Discussion

An attendant at a popular garden in the heart of Tokyo has cost the facility millions of yen because he was “too frightened” to ask foreign visitors to pay the admission fee.

The attendant, who is in his early 70s, admitted failing to collect the fees for Shinjuku Gyoen national garden after an investigation was launched following a tip-off by another employee. The unnamed man said he had stopped collecting admission fees of 200 yen (US$1.80) for adults and 50 yen (US45¢) for children in April 2014, and had continued to allow foreign visitors in free of charge for about two and a half years. As a result an estimated 160,000 people entered the garden without paying. The environment ministry said that it had lost at least 25 million yen ($220,000).

Do you have a habit of picking up books that you never quite get around to reading? If this sounds like you, you might be unwittingly engaging in tsundoku—a Japanese term used to describe a person who owns a lot of unread literature.

The Japanese word doku can be used as a verb to mean "reading", and the tsun in tsundoku originates in tsumu—a word meaning "to pile up". So when put together, tsundoku has the meaning of buying reading material and piling it up.

On the other hand, Bibliomania is the title of a 19th century novel by Thomas Frognall Dibdin which claimed to explore "book madness"—the act of being unable to stop collecting literature.

Every Christmas, Ryohei Ando gathers his family together for a holiday tradition. Just like their father did as a child, his two children will reach deep into a red-and-white bucket and pick out the best piece of fried chicken they can find.

Yes, it’s a Merry KFC Christmas for the Ando family. It may seem odd anywhere outside Japan, but Ando’s family and millions of others would never let a Christmas go by without Kentucky Fried Chicken. 

“My kids, they think it’s natural,” says Ando, a 40-year-old in the marketing department of a Tokyo sporting goods company.

Every Christmas season, an estimated 3.6 million Japanese families treat themselves to Kentucky Fried Chicken, in what has become a nationwide tradition.