Me and my wife recently left Japan and she has N1 and loves speaking Japanese. She asked me to find some things to read in Japanese so she does not loose her skills.
She is very interested in “minimalism” and decorating, or “lifestyle” things (for girls) like bullet journaling, recipes, etc.
Any suggestions for some Japanese language blogs or news websites? Something she can wake up to every day and read for 30 minutes?
Or Youtube channels or Instagram?
2 comments
For podcast, how about Nihongo Con Teppei Z on Spotify?
I’d be kind of surprised if she wasn’t already familiar with it, but one of the first “real” Japanese sites (i.e. written by and produced for native speakers rather than second-language learners) that I became a regular visitor / fan of — it’s been around for a while — is [ほぼ日](https://www.1101.com/home.html), or ほぼ日刊イトイ新聞.
It’s a professional blog and lifestyle site curated by Shigesato Itoi, a well-known copywriter who is also familiar to many video game fans as the “father”/creator of the Mother/Earthbound series.
It’s updated almost every day — hence the name — with a front-page column (called 今日のダーリン) by Itoi himself, and the rest of the page is full of the sort of minimalist/自然体 lifestyle and fashion stuff that sounds like it would be right up your wife’s alley.
The site has gotten quite a bit larger and more commercial (they also sell a lot of clothes/goods nowadays) than it used to be, but the “heart” of the site is still intact today, some 35-odd years after it started. Itoi’s columns and interviews are always worth a read — he’s a compelling and thoughtful writer. There are also a lot of great interviews, essays, etc. in the archives if she wants to dig around more.
(*edited to add:* If she’s N1 level, I’d suggest that she not limit herself to “Japanese langauge blogs”, and instead get comfortable with reading material produced for natives. I would also recommend that she get comfortable searching (in Japanese) the internet or social media sites for the kind of things she’s interested in. If she’s N1 and has lived in Japan for several years, there’s really no reason she can’t use the internet to stay in contact with the language and culture the same way a native Japanese person living abroad would.)