Konnichiwa, Enid desu and welcome to my trip to Japan. Japan is an island nation in East Asia, made up of four major islands and 14,000 smaller ones. Its population of 123 million is more than four times as many as Australia’s, even though Australia’s land size is 20 times bigger than Japan’s. It’s a fun and exciting place, and here are my highlights.
Food. Japanese people love food. It’s a big part of Japanese culture with heaps of restaurants everywhere. Japan has given us lots of popular global foods such as sushi and sashimi, ramen, yoza, teppanyaki, tempura and okonomiyaki.
Language. In Japan, they use three different alphabets: hiragana, katakana and kanji. Often their characters are mixed throughout a word or sentence. They also have a very different sentence structure to English. For example, where is the cat becomes neko wa doku desuka or cat where the is. Their books are read in the opposite direction to us and are often read and written from top to bottom.
Toys. Toys are very popular in Japan and are loved by people of all ages. Japan is famous for its character toys such as Sanrio, Studio Ghibli and Godzilla. Another thing that is very popular in Japan is their gachapon or capsule toys, which are small mystery toys which can be found almost everywhere.
Money. The national currency of Japan is the yen, which uses this symbol ¥. At the moment, one Australian dollar buys about 100 yen. Generally, things are cheaper than in Australia. For example, an ice cream from a convenience store will cost about 150 to 200 yen, and a gachapon tai will generally cost between 3 and 500 yen.
Thanks very much for joining me on my trip to Japan.
AloJapan.com