I tend to always head straight for the Japanese travel books just to needlessly tease myself that I am standing here in Australia and not in Japan. ^^

In amongst the Lonely Planet and Frommer guides I found an awesome illustrated book called “Tokyo On Foot” written and beautifully illustrated by Florent Chavouet,. The style of drawing immediately caught my eye and 5 minutes later I was at the register handing over AUD$24.99 to the cashier.

I’ll admit that I can barely draw a straight line so anyone who can achieve the level of detail in the drawings included below is just astounding to me.

Every time I think about Japan, I can now sit down and flick through the pages of this book and all the atmosphere, sights and sounds come floating back.

I highly recommend grabbing a copy – I know you won’t be disappointed. It’s available at Amazon (for much less than what I paid) or check out an online or old-school book store near you.

View more of Florent Chavouet’s stunning illustrations at www.florentchavouet.com.

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Unlike back home where I live in Australia, Tokyo just keeps pumping all night long and for a photographer there is so much to see and do – even at midnight.

As I was wandering the streets towards the Expressway to get a few timelapses I stumbled across this restaurant. It had a great feel to it – hope you like it too ^^

These images were taken with a Sony NEX 5N and the 16mm (24mm) kit lens.

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I was meaning to put this up last week and I noticed over the past 7 days that the pile had mysteriously disappeared eg my wife had eaten them.

So anyway I grabbed the last one for your viewing pleasure below ^^

The front and back of the box provide a fun way to practice your hiragana, katakana and kanji reading while you munch on your own yummy chocolate or salivate over your computer screen.

A few simple ones to get you started – おいしい (o-i-shi-i = delicious, yummy), マシュマロ (ma-shu-ma-ro = marshmellow), イチゴ (i-chi-go = strawberry) and チョコレート (cho-ko-re-e-to= chocolate). Chocolate is often abbreviated to just チョコ (cho-ko).

The small ュ in マシュマロ gets added to シ (shi) to form シュ (shu) while the small ョ in チョコレート forms with チ (chi) to give us チョ (cho) in チョコレート. And finally the ー in チョコレート elongates the vowel sound preceding it so “re” becomes “ree”.

Here’s a much larger version of the back of the box if you feel like going nuts on the translation.

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I was really surprised at its size and also the sheer number of Tokyoites squeezed in to this place on a lazy Sunday afternoon.

Despite the crush of people, these girls found a nice quiet place to practice their ukulele chops ^^

For the photo nerds, like myself, this image was taken with a NEX 5N and an old Contax Yashica Carl Zeiss 135mm f2.8 and C/Y to NEX adaptor.

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Everyone is there for the same reason – it is a truly unique experience. Make sure you drop by on your next trip to Tokyo ^^

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I shot this around the same time – hopefully it gives you some sense of the feeling but there’s nothing like the buzz of being there in person.

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Compare (比)

Use the image of a spoon (ヒ) to create your stories.

Here we see two spoons and if we “compare” the two, the one on the right looks like the normal kanji for spoon (ヒ) but the one on the left looks a little squashed.

Use this “comparison” to get this kanji firmly separated in your mind from “north”.

Just to mess with your brain – ヒ is also the katakana for “hi”. Don’t get them confused ^^

North (北)

The Heisig primitive for ヒ is “two people sitting on the ground”.

Your mnemonic here is to visualise two people sitting back looking up at the “northern” stars in the sky or two people sitting back to back to keep warm in a freezing wind blowing in from the Arctic “north“.

Beware not to confuse the left hand side with the Heisig “turtle” primitive, which features in kanji such as 兆 (portent). However, the stroke order is different and the look is slightly different – confusing I know!

Download a pdf of today’s kanji →

Remember that if these don’t work for you, think of another story that makes sense to you.

It’s no use forcing yourself to remember a story that just won’t stick. The idea is to make it work for you and your memory will take care of the rest.

The possibilities are endless.

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Thanks to the internet, we now have instant access to more language learning material than you could use in a hundred lifetimes. A large part of that video material can be found on YouTube.

There’s always been plenty of user uploaded Japanese videos but in the past few years, many of the Japanese TV channels have come on board and now we can enjoy video clips from the likes of NHK, TBS, Fuji TV and much more.

