Who is teaching you
I am Eisaku — a native Japanese speaker, a breakdancer, a bodyworker, and someone who builds small strange apps like the one on this page.
I am not a school. There is no curriculum I have to follow. The lesson bends to you.
Most people quit Japanese because it stays on paper. Here you catch, move, say and use it — so it stays in your body, not in your notebook. For anyone learning Japanese, and for people already living in Japan.
The plaque says 春夏冬中.
The deep Japan is not hidden. It is just unreadable.
Free, no sign-up. Most games are for two — send one link and play anyone, anywhere.
Three things you will not get from an app or a grammar book.
I am a dancer. Verb forms, pitch accent and long vowels are rhythm problems, and rhythm is learned by moving — not by staring at a chart.
I also work as a bodyworker. 肩がこる, 腰が痛い, だるい — the words you need at a clinic, a pharmacy or a job in care. Almost no course teaches them.
ぴかぴか, どきどき, ふわっと. Japanese people use these all day and no dictionary can explain them. I can show them with my body until you feel the difference.
Written for people who have already done Kyoto and Shibuya. Why things in Japan are still standing, and why most of them are not.
The blue in the Great Wave is a German chemical that got cheap in the 1820s. Where Edo's print trade is still running, and why no museum can promise you the famous one.
🏯The museums stand there because the government burned the hill down in one morning in 1868. Two bullet-holed gates, and a grave with the name left off.
🌲A tree was struck by lightning in 1849 and became part of a building. Nobody has written down whether it is still in there.
🗿Those grey roadside stones are attendance records. Tokyo's oldest is from 1623, in a suburb with no tourists, signed by farmers.
🔥Nishiarai Daishi came through the firebombing. Its main hall burned down in 1966, and what everyone photographs is concrete from 1971.
🐟The preserve on every breakfast tray is named after a Tokyo island, and the island after an Osaka village. Both are still there. Almost nobody visits the second one.
🌶️Look down from the free City Hall observatory: that strip was a pond and a geisha quarter until 1968. Across the station, Edo's soba chili is growing again.
🐱The earliest record of the beckoning cat puts it in Asakusa in 1852, made of Imado clay. Fifty potter households once worked here. Taitō City now counts one craftsman.
🔥Akihabara is named after a fire shrine on an empty firebreak. It moved out two years before the station opened, and once a year it still lets you walk across fire.
🪨Osaka Castle's rejects: stones that fell off boats on the Yodo, stayed on a beach in Ashiya, or spent 21 years as a park sign in Kobe.
🪧Some Japanese shop signs are puns you cannot decode even if you can read every character. How seven of them work, which are truly Edo and which are thirty years old.
🎍Edo's year-end markets ran as a relay across the city, and the last stop is still held on a back street of Tokyo's garment wholesale district. Go on the 28th, when kōdan storytellers burn their worn-out fans in the temple yard.
🏮That knocking you heard from a hotel window in the last week of December was the neighbours walking the block against fire. Who they are, what they are calling, and which nights to be standing in the street.
🧱You have walked past hundreds of 定礎 stones without reading one. Learn the ten kanji that date any building in Japan, and what sits in the sealed box behind the plaque.
🌱The post town beside Shinjuku Gyoen once grew a chili that every soba stall in Edo knew by name. It vanished, came back in 2010, and this is where to find it within a walk of the garden gates.
⚙️Earthquake, firebombing, and a wartime scrap-metal order. Three sieves, three different meshes — and a rule for reading any old thing in Tokyo.
Every lesson is built around something you will say out loud this week.
No contract, no monthly fee. Stop whenever you like.
We talk, I find your level, you try one game.
Online or in person. Materials included.
About 10% off, no expiry.
I am Eisaku — a native Japanese speaker, a breakdancer, a bodyworker, and someone who builds small strange apps like the one on this page.
I am not a school. There is no curriculum I have to follow. The lesson bends to you.
Fill this in and press send. It comes straight to me.