Why This Site Exists
I moved to Osaka in my late twenties for an ordinary office job in IT. I did not come here to study Japan. I came for work, with one suitcase and about enough Japanese to order lunch without pointing at the menu. The plan was a couple of years. That was roughly eight years ago, and I have been in and out of the country ever since.
Most of what I know about Japan, I learned the slow way. I rented apartments before I understood what a guarantor was. I sorted my trash wrong for about a year before a neighbor quietly corrected me. I have stood in a ward office holding a form I could not read, and I have done that more than once.
What I did not expect was how many questions it would generate back home. Why do people take their shoes off at the door? Why does the same drink come in a new flavor every season? Why does everyone apologize so much? They were ordinary questions, and most of them started with the same word: why.
What This Site Is
JapanSimply is where I put my answers. It explains everyday Japan to people who have never lived here: what a thing is, why it is the way it is, and how it actually works in daily life. The question I keep returning to is why, not where. Where to go is a different site’s job. This one is for the person who saw something in a clip, heard about it from a friend, or is thinking about a move, and wants to understand what they are looking at.
Some pieces are small. Why the convenience store does more than sell snacks. Why shoes come off at the door. Others are practical, about the machinery of living here: how renting works, what a ward office does, how a payslip is put together, what happens at tax time. Both kinds are the same job underneath. Something ordinary is going on, and there is usually a reason for it that nobody bothers to explain.
Who I Am, and What I’m Not
I am not an expert on Japan. I am not a translator, a journalist, or a scholar of the country. I never took a course or earned a qualification. I write as someone who lives here, notices things, asks questions, and keeps notes.
My Japanese gets me through an ordinary day. It does not get me through a tax form, and I have never pretended otherwise. My girlfriend is Japanese, and she is occasionally able to explain something that had puzzled me for years. She is one person with her own opinions, not a spokesperson for anyone, and I try to write about her the way she would want.
I live in Osaka, and that is the limit of what I can claim. When I say “where I live”, I mean my apartment, my office, the ward office I use, the streets I walk. That is not a claim about the rest of the country, which is not one place. Eight years in does not make me finished with it either. I still get surprised.
How This Site Is Made
I research and write these pieces, and I use AI tools to help organize and polish the text. The questions, the reading, and the notes are mine. The tools help me get them into a clearer shape. I am upfront about this because I think readers deserve to know how a site is put together.
Where a claim really needs a source, such as a law, a fee, or a procedure, I try to point to the official body that publishes it, and to say when the figure was current, because rules and prices move. Where something is only my own observation, I say that instead. And where I do not know why something is the way it is, I say so. That happens more often than you might think.
Thanks for Stopping By
Whether you got here from a clip of a train station, a conversation with a friend who came back from Tokyo, or a stack of paperwork for a move you are actually considering, I am glad you found this. I hope you leave understanding one thing that had been nagging at you. If you finish an article thinking “huh, I never knew why they did that”, then it did its job.
Happy reading,
Ben
