in Japanese. They are very expensive, like about 300 USD for one piece, but funnily enough, it's not popular at all outside Japan. Let's see the long history of eating mushrooms in Japan.

In Japan, baseball is still the most popular sport, and the national high school baseball championship (Koshien) is a popular seasonal sport event. It has a long history of about 100 years. The shaved head of high school players is one of the traditions, funnily enough.

Almost all the Japanese people can't help feeling "I have to go home" whenever hearing the Scottish folk song "Auld Lang Syne." The song is very popular and recognized in Japan as a song to inform closing time of shops, restaurants, etc. The Japanese title of the song is "The Light of Fireflies." People in Hokkaido have been working hard to recover the environment to see fireflies again.

Japan and India seem to have their own unique box lunch cultures: Japanese bento and Indian dabba. Among other things, the tidy content arrangement of Japanese bento is one of a kind, while the lunch delivery system (dabbawala) in Mumbai is unequaled in the world.

Instant noodles were invented in Japan in 1968. The inventor's name was Momofuku Ando, the founder of Nissin, the top instant noodle brand in Japan. Let's see the background story of how he invented instant noodles and his company has been improved them.

Gacha, Japanese capsule toy vending machines come back in style! The biggest Japanese advertising agency brought about a revolution in the Gacha industry. They've started to install Gacha in some international airports in Japan. Their target customers are foreign tourists who have too much time and too many Japanese coins on their hands.