Japan Forum

Hi LuanPienaSensei, I’m from Italy, and entrepreneurship has been on my mind a lot lately. Back home in Italy, starting a business in your 20s is honestly seen as quite romantic — we have a long tradition of family-run small businesses, the so-called bottega culture, and young people jumping into ventures with passion and a…

Hi LuanPienaSensei, I’m from France, and a striking statistic I recently encountered left me completely bewildered. A survey revealed that nearly 48% of Japanese men between 20 and 40 admitted to having used some form of paid sexual service. Here in France, we tend to think of ourselves as quite open-minded about sexuality, and yet…

Hi LuanPienaSensei, I’m from the Netherlands, and I’ve been genuinely puzzled by something ever since I arrived in Japan as a tourist last spring. Back home in Amsterdam, you’ll find rubbish bins on practically every street corner, and yet the streets are still often littered with wrappers and cigarette butts. Japan, on the other hand,…

Hi LuanPienaSensei, I’m from Sweden, and lately, I’ve been really curious about what the dating culture is actually like in Japan. Here in Sweden, romance and dating are usually very laid-back and egalitarian. We rarely go on formal ‘dates’ in the beginning. Instead, we usually just ask someone to grab a fika (a coffee and…