While it’s easy enough to click around YouTube all day long, if you’re really serious about immersion you probably want to just have a bunch of videos lined up so you can leaving them playing all day long and suck in all that glorious Japanese goodness.

YouTube has the ability to do playlists but having an app right on your desktop that lets you set and forget your daily immersion playlists is pure gold – and recently I found such a beast – Minitube.

Minitube is a cross platform app that allow you to search YouTube from your desktop. You simply type in either a keyword (“Versailles PV”) or a channel name (“jaxachannel”) and it will instantly bring back all the videos that match your query.

Front Screen

In the search results screen, you have three tabs to sort by – Most Relevant, Most Recent, Most Viewed. You can double-click any video to start playing, switch to full screen, change video quality and more.

Search Results

The best part is once you start playing any video, Minitube will just continue playing the next video for as long as there is one. So if you’re wanting to listen to your favourite band, you simply type in their name and then click the first result and you can sit back for the next few hours as Minitube rolls through every match on YouTube.

You may have noticed I added “PV” to the name of the Japanese band “Versailles” (Check them out – they’re great btw). “PV” stands for “Promotional Video”, which will mean YouTube brings back the official PV videos uploaded by the band or record label rather than the (generally) crappy user uploaded versions.

Minitube is available for Mac, Windows and Linux and is also available for instant download in the Mac App Store, where I got it for around AUD$10.

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With the word “Yakuza” somewhere in the back of brain, I wasn’t game enough to walk in to a parlour full of people so this is what they look like at midday on Tuesday (Golden Gai, Shibuya). I was in and out pretty quickly!

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Special (特)

Use the images of “cow (牛)” and “Buddhist Temple (寺)” to create your stories. The most popular mnemonic for this kanji is the use of “Cow” as a sacred or “special” animal in countries like India where, in some places, a person can be jailed for killing or injuring a cow!

Picture the religious image of a cow to remember that “special” “cows” roam freely in the “temple” grounds.

Wait (待)

The Heisig primitive on the left of this kanji means either “column”, “going” or “line” – in this instance we’ll use “line”. Again on the right hand side we see “Buddhist Temple (寺)”.

Imagine going to a well-known tourist area such as Nikko, in the height of the Japanese summer, and having to “wait” in “line” to see the “temples”. No-one likes to wait – use that image to make sure you remember this one.

Hold (持)

This time we have “finger” on the left and “Buddhist Temple (寺)” on the right.

At most temples you’ll see one or more large bells that are struck with a large wooden log or smaller bells that are rung by hand. We’re going to use the smaller bells as our story for this kanji.

The monks each “hold” a bell between their “fingers” and ring them at important times throughout the day at the “Buddhist Temple”.

Download a pdf of today’s kanji →

Remember that if these don’t work for you, think of another story that makes sense to you.

For example we could have used something like – “At a Buddhist temple, the monks hold their fingers together during prayer time” or the image of a monk holding himself up with one finger at the Buddhist temple.

The possibilities are endless.

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What can be really disheartening though is the realisation that after studying kanji for months or even years (depending on your daily kanji diet), you still cannot understand your favourite Japanese Facebook page or read the subtitles of your favourite anime.

It’s a vicious circle – you get frustrated because you can’t read enough kanji and stop studying. By not studying you never reach the point where you know enough not to get frustrated.

While nailing several hundred kanji is quite an effort and requires the sort of dedication and effort that not everyone possesses, I found it wasn’t until I hit the magic 1000 mark that everything started coming together – it’s what I call the lightbulb moment.

My Lightbulb Moment

I didn’t suddenly wake up one day and yell out “Praise the Lord, I can now read all the kanji! Hallelujah!” but over the course of several months, I clearly remember being able to look at a normal Japanese sentences on TV or a website and work out what it meant. It’s an exciting feeling and a proud moment – at least it was for me ^^

Kanji compounds become far less daunting when you can look at each character and recall each of their meanings. It’s also a great motivator knowing that the 25 kanji you’ll learn today is only going to make things even clearer tomorrow.

So if you’re sitting on 200, 300 or even 500 kanji and frustrated by your perceived Japanese illiteracy, make sure to remind yourself that the lightbulb moment is just around the corner. Yours may come at 700, 800 or 1000 but it will come – that’s guaranteed.

Five or six kanji a day and you’re all done in a year. Simple, huh? ^^

Image Credit: Pixiv

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