Peter's Japan blog

Furoshiki, the traditional Japanese wrapping cloth. Before the time of plastic bags, since hundreds of years, people in Japan used cotton or silk cloths to hold and carry stuff. They had invented useful ways to fold a simple cloth so that it could be used as a purse or to hold boxes, books, water melons and even bottles. But since the introduction of the plastic bag, it has been on the decline and there don't exist many furoshiki shops any more.

The Japanese government is trying to promote the people to use the furoshiki more again.

Here are two video about Furoshiki. (the first one is cheesy I know, but it gets the message across), the second one is from inside the Kakefuda, a furoshiki shop in Kyoto.

You can find folding patterns and other info on Furoshiki.com.

The world famous video of how to fold a T-Shirt Japanese style.
Quick, easy and neat ;p Enjoy ;p

Last time we talked about the basic sentence structure in Japanese. Two important things about the Japanese sentence structure is that the subject comes first, and the verb comes last. Now we will talk a bit more about a few particles which have a direct impact on our sentence structure.

1. '-wa': the subject particle: は　(note that -wa is written with the hiragana of 'ha', not 'wa')
- used to indicate the subject of a sentence. It is used to put emphasis on the thing we are talking about when it might not be clear or there is a change in subject.

2. '-ga': the subject particle: が
- subject being talked about without putting special emphasis.
- also a weak condition between two sentences.

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The basic sentence structure of the Japanese language is of the form: SOV. Meaning, Subject Object Verb.
(note that I will use spaces between words for readability, spaces are normally omitted)
Example:
私は　ペテル　です。
Watashi-wa Peter desu.
I am Peter.
Litt: I Peter be.

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