Culture

Language

Japanese has no genetic relationship with Chinese, but it makes extensive use of Chinese characters, or kanji (漢字), in its writing system, and a large portion of its vocabulary is borrowed from Chinese. Along with kanji, the Japanese writing system primarily uses two syllabic (or moraic) scripts, hiragana (ひらがな) and katakana (カタカナ). Latin script is used in a limited fashion, such as for imported acronyms, and the numeral system uses mostly Arabic numerals alongside traditional Chinese numerals.

Each kanji have a meaning. The kanji that make up Japan's name mean "sun origin", and Japan is often called the "Land of the Rising Sun".

Simple Japanese

Hello → こんにちは (ko　nn ni chi wa)
Good bye → さようなら (sa yo u na ra)
Thank you → ありがとう (a ri ga to u)
I'm sorry → すみません (su mi ma se nn)
one → 一 (i chi)
two → 二 (ni)
three → 三 (sa nn)
four → 四 (si)
five → 五 (go)
six → 六 (ro ku)
seven → 七 (na na)
eight → 八 (ha chi)
nine → 九 (ku)
ten → 十 (zyu u)

Manners

In Japan, most people live in their house without shoes or slippers. It is not only for traditional Japanese houses with Tatami floor, but also modern western style houses in Japan. People have to remove shoes when enter houses.

When you enter someone's house, you have to remove your shoes.
This space is called genkan(玄関).

When you have a meal
You can slurp noodles in Japan. But it is not necessary if you don't want to do it.
The Japanese has rice bowl at meal. Therefore it is bad mannered when I eat rice with having put a rice bowl.

Religion

In Japan, freedom of religion is guaranteed by the constitution. Most people are Buddist and Shintoist because these were Japanese ancient religions. So there are a lot of temples and Shinto shrines in the whole of Japan, especially in the old capital such as Kyoto, Kanmakura, Nara. Today's Japanene society, it is not important which religion you believe in, and the people are not so conscious of their faith.

Events

In Japan, some unique events for each season exist. Hanami(花見,meaing to see flowers) is event in March~April. People gether under cherry blossoms and enjoy seeing the beautifullness of them and eating, drinking. Koyou(紅葉,meaning of red leaves) is event of autumn. In autumn season, we can see vivid colored loadsides, parks, and forests because of changing color of their leaves of trees - from green to red, yellow, brown, etc. There are many other various events related to Japanese 4 seasons.