hi,
since i've only been subscribing to this podcast for a few weeks now, I'm not sure if this has been covered already...but I think that a good suggestion for a lesson is an intro to the trash sorting system in Japan. I remember when I did my summer internship in Japan a couple years ago, the thing that freaked me out THE MOST when I first arrived to my dorm was figuring out trash-sorting system! The thing was, the instructions in my dorm for sorting the trash were available in Japanese only (I was in a suburb of Osaka, so English was not as prevalent as it was in Tokyo area). Even though I had taken 2 years of Japanese classes, it wasn't enough to fully understand all the instructions (I even took a picture: http://web.mit.edu/~anita7/www/MiscJapa ... photo5.jpg ). I tried using a dictionary to decipher it, but made too many mistakes...too many times I took the wrong trash out on the wrong day, or ended up mis-classifying something! Doh!!
Well, it took me a while to get used to the whole sorting trash idea, since in the US it's pretty simple (you just recycle paper & aluminum, and just throw out everything else together). But in Japan since you have categorize stuff into burnable, non-burnable, plastic, paper, etc, it is a lot more complicated (even native Japanese people have told me it is sometimes confusing for them). I know that sometimes the "trash category" is written on items themselves (i.e. it will say プラ on a plastic container) but if it consists of multiple parts, it may be confusing if your vocab and/or kanji isn't that great (i.e. should know what 袋, 包装紙 etc mean).
