The Quirky Japanese TV series, ごめんね青春!, hits worldwide audiences — Despite writing about Japanese language and culture, I rarely watch Japanese television. Let’s be frank — most Japanese TV is booooring. And the few Japanese TV shows I do enjoy featuring travel, nature, and food, aren’t available overseas. Japanese scripted TV is highly formulaic and extremely predicable, and is either…

Founders have to do product sales even if they hate it — My personality is almost the stereotype of an engineer — I love working through problems to find the optimal solution but suck at building relationships. I can send you an email with the 10 reasons why you need my product, but I struggle to build an emotional connection that makes…

Engineers and scientists pick up Japanese easily while language students struggle — For my foreign language classes in high school, I studied Spanish. I nearly failed. Although I was a whiz at math and science, I sucked at learning languages. For English speakers, Spanish is supposed to be one of the easiest languages to learn. The Foreign Service Institute says it takes…

There are 5 good reasons to build a startup and 1 bad one — As a startup mentor and investor, I spend much of my day speaking with early-stage startup founders. Some are still in college, others retired. Some are based in the US; many are overseas. Some have already founded their startup while others are debating what to do. …

Make your own original design steamed buns in Kobe — What’s the first thing you do when you arrive in Japan? Go to a hot springs onsen to relax from the long trip? Climb Mt. Fuji? Eat sushi? For me, even before I get from the airport to the hotel, I stop at the conbini to pick up a nikuman…

Picking the right option to publish your book — Everyone has a book in them desperate to get out. And it’s easier now than ever to get that book published. Whether it’s a business book about how to build a startup, a memoir about your childhood adventures, a book of travel photography, or a mystery novel, if you’re a…

Forget wabi-sabi, ikigai, and kintsugi. This is the one phrase to really understand Japan. — When you study introductory Japanese, you learn a set of daily expressions: konnichi wa, sumimasen, gomen nasai, arigatō... But there’s one critical expression missing from the introductory textbooks. One expression you not only hear every day, but epitomizes the attitude to life in Japan. Shikata ga nai — 仕方がない

Angels have different motivations from VCs and need to be approached differently — Angels are the first investors in most startups. Yet founders usually have little idea of who we are and what we’re looking for. I’ve been an angel investor since 2010 and invested in close to 100 startups: 40 individual investments and the rest through angel group funds. …

Dealing with a deluge of AI-written articles — I’m an editor of Japonica, a publication on Medium focusing on Japanese life and culture. We used to receive a handful of articles per week, mostly from Japanese people or non-natives with extensive experience in the country. …