You've got a friend in Japan

Dig your chopsticks

2009-09-02T17:29:00.008+09:00

Received 14.10.2008

One thing foreigners visiting Japan should be sure and try is "real" ramen.

Thanks to its cheapness, virtually everyone in the world is familiar with instant ramen noodles like Cup Noodle, and I sure ate my share during my days as a poor college student.

The difference between instant noodles and the real stuff found in Japanese ramen restaurants, though, is like night and day.

Would you like pickled bamboo shoots with that?

Although you might think of ramen is being a Japanese dish, it originated in China around the start of the 20th century, and within Japan ramen is considered Chinese food, on par with gyoza dumplings and spring rolls. (They even write the name for it in katakana, as it's a foreign loan word.) Ramen comes in one of several basic soup flavors, with the most common being shoyu (soy sauce), followed by miso (my own favorite), shio ("salt" flavor), and so on.

I love ramen now, but it took me a few months to work up the courage to try many different kinds of the noodles when I first got here -- I was bowled over by the naked variety of ingredients, many of which I couldn't identify, that it took time for me to take it all in.

Although you can probably find a ramen shop within twenty meters of you at all times in Japan, I recommend you try a yatai, or outdoor ramen stand, which is a wonderful icon of Tokyo; it's fun to talk with the Master while you eat.

If you fancy yourself a ramen fan, plan on visiting the Yokohama Ramen Museum next time you're in town. Besides various displays on the history of the noodles, you can wander a perfect recreation of a 1958 Tokyo street and dig your chopsticks into the noodles of a bygone era.

The word "salaryman" is a wasei-eigo (lit. "made-in-Japan English") term referring to a salaried male employee of a company.

The word came into use in the Taisho Period (1912-1926) to describe the new professional class of company employees doing jobs we'd think of as "white collar," and during Japan's period of rapid economic growth in the postwar years these salarymen were responsible for Japan's economic miracle.

The trademark of the salaryman is his conservative dark suit, called a sebiro in Japanese, which probably came from the English word "civil" since they are civilian clothes, i.e. not a military uniform.

Although the salaryman is still the basis on which Japan's modern economic society is built, there are an increasing number of people turning on their backs on working full-time in a monolithic company, whether it's young people who choose to live as freeters, never tying them selves to one job for long, or men who escape their status as salarymen (known as datsu-sara), quitting their jobs to open a restaurant or a Japanese inn or go into business for themselves.

The word salaryman describes male employees; female employees would likely be called "office ladies" (OLs) if they're doing standard clerical work, or "career woman" if they've made a choice to pursue their careers, which puts them in a different career track than normal OLs. Personally, I can't get past the fact that labels are used in such an overt way in Japan, the ultimate land of subtlety, where in the "always say exactly what you're thinking" U.S. it would be much more common for a more general term to be used for all employees.

The Japanese use a lot of English, but it's not always easy for gaijin to figure out what's being said. "Punk" doesn't mean a tough-looking guy, but a flat tire (it comes from the word puncture). If someone is "cunning" in Japan, it means they're cheating on a test.

For some reason, the English word "glamor" has come to mean women who are well-endowed, so you might want to use the Japanese word for grammar (bunpo) to avoid chuckles in your classroom. If you buy a "bike" for your child you might get looked at funny since the word always refers to a motorcycle and never to a bicycle.

If you have a business proposal to make to a Japanese woman, there's a slight chance she'll start blushing on you, since the English word "propose" is only used for marriage proposals in Japan, not for other kinds of formal business suggestions.

If you "rinse" your hair, you're applying cream rinse, and if you live in a "mansion" it means you live in a nice townhouse that you own yourself.

Living in Japan can be wacky!

The tenth man

2009-09-02T17:15:00.004+09:00

Received 11.10.2008

One thing that's fun about having kids is all the creative observations they make.

Like the time my daughter saw a toy German airplane from World War II I had at home and proclaimed, "This airplane looks angry," because the Luftwaffe insignia looked like the "anger mark" seen so often in anime and manga.

Or the time my family went to stay with a friend in Malaysia, and my daughter wondered why the (normal) maids that worked at our friend's house weren't wearing extremely kawaii uniforms like the ones she'd seen on Japanese TV. Then there was the time my son made a mistake in English, so he shrugged and said, "My name is stupid English," making a joke on that most elementary of ESL phrases.

But you don't need to be a kid to be creative: just start learning a foreign language like Japanese. The natural period of exploration you'll go through as you engage in silly wordplay games in order to discover the bou ndaries of the language will have you coming up with the most expressive and inspired observations in no time, just like children do.

This "linguistic childhood" effect also can also serve as a defense when your wife wants to know you're still geeking out over episodes of Mobile Suit Gundam at your age. Since I started learning Japanese in college in 1987, linguistically I'm only 21 years old!

Yesterday we went to visit my wife's uncle in the hospital. Making a hospital visit to a sick friend or family member is quite an involved custom, called omimai (oh-me-my!), not to be confused with omiai (oh-me-eye!) which is formal meeting with a prospective marriage partner usually arranged by your parents.

This is the guy who fought in World War II, and he just loves me since I'm the only one who listens attentively to his recollections of the war.

I don't mind at all: it's great to be able to talk with someone who lived through such vibrant history during a time when our two countries were bitter enemies, and I gladly listened for an hour as he talked about his years manning the large guns on the Battleship Ise, a mammoth vessel that was retrofitted after Midway so that the back end could serve as a carrier. (Being an anime fan, I had to convert the scenes he described into proper Yamato vs G alimas space battles.)

During the war, he escaped death no less than three times. The first was when an American bullet grazed his face, leaving a long scar.

Then, his ship was to have been sent out with the Yamato on her final one-way mission, but there was no fuel so they got to stay at the shipyards at Kure.

Finally, after the atomic bombing of nearby Hiroshima, the captain picked eight crew members out of a line to go to the city and see what had happened, and all eight men ended up dying of radiation poisoning. My wife's uncle had been the tenth man in that line.

While most people in the U.S. probably opt for a shower to get clean, in Japan hopping in the furo (bath) is the norm, a nice custom that gives you time to relax after a hard day, although it does mean you need to wash your bathtub every other day or so. (Japanese baths come with heating units to allow water to be re-heated and used the next day, which is possible because you always wash yourself outside of the bath, keeping the water ostensibly clean.)

This unpleasant task usually falls to me, since my kids are masters at disappearing the moment I go to ask them to do it.

The other day I went shopping for various things for the home, including a new bath sponge, and I was surprised to see that the universal concept of kawaii (cute) was alive and well even in such mundane industries as cleaning supplies.

Looking at the sponges the store offered for sale, I saw one that had a cute happy face that smiled back at me, so of course that was the one I reached for.

Are Japanese afraid of gaijin?

2009-07-08T17:40:00.004+09:00

Received 09.10.2008

You never know what's going to become popular in Japan next.

It could be a new variation on the Maid Cafe concept like the Code Geass Cafe in Akihabara, where all the employees dress as characters from the anime series, or the "Morning Banana Diet" craze that supposedly has people buying up all the bananas in Japanese supermarkets right now.

In Okayama Prefecture, a cat named Tama has been made honorary stationmaster of Kishi Station, which has created a huge spike in popularity for the region as tourists flock to see the cat of the hour and buy his official cat photobook. Kishi Station is located in an area so rural that it's been reconfigured as an unmanned station, with no permanent staff working there.

Tama is owned by a man who runs a kiosk outside the station, and the cat became such a local icon that the train line decided to name him official stationmaster and buy him a little hat to wear. The popularity of the cat has been credited with bringing millions of yen to the entire prefecture in the form of increased tourist revenue, and the rail company has offered Tama all the cat food he can eat to show their thanks. I can has lifetime employment?

I was recently asked on my blog, "Are Japanese afraid of gaijin?" It was an interesting question which I had to think on a bit before responding.

Certainly the answer is no -- although Westerners are sometimes viewed as mysterious and confusing creatures by the locals, I wouldn't say anyone feels actual fear, except possibly for small children who might hide in their mother's skirts when a big foreigner comes lumbering up to say hello.

Of course, foreigners here do perplex the Japanese around them on a regular basis with some of the strange things they do, whether it's leaving a box of laserdiscs out in the rain then taking them back to the store the next day as defective (as a friend of mine did once), using a mimikaki ear cleaner as a coffee stir, or squealing with delight at the most mundane sights and sounds of the country, like my unending fascination with Japanese railroad crossings.

Of course, there are times when Japanese are freaked out by foreigners for good reason, like when a British tourist from Spain decided it would be a good idea to take his clothes off and go for a swim in the moat around the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, after he'd accidentally dropped a bag he was carrying in the water.

It took the Japanese two hours to finally corner and arrest him.

2008 marks a special event: the 1000th anniversary of the completion of The Tale of Genji, the famous story penned by a woman known as Murasaki Shikubu, who was born in the year 973.

Often called the world's first novel, the book was written in installments which were delivered to the ladies of the Imperial Court, with each chapter developing the 400+ characters in new ways, essentially making it the first Japanese soap opera.

It's the tale of a fictional Japanese Emperor named Hikaru Genji ("Shining Genji") who was quite the playboy, and the first part of the story is largely concerned with the many noble women who loved him or who were loved by him.

Just as students in English classes must schlep through Beowulf, Chaucer and Shakespere, which they usually hate at the time but hopefully come to appreciate later, all students here have to tackle Genji, although it's difficult because the Old Japanese the story was written in is so different from the modern language.

The novel was written at the height of the Heian Period (794-1192), a kind of Golden Age when cultural influences from China and Korea enabled a level of peace and civilization hitherto unknown, before Japan came to be dominated by samurai warriors who warred for control of the country.

To commemorate the millennium anniversary of the Tale of Genji, there are special museum displays going on throughout the country including one in Yokohama this month.

The Japanese Post Office has gotten into the game, too, issuing a set of commemorative stamps for collectors.

Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea

2009-07-08T17:27:00.006+09:00

Received 07.10.2008

Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea is the latest film by Hayao Miyazaki, and it's been quite an event here in Japan.

It's the story of a curious fish named Brunhilde who decides to sneak away from her father and sisters and see what's on the surface. There she's befriended by a human boy named Sosuke who names her Ponyo, and the two become fast friends.

Because Ponyo licked a cut Sosuke had, she acquired the magical ability to assume human form, and she makes up her mind to leave the sea and live with her friend forever. It's a simpler film than Miyazaki-sensei has made in the past, closer to My Neighbor Totoro or Kiki's Delivery Service than to more plot-driven action films like Laputa.

Just as his famous character Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind was based on a character from Homer's Odyssey and a Japanese folk story of a princess who loved insects, Ponyo is a fusion of multiple sources, namely The Little Mermaid with its core elements rearranged; the local version of mermaids, as drawn in a famous woodblock printing from the Edo Period; a reverse version of Urashima Taro, the tale of a Japanese fisherman who visits a magical undersea palace; Little One-Inch, the story of a tiny child who goes to live with a Japanese couple, eventually attaining full size after many adventures; and The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, about a child who emerges from a bamboo stump who turns out to be the Moon Princess. (This last tale is, I am certain, the basis for E.T. as well,)

As is usually the case with Miyazaki's films, there's always one song that you can't get out of your head, and the Ponyo theme (iTunes link) has been the most popular song in Japan for months. Ponyo, Ponyo, Ponyo...sakana no ko...

You've been in Japan to long when, while driving on a two-lane road, you know the lane nearest the curb is going to be used as a parking lot.

Since Japan has a lot less land area than the U.S., cramming four times the population of California into a space that's slightly smaller, allowances for the lack of space have to be made, and on most streets you can expect to see cars pulling over along the side of the road so people can run into the conbini (convenience store) and buy milk.

There are always two or three cars in front of my parents' liquor shop on Sundays, too, since that the day Shonen Jump comes out.

In all my years of driving in the U.S. I've never been on a road that was so narrow that two cars couldn't pass side-by-side, but it's not difficult to find roads like that in the more rural parts of Japan, and one of the skills you need when driving on such roads is the ability to back up until you can find a wider spot for the oncoming car to pass.

Since there are many blind corners on narrower Japanese streets, there are curved mirrors posted to help you see oncoming cars or pedestrians, although learning to drive while being aware of these mirrors is quite a challenge -- they just don't enter my vision at all.

Japan is a great place with a lot to offer many people, whether you're interested in learning the language, making good friends or just surfing the weirdness (of which there is plenty).

One area where I feel America beats Japan handily its university system, which provides an incredibly rich array of options for anyone wanting to broaden their horizons. I've got a friend who worked for a major computer company doing a job that was not terribly fulfilling for him (I believe "soul crushing" were his exact words). When he was laid off a couple of years ago, he decided to make a big change by going back to school and getting an art degree.

Although Japan's competitive university system does do some good by helping students set goals for themselves early on, one downside is that almost no one has a hope of getting into a major university unless they're near the age of 18 and are very focused on their studies -- going back to school in your thirties or forties is almost unthinkable.

Japanese universities are inflexible in other ways, for example each major is generally walled off from the others, with little ability for students to experience a broad range of subjects.

If you're a poly sci major and decided you want to switch to education, you're going to have to start your entire college career over from scratch, rather than being able to change majors and keep most of your units.

Back during my time at SDSU (affectionately called "Suds University" by students because of all the beer we drank), students deciding they wanted to change majors was a regular occurrence, and even encouraged by the school, since the whole point of a university is to help students find their way.

Seasonal changing of clothes

2009-07-08T17:07:00.005+09:00

Received 02.10.2008

Do you that rustling noise?

It's the sound of millions of Japanese students, mostly in junior high and high school, changing from their summer to their winter uniforms.

Today is the day for koromo-gae (koh-roh-moh GA-eh), meaning "seasonal changing of clothes," when Japanese students will switch from their light uniforms for summer to their heavier uniforms for winter, which they all do on the same day, from Kyushu to Hokkaido. (Okinawa, being extra warm, gets to wear their summer uniforms for two months longer than the rest of the country.)

Of course, the weather doesn't always get the memo, and at the end of September it got really cold in Japan, forcing my son to go to school shivering in his summer uniform...and of course, now that the uniform change has come, it's gotten really warm again, so he'll be sweating.

Like many aspects of Japan there's more to the clothes-changing custom than meets the eye, and it turns out that it dates back to the Heian Period (794-1185), when the Emperor would commemorate the seasons by officially changing his ceremonial kimonos from winter to summer or vice-versa.

You can pick almost any area to compare Japan with the U.S.: history, culture, sports -- or if you like, convenience stores. The modern combini came to Japan in 1974 with the opening of the first Seven-Eleven here, a project which got its start when Japanese businessman Hideo Shimizu took a bus trip across the U.S. looking for the "next big thing" and fell in love with the idea of stores that offered items customers might need to buy on short notice, sold in a uniform way.

Now there are dozens of convenience store chains here, including Lawson ("your town's hot station"), Sunkus (the name is a bizarre merging of "sun" and "thanks"), FamilyMart, MiniStop, Heart-In, and Yamazaki Daily Store.

While most of the foods sold at U.S. convenience stores are pre-packaged and highly processed, many of the offerings in their Japanese counterparts are downright wholesome, with traditional Japanese-style food (be nto and onigiri), Western favorites like cucumber and strawberry sandwiches, bread products including sliced bread as well as specialty items like Curry Pan, a good selection of salads, dozens of types of bottled Asian and Western teas, aloe-flavored yogurt, and so on.

Convenience stores are the salvation of the single male since there are enough healthy choices that you can usually eat pretty well there without resorting to that most famous of bachelor foods, instant ramen, although they sell that, too. You won't find the iconic Slurpee or Big Gulp at Seven-Elevens in Japan, but I'd give them up any day in exchange for niku-man, a steamed Chinese bun filled with meat that's great in the Winter.

Combini offer other forms of convenience, too, like a full color copier and digital photograph printer, the ability to pay your electric and phone bills at the cash register, shipping services for sending packages, and increasingly, real banking servic es, including making cash withdrawals and deposits using the smart ATM.

That first pilot store back in 1974 has really paid off: Seven-Eleven's parent company Seven&i Holdings purchased its parent company in 2005 and now owns the brand worldwide.

The Japanese, they take their gift-giving seriously, a fact that I was reminded of while in Tokyo yesterday. I was passing through Ueno Station, one of my favorite parts of Tokyo, and I saw an interesting shop selling omiyage (oh-mee-YAH-gay, souvenirs) of Tokyo, with the interesting name of Gift Island.

They offered all manner of exotic sweets for sale, from the famous Tokyo Banana (banana-shaped cakes) to Goma Tamago (a traditional manju cake shaped like an egg and made with black sesame seeds, supposedly very healthy) to the fabulous castella, a cake rich in eggs that was introduced by the Dutch in the 16th century.

One of my favorite traditional treats is called dora-yaki, which looks to the Western eye to be two pancakes with sweet Japanese beans inside; this is the favorite food of Doraemon the time-traveling robot cat, by the way.

Unnerving experience

2009-07-02T21:50:00.004+09:00

Received 30.09.2008

The Japanese are masters of influencing emotions using voice, and I'm often amazed at the eerie beauty of the voices that enter my ear here.

If you watch anime in Japanese, of course, you know how talented the Japanese voice actresses are, and their ability to bring to life a character that would otherwise be (literally) two-dimensional and inert is one of the major attractions of the genre.

One of the most popular voice actresses in Japan today is Aya Hirano, who provides the voices for Haruhi Suzumiya, Konata from Lucky Star and Misa from Death Note, and she can do the most amazing things with a character.

But the strangely compelling beauty of Japanese voices isn't limited to anime: you can find females who are specially trained to speak in a uniquely soft way in various professions, too, such as female bus guides, who entertain passengers on long sightseeing trips; ground hostesses, those airport employees who call out your flight number in the most delightful sing-song tones; and Japan's legendary elevator girls, the uniformed women who stand in the elevator and announce each floor for you (although they've almost completely disappeared).

It's hard to describe the quality of these sweet voices, which are made possible by weeks or months of vocal training -- there's something about the way they dip down and back up again at the end of a sentence that casts a spell over me.

But speaking in a cute voice isn't just for a few professions with high customer visibility. I'll never forget the time I called NTT, Japan's sprawling telephone and Internet provider, to get help with some computer hardware I was having problems with.

The voice on the other end belonged to an extremely kawaii-sounding female NTT employee, and bastard that I am, I actually expected her to take down my information and then transfer me to some male technician who would tell me how to fix my problem. I was quite surprised when the cute voice quickly proceeded to help me debug my router and fix the TCP/IP problem I'd been having, solving it in no time.

I had to hang my head in shame for a while after that.

In the movie Tron, there's a great scene where you see this sea of cubicles going on forever, an extremely prescient visual for 1982. I'm pretty sure most people wouldn't look at that part of the film and say, "Wow, that'd be a great place to work!" but in Japan, that might not be the case.

Japanese offices are nearly always open, with desks lined up in rows or facing each other so that the only privacy workers have at their desks is whatever reference books they can manage to stack around themselves.

Before starting J-List I worked in the local City Office as a "Coordinator of Internationalization," helping to provide various services to foreigners in our city, and it was a rather unnerving experience, working in a room where 30+ people had a direct line of sight to me at any moment.

Larger organizations use the open floor office model, too.

Once I visited one of our distributors (Tohan) and was surprised to see the entire company working in one cavernous space with rows of desks and hundreds of people buzzing about, without so much as a cubicle wall to hang a Dilbert strip on.

One interesting aspect of this open approach to workspace-building is that the bosses are in the same space as their employees, although usually with their desks set in a special location so they can oversee the employees attached to them.

At least, working in this way adds a layer of transparency and democratization to the company as a whole, even if it wouldn't be much fun to work in.

If you want to learn a language as different from English as Japanese is, you'll need a few things.

First, you'll need to get past the brain's natural resistance to trying to "read" a language comprised of little snakes wriggling on a page, as Japanese looks to be at first, and the best way to accomplish this is to practice hiragana, katakana and kanji until your brain starts recognizing the characterswithout conscious throught. (It takes less time than you'd think.)

You'll need a lot of perseverance, and as wide a range of areas related to the language you can feel passionate about as possible -- this is usually not a problem when it comes to Japan, since there are so many fascinating aspects of the country.

Another thing that really helps with foreign languages is what the Japanese call kan, meaning "sense" or "intuition," and if you are kan ga ii (kahn ga EE, ha ving a good sense about things) you'll be able to intuit the meaning someone is trying to communicate even though you might not know the word per se.

My son and daughter are both preparing for the Eiken English test in a few weeks, but they're going about studying in different ways.

My son, who is very methodical and likes to understand everything about what he's studying, gets hung up on difficult vocabulary, made all the worse by the fact that he's taking a test intended for college-level students yet is only 13.

But we're constantly amazed at how often my daughter, a year younger, is able to pull the correct answer out of her head without actually understanding the material she's studying on a conscious level.

She's got kan, which helps her sense the meaning most of the time.

Waiting longer to start having children

2009-07-02T21:40:00.005+09:00

Received 27.09.2008

Taro Aso is getting down to business as the 92nd Prime Minister of Japan, forming his cabinet quickly after his landslide election.

One of his first moves has been to appoint Yuko Obuchi, the 34-year-old daughter of the former Prime Minister who sadly died in office, as a new Special Minister in Charge of Measures Dealing with the Falling Birth Rate.

Obuchi, who happens to hail from J-List's home prefecture of Gunma, might be the perfect person to serve as poster child for the issue, since she's got a lot of visibility as a young female lawmaker (following recent political trends, she's quite the hottie), and she has a one-year old baby, too.

The problem of shoshika, literally "fewer children-ization" or the increasing dearth of children in Japan, has got a lot of people worried as its effects start to be felt in earnest, and Japan's population is projected to drop from 130 to 100 million by the middle of the century if things don't improve.

Already Japanese cities are being forced to close some elementary schools, tearing them down or re-purposing them for use as general municipal buildings.

There are many reasons why Japanese women are waiting longer to start having children and are having fewer when they do, with everything from the high cost of raising a child to changing social roles to a general lack of patriotic spirit among Japanese suggested.

Prime Minister Aso will likely face more debate on the issue if an election is called in the next few months, as is expected, and the opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) has been floating a plan to pay each household $250 per month for every child they have.

Personally, I'd feel better about bringing children into a world where the government is solvent and not wasting its money in silly ideas, but that's just me.

(This is a chart of the Japanese birth rate, going form 4.5 children per female in 1947 to 1.4 today. The dip you see in the middle is the year of Hinouema, the Year of the Fire Horse, 1966. According to superstition, girls born in this year are supposedly very headstrong, and parents avoid having children in this year to avoid having daughters that can't find husbands.)

I wrote last time that one of the challenges of living in Japan is getting accustomed to Japanese-accented English, sometimes called katakana English because of the way it's filtered through the syllable-based phonetic structure of Japanese.

Back in high school, I listened to the old-school Macross song "0-G Love" for more than a year before it it dawned on me that the phrase was English -- the unfamilar pronunciation confused me enough that I wasn't even able to identify it as my own language.

Of course, everyone has an accent when speaking another language, including me, and I might have similar challenges understanding the local English whether I was in Japan or China or Jamaica.

Part of the probem is, the special nature of Japanese phonology makes words that are a single syllable to us (like "truck") into three when spoken by a Japanese person (torakku, pronounced to-RAH-kkoo).

Some other vocal concepts we take for granted need to be remapped into sounds that exist in Japanese, which is why "where" sounds like "oo-eh-AH" and "twins" comes out like "tsoo-EE-nzoo," which can take a while to get used to.

Then there are words that are used differently here, even though they're ostensibly English, like VIP and UFO, which are pronounced as "veep" and "you-fo."

One of the more interesting aspects of Japanese is their strong tendency to be humble, being polite by putting one's self down in order to raise others up.

If you've ever complimented a Japanese person on their English only to have them deny your compliment strongly, you've experienced what Japanese call kenson (ken-SON, which means humility).

You can see this at work in Japan's group culture -- each member of a group of people trying to decide which restaurant they all want to eat at will gently probe and test the other members before putting forth a suggestion.

Successful learners of a language inevitably go beyond mere grammar and vocabulary, actually internalizing the values of the group you're interacting with.

Another side of Japan's famous humility can be seen in the times and places where apologies are used, often in situations that English speakers would have trouble comprehending.

When I first got to Japan, some friends took me to a sento, a public bath with a sauna.

It was late, near closing time, and we were a little slow getting out of the bath, which caused inconvenience for the staff who were trying to clean up so they could go home.

I thanked the lady at the counter as I left, using the Japanese phrase arigatou gozaimashita.

But my Japanese friends corrected me, saying I should apologize instead, using the word sumimasen deshita.

I was confused -- why apologize when I'm trying to thank the lady for letting us stay past closing time? "Thank you sounds cheap," I was told. "In this case it's better to use words of apology like sumimasen."

Manga Diplomacy

2009-07-02T21:35:00.002+09:00

Received 25.09.2008

Would you get your car serviced at a Speed Racer Service Center? I sure would.

It's an interesting gimmick by entrepreneur and former Super GT race driver Tetsuji Tamanaka, who licensed the characters from Tatsunoko Production's venerable "Mach GoGoGo" to create a chain of Speed Racer-branded service centers, gas stations and used-car dealerships designed to bring a well-known face to the "total carlife support" they offer their customers.

The familiarity of the character Go Mifune (as Speed is called in Japanese) combined with the current income level of the generation that grew up watching the original show has proven to be a big win for the company, which is opening franchise shops throughout Japan that do everything from buying used cars for sale through its national network to auto painting and that annoying sha-ken car inspection that drivers of older cars must pay $1500 for every two years.

This isn't the only company that ties anime to car culture: there's also a chain of car repair shops that uses the famous Space Battleship Yamato logo and characters to promote themselves.

These businesses are somewhat unique though: while anime is enjoyed by literally everyone at some point in their lives here, it's not usually something you see while driving down Main Street very often.

Like Cowboy Bebop and Akira, Mach GoGoGo is one of those shows that became far more popular internationally than it ever was inside of Japan, and I for one am glad to see that Speed Racer hasn't been forgotten in the country of his birth.

Japan's next Prime Minister has been decided, and as expected, it's to be Taro Aso, who received more than 95% of the votes by his ruling Liberal Democrat Party.

One of the few really interesting Japanese politicians, he worked his way through college at Stanford before his parents called him home to keep him from becoming too "Americanized," so he went to England to complete his studies instead.

He mined diamonds in Sierra Leone, represented Japan in the Olympics in 1976 at Clay Pigeon Shooting, and he's quite technically minded, having assembled his own PCs from the motherboard up for the past ten years.

When discussing Japanese politicians, the word "thoughorbred" often comes up, and this term applies to Aso-san as well: his father was a cabinet member, his grandfather a Prime Minister, and he's the great great grandson of Toshimichi Okubo, one of the most important reformers of the Meiji Restoration of 1868.

I t's well know that Aso-san is a fan of Japan's manga and anime culture, which has helped him attain popularity among younger Japanese, especially among 2channelers and the English anime-related blogosphere.

He supposedly reads three volumes of manga a day, sometimes on the Diet floor, and much of the recent recognition of the importance of Japanese popular culture have come from Aso-san, who has said he would like to create an international "Nobel Prize" for manga. popular culture have come from Aso-san, who has said he would like to create an international "Nobel Prize" for manga.

His interest in mixing comics with politics -- for example, he promoted education about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima using the famous manga story Hadashi no Gen (Barefoot Gen) -- has caused the term "Manga Diplomacy" to be coined, and it will be interesting to see how his ability to name all the Lucky Star characters will color his leadership.

One of the most refreshing things about Japan is their ability to have elections without contemplating the religion of the candidates in question in the slightest.

When I mentioned to my wife that Aso-san happened to be a devout Roman Catholic, a rarity in a Buddhist country like Japan, my wife was surprised to hear it. At no time had the issue even been brought up by the Japanese news media.

When foreigners come to live in Japan, there are certain skills they will need to acquire. When I first arrived in Japan back in 1991, I was surprised to see that almost none of the roads in Japanese cities had names, which made it extremely difficult to learn my way around. I had to get good at visualizing routes inside my brain and learn how to refer to roads in vague terms ("the road with the beauty shop and the convenience store") when asking for directions.

Another skill is getting accustomed to the accents of Japanese people you'll be interacting with, which can be quite a challenge, as your brain doesn't immediately understand that someone asking for uu-OH-tah wants a glass of water.

When speaking Japanese with people, you'll need to get good at identifying the subjects of sentences since they're often left off when the meaning is otherwise clear from the context, or at least faking unders tanding in certain situations, such as the time I was picked to stand up and conduct the Maebashi Philharmonic playing Beethoven's Symphony No. 5.

Afterwards, the MC asked me something that I didn't catch, and rather than embarrass myself on the stage with hundreds of people watching me, I replied with the non sequitur so desu ne, which should mean "yes, that's so" but in effect doesn't mean anything.

"My voice is my credential"

2009-07-02T21:27:00.005+09:00

Received 23.09.2008

Autumn is upon us, and in Japan that means one thing: School Sports Festival, a special event held at all elementary schools where kids run relays, do tug-of war, have egg toss competitions, perform dances that they've been practicing for months, and so on.
Known as undo-kai in Japanese, pronounced "OON-doh-kai" and having nothing to do with the undo feature on your computer, the Japanese tradition of a special day when kids can show off their athletic abilities to their parents began in 1874 when an English teacher named Frederick William Strange organized the first "outdoor games" as a way for Japanese to learn about Western sports.

Today, Sports Festivals are held across Japan, which turns out to be quite profitable for companies like Panasonic and Sony, who are all too happy to sell this year's hot new video cameras to all the oya-baka ("parent-fool"), the word for parents who go ga-ga filming their own kids. Saturday was my daughter's last Sports Festival of elementary school, and we dutifully gathered to cheer her on during the various events she was in.

It's an annual tradition at the school that the sixth graders treat everyone to a brass band performance of the theme to Space Battleship Yamato, aka Star Blazers, and everyone did a great job.

During the Sports Festival, I engaged in a little hobby of mine: hunting for bizarre English T-shirts. For some reason, the parents who attend these sporting events often choose to wear T-shirts with the most interesting English phrases on them, so every year I walk around with my camera and see what I can see.

My search got off on the right foot when I came across a young woman whose shirt said, "Gluttons: Smile Positive and Good Heart," followed by a man whose shirt proclaimed "Make Up Foundation For This World." Some of the slogans I saw seemed quite deep ("Music: Make a Recording, Life 83% Full"), while others were more perplexing ("Sense of Pitch 1962, Rosegirl").

Sometimes the messages were silly ("You're my Hearo [sic], Fashion Icon!!") while others tried to offer insight into that elusive concept of "freedom" which Japanese often associate with the USA ("Liberty Bell is Prime Wish -- I Love Me").

Of course, no one gives a second thought about what their T-shirts have printed on them in Japan, since for most people, English is primarily a decoration that's considered kakko ii (cool) and not something actually used for communication, which is why there's no problem with displaying a message like, "Definite Difference: That Oneself Cannot Be Ruled Is Not Free."

I got a good laugh the other day while watching an episode of Comedy Central's The Daily Show.

During the "Moments of Zen" compilation of coverage of the two political conventions, British comedian John Oliver tried to walk into the BBC's preparation room, despite not having an official pass. "I'm British," he said, with his proper accent, "and you don't need a credential to be British. My voice is my credential." It was extra amusing to me because I'd done a very similar thing in Japan.

A decade or so ago, they held an international speed-skating competition in my prefecture, so I decided to go check it out. As I went to find my seats in the bleachers, I happened to notice a door for coaches and other VIPs, most of whom were from the U.S. or Europe, and on a hunch I wondered if I could get into that room just by being American.

The Japanese person watching the door didn't want to let me in at first, but the right mixture of appearing to be in a hurry and speaking English at him rapidly got the job done, and I got to enjoy the skating competition while helping myself to beers and munchies.

It wasn't very nice of me, of course, but it was an experiment I felt had to be made at the time.

Cash

2009-07-02T21:05:00.002+09:00

Received 20.09.2008

Each year the organization that publishes the Standardized Kanji Test announces the "kanji of the year," the character that best sums up the events of the past twelve months.

Previous characters have included inochi (life) in 2005 to mark the terrible young lives lost in suicides that year, tora (tiger) due to the historic Hanshin Tigers' victory in the Japan pennant, and ikusa (war) in 2001, when the U.S. invaded Iraq.

The kanji of the year for 2007 was nise (nii-SAY), meaning "fake" or "fraud," due to the large number of food-related scandals that became news, including a famous restaurant caught labeling normal meat as high-grade Kobe beef and serving leftovers to customers, a confectionery company that sprayed water on stale slices of cake so they'd look fresh enough to sell, and Hokkaido-based "Meat Hope," which despite its awesome name got in trouble for intentionally mis-labeling its products. So far, 2008 has been more of the same as food scandals continue.

The most egregious one so far has been a company called Mikasa Foods, which bought inedible rice that had been contaminated with pesticides and seawater (it said) for use in glue production.

In reality, it relabeled the rice and sold it to more than 370 companies, which used it to manufacture everything from food to sake to beer and more -- bleah.

It's time for Traffic Safety Week in Japan, when awareness of various automotive safety issues is raised throughout the country.

