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When artist Kazuo Ishii posted his latest painting on Facebook, it blew me away on several levels:

Here's a quiz for you. What do you think this could mean?

鴨居 (かもい)     wild duck + to exist

My life centers around dog hair. That's just what happens with you live with dogs. I was therefore intrigued by this term:

毛嫌い (けぎらい)    ...

It's time for a round-up of Japanese expressions that have confused and amused me recently.

A Japanese friend wrote this to me:

歯に衣着せぬアドバイスをよろしくお願いします。...

As you may have noticed, Joy o' Kanji was on vacation last week. To celebrate my birthday, my husband, dogs, and I spent five blissful days near the white-sand beaches of Los Angeles, taking wa...

I recently befriended a blind photographer in Japan. He isn't just partially blind. Because of a heart condition and glaucoma, he had his eyeballs removed and protheses inserted. (He has posted...

A Facebook friend came across this proverb:

Vision without action is daydream. Action without vision is nightmare.

Identifying it as a Japanese saying, she aske...

A beautiful restaurant in Berkeley has been driving me crazy. Every time I walk by this izakaya (居酒屋, いざかや: bar, pub), I see three panels filled with gorgeous kanji. I can never make out what they...

One of my favorite ways to study Japanese is to eavesdrop. My Japanese Facebook friends often chat in Japanese with the people they know, which gives me a wonderful opportunity to read colloquial J...

Do you think of 一 (one) as representing a lot or a little? This isn't necessarily a question about Japanese; when English speakers refer to coming together as one, it conveys that many people h...

A yoga teacher used to annoy me to no end when he asked us to shift our kidneys to the right or left. How in the world could we do this? I think it was all in the name of heightening body awareness...

I live just an hour and a half from Sacramento, and yet I didn't know something fundamental about it until I wrote the just-published...