Everything you always wanted to know about Japan,
but did not know where to ask
Q. Why do Japanese people say that women deliver their babies in the TENTH month?
Japanese do not count calendar months
Q. "Why do Japanese people say that they have blue traffic lights when they are really green?"
historically, Japanese people considered green to be a shade of blue.
Q. Why do Japanese school girls wear sailor suits?
It is based on the British navy uniform
Q. Many Japanese people have told me that instead of seeing a "man in the moon" in the moon's craters, they see a rabbit. Where exactly is the rabbit?
Q. I have long wondered how Japanese people look words up in the dictionary. They can't alphabetize their words, so how do they find them?
the words are organized by sound
Q. Why do haiku have to have exactly 17 syllables?
Japanese has a very limited number of sounds, almost all words end with vowels,
Go and read the rest of that huge
list of cultural oddities and interesting facts. Discover, for example, why Japanese writing is rather vertical than horizontal ( because the letters were usually written on tortoise shells), why Japanese houses do not have basements, and is it true that most Asian babies have a blue spot on their butt when they're born... (yes it's true, it's a dense collection of Melanin-containing cells on their lower backs). The page is constantly updated with new answers, so visit there more than once. Or better yet, go visit Japan, what are you waiting for?..
clipped from: thrillingwonder.blogspot.com 