Originally begun in 1948 in response to the increase in motor traffic in regional Japanese cities, the government officially adopted a twice-annual Traffic Safety Week system in 1962, designating April 6-15 in the spring and September 21-30 in the fall as special periods to promote "safety driving" (as the Japanese invariably call it). Everywhere you go for the next ten days, signs and flags will remind drivers to slow down, and there'll be plenty of police checkpoints looking for drunk drivers, people not using their seatbelts, and so on.

Since Japan is crisscrossed by so many railroads there's a big problem with drivers trying to run train crossings as they close, and during this week groups like the Lion's Club will stand at train crossings wearing Haruhi Suzumiya-like "traffic safety officer" armbands to make sure drivers stop at the train crossings properly.

The Japanese care a great deal about traffic safety, and often carry Shinto good luck charms specifically made for that purpose.

I remember my first payday after coming to work as a teacher in Japan, being handed an envelope containing my entire month's salary in cash, which was quite a surprise to me.

Japan has always been a very cash-oriented society, with no equivalent to personal checks or money orders, and when making purchases most people will pay in 10,000 yen bills.

Credit cards exist here of course, but they're much less common than in the U.S., and to get one you need to pass a strict credit check and have been employed at the same company for at least a year -- a far cry from the pre-approved credit cards I'd get in my mailbox back in college.

A few years ago, we bought the plot of land behind our home, I remember going to pay for it in cash, counting out the bills for the previous owner as we finalized the contract.

Of course, the only thing constant in the world is change, and Japanese are slowly adopting alternate ways of paying for products, such as Suica, a rechargeable contractless smart card that can be used to pay for train tickets, food purchases and so on.

One of the most innovative ideas I've seen in a long time are the cell phone with Suica cards built into them, so all you need is your phone and you can pay for just about anything.

Descent from heaven

2009-07-02T21:04:00.003+09:00

Received 18.09.2008

I went to Tokyo to meet a friend yesterday.

He's working for the prestigious Tokyo University, the top ranked school in Japan, and it was interesting to take in a part of the city I'd not seen much of before.

The hotel we stayed at was called Eminasu, and I was surprised to see a large sign stating proudly that the hotel had been built with money from the National Pension System, the equivalent to Social Security in Japan.

Yes, there's so much money sloshing around in funds like the pension system and Japan Post deposit accounts that legislators are quite unable to keep their paws off it, and regularly launch grand hakomono (lit. "box-thing") construction projects to foster economic development, provide services for citizens and (of course) secure lucrative employment for the former government employees who were directly involved with said projects when they retire. (This is known as amakudari or "descent from heaven.")

Sometimes the system works okay, as in the case of the hotel we stayed at, providing a good room at a slightly subsidized rate since the government-operated hotel didn't need to generate a profit.

But there are plenty of horror stories of massively wasteful construction projects made with taxpayer funds, like a sprawling resort hotel at the top of a mountain that no one ever stayed at and a now-bankrupt theme park designed as a replica of a Turkish village, complete with a full-sized Trojan horse.

How fitting.

Most Western nations are facing the problem of ageing populations, but Japan is really leading the pack, with its combination of a very low birth rate, healthier diet and a good medical system.

Japanese older people are just like elderly from any other part of the world, sometimes friendly and interesting to talk to, and other times unwilling to take crap from anyone as they dive for the last pair of shoes at a department store bargain sale.

As an American living in Japan, it's can be interesting to strike up conversations with older Japanese, who will often talk about what the war years were like for them, or the time they saw General MacArthur, and there's an unspoken acknowledgement of all that's changed in the past 60 years.

Since it's generally expected that the oldest son or daughter will take over the family house and care for the parents in their silver years, elderly folks generally have the benefit of l ots of family around them, at least in the semi-rural prefecture where I live.

Partially because of this system, and also (I've been told) because Japanese rarely leave the area where their family grave is located, you don't see people migrating to a different part of the country when they retire as is the case with Florida.

The main social activity of Japanese retired people seems to be going to the doctor's office every day to sit and chat with friends while they wait to be seen by the doctor for some (usually imagined) pain, and if you ever get sick in Japan you'd better have a strategy for getting to the doctor's office early. While most of the older people living in my neighborhood are very genki (healthy, full of energy), there's one poor woman whose back is stuck at a 90 degree angle, making her unable to stand up at all.

I'd always assumed this problem came a lifetime of planting rice by hand, but supposedly it's caused by a chronic vitamin B1 deficiency that was a chronic problem in the first few decades of the 20th century.

If you've paid attention while watching Japanese anime or, ahem, other videos in Japanese, you've might have noticed the word ne. This is an interesting Japanese grammatical particle that usually goes on the ends of sentences and serves several purposes, mostly related to asking for confirmation of information or agreement with an opinion.

Here are two examples:

Aisu kohii futatsu desu ne? You'd like two glasses of iced coffee, is that right?
Kyou wa atsui desu ne. It's hot today, isn't it?

Other functions of the all-purpose Japanese particle ne include softening a sentence so its meaning it less harsh (Chotto furorimashita ne.

You've gained a little weight, haven't you?); emphasizing what you want to say (Kondo chanto kiite kudasai, ne. Please listen closely next time, alright?); working as a pause in sentences, like "um" in English; and to get the attention of the listener before speaking. Girls use ne more often than men and with a higher intonation, so males should use the word with caution lest they appear effeminate, although guys speaking Japanese will mess this up all the time (it's part of our charm).

Even if you don't speak any Japanese at all, just memorize the phrase ne! and pull it out whenever a Japanese person says something you want to agree with, and watch the look of surprise on their face.

Gone on to the next world

2009-07-02T21:03:00.003+09:00

Received 15.09.2009

"How many Taco Bell sauce packets do you have in your glove compartment?" I've got a lot, and whenever I go to the U.S. I make sure to bring back more, since they're awfully convenient and taste good, too.

We had soft tacos for dinner the other day, and it was a reverent experience, with everyone making each taco with care and eating it slowly, savoring each bite.

Unlike Hong Kong with its mish-mash of food cultures, with all manner of cuisine from Asia, Europe and everywhere else mixed together, Japan can be rather closed-minded about what it eats, which makes it hard to find some of my favorite items.

The amazing thing about the tortillas we ate this time, though, was that they were bought here -- I kept re-reading the Japanese text on the package, unable to believe my eyes.

Could this be the beginning of a renaissance of culinary internationalization in Japan? My fingers are so crossed.

Japan has the best Internet connectivity in the world, according to a newly released study which compared actual data-transfer rates and overall customer satisfaction by Internet users around the world.

Sweden came in second, followed by the Netherlands (#3), South Korea (#5), Germany (#9), France (#12), the U.S. (#16) and the U.K. (#24).

The results were interesting to me because Japan lagged behind the rest of the world in adopting the Internet throughout the 1990s, with significantly higher prices and lower connection speeds.

A lot of the slow Internet development was due to NTT, the 800 lb gorilla of the telecommunications world here, a former government-run monopoly that owned all the lines ISPs needed to lease in order to do business, and which generally kept a lot of competition out of the marketplace by functioning as the country's largest ISP directly.

It turns out that having a less competition might ha ve been a good thing in the case of Japan, since NTT and its subsidiary companies were able to execute technology roll-outs more efficiently than if it'd been up to a hodge-podge of companies, as is the case with the U.S.

J-List connects to the net through hikari fiber or an optical fiber line, although it was a long wait to get our office wired for the fast connection.

We actually had to make a formal request to the mayor's office (my wife happens to have the same last name as him, so we let the staff think we were related), and they passed along our request to NTT, who made sure J-List was the first customer connected in our city.

Having fast, efficient Internet despite the lack of competitive pressures might seem puzzling, but it's quite common for Japan to seemingly violate the rules of Capitalism yet have things turn out okay in the end.

"Children who are able to greet others properly won't be steered wrong in life." This is one of the many tidbits of wisdom hung on metal signs put up by our local PTA, and every time I drive down a street I haven't been on before I'm strangely compelled to keep my eyes open for new signs.

"People who don't show respect to their parents won't receive it from their own children."

Japan is a unique industrialized nation in that its ideas on morality were never based on the Bible, unlike Western countries, and I've always been interested in how the Japanese define the concept.

All elementary school kids have a class called dotoku (morality) in which they learn about various (of course secular) moral issues, such as how recognize and stop ijime, how to be thankful to others, and so on. "Weak-minded children are caused by over-protective parents."

Yes, pinning down the basis of Japan's thinking on morality is a challenge.

Is it based on Buddhism? I haven't been able to identify any active lessons that Japanese Buddhism imparts to its followers other than to be respectful of your family members, especially those who have gone on to the next world.

It's a question I hope to find the answer to some day.

Bettering yourself

2009-06-22T16:45:00.011+09:00

Received 13.09.2008

Happy Wedding!
To commemorate the 25th anniversary of Fist of the North Star, the popular manga and anime set in a post-Apocalyptic future in which everyone looks strangely like extras from Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, the publishers are holding an actual wedding ceremony for the two main characters, Kenshiro and the woman he spent years battling for, Yuria.

On Saturday, 777 lucky fans who won invitations to the event will dress up in their best formal suits to attend the special wedding, which is being put on by the famous "charisma wedding planner" Akemi Ariga.

The event will be similar to the fake "funeral" for Kenshiro's brother, the warlord Raoh, and should be widely attended by the media. You can always tell someone who's on his way back from a wedding in Japan, because he's carrying a large bag of gifts he received from the new couple containing things like katsuobushi (dried bonito fish), seki han (red-colored rice with beans) and manju cakes.

Tomorrow there will be 777 Fist of the North Star fans carrying some serious otaku cred home with them on the train. Although they're fictional characters, we certainly wish Ken and Yuria lots of happiness. You are already married!

I write often about how Japanese consider themselves to be a decade or so "behind" the U.S. and Europe, and almost take it for granted that their country is less advanced than the West.

For example, I've heard people here remark that no one from Japan could have created a company like YouTube, capable of serving videos to every point on the globe, because no one here could think on such a nakedly large scale.

Although it's all too easy to judge Japan from my American point of view, there are some core areas that could be improved, starting with thinking about the web.

Yahoo Japan's video site would like to be #1 here, but it not only requires Windows 2000/XP/Vista to work, but you have to be using Internet Explorer, which is a real bummer for Linux, Mac and all Firefox users.

Japanese web companies don't seem terribly interested in the outside world, either: Mixi.jp, the leading Facebook-like site in Japan, requir es an email address with a Japanese ending (yahoo.co.jp as opposed to yahoo.com) to sign up. Banks can be frustrating, too.

Back in my single days, I went hitchhiking up to Hokkaido, being sure to bring my bank card so I could get money from the "cash corner" (ATM) when I needed it.

Unfortunately, banks and their ATMs were closed for the Golden Week holidays back then, so I wasn't able to get any cash out all week. (Banks have gotten better, but are still frustrating -- it still costs $6 to send $50 to someone's bank account, as there are no personal checks in Japan.)

In the past, many of the most innovative ideas have flowed from Japan, like the Sony Walkman or the idea of putting a camera in a cell phone, but I don't think something like Skype could ever have been invented here.

The Japanese like tests, and there are a mind-boggling number of them offered to people of all ages, from the most popular English test (the Step Test, called Eiken here) to tests for penmanship and kanji writing ability, knowledge of world historical sites, the ability to memorize train schedules and even use of a kendama.

Japan's culture of bettering yourself through study and competitive testing was imported from China, where the idea of awarding government jobs based on academic ability rather than, say, giving them to the sons of current officials, emanated from the teachings of Confucius.

When I first arrived in Japan, I wanted a way to make myself study Japanese harder, and I found the perfect goal: the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT), held every December.

The test is set up in four levels, with level 4 being the easiest (hiragana, katakana and a limited number of kanji) and level 1 being required for entrance into a Japanese university, which worked out great because it's not hard to raise yourself up one level with each year of study.

The deadline for applying for the test this year is coming up on Sept. 20, so if you'd like to give the test a try, see this site for more information.

Let's go to Kyoto!

2009-06-18T21:56:00.006+09:00

Received 11.09.2008

My daughter's been quite happy in school recently, after a trip she took with her class a few weeks ago to Kamakura, the historic town known for its many beautiful temples.

As part of her Ministry of Education-mandated English class (they recently decided that Japanese were never going to get good at English unless they started studying the language earlier), the sixth graders had a special assignment: they were to approach the foreign tourists and ask them some questions that had been prepared, like where they were from and what they liked about Japan.

It was quite a challenging task, since the students had taken their English lessons from their normal Japanese homeroom teacher who doesn't actually speak the language at all, and most of the kids weren't able to make themselves understood by the foreign tourists.

It was the perfect moment for my daughter, who came to everyone's rescue and engaged the gaijin visitors, getting them to come and answer everyone's questions while she translated.

After that, the other kids in my daughter's class had a bit more respect for her.

Although anime has become a part of our world culture, watched by fans from all over the globe, the word anime has some interesting history to it.

From the early years of the industry, the most common term for animation in Japan was doga, meaning "moving pictures," but when the groundbreaking Tetsuwan Atom (Atom Boy) aired in 1957, it was marketed as "TV manga," starting the early trend of referring to animation with the same word that's used for comic books, manga.

The first known example of the word anime being used as an abbreviation for "animation" was in 1965, in an industry magazine for independent film directors, and the word started to spread out to fans from this point.

By the time the popular World Masterpiece Anime Theatre series began in 1975, bringing classic works of children's literature like Heidi, Girl of the Alps and A Dog of Flanders to viewers, the word a nime was universally used to refer to the genre.

One of the biggest events for anime fandom as a whole was Tokuma Shoten's launching of popular anime magazine Animage in 1978, which went on to define many of the concepts of the genre that we take for granted now, bringing all fans together under the same big tent.

Although the word anime is often used in the west to mean the opposite of traditional Western animation, Japanese will readily refer to Disney films using the term.

Every visitor to Japan develops, I think, a special relationship with Kyoto, the beautiful city that was capital of Japan for most of the country's history.

Founded in 794 as Heian-Kyo, it was made in imitation of the great Chinese cities of the era, sporting a Manhattan-style grid pattern with wide, straight roads that are actually named, quite convenient as streets are generally not named in Japan.

Of course, everyone loves the beautiful old temples, and whenever I'm in the city I've got a mental list of must-see sites that are among my favorites, from the bamboo forest at Arashiyama to Nijo Castle with its anti-ninja squeaking floors to Kiyomizu-dera, nearly destroyed in Godzilla vs. Mothra.

History can be found at every corner, for example on the Gojo Bridge, the scene of a famous sword battle between the 7-foot tall warrior monk Benkei and the charismatic Yoshitsune more than 1000 years ago.

When you go to Kyoto, you suddenly become linked with every other foreigner who's ever visited the cty.

Even Albert Einstein, who spent several months lecturing in Japan, loved the city.

As fall approaches, we'll be under attack from TV commercials reminding us ofhow beautiful the city is this time of year, with the slogan, "I've got an idea! Let's go to Kyoto!"

Raw egg in sake

2009-06-18T21:45:00.006+09:00

Received 09.09.2008

There's a sad statistic that's on the rise in Japan these days: divorce.

The combination of the country's rapidly aging society, high stress levels and a new law that enables a woman to claim up to half of her husband's company pension is causing the number of older couples getting a "vintage year divorce" to rise.

When I was an English teacher, I taught a wide range of students, including a fair number of housewives, and I remember being surprised by the venom some of the women were capable of spitting when discussing their husbands.

I didn't understand at the time that at least some of this husband-bashing was part of a Japanese social custom you might call "out-humbling each other," as women try to show that they have the most worthless, lazy husband in the room. (Japanese mothers and grandmothers will do the same thing when discussing their own children with others, having competitions to see whose kids were the most baka, and I've had to expressly forbid this kind of talk in my own home.)

The divorce rate in Japan is still comparatively low -- currently around 2.2 per 1000 people per year, compared with 4 in the U.S. and 2.6 in the U.K. -- but finding someone who is batsu-ichi (lit. "one strike out") is a lot more common than it has been in the past.

Coupled with the trend of women either marrying much later or not at all, it Japan has some tough issues to face as the 21st century progresses.

I remember back in the 1980s, when Japan's educational system was held up as a success story for other nations to follow. While there certainly are some good elements the country's approach to education -- like the idea of using competition to get students to become goal-oriented and apply themselves in ways I could never have dreamed of when I was that age -- not every aspect of schools here would be appreciated in other countries.

The primary goal of education in Japan seems to be to help create happy members of society through inclusion in groups, and there are several mechanisms for promoting this appreciation of your own place as a member of the larger group, for example the complex system of sports and other character-building clubs that students are compelled to join in Junior High School.

Whereas American Junior High and High School kids will each have random schedules, Japanese classes are fixed, with all 40 students of class 3-A staying in the same classroom for every hour of every day, as different teachers come and go depending on what the next subject is.

One side effect of this is that all classes in Elementary and Junior High learn the exact same material, no matter what their individual level might be.

My daughter was taking some lessons with a private tutor in the U.S. over the summer, and I was discussing the possibility that she might be borderline dyslexic with her teacher, since I am myself.

The tutor asked me, "Well, if that's the case, they must have some kind of special class for her in Japan, right?" The answer is no -- unless a child is so different they're not able to go to their normal school, everyone will be treated exactly the same no matter what, the better for the harmony of the group.
If you love "corn potage," then get to Japan as fast as you can, since people here just can't get enough of creamed corn soup. Most every famires (family restaurant) sports a Drink Bar where you can help yourself to as many glasses of iced coffee or melon soda as you'd like for 200 yen or so, and nearby, there's usually a Soup Bar with a big pot of delicious creamed corn soup -- mmm.

As an American, when I think of soup I think of the Campbell's classics like chicken noodle, tomato, and vegetable beef, but these are as alien here in Japan as Green Tea Butterscotch and Rose Flavored Gum are in most parts of the world.

Other types of soup the Japanese like include creamed pumpkin or carrot soups, healthy wakame (seaweed) or miso soup, or if at an Italian restaurant, perhaps some minestrone.

When you get sick in the U.S., most people think of eating chicken soup, but in Japan the most common remedi es are drinking a tea with ginger in it or swallowing down a raw egg in sake -- yum.

This is kampo

2009-06-18T21:39:00.003+09:00

Received 06.09.2008

Don't tell anyone, but I'm on a diet.

You could call it the "iPhone diet" because I'm using one of the many applications (iTunes link) for my iPhone to track daily calorie intake.

My plan is to eat whatever I want while accurately recording everything, which will help me identify the stuff I've been eating that's the most harmful.

To help me out, my wife bought some bad-tasting medicine, saying, "Now, this is kampo, so it will definitely work." A word that literally means "Chinese way," kampo refers to the traditional herbal medicine of China, and it occupies an almost mythical place in the minds of the Japanese, in effect being a complete class of medical science that's separate from Western medicine.

Many products, from energy drinks to various "enhancers" to Yomeshu (a kind of medicinal sake loaded with Chinese herbs) advertise themselves as making use of the magical power of kampo to relieve symptoms.

Many kampo medicines have the full backing of the medical community here, and health insurance even covers them. In the U.S., however, traditional Chinese medicines are completely ignored by almost every major company.

It'd be interesting if there were some really effective drugs sitting right under our noses that have been in use in China for thousands of years.

For some reason, studying the etymologies of Japanese company names is fascinating to me.

Like how the founder of Canon got the name for his company from the Bodhisattva Kannon, a kind of Goddess of Mercy revered by Japanese Buddhists, or how the name Epson was formed from "Son of Electric Printer."

When you study Japanese, you start to see these famous brands in a new light, for example watchmaker Seiko is written with characters meaning "delicate and minute engineering," while Nikon is an abbreviation of Nihon Kogaku ("Japan Optical").

Yakult got their name from the Esperanto word for yogurt, which was suggested by a Polish researcher working with the company at the time, and Subaru is the local name for the Pleiades star cluster, deemed fitting as the company was formed by merging six smaller companies together.

Bandai's name is rather complex: it comes from Bandai Fueki, one of the books in Sun Tzu's The Art of War, and the phrase means "forever unchanging," since children's toys should be something that are constant throughout the ages. A lot of Japanese company names have the word ya at the end, such as toy maker Kotobukiya or the bookstore chain Kinokuniya.

This is a character meaning "roof" which is used to denote a shop, like hana-ya (a flower shop) or ramen-ya (a ramen shop) in addition to being part of various proper names.

There's a new sporting goods store that just opened in our city called Himaraya, which is great since it fits the standard Japanese naming practice yet makes you think of the mighty Himalayas. Their official company slogan is pretty cool, by the way: "We have a fine dream."

One of the cardinal rules for gaijin coming to Japan is, try your best to make it over here as a university student.

College life in Japan is a kind of magical time between childhood and adulthood, mercifully free of the stress that normally comes with studying at university, where you can make lifelong friends and see Japan from a viewpoint you won't ever get to enjoy again. I was too poor to come to Japan when I was in college, so I had to come here as a shakai-jin, a "society person" or full-time worker, which colored my experiences in a different way, but I'd have given anything to be able to visit Japan during school.

Many universities offer study abroad programs that allow students to spend a semester or a year living in Japan, so if you or a Japan-focused young person you know would like to come to Japan for a year, start looking into what's available.

Remember my theory that every young American should be made to live for a year outside their home country, which would do wonders for the way we view our own country and the rest of the world.

"Discrimination"

2009-06-18T21:31:00.005+09:00

Received 04.09.2008

Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda surprised everyone by suddenly announcing his resignation on Monday.

He's stepping down, he says, to take responsibility over the political stalemate that's grown between his ruling Liberty Democratic Party and the opposition Democratic Party of Japan, which has control of half the Japanese legislature and which is stubbornly resisting working with the LDP to resolve various issues.

Incredibly, this is the 10th leadership change since I came to Japan in 1991, compared with only three in the U.S. and Britain during the same period, which illustrates a real problem with Japan: the near total lack of long-term quality leadership.

Of all the recent head honchos in Japan, only the popular Junichi Koizumi was able to overcome the strange phenomenon of Japanese politicians withholding their support for their own leaders the minute they try to lead long enough to enact any reforms -- I really have to feel sorry for Fukuda-san, who was never given a break by anyone.

The anime-watching world is all aflutter with the hopes that Fukuda's second-in-command Taro Aso will become the next PM. Aso-san is famous for being an otaku, known for carrying volumes of manga with him onto the Diet floor and calling for the government to support artists and companies exporting manga and anime to the world.

In addition to his appreciation for Japan's popular culture, Aso-san is a maverick in other ways, being Roman Catholic in a very Buddhist nation, and fluent in English after studying at Stanford and the London School of Economics as well as spending two years mining for diamonds in Africa.

Next time you're in Osaka, consider visiting the Monofuku Ando Memorial Ramen Museum, a sprawling facility commemorating the achievements of the Taiwan-born Japanese inventor of instant ramen.

In the postwar years, Japanese were eating bread made with wheat flower brought in by the occupying U.S. military, and Momofuku (then operating a small business extracting salt from seawater) wondered why they didn't eat noodles instead, which were more familiar to the Japanese people.

In 1957, a bank he was director of went under, taking his personal finances down along with it. In order to get out of debt, he returned to his idea about noodles, trying to find a more convenient way to prepare them.

The result was Chikin [sic] Ramen, a delicious chicken flavored raman that's still being sold after fifty years. (I had some for lunch today.)

At the museum, you can see different varieties of Cup Ramen from around the world, like broccoli ramen from Germany or curry flavored noodles from India, which are made without the soup base so that the noodles can be eaten with the hands, as is the custom in that country.

Cup Ramen in all Western countries have noodles that are shorter than in Japan, to make them easier to eat with a fork. The museum sports a virtual reality room showing what happens as ramen is made, from the viewpoint of the raman itself, and afterwards you can mosey up to the Instant Ramen Bar and order some ramen with custom toppings that you can specify.

The most common word for "foreigner" in Japanese is gaijin, written using the characters for "outside" and "person."

While ostensibly referring to any non-Japanese person, the term is most often used to mean American and European foreigners, and never to, say, Chinese or Koreans, who are referred to by their own specific nationality (e.g. chugoku-jin, kankoku-jin).

Depending on who uses it and in what way, the word gaijin can sound derogatory to some, which is why TV newscasters will always use the more polite gaikokujin or "outside-country-person" instead.

Recently there's been some discussion on various blogs about how bad the term gaijin really is, and weather we should be trying to stop its use.

My own take is that it's just a word, and no worse than the term "alien," which sounds a little strange when you've grown up watching sci-fi films then realize it can refer to people from other countries, too.

The reality is that the majority of the "discrimination" many foreigners get in Japan is positive -- people offering to pay you $40 an hour to speak your native language with their kids, pressing gifts into your hands, and girls writing their phone numbers on the back of chopstick wrappers.

Personally, I think that if someone you don't know starts buying you beers in a bar and inadvertantly calls you gaijin, as has happened to me, it's best to not be too quick to take offense -- you are enjoying their beer, after all.

Of course, Japan is by no means perfect, and improvements should be made.

Still, when I compare my own experiences here with what the reverse situation might be, I really can't find reason to complain.

Every self-respecting Japanese city

2009-06-18T21:24:00.002+09:00

Received 02.09.2008

There are certain things that every self-respecting Japanese city will be sure to have.

For example, a large central Culture Hall, or bunka kaikan, to hold important events like concerts, piano recitals and taiko drum performances put on for parents by the local kindergarten kids.

In April, Japan's cherry blossoms explode with color, and virtually every Japanese city has an established park or two lined with cherry trees for their citizens to sit under, as they try pretend that their city alone is famous for sakura.

If a city has more than a million residents, it starts to pine for a large tower in the center of town, and almost every major city from Tokyo to Kyoto to Fukuoka sports a tall Space Needle-like tower.

Then there are big fireworks festivals, large displays of color put on for everyone's enjoyment on a specified day during the summer. Our city's fireworks festival was on Sunday, and the entire city oo'd and ah'd as the sky was lit up with beautiful "fire flowers," as they're called in Japanese.

Fireworks, of course, go back a long way in Japanese history, and you have to wonder what it was like seeing a fireworks display back in the Edo Period.

I finally got to see the new Clone Wars computer animated film, which just opened here.

One of the minor agonies of being a Star Wars fan in Japan is having to wait an extra long time for films to open, because George Lucas likes Japan and always wants to personally be here for any of his film releases.

Whenever a new Star Wars film comes out, my son and I pick through it to see what character names were obviously inspired by Japanese words, like Count Dooku's name from doku meaning poison, or the obi in Obi-Wan meaning a kimono belt.

The new character in this film was Anakin's padawan Asohka, which seems like it can only have come from the phrase ah, so ka? meaning, "Oh, is that so?"

The new film was obviously inspired by Japanese animation to a certain degree, and I noticed the animators even followed the recent convention of including an okama or gay character, in the form of the makeup-wearing Ziro the Hutt, nephew to Jabba.

It's quite common for recent anime series to feature one effeminate male character, called okama kyara in Japanese, to provide comic relief and act as a foil for the main characters.

Some examples of these fabulous characters include Leeron, the capable and flamboyant engineer from Gurren Lagann, and Bobby Margot, the helmsmen of the Macross Quarter from Macross Frontier, so manly and yet so girlish.

Heck, Gonzo's gorgeous Romeo x Juliet anime remix even featured an okama character: it was William Shakespeare himself, repurposed as a mentor to the starcross'd lovers.

Japan has a new Prince of Tennis, by the name of Kei Nishikori, who is kicking butt in the U.S. open right now after his big win against David Ferrer over the weekend, making him the first Japanese tennis player to advance to the 4th round since 1937.

Born in in rural Shimane Prefecture in 1989, he took up a racket at the age of five and would hit balls against the side of his house for many hours, showing a remarkable aptitude for the sport.

He took the incredible step of leaving Japan behind, crossing over to the U.S. at the age of 13 to be trained at the IMG Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy, which caused quite a lot of buzz at the time.

As usual, Japanese who compete in the world stage and raise the image of Japan in the eyes of foreigners become overnight sensations in here, and suddenly his name is on everyone's lips.

I certainly hope that Nishikori-kun can follow stars like Ichiro, Hideki Matsui and soccer player Hidetoshi Nakata in redefining the international image of Japan through sports.

Ganbatte, Nishikori!

Rain, rain, rain

2009-06-15T18:42:00.002+09:00

Received 30.08.2008

Rain, rain, rain: this has been the wettest summer I can recall in Japan, and we've had wet weather off and on for weeks.

The especially heavy rains this week brought Japan's famous Shinkansen trains to a stop, stranding thousands, and an evacuation warning was issued for the entire city of Okazaki, near Nagoya, as rivers that ran through the city overflowed, killing at least one.

It was even more tragic in July, when rain-fed flash floods whipped through a riverside play area the city of Kobe had constructed to give children a place to play in the water, washing away a mother and three children. Summer in Japan brings thunderstorms almost daily, and last week lightning started a fire that damaged the Daigoji Temple in Kyoto.

We're especially nervous about lightning around here -- twice J-List's building has been struck, killing our main air conditioning unit and causing us to go a week in the sweltering heat as we waited for it to be repaired.

The extra wet summer is all the more puzzling because typhoon season isn't supposed to start until September -- which means we might have another month or so of pummeling and rain to look forward to.

Our new warehouse construction is nearly done, and we hope to be able to move in soon.

To help us transport all the cool products that J-List is going to be bringing you, we bought a new company van yesterday.

The one we got is an Every Wagon by Suzuki, and no, I didn't choose the car because of the wacky English name, although that was an added bonus.

With its small 660 cc engine, the car belongs in a class of Japanese vehicles known as kei cars and trucks, meaning "light weight," identifiable by a special yellow license plate.

These "K" vehicles are great for Japan -- inexpensive, easy to drive cars with small engines that are able to do just about anything a larger one can do, even drive on the freeway, although it takes a while to get up to full speed.

Our van gets great gas mileage, too, around 16 kpl / 39 mpg, and because there are no newfangled hybrid features involved, it was very inexpensive to b uy. With gas prices hitting the equivalent of $6.80 a gallon here, these small cars are more popular than ever, even without the tax benefits the Japanese government gives for owning more efficient cars.

For some reason, these small "K" cars seem to feature names that are extra strange, like the Suzuki Carry, the Honda Acty, the Mazda Scrum, the Toyota Deliboy and the Daihatsu Applause. Sadly, these ultra-small cars are not generally sold in the U.S., although they're legal for non-freeway use in some more rural states and for specialized uses, like on college campuses.

When you can't read or write kanji, the idea of being able to recognize hundreds or thousands of the symbols probably seems daunting, but as with most things in life, it's not as difficult as it first looks. Kanji characters are built quite logically, with different quadrants of many characters organized around the meanings for that character.

For example, the kanji for words like to speak, to read and to translate all feature the same left section, a radical which happens to look like a stack of books on a shelf, which is the character for "to say" (iu), indicating that all these characters are related to communication in some way.

While Chinese might need around 3500 characters to read and write their language properly, Japanese is a bit more manageable, with 1006 characters taught in Elementary School and another 939 in Junior High, which are collectively known as the joyo kanji or "general use" characters.

One of the most interesting thing that happens when you learn a language that's as different from English as Japanese is the moment you find yourself "reading" normally, without subvocalizing or translating into English -- nothing but your eyes, passing over the page and reading in the chunks of kanji, hiragana and katakana directly.

The brain is amazing, really -- it can do anything.

The oldest record of human habitation

2009-06-15T18:36:00.003+09:00

Received 28.08.2008

If you want to live in Japan, there are certain skills you'll need to acquire.

For example, you should be okay with popping something in your mouth without stopping to ask what it is, as food that's placed in front of you won't always be something you can identify.("That can't really be a baby octopus, can it? OM NOM NOM.")

If you're taller than 5'9" (175 cm) or so, you'll probably need to learn to duck or else bang your head in doorways a lot.

There might also come a time when you want to let your friend know he should check out the pretty Japanese girl standing nearby, but do it in a way that the girl can't understand.

This is where speaking extremely difficult English comes in handy, since most Japanese won't be able to pick up on intentionally complex words, like, "Hey John, I recommend that you examine the specimen of the opposite gender standing off your starboard bow. A delightful and tantalizing example of the human form, wouldn't you say?"

I've had extensive conversations in front of members of the opposite sex, cloaking my conversation in this way, although the longer you live in Japan, the harder it becomes to recall really difficult words.

Another suggestion is to use Pig Latin, a great way to obfuscate anything you want to say, since Japanese people don't know what it is. "Ook-lay at-tay at-thay ueaituful-bay irl-gay!"

You never know what skills you'll need in Japan.

J-List's home prefecture of Gunma isn't as famous as Kyoto or Nara, but it can hold its own when it comes to ancient history. For example, there are more than 8000 burial mounds from the Kofun Period (250-538 A.D.), indicating a high level of civilization in the past, even though Tokyoites consider us to be a quaint place only useful for hot springs and skiing. But our prefecture's history goes a lot farther back.

By an amazing coincidence, J-List is located only a few kilometers from the Iwajuku Archeological Dig, which happens to contain the oldest record of human habitation in all Japan. In 1949, an archeology enthusiast named Aizawa Tadahiro was digging for pottery shardswhen he hit on something much older: hand-made tools of obsidian and flint.

At first, Mr. Tadahiro's discovery was mocked by the establishment, but his findings were verified, essentially pushing the timeline of humans living in the Japanese islands from 10,000 years ago to more than 30,000.

Sadly, almost nothing else is known about the previous residents of Iwajuku, due to the fact that the area lies at the foot of Mt. Akagi, an active volcano that spits out highly acidic ash, but it's interesting that such a famous place is only a stone hammer's throw away from us.

