As Filipinos living in Japan, one thing that we really miss from home is eating unripe mangoes.  The mangoes that are available in Japan are imported from other countries and most, if not all, are already ripe. 

When train lines in Japan unexpectedly stop for quite a while due to some untoward incidents, many foreigners unnecessarily buy new tickets upon transferring to alternative train lines.  They do not know that on such cases, train companies switch to Transfer Operation or Furikae Unten where transfer tickets called furikae jousyahyo are issued to passengers for free.  What is good about these Furikae tickets is that they can be used to ride alternative train lines,  even those of completely different companies.

If you have worked in a Japanese company, you probably know what chourei is.  Chourei, translated literally as morning-bow, is the short meeting or assembly of people in an entire company, a section, or a department, done first thing in the morning before the actual work begins.

In a Windows-based computer that is configured for Japanese input, typing Japanese Hiragana or Katakana characters is pretty easy. You usually just type the letters as you pronounce them in English. For example, when you want the character "か" which is pronounced as "ka", you will just type "k" and then "a".