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During my recent Japan trip, I became aware of what I call the “Language Tradeoff”, or “Language Compromise”. One of my goals in Japan was to improve my own spoken Japanese, which I’ve been studying for a couple years now. “Awesome,” I thought, “I’ll go to some bars and clubs and everyone will talk to [...]

The sun is setting on the Japan trip, kindling in us the acute pangs of parting. Let’s bid farewell to the World’s Last Empire with a final bash of photos. These photos are mostly from Tokyo. By clicking any picture, you’ll get a large, high-resolution copy of it. In fact, it’s so high resolution it’s [...]

In Kyoto, you can’t throw a rock without hitting three temples and a shrine. Eventually they’re just gonna tear up the whole city and replace it with one gigantic temple. They’ll replace the city buses with little shrines you can crawl into and sit inside of while the power of Buddha levitates them around. Speaking [...]

Mt. Fuji, here we come! This article is the third of a five-part photoblog series. I met up with Tom of JAPANEXILE fame and we took the late bus from Tokyo to the 5th station of Mt. Fuji. There, we also met another friend. Fuji is divided into 10 stations, with the 10th being the [...]

This is part 2 of a five part series of commented photos from my recent Japan trip. The photos are totally badass and my commentary is icing on the cake. How much better could it get? Today’s installment of photos has a loose Yokohama theme. Yokohama means roughly “city by the seashore”. You can get [...]

The “Pictures From Japan” series will be my first attempt at photo blogging. I have around 150 pictures from the Land Of The Rising Sun, and they’re all pretty badass. I’m gonna make this a five-part series, with one installment each day for five days. The posts will be, obviously, image intensive. I’ll attempt to [...]

I’m actually still in Tokyo. Even though I told you I was flying home on the 19th, it turns out there’s still something I’m meant to see, learn, or do here, because I missed the flight and now I’ll be flying home on the 21st. Speaking of things that are meant or not meant to [...]

The best thing about a long Summer vacation isn’t the length itself, but the fact it gives you enough cushion time to make big, spontaneous decisions and follow through with them. I’ve always wanted to travel, but until this Summer I’d actually never left North America (and I only left the U.S. if you count [...]

Readers, Im just writing to let you know why I havent updated this website in awhile. Since July 24, Ive been exploring Japan. Ill be returning to the States on August 19th, and at that time Ive got a shitload of cool stuff Im gonna write about here. Travelling has really opened my eyes to [...]