By another amazing coincidence (there are a lot of them in Japan for some reason), when J-List's own Tomo was in the 4th grade, he was in the hospital getting his tonsils out, and the man in the next bed over was Tadahiro-sensei himself. So Tomo got to hear all about the discovery at Iwajuku first-hand.

What kind of juice would you like, cola or tea?

The Japanese sometimes take liberties with words when they import them from English, adjusting their meanings to suit their needs.

In Japan the word "juice" is usually used to mean any canned or bottled beverage, and it's common for the term be applied to things like a can of iced tea or a carbonated drink, although we wouldn't think of these things as juice in English.

Some other words the Japanese use with slightly altered meanings include "rouge" for lipstick, "manicure" for nail polish, "hair manicure" for hair coloring, and "milk" for powdered creamer to put in your coffee.

If your house gets cold in the winter, you can turn on a "stove" (a kerosene heater), and if you want to check your weight, just step onto the "health meter" in your bathroom.

The large number of differences between the meanings of "English" words as the Japanese use them and what they mean to native speakers can certainly get confusing: I remember a conversation I was having with a student about a shortcut I'd found while exploring the city that day, but she thought I was complimenting her on a short haircut she'd recently gotten.

Foreigners' graveyard

2009-06-15T18:35:00.000+09:00

Received 16.08.2008

When is a graveyard likely to be filled with tourists snapping pictures?

When it's a gaijin bochi, or "foreigners' graveyard," which you can see in several old Japanese cities that have had Westerners living there for a long time, like Yokohama, Kobe and Hakodate.

Japanese burial rites involve cremation and placing the bones and ashes of the deceased inside a family grave, customs which are very different from the West, and these special foreigners' graveyards are places where Europeans and Americans can be interred according to their own traditions.

The oldest can be found in Nagasaki, the only city where trade was allowed during the Edo Period, and you can see the gravestone of a Dutch trader that dates from 1778.

By far the most famous gaijin bochi in Japan is the Foreign General Cemetery in Yokohama, in the Naka Ward region that's been popular with foreign residents for more than 150 years, and it's up there with Chinatown and the Marine Tower on my list of attractions to hit when I'm visiting the city.

The cemetery was commissioned by Admiral Perry himself, who requested a place for Westerners to be buried when one of his sailors died during his second visit to the country in his fleet of "Black Ships" in 1854.

Whenever I'm there I like to walk through the headstones and wonder what these early sojourners to Japan experienced here, and how things compare to today.

Speaking of graves, Japan is in the middle of Obon (pronounced "oh, bone!"), a three-day Buddhist holiday to remember the souls of one's ancestors that's kind of a combination of Halloween and Thanksgiving, when all is said and done.

Much of Japan shuts down on August 13, 14 and 15th as people travel to their jikka, or "real home," meaning their parents' home or wherever their family's Buddhist altar is located, to spend some quality time with family members.

The custom of haka-mairi, making a visit to the family grave, is also important, and Japanese will go to their family's gravestone to wash it with clean water and decorate it with flowers.

Ancestors are extremely important in Japan, and Obon is a good time for people to take a break and remember how important family is, including those who have gone on.

Just as Christmas has grown beyond its original meaning to become a big part of the culture of the West, many of these traditions are practiced by all Japanese, even if they don't actively consider themselves to be Buddhist.

The Obon holidays are also a popular time to travel, and this week hundreds of thousands of Japanese are taking vacations overseas. If you live in a place that receives many Japanese visitors like Hawaii or California and you're wondering why there are so many Nihonjin around, now you know.

Languages are interesting because each one has its own unique features.

For example, double negatives like "I didn't see nothing" are considered incorrect in English, although they're perfectly permissible in Spanish.

If you've watched some anime in Japanese or had dinner with a Japanese family, you may have noticed the word that's spoken before eating, itadakimasu, pronounced "ee-tah-dah-ki-MAHS."

Essentially meaning "I humbly receive the gift of this food," it's a polite way to thank the person who made the food for you, and the word is interesting because it illustrates some of the "back end" of Japanese grammar.

There are two verbs for "to receive" in Japanese, morau and itadaku; the former is a neutral word, which you'd use when telling your wife about the movie tickets you got from a co-worker, but the latter is a polite word that basically means to receive something from someone s ocially higher than you, like your boss or a guest. (It's the root of the word itadakimasu.)

Since subjects are often left off of Japanese sentences, it's conceivable that you might find yourself in a linguistic situation that called for you to understand the overall context of a sentence based on what verb someone chose to use. For example, my mother-in-law might say to me, "Itadakimashita yo," which essentially means "[we] received [something from someone]."

It would be up to me to figure out the larger context, namely that we'd received some gift from someone that my mother-in-law wants to be polite to who's standing nearby, and I should come and say thank you to that person for the gift.

Japanese can be a confusing language, but with practice, some of these situations start to make sense.

So many people and so little land

2009-06-12T17:38:00.001+09:00

Received 14.08.2008

One of the stranger aspects of Japan's kanji-based writing system is the way many people lose some ability to write characters as they get older, although reading skill is generally not affected.

I can read around 2500 kanji, including both the kun (Japanese) and on (Chinese) readings of most characters.

My ability to write said characters is another matter, however, and since I haven't studied the language formally for a decade or more, my writing skills are far lower than my reading. (I used to do "kanji battle" tests with my kids as they progressed through elementary school, but had to give it up because I kept getting beaten too badly.)

As a foreigner I can perhaps be excused, but the phenomenon happens with native Japanese too: when J-List employees like Tomo or Yasu have to write something by hand in Japanese, it becomes a little more difficult to recall how to write the characters properly.

The primary reason for the decline in kanji writing ability is the rise of pasocon (personal computers) and keitai (cell phones), which make producing kanji as easy as hitting a button until the character you want comes up.

The technological advances we enjoy have brought great convenience, but at a cost, since almost everyone in Japan's ability to write kanji is lower than it was a generation ago.

Yes, after studying Japanese at SDSU then living here for 17 years (ack! I shouldn't have calculated that), I'm generally able to read most of the kanji characters that I happen across, unless I pick up a book about a specific subject I have no experience in, like biology or Buddhism; Japanese history is also a challenge, since by its nature it's filled with archaic characters that are no longer used, but which are still important when talking about the past, which sucks since it's one of my favorite subjects.

Once I was driving with my wife and saw a character on a sign that was new to me; it turned out to be bunjo, literally meaning "dividing of land into smaller lots for sale."

In a country where half the population of the U.S. is crammed into a space 1/25 the size, there's not really any "new" land for people to use, and a major way land is acquired is by waiting for some larger patch of it - - a factory that moved to a new location, or agricultural land being opened for development -- to be divided into smaller lots that people can snap up.

Our own prefecture of Gunma is very conservative, and there's a constant battle between groups that want to keep land zoned for agricultural use from being developed, versus people who want to do things like build houses on their own land, and it took us a year to get permisison to build the J-List office, since our land happens to be in one of these special agricultural zones.

In Tokyo, the dynamics are different, since there are so many people and so little land, and it's not uncommon for someone to cram a three-story home on a ridiculously tiny plot no bigger than three parking spaces.

Being an expat in another country involves making certain compromises you'd never consider at home. In Japan, it means giving up familiar things like good American peanut butter for the triple-sweet stuff they sell here, or drinking at a bar where the most exotic beer on the menu is Budweiser, or knowing that the box of Kellogg's "Corn Frosty" you just bought wil be gone in two mornings, since it's so tiny.

Then there's ignoring the fact that the nachos you were so excited to find came with a packet of tomato sauce instead of salsa, or trying to smile while eating s'mores with your daughter's Girl Scout Troop made with Saltines instead of Graham crackers, since they don't have any Graham crackers in Japan.

When I got here in 1991, the world was a very different place, and foreigners here really couldn't be choosey about anything: there was one decent English book store in the entire country, and if you wanted to buy some books, you took the train to Shinjuku and visited the sixth floor of Kinokuniya Book Store. Similiarly, if you wanted to watch some TV in English, you tuned in to Beverly Hills 90210, since there was nothing else on.

All-in-all, things have improved immensely, thanks mostly to the Internet but also thanks to various American companies entering the Japanese marketplace and forcing many outdated, dinosaur-esque Japanese companies to change.

Hang your bed out of the window

2009-06-12T17:32:00.003+09:00

Received 12.08.2008

Well, the Olympics are here, and Japan is buzzing with sports fever, hoping that their athletes will do well at the games.

Ryoko "Yawara-chan" Tani, the darling of the the women's Judo world, was hoping to win her third consecutive gold medal -- her slogan was "Mama demo kin!" ("Even though I'm married and am a mother now, I'm going to bring home the gold!") -- but unfortunately she came away with only a bronze this time.

Other athletes hoping to shine include the super-cute "table tennis idol" Ai Fukuhara, women's freestyle wrestling champions Chiharu and Kaori Icho (who are sisters), and the badminton doubles team of Kumiko Ogura and Reiko Shiota, nicknamed "Ogushio" by fans.

Japan already has two gold medals, Masato Uchishiba in men's judo and Kosuke Kitajima in the 100m breaststroke, and they're hoping to add to that tally in the next few days.

We wish them luck!

I wrote recently about how Japanese names are (usually) written in kanji, and how there are many possible ways of writing a particular name, just as many Western names have various alternate spellings.

One of the challenges when making a new business contact in Japan is learning the person's name characters properly, which is one of the reasons for meishi or "name cards," what business cards are called here.

It's extremely rude to write someone's name using the wrong characters, and when it comes time for J-List to send the customary mid-year gifts to the various companies we do business with (distributors, the makers of the anime dating-sim games we publish, and so on), we check carefully to make sure every gift is properly addressed using the correct name.

An interesting facet of names being written with unique kanji characters is that when you perform a search using Google or Yahoo in Japanese, you need to already know the correct kanji if you want to get any results.

Since this isn't always possible, Japanese net users will often do a search using hiragana or romaji (the Roman alphabet), which generally brings up the Wikipedia page for the person in question, containing the correct characters so that a second search be made.

The Japanese government maintains a list of officially approved "name kanji" to keep people from naming their children with improper or archaic characters that aren't used anymore, although parents sometimes take issue with the government telling them what names they can or can't use for their children.

Before you left for work today, did you hang your bed out of the window to dry in the sun?

That's what millions of Japanese do each morning, if they sleep on futon, the traditional fold-away bedding that's been used since, well, forever.

A Japanese futon is basically a soft sleeping mat, a separate foam mat that goes below that, and a thick blanket on top.

Futons are enormously convenient for living in small spaces because they can be folded up and put away in a closet during the day, which allows a room to fulfill two separate roles.

Because the sleeping maps absorb sweat, they can become damp, which is why they're hung from the balcony to dry and kill germs; there's almost nothing nicer to sleep on than a Japanese futon that's been hung and beaten to get any dust out of it.

While traditional futons are nice, it can be a chore to put them away each morning and lay them out again at night, and over the past couple of decades, there's been a tendency for Japanese to switch to Western-style beds instead, something that my wife's parents recently did when they "reformed" (remodeled) their bedroom last year.

Even if they opt for conventional beds for themselves, most every household in Japan has a "guest" futon for use when unexpected visitors need to sleep over, which is great because it takes up almost no space when not in use.

Companies often sell wooden-frame futons in the U.S, but these are very different from traditional sleeping futons in Japan, and they're not sold here at all.

Those who you go with

2009-06-11T23:06:00.007+09:00

Received 09.08.2008

I write a lot about how Japan is a homogenous place where everyone considers themselves as having come from the same genetic stock, which can be a useful vehicle for creating a more harmonious society despite the fact that there's actually quite a lot of variation in the local genetic make-up, with plenty of Korean, Mongolian, Russian, Ainu and other DNA hiding under the surface (including some I've contributed).The famous Japanese uniformity might be changing in the near future, though.

A new statistic was recently released showing that one in 30 babies born in Japan had at least one foreign-born parent, reflecting both imigration as well as the popularity of kokusai kekkon (international marriage), currently 6.6% of all registered marriages.

Japan is a fabulous country, but I for one would love to see some alternate cultural influences here, whether from Korea, Brazil, America or wherever, and an increase in foreigners settling here and raising families would help a lot.

My half-Japanese daughter regularly has issues with the other kids who can't seem to understand why she's not completely in sync with them, but if each class had more students who were haafu or who came from other cultures outright, it'd be more acceptable to stand out.

Remember my crazy theory that Japanese/foreign couples are less likely to fall into the same "sexless" rut that Japanese couples sometimes get mired in, and thus by intermingling with Japanese, we foreigners can do our part to help repopulate Japan.

If you ever come to Japan, be sure and visit Kamakura, a charming city located about 50 km south of the Tokyo-Yokohama sprawl, which makes a really nice day trip.

A picturesque city by the sea with a very long history, it hosts many temples and shrines, the most famous being the Tsurugaoka Hachimangu, founded in 1063.

Old stuff like this always floors me as an American, since nothing any ancestor of mine is half that old.

Kamakura is most famous for the giant bronze statue of Buddha, the second largest in Japan, and this alone would make the city worth a trip even if it weren't one of the prettiest places in Japan.

Kamakura is also home to one of the most famous train lines in Japan, the Enoshima Electric Railway (nicknamed Enoden throughout Japan), which has been in operation since 1900 and which is beloved by Japan's many train otaku, who come from miles away ride on it.

It's funny how how tenuous the meanings of seemingly basic words can be. In English, the word "friend" is pretty straightforward, meaning someone you are somewhat well acquainted or friendly with. Most of my English-speaking "friends" are close in age to me, but I certainly could have a friend who was 25, or 45, or 75 if I wanted to. It's not uncommon for someone who is only a passing acquaintance to be labeled "friend," too, for the sake of convenience or to avoid being rude.

In Japanese, however, the word tomodachi (which literally means "those who you go with") and it has a more "close" feel to it than the English word friend.

Tomodachi in school years are almost always the same age; otherwise you'd use the term senpai (for upperclassman) or kouhai (for underclassman), which are quite different concepts in Japan's vertically-oriented society.

Once, my son was playing dodgebal l with a boy he'd known since preschool -- they've played together for years. I talked about the boy with my wife, using the word tomodachi to refer to my son's friend.

My wife corrected me, saying the boys weren't friends in that sense, but were instead osana-najimi (o-SAH-NAH NAH-jee-mee), translatable as "childhood friend," a concept that comes up in anime and bishoujo games quite a lot, referring to someone you've been very close to since childhood, and it seems to be both more and less than the English word friend. "An osana-najimi is different from tomodachi," my wife explained to me.

"They're always there, and you don't even notice them after a while. You get so used to being with each other, it's like air."

Some years are unlucky

2009-06-11T23:02:00.004+09:00

Received 07.08.2008

J-List is breaking ground on a new warehouse tomorrow, which will allow us to stock a lot more cool Japanese toys, bento boxes and other fun products and help us serve our wonderful customers better than ever.

We've been in quite a hurry to start the construction, of course so we can have the space to use for the busy Christmas season, but there's another reason, too.

I recently turned 40, and because of a commonly held Japanese belief that some years are unlucky (called yakudoshi, meaning "unlucky year"), we've got to finish the warehouse construction this year.

For a man, his 42nd year is thought to be extremely unlucky, and the years before and after are also considered dangerous; during these years it's a bad idea to begin any new project, such as building a house or starting a business.

While I'm generally not the superstitious type, and in fact married my wife on Butsumetsu, the Japanese unlucky day that commemorates the death of Buddha (we figured my foreign-ness would cause the bad luck to work in reverse, and it has so far), my wife refused to budge when it came to the yakudoshi issue.

The supposed unlucky ages are, for males, 25, 41 ("pre-unlucky"), 42 ("big unlucky"), 43 ("post-unlucky"), and 61; for women the ages are 19, 32 (pre), 33 (big), 34 (post), 37 and 61.

If you do have an unlucky year coming up, don't worry: you can visit a Shinto shrine that specializes in yakuyoke, or removal of bad luck, like the famous Sano Yakuyoke Taishi shrine near Tokyo, where the Shinto priests will pray for the removal of your personal bad luck for a fee of 3000, 5000 or 10,000 yen.

When I was a boy, I had some issues when it came to fish.

I lived on the East Coast of the U.S., and for some reason, going to the beach in the spring in Maryland meant seeing (and smelling) hundreds of dead fish that would wash up on shore, not really something the Beach Boys would be likely to sing about.

Never one to give up easily, I remember going out into the water to try to swim, and feeling all those dead fish bumping against my body as I moved through the water, a trauma that pretty much turned me off of eating fish for the next twenty years.

Happily, I came to Japan, a country that takes a lot of good things from the sea, and was able to develop a real appreciation for all types of fish, from sushi and sashimi to the many kinds of broiled fish eaten as part of Japanese cuisine.

When going drinking with friends, I'm apt to pick an izakaya that offers really fresh fish -- there's nothing like everyone gathering around a delicious hokke (which the Internet tells me is atka mackerel - I can never remember its name in English) and grabbing the soy sauce-dabbed fish with chopsticks.

To me, the pinnacle of fish enjoyment is a sushi restaurant called Edokko, located in Narita City, near the airport. If you've ever got a layover there and want to try the freshest fish in Japan, with neta (the fish part of sushi) that's so big it falls off the rice, head to Narita Station and ask any taxi driver where Edokko sushi is. We were there last weekend and I can still taste it.

Japanese names are generally written in kanji, the Chinese characters introduced to Japan around the 6th century A.D. Family names, which are written before given names rendering the terms "first name" and "last name" fairless useless here, usually contain two kanji characters; as with English last names such as Smith, Japanese family names like Tanaka ("in the rice field"), Yamada ("the rice field on the mountain") and Ishii ("the stone well") seem to indicate humble origins, despite the insistence by every Japanese that their ancestors were samurai warriors.

Until January of this year, women had been required to take their husband's family name when they got married, but the law was recently changed to allow for married couples with differing family names.

When it comes to deciding on a name for a new baby, there are many choices available to parents: even for a simple name like Yuko, there are a half -dozen or so common kanji to choose from, or they can opt for no kanji at all, writing the name instead in hiragana for stylistic reasons.

Because there are so many ways to write a particular name in kanji, it's quite common for people to have no idea how to read someone's name properly, and when two people meet for the first time, there'll often be small talk about what characters they write their name with.

How unfortunate!

2009-06-11T22:55:00.003+09:00

Received 05.08.2008

Hello from Japan, where the pound key on a phone (#) is called "sharp" (as in a musical note) and where screwdrivers come in "plus" and "minus" varieties.

Whenever I'm in the U.S., I like to "surf" the culture shock I naturally experience as a result of having lived for so long in Japan; it's fun to observe the differences between the two countries, from the size of a "small" drink to foods that really don't need to exist, like Chocolate Marshmallows.

During my last trip, though, I was actually surprised at how many things I saw in San Diego that were quite familiar to me.

First there was Book Off, a used book store chain serving the Japanese community of San Diego, which took me by surprise since they're all over the place here in Japan.

Later I saw a sign advertising Gulliver, a Japanese company that buys used cars and resells them through its own network of dealers, a business model that makes sense in Japan, where there is no tradition of selling your own car through the Auto Trader.

My wife and I went to the store to buy milk and found Yakult, the popular Japanese yogurt drink that's such an institution, they have their own baseball team (the Yakult Swallows), and in a movie theatre, we observed that they'd started showing commercials before films, another import from Japan (there's nothing like watching a commercial for Parliament cigarettes before a movie).

But one of the biggest surprises came when we went to our local Costco. One of the employees heard us speaking Japanese, so he approached us and started reciting the prayer to Buddha, namyo horen gekyo, and told us that he was a member of Sokka Gakkai, the evangelical Japanese Buddhist religion which was founded in 1930 and which now has a presence all around the world.

We came away from Costco with edamame beans and mikan (those little Japanese oranges), so we were feeling quite at home by the end of the day.

I got my Japanese iPhone 3G, and am currently experiencing that state of gadget-derived bliss known as "Nerdvanna."

While I was waiting for them to process my phone, I wandered around the Softbank store to check out what other models they were selling, so I could do my semi-regular "State of the Cell Phone in Japan" post and also see what kind of competition the iPhone was up against.

There was quite a lineup: a water-resistent phone that can be submerged for three minutes without damage (great for people who check their mail in the bath, I guess), a very thin cell phone with a 5.2 megapixel camera, and models made specifically for young children or the elderly.

The company's "Premium" line of phones that come with leather or wood-grain exteriors was very stylish, as was the vibrant series that offered a phone in any of the Pantone colors -- wow. Japan is very big on Wanseg, a sub-set (i.e. "one segment") of the d igital TV spectrum that lets you watch fairly passable TV on your phone, and many models trumpeted this feature, even offering slidable screens so you could watch widescreen TV without turning your phone.

This being Japan, there was even a phone that could transform into a robot, based on a popular drama called Keitai Investigator 7. Still, while the slender and stylish phone offerings were nice, I've been extremely happy with my iPhone. The ability to use the web and email almost as easily as I do at J-List, and extend the functionality of the phone with a killer new third-party app or three each week, have been a big win for me.

Life is a little more fun when you know Japanese, whether it's to communicate with nihonjin who can't use English or to catch the attention of cute Japanese coeds on campus.

One word you can get quite a lot of mileage from is sugoi (sue-GO-ee), which means "amazing" or "incredible" and which can be used just about any time you need to praise someone. See a Japanese man who's adept at playing the Super Mario theme on an accordion? Just tell him sugoi! and your meaning will be instantly communicated.

Then there's daijobu (die-JOE-boo), which means "okay" or "alright" and is generally one of the first words a person learns after coming here (well, one of the first anyway).

Want to ask if someone is alright with yo ur menu selection at a restaurant, or if they're okay after bumping into that drunk salaryman just now? Just say Daijobu? and they can reply, Daijobu (Sure, I'm fine).

Finally, another fun short word you can find some interesting uses for is zan-nen (ZAHN-nen), which means "what a shame!" or "how unfortunate!" If someone misses the answer to a question or otherwise fails at something, you can pull this word out and get some laughs from them. It's used a lot by Japanese game show hosts when a guest makes a wrong answer and misses out on the $100,000 prize.

Pinky Promise

2009-06-10T00:02:00.004+09:00

Received 02.08.2008

You never know what the next "boom" of the summer will be in Japan.

One year it might be a trend towards girls making their own jewelry, the next they'll be wearing sneakers with ridiculous 10-inch high soles.

This year fashionable clothing maker Uniquo, often thought of as the "Gap" of Japan, has scored big with a line of tank tops for women that feature bra cups built into them, allowing women to feel completely free as they go around town this summer.

Other fashion trends you see this year are extra-colorful skirts and tops known as "Brazil-kei" which represent Japanese copying the stylish Brazilian-Japanese population living here, and "gladiator sandals," which go all the way up the leg like something the ancient Romans might have worn (they really look quite silly).

I wrote recently about how Japanese ESL students were sometimes surprised that Americans have a subject in school called English, and wondered what on Earth we could possibly be studying there, since we obviously all know the language automatically just by being born.

For the record, the Japanese study "Japanese" in school, too, although the subject is called kokugo, literally "national language."

In this class, Japanese children start the task of learning to read and write their language properly, jumping right in with the first 80 or so kanji characters in first grade and completing the 1006 joyo or "common use" characters by the end of the sixth grade.

In addition to Chinese characters, of course, Japanese read a lot, and develop their cultural identity in part through such classics of Japanese literature as "Run, Melos!" by Osamu Dazai (the story of a man in ancient Greece who has just three days to attend his sister's wedding then run back in time to save his friend), or the poem by Kenji Miyazawa "Not losing to the rain/Not losing to the wind" that's about as famous as "And miles to go before I sleep" in the U.S.

Just as I had to read hard-to-understand works like Beowulf and Chaucer, the Japanese are required to slough through classics like the Tale of Genji, the story of a fictional Japanese Emperor in the Heian Period that has more than 400 characters in its dramatis personae.

The Japanese know that their educational system stresses rote memorization too much, for example tying the date of the Kamakura Shoganate (1192) to the phrase "let's build a good country" (ii kuni o tsukurou) rather than understanding the event critically, and increasingly there's been a trend towards having students write more essays and do class presentations to show that they really understand the material in question.

Do you know the Japanese Pinky Promise?

It's a similar to the "Make a promise/Hope to die/Stick a needle in your eye" song I learned while growing up. Hook your pinky with someone else's and chant the song, which goes, "Pinky Promise, if you lie, I will make you swallow 1000 needles." (If you want it in Japanese, it's Yubikiri genman, uso tsuitara hari senbon nomasu.) You then say "Yubi kitta!" (I break the pinky connection!) as you pull your fingers apart, and you've made the most excellent promise you can make in Japan, at least if you're in elementary school.

The Pinky Promise shows up quite a lot in anime, often to show a promise made between characters while they were younger, although the origin of the custom is somewhat less innocent. Supposedly, the Pinky Promise began back in the Edo Period as a gesture of devotion that prostitutes would make with their favorite customers.

The "cutting" of the pinky signified the women severing her own finger as a sign of eternal affection for her partner, essentially saying that she loves him enough to commit shinju, or ritual lovers' suicide with him.

Kind of adds a new dimension to watching your favorite cute anime series, doesn't it?

Woozy, happy feeling

2009-06-08T21:47:00.006+09:00

Received 31.07.2008

Well, I'm back in Japan, having journeyed halfway around the world for the nth time.

Even while still at the airport, I was subjected to little culture shocks at being back here, like a cleaning lady patiently tidying the men's bathroom while men did their business a few feet away, or that bizarre statue of an "American" hot dog covering himself in ketchup and mustard, located in the arrival lobby of Terminal 1.

When traveling from Japan to the U.S., I get a day "free" thanks to the International Date Line, but coming back, I had to surrender it, so that both Monday and Tuesday were completely used up traveling. Well, it's nice to be back, and I hope to be over my jet lag soon!

The Famous Narita Hot Dog Guy

Every summer, we arrange to have our kids spend some time in the U.S. to help them learn English and generally get some "fun time" in, since America is a very fun place to them, with Disneyland and Girl Scout Camp and other enjoyable things to do.

Making the plans is always a challenge, since their summer vacation is only around five weeks long, compared to three months in the U.S.

My daughter arrived in San Diego a few days before I left for Japan, and in no time she had been transformed into a giggling American girl, watching Hannah Montana and SpongeBob Squarepants.

Before I left, I took her aside and reminded her of something we'd discussed before: that America is a country where you have to take charge of things for yourself.

In Japan, it's pretty much a given that parents will pamper their children, putting breakfast in front of them without even being asked, or noticing when they're hungry and making a snack, but you have to take more responsibility for yourself in the States.

When my son was six or seven he went to a day camp in San Diego, and when it came time to eat lunch he didn't know where his had been put. Instead of speaking up and asking for help, he quietly waited for someone to notice his distress, but no one did, and he went hungry all afternoon.

It was a valuable lesson for us about about being assertive and taking responsibility for one's self, like Americans do -- or at least that's the way things loook from the viewpoint of Japan.

As a long-time anime fan, it's been interesting to see how the characters in anime and dating-sim games change and grow. Over the past decade or so there's been a huge increase in the genre known as moe (mo-EH), which is written with the kanji character for "sprout" and which could be translated as "the woozy, happy feeling you get when contemplating your favorite female anime character."

It also seems that every character can be categorized neatly into one archetype or another, no matter how original the character might seem.

Some of the most common types of anime/game characters include meganekko (meh-gan-NEH-ko), or Girl With Glasses, the often related dojikko (doh-JI-ko), or Clumsy-in-a-Cute-Way Girl, and osana-najimi (oh-sa-na na-ji-mee), the Childhood Friend that comes to wake you up every morning and who is secretly in love with you.

One of the most common recent genres of anime characters is tsundere (TSOON-deh-reh), which comes from tsun tsun (angry) and dere dere (soft and tender) and which describes characters that give everyone the cold shoulder yet are actually very vulnerable inside (like Haruhi or Shana).

There's just no end to these cute character categories.

Some others include Rich Girl who is the Daughter of a Wealthy Zaibatsu Family; Girl Who Talks in the Third Person; Girl Who Works at her Family's Shinto Shrine as a Shrine Maiden, and a recent trend, Girl Who Is So Jealous She'd Kill Her Boyfriend Rather Than Let Him Go With Someone Else (known as yandere). Which anime character type is your favorite? (I'm fond of the Class Representative myself -- they're so organized, so concerned about everyone else, I just love them.)

Because I only visit the U.S. once or twice a year, I'm always noticing things I might not otherwise. It's a big surprise to me whenever they change the U.S. money, for example redesigning the bills to add anti-counterfeiting features. This time I started receiving those new $1 coins, which feature different presidents printed on them and which have a nice gold color that makes you want to go out and buy a pirate's chest.

Although most Americans no doubt like having the $1 unit in paper form, the fact is that governments spend millions to print these bills only to have them wear out in a few years, and it makes sense for the U.S. to follow Europe, Canada and Japan in retiring its lower-denomonation bills in favor of coins.

Japan gave up its 100 and 500 yen paper notes long ago, with the main result being that if you have a pocketful of change you can probably buy half a tank of gas, and once you get used to the new money, it's not a nuisance at all.

So I say, bring on the $1 (and eventually, $5) coins!

Japanese frequently don't know anything about

2009-06-08T21:39:00.004+09:00

Received 29.07.2008

Back when I was teaching English, I found it interesting to observe how my students perceived my own native language.

As rule, Japanese ESL students tend to treat English as an exact science, with absolute "right" or "wrong" answers, and whenever I'd give a vague reply about a certain word being correct in some situations but not in others they seemed disappointed, like I'd divided by zero or something.

Many of my students were amazed that Americans have a subject called "English" in our schools, and they seem to imagine that we all automatically know every aspect of the language just by being born in an English-speaking country, so why would we ever need to study it?

Everyone makes occasional mistakes with spelling or grammar, but if you're an English teacher in Japan, you'd better watch yourself, since students aren't equipped to comprehend the idea that their sensei might not know everything about English like the back of their hand.

I had one student who told me she was able to understand English perfectly once she mastered the compound verbs which are quite common in English, like take on, take off, take over, take in; the rest, she told me, was just mastering vocabulary.

One of the more unexpected aspects of living in Japan as an American is the presence of political posters for candidates in the Japan Communist Party. I'm pretty sure most people don't think of the words "Japanese" and "Communist" together very often, but the surprising fact is that the JCP is Japan's second largest minority party, with 400,000 members.

Because the Parliamentary system in Japan makes it possible for small political parties to win some representation, there are currently 16 national Diet members who are affiliated with the JCP, something that wouldn't be possible in the U.S. with our two-party system.

The Japan Communist Party isn't pushing for the kind of Soviet-era ideas Americans usually associate with Communism -- the Japanese are far too conservative politically for that -- but they do oppose the special military relationship Japan has with the U.S., as well as any cooperation by Japan's mili tary with foreign wars, even in a support capacity, as going against Japan's Constitution.

Supposedly a 1929 novel called Kanikousen (Crab-Canning Ship), which portrays the hard life of workers on a ship at sea, is experiencing a boom among younger readers, which is causing conjecture that larger numbers of young people will consider joining the JCP.

On the other hand, this could just be the summer's short-lived "My Boom," as something that's popular with an individual for a short time is called.

One of the coolest images of Japan, to me, are the Daruma, the unique red, roundish dolls that are quite visible in Japan around this time of year. (The word is also written Dharma, for all you Lost fans out there.)

A Daruma is a representation of Bodhidharma, a historical figure from India who founded Zen Buddhism and what would become Kung Fu, and who attained his unique shape by fasting and meditating for so long that his arms and legs disappeared -- although I just know that if I were to ask my Japanese wife about this she'd throw up her hands and tell me she has no idea what I'm talking about, since Japanese frequently don't know anything about.

Like Japan's Lucky Cat, which beckons good fortune (especially in business or money) into your home, a Daruma is an object that promises to bring you good luck.

The doll originally comes with no eyes drawn in, and when you make a wish for the New Year, you blacken one of the eyes with ink. If your wish comes true during the year, you color the other eye, and a Daruma displayed in a home or business with both eyes colored in is a statement of having attained success.

While the Daruma is ostensibly a Buddhist icon, it's become associated with Shinto rites such as New Year's Day, and has kind of "jumped" from one Japanese tradition to the other.

Every city in Japan stakes out a meibutsu or "famous thing," some object or food that it is famous for, and Takasaki, our neighboring city, just happens to be famous for these beautiful Daruma Dolls.

Their official train station bento lunch is Daruma Bento, too, which is well-known throughout Japan.

Things you have to do without

2009-06-08T21:14:00.007+09:00

Received 26.07.2008

Osaka is Japan's second largest city, with 17 million people living in the greater metropolitan Osaka-Kyoto-Kobe area. The city is a sprawling concrete jungle, with tall buildings, deep subways, and lots of bustling people.

In general, Osaka seems to be the New York of Japan, while Tokyo is more like Los Angeles, with a much shorter history and a culture that can feel more bland and standardized at times. Osaka is a funny place, and it's almost a given that successful comedians will speak Osaka-ben (Osaka dialect), which is much more entertaining to listen to than standard Japanese, in a somewhat Eddie Murphy/Jerry Seinfeld kind of way.

Like Tokyo, Osaka is so big it has to be governed like a prefecture, with 24 districts (ku) that function like individual cities.

Some areas foreigners might like to visit include the electronics region named Den Den Town and a nightlife/drinking district called Doutonburi, where you can see Japan's most famous neon sign, the Glico Man.

