After having a few brushes with the the evil deers of Miyajima, I swore to keep my distance. I was just sitting there, freshly arrived, eating my Pocky and planning my little half-day trip when I felt something invading my privacy. I was caught completely off guard as I have completely forgotten about the existence of…

Maybe it's mainly environmental? Two Japanese acquaintances developed grey hairs after living in the Gulf states of the Middle East for a few years.

YouTube has been trying to enforce the real name policy on commentators for a long time now because they think it will curb some of the bad mouthing going on. I get a reminder of that at least once a month.

Influenced by Japan?

There is at least one car with a name of Japanese origin: Toyota Camry. Toyota is obsessed with crowns, it seems, but since they already had cars with the Corolla, Corona and Crown names, they had to improvise. The solution was to take the Japanese word for crown (冠 kanmuri) and transform it into English.

The silence and stress depend on the words and the location of vowels in them (not to mention the dialect).

How hard is it to give us perfectly round circles and corners? :/

Dr Pepper sure wasn't happy when Chinese Democracy arrived.

Actually, the limited sounds are the source of the issue. Due to having a limited set of sounds (as compared to many more combined sounds in English), the language has become filled with lots of homonyms and similar sounding words. Many of these words lack 'character' or something that make them memorable. The…

196 additional characters have been added to the Jouyou list in 2010 just to make our lives more interesting XD

It is indeed and the results, I assure you, are not pretty once the words are exposed to the A.I.U.E.O sound system. I always have trouble with Katakana words especially the long ones. It can be tricky to link some of these words with the original English word the first time you hear them.

Some examples with varying…

You are right. Technically, however, Katakana was also imported since it has been derived from Kanji.

Quick, someone needs to release a Sony vs. MS fighting game on the the Wii U and let the fanboys battle it out :D

Lotteria's craziness is boundless, it seems. They have just introduced the Okonomiyaki Burger a couple of days ago *rolls eyes*

Yeah, he was one of the original animators in Nausicaa but I doubt I want him to direct future installments for the fear he will make the themes much darker or more confusing. That said, he should stick with directing as I could barely get over his acting in Kaze Tachinu.

I guess we will also have a sequel for its remake (Princess Mononoke) eventually, then?

*before Nintendo's shareholders see it

There are a couple of 4K Sony TVs on display at the local Yodobashi Camera shop. It's not all that impressive watching the reel while standing 2-3 meters away. However, once I sat down on the provided benches (around a 1-1.5m away from the TVs) things started to look quite impressive. I liked the idea of the yellow…

Sadly, the infection is spreading to other parts of the world....

I think everyone should factor in the cost of games (new and used) in the equation in addition to the initial cost of hardware and see what provides the best ROI (and peace of mind).