About Japan Culture Navi
Japan Culture Navi is a bilingual dictionary of Japanese culture, currently 1113 topics.
It was built for Japanese people who need to explain their own country in English — for exams, for study abroad, for work with visitors. That shapes what you find here. Every topic has a one-line answer, a thirty-second explanation and a short speech, plus the questions visitors actually ask and the phrases you need to answer them.
If you are visiting Japan, that same focus makes this a useful reference. Instead of a dictionary definition, you get the explanation a Japanese person would actually give you, including the parts that are usually left out of guidebooks.
How it is written
- All text is written in-house. Nothing is copied from other sites or guidebooks.
- We do not write things we are not sure about. Where accounts differ, we say so.
- We try not to idealize Japan. Hanami is a loud party, not a silent meditation, and we say that.
- We avoid presenting one region's or one generation's practice as "what Japan does."
Japan Culture Navi is part of Harada Eigo, a free English-learning site run by Takashi Harada, a high school English teacher.
Corrections and questions
If you find a mistake, please tell us. Wrong facts, English that does not sound natural, a topic we are missing. Everything here is written by hand, one entry at a time, so corrections are genuinely useful. It helps if you mention which entry you are writing about.
This opens the contact page on Harada Eigo. Replies may take a while.