Osaka has always been a commercial city where business comes first, and a popular greeting among people above a certain age is moukarimakka? (moh-kah-ree-MAH-KAH?), literally meaning, "Are you making a lot of profit lately?" (The standard reply is bochi bochi den-NAH, "Yes, a little.")

An interesting tidbit about the city: when using escalators, Tokyo-ites who want to ride up keep to the left, leaving the right side for people in a hurry to walk up, but in Osaka this is reversed.

Thus, whenever Tokyo-ites visit Osaka they stand on the wrong side, causing confusion and exposing themselves to embarrassment.

Something to keep in mind on your next visit to Osaka.

I like living in Japan, really I do, but there are some frustrations a poor gaijin must endure.

Things you have to do without, like a real selection of types of bread or cheese, which are nearly always rather boring. Having low ceilings and cars that remind you of the last time you flew in a cramped airplane, or slippers that only come in Ewok sizes.

Or everyday inconveniences, like Japan still lacking 24-hour automatic cash machines or banks that can easily interface with international banking systems, despite Japan's famous image as a high-tech superpower. Another is waiting for things you want to be released, which is never fun.

Folks in the States can go see the new Batman movie anytime, but it won't start in Japan for another couple of weeks, and often movies take months to make it to Japanese theaters. Amazingly, it took the Japanese publishers of the Harry Potter books a whole year to translate the final book, which is just now being released in Japanese bookstores, to the great joy of Japanese fans who are lined up to buy Harry Potter and the Secret Treasure of Death (the Japanese title) this weekend.

It's always interesting to compare the differences between Japan and the U.S. In America, many products like Coca-Cola, Dr. Pepper, Wrigley's gum and Tootsie Rolls have been around for over a century, some since the Civil War, and they continue to dominate in their respective categories.

Japanese consumers, however, seem to favor new products when they shop, forcing manufacturers to come up with fresh ideas at a faster pace. While there are some solid Japanese standbys that never change -- Kompeito, or Peko-chan Milk Candy -- any visit to a Japanese conbini (conven ience store) is sure you bring you into contact with a dozen or so products you've never seen before.

The red-hot Japanese beer industry is an example of this: even in the small-town liquor store that my wife's parents operate, I constantly see new twists on Japanese beer, like beer formulated for ladies, or beer with dietary fiber added, or beer that tries to recreate the beers brewed in the Meiji era.

I've been told that this is because the Japanese themselves have short attention spans, and move onto the next big thing rather quickly.

While it's always nice to find a new flavor of Pretz or a new blend of green tea on store shelves, it's also good to have a core of old favorites that never change.

Easy-does-it education

2009-06-07T03:30:00.008+09:00

Received 24.07.2008

Big changes are in store for Japan's schools: the end of yutori kyoiku, translatable as "easy-does-it education," when Japan's Ministry of Education tried to reduce the amount of stress students were subjected to by lowering academic goals and ending the half day of school kids had to attend on Saturday. (Yes, poor Japanese kids had to go to school six days a week.)

It turns out that reducing the number of hours of instruction has a negative impact on academic performance, though, and Japan is now behind nearly all other Asian nations in math and science scores, which has policy-makers rather freaked out and wanting to try to reverse the trend.

Japan can make quick changes to it's national curriculum due to it's tradition of top-down administration which allows a plan to be carried out on a national level as directed by Tokyo (for better or worse).

This system is quite different from the U.S., where each state is a soverign entity and school districts have more power to decide things.

The problem for us is that this revised education plan takes effect in 2012, the year after both my kids are out of the Japanese school system, so they'll miss out on any benefit there may have been from it.

It doesn't matter though: virtually all parents who are concerned about their children's education make supplemental plans, whether it's juku (an evening school that helps kids study or prepare for entrance exams), a focused study program like the Kumon system (which they have all over the world now), or an in-home tutor to help students keep up with their studies.

Back when I was learning Japanese, I distinctly remember thinking to myself that the Speedo swimsuit company had to be Japanese.

The reason for this was the way all Japanese sounds are based on syllables -- for example, you can have sa, shi, su, se and so but never s by itself -- which plays some tricks with English names when rendered into Japanese.

Since all syllables end in vowel sounds (except for n, the only consonant that can come at the end of words), English words get a bit of unwanted vowel at the end, which changes a word like "meet" into something like "meet-oh" and the word "friend" into "friend-oh."

The English word "speed" similarly becomes "speed-oh," which is where my confusion came from. The Japanese know that they often have thick accents when speaking English, and sometimes try to snip this final vowel sound in order to sound more natural. Sometimes they clip too much, though. Once a student of mine asked me for a "tish," and it took me several minutes to realize he was trying to get me to give him a tissue.

In my American kitchen right now I've got no less than seven boxes of cereal sitting on top of the fridge.

This happens every time I'm home: I can't resist the urge to buy all the breakfast cereals that make me natsukashii (nostalgic) for when I was a kid, eating cereal and toast while watching Land of the Lost on Saturday mornings.

The cereal I've got right now are Raisin Bran (I've always Kellogg's was far superior to Post), Cinnamon Life (one of the best spin-off flavors of a cereal ever, in my opinion), both Cocoa Pebbles and Cocoa Puffs, Kix, which I've always had an odd attraction to, Golden Grahams, and the most excellent breakfast cereal known to man, Corn Pops, which they used to call Sugar Corn Pops back in the day. (I bought Pop Tarts too, but they're packed now, ready to go back home.)

No matter how long I live in Japan and consider it my home, there's nothing like getting your hands on something familiar that brings back the warmth you knew from another time.

Of course I can't possibly eat all of this cereal in the next week, so I'll be leaving most of it behind, but in the meantime I'm living the springtime of my youth with American breakfast cereal culture.

If you'll be at the San Diego Comicon, be sure and stop by our booth around the 400 aisle, near the wall (it's called "Anime Alley") and say hi.

We're going to have hundreds of items from Japan for you, including our wacky anime and kanji T-shirts and hoodies, bento boxes, figures, and of course our cool new PC dating-sim game releases, with free stuff for every customer who comes by to check us out.

Note that the Con is unfortunately sold out completely, so if you don't already have tickets, there are no more to be had (just to save you a trip downtown in case you didn't know).

Green curtain

2009-06-01T23:45:00.002+09:00

Received 22.07.2008
I mentioned last time that Japan has very few lawyers. It's true -- there's just one lawyer for every 7325 people in Japan, compared with one per 288 individuals in the United States and, for comparison, one for every 1634 in France.

For various reasons, likely related to Japan becoming a modern Westernized nation only 130 years ago or so ago, the country has evolved a legal structure that's largely based on common sense, or at least that's how it appears to my unfamiliar gaijin eyes.

There's almost no tradition of litigatating civil disputes in Japan, a phenomenon which is assisted by the Japanese tendency to prefer being harmonious rather than confrontational, and I can't think of a single instance where a Japanese person I knew was involved in any kind of lawsuit. Another contributing factor to this might be the fact that lawyers seem to earn only $50 per hour -- I wonder how that would fly in the U.S .?

When my wife was here in San Diego, one of the things on our list to do was meet with my lawyer and go over my will and living trust, which covers what should happen to the house I own in the event of my demise. American ideas of "Death planning" are totally alien in Japan, since when a man dies, his possessions naturally should go to his wife and kids with no questions asked, and it's actually quite taboo to bring the subject up, as I've discovered to my cost.

Because these concepts are so different from Japan, I thought my wife was going to be confused during our meeting with the lawyer, but fortunately she'd seen enough episodes of Sex and the City and Desperate Housewives to grasp the issues right away.

If you've listened to spoken Japanese at all you've probably heard the word desu, often pronounced with the last syllable reduced so that it sounds like "dess." Linguistically speaking, this word is known as the copula, because it makes the noun and the verb in a sentence, er, want to have a romantic evening together or something; in more useful terms, it fulfills the role of "to be."

It's really simple to use: if you want to say "I am John" just say John desu; if you want to state your nationality, just say America-jin desu or Canada-jin desu or whatever.

The subjects of sentences are usually left off if the meaning is clear from the context, but if you wanted to clarify that you're talking about yourself and not, say, Michelangelo, you could say watashi wa John desu (As for me, I'm John).

If someone pointed to an apple on a table and asked you what it was, you could say ringo desu, which would also be an appropriate answer if someone asked you who your favorite Beatle was and the answer was Ringo Starr.

The desu sentence ending is a formal word, useful for making a good impression on Japanese you might try talking to; every Japanese verb comes in formal and informal versions, and the informal of desu is da, allowing you to say Eigo no sensei da "I'm an English teacher" if you were talking to a person below your station, like a teacher addressing his students or to a child or a dog.

Now you know some more Japanese!

Like most countries, Japan is struggling with the desire to be more "green" in order to reduce pollution and the urge to escape rising energy costs.

While embracing concepts like cool biz -- which means allowing politicians and businessmen to dress more casually so they'll be more comfortable with the air conditioning set at a higher temperature -- are one possible answer, the extreme heat and humidity of Japan makes this less than a perfect solution.

One answer the Japanese have evolved is called midori no kaaten, or a "Green Curtain" of plants that grows on the outside of buildings, providing cooling shade as well as more oxygen for the air and the general feeling of well-being that comes from having living plants around you.

The way it works is this: you take a pre-made wire frame and plant vines that will crawl up the frame until you have a wall of greenery shading your windows from the sun. They're popping up all over Japan this summer, and it sounds like a great idea to me.

Bikini idol

2009-06-01T23:30:00.007+09:00

Received 19.07.2008
There are many good things about being in the U.S., like being able to order a taco without getting octopus, since tako happens to be Japanese word for that marine creature.

It's nice driving for free on the freeways instead of forking over $25 or so for a trip as I do back home, and having three dozen Mexican restaurants within a ten minute drive of my house isn't bad either.

My wife is enjoying American television, from the endless reruns of CSI on cable channels to reality television like The Baby Borrowers, which seems oddly to be made in a way that a former ESL student like my wife can easily understand it.

Even American TV commercials have her giggling with delight, from the ubiquitous ads for lawyers (unthinkable in Japan, where attorneys are so rare that I've never met one in 17 years of living in the country) to commercials for products she's sure would be popular with housewives back home, like the Reynolds Handi-Vac bags with a device that removes the air from the bag before you freeze it.

Just as Americans might be amazed at watching television in Japan with all its chaos, it's fun for us to sit back and soak up the American TV that we don't generally get to see.

Whenever I'm in the U.S., I find myself doing things in a slightly more Japanese way, just as I'm not afraid to openly embrace my gaijin side when I'm in Japan.

For some reason, Japanese drivers always park their cars by backing in, so that Japanese parking lots are made up of rows of cars lined up the same way, like expertly groomed teeth.

I refuse to follow this custom when in Japan, and pat myself on the back as I recklessly park my car front end first, with the back sticking out, and make sweeping statements to my kids about not being afraid to be original and choose your own path in life, which is incidentally called going my way by the Japanese.

Today I noticed that most of the cars in the American parking garage I was in were parked front end first, so naturally I had to pretend I was Japanese, backing my car into the space, just to be me.

Incidentally, living in Japan will make you a much better driver than you would otherwise be. The space I was backing my car into was far too small for the vehicle I was in, yet I expertly maneuvered the car into the space, something I probably could not have done before going to live in Japan.

I saw that super-cute Japanse idol/actress/singer Yuko Ogura (age 24) has been awarded the prestigious (?) First Gravure Idol Award from Sankei Newspaper's entertainment website "ZAKZAK."

Yukorin, who was the girl dressed as a baby seal in the Youtube video with a polar bear you may have seen, got the award for being pretty much the single most popular bikini idol in Japan over the past eight years, and for breaking the iron-clad rule that a cute idol had to be, well, chesty in order to make it in Japan's cut-throat gravure idol world. (The term gravure comes from the word photogravure, a process for printing glossy magazines, but has come to mean sexy girls in bikinis in Japan -- no, I don't know what the heck is up with this word, either.)

The Japanese are quite amorous of giving awards, and there seems to be no end to the prizes that can be given each year: popular idol/actress Yumiko Shaku recently won the "E-Line Award" from the Japan Association of Orthodontics for having the best facial profile, which includes a beautiful nose, jaw and chin.

Literary awards are also rampant, and there are frankly so many -- the Yomiuri Prize, the Osaka Women's Literature Award, the Saitama Sports Literature Award -- that they all become kind of meaningles.

A simple pronunciation guide

2009-05-29T19:59:00.012+09:00

Received 17.07.2008

Groups are, of course, extremely important to human beings, since you can't have much of a society without them.

The various customs the Japanese have evolved regarding groups, such as having different categories of polite language for use when talking to someone from outside your company (soto) compared with someone from inside (uchi), or the inability to bring any group together without deciding who the leader will be (who then goes by titles like dancho, group leader, or kaicho, chairman), can really look odd to foreigners.

While most people have different circles of friends they don't bring together -- I certainly wouldn't expect the local Miata Club members to mingle well with my anime friends -- the Japanese have raised this separation of different groups of friends to an art form.

Because compulsory education ends with Junior High in Japan, most people have two groups o f school-era friends: the ones that live in their part of town, who they went to the local Elementary and Junior High with, and a separate group of friends from High School, which is often located in another city.

The idea of mixing these two groups together is almost taboo, since each group represents a separate set of experiences and memories that are walled off from each other, and going to dinner with friends from two different groups would be an extremely difficult situation for everyone.

We certainly had fun in Las Vegas, enjoying some quality down time.

On the way back to San Diego, our flight was delayed due to mechanical problems, causing us to wait at the gate to be put on another flight. When the airline counter called my my wife, they had the usual trouble with her Japanese name, stuttering over it several times, so I thought I'd write a simple pronunciation guide.

Basically, keep in mind that:

a) Japanese words or names are made up of syllables, e.g. ka, ki, ku, ke or ko, never "k" by itself.

b) the only syllables that don't come in consonant + vowel pairs are the five vowels by themselves and n, which can only come at the end of words.

c) the five vowel sounds are always a ("ah"), i ("ee"), u ("oo"), e ("eh") and o ("oh"), with no exceptions.

d) English rules of pronunciation don't apply to Japanese, and every syllable is pronounced, hence the name Kazue would be "KAH-zoo-eh" and not "kah-ZOO" (the English concept of silent e doesn't work in Japanese).

e) the best way to get comfortable with Japanese names or words is to listen to them, so watch anime in the original Japanese and repeat what you hear, or ask Japanese people to pronounce things for you.
My wife and I are raising our kids to be bilingual in English and Japanese, and it's interesting to observe how thought processes work in both languages.

For the past four years, my son has attended a special experimental school that teaches the normal Japanese curriculum but with 70% of the classes in English, and as a result, his brain has gotten quite used to thinking in that language.

When working through difficult math problems, for example, I'll hear him utter, "Oh, they're talking about lowest common denominator" because he's more familiar with that term in English rather than in Japanese.

Or sometimes it'll work the other way: once he didn't know what "gravity" was in English because he'd learned the concept in Japanese and hadn't built the synaptic bridge between the two words.

When I came to Japan, I somehow managed to learn the word muri, meaning "not able to be done," by having it explained to me in Japanese. As the word embedded itself in my brain I got quite comfortable with its use, and I never had the need to connect the word to an English equivalent.

It was about a year later when I realized that the word had a very simple English counterpart, which was the word "impossible." It amazed me that the two parts of my brain could work so independently of each other that I could learn a concept in one language without it being hooked up on the other side.

And yet, this is what happens in the minds of children who learn two languages growing up: both are separate and only come together synaptically when needed.

Call a duck a duck

2009-05-29T19:16:00.005+09:00

Received 15.07.2008

Hello from Las Vegas, where my wife and I have come for some R&R without the kids, which is always a fun thing to do.While sampling the various casinos and other attractions the city has to offer (including Penn & Teller, which I recommend to everyone), we've been having some interesting conversations with the other tourists we've met here, including many Europeans, getting into debates about things like how there can be so many distinct accents in the U.K.

My wife was taken aback at my talking with strangers at first -- after all, it's rare to have a deep conversation with someone you don't already know in more reserved Japan unless you're already comfortable with each other, and to an extent, aware of each others' role in the group. But she came around, realizing that it's quite interesting to strike up a conversation with someone nearby and learn about Oklahoma or Florida or France.

I feel sorry for the many Japanese tourists who come to America but miss out on the chance to make new friends, either because of language barriers or needless clinging to invisible social rules.

There have been a lot of changes in Japanese society since we started J-List in 1996.

First, the old concept of lifetime employment, that Japanese workers will generally stay at a firm their entire lives without ever changing jobs, fell by the wayside when iconic companies like Sony started eliminating jobs and laying off employees, something that had never been done in the past (although companies would often force layoffs in their subsidiaries when times got tough).

Another big change was the idea that Japanese companies could be headed by (gasp!) foreigners, a trend which probably started when Brazil-born Lebonese-French Carlos Ghosn assumed leadership of Nissan in June of 2000, turning the company around by eliminating jobs that the company's core business couldn't support.

Now it seems that many of the most visionary Japanese companies are headed by foreigners, for example Shinsei Bank, a popular Internet-based bank that's breaking rules and taking names in the extremely conservative Japanese banking world, introducing concepts like not charging a $6 fee to transfer $20 to someone's account, letting Japanese use ATMs without fees when traveling in other countries, and having bank branches that stay open past 3 pm. (My theory is that banks in Japan close so early in Japan to encourage young men to get married, so they'll have wives who can do their banking for them.)

Foreigners have taken the lead in sports, too, for example Coach Bobby Valentine, who made a name for himself as the talented coach of the Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters.

There's another company in Japan run by a foreigner which you may have heard of: it's J-List.

When we founded the company, Japan was really at the dawn of the Internet -- I mean they were tapping stones together to send TCP/IP packets.

When we incorporated, we asked our bank we could go about setting up an account for credit card processing, and our request was so bold and unexpected that one of the vice presidents of the bank came out to personally apologize, saying they didn't believe the Internet would be appropriate for processing financial transactions, forcing us to do our banking through the U.S. instead.

I sometimes reflect on what it's been like for the Japanese staff who have worked at normal companies to come to J-List and suddenly have an American for a boss.

My staff tells me that it's interesting working for a gaijin because I don't play games with the concepts of tatemae (something we pretend is true even though we all know it's not) and honne (the truth; the way things really are); we're more likely to call a duck a duck.

Also, foreigners have a way of doing things that would be impossible for Japanese, and that strange latent power that gaijin seem to have in Japan has helped us make J-List what it is today.

Personally, I'm sure it's challenging for them working for a person who's more emotional and less organized than a straight-laced Japanese shacho (company president) might be, but hopefully the fun we have bringing wacky and fun products to customers around the world make up for it.

Irony, sarcasm and cynicism

2009-05-28T16:32:00.007+09:00

Received 12.07.2008

Humor is a very cultural thing, and it's fun to analyze the things people from different countries consider amusing -- jokes about the lack of education or hygiene among people in a certain region, visual or slapstick forms of humor, orifice-related jokes and so on.

Often, we can't comprehend the things that people in one culture find funny -- Canadian stand-up comedians telling jokes about Nova Scotians go way over my head, for example.

Then again, there are times when the cultural difference can make something all that much more hilarious, which I believe is why Monty Python and the Holy Grail is such a cult favorite in the U.S. -- the gap between the two countries magnifies all the jokes, and our unfamiliarity with British understatement ("There are some who call me...Tim?") make it a ridiculously funny film.

Humor in Japan often seems to be situationally-based, putting a character in an impossibly bizarre posi tion and drawing laughter from his embarrassment, for example. One important category of humor in Japan comes from manzai, two-person stand-up comedy that involves a dumb comedian (boke) who makes erroneous observations and his sharp-tongued partner (tsukkomi), who berates him at every turn.

The interplay of R2-D2 and C-3P0 in the Star Wars films is largely a reflection of this comic tradition, of course filtered through the films of Akira Kurosawa.

The old adage that if you have to explain it, it isn't funny holds up pretty well in my experience, and back when I was a teacher I tried using American humor as teaching tool, bringing in Far Side comics or funny song lyrics for my students to discuss. I remember once trying to explain the concepts of irony, sarcasm and cynicism, all three of which are represented by the exact same word in Japanese (hiniku).

It was, ahem, not my most inspired of lessons, and I think my students were more confu sed when I was finished.

Well, the International Day of the iPhone is here, when Apple's new 3G iPhone launches around the world. In Japan, the line outside Softbank's flagship store in Omotesando, Tokyo reached 1500 people and over a kilometer in length, as Japanese fans lined up to get their hands on the device for the first time.Masayoshi Son, the enigmatic president of Softbank and the mind behind the success of Google-trouncing Yahoo Japan, was beaming as he watched the lines of iPhone buyers, most of whom were switching from competing cellphone companies au/KDDI and NTT Docomo.

Being a maverick has helped make the UC Berkeley-educated Son, a third-generation Japanese of Korean descent, the richest man in Japan, and his ability to "think different" probably helped him win the contract for the iPhone from Steve Jobs.

While I'm still not sure if the iPhone will bowl over Japanese keitai users, who are extremely hidebound and love their flip-fones with the fancy styling and easy-to-type (for them) numeric keypads, I do love the coming havoc the iPhone will wreak in the Japanese cellphone marketplace as users realize they don't have to give cellular providers power to dictate everything about their phone, from what music formats they can listen to to what applications they can run -- they can just stick anything in iTunes and sync it over.

Today I updated my (first-gen) iPhone to the updated 2.0 firmware and downloaded the app I've always wanted, a light saber sound simulator (iTunes link). Any phone platform that can bring that kind of awesomeness to its users will certainly find a niche in Japan.

Ask any gaijin living in Japan about dentists, and you'll be sure to get an earful.

While Japanese dentists are good at fixing teeth, they're famous for making you come back dozens of times to finish your dental work, instead of getting it out of the way in a few visits. Once I had some work done on three teeth that took an incredible 18 months.

I believe Japan's dentists take so long to work on teeth because of the way insurance is structured -- they're only allowed to charge a certain amount to the system each day, so they spread it out as much as they can.

Like men whose job it is to stand by the road and wave a flashlight to let you know there's road construction going on and NHK employees who knock on millions of doors to collect the $20 monthly fee from households in person, Japanese dentists are an unfortunate symbol of Japan's lack of efficiency in some areas.

Industriousness

2009-05-27T23:31:00.006+09:00

Received 10.07.2008

There are three kinds of employees in Japan: full time, part time, and arubaito (ah-roo-BAI-toh).

The last type, the name for which comes from the german word for "work" (arbeit), refers to contract-less employees who are paid by the hour and work irregular or semi-temporary schedules, as differentiated from full company employees, who have benefits like twice-annual bonuses and vacation time, and semi-official part-timers, who also have some formal benefits.

One of the biggest trends in post-bubble Japanese society is the tendency of younger workers to shun traditional full-time employment, instead being content to work informal jobs staffing video rental stores and gas stations, tutoring at evening cram schools, and so on.

According to a new government report, an amazing 35% of the workforce now occupies these "non-regular" employment positions, exchanging freedom to change jobs at will and less on-the-job stress for lower job security.

Why so many would choose to work as "freeters" (as these part-time and temporary workers are called) puzzles older Japanese, who of course benefited greatly from the stable economic growth of the postwar period.

The reasons 'baito is so popular are many, but one big one is that many Japanese have come to value their own leisure time over work. This is a good thing of course, although I personally consider the industriousness of the Japanese people as a whole to be no less than a National Treasure for the country, and something that I hope will continue into the future.

In addition to lots of anime-related panels, video rooms and other interesting events, anime conventions are great because you can wander the dealer's room and find some cool things to buy, like, well, J-List stuff.

While there are always plenty of companies selling anime, manga and similar products, I like to check out what non-anime booths there are at a given show, hawking things like swords or vampire contact lenses or steampunk art.

At Anime Expo I happened across an interesting booth by Japanese bottled tea company Ito En, giving out samples of that most Japanese of beverages, green tea, and carrying their marketing message of Oi, ocha! ("Hey! Tea!") to Americans.

Bottled tea beverages are extremely popular in Japan, with twice the volume sold compared to carbonated soft drinks (6 million vs. 3 million kiloliters, if you're curious).

Since all Asian-style teas are consumed without sugar of any kind, they're extremely healthy, and it seems clear to me that the #1 beverage of choice among Japanese being naturally free of sugar (unlike, say, Coca-Cola, or virtually everything sold in any store in America) is probably the single most important reason why Japanese are among the thinnest nations on Earth, which is certainly something to think about. (As an aside, today I was eating some tuna salad from a supermarket here in the States and was surprised to find there was sugar in it -- ack.)

Incidentally, J-List offers various kinds of good Japanese tea for you to sample and enjoy, including a beverage I can't recommend enough, mugi-cha, the refreshing Japanese barley tea that's so cold and good in the summer. It comes in handy cold-water tea bags so you can always keep some in t he fridge.

Studying a foreign language is interesting because you learn a lot about how your own brain works in the process. I remember back in Psychology 101 at SDSU, being told that when you learn something while in a certain state, it's easier to recall the information later while you're in the same state.

The example the teacher gave us was, if you're dumb enough to study for a test while drunk (it was college after all), you'd do better on the test if you took it while in the same state of inebriation.

While I've not tested this, I have noticed that memory seems to be tied to language in interesting ways.

During my Japanese literature phase, when I was going to read all the classic works of writers like Soseki Natsume in the original Japanese, I read several interesting Japanese literary novels, including Kokoro, a story of a love triangle between in Meiji-era Kamakura.

After reading it in Japanese, I found that I had difficulty remembering the plot when I talked about it in English, but discussing it in Japanese was actually easier.

You've been in Japan too long when...

2009-05-27T23:24:00.002+09:00

Received 08.07.2008

Sometimes I think that no one is happier with the changes that have been brought on by the arrival of the Internet than me. When I went to Japan back in 1991, I had no inkling of the transformation that was about to sweep over the world, making it a lot less of a hardship to be a gaijin living in a far-off place like rural Japan.

Back then it was still the era when people paid something called "long distance" to "call" people who lived far away, which incurred extra fees, and I remember spending $4 or so per minute to call my family when I'd get homesick.

It didn't take long before something called the Internet soon put that odd custom in its place, and before I knew it I was able to order the things I needed from companies like Amazon, and of course, offer similar services to people not lucky enough to live in Japan through J-List.

One of the best things about the way the Internet has grown is the ability for me to work just about anywhere, doing things like writing this update as easily from the U.S. or Europe as from Japan. A long as there's a nice, fast Internet connection, that is.

I have a friend from Italy who likes being in Japan because he can access his server that's 20 km from his Italian office more quickly than home in Italy, where his local connection is much slower.

What will the future hold for the Internet? I'm optimistic that we'll all have wireless T1 Internet nodes embedded in our skulls within a few years, and then things should start to get really interesting.

If you ever want to appreciate your local Denny's, I advise you to go live in Japan for a few years. It's not that Denny's Japan is all that bad -- it's actually one of my top picks for late-night famires (family restaurant) coffee and dining -- but something about it just doesn't satisfy the American in me like the ones in the U.S.

Denny's Japan is owned by the company that also owns Seven-Eleven, the top chain of convenience stores in Japan, and for some reason the company thought it would be a great idea to remind everyone of this fact by sticking big Seven-Eleven signs on all Denny's, showing the parent company's new name, 7&i Holdings.

After all, nothing makes you hunger for good restaurant dining like a convenience store logo, and nothing builds customer loyalty like branding yourself as a holding company. During Anime Expo, I was quite happy to be able to enjoy breakfast in the nearby Denny's, since I associate a Grand Slam Breakfast with the restaurant chain far more than the menu items they offer in Japan, which include lots of traditional Japanese foods like fried pork cutlet and miso soup.

You've been in Japan too long when you pay over $70 for a Captain Santa T-shirt and realize a few days later how much you really spent.

It's true: Japan can be an incredibly expensive place when it wants to be.

Virtually everything, from construction materials to gasoline (currently up to the equivalent of $6 a gallon now), is pricier than in other parts of the world, and food costs consume a quarter of the average household budget.

One problem is that the ways goods are sold in Japan is still too structured, with products coming into the hands of consumers through established routes and multiple levels of distribution, for example the multi-tiered book distribution system that J-List has to deal with when ordering artbooks or manga.

But there's something about living in Japan that compels a person to want to own things he wouldn't otherwise bother with, like the above-mentioned T-shirt I bought in 1992 featuring Captain Santa, a line of high-end clothing featuring images of Santa at the beach.

It was the best T-shirt I've ever owned in my life, but at $70, I probably should have had my head examined.

From toilet seats that wash your butt to the 20+ varieties of massage chairs they sell here, there sure are a lot of ways to spend your money in Japan.

Shut up and eat

2009-05-27T23:07:00.008+09:00

Received 05.07.2008

We're here at Anime Expo, the most excellent anime-themed annual event there is, with something like 40,000 other fans who have gathered to celebrate the important alternate popular world culture of Japanese animation.I've been involved with American anime fandom from the beginning -- I was at this event back in '91 when it was called Anime Con, when no one was sure if there were enough anime fans to fill a whole convention.

As I wander the halls of the Westin Bonaventure hotel looking at the inspired kids (I'm at that age where most everyone I see can be described with this word) I see, it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

One of my favorite movies is Pleasantville, a fun film about two modern-day teenagers who get transported inside a 1950s-era black-and-white TV show similar to Father Knows Best or Leave it to Beaver.

In the strange universe of Pleasantville, every wife stays in the kitchen cooking her family's dinner, and there's a funny scene where the husband comes home to an empty house to find no wife and no dinner waiting for him, which utterly confuses him since it's supposed to be impossible in the world he lives in.

Watching that scene the other day amused me because just that day my Japanese father-in-law had been upset because his wife had gone off to a UNESCO meeting without leaving his dinner, forcing him to fend for himself in the kitchen, never an easy task for an older Japanese man.

The idea that a funny joke about life in the 1950s could still describe people in contemporary Japan is a surprise, but then Japan is a very different place from the U.S.

In my family I'm considered the daikoku-bashira or the "big black pillar" that holds up the family, and it's always interesting to observe from a cultural standpoint the way my Japanese wife or her mother jumps up when I get home from work, fetching me a bowl of rice and my chopsticks in a way that reinforces my role in the family.

Part of me feels like resisting that kind of treatment, since I don't think it's particularly necessary, but in the end I usually just shut up and eat my dinner.

There's nothing more interesting than studying a foreign language, of learning the way its unique grammatical rules work so you can form sentences and ideas and communicate with others.

Language is always rule-based, and even dialects like Ebonics and Cockney which may sound "wrong" to speakers of standard American or British English are actually formed around their own suites of unique grammatical rules.

The Japanese make heavy use of foreign loan words, usually borrowed from English, but since the grammar of the two languages is different, something is needed to "bridge" the two, and conveniently there are two such grammatical aides built right into the language.

The first is the adjective particle na which allows an adjective to be plugged into a Japanese sentence without breaking any rules, and you can hear phrases like surimu na onna (a slim, slender woman), gohjasu na hoteru (a gor geous hotel) or torendii na dorama (the latest trendy drama on television) spoken every day in Japan. I've even heard the word "epoch-making" used in this fashion -- as in, epokkumeekingu na ibento, meaning an event that is truly Earth-shattering in nature.

The other tool to help foreign words be used in Japanese is the catch-all verb suru which means "to do." Words you might hear in Japanese include getto suru (GET-toh suru, to get or find something), doraibu suru (doh-RAH-ee-bu suru, to go for a drive), kamingu auto suru (kah-min-GU AH-oo-toh suru, lit. to do "coming out" or to come out of the closet about something), and of course, sekkusu suru (to have, well, you know).

The staff at J-List uses lots of English in their Japanese, too, and you can hear terms like sukyan suru (to scan something), pikku suru (to pick products in preparation for shipping) being used everyday.

Worship-of-the-West-ism

2009-05-27T23:01:00.004+09:00

Received 03.07.2008

Well, I've made the big hop from Japan to San Diego, in preparation for the upcoming Anime Expo, which is sure to be a blast. The trip is 24 hours door-to-door, which includes 3 hours on a bus to Narita, sitting around the airport, and the total flight time.

It's a stressful journey to be sure, although I'm always happy to make it because one of my two favorite places (San Diego or Japan) is waiting for me on the other end.

As usual, I've spent a couple days experiencing various forms of reverse culture shock, being surprised at things like "small" drinks here (quite large compared to Japan), how dirty some people let their cars get (you just don't see cars that beg to have "wash me" written in dust as you sometimes do here), or how American school buses and mail delivery trucks manage to stay e xactly the same as they were when I was a kid in the 1970s.

I'm also fighting off the late-afternoon jet lag that starts to slowly creep up on me, so if I fall asleep during this update, I apologize in advance.

Last time I talked about how there are times when gaijin in Japan might find that some doors open for them if they speak English rather than fluent Japanese.

I'm not sure why this, but the tendency for Japanese to react positively to someone speaking English seems to be related to the strange "English complex" they possess, the various difficult emotions each Japanese person has about the language, which most study for years but don't really master.

Tomo tells me it's related to what's known as seiyo suhai shugi, translatable as Worship-of-the-West-ism, the tendency for Japanese to assume that Europe and America are more socially advanced and inherently superior to Japan.

Basically, when a person speaks English, he seems to be elevated to a higher rung of the social ladder than if he spoke fluent Japanese -- even if he could recite the Tale of Genji from memory while performing tea ceremony and folding origami (sigh).

