Source: Asiajin.
Categories
Categories
Seven years of Kirai: A Geek in Japan
Today, 7 years ago, I started blogging; and last December it was 4 years since I started blogging in the English version of Kirai: A Geek in Japan. When I started my Spanish blog I was 23 years old and I was finishing university back in Spain; now I am almost 30 years old. During these years many things have happened and many things have changed in the world, on the Internet, in this blog and in my life.
Thanks to you all for walking with me in this journey to have a better understanding of Japanese culture and continue learning together. During these 7 years, you have visited my blog 45 million times (almost 1 million times the English version), I have written 2635 posts in Spanish and 978 posts in English, and you have made 118,000 comments in Spanish and 4,900 comments in English. I uploaded 13,000 pictures to my Flickr, I started a new photography blog (in Spanish) and I twitted 6,290 times. I also wrote two books Un Geek en Japón (available in Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese and German) and Momentos (which includes texts in both Spanish and English) based on the contents published in this blog. More than 20,000 units of the books have been sold all around the world. I say thanks 20,000 times to you all!
At the moment I am finishing up a new book in English published by Tuttle Publishing, that includes rewritten contents of my first book in Spanish as well as brand new chapters. It is already available for pre-order at Amazon!
I will keep writing in my blog for many years to come!
If you are a new reader of Kirai: A Geek in Japan, these are some of the articles I wrote that I particularly like that will give you a good grasp of the blog:
- Kancho
- 10 tips to travel to Japan
- Kappa
- Sony timer
- Sex in Japan
- Ninja restaurant
- Real money disappearing in Japan
- Japan financial crisis
- Crisis, danger, opportunity
- Hiro Nakamura’s katana
- Yakult and lactobacillus casei
- Perseverance
- Learning Japanese
- Kawaii
- Casio reinventing itself with every change
- Masturbation World Record, 9 hours and 33 minutes non-stop
- 10 Japanese movies
- Vibram Fivefingers
- Japanese sleeping
- Things that happened to me the other day and probably I am the only one who cares
- Hideo Itokawa and Hayabusa
- Uchi-Soto
- Honne and Tatemae
- Red Bull strategy in Japan
- Tweetup Japan 2010
- Heike crab
- Furoshiki
- 8bit cafe
- Sony “secret” labs
- Trash cans for adult magazines
Categories
Setsubun – Oni
Yesterday, February 3rd, it was setsubun day here in Japan, which supposedly marks the end of the winter (a little bit early) and the entrance of spring. According to tradition, on setsubun day you have to scare the demon spirits away and eliminate all the bad things that happened the former year.
One of the rituals consists on throwing beans to somebody who portrays an Oni (demon). The demon has to dance and pretend to be escaping while no being able to do it. In my company we made the ritual with Maruyama-san portraying the oni/demon while we threw beans at him (you can’t really see them on the video).
For a better explanation about setsubun and the demon ritual, read this post.