History
This ruling class of warriors defined Japan's feudal era.
What is samurai (侍)?
Typically made from fresh fish pressed to seasoned rice, this dish is one of Japan's most famous worldwide.
What is sushi?
This song by Miki Matsubara (松原 みき), often considered emblematic of the City Pop genre, released in 1979 but achieved global fame only after going viral in late 2020.
What is 真夜中のドア〜Stay With Me?
What is Stay With Me?
This conjugation is subject to confusion by English speakers due to its application to situations both of "forcing" and "letting."
What is -させる?
Formed by contracting であります, this particle is used to mark politeness and (usually) as a verb.
What is です?
Though its date of December 7th is famous in the U.S.A, Japanese records list this event as taking place on December 8th due to timekeeping conventions.
What is the Pearl Harbor attack?
Westerners visiting Japan are often astonished by the association between Christmas Eve and this restaurant chain.
What is Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC)?
Creepy Nuts wrote the hit song Bling-Bang-Bang-Born as the opening to the second season of this show.
What is Mashle: Magic and Muscles?
What is マッシュル?
Exhibiting different conjugation patterns, accent placements, and word-initial tone, this dialect, associated with popular comedians, is the second most spoken in Japan.
What is Kansai-ben?
This honorific is famously confusing for learners of Japanese due to including both educated professionals and creative writers.
What is -先生?
This U.S. commander led the 1853 expedition which forcibly negotiated the end of Japan's sakoku (isolationist) policies.
Who is (Commodore)/(Matthew C.) Perry
Despite deriving its name from lāmiàn (拉麵) from Northern China, this popular Japanese dish evolved primarily from Cantonese noodle dishes.
What is ramen?
What are ramen noodles?
This popular rock band wrote the soundtrack for the 2016 film Your Name (君の名は。).
What is RADWIMPS?
Depending on the dialect, speaker age, politeness, and individual word, these two verb conjugations often can be distinguished only through context.
What is passive and potential (conjugations)?
This verb is often mispronounced by young children since it is the only verb in the Japanese language to end in -ぬ.
What is 死ぬ?
Japan's Taika reforms (大化の改新) of 645 AD sought to comprehensively copy the political, social, and even interpersonal characteristics of this contemporary world power.
What is Tang China?
What is the Tang dynasty?
After seeing the Royal British Navy use this dish to prevent Thiamine deficiency, the Imperial Japanese Navy adapted it into its modern form for convenient consumption at-sea, which has become a national dish.
What is Japanese curry?
Entering Japan through Western hits such as The Beatles' "I Want to Hold Your Hand" and later Kylie Minogue's "I Should Be So Lucky," this chord progression is used in 8 out of the 20 top selling Japanese songs of all time.
What is the Royal Road chord progression?
What is the 王道進行？
What is IV-V-iii-vi?
This conjugation's long vowel is often shortened in natural speech, but doing so before sentence-final particles immediately marks one's speech as being from Western Japan.
What is the volitional form/conjugation?
This phrase is notorious among the Japanese for appearing to accept an invitation while being used as a near-absolute declination.
What is 行けたら行くわ?
Oda Nobunaga (織田 信長) made this peasant his general based on merit, against the customs of the time. This peasant ultimately would succeed him in reunifying Japan.
Who is Toyotomi Hideyoshi (豊臣 秀吉)?
Upon meat's official legalization 1872, meat eating was quickly embraced in Japan due to the pre-existing grey-area loopholes for these two animal types.
What are seafood and wild game?
Coined by Uehara Rokushiro in the late 1800s to categorize indigenous Japanese tonal systems that showed up in Edo period koto tuning, these two scales correspond to the Western major and minor pentatonic scales, though treating as the root what would in Western Theory be called the fifth.
What are the yō and in scales?
What are the light and dark scales?
(陽音階, 陰音階)
Placing だ after an い-adjective is considered a mistake in standard Japanese, but is used as a native grammatical structure in parts of these five prefectures.
(A single correct guess gets full points.)
What is Shizuoka/Eastern Aichi/Nagano/Eastern Aomori/Northern Iwate?
(静岡県、愛知県東部、長野県、青森県東部/岩手県北部)
To the displeasure of older speakers, young Japanese speakers often apply い-adjective conjugation and sound changes to this common verb.
What is 違う?