One area that tends to be important to males living in Japan is, well, meeting females, and the great agony of gaijin who have studied a lot Japanese is the inverse relationship of language study to how popular you (might) be with certain kinds of Japanese girls.

It seems that a fun English-speaking foreigner might just be more interesting (mysterious?) than a Japanese-fluent gaijin who can discuss the various historical causes for the Saigo Takamori's Rebellion which took place after the Meiji Restoration.

Of course, this is a pretty big generalization, and I know that my wife was intereted in me because of my deeper passion for Japan rather than in spite of it.

But seeing newly-arrived teachers in the JET program go drinking with girls hanging off them at the local pub made cramming for Level 1 of the Japan Language Proficiency Test just a little bit harder. Oh well.

Pen spinning is the art of spinning a pen around your fingers and doing amazing tricks with it, and J-List has recently added a line of specially weighted spinning pens to our site for you to check out.

The unique activity of twirling a pen is thought to have originated in Japan with ronin, a word which once meant a masterless samurai but in modern days refers to a student who has failed his university entrance exams and must live in limbo as he studies to take the tests near year. Since these students had plenty of free time, they'd get really good at spinning their pens in their fingers while they studied.

The First Pen Spinning Boom got underway in Japan around 1976, when students of several famous national and private universities became known for the ability to spin pens. It was later learned that all these students had attented a yobiko (cram school) called Sundai Preparation School, which soon became legend among "spinners" for birthing the sport. In 1997 a pen spinning fan named Hideaki brought spinning to the Internet age with the first website dedicated to the activity, which ushered in the Second Wave of Pen Spinning.

The Third Wave arrived with the defining of the various pen spinning tricks (backaround, infinity, palm spin and so on -- they are frankly over my head, although they look cool) and the rise in pen spinning internationally in the form of world tournaments.

How long will it be before Electronic Arts comes out with Extreme Pen Spinning for the Playstation 3?

I'll let that be a question for the ages.

Air-con wars

2009-05-22T21:51:00.002+09:00

Received 01.07.2008

One thing you learn about Japan pretty quickly is, what a seasonal place it is, with people doing different things at different times of year.

It's summer now, time to enjoy traditional activities like listening to the soft sound of fuurin (Japanese wind chimes) as the wind blows in and watching fireworks at the Tanabata Festival while people mill around wearing yukata and eating shaved ice.

If you are male and live with a female, you can expect to have your share of what I call "air-con wars" over what temperature the room should be, with females shiv ering at anything below 27 degrees C (80 degrees F) while males like me instead prefer that the temperature be cold enough to see your breath. Summer is also the season to eat one of my favorite dishes, hiyashi-chuka, essentially cold ramen-style noodles in a tangy sauce, with things like scrambled egg, ham and cucumber on it, a dish I've never come across in the U.S., although it must be available at some Japanese establishments.

Restaurants only offer this dish in the summer months, and when summer is over it's off the menu, letting you know that the season has finally ended and Autumn has arrived. While I'm never too sad to see the heat and humidity of Japan's summer go, seeing that hiyashi-chuka is no longer available at my favorite restaurant always brings a tiny pang of sadness to me.

Between studying Japanese for four years at SDSU and living here for 17, I've pretty much got the Japanese language down. I've actually forgotten a large part of what I studied over the years, especially written kanji, since the great convenience of computers that let you select the right character by hitting the space bar means that almost no one writes kanji as well as they used to, including both Japanese and foreigners like me.

Although I'm functionally fluent in the language, I've learned something odd, that it's often better to speak English in some situations. The other day I was at the public bath with my son (it's called Yura no Sato, which translates as Village of Hot Water Relaxation) when one of the other bathers struck up a conversation with me, asking me where I was from. He'd just finished an interesting trip around the world, visiting China, the Middle East and Europe, and was planning on going to the U.S. next. While my long years of studying tempted me to speak Japanese with him, instead I spoke only English, since I knew that getting to practice his language skills would really make the man's day. Speaking English instead of Japanese can open doors that might not otherwise open for you. Once I speaking with a Japanese female airline employee at a ticket counter about about the possibility of an upgrade to business class, and I received a somewhat cold reaction to my suggestion when I spoke in Japanese to her. I decided to ask at another counter run by the same airline, this time speaking polite English and batting my "gaijin Bambi eyes" as best I could, and darned if I didn't get that upgrade.

My wife tells me that if I want to yell at someone for something, it's much more effective to do it in English -- it seems that angry words just carry more impact in English than in Japanese.

I wrote before about how, in the complex world of obsessive otaku culture in Japan, there are (for example) fans of Japan's various city towers, who love to travel to Yokohama's Marine Tower or Osaka's venerable Tsutenkaku Tower (the name means "Tower Reaching to Heaven") and fill scrapbooks with pictures and ticket stubs from their journeys.

This odd tower fascination is part of a larger general tendency of Japanese to feel natsukashii (nats-kah-SHEE) or nostalgic, about the past, especially the early or middle Showa Period (1925-1989).

There seems to be no end to things the Japanese can feel nostalgic about, and there's even a well developed otaku culture that worships the old city busses used in the postwar period, like the charming bus the father rides in on in My Neighbor Totoro, as well as a fondness for those old covered shopping streets that used to be so important to commercial life in Japan, but which are now largely dilapidated. When J-List's Yasu first came to work for us, we took him to Yukara, a delicious local restaurant that opens at 11:30 pm, and their food is so good that there are dozens of people lining up to eat even at that late hour. (It's kind of an official initiation for J-List employees to go there and eat.)

While we were standing in line, Yasu walked up and down the street admiring the run-down houses in that part of the city, many of which didn't even have people living in them anymore.

While some might just see ugly old buildings, he was fascinated with the kinds of construction used back when the houses were built, including the wooden sliding doors or the large recessed areas by the front doors (genkan), which were often bare earth ra ther than concrete or tile as you'd have today.

I can understand the Japanese fascination with cool old things -- I personally have an odd compulsion about pictures and postcards of Disneyland and Las Vegas from the 1960s and 70s which I can't explain.

So, what do you feel natsukashii about?

The most successful motor vehicle in history

2009-05-22T21:44:00.004+09:00

Received 28.06.2008

I took a day off yesterday to attend the official Firefox 3.0 launch party in Tokyo, which celebrated the historic third release of the great open source web browser.
At the party, I wandered around a large room filled with various industry people -- developers, programmers, the occasional bigwig from Bandai or Yahoo Japan -- with everyone in attendance being Japanese, except for myself and two friends from Italy and Spain who were with me.

I knew intuitively that the normal mingling you'd expect at a party like that would be a little more difficult due to the (perceived) language barrier that separated us from the Japanese around us, and we would have stood there not talking to anyone all night if it hadn't been for the natural exuberance that foreigners seem to have, enabling us to ignore whatever invisible social rules that may have been in effect and start up a discussion with strangers by, say, overhearing a conversation about Osaka and responding by doing an impression of the Glico Man, from the famous neon sign in that city.

In no time, we had melted the ice and had a circle of interesting people around us, chatting about various topics.

Back during my days as an ESL teacher, I quickly learned that my students responded more when I was energetic and outgoing, and in fact Japanese seem to take it for granted that foreigners will be a little more interesting in social situations than they are themselves.

Incidentally, I really am happy to recommend Firefox as a great browser for everyone to use when viewing J-List or any other website, whether you're on a Mac, a PC or a Linux machine, and I'm not just saying that because they gave me free beer and sushi, although that was pretty cool.
The most successful motor vehicle in history isn't the Toyota Corolla, and it's isn't the Ford F-Series pickup, or even the Volkswagen Beetle. It's the Honda Super Cub, the two-wheeled miracle created by the Honda Motor Company in 1958.

Conceived as an easy way for people to get around cities in postwar Japan, the Cub (which stands for Cheap Urban Bike, in case you were wondering) was designed as a follow-up to a popular engine kit that could be attached to a bicycle to aid the rider when pedaling.

The 50 cc motorcycle became an instant hit, making Honda a leader in economical transportation and becoming one of Japan's most successful export products. The Cub, which has sold more than 60 million units to date, is used in Japan in a wide range of industries, including delivery of mail and home-delivered ramen noodles.

When I first got here I really wanted to buy one, although my high school-age students were shocke d by this, since (in Japan) the stereotype of these small motorcycles is that only ojisan (middle-aged men) ride them, although there are enthusiasts who manage to tour the country on their little Cubs.

Although sold in the U.S. and Europe, the Super Cub really caught on in Asia, especially in countries like Indonesia and Vietnam and where they're used by millions -- I'll never forget going to Bangkok and seeing a family of five, including father, mother, two toddlers and a baby, perched on one of these tiny 50 cc bikes.

Considering that the Honda Super Cub gets an amazing 340 mpg (146 kpl), it seems to me that this is the perfect solution to the current gasoline crisis. All we have to do is encourage everyone to start commuting on these cheap, economical motorcycles, perhaps after reworking our cities a little to be friendlier to slower-moving traffic. Who's with me?

There are some words that the Japanese seem doomed to have problems with, due to the fact that their language is rather phonetically impoverished, with just 5 vowels and a limited repertoire of sounds produced normally.

For example, the sounds of L and R are not separate in Japanese, which makes it nearly impossible for them to tell the difference between words like "right" and "light" without years of practice, and opening up some pretty humorous situations in election season. The Japanese are less likely to use the Internet term "FAQ" because it has the same pronunciation as another famous word that starts with F, which can cause confusion.

The sound "si" is pronounced "shi" in Japanese, which of course can lead to problems when Japanese ask you, "Please, sit!" The J-List staff reports thinking that the the word "peanut," which is always pronounced as "peanuts" in Japanese (even if you're eating just one), sound s quite close to a potentially embarrassing word in English. Finally, the joker who introduced the song "Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star" to Japan might have thought it was funny at the time, but I've observed that virtually everyone here has managed to memorize the "twinkle, twinkle" part without the "w" sound.

Tsk, tsk...

Battling the dreaded metabo monster

2009-05-22T21:36:00.003+09:00

Received 26.06.2008

Japan has started a new initiative to fight fat using the buzzword metabo, short for metabolic syndrome, a polite way of describing the tendency to gain weight as people get older.
Under newly passed rules, everyone between the ages of 40 and 74 must get a check-up that measures their waist, and if the circumference is over 85 cm (33.5 inches) for men or 90 cm (35.5 inches) for women, the person will be assigned to a nutritionist who will give recommendations on diet and exercise.

They're also making some vague noises about financial penalties for companies that don't reduce employee paunch, although I've lived in Japan long enough to know tatemae (an untruth made for appearance's sake) from honne (the way things really are) when I see it.

Compared to most of the rest of the world, the Japanese are far from overweight, and I've known 24-year-old Japanese women who had to do their clothe s shopping at Gap Kids when in the U.S. to find clothes that would fit them. But as Western-style foods like the Mega Mac become more popular here, there's widespread fear that Japanese waistlines might follow the U.S. in coming years.

I talk a lot about how the Japanese like to think of themselves as a homogenous people coming from the same genetic stock (there's another good example of tatemae by the way), but I didn't think they believed it so fervently that the government would try to apply one set of health metrics to the entire population.

Still, battling the dreaded metabo monster is certainly not a bad thing, and I believe the new focus on health in middle-age will bring families closer together as wives and children show more concern for Dad.

The terrible rise in suicides in Japan (more than 33,000 last year) has everyone talking about what can be done about the problem.

While U.S.-style medical services that provide counseling for people in mental distress are not completely absent from Japan -- I remember being fascinated after learning that my old Japanese teacher had been training for a license to work a suicide hotline -- the fact is that these kinds of services seem to have much less reach in Japanese society compared with the U.S.

Even if psychological counseling were widely available here, my feeling is that it wouldn't be used that much.

Perhaps as a result of living in a country with half the population of the U.S. crammed into the area of Nebraska, the Japanese are extremely protective of their privacy, and many people in need of counseling might be unwilling to open up and talk about their problems with strangers, instead choosing to ga man, or stoically endure their problems in silence.

The Japanese also have an extreme mistrust of drugs, and many of the most common medicines in use in the U.S. aren't even available here.

In an odd way, the role of psychological counselors is filled in Japan by -- no laughing, now -- fortune tellers, people who provide advice and guidance after reading palms, tarot cards, and so on.

Whether it's a website accessed from a cell phone that gives advice on what emotional challenges a person may face tomorrow or the weekly TV appearances of famed author (and former Iron Chef judge) Kazuko Hosoki, when Japanese need some advice, more likely than not they'll get it in the form of fortune telling.

As an American living in Japan, I know how surprised Japanese can get when foreigners internalize the society around them too much. Here at J-List, the Japanese staff have gotten used to me doing things like bowing while speaking Japanese on the phone to someone or pulling out a kotowaza (Japanese proverb) to make a point.

According to an interesting online poll, some other things gaijin do that surprise Japanese include speaking using dialects like Osaka-ben, singing enka songs at karaoke, giving dates in the Japanese calendar system (e.g. Showa 43 instead of 1968), drinking fruit-flavored milk with a hand on one hip after a bath (sounds odd, but I do it most every week), and sitting seiza, or in proper Japanese kneeling position.

Another thing that surprises Japanese people is when foreigners are polite, or when they line up properly in crowds -- it seems sad to me that this kind of behavior be the exception and not the rule.

When Japanese go drinking with a foreigner, they always seem to expect him to order a Budweiser, since that's what all foreigners drink, right? But I'm much more likely to ask for atsukan, or hot sake, which always seems to surprise Japanese around me.

The holy grail of a foreigner living in Japan is when a Japanese person temporarily forgets how to write a difficult kanji and you casually jot it down for them.

That's only happened a few times to me, but it was glorious, let me tell you.

Excellent service

2009-05-22T21:29:00.002+09:00

Received 24.06.2008

There's a new tree set to start growing in Tokyo, all the way up to the sky.

It's called Tokyo Sky Tree, a giant new 610 meter (2003 ft) tall broadcasting tower that, if completed as planned, would be the tallest structure in Japan. The tower will replace Tokyo Tower, a scale replica of the Eiffel Tower built in 1958, as the primary means of beaming television to the 35 million residents of the Greater Tokyo Area.

The name was chosen by voters who picked it over such choices as Tokyo Edo Tower, Mirai (Future) Tree, and Rising East Tower. Like many people, I personally liked the originally proposed name of New Tokyo Tower -- very sensible and Hobbit-like -- but it was unavailable due to trademark issues.

In the end, Tokyo Sky Tree does have a kind of pleasingly weird appeal not unlike Tokyo Big Sight, the sprawling convention center where the Comic Market doujinshi convention is held twice a year.

One thing you learn early on when traveling around Japan is, the Japanese are fascinated with towers, and there seems to be a large tower in every major city, from the historical Marine Tower in Yokohama to the unique beauty of Kobe Port Tower and many more.

There are even "tower otaku" in Japan, people who obsess about visiting every tower they can and collecting the ticket stubs from past years. I'm sure they'll enjoy making the pilgrimage to Tokyo Sky Tree when construction is completed in 2011.

It's still drizzling in Japan, as rainy season continues dumping an extra helping of precipitation on the Japanese islands. This morning while leaving the house I grabbed for an umbrella so I could make the 2-minute trek to J-List World Headquarters without getting wet.

The umbrella turned out to be my wife's favorite Louis Vuitton, and when she took me to task for using it, the inner reaches of my brain came up with a retort: "But honey, mi casa es su casa!" This was a play on the word kasa (casa) meaning both "house" in Spanish and "umbrella" in Japanese.

For some reason, I've gotten very good at thinking of ingeniously bad puns in Japanese, called dajare (dah-jah-REH), and when we go for a drive on the weekends I'm known to torment my kids with joke after bad joke.

Some of these linguistic puns come naturally in the course of learning Japanese, of course, like the word ik ura which means both salmon roe as well as "how much is it?" making for the obvious gag ikura ikura? ("How much is this salmon roe?"), or how the word for "like" (suki) is pronounced similar to "ski," which causes every student of the language to suddenly ask each other sukii ga suki? ("Do you like to ski?").

At least I'm not the only one with an odd sense of humor in Japanese. Currently California Governator Shuwa-chan is appearing in TV commercials promoting tourism in his state. The goofy slogan he recites combines the word nandemo ari meaning "it's all here" with California, with the result being Nandemo Arifornia. It's quite silly.

For some reason, living in Japan robs a person of the ability to open the hood of their car. When I lived in the U.S., I was quite comfortable giving my car a tune-up, changing oil and spark plugs, and even replacing the odd head gasket, but since coming to Japan I find I haven't touched a car's engine in fifteen years.

My wife is indicative of most Japanese on the subject of auto maintenance -- she once said to me, "I opened my hood once, but I didn't know which one was the engine." This is partially due to excellent service here, with uniformed gas station employees who will cheerfully check your oil and air when you buy a tank of gas, but another reason is sha-ken, a government-mandated automobile maintenance check-up you have to get every two years.

The sha-ken check-up is expensive, costing $800 or more, although this amount includes various taxes and a required form of auto insurance, but t he upside is that cars are safer and almost never break down.

The sha-ken check-ups have a somewhat cynical purpose too: when the next one rolls around, it's common for people to buy a new car instead rather than pay the check-up fee for the old car, which no doubt contributes millions to car manufacturers' bottom lines as people replace their cars at a faster pace than they otherwise would.

The Great Wall of Language

2009-05-19T23:19:00.008+09:00

Received 21.06.2008

I like to read sci-fi novels with mind-bogglingly big ideas in them.

One series I enjoyed was the Uplift Saga books by David Brin, which described a galactic society of races that gained status in each others' eyes by discovering pre-sentient life and "uplifting" them to intelligence.

There were two fundamental forms of life in the books, oxygen-breathing types like humans and hydrogen-based life that lived inside gas giants and stars, and the great differences between these two groups meant that they could never interact but must exist side by side instead.

Sometimes I feel this way about the Japanese and the English web: both are vibrant, constantly inventing new mini-trends and memes and fads, yet they're largely separated by the Great Wall of Language.

Most Japanese people will instinctively click away from an English page they happen to land on, perhaps as a result of being forced to study it for all those ye ars in school; likewise, most native English-speakers I know won't spent a lot of time trawling Japanese-language websites unless they're there for a reason.

They come together at certain points, of course -- YouTube is a good example of a bridge that has joined the two halves nicely -- but by and large, English-speaking web surfers will tend to be more familiar with the latest "I Can Has Cheeseburger" cat jokes while Japanese fans watch videos of computer-generated vocal idol Miku Hatsune singing while waiving her leek back and forth.The iPhone is finally coming to Japan, and I'll certainly be in line to get one when they become available next month. But how will the device really do here? I'd say that while there is a lot of interest by Japanese fans in the phone, it's still unsure whether it will be a runaway success or not.

First of all, Japanese consumers are extremely fickle, and anyone doing business here needs to really be on the ball if they want to do well, especially if you're selling a device that does things in a totally new way.

Another problem comes from the syllabery nature of Japanese, which can express sounds like KA-KI-KU-KE-KO but not "k" by itself. It turns out that it's quite easy to type Japanese using a standard numeric keypad by entering, say, 1992*44444 for arigato, and -- I am not kidding, here -- there are novelists who write their works exclusively with a numeric keypad on a phone because they can type fas ter that way.

The new iPhone will have support for an on-screen kana-based method of text entering, but my guess is that it won't feel the same to Japanese phone users, who are used to walking or riding bicycles while pecking away on their phones.

Finally, there's a slew of handy local features iPhone won't support, like a payment system that lets you buy train tickets by touching a panel with your phone and a low-bandwidth TV system called Wanseg (from "one segment").

I've heard from many Japanese computer users that American companies like Apple and Microsoft regularly get little details wrong when producing products for the Japanese market, so I wonder what other small aspects of the iPhone will feel funny to users here.

Still, considering the number of things you can do incredibly well on the thing -- I use my American phone a few hours a day in Japan, where it's not even usable as a phone -- I've got a feeling Apple will do quite well.

One interesting aspect of education in Japan is how students face competition in many forms which helps make them better students.

Starting with junior high school, many students are ranked according to their test scores, with a board hung outside the class that lists each student's rank is in relation to everyone else. If you're the #1 student in your class, you can bet your classmates will be gunning for your slot, so you'd better study hard.

The system of having to take an entrance exam to get into high school also provides a reason for students to be more serious about their own education, since you have to hit the books if you want to get into one of the best high schools. (My 13-year-old son is already preparing for a high school that's known for its engineering and robotics courses.)

Although I often wonder if it's really a good idea to put pressure on kids to study at such a young age, I can see benefits f rom creating a more vigorous study environment for teenagers.

Growing up in the public school system in Maryland and California, I can honestly say I don't have a single memory of studying hard or being challenged until I got to college, and getting kids to apply themselves at a younger age can't be a bad thing.

People you can trust

2009-05-19T23:14:00.004+09:00

Received 19.06.2008

One of the most important concepts in daily life in Japan is shinyo (SHIN-yo), which means "trust," and when Japanese have dealings with individuals or businesses, choosing someone they can trust is extremely important.

Of course, everyone wants to deal with people and companies they believe will do right by them, but in Japanese society the idea of only working with trustworthy entities is elevated to a much higher cultural level.

One way to make sure you're working with people you can trust is the concept of shokai (SHO-kai), a kind of introduction whereby someone who is already trusted by a third party will formally introduce you to them, in effect sharing the goodwill they've already established with both you and the third party. Because both parties have a trust relationship involved, they have an obligation to make sure everything goes smoothly to avoid "stepping on the face" (to use the Japanese phrase) of the person that brought you together.

There isn't a single aspect of Japan that isn't improved by this trust-based relationship system, and time and time again I've found myself depending on people who had been formally introduced to me by someone else I trusted.

My wife recently sold her car through a used car dealer, and I happened to remark that it was odd that cars are seldom sold between individuals in Japan -- there's no local version of the Auto Trader or eBay Motors.

The reason, I was told, was that no one would ever be able to trust a stranger enough to buy a car, since they might be lied to about important details or otherwise taken advantage of, so they instead rely on professional companies whose reputations they can verify, of course paying more for the privilege.

In the Japanese version of Wii Sports Golf, a player who gets his ball onto the green is rewarded with a voice that says, "Nice on!" which of course means "That was a very good drive that resulted in getting your ball on the green!"

It's an example of the "reduced English" that's used so often in Japan to communicate the most meaning in the simplest language possible.

It's really quite logical -- when a woman is pregnant you might say she's "baby in," while it's natural to think of a male salaried employee is a "salaryman."

Instead of taking a recreational vehicle camping, just rent a "camp car" instead, and when you take a shower reach for the "rinse in shampoo" (that is, shampoo with cream rinse in it, or conditioning shampoo).

Within the context of the Japanese using English within their own society, the shorter and more direct the phrases can become, the better, since all those extra English words can really m ake a person's head hurt.

I get so used to seeing shortened or simplified English around me that properly formed language stands out.

At Japanese hot springs, the usual notice about customers with tattoos not being allowed to enter the bath (because of yakuza) is usually limited to "NO TATTOO." However, at one bath near us the notice says, "Please understand that we cannot accept customers with tattoos." I was really impressed with how politely they had worded that.

Are you ticklish?

My kids certainly are, and I only have to move my hands towards them in a threatening manner to have both of them giggling on the floor in laughter. My Japanese wife, however, isn't the slightest bit ticklish, and you could spend hours rubbing feathers over her body and not get the slightest response.

I know nothing about the physiology of ticklishness or were it comes from, but my own pet theory is that stimulation of the the body during a young age causes the nerve endings to become more sensitive, which results in ticklish bodies when the kids get older.

When my kids were babies, we did caress them and touch them a lot, something the Japanese wisely call skinship, yet my wife says that it's very un-Japanese to touch your children so much, and insists that she was never held or played with that closely when she was small.

I've always believed that my wife's being raised in a traditional Japanes e environment which had a lot less warm parent-to-child touching led to her never becoming ticklish.

Do you think people raised in happy, loving households are more ticklish as a result?

Immigrant nation

2009-05-19T23:07:00.004+09:00

Received 17.06.2008

Sunday nights at our house is time for Chibi Maruko-chan (Little Maruko), one of the most popular anime shows in Japan despite it not being terribly well known internationally.

It's the story of Maruko, a cute but lazy third grader who lives in the magical time of the 1970s, a simpler age when there was no Internet and even the idea of a wireless remote control for your TV was a dream.

It's a great show because of the many cultural references it makes to the late Showa Period, allowing kids to see the (sometimes silly) stuff that was popular when their parents were young.

In last night's episode, Maruko's wealthy classmate Hanawa-san invited Maruko and her friends over to meet a mysterious "blue-eyed person" who was staying at his house, which turned out to be a girl named Pearle, visiting from overseas.

Immediately there was mass chaos as all the characters tried to come up with some English to say to the girl, b ut no one knew any, so they sat there shyly.

Maruko went home and asked her family to teach her some English, but all she got was useless phrases like "this is a pen" and "hello! thank you! goodbye!"

When Maruko finally was able to figure out how to say "nice to meet you" to the foreign visitor, she was met with puzzlement.

It turned out that Pearle was from France and didn't speak any English, which caused even more confusion.

It was an extremely funny episode -- I've observed the Japanese tendency to assume that any Western-looking foreigner walking down the street must be a native English speaker very often.

Many industrialized countries are battling falling birthrates, as human societies change and shift. The numbers of babies born per female in Russia, Italy, and Germany, for example, are 1.25, 1.29, and 1.35 respectively. There are all too few babies being born in Japan, too, just 1.29 per female, a situation made worse by the lack of imigration to offset the drop in real population here, unlike the U.S. and Europe.

To avoid a future in which there are too few people in Japan to do the jobs that need doing, a group of Japanese Diet members has for the first time put forth a proposal calling for Japan to create a forward-looking immigration policy and accept 10 million foreigners over the next fifty years as a way of keeping its society and economy healthy.

In making the proposal, Japanese legislator Hidenao Nakagawa said, "There is no way to save Japan's future without turning to other nations. Japan must open its doors as an international state and shift toward establishing an 'immigrant nation.'" I've long thought that Japan should form relationships with countries and eliminate barriers to long-term work-stays and full-fledged immigration, and maybe this will be a first step.

Incidentally, while many nations are seeing their birth rates fall, they're actually on the upswing in the U.S., up to 2.2 per female on average. Japanese leaders must be asking themselves how America can keep its birth rate high without the social programs that give parents a monthly bonus for having three or more kids, which are common here.

It's hard to know what the reasons for the difference in birth rates are, but personally I think the American tendency to be positive about the future plays a big part.

The Japanese are rather quick to see huge, unsolvable problems when they look to the horizon, which can cool couples to the idea of having another child, b ut Americans are (at least as seen from the outside looking in) much more likely to be optimistic about the future, and I think this is one factor at play here.

Like many other Japanese men, my father-in-law likes baseball. I mean, he really likes Baseball, so much that he'll watch a game on TV while listening to another one on the radio, with three sports-related newspapers beside him. (Japan has no less than ten national sports-dedicated newspapers published daily, if you can believe that.)

One day our cat climbed on top of our TV and, as we all watched in horror, managed to vomit inside the case, causing the circuitry to fry and the picture to go dark. It was an inconvenience, but the timing was actually quite good -- like the U.S., Japan is in the middle of phasing out the old analog TV broadcasting system for digital terrestrial, and by 2009 everyone will have had to make the switch one way or another, so we couldn't get too mad at our cat.

On the way to the denkiya (home electronics store) to shop for a new television, my father-in-law asked me t o make sure we picked out an "HD" model, but the way he pronounced these letters -- ecchi deh -- was very amusing to me. Due to a quirk of Japanese phonology, the sounds ti and di could not be written in the katakana writing system until a few decades ago, so teh and deh were substituted instead.

The result of this is that everyone above the age of 50 or so has memorized English words like party, DVD or Disneyland as par-teh, deh-vee-deh, and Dehs-neyland, and the mere act of using these older pronunciations marks you as an old fogie.

To hear a super high tech word like "HD" pronounced using this outdated pronunciation system was quite unexpected, and I had to laugh.

It's Me, It's Me

2009-05-14T21:15:00.009+09:00

Received 14.06.2008

Last time I talked about the Ainu, the original inhabitants of the Japanese islands going back to the stone age.

There's one "other" ethnic group in Japan, the residents of the Ryukyu Islands, also known as Okinawa, where a big chunk of the U.S. military in Japan is stationed.

A separate island kingdom until 1609 when it was annexed by the Satsuma Clan (present-day Kagoshima), Okinawa has a fascinating culture that's completely different from that of the mainland, with a unique language, social identity and architecture. (The Ghibli film Spirited Away makes use of architectural motifs from Okinawa to create a mysterious supernatural world inhabited by spirits.)

Like all regions of Japan, Okinawa is famous for various foods, including goya, a bitter gourd which is fried with other vegetables, and awamori, a very strong rice wine. Residents of Okinawa seem to have gotten very good at "slow living" and are very much outside the pressures of normal Japanese urban life, which is no doubt part of the reason they have the longest lifespans in the world.

I've only known a small number of Okinawans, but the few I've met have been extremely open to other cultures, speaking languages like Spanish and French that almost no one in the homogenized mainland ever masters.

In much the same way that black popular culture influences overall American culture, Okinawa's "otherness" provides much-needed flavor to the rest of Japan, and many of the country's singers hail from there, like superstar Amuro Namie and Gackt. There's a whole class of eerily beautiful Okinawa-influenced Japanese songs (iTunes link) like the recent hit song Nada Sousou, one of the most popular songs on iTunes Japan, which you can purchase using our popular iTunes Japan Prepaid Cards.

Doujinshi are the fan-created comic-books which have become a huge sub-culture here in Japan.

The word literally means "same-person-magazine" and grew out of the tradition of like-minded writers forming literary circles and publishing their short stories and poetry in the form of small-run magazines that they each contributed to financially.

The history of comic doujinshi circles began in 1953 when manga artist Shotaro Ishinomori formed a group called the East Japan Manga Research Club, with another landmark coming in 1967 with the publication of Tezuka Osamu's COM, a magazine that invited readers to send in their own manga to be published.

By the 1970s, university artist circles were commonplace, and early doujinshi paying tribute to the anime series of the era flourished; attendance at the nascent Comic Market doujinshi convention would grow 600 in 1975 to more than 500,000 today.

Over the years, the underground comic world has served as an incubator for talented manga artists who want to go pro, and a huge number of big names started out drawing doujinshi, including CLAMP, Rumiko Takahashi and Lupin III creator Monkey Punch. This creative "DIY" esthetic extends beyond comic books, and there are many kinds of self-created works sold as doujin, including novels, BGM compositions and fan-produced computer games.
So picture this. Suddenly you get a phone call, and a young voice says, "It's me, it's me," as if you knew the person -- well, it must be your grandson, Taro.

He then tells you that he's done something terrible, gotten into a traffic accident perhaps, and he needs $40,000 to pay off the other driver before the police become involved, so would you please go down to the bank and transfer the money to this account?

Or maybe it's a man posing as your son's boss, who sternly tells you that your son has made an error that cost the company $50,000, which you must pay on his behalf.

The most common name for these scams is Ore-ore Sagi, literally "It's Me, It's Me Fraud," and the damage from these crimes this year may top the previous record of 28 billion yen ($259 million) set in 2004, which is a lot of soybeans.

Now matter how much the police try to educate citizens against the dangers of believing what strangers tell them over the phone, the situations continues.

Between the high number of elderly people with hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash savings and the Japanese sense of on (pronounced "own"), translatable as moral obligation to family members, it's apparently easy for these thieves to score big.

One of the regular customers at our liquor shop was nearly taken in by one of these scammers, who had researched his family extensively in order to craft more believable lies.

Tattooing moustaches

2009-05-14T21:09:00.006+09:00

Received 12.06.2008

When I came to live in Japan back during the first Bush Presidency, I brought many things with me, including a suit, long underwear, and extra shoes, since I was sure I couldn't find my size here (turns out I had nothing to worry about there).

I also brought a suitcase full of preconceptions about what life in Japan would be like, many of which turned out to be wrong.

First of all, I expected Japan to be a fairly un-religeous place, but when I got here, I was immediately invited to attend the Japanese Baptist church in our city, where I learned that studying by reading the Old Testament in Japanese is very, very hard.

I was also surprised at the existence of Jehovah's Witnesses handing out local versions of The Watchtower and polite Mormon missionaries riding mountain bikes while wearing ties, which they're famous for here.

I was also pretty sure I wouldn't encounter any guns, since everyone knows that there are no guns in Japan, right?

Imagine my surprise when a Japanese friend of mine who built high-performance racing bicycles turned out to be a hunting aficionado who owned several new and antique Remington rifles.

Getting a license for a gun in Japan is very difficult, and prospective owners must undergo several months of training in their use and safety and be able to pass background and vision checks, but gun owners do exist here.

I guess that's the way of it: for every impression you have of something, there are always counter-examples, waiting to prove you wrong.

The other day I reached for some saltine crackers and found myself smirking at the name on the package: Mornin' Cracker. This interesting name the manufacturers had chosen for their product sheds light on the unique fascination many Japanese have with speaking "natural" English.

The Japanese study English for an average of six years yet know what's being taught to them isn't a living, breathing language, and many students who do want to learn focus on what they perceive as "natural" English, which often means going out of their way to copy the slang they see native speakers using, like the alternate spelling of the -ing suffix.

I've had students who refused to use phrases like "want to" or "going to," instead substituting "wanna" or "gonna" as often as they could, despite the fact that their overall language ability wasn't at the level for that to sound natural.

As a learner of Japanese, there was a lot of temptation for me to use slang I picked up reading manga or heard others using, but often I found that I lowered people's impression of me when I did so, just as you might not know what to think if a slang-obsessed Japanese man introduced himself to you for the first time by saying, "Nice to meet you, Brutha."

When learning a foreign language, it's best to go slowly when trying out the fun but potentially offensive slang terms you come across, and always watch the Japanese people around you to see what kind of reaction you get. If you screw something up, as I've done many times, you'll know it.

Japan is a country that likes to think of itself as coming from more or less the same genetic stock, called Yamato Japanese, which is kind of silly since you only need to meet a few dozen people here to see that there are many obvious differences in skin shade, the shape of the face and eyes, body type and so on among the "uniform" Japanese people.

The original inhabitants of the Japanese islands were a group called the Ainu, which were once spread throughout the islands but were pushed northward as Japan's mainstream culture expanded out from the Nara-Kyoto area.

The Ainu were quite different from the Japanese, growing long, thick beards and tattooing their bodies extensively, with women traditionally tattooing moustaches onto their faces to ward off demons.

Their belief system is very close to the Japanese Shinto religion which sees kami (gods or spirits) in natural objects, and this probably formed the basis of Shintoism, although I'm not sure if Japanese like to admit that openly. The Ainu possess their own language and culture, although it's been very difficult maintaining their individuality given all the changes that have visited Japanese society over the past century, including the Soviet seizure of Sakhalin Island at the end of World War II, which forced many of the the remaining Ainu to flee to Hokkaido.

Recently the Japanese Diet passed a resolution calling for the government to officially recognize the Ainu as a separate ethnic group, an important historical milestone.

Sunday afternoon in Akihabara

2009-05-14T21:04:00.006+09:00

Received 10.06.2008

Usually there's nothing like a Sunday afternoon in Akihabara.

It's fun to roam through the many electronics stores to see the latest devices, or head into one of the anime shops to browse figures or doujinshi comics.

The blocked-off street (known as "pedestrian's heaven") is so full of shoppers and tourists and fans in cosplay giving "guerilla live" street performances that it feels like a great big carnival.

This happy image was destroyed on Sunday when a crazed man drove a rented truck into a crowd then jumped out and started attacking people with a large survival-type knife, eventually killing six men and one woman and injuring ten others before police could take him into custody.

Although rare in usually-peaceful Japan, these bizarre knife attacks do sometimes occur, and they're called torima, roughly translated as "a devil who just happened to be passing by."

Sunday's tragedy called to mind an attack on children in an elementary school by a deranged man in which eight children were killed, which in an eerie twist happened exactly seven years before this attack.

All Japan is buzzing about the possible motives of the attacker, a 25-year-old temporary factory worker from Shizuoka Prefecture, who may have been set off by a mistaken belief that he had been let go from his company when this was not the case.

All throughout the world and the web, people are expressing sadness over the terrible tragedy.

I've got a grammatical problem: my son, who began Junior High School in April, has started learning formal English grammar in ernest, and suddenly I'm being called upon to explain the ins and outs of past perfect, present progressive, subjunctive mood, and tense agreement to him. Back in my ESL (English as a Second Language) days, I was quite adept at teaching the rules of grammar either in English or Japanese, but it's been ten years since I was called sensei, and a lot of that knowledge escapes me now.

The Japanese take English grammar seriously, and during Junior High and High School spend six years learning it in great detail, of course always discussing it in Japanese rather than, you know, English, since it's mostly considered a test subject for university entrance examinations anyway.

The biggest question students usually ask is why, why do sentences like "He will have been to Kyoto five times" or "If he had gotten the job, he would have been happy" need to exist. Due to the simpler construction of Japanese sentences, most of these linguistic twists aren't needed and can't even be easily expressed, which was a real boon to me, coming from the other direction.

The Japanese are a very seasonal people, doing different things at different times of year, and as the warmer weather approaches, everyone is getting into "summer mode."

First of all, summer is the season for drinking mugi cha, the delicious barley tea which is consumed all around the country, since it's cold and refreshing and can be easily made with cold-water tea bags.

In July and August, the summer festivals like Tanabata will arrive, without a doubt my favorite part of Japan (well, after hot springs). Summer is also time for Japan's politicians to show they're doing something about global warming by embracing what's called cool biz, a program promoted by the Japanese Ministry of the Environment every year that promotes us ing less electrical power by embracing clothing that allows people to be comfortable even with the air conditioning turned down.

Prime Minister Fukuda (who comes from our prefecture of Gunma) held a press conference over the weekend wearing a casual shirt from Hawaii, which looked ridiculous on the man.

He was clearly relieved when the press event was over and he could change back into a suit.

No Gaijin

2009-05-14T21:04:00.001+09:00

Received 07.06.2008

You've been in Japan too long when you can pronounce the constellation of Orion like the Japanese do, which sounds something like OH-ree-ohn.

The Japanese use a lot of English in their daily lives, which is ostensibly good for native English speakers living here since it means fewer new words to learn, although you often have to spend time getting used to the alternate pronunciations, which is partially a function of the language being phonetically based on syllables rather than consonants and vowels.

To you or me, the word "weekend" probably has two syllables, but in Japanese it sounds like "oo-EE-koo-EN-doh." Some other hard-to-get-used-to words include allergy ("ah-REH-roo-gii," with a hard "g" in the last syllable), energy ("eh-NEH-ru-gii," also with a hard "g"), and the word loose, which always seems to be pronounced "lose" (as in the word loose socks). Despite how odd these (mis-)pronunciations of familiar English words may feel at first, accepting them is all part of learning to speak Japanese properly.

If you're interested in learning some Japanese and want to help improve your pronunciation, I recommend using textbooks or other study materials that force you to read everything in hiragana right from the start, and not romaji (Romanized Japanese), since your brain would try to apply the pronunciation rules of English where they don't belong. The Genki textbook series or the kanji cards from White Rabbit are both excellent places to begin.

Japan is a great country, with a lot to offer both short-term visitors and tourists as well as people like me, who like the place so much we put down permanent roots.

But still, Japan is far from perfect, and there are various sources of stress for gaijin living here, for example (if your language skills are still improving) not being able to talk freely to people or even to read what's written on some signs, not being able to understand local customs that might be taken for granted by everyone but you, or (if you live in a rural city like I do) having kids occasionally stare at you because you're different. (I just say hello to them in English.)

I've lived in Japan for 17 years and have traveled quite extensively throughout most of the country, meeting a lot of people along the way.

It has happened, so infrequently it's almost statistically insignificant, that not every experience I had here was a good one, and not every person I met was 100% happy to be dealing with an overly-exuberant American like myself.

Like an old farmer who, when in his cups, asked me why "big America" had to beat up on "little Japan" during the war, or the scary yakuza gangsters I found myself surrounded by when I stupidly stayed at a 24-hour sauna in Kyoto, or the one time I tried to enter a bar in Roppongi and was told politely that they didn't accept foreign customers. (I should have worn our "No Gaijin" T-shirt.)

Whenever I encounter some minor inconvenience I shrug and move on, reciting that useful Japanese mantra shikata ga nai (or more colloquially, sho ga nai), which means "it can't be helped," the main way the Japanese maintain their happy, largely confrontation-free society.

I know that every one is human, and for every minor negative experience I may encounter here in Japan, there are a few hundred positive ones.

Have you had Tuna Spaghetti recently? I did for lunch, and it was really good, a fresh marinara sauce with chunks of white tuna and several stalks of asparagus on top.

I don't remember seeing much in the way of seafood pasta dishes in the States, but they're among my favorites here in Japan, and many restaurants offer good spaghetti alla pescatora, even your basic famires (family restaurants) like Denny's and Coco's.

Living in Japan certainly makes you appreciate seafood, and I eat all kinds of things I would never have otherwise, from sushi and sashimi to miso-stewed mackerel, although I do draw the line at shio-kara, which is pickled squid intestines -- that's just going too far.

There's one problem: I tend to know the names of fish in Japanese, and can even write them in kanji in some cases, but I often have no idea what the name of the fish I'm eating is in English.

Rainy season

2009-05-08T18:17:00.007+09:00

Received 05.06.2008

Japan has entered its rainy season, a month-long period when it will rain most every day as the country does its best impersonation of Seattle.

The word for rainy season is tsuyu, written with characters that mean "plum rain," and there are several theories about how this odd name came about, including that it comes from the fact that Japanese plums ripen around this time of year, or that the kanji for plum resembles the character for "every day" (as in, I can't believe it's going to rain every day).

Although I complain about the dreary weather, the rain is important to Japan's rice growing, and odd years when very little rain fell have been followed by bad rice harvests.

Incidentally, if you ever want to know what the weather will be like tomorrow, do what Japanese kids do and throw your shoe as hard as you can. If the shoe lands upright, it will be a nice day tomorrow; if it lands on its side, look for clouds; and if it lands upside down, it will rain.

The Japanese can be quite creative when it comes to playing with words, whether it's coming up with an advertising slogan like "Shall We Sapporo Beer?" or making textbooks called "Let's English!" or Japan's leading cellular phone company changing its name from DoCoMo to DOCOMO (all caps).

They also keep their language fresh by constantly adding new words, some of which come from English, although they're often adapted for easier use by shoehorning them into Japanese grammar.

Since most Japanese verbs end in -ru, there's a tendency to make slang words by tacking on this ending, which creates interesting hybrids like memoru (to take a memo), daburu (to be duplicated, from "double"), misuru (miss + ru, to miss, to get an answer wrong on a test) or baguru (bug + ru, to get a bug in your software).

Just as "to google" has become a verb in English, the unoff icial word for "to search using Google" in Japanese is guguru, used by almost all Internet users.

Another example of this trend is the English word "trouble," which is converted into the slang verb toraburu meaning "to get into trouble," which inspired the title for To LOVE-ru, a popular anime series about a princess from space who wants to marry a Japanese high school student, which combines this troublesome word with "to love," making an even deeper linguistic joke.

These words conjugate just like a normal Japanese verb, yielding sentences like boku no geemu ga bagutta! "my game froze up!" or kore, gugutte mite "try googling this and see what comes up."

Can you guess what these English-derived words mean? nabiru, takuru, hamoru, homoru, rezuru. (Answer at the bottom of today's post.)

One of the things I've liked about my years of learning Japanese is what I've come to call the "joy of satori," a sort of thrill that jumps through your brain when you make a difficult linguistic connection, solve a challenging kanji problem, or intuit a correct answer without really knowing why.

Satori means understanding or comprehension, or written with another kanji, enlightenment in the Buddhist sense, and I believe our brains are hard-wired to feel joy when a difficult solution is finally comprehended.

I remember back when I read reading my favorite manga, the Rumiko Takahashi classic Maison Ikkoku, the story of a university ronin who falls in love with the widowed manager of his apartment building and takes several years to woo her.

There's a secret code embedded in the series, a number system based on the names of the characters and the apartments in the building: for example, the main character is Godai and he lives in room number 5 since go is 5 in Japanese; his neighbor Yotsuya lives in room 4 as yotsu represents that number; and so on, with Kyoko being zero, since her last name contains the character nashi (meaning "nil").

I'll never forget the thrill I felt when I puzzled this system out for the first time -- it was a small piece of enlightenment, but it was my own.

---------------

(The answers to the quiz above are nabiru, to navigate, i.e. to serve as navigator for the driver when taking a trip; takuru, to go somewhere by taxi; hamoru, to harmonize when singing; and homoru and rezuru, which both mean to be with someone of your own gender, depending on whether it's guy/guy or girl/girl.)

Sashimi bar in the sky

2009-05-08T18:11:00.006+09:00

Received 03.06.2008

I know I write about toilets in Japan quite often.

For some reason, there's a lot of interesting culture to be found at the porcelain altar, between the seatless Japanese-style toilets that present foreign visitors with their first major culture shock in Japan to those wonderful "Washlet" toilet seats that clean and dry your rear end while you do your business.

Once I went to a restaurant with my daughter, who was about five years old at the time, and had an interesting experience. She excused herself to go to the ladies' room, but came out a minute later saying she was too scared to go because there was a "strange sound" in the bathroom.

She insisted I come in with her, so I ducked inside to see what this scary sound could be. It turns out it was a device called Oto-hime (a play on the name of a goddess from Japanese mythology, with the characters switched around to mean "Sound Princess") which makes a chirping sound when ladies use the toilet, because Japanese women hate the idea of anyone being able to hear any sounds they make while they go.

Before the device was introduced in the 1980s, it seems that female patrons in restraunts would flush the toilet multiple times to mask the sounds, which wasted an incredible amount of water. Since males don't usually go into public ladies' rooms, the existence of these strange sound-emitting devices is quite mysterious to men in Japan.

You never know what's going to get popular in Japan next: maybe horn-rimmed glasses will suddenly come back into vogue, or a new restaurant will open in Akihabara selling gourmet instant cup ramen prepared by pretty girls in maid costumes (this actually exists).

Sadly, there's been a tragic "boom" in Japan involving suicides using a concoction of easily available household chemicals which, when mixed, make for the perfect way to die. (Well, that's if you consider being paralyzed and slowly suffocating over two hours to be perfect.)

So far there've been more than 40 cases involving the chemicals, not counting related deaths like the father who tried to save his son and also succumbed to the fumes, and it's feared the number will keep growing.

There are many reasons why more Japanese are likely to willingly visit that sashimi bar in the sky, including the high degree of stress in Japan's overly urbanized society and differing attitudes about death in a country that has glorified suicide in the past, in the form of classic novels of shinju, or lovers' suicide; seppuku, the ritual self-disembowling of samurai; and of course kamikaze.

Still, there are real reasons why there are so many suicides in modern Japan, including the near total lack of counseling services, the tendency for Japanese to widely ignore such services when they do exist, and mistrust of virtually all medications, making it rare for depressed people to be given drugs that might be able to help them.

The government could be doing more, too: recent changes in traffic laws have managed to bring the annual number of people killed in traffic accidents to a record low of under 6000 per year, but there are few visible signs that the government is trying to do anything to stop suicides.

Although Japan has quite a reputation as a suicide country, it's only 10th in the world, with countries like South Korea, Russia and Lithuania ranking considerably higher.

You probably know that the Japanese have an extensive custom of bowing as a greeting or to show thanks or respect, called ojigi. There are three different kinds of bowing: the casual eshaku (EH-shaku) bow made with a 15 degree inclination, often made when passing coworkers in the hallway; the keirei, a deeper 30 degree bow that's most used in business; and the sai-keirei, in which you incline your head and body 45 degrees to show special respect to someone.

To do a proper bow, stand up straight with your feet together, look the person you're bowing to in the eyes, and bow from your waist for 1-2 seconds before standing up again.

Remember, in business settings, the goal is raise the other party up by lowering yourself, which in itself is quite a metaphor for much of Japanese society, hence learning to bow properly will help you understand Japan a little better.

Bowing is also important in Japanese martial arts, and it can come in handy if you should encounter any Jedi Knights in your travels.

Whimsical pictures

2009-05-08T18:04:00.002+09:00

Received 31.05.2008

No work is ever created in a vacuum, and everything is constantly being influenced by everything else.

Every time I watch Silence of the Lambs, I marvel at how blatantly the X-Files draws its core inspiration from the film, right down to the geeky Lone Gunman characters who help out on the case, and I'm sure the creator of CSI: Las Vegas got his idea for that series while watching Manhunter, the 1986 film that introduced Hannibal Lecter (the 2002 film Red Dragon is a remake of Manhunter).

The world of Japanese animation is not immune from taking inspiration from other sources either, for example the many cues Fist of the North Star takes from The Road Warrior, or my pet theory that the "magical girl" genre of anime rose in response to the popularity of My Wife is a Witch, aka Bewitched, which was popular in Japan during that era.

If you've seen the film The Matrix, you know how Hollywood has been influenced more than a little by the world of anime.

While a lot of the inspiration for the movie obviously comes from Shirow Masamune's hard-hitting Ghost in the Shell sci-fi series, a larger part of the story is a tribute to Megazone 23 (pronounced "two-three"), one of the breakthrough anime concepts of the 80s.

In the series, the population of Tokyo thinks its the end of the 20th Century, but in reality it's 500 years in the future and everyone is living inside a space ship. Many elements of the Megazone series are borrowed for the Matrix, including the hacker-as-semi-messianic main character idea.

Manga is the name given to Japanese comic books, although most people over the age of 35 or so will use the word to describe animation on TV as well.

The word literally means "whimsical pictures" and was coined by Edo Period ukiyo-e artist Hokusai (the dude who painted the famous Red Fuji and Great Wave Off Kanagawa pictures you may have seen) to describe a book of woodblock art he'd done.

Although manga can be associated with obsessive otaku culture, there really isn't a single Japanese person who didn't grow up with a favorite manga that they still feel nostalgia for, whether they're an active fan now or not.

On Sundays our rural liquor shop gets the new issues of the popular weekly manga magazines, a day earlier than the large chains and convenience stores, one of the few bones thrown to small retailers in Japan. I always marvel at the customers who stop by to pick up the new issue: elementary school and junior high kids, of course, but plenty of adults, including a businessman in a really nice BMW who makes small talk with me and, since we live next door to our city's mayor by some strange coincidence, the deputy mayor of our city.

This year marks the 40th anniversary of Shonen Jump, the popular manga weekly, and Japanese canned coffee maker Roots is putting on a major advertising campaign for its new coffee called "Innocent Blend" (I am not kidding), showing panels from the great Jump comics of the past, from YuYu Hakusho to Dragonball Z to Saint Seiya all the way up to Death Note. So everyone celebrate manga by, er, drinking some canned coffee, or something!

Today is Inventory Day here at J-List, when we have to count the many thousands of excellent products we stock.

It's quite a job, with our entire 15-person staff counting all the items throughout the day, so we make it fun by ordering lunch from Pizza Hut, which 99% of Japanese think is Pizza Hat.

Anyway, we mis-calculated the number of people who'd be eating and didn't order enough quite pizzas, making me worried that there might not be enough food for everyone.

However, I'd forgotten about the Japanese tradition of enryo (en-RYO), a word which means constraint, modesty or to refrain from doing something, and when we opened the pizza boxes and told everyone to dig in, it took five minutes or more for the Japanese staff to start eating.

The girls would take one piece and say they were full, and we had to literally put the pizza slices on plates and press them into people's hands to get them to eat. In the end, there was just enough pizza to go around.

It's difficult as an American to completely understand a concept like enryo, but part of the reason it was so hard to get everyone to start eating was, no one wanted to be perceived as being first to grab for food, so they stood around saying, "No, after you" to each other.

This was probably due to having so many people in the same place at once.

If there had been only 2-3 people and a single pizza, they'd have been less self-conscious.

School ghost

2009-05-08T17:46:00.005+09:00

Received 29.05.2008

Do you know the story of Toire no Hanako-san, or Miss Hanako of the Toilet?

It's a Japanese urban legend that can be found at most every elementary school here, and it goes like this: if you go to the fourth stall of a specified girl's bathroom, usually on the third floor of the school, knock three times and call out "Hanako-san, are you there?" then you'll hear her reply, "Hai" (yes).
Open the stall and you'll see a shimmering figure of a girl with bobbed hair with a red skirt on standing there.

It's the ghost of Hanako, a girl who committed suicide after being bullied by her classmates (ijime), who is said to haunt the girl's bathroom looking for revenge. Or in an older version, Hanako is a girl who was playing hide-and-seek in the school bathroom during the war and was killed in an American air raid because she couldn't hear the air raid siren.

Hanako-san is part of a pantheon of "school ghost" stories that are well known in Japan, like Kuchisake Onna or Split-Faced Woman, a female ghost who asks you if she's beautiful before trying to devour you, and Teke-Teke, the upper torso of a female who claws her way around Japan searching for her lower half, which was severed in a train accident in Hokkaido.

Anyone hearing this story will supposedly see Teke-Teke's lower half walking aimlessly around the countryside within three days. Let us know if you see anything!

When learning Japanese, I found myself fascinated by words or phrases that were completely unlike what existed in English.

For example, there's a class of single-word phrases which, for some reason, have many possible translation paths in English, making them challenging (but fun) to use.

First there's yahari (alternately, yappari), which you use to express your own expectations about something, roughly equivalent to "I knew it" or "just as I expected."

When someone tells you something that you didn't know, you can use naruhodo (nah-roo-ho-doh), which means "I see" or "that's news to me."

If you watch an hour of anime in Japanese, you'll likely hear the phrase masaka (mah-sah-kah) at least once, usually said by a shocked character -- it just means "it can't be!" or "you've got to be joking!"

Finally there's a great word to pull out when you want to praise someone: sasuga (SAH-soo-gah), which roughly means "I always knew you were incredible!" So if you have a friend or coworker named Yamada-san who does something good, hit him with "Sasuga, Yamada-san!" and know that you've made his day.

There are some big differences between how elections work in Japan compared to the U.S. Because Japan uses a British-style Parliamentary system, the elections aren't held as regularly as they are in the States, and you never know when the Prime Minister will disband the government and throw us all into Election Hell, with candidates riding around in loudspeaker cars thanking everyone loudly for their support.

Election advertising is usually limited to posters showing the candidate wearing a smart suit with his name in large kanji characters, and negative advertising and campaigning is strictly forbidden. There are two types of election news coverage in Japan: reporting done by NHK, Japan's version of the BBC, which by law must be neutral on all issues; and traditional masukomi (from "mass communications") outlets like Fuji or TBS.

While the press in Japan seems well balanced when covering politics -- for example, even minor parties are given ample time to present their views on popular political talk shows, no matter how small their representation -- you can always count on Asahi Shimbun-affiliated TV Asahi to give the ruling Liberal Democratic Party a hard time because of their long history of opposition.

Also, the news media is always careful to tip-toe around any issue involving the New Komeito, Japan's third-largest political party and part of the current ruling coalition, since many famous singers and actors are members of the Soka Gakkai Buddhist religion, which is completely unaffiliated (wink wink) with the New Komeito party (wink wink).

Sumo

2009-05-08T17:37:00.002+09:00

Received 27.05.2008

History has been made in the Sumo Wrestling world with the victory of Bulgarian wrestler Kotooshu (koh-toh-OH-shu), the first time a wrestler from Europe has won a Sumo Championship.

Born Kaloyan Stefanov Mahlyanov in Bulgaria, he was a successful wrestler in his home country, but when his weight increased past 120 kg, the maximum for participating in the Olympics, he decided to try his hand at sumo wrestling instead after participating in a few bouts as a joke.

He climbed the ranks in the sumo world quickly, attaining the 2nd highest level of ozeki after only 19 tournaments, the most rapid rise of a wrestler starting from the lowest rank. (There are six tournaments held each year, three in Tokyo and one each in Osaka, Nagoya and Kyushu.)

His handsome good looks and relatively low weight of just 152 kg / 334 lbs -- compare that to Hawaiian wrestler Konishiki, who was a massive 264 kg / 580 lbs -- have earned him many fans, and the nickname "the David Beckham of sumo."

His wrestling name of Kotooshu combines the traditional Japanese musical instrument koto with the kanji name for Europe, Oshu. The top sumo wrestlers are always quite famous in Japan, appearing on TV commercials and talk shows, and I'm sure we'll be seeing plenty of this wrestler from now on. He's even won his first first sponsor: Meiji's Bulgaria brand of yogurt, which makes a lot of sense.

When you study a language like Japanese, you learn many rules that make up the grammar, like the unique particles wa and ga which verbally mark the subjects of sentences; o, which conveniently marks the object of a sentence; how to change the verb forms to add whatever meaning you want to express, and so on. But as you study, you'll learn that to every rule there's an exception.

For starters, the grammatical structures used in Japanese are important, yet in real spoken Japanese, most parts of sentences are usually understood by speakers and are thus eliminated, which can create confusion in the minds of students.

When addressing someone, the Japanese add -san to the ends of their names for formal speech, and for relationships that are closer, -chan for girls and -kun for boys.

But there are plenty of exceptions to this neat little system, for example, calling all children with -chan regardless of sex, mothers adding -san to the names of foods in bento lunches for their kids, -kun being used with females in formal classroom or military settings, or the Japanese obsession with nicknames, with the whole country thinking of Arnold Schwarzenegger as "Schwa-chan" because that's so darned cute.

Bottom line, any language is complex, and the best way to cover each different facet of it is to expose yourself to plenty of input in that language. Thankfully, it's quite easy to find interesting and compelling ways to get input in Japanese, whether from manga or anime or Japanese dramas or even the PC dating-sim games we sell.

It's time for another installment of Wacky Japanese You Already Know, featuring Japanese words that happen to be homophones with English, like hen, a word for a female chicken which happens to mean "strange" in Japanese, or the letter "E," which is an all-purpose word for "good" or "okay" here (Romanized ii, pronounced like the letter).

In American English, "honky" is an impolite word for a white person, but in Japanese, honki means "serious," e.g. honki desu ka? "Are you serious?"

The word "kinky" might make you think of something creative in the bedroom, but in Japan the region of the country containing Kyoto, Osaka and Nara is designated as the Kinki Region -- there's a popular "multi-talent" duo from the region called the Kinki Kids.

If you've ever seen one of the Rambo movies, you know how to say "violent" or "violence" in Japanese, since that's what it means -- rambou.

When a relationship has bumps, the word for this is giku-shaku, which sounds so much like "geek shack" that you can probably just use that word. "Emo" describes a kind of music and related counter-culture style of living, but in Japanese it's...a potato (imo).

And if you've ever wondered how you say "voice actor" in Japanese, it's really easy: "say you" (seiyu). Now you know some more Japanese words.

Wasn't that easy?

High nose

2009-05-04T20:53:00.004+09:00

Received 24.05.2008

One of the first things you learn as a foreigner in Japan is that people here will assume you're intimately familiar with every word written in katakana, the writing system used for expressing foreign words, just by being a native speaker of English.

Although the majority of foreign-loan words do come from English, many are taken from other languages, such as the medical terms that were imported from German during the early 20th century, or various everyday words like ankeeto (questionnaire, from the French d'enquete) or arubaito (part time job, from the German arbeit).

I remember trying to make curry back in my bachelor days and stumbling because I didn't know what the "ruu" the instructions called for was. (I now know it's roux, the French word for cubes of curry or consomme.)

This assumption that every foreigner knows everything associated with Am erica and Europe goes beyond words, too. I was asked by the PTA of the special English school my son attends if I thought the International Baccalaureate program would be a good base for students wishing to attend university in the U.S. I'd never heard of this system, which seemed to confuse the PTA members. I was a gaijin, wasn't I? How could I not know? They were disappointed when (after doing some research) I told them the IB program, which is widely accepted in Europe and elsewhere, wasn't officially recognized by most mainstream U.S. universities the students would likely attend, since Japan considers itself an honorary European nation.

Learning a foreign language is good for reasons beyond the obvious benefit of being able to communicate and share ideas with people from other parts of the world. It can also give you unexpected insights, including the etymology of words you might miss otherwise.

The name China uses for itself literally means the Kingdom at the Center of the World, which seemed overly ethnocentric to me when I heard it for the first time.

Of course, the Mediterranean Sea means the exact same thing, the Sea at the Center of the Earth, something I never would have picked up on if I hadn't seen the name in kanji characters.

Similarly, I'd never consciously realized the days of the week were named after the ancient gods, although it's very clear when you write the Japanese days of the week in kanji, which correspond to Moon Day, Mars Day, Mercury Day, Jupiter Day, Venus Day, etc. (The names in English have been filtered through the Germanic/Norse pantheon, for example Thursday comes from Thor's Day, although the system is the same.)

Sometimes words can get lost in translation when they move from one language to another.

Despite Japan being a pretty non-religeous country, the name for the Statue of Liberty in Japanese is jiyu no megami, or Goddess of Freedom, and the official word for the Olympic Torch translated as the Holy Fire of the Five Rings. Sounds like a magic item from a video game.

In Japan, there are often concepts that are difficult for Westerners to grasp.

One measurement of beauty here is related to the number of creases in a persons eyelid when their eyes are open -- one crease is called hitoe (hee-TOE-eh), two creases is futae (fu-TAH-eh). Single-creasers have slender, traditionally Asian eyes, while those with more creases have larger eyes that look European to the Japanese.

Getting plastic surgery to change the appearance of your eyes is quite popular among TV stars and young Japanese people, and my wife likes to regularly report on which TV stars who have suddenly changed their faces. (There are even products that promise to make your eyes look larger and more "Western.")

I have to admi t, I'd never considered that people had different numbers of creases in their eyelids until coming here -- it was a totally alien concept to me.

Another measure of beauty is having a "high nose" (hana ga takai), an important feature for anyone who wants to be considered one of the Beautiful People here; the opposite is a "low nose" (hana ga hikui).

The rule is, if you can touch your chin and the tip of your nose with one extended finger without contacting your lips, you've got a "high nose."

I never really thought of schnozzes as anything other than "big" or "small" before coming to Japan, but apparently there is more to a person's nose than meets the eye.

Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore

2009-04-20T22:50:00.005+09:00

Received 22.05.2008

I write often about how harmonious Japan appears to foreigners living here.

Seen from our special position as outsiders (which is what the word gaijin really means, after all), most Japanese seem to possess joshiki, a kind of "national common sense" which keeps them generally in sync with society at large; in cases where an individual moves away from accepted norms, the phenomenon of hito no me ("the eyes of others") will usually bring him around, or at least get him to keep his penchant for [fill in any slightly anti-social but fun activity here] hidden from general view.

This tendency to get along with each other doesn't just happen automatically: there are concrete mechanisms in place that help make Japanese society the happy, feel-good place it is. When I walked to school back in the U.S. I walked alone, and my primary concern was avoiding getting beaten up by a bully along the way, but in Japan, kids walk to school together in a group called a han, with the oldest child acting as hancho (remember, "head honcho") which forces kids to interact socially in positive ways.

Our larger neighborhood is divided into sections called kumi, which plan various community events, establish schedules of mothers who will stand along the route kids walk to school to make sure they're safe, and publish information on designated evacuation areas in the event of a disaster.

They also distribute the kairanban (kai-rahn-bahn), a circular with information on various goings-on in the community, another subtle way of building social ties since it has to be manually passed from house to house.

When I married my wife in 1994, I puzzled at the small speaker wired to one wall in their living room, out of which a calm voice would occasionally sound, announcing things like an ikebana class being held in the Community Center, or the all-im portant-in-fire-prone-Japan reminders to make sure your kerosene heaters are turned off at 10 pm.

The system eventually fell out of use and the speaker was removed when we "reformed" our house (as they say in Japan, meaning remodel), but while it as hooked up I was amazed at the benevolent 1984-esque-ness of it all.

One of my favorite anime/manga series is Genshiken, an exploration of the deeper aspects of anime, manga and related culture as seen through members of a university club dedicated to the Study of Modern Visual Culture.

The show follows the main character Sasahara as he comes to terms with his own self as an otaku, and examines different areas of popular culture through the other club members, like Ohno the obsessive cosplayer; Tanaka, who likes costumes and plastic models; Madarame, the textbook super-obsessive Gundam fan; Kugayama, the group's first doujinshi artist; Kasukabe, who's only there because her boyfriend is a member; and Ogiue (oh-gi-OO-eh), the enigmatic yaoi-obsessed female who secretly hates otaku.

One of the funniest moments in the series is the introduction of two American characters who are friends of Ohno: tall, elegant Angela, who possesses way too much knowledge of underground otaku culture, and petite Sue, who's managed to memorize the most embarrassing lines in anime and says them at inappropriate times.

The reaction of the Japanese characters to the two Americans is priceless, and (as usual in this series) also very accurate: despite six years of English study in Junior High and High School, they freeze up and are almost completely unable to even try to communicate. I've occasionally had that reaction from people here, despite the fact that I was speaking fluent Japanese to them the whole time, so it was hilarious to watch.

If you've ever visited Japan, you've probably answered the call of nature at some point, and seen the famous TOTO logo featured on most every toilet here. If you're a wise-cracking gaijin like me, you might have been compelled to say, "Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore."

Toto is the largest toilet maker in Japan, and the fourth largest in the world, and if you've ever enjoyed the warm feeling of having your butt carefully washed and dried by your toilet, you have these people to thank, since the "Washlet" is their invention.

The company was launched in 1916 in response to the need for Western-style sanitation as Japan grew more modern, and it experienced rapid growth during the rebuilding after the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923. Like many Japanese company names such as Kyocera ("Kyoto Ceramics"), its name is an abbreviation, in this case Toyo Toki, or Oriental Porcelain. In additi on to high-tech toilets, they invented the "unit bath," an easily constructed one-piece bath, sink and toilet room common in Japanese apartments.

They also had a successful line of porcelain tableware, although I for one wouldn't want to eat off porcelain plates with that TOTO logo on it.

Doggie bag

2009-04-20T22:44:00.004+09:00

Received 20.05.2008

World War II officially ended 63 years ago with the surrender of Japan, but the legacy of the war isn't completely over.

On Sunday, an unexploded bomb dropped from a B-29 was discovered in Tokyo, forcing the evacuation of 16,000 residents while the Self Defense Forces were called in to defuse it, which they did successfully.

Although this was a unique reminder of the reality of the war for modern Japan, I've always wondered why tangible signs that there really was a war here are so rare today.

There are a few, of course -- a really straight road in a nearby city that locals will tell you used to be the runway for the Nakajima Air Base, a playground with an old Zero fighter converted for kids to play on, and a deactivated American bomb on display in a library.

Growing up in the Washington D.C. area, though, I remember visiting Arlington National Cemetery and the Iwo Jima Memorial, and I feel as if I was more aware of the war than Japanese kids growing up here, where it actually happened.

There's nothing like Arlington here in Japan, no equivalent to Veteran's Day or Memorial Day -- I guess there are psychological factors at work in the minds of the Japanese that are hard for an American to fathom.

I saw a report that said Americans throw away an average of 27% of available food, an unfortunate reality in a world where not everyone has enough to eat.

Being a prosperous nation, Japan has a similar problem, with a large amount of perfectly good food being disposed of instead of eaten, dispite the loud protests of members of the generation that grew up immediately after World War II, when the country knew real starvation.

There are various reasons for this waste, such as unsold food being disposed of in supermarkets and convenience stores at the end of the day, food being tossed due to the expiration dates having passed, or food being left behind in a restaurant by patrons. (There's no custom of taking home a "doggie bag" in Japan and most Japanese would be horrified at the thought of asking for one.)

Still, there's a big difference in the potion sizes between Japan and the U.S. with the average plate of food here probably about 25-30% smaller than in the States, and it's surprising how easy it is for foreigners living here to get used to this. Among the benefits of these smaller portions are by ability to be satisfied ordering a "child's" ice cream or frozen yogurt when visiting the States, since the size is just right.

An interesting aspect of Japanese polite grammar is the honorific "o" that goes in front of some words to give them a higher status.

Various words that are especially important in Japanese society receive this prefix, like money (okane) or relationships like mother or grandmother (okaasan, obaasan). It's interesting to notice the patterns of words that take this unique honorific. For example, words having to do with death or Buddhism tend to take it (otera = temple, okoh = Buddhist incense), yet words related to Japan's Shinto religion usually don't.

English words don't take the honorific, with the exception of o-new, a slang word for something purchased recently that's very important to you.

Adding the honorific "o" to words sort of "softens" it, so words related to children or babies often feature it (omaru = child's potty, omutsu = diapers, oshiri = a cute word referring to a person's rear end).

An alternative reading for the "o" kanji is "go" and some words have "go" on the front instead (such as gohan, a polite word for rice or any food). Conceptually, "o" and "go" are exactly the same, since they're written with the same kanji character.

High-end fruits

2009-04-20T22:35:00.007+09:00

Received 17.05.2008

Visitors to Japan will encounter many strange and wonderful sights, from thousand-year-old temples and five-stories pagodas to vending machines that manage to take up less than ten inches of space along narrow Tokyo streets.

While prices in Japan are often quite reasonable -- we took nine J-List staff members out for Indian Curry and naan bread to welcome a new employee today, and it only cost $100 -- the opposite is sometimes true.

For example, virtually all forms of media are pricier in Japan than they are in the U.S., with music CDs still costing around $30, and a video game in a ge-sen (game center) setting you back $2. Gas is expensive, too, currently up to $6.25 a gallon or so.

Then there are those mysterious honeydew melons you see in produce shops which cost a mind-blowing $60-80. Japan being Japan, there's more to this high price tag than meets the eye, and these high-end fruits are nearly always purchased as gifts for individuals who have helped you out recently, given to bosses to butter them up for larger bonuses, or exchanged between companies.

The bar for ridiculously priced fruits was raised this week, when a pair of exquisite melons from Yubari, Hokkaido (the Mecca of melons in Japan) fetched an unbelievable $24,000 at auction.

The high purchase price helps local melon farmers doubly because the news generated by the new price record will no doubt generate a lot of extra interest in these high-grade melons all season long.

Japan is preparing to host the 34th G8 Summit, to be held at beautiful Lake Toya in Hokkaido this July. One thing you learn early on about Japan is that it's extremely pleased to receive recognition from the nations of the West, and whenever events like the Nagano Olympics or the 2004 World Cup draw near, there's a flurry of construction as Japan makes itself look good for all the foreign visitors.

Japan is extremely pleased to be hosting the other major nations at the summit this year, so much so that it's issuing commemorative 500 and 1000 yen coins to mark the occasion -- you'd think it was a World Expo all over again. The summit will be held in one of the most beautiful and least-spoiled parts of Japan, a decision the government no doubt made to help bring attention to the environment.

Living in Japan, it's always interesting to observe the various "when worlds collide" moments that come along every once in a while. I remember back when J-List's Tomo came to work here, nine years ago. Like many Japanese who grew up in the postwar period, Tomo has always had a lot of respect for the music culture of the West, and he basically taught himsef English by translating and memorizing songs by the Stones and Led Zeppelin.

I don't think he ever expected to meet an American who had done the opposite, embracing Japanese pop culture in order to learn his language, as I've done. One day we were talking about the classic 1972 song "Alone Again (Naturally)" by Gilbert O'Sullivan, which a student of mine had ironically played at her wedding, not understanding the words.

I was sure was a Beatles song for some reason, and I'll never forget the look of utter shock on his face that an American could get a fact like that wrong.

Ever since coming to Japan I've loved onsen, Japan's volcanic hot springs, and I've been to dozens all over the country. When Tomo told me that he almost never went to hot springs, I was equally shocked that a person could live here and not love the bathing culture as I do.

It was quite an educational experience for both of us, and these days, he goes to hot springs and I know that Gilbert O'Sullivan was not a member of the Beatles.

OH! Mikey

2009-04-20T22:23:00.001+09:00

Received 15.05.2008

There was a bizarre Japanese TV show that was on a few years back called OH! Mikey, in which an American family moves to Tokyo and must get used to their new life in strange Japan. Since the characters are all played by mannequins who never move, well, it's one of the strangest things you can possibly imagine. Anyway, in one of the episodes, Mikey tells his mother Barbara that the teacher will be dropping by for a visit soon, which makes her sure that Mikey has done something scandalous at school.

In reality, it's customary for teachers to visit the homes of their students once per school year, to observe the home environment first-hand and to talk with the parents about any concerns they might have for the new school year. It's another ex ample of Japan being focused on the important issues of education and child-rearing, and it's something I'd like to see considered for adoption in the U.S. My daughter's home visit was today, and my wife spent an hour discussing various topics with her teacher.

As usual, my daughter going to the U.S. for the summer was a minor problem, since even during summer vacation the other kids will attend various school events as well as practicing the theme to Space Battleship Yamato on brass band instruments, a rather unlikely tradition at their school. But my wife stuck to her guns, letting the teacher know that going to the U.S. to learn English and do fun things like Girl Scout Camp is equally important to our family.

When you flit between the U.S. and Japan a lot, you can sometimes find yourself coming unglued culturally.

I was in Tokyo yesterday on business, enjoying the best American-style cheeseburger in Japan at the Hard Rock Cafe, and when it was time to leave, I had a mini-stress attack as I tried to remember how I was supposed to pay. Should I ask for the check and pay at the table, as in the U.S., or take the receipt to the cash register near the door and pay there, as is done in Japan? I wasn't sure which custom went with which country for a moment, a fact that was no doubt exacerbated by my strange surroundings.

Another area with the potential for cultural goof-ups is driving.

Although it's not that difficult to learn to drive on the left (just make sure you're closer to the center of the road than your passenger, whichever country you're in), it's a constant challenge to remember which side of the car to get in, and I've gotten quite good at nonchalantly strolling around to the other side of your car after trying to get in on the wrong side.

Similarly, although automobile controls are identical no matter what country you're driving in, the turn signal and windshield wiper controls are reversed between the U.S. and Japan. This increases the likelihood that I'll accidentally turn my wipers on when making a turn, usually when a group of attractive girls happens to be watching me.

"Even monkeys fall from trees." This is one of the many bits of wisdom you can glean by studying Japanese kotowaza, or proverbs, which are so plentiful in Japan there are books to help you study them.

This phrase is saru mo ki kara ochiru in Japanese, and it means that even experts make mistakes occasionally, and no one is perfect. Another one that comes up a lot is, "Sit on a rock for three years" (ishi no ue ni mo san-nen), which means you should stick to something for a certain time (three years) before knowing whether you like it or not, which can be good advice for young people who change their minds too easily. Or, "If you fall down seven times, get up an eighth" (nana korobi, ya-oki), meaning that you should never give up trying to attain your goals -- always come back swinging.

One of my favorites, juu-nin toh-iro, which literally means "ten people, ten colors," or people are all different, so don't look at me funny for wearing this domo-kun hat, alright? Although these proverbs can be difficult to learn since they often use old or archaic grammar, pulling one out at the right moment can bring a look of astonishment to the face of a Japanese person that's pure gold for a gaijin.

Most kotowaza were originally adapted from Chinese versions, but sometimes they're added from other sources, for example snippets of wisdom from the Bible or Shakespeare. There here are local versions of all the most famous English proverbs, too ("a bird in the hand" and so on).

Speed Racer

2009-04-20T22:18:00.000+09:00

Received 13.05.2008

Last time I mentioned that the word "taco" (tako) happens to mean something very different in Japan: octopus.

The Japanese get around any confusion related to this by always referring to the Mexican version in the plural, as tacos, which takes some getting used to when you're talking about just one. Sadly, tacos and all other forms of Mexican food are almost completely absent from Japan, and the closest thing you can find are those Twisters from KFC, which aren't that bad if you keep packets of Taco Bell sauce in your car like I do.

Imagine my surprise when I went to the local home center over the weekend and saw a real live taco stand set up, selling authentic "Mexican Tortilla Tacos."

Every food must adopt to meet the tastes and expectations of the locals, however, so there were some changes to the tacos.

These included the option of choosing sweet chili or Italian sauce instead of salsa, and fresh cabbage and cucumbers instead of lettuce -- hmm. I certainly hope the taco stand does well so we can enjoy this special treat in the future, which folks in the U.S. are able to take for granted.

The "M" is hard to see, but it's there

At the anime convention in New York last December, I got to meet Peter Fernandez, the voice behind the legendary Speed Racer cartoon of the 1960s (he also directed and wrote every episode).

As a child, I was a card-carrying member of the generation that thrilled to the ongoing adventures of Speed and his Mach 5, the car that could jump chasms, zoom at full speed through a thick forest thanks to retractable buzz cutters, and even drive along the bottom of the ocean.

The show was originally broadcast as Mach Go Go Go! in Japan, the story of young race car driver Go Mifune -- a multi-level name which represents both the English word "go!" and the number 5, which is go in Japanese -- along with his former pro wrestler father Daisuke (Pops), his girlfriend Michi (Trixie), his mischievous younger brother Kurio (Spridle), chimpanzee Senpei (Chim Chim), and who could forget the mysterious Mr. X (Racer X)?

Speed Racer was unique in that it was more popular outside of Japan than at home, becoming a cult favorite in English and more or less enjoying a revival in Japan only because of its special status overseas.

Although there are plenty of of snarky cultural references to Speed Racer in our culture, it's far more common for Japanese fans of the era to profess a love of Chiki Chiki Machine Super Race, the Japanese version of the Hanna-Barbera classic Wacky Race, and show you their impression of that cute dog Ken-Ken (Muttley) laughing.

As if to mark the occasion of the new Speed Racer film, our cat Su-chan just gave birth to a cute baby kitten that has an "M" on his forehead. I think I'll name him "Mini Mach."

Part of the challenge of studying a foreign language is learning to categorize and separate the new concepts you encounter. Take the word wa for example, which English speakers sometimes use as a term for peace or harmony, as in, "Hey man, you're messin' with my wa."

The character has other meanings, too, including "peace" as well as referring to Japan itself; it can be combined with other characters to form words like heiwa (peace), washiki (Japanese-style, as in a Japanese-style toilet), or washoku (Japanese food).

A completely different word wa means circle or hoop, and in the context of Japanese relationships, a group, and it's quite common to hear phrases like wa ga aru kara ("I have to think of the whole circle of people") or wa ga kuzureru ("the circle of friends would suffer").

Finally, there's wa, the grammatical "topic marke r" used in Japanese sentences, which verbally marks the subjects of sentences, like kore wa bento-bako desu ("this is is a bento box") or gohan wa? ("What about dinner?").

Eyes of others

2009-04-16T22:23:00.005+09:00

Received 10.05.2008

Japan is one of the most earthquake-prone countries in the world, a fact that I was reminded of on Thursday morning when the Kanto region (where Tokyo and Gunma are located) got a big 6.7 magnitude shake that seemed to go on for two minutes or more.

A staggering 20% of all earthquakes in the world occur in Japan, a chain of islands that sits astride four different tectonic plates, and one of the major challenges to the country has been how to apply its unique engineering skills to make sure buildings and people are safe.

It's a tribute to those skills that Thursday's quake resulted in only a few injuries and no deaths, although it doesn't always work out so well.

The Great Hanshin Earthquake (Hanshin means "Osaka-Kobe") of 1995 occurred in a region of Japan where strong quakes were less common, and as a result of lower building standards, a staggering 6400 people lost their lives.

One of the features homebuilder s tout on TV commercials in Japan is how well engineered their houses are, with special spring joints that allow the homes to rock back and forth flexibly in the event of shaking.

Last time I talked about what makes the Japanese the way they are, putting forth the theory that the strict Junior High School system is a major factor in shaping children into the adult citizens they'll become. Another of the social engines at work in Japan is called hito no me (hee-toh no meh), meaning the "eyes of others," essentially the ever-present invisible gaze of people around you.

A friend of mine just built a house in Nagano, and he's enjoying having cleaner air and less people around him than when he was in Tokyo.

His new neighborhood has a strict rule, however: trash must be deposited in the appropriate pick-up area between 6 and 6:30 in the morning, which means he has to get up extra early every day to put the trash out.

If he were to break this rule by, say, putting his trash out the night before, he'd find himself the subject of the disapproving stares of the other people in the neighborho od, which is a lot harder to deal with than the threat of a monetary fine would be.

This sensitivity to how you appear in the eyes of others is probably the primary reason Japan seems so harmonious when viewed from the outside, as gaijin see it. My sixth-grade daughter is half-Japanese, and she somehow managed to inherit my easy-going American personality.

When my wife went to my daughter's class for parent participation day last week, my daughter threw her arms around her mother, to the shock of everyone in the classroom. Hugging your mother isn't really done in Japan, and certainly not in the middle of classroom full of the "eyes of others."

There are many strange and new tastes that await a foreigner who comes to live in Japan. Some, like pickled plums, chicken cartilage or the fermented soybeans called natto don't sit too well with me, although I've come to enjoy many other foods, including all manner of fish and other good things from the sea. (At my house, we regularly eat tako salad, which is fresh salad with octopus meat, served with a tangy vinaigrette).

Another food I've really come to like is wasabi, an extremely spicy flavoring that adds so much to sushi and sashimi as well as soba and udon noodles. Similar to horseradish, wasabi has a very long history in Japan, and there are documents dating from the year 718 that mention it as a medicinal herb, which is interesting since wasabi is known to naturally fight infections and act as an antibiotic, for example killing the bacteria that cause ulcers.

Half Japanese and half-Western

2009-04-16T22:15:00.008+09:00

Received 08.05.2008
You probably don't think of soybeans as being vital to culture, but in Japan, the lowly soybean is the most important national crop after rice. Soybeans began being cultivated in China 4000 years ago and found their way to Japan through Siberia soon after.

Today many of the traditional foods of Japan are made from soybeans, including tofu, or soybean curd, which tastes a lot better than its English name sounds; miso soup, how I start my morning every day; and natto, the fermented soybeans that foreigners usually shun because of the way it smells.

Soybeans are the base for soy sauce, a flavoring used more often than salt in Japanese kitchens, and they're also used to cast out "devils" (actually fathers wearing cardboard devil masks) on a s pecial day in February called Setsubun.

Another popular way to eat soybeans is as edamame, lit. "twig bean," which are boiled soybeans in their pods that are great for munching on over a beer, and healthier than anything else you could choose, too.

The way the soybeans pop out of their pods when you give them a squeeze is especially fun, and there are compulsive people here who love nothing more than to order an extra large bowl of edamame and pop all the seeds out. If this sounds appealing to you, check out the Endless Edamame Keychains we've gotten in stock today -- they're great fun to play with all day long!

The question of "What makes the Japanese the way they are?" is an interesting one, and I'm certainly not the first gaijin to ponder it.

While the U.S. is viewed by Japan as a "horizontal" society in which everyone is more or less equal, Japan's society is considered "vertical," with relationships that change based on relative age or status in a group.

One example of this are the concepts of senpai and kohai, words that describe an upperclassman in a school or senior member of an organization, and underclassman or junior in a group, respectively.

Another example is how the concept of, say, "brother" is split into separate words for older brother (oniisan) and younger brother (ototo), and it'd be difficult for the Japanese to think of the idea of a "brother" without classifying older or younger in his mind. (In the case of twins, by the way, the one that pops out first is the older brother.)

My personal theory is that the the majority of Japanese social imprinting occurs in Junior High School, a unique period of three years in which students are first exposed to the strict reality of these top-down relationships for the first time. It's in Junior High that kids are forced to join clubs and engage in "club activities" with older kids, which includes greeting senpai in a loud, clear voice, showing respect at all times, and putting up with some hazing, no doubt.

This period of intense social pressure seems unique to Junior High: in Elementary School, kids are still treated as kids and almost never interface with kids at other age levels, and High Schools function like a miniature version of the university system in Japan, with students choosing which school fits their study goals and academic abilities, so there's less social pressure (although there are plenty of other pressures, like college entrance exams).

Wherever you're from in the world. there's a good chance that your blood contains contributions from different national groups -- maybe some German or Italian blood from this branch of the family, or perhaps a dash of Cherokee to keep things interesting.

To people from the melting pot that is the United States, mixed ancestry is taken for granted, and it's quite common to talk about about where your ancestors came from with others.

This is one discussion you probably won't hear in Japan, a very homogenous country where virtually everyone considers themselves to be of identical stock.

The exception to this rule are individuals who are haafu, or half Japanese and half-Western, who exist in the special place between futsu (normal) Japanese and the incredible varieties of face, hair and body types seen in Westerners.

To many people here, haafu seems to be the perfect blending of Japanese sensibilities and Western mystique, and there's a large group of "talents" on TV whose mixed blood helps them appeal to fans.

These include popular TV announcer Crystal Takigawa, whose soft half-French appearance might subliminally lend credibility when reporting on international news; half-English JPOP singer Kaela Kimura, who got her break when she was chosen to appear in the "Have a break, have a Kit Kat" TV commercials; and of course the super-cute Leah Dizon, whose ancestry includes French, American, Chinese and Filipino.

Perhaps the current pinnacle of haafu cuteness is actress Erika Sawajiri, the Algerian-French-Japanese star, who's incredible beauty has won her many fans.

Cipangu

2009-04-16T22:09:00.003+09:00

Received 06.05.2008

Japan is a small country, which has to fit about half the population of the U.S. into an area just 1/25th the size. This makes it important for people to use less space, and you can see many ways in which the Japanese go about doing this in their cities. First of all, many businesses such as family restaurants or electronics retailers are built up high, with the ground level clear for cars to park, which saves a lot of space.

Houses with business built into them are quite common in Japan, like Seven-Eleven convenience stores with apartments above for the manager to live in, or my own house, which contains the small liquor shop that my wife's family has operated for fifty years. Gas stations need to save space, too, and many have their pumps located in the roof, with hoses that can be dropped down from above, allowing for more space for cars waiting to be refueled.For parking a lot of cars in a small area, the Jap anese have automated car storage systems that will whisk your car away and store it while you shop, then return it to you when you insert your parking stub.

There's even a version of this for bicycles that has just gone online, which can store 9400 bicycles in a small underground space. Of course, building up always gives you more room with work with, but it's not always possible to do that in earthquake-prone Japan, which puts extra pressure on engineers to come up with ways of doing more with less space.

Japan has been undergoing a "Miyazaki Prefecture Boom," lately, thanks to its governor, former TV comedian Sonomanma Higashi, a discovery of director/comedian Takeshi Kitano, who appeared on Takeshi's Castle for years. The TV comic gave up his career as a "talent" to run for governor of this rural prefecture last year, winning despite having no backing from any political party.

Since taking office, he's shaken things up quite a bit, using his celebrity status to shed light on the wasteful construction projects that plague rural Japan and trading in his official governor's vehicle for a hybrid. Now, his face adorns dozens of products that contain ingredients from the prefecture, and it seems you can't go into a shop without seeing his face smiling up at you.

Miyazaki is located in the southeast corner of the southernmost island of Kyushu, one of the early centers of Japanese civilization due to its proximity to Chi na and the Korean Peninsula, and it's famous for mangoes, the off-season training camp for the Tokyo Giants, and a sprawling resort called SEAGAIA, which recreated a tropical beach under an 85 acre dome, although it was closed last year due to the inability of the operators to make a profit.

The name of Japan in its own language is nihon or nippon, alternate readings of kanji characters that mean "origin of the sun," a name given it by China. The two names are interchangeable, with nihon being used in everyday speech and nippon used in more formal situations, for example by lawmakers or the straight-laced newscasters on NHK, Japan's version of the BBC.

The first Westerners heard of Japan was through Marco Polo, who wrote about a strange country 1500 miles to the East of China called Cipangu, a place of great wealth where both temples and average homes were made of gold, and where the people were very polite, although they had a strange custom of eating human flesh.

The modern name of Japan has been filtered through many other languages, including traders in Malaysia (who called it Jepang), Manchuria (Zeppen), and the Portuguese (Iapan), and first appearing in English as Giapan.

For some reason, the Japanese have focused on the version Zipang as a cool, retro early word for their country, and this name is commonly found in books, video games, an anime and manga series, and computer CPU cooler.

Now Accepting Applications for a Japanese Girlfriend

2009-04-16T22:08:00.000+09:00

Received 03.05.2008

Being a healthy male, I'm naturally fascinated with the opposite sex, and I find the subject of Japanese females to be an especially complex and interesting one.

Over the years I've known many Japanese females, from students I taught English to, to girls I dated, and of course my wife, and while each of them is unique, I have noticed some patterns.

Japanese females are often very concerned with how they appear to others, wanting to be chanto shiteru (roughly translatable "doing things properly, as they should be doing") in all things, and when it comes time to, say, split a lunch bill, out come the calculators so they can accurately compute the amount that each person must pay.

Often, Japanese girls feel the need to cultivate a certain kawaii character about themselves, and it's not that difficult to find a girl in her high teens or twenties who thinks its cute to hold her coat sleeves in her hands to make herself look "super deformed," to refer to herself in the third person or to spontaneously channel a "catgirl" without warning. (As you can see from looking at Colonel Sanders wearing a maid costume, there's no natural upper limit to what can be made "cute" in Japan.)

While there are exceptions, most Japanese girls are extremely slender, and I've known grown women here who, when visiting the U.S., need to shop at Gap Kids if they want to find their size.

Thanks to eating rice three times a day, Japanese females are constipated more often than not, and spend great quantities of money on exotic Chinese herbal remedies, when all they need to do is eat a little less rice.

I could go on, but I wouln't want to ruin the mystique of Japanese women for anyone, and besides, they confuse me, too.

At J-List we've got a wacky line of T-shirts, polo shirts and hats that say "Now Accepting Applications for a Japanese Girlfriend" in kanji, and based on its ongoing popularity, I'm pretty sure that I'm not the only one fascinated by the enigma of Japanese women.

Like most countries, the keitai (mobile phone) has become a huge part of life in Japan, and for the younger generation, cell phones seem to be supplanting the personal computer as the primary Internet device of choice.

The newest trend is young people using their phones to access sites called purofu (i.e. "prof," from the English word profile, which looks very similar to "blog" when rendered in katakana), centralized services that allow people to create profiles for themselves showing their pictures, specifying their age and location, and listing their favorite music, movies or food.

These purofu services are sort of like guestbooks optimized to display on cell phones, where people can search for keywords then leave comments or links and have random, meandering discussions, creating a way for lonely Japanese young people to make friends.

No one knows exactly how many users of these services there are in Japan, but conservative estimates start at 1 million or more.

The new Internet services aren't without problems, however, some of which came to light last week when a 17-year-old student attacked a 14-year-old in Chiba Prefecture with a metal baseball bat for writing insults on his profile page.

It's always interesting to compare the differences between Japan and the rest of the world.

In America, many products like Coca-Cola, Dr. Pepper, Wrigley's gum and Tootsie Rolls have been around for over a century, some since the Civil War, and they continue to dominate in their respective categories decade after decade.

Japanese consumers, however, seem to favor new products when they shop, forcing manufacturers to come up with fresh ideas at a faster pace.

While there are some solid Japanese standbys that never change -- Original Pocky, or Peko-chan Milky Candy -- any vi sit to a Japanese conbini (convenience store) is sure you bring you into contact with a dozen or so products you've never seen before, like the brand-new Fanta Furu-Furu Shaker, a can of orange Fanta with gelatin in the can that makes it rather difficult to drink.

The Japanese beer industry is another example: even in the small-town liquor store that my wife's parents operate, I constantly see new twists on Japanese beer being sold, like beer formulated for ladies, or beer with dietary fiber added, or beer that tries to appear "green" and somehow friendly to nature.

I've been told that this is because the Japanese themselves have short attention spans, and move onto the next big thing rather quickly.

While it's always nice to find an innovative new flavor of Kit Kat or a new twist on Doritos, it's also good to have a core of old favorites that never change.

Golden Week

2009-04-02T19:22:00.004+09:00

Received 01.05.2008

Japan is in the middle of Golden Week, a semi-accidental grouping of holidays which gives everyone a break from normal their school or work lives.

The name Golden Week was coined in 1951 when an executive at the Daiei Movie Company noticed a spike in ticket sales around these holidays, so his company started a campaign advertise the holiday week as a great time to go see a movie, in the same way that "golden time" is the best time to watch television (although we call it "prime time").

While everyone uses this label today, Japan's public broadcasting network NHK stoically refuses, preferring the term "period of consecutive holidays" as the name Golden Week is ostensibly an advertising term for a private industry.

Golden Week is a major economic event both for leisure-oriented businesses inside Japan as well as for areas popular with Japanese tourists, like Hawaii, Guam and California, but the fact that several of this year's holidays fall on Saturdays may mean fewer leisure-travelers.

In case you're curious, the holidays that make up Golden Week are Showa Day on April 29, the birthday of the former Emperor; Constitution Day on May 3, to commemorate Japan's postwar constitution; Green Day on May 4, a day for appreciating plants and growing things; and Children's Day on May 5, which is traditionally a day to celebrate boy children by flying carp-shaped kites which represent the boys swimming up the stream of life.

Happy Golden Week, everyone!

Although you probably don't know much about how the law functions in Japan, most Japanese have at least a basic idea of how the courts operate in the States, thanks to the many kaigai dorama or "overseas dramas" that are shown here.

As a general rule, the law and lawyers don't play a large part in people's lives in Japan, which seems to be partially for cultural reasons and partially due to people just having a little more common sense and courtesy when dealing with each other.

Awards for civil lawsuits are based on actual, provable damages, which makes it very hard for a plaintiff to get an unreasonably large judgment; in addition, lawyers' fees are based on the damages sought by plaintiffs, rather than damages actually awarded, which eliminates a lot of potential for greed. On the criminal side, prosecutors currently enjoy a mind-boggling 99% conviction rate, nearly always after a defendant makes a signed confession.

There are some difficult cultural elements involved here, but the conviction rate is so high in part because prosecutors only bring cases for which they have solid evidence.

Big changes are coming for the legal profession though, as Japan prepares to introduce a trial-by-jury system in which citizens will act as "lay judges" and determine the the outcome of cases.

Personally, I don't think it will fly: between the tendency of Japanese to be overly group-oriented and come to agreement for the wrong reasons, the occasional amano-jaku, the kind of "absolute contrarian" that refuses to do things that are popular that I talked about recently, which in the case or something like a jury trial could really cause problems for the justice system here.

Sushi is the delicious raw fish on rice eaten in Japan, and it's so popular here that we have to plan carefully when we want to go eat it, to avoid having to wait an hour to get into the restaurant.

By definition, sushi is raw fish on vinegared rice, with the vinegar originally added to keep the sushi from going bad back in the days when there was no refrigeration.

Although the standard cut fish perched atop a pressed piece of rice (called nigiri-zushi or hand-pressed sushi) is the most famous type, there are many other varieties, including gunkan-maki or "battleship roll" with seaweed around the outside of the rice; maki-zushi or rolled sushi; and one of my favorites, chirashi-zushi or "scattered sushi" with different kinds of fish sitting on rice, which you mix together then eat.

Certain types of sushi actually contain no fish, yet are still considered sushi, including cucumber rolls and the favorite of kids throughout Japan, tamago or scrambled egg sushi.

Although Japanese eat a lot of raw things from the sea, the same cannot be said of the Chinese.

I've got an American friend who has a Chinese wife, and whenever we eat dinner with them I rub my hands together in anticipation, knowing that she'll give me all her sushi and sashimi.

Spirited Away

2009-04-02T19:13:00.005+09:00

Received 29.04.2008

I took the kids out for ramen last night, and while we were waiting for our gyoza dumplings to be fried up, I realized something interesting: I'd been coming to that restaurant for a decade and a half, since back when my wife and I were dating, and for all that time, the prices had never gone up.

It seemed incredible to me, so I glanced at the menu to be sure, but the Miso Corn Ramen was still 600 yen, and the gyoza was still 300 yen for a plate of five pieces.

This is the general rule in Japan, a country which for some reason sees very little inflation in the prices of everyday goods, perhaps due to government involvement in various aspects of the economy for "stability" purposes, or for other reasons we gaijin can't fathom.

Now, of course, the price of oil is finally causing some prices to inch up faster than the snail's pace they normally move at, and when the Nissin Food Com pany announced they'd be raising the prices of their instant noodles, it was treated as big sky-is-falling news, despite the fact that it was a small increase, and the first in no less than seventeen years.

Today at lunch the cashier at the croquette shop we stopped at apologized in a meek voice that they'd been forced to raise their prices slightly, and I told her it was okay.

One of my favorite movies is Spirited Away, a beautiful feature film by Hayao Miyazaki with a fabulous soundtrack by Joe Hisaishi.

It's the story of Chihiro, an average, somewhat spoiled Japanese girl who finds herself "spirited away" to a another world inhabited by all manner of gods and spirits, not unlike a girl named Alice who walked through a looking glass.

In order to save her parents, who have become pigs, she must work at an abura-ya (an old word for a public bathhouse) frequented by various odd creatures from the spirit world.

I like the movie because of the many important Japanese values that are demonstrated as Chihiro goes on her strange journey, such as the Shinto belief that there are kami (spirits) in natural objects such as rivers which we should show respect for rather than harm.

Chihiro grows a great deal during the film, for example learning that good things will come to those who are industrious and work hard, a message Mr. Miyazaki no doubt wanted to send to the current generation of young viewers in the hopes that they take it to heart.

Perhaps the most important thing is that she learns how to show thanks when someone does something for her, and communicate this thanks loudly and clearly as a good Japanese girl should.

If you haven't seen the film, please do, it's really a special one.

Bento is the famous boxed lunch consumed millions of times daily across Japan, and fast becoming a sensation all over the world.

As a rule, bento lunches in Japan are almost always comprised of a quantity of rice along with meat, fish, vegetables or other foods that go well with the rice, which is collectively called okazu, the "main course."

Although there are endless varieties of bento you can create, there are several well-defined categories that I'll tell you about.

The most basic type of bento there is is probably noriben, white rice with nori seaweed over the rice, which you can easily make at home.

Another is toriben, essentially chicken with teriyaki sauce over rice, although one of the great mysteries of Japan is that no one seems to use the word teriyaki here.

I love jubako, the "stackable" bento that comes on two or three levels, and you never know what the next section will contain until you open it -- it's quite fun.

When my mother-in-law was growing up in the 50s, her family didn't have much money, so she had to eat hinomaru bento, or "Circle of the Sun" boxed lunch, which is a big section of white rice with a small, round ume-boshi (pickled Japanese plum) in the center, like the Japanese flag.

In general, the kind of bento lunch most men would love to eat is called aisai bento, literally "loving wife lunch," the word for the delicious hand-made lunch a man's wife will make for him.

If a married man is eating bento and a Japanese person passes by, there's a 77% chance they'll smirk and make a comment about how jealous they are that you're eating aisai bento and they're not.

"No Smoking As Possible, Please"

2009-04-02T19:06:00.002+09:00

Received 26.04.2008

Today I ate soba noodles for lunch, and I was amused at a sign I saw above my head, which said narubeku kin'en, translatable as "No Smoking As Possible, Please." I found it quite amusing for the restaurant owners to ask customers not to smoke "if they can possibly avoid it."

Although smoking rates have been falling in recent years, the Japanese do smoke quite a lot, with 41% of males and 12% of females currently lighting up, which compares to 27% and 24% in the U.K. and 24% and 18% in the U.S., respectively.

Tobacco was introduced to Japan by the Portuguese during the 16th Century, and it took hold quickly, with a traditional pipe called a kiseru very popular throughout the Edo Period.

Today cigarettes enjoy a rather unique status, since the Japanese Ministry of Finance is the majority stockholder in the country's largest tobacco company, and regional economies get 50% of the taxes collected on cigarettes by law.

One area where the industry here has shown vision has been preempting some of the negative feelings about cigarettes by promoting good smoking manners, as with the "Ah! Delight" and "Smokin' Clean" campaigns that show smokers being considerate of others.

Japan often seems custom-built to confound Westerners, and it's interesting that a country that smokes as much as it does still manages to enjoy long life spans, something that generally goes against expectations in the West.

One of the first things you do when learning a foreign language is, of course, to investigate all the "naughty" words. But this usually isn't too exciting in the case of Japanese, as the language lacks the satisfying range of curse words and anatomical references you find in English.

Most of the "bad" words aren't even that bad, with the "s" word (which is kuso in case you were curious) used regularly on Japanese children's shows, and the average insults being along the lines of baka! "Stupid!" or sashimi yaro! "You cold fish without rice!" (Actually that last one was a joke.)

Instead of focusing on the naughty words, some students instead find themselves giggling over words that sound "goofy" to the English ear for one reason or another.

One such word I encountered early on was the word for "sometimes," toki-doki, written using the kanji for "time" twice.

The word sounded so similar to "okee-dokee" that I couldn't stop using it in every sentence, to the great annoyance of my Japanese friends. Some other Japanese words that stood out because of the way they sound included haha, which means "my mother"; ware-ware (WAH-reh WAH-reh), a formal word meaning "we"; doki-doki, the sound of your heart beating in anticipation of something; and mokkori, which is defined as the sound something makes when it protrudes or sticks out suddenly (i.e. pitching a tent).

One of the best aspects about living in Japan are trains, an incredibly convenient way of getting around cities. Within just a few months of living in Japan I was hooked on the convenience of trains, and found myself paying attention to things like, where the best place to board the train is if I want to be at the top of the stairs when I arrive at my destination.

Japan is a very precise country that likes to be on time, and this is reflected in its rail system, in which trains are never late except in the occasional cases of "bodily injury accidents," the code word for someone committing suicide by jumping onto the train tracks.

Today happens to be the third anniversary of the terrible train derailment at Amagasaki, near Osaka, in which a commuter train jumped its tracks while rounding a sharp curve and slammed into an apartment building.

The crash came about because the driver was trying to make up time and avoid being late for the next scheduled stop, and he'd pushed the train up to 108 kph despite the speed limit for that section of the line being a mere 70 kph. With 106 passengers killed including the driver, it was Japan's worst rail accident in three decades.

We continue to experience some delays shipping items out of San Diego, due to some unforeseen circumstances which included a fire (!) at our ISP, which brought down the database used in shipping products out of San Diego.

All systems are up now, and the staff in San Diego is working very hard to get all delayed items out the door, and we apologize for the slowness.

Soft in the head from too much peace

2009-04-02T18:46:00.004+09:00

Received 24.04.2008

A lot has changed in the 17 years that I've lived in Japan.

I arrived here in 1991, also known as Heisei 3, being the third year of the current Emperor's reign. Although this sounds really cool if you imagine it in Star Wars terms, with the Emperor sitting in a high-backed chair or something, in reality the Japanese Emperor doesn't do that much.

Back then, the Tokyo land bubble, which saw the value of Japan's capital climb higher than that of the entire USA, had just burst, but the economy was still humming along fairly well.

Back in those days, it was a given that most young people entering the workforce would take a full-time job with a large company where they'd enjoy de-facto lifetime employment.

Well, for males, anyway -- in those days, as now, the majority of women chose to quit their jobs within a few years after getting married, often despite spending years on their educations beforehand.

After the roller coaster ride of the past decade and a half, however, many things have changed: for example the staff of J-List find themselves working in a company founded by an American, with a highly competent female (my wife) as company president.

Today no one expects to be able to work at the same company throughout their career, making Japan a little more like traditional economies in the West. Perhaps in response to this general change in thinking, a sizeable class of young people who choose not to bother with full-time employment at all has appeared.

They're called "Freeters," people between the ages of 15 and 34 who live at home and who are happy to bounce between part-time jobs without beginning a formal career.

In order to spur the economy, the government is trying to come up with ways to get more young people to see the benefits of working full-time, including stability, opportunities for personal growth and higher income.

Personally, I've long thought that Japan should institute a draft of persons between the ages of 18-20, as countries like South Korea and Switzerland do, to give Japan's youth some purpose and toughen them up for the challenges that await them in life.

Young people in Japan are extremely heiwa-boke, a word that literally means "soft in the head from too much peace," and maybe serving a couple years in the Self-Defense Forces would do them some good.

I've written before about how, while studying Japanese, it's easy to find yourself latching on to words or kanji characters as being especially kakko ii, a word that means "good style" or "cool," and one word I've always liked is amano-jaku, pronounced "Amano Jack."

Originally the name of a shape-shifting Shinto/Buddhist deity known for tempting mortals into doing naughty things, today the term applies to anyone who is extremely contrarian in nature, and who avoids doing things that are popular simply because they're popular.

For example, I've never in my life seen the movie Top Gun, because back when it was in the theatres it was so popular that I felt pushed away by that, unable to watch a movie that everyone was raving about so much, and in this the term definitely applies to me, and to anyone who hates being trendy.

The opposite of an amano-jaku is mii-haa (like Me! Ha!), s omeone who loves popular things because they're popular, which happens all too often in Japan's group-oriented society.

When Japanese think of foreigners, they think of overly tall, blonde Americans or Europeans with huge feet, trying to find their way to the right subway line.

Even though some of us aren't that tall (I'm only 5'9"), they apologize for having such small cars when you sit in the passenger seat, and likewise apologize for living in such a tiny hovel when you visit them at home, whether or not their house is really that small.

It's also assumed that every foreigner will speak English, and it's not uncommon to be told "sorry, I can't understand!" by a Japanese person even though you're speaking to them in their native language.

In actuality, the vast majority of foreigners living in Japan are not Westerners, but are from both Koreas, Brazil, Peru, and China. Officially, 1.5% of Japan's population are resident foreigners, although that number doesn't take into account people who are here illegally, so the number is prob ably higher.

Isesaki, the city we live in, has a much higher foreign population (3%) than average due to a lot of factories based here, which means a lot more choices when you want to eat ethnic.

One of our favorite restaurants is a Peruvian place that serves the most heavenly pollo a la brasa.

Longevity

2009-04-02T18:45:00.001+09:00

Received 22.04.2008

Akihabara is the area of Tokyo famous for its electronics shops, and you can find whatever you're looking for there, whether it's the newest computer gadget or fifteen-year-old software for your Sega Mega Drive game console.

Akiba is also the "Mecca" of otaku culture in the world, with hundreds of doujinshi shops, maid cafes and other companies selling products of interest to Japan's booming otaku generation.

Take a stroll down the main street on a Sunday -- they close the whole street down since there's so much foot traffic -- and you'll see a spectacle like no other, with thousands of fans laughing, shopping or dancing while cosplaying their favorite anime characters, including more than a few males dressed up like female characters.

Lately some less-than-savory elements have been showing up at Akiba, including up-and-coming bikini idols providing "fan service" for passersby with camera phones to increase their popularity, which tends to tarnish the area's image as a fun playground for nerdy types.

As the fans get rowdier, the Tokyo Metropolitan Police have been increasing their patrols in the region, walking around and making grim faces at fans who look like they're about to start a "guerilla live" or sudden performance of anime karaoke along the side of the street.

They've been checking the belongings of otaku shoppers, too, ostensibly to make sure they don't have any knives, which seems silly, given the extremely innocuous nature of most otaku types -- most of us wouldn't hurt a fly outside of a video game. There've been a lot of theories put forth about the crackdown on geekish activities, including that it's a lot safer to mess with the "A-boys" then, say, yakuza gangsters over in Kabuki-cho.

As a group, the Japanese are fortunate enough to enjoy extremely long lifespans, with the current average being 78.5 years for men and 85.5 years for women.

There are many reasons for this longevity, including a healthier diet, an extremely safe society, and a tendency to build lifelong relationships that provide important support in later years. (My mother-in-law is still close friends with women she went to elementary school with six decades ago, something that's unthinkable to me.)

Another reason Japanese live a long time is the health care system here, in which private institutions provide health services according to highly structured price schedules imposed by the National Health Insurance System.

Currently Japan is going through "Health Insurance Hell" as various changes that kicked in April 1st continue to cause mass confusion.

For starters, Japan used to offer free healthcare to everyone over the age of 75, but this has changed, and under the new system, some elderly users must pay a monthly premium.

It's not clear which groups this applies to, however, and it's feared that the new system, which makes people pay more for health insurance the more often they use medical services, will keep sick people from going to the hospital.

In addition, the government saw fit to change the Health Insurance Card from a large booklet to a paper-thin card, which is easily lost or thrown away by elderly Japanese.

Japan leads the world in many important areas, including sporting more vending machines than any other country in the world, with one operating machine for every 23 citizens.

While there are vending machines that sell everyday items you'd expect to find, like canned drinks or Pocky, it's not hard to find machines offering frozen ice cream or 5 kg bags of rice, as well as machines that sell cigarettes and beer when you slide your drivers' license in for verification.

The other day I was walking around our city trying to find a shop that would give me change for a 10,000 yen note, but I wasn't having any luck since there were no regular shops near where I was. I happened to walk past our city's Passport Center, the place where Japanese citizens in our c ity go to order a passport, so I ducked inside to ask if they could make change for me.

The lady at the counter just shrungged, gesturing to a vending machine that stood behind me, and I knew I was out of luck: the Passport Center, like many businesses, used a vending machine that dispensed tickets that could be traded for the various services they offered.

This allowed the office staff to completely avoid dealing with cash, which no doubt made their operations safer and more efficient, since all the cash was stored safely inside the ticket vending machine, which could only be opened by the armored car drivers who came to empty it every day.

You also find these ticket vending machines at restaurants quite often: just insert your 500 yen, hit the button for "curry rice," and give that ticket to the waitress, who never needs to touch money herself.

Sauce

2009-04-01T16:41:00.005+09:00

Received 19.04.2008

Japan is a great place, and I like it a lot.

The people are kind and honest, and every day is a learning experience for me, both in terms of language as well as the wider world of Japanese culture around me.

Japan is a free-market country in which products can be introduced into the marketplace to create value for smart companies with good ideas, the investors who provide capital to the companies, and the consumers who get the benefits of having innovative products to choose from.
However, there are some areas in which Japanese-style capitalism doesn't always function in the way that a Westerner might expect.

First of all, many companies must deal with competition from an unexpected source, the Japanese government itself, which chooses to involve itself in a wide range of businesses including operating Japan's horse racing industry and a government-subsidized provider of life insurance (Kanpo) -- they even ran Japan's largest tobacco company until it was privatized in the 1980s.

Last year, an investment group called Steel Partners tried to engineer a U.S.-style takeover of Bull-Dog Sauce Company, the makers of that heavenly tonkatsu sauce that's usually usually called "sauce" in Japanese.

While I'm all in favor of my favorite condiment company not being bought out in a hostile merger, there is the small issue of companies being owned by the actual shareholders, and not the management of the company, who seemed bent on preserving their own positions above all else as they fought off the takeover bid. Japan is a wonderfully litigation-free country, which is certainly a good thing al l around.

However there are times when a functional democracy might just need a few lawyers, for example if the management of a company did something that actually harmed the investors, yet in Japan concepts like shareholder lawsuits are completely unheard of.

My family is going through our annual "what are we going to do about summer?" decision-making process, trying to make plans for our kids to go to the U.S.

Figuring out what to do with kids during summer vacation is a challenge for any parent, I'm sure, but in our case it's extra difficult due to various cultural and scheduling differences between Japan and America. First of all, summer vacation is very short in Japan, being only six weeks long, so the time we have to work with is quite limited.

We like to find activities for our kids that will help them maintain their English skills, like Girl Scout Camp for my daughter and various science-related camps for my son, but choosing the right program is never easy.

While I think summer should be a time for kids to relax and have new experiences at a leisurely pace, my wife always goes into kyoiku mama ("education mother") mode, insisting that anything we choose for the kids to do have serious academic value.

While the idea of doing homework over the summer break is totally alien to American children, kids in Japan aren't so lucky. In addition to everything else, we've got to factor in about 20-30 hours for the mountain of homework my kids will have to work through before school starts in September.

If you read a lot of science fiction novels, as I have, one vehicle you'll find writers using is the idea of a "great renaming" in which familiar place names are changed, usually to denote much time passing or a period of great upheaval. (For example, 5,000 years after the original Dune novel, the planet Arrakis becomes known as Rakis.)

It sounds very cool and science-fictioney, and yet a "great renaming" is exactly what happened in Japan during the Meiji Reformation, when the old system of feudal domains (han) was retired in favor of a modern prefectural system with all new names.

As a result, virtually every region of Japan has two names associated with it, its current one (for example, Gunma Prefecture, where J-List is based), and its old name (which is Joshu-no-kuni).

The archaic names aren't official anymore, yet they're still used quite often, for example an udon restaurant might advertise "authentic Joshu noodles" to make customers associate their food with something old-fashioned and tasty.

Sometimes the use of the archaic names seems to be custom-made to confuse foreigners living here.

For example, the freeway that goes from Tokyo to Niigata is the Kan-etsu Freeway, which makes use of the kanji for the old name of Niigata (Echigo), something that almost no poor gaijin would be likely to know.

Less than satisfactory answer

2009-04-01T16:37:00.002+09:00

Received 17.04.2008

The subject of religion in Japan is a complex one.

The two main religious traditions here are Buddhism, which was introduced through the Korean Peninsula along with the kanji writing system in the 6th century; and Shinto, the naturalistic original religion of Japan which sees kami, gods or spirits, in trees, rivers and mountains. Anywhere between 63-96% of Japanese report themselves as being Buddhist, with around 3% and 1% for Shinto and Christianity, respectively. Exact numbers are difficult to pin down, though, since there's no subject more "about" (an English word the Japanese use to mean nebulous or imprecise) than religion here.

Although someone's family may belong to one religion or another, nearly everyone mixes themes regularly over the course of their lives, generally turning to Shinto or Christianity for life-affirming ceremonies like weddings or baby namings and Buddhism for funerals a nd ceremonies that pay respect to family members who have gone on. It's quite a mish-mash, really, but somehow each group is able to coexist alongside the others without friction.

If you ever have a question about religion in Japan, feel free to ask a Japanese person about it, but be prepared for a less than satisfactory answer, as Japanese rarely think deeply about their own country and culture in the way that foreigners fascinated by the country do.

One of the great achievements of modern Japanese society is that they've managed to completely separate religion from politics, and when election time rolls around, the question of what religious background a certain candidate might have isn't contemplated in the slightest. (A possible exception to this might be members of the New Komeito Party, which is affiliated with the "evangelical" Buddhist movement, Sokka Gakkai, and whose mem bers are presumably a member of that religeon.)

Bento are the amazing boxed lunches from Japan that are both delicious to eat and pleasing to look at, and since J-List has brought so much bento goodness to customers all over the world, I thought I'd write about the history a bit.

The origin of rice in a portable box for easy carrying began in the Heian Period (794-1185), when people would pack rice that had been cooked then dried again as well as onigiri (rice balls) for journeys.

The emergence of the ornate stackable bento box (jubako) came later as a way for nobles to enjoy a beautiful meal while drinking tea and viewing the cherry blossoms in the Spring. During the Edo Period (1603-1868), a popular form of boxed lunch called maku-no-uchi bento or "between-the-acts" boxed lunch appeared, which was eaten by playgoers during intermissions at public performances, or (according to another theory) by aficionados of sumo wrestling, who would wolf down the lunches in between bouts.

With the coming of trains to Japan, people needed a convenient way of taking their lunch with them, which was the beginning of ekiben or train station bento, which has blossomed into a huge industry unto itself, with each region of Japan creating bento lunches you can only buy there, making even something as commonplace as lunch something special.

Starbucks Japan has a new product for the coming summer season: the Coffee Jelly Frapachino, which is a coffee frap with chilled coffee-flavored gelatin at the bottom. Although coffee jelly ("jello" to our American readers) is probably up there fermented soybeans (natto), puffer fish (fugu) and pickled squid intestines (shiokara) as something you wouldn't expect to find gaijin eating, it's actually really good and easily one of my favorite desserts in the summer.

It's sold in every convenience store or supermarket , usually in the form of little plastic cups that come with a separate container of sweetened milk that you add to your coffee jelly before eating it, just like you'd do to a cup of black coffee.

There are many ways to eat coffee jelly, including pouring the milk over the pristinely shaped gelatin then digging in with your spoon, but I prefer to mix my coffee jelly up first then add the milk, letting it seep everywhere before I eat it.

Taboo

2009-04-01T16:35:00.002+09:00

Received 15.04.2008

Japan's defeat in World War II was a huge emotional blow to the country which is still felt today.
Although more than sixty years have passed, the subject of the war is still in many ways "taboo," and not discussed very often outside of certain specific situations. (Kind of reminds me of growing up in the 1970s and asking what that Vietnam War thing was all about...no one seemed to want to tell me.)

One interesting mechanism the Japanese have evolved to allow them to deal with the subject of war has been an unlikely one: animation. While the traditional image of a "soldier" used to be tied to black and white photographs from the historical Pacific War, this has changed somewhat after three decades of popular culture in which the idea of "war" was more likely to be defined in sci-fi terms, such as the One Year War of the original Mobile Suit Gundam series, in which spacenoids living in orbital colonies fight for in dependence from Earth.

While it's not generally possible for Japanese to wax romantic about the real war, which they lost, you can probably find fans within a certain age range who could tell you about the First Battle of Jaburo between Char Aznable-lead Zeon forces and the Federation in great detail, or a Space Battleship Yamato fan who can get misty-eyed about the Battle of Saturn, when dozens of Andromeda-class battleships were destroyed by the Comet Empire.

If you asked Japanese who they considered the most respected "military heroes" of the country were, you might find some who would answer Amuro Rei or Bright Noah or Captain Okita/Captain Avatar, the legendary characters from these war-oriented anime series.

It's not unlike the original Star Trek, which was able to tell stories about race relations and other difficult topics that couldn't be discussed in the 1960s unless they were disguised as science fiction tales set far off into the future.

Is it possible for a person to forget their native language? You wouldn't think so, but during my years of living in Japan, I've definitely noticed my skills at English changing in alarming ways.

The first to go were my college-level reading skills, something I realized with a shock while thumbing through a graduate school catalog less than a year after graduating from SDSU and coming to Japan to teach English as a Second Language.

Teaching ESL is especially challenging since you're surrounded with students who speak very simple English, and in order to make yourself understood you find yourself talking more slowly, perhaps, or pronouncing the "t" sound in "party" more than a native speaker would.

When you go for months or years without hearing English vocabulary words above the Junior High School level, the brain can have real difficulties pulling difficult words like "irreplaceable" or "gynecologist" out on short notice.

But it's really shocking when you make an actual mistake, which happened to me once when my family and I were in the U.S. In Japanese the words for splinter (a sliver of wood) and thorn (the prickly things on a rosebush) are the same, toge (TOH-gay), and once, when my daughter got a splinter in her foot, I got the two words confused in my head.

When my mother heard me asking to help get the "thorn" out of my daughter's foot with tweezers she looked at me funny.

One thing that surprised me about the Japanese was how superstitious many people are, and there are many beliefs here that seem odd to foreigners, such as, don't cut your fingernails at night or you won't be able to be with your parents when they die, don't whistle at night or snakes will come and get you, and so on.

Many of these beliefs come from Japan's unique flavor of Buddhism, which seems to be very death-oriented -- for example, it's bad luck to sleep with your head to the north (kita makura), as dead people about to be cremated are laid with their heads to the north.

In this vein, there's a complex system of lucky and unlucky days according to a Buddhist calendar, with six different days that cycle throughout the month.

It's goo d luck to get married or start construction on your home or take delivery of a car on the luckiest day (called Taian), but if you were to get married on the unlucky day (called Butsumetsu), you'd probably end up divorced and unhappy.

The six days, and their kanji meanings, are Sensho ("Win First"), Tomobiki ("Take Away With"), Senpu ("Lose First"), Butsumetsu ("Buddha's Death"), Taian ("Great Calm"), and Shakkou ("Red Mouth").

Supposedly, it's lucky to do things in the morning on Sensho, but it's unlucky to do anything in the morning on Senpu -- wait til the afternoon instead on that day.

Never have a funeral on Tomobiki, as the soul of the deceased will be taken away instead of staying near his loved ones, while Butsumetsu is a general unlucky day, and virtually all Japanese avoid doing important things on this day.

Today (the 14th) is Taian by the way -- I hope everyone enjoys good luck today!

Popular culture of choice

2009-03-31T21:15:00.003+09:00

Received 12.04.2008

One interesting side effect of studying a foreign language like Japanese is finding yourself naturally fixating on various aspects of the language as kakko ii, or "cool."

While learning Japanese I found myself liking certain phrases or kanji, like the flowing character for hashiru (to run), which is quite fun to write, or the mystery of the word ku-no-ichi, written with three kana characters from the kanji for woman and meaning "female ninja."

In Japanese there are quite a few four-character compound words imported from China centuries ago, which are interesting because they express highly poetic ideas, like jinba-ittai, a slogan adopted by Mazda which means "man and horse as one."

If you watch anime, you already know some of these kanji-based i dioms, such as ikki tousen, which literally means "one knight who is a match for 1000 enemies," i.e., really strong; or tenchi muyo, written with the characters for heaven + earth + no need, although its meaning is somewhat less elegant, since it's what they print on boxes to represent "this end up."

One of these compound words I found myself drawn to during my studies was issho kenmei (ee-SHO ken-may), written with characters that mean "to put one's only life on the line," which in everyday use means to try very hard, to do something with all one's might.

It encapsulates the Japanese ethic of working hard, whether it's beating your rival team at sports, studying hard and getting into a good university, or showing diligence to your boss and coworkers at work.

Perhaps the most famous symbol of being issho kenmei about something is the traditional Japanese hachimaki headbands, which are worn by anyone who is fired up with passion for something, for example high school students studying for their university entrance exams, new employees in a company opening ceremony, volunteers at a political rally, and so on.

We just happen to have a great selection of these traditional headbands -- check them out now!

I happened to see that this month marks the 30th anniversary of the venerable "Invader Game," what Space Invaders is called in Japan. This was one of the most influential video games ever released, with many innovative features for its era, including being the first game to introduce the element of competition by recording the day's high scores.

For me personally, Space Invaders represents no less than the point in history when just about everything cool started to come from Japan.

While the Golden Age of coin-operated video games would still see plenty of innovative releases from American companies over the next few years, it wouldn't take long for icons like Mario, Link and friends to win the hearts of gamers everywhere, for the first time creating a generation that looked to Japan as a major source of its popular culture of choice.

Japanese influence would continue to be felt everywhere, starting with the tire d lineup of after-school cartoons which were really ready for a smack-down, through the world of American comic books, and all the way to Hollywood.

Now, it's almost impossible to separate the ways in which Japan has influenced the world we live in, and to me, it all started with that simple, fun Invader Game.

Like Cherry Blossoms in the Spring, words are fleeting things, and it can be surprising how their meanings change when they're imported into other languages. Many of the English words the Japanese use don't match up perfectly with their Japanese counterparts.

When I had to replace a cooling fan in one of our Macs, I went to the local computer store ("Power Up Computing Life") and asked for a fan, using the English word, guessing correctly that the modern electronic concept of a fan would be covered by the English word.

Other concepts that we use the word "fan" for go by very different names in Japanese, such as senpuuki (an electric fan), uchiwa (a fan you use to fan yourself, non-folding) and sensu (a traditiona l folding Chinese style fan).

There are some other English words that the Japanese use, but only in limited ways.

If there's a girl you're secretly in love with, a Japanese might advise you to "attack" her (meaning, go and win her love). The English word "camouflage" often refers to a gay man and woman marrying to hide this fact from others.

And the English word "propose" is used in Japan only to mean a proposal of marriage, which certainly presents the potential for confusion in international work settings.

Envy

2009-03-31T21:10:00.002+09:00

Received 10.04.2008

Quick, what's the square root of five?

I have no idea, but my wife knows: it's 2.2360679.

How about the Periodic Table of Elements? My wife can recite the first dozen or so.

Do you know what year the Kamakura Bakufu, the first military government in Japan, was established? She tells me that it was the year 1192. This isn't because she's especially smart -- like all Japanese she has a tendency to be self-effacing and regularly calls herself baka, or stupid.

No, the reason she knows these tidbits of knowledge is because of the way Japanese memorize some forms of information, by converting it into easily learned phrases, which is called goro-awase.

Through a mechanism few gaijin can really understand, numbers are easily mapped to syllables in Japanese, for example the "ee" sound can stand for ichi (one), and "yo" or "shi" for the number four, and "o" for zero.

To conjure up the squ are root of five in the example above, my wife needs only to remember a phrase meaning "at the base of Mt. Fuji, a parrot cries" (Fuji-sanroku ni ohmu naku).

Back in the late 1980s, the U.S. was going through a period of serious Japan envy, when just about everything from the country seemed to be perfect, especially the much-vaunted education system, and at least a small reason the Japanese were beating us on international standardized tests was because of these little mnemonic tricks.

Of course, breaking information down into easy-to-digest chunks or memorizing by association are great ways to study more effectively. If you're looking for some innovative ways to learn Japanese, be sure to view our study pages for some good ideas.

The Emperor of Japan made a visit to our fine prefecture of Gunma on Monday, stopping by a community of Brazilian-Japanese citizens who worked at a large Sanyo plant.

He was there with his wife, Gunma-born Empress Michiko, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the beginning of immigration between Japan and Brazil, when a ship from Kobe departed with 791 Japanese farmers in search of a better life there.

During the first half of the 20th century, hundreds of thousands of Japanese resettled in Brazil and neighboring countries, and many of their descendents have returned to Japan, forming one of the largest ethnic groups here.

The town of Oizumi, about 30 km from J-List, has the highest official foreign population in the country (10%), although everyone knows that the real number about double that when people without valid visas are taken into account. It was quite a special event to have the Emperor in our neck of the woods, so naturally everyone dropped what they were doing to go try to get a glimpse of him, causing huge traffic jams everywhere.

If English is your native language, call up our parents and thank them now, because you've got it good.

Japanese students learning English face an uphill battle on several fronts, not the least of which being the complex range of sounds they have to master if they want to be understood by anyone.

Linguistically speaking, there are twelve vowels in most dialects of American English, with sounds like the schwa and the way New Yorkers pronounce "coffee" counting as separate vowels.

One way Japanese learners can differentiate the various sounds in their minds is by memorizing "minimal pairs," sets of words that sound similar, such as walk and work, close and clothes, or election and, well, you know, that other word.

I remember wondering why some of my former students would go out of their way to use "will not" as opposed to "won't" -- it turned out that they lacked confidence that the word wouldn't be mis-heard as want.

There are pairs of words in Japanese that manage to give foreigners trouble too, and just about every expat living in Japan can tell about the time they really screwed up by using the wrong word in a delicate situation.

Some of these tricky word pairs include kirei (kee-REY), meaning "pretty" or "clean," which is easily confused with kirai (ki-RAI), meaning "hated," as well as kawaii (KAH-WAH-ee), which means "cute," and kowai (ko-WA-ee), meaning "scary."

Worthy of a tattoo

2009-03-31T21:05:00.005+09:00

Received 08.04.2008

Over the weekend I took my son up to the mountains for some quality onsen (volcanic hot springs) bathing, one of my favorite activities in Japan.

As I've written before, virtually all public baths and hot springs here have signs saying that customers with tattoos are not allowed in, which is done to promote a "family friendly" atmosphere and keep scary yakuza gangsters away.

Of course people with casual tattoos on their bodies regularly ignore these signs, which was the case with a man I happened to see who had a really awesome tattoo on his arm: the face of Ryoma Sakamoto.
One of the "founding fathers" of modern Japan, Ryoma was a samurai from the small Japanese island of Shikoku who embraced the slogan sonno jo i (Respect the Emperor and Expel the Foreign Barbarians), rallying around the Emperor, who had been a figurehead of Japanese rule for most of the past 2000 years, and against the Tokugawa military government.

Fearing that any battle that resulted in a large loss of life among Japanese soldiers would see Japan colonized by foreign powers, he made a master plan to force the Shogun to surrender power by bringing the the rival clans of Satsuma and Choshu (modern day Kagoshima and Yamaguchi) together in a military alliance.

Although he was fighting against the influence of the U.S. and Britain on his country, he readily adopted Western technology, carrying a Smith and Wesson revolver and wearing boots as opposed to normal samurai footwear, popularizing both.

Sadly, Ryoma was assassinated by members of the Shinsengumi, a group of pro-Tokugawa samurai, a month after achieving his victory.

Today Ryoma is a very popular figure in modern Japan, a combination of Che Guevara and George Washington rolled into one.

And certainly worthy of a tattoo.

The word otaku is a formal term meaning "you" or "your family" which acquired its alternate meaning of "obsessed fanboy" after a magazine article critical of the rising underground culture of anime and doujinshi (fan-created comics) first used the term in 1983.

While the most common forms of otaku are fans who are devoted to anime and manga, there's no limit to the varieties of popular culture that can be encompassed with this word, and I've known karaoke otaku who sing for hours on end, a perfume otaku with more than 100 bottles in her collection, and an R/C otaku in our neighborhood who's been flying his airplanes in a nearby field every Sunday for a decade now.

Still, although we otaku have a lot of fun with our anime figures and our life-sized anime hug pillows, the true progenitors of fanatical hobby culture would have to be the railroad fans, generally called densha mania in Japanese, a term for anyone with a deep interest in railroad culture and who enjoy taking pictures of or riding on different trains.

Japan's history with railfans is long, with the first magazines for the genre appearing in the 1920s, although the hobby really took off in the 1960s and 70s as people acquired more time for leisure.

One of the most famous rail aficionados is children's author Kenji Miyazawa, who brought his imagination and love of trains together in his famous story Night of Galactic Railroad, a tale about a train that flies through space.

There are many approaches to learning a foreign language -- the Army Method (stress on learning through memorization), the Grammar Translation Method (learning a language by parsing its grammar), the Communicative Method (leaning by speaking and listening in the target language), and the Natural Approach (trying to replicate the steps that children go through when they learn a language).

Then there's the "get attention" method, which I'll label the Social Feedback Method to give it a proper name. Basically, you learn whatever vocabulary and phrases that will make you the life of the party among your target linguistic group, be it fun ways to begin conversations with attractive Japanese girls or memorizing interesting phrases that will amuse people around you, like esoteric proverbs they don't expect foreigners to know.

I have a friend who worked his way across Asia using this method, learning just enough of the local languages to be social and have fun with his hosts, and it seems to have worked very well for him.

Bottom line, when you study a foreign language, don't forget the "fun."

Sticky spot

2009-03-27T18:32:00.004+09:00

Received 05.04.2008

When you live in a place as different from the U.S. or Europe as Japan is, you have to get used to some changes, and something that I kept noticing back when I first arrived here was the great "duality" the country kept presenting me with.

This tendency for things to divide into two contradicting halves goes beyond the obvious mix of old-and-new, of highly advanced electronics co-existing beside an old guy who drives around in a truck selling stone-baked sweet potatoes on the road, or drinking water from a centuries-old Shinto shrine to wash down the KFC you just had for lunch.

One source of this perceived duality is the kanji writing system used by the Japanese, which usually has two readings or each character, the original Chinese one (the on reading) and the Japanese one (the kun reading).

As a general rule, characters appearing by themselves will use the Japanese reading, for example words like ki (tree) or mizu (water), but compound words will use the more complex Chinese one, e.g. mokusei (wood + produce = made of wood) or suido (water + road = water pipe).

This neat little system goes out the window when it comes to writing names for places or people, though, making it nearly impossible to accurately pin down the correct way to pronounce a kanji name without getting it wrong at least once.

Since there are two answers to "how do I read this kanji?" and neither one is entirely wrong, it can all make your brain feel like it's being pulled in two different directions.

I've written before about how the question of "patriotism" in modern Japan is a tricky one.

In the U.S. we have many opportunities to show our patriotic spirit, enjoying hot dogs and fireworks on the Fourth of July or saying "oo" and "ah" as we take in an air show at a nearby military base.

However, it's quite difficult for the average Japanese person to enjoy this experience.

The sad fact is that many of the traditional symbols of the country, from the Japanese flag on up, are often associated either with Japan's wartime past or with modern-day right-wing extremists who drive around in speaker cars playing World War II songs like idiots.

The official national anthem is another sticky spot.

Written in 1880, Kimigayo (warning: sound link) is a brief, solemn anthem based on a poem from the Nara Period which calls for the Emperor's reign to last for eight thousands years, until the pebbles grow into boulders with moss growing off of them.

Although that sounds very militaristic to us today, it was originally written as a Japanese version of God Save the Queen, and nothing more.

Recently the government has been trying to force teachers to sing the song during school events, but there's been a lot of opposition to this on the grounds of protecting freedom of expression.

What would you do to bring a reasonable sense of patriotism to Japanese young people?

One of the surprising things about living in a country like Japan is, is how you can get used to the local giseigo, literally "mimic-voice words," also known as onomatopoeia. To English speakers, dogs go "bark" of "woof" and cats "meow," but of course these are different in Japanese, where a small dog makes sounds like kyan kyan but a larger dog sounds like wan wan, and cats say nya nya.

A rooster may cock-a-doodle-doo in English, but in Japanese he makes the sound keko-koko, and while the Japanese manga called Gao! might sound odd to you, everyone here understands it as a dinosaur or a lion roaring.

The extent to which you can become accustomed to this differerent system of sound words is amazing, proving that the brain really can accept and adapt to anything.