All about New Year's Eve and Oshogasu in Japan, the big Kohaku TV event, and a New Year's Card from us!

Hello again from J-List, where the country is preparing to say goodbye to the current year and ring in the new one. Dec. 31st is a busy day as people rush to get everything ready for the New Year, buying food to make traditional dishes called "osetchi" that are made to keep for several days so housewives can take a break from cooking during New Years, and buying various decorations for the home. It's customary to eat Japanese soba (buckwheat) noodles on the last day of the year, believed to help everyone enjoy long lives, and December 31st is the busiest day for restaurants that serve noodles. But the most important activity that takes place on New Year's Eve is watching Kohaku, the Red and White Song Battle, an annual live show put that's been put on by NHK every year since 1951 in which female singers (the red team) battle male singers (the white team) to see which side can put on the more extravagant performances. The Kohaku show is "the" music event of the year, a veritable institution in Japan's music scene, and virtually every top star will be there from Ayumi Hamasaki to Kumi Koda to Orange Range and enka great Saburo Kitajima (I always make sure to catch his slot). After the Kohaku show ends at 11:45 pm, NHK shows solemn images of people making their way to beautiful Shinto shrines, Buddhist temples and Christian churches (and maybe a mosque?) to do hatsu-mode (ha-tsu MOH-day), the first prayer for good luck and happiness of the New Year, overlaid with the sound of beautiful bells until the display flashes "0:00," letting you know the New Year has arrived.

January 1st is a day to sit home and relax, reading through the New Year's Cards that arrived and eating mikan oranges while putting your legs inside the kotatsu to keep warm. Or you could turn on the TV and watch the New Year's Day Marathon, which through another inconceivable coincidence is held in our city, with a route that takes the runners right by our house (we get on TV a lot, considering how boring our city is). In the afternoon it's off to the Shinto shrine to pray for good luck, health and happiness. This year my wife is yaku-doshi, an unlucky year according to some Japanese tradition or another, so we'll probably be skipping our usual Shinto shrine (the one with 108 cool Japanese arches that you walk through to get to the shrine itself) and visiting one that specializes in neutralizing bad luck years. Then we'll go visit our favorite relatives, my wife's uncle, the one who fought in World War II and saw the Yamato sliding out of port as it went off for its final mission. I love to get him to talk about the old days when my kids are there so they can know how much things have changed.

(Speaking of New Year's Cards, here's ours. Print it out, secure in the knowledge that you got yours before anyone in Japan did, as we were late getting them out the door.)

It's the end of another year, our tenth since starting J-List, and looking back, I couldn't be more pleased. We've brought a slice of Japan to hundreds of thousands of people through my "Postcards from Japan" emails, and shipped tons of cool products to those not fortunate enough to live in this fascinating country. We've encouraged many to learn more about Japan, either through our Japanese language textbooks and other study aids or through many more indirect means. We've always loved the slogan "World Peace Through Shared Popular Culture," and we like to think that our efforts to make Japan more accessible to people all over the world. J-List plans to make 2007 our best year ever, with lots of new products to delight you and help you come closer to Japan. And so we say from the bottoms of our hearts, kotoshi mo yoroshiku, which roughly means "thanks in advance for your friendship and support this year, also."

This was our day to go see some waterfalls in Guam, no doubt billed as the Niagara of Guam in some Japanese tour guide, and see the famous Yokoi Cave, where "Hero Yokoi Shoichi Soldier" waited 28 damned years after the end of World War II, sure that the war was still going on.

This is a picture of his cave. Bloody guy was smart, using bamboo in his cave to absorb moisture, making a chimney for smoke to exit.

Commemorative plaque.

A beautiful Buddhist shrine someone had created, in memory of Mr. Yokoi and his two comrades who stayed with him for many years, but who died before being discovered.

Here is the cave. Pretty funky to see it for reals.

Another picture.

The other highlight of the place (other than some rides that were so laughable we didn't go near them) was a little history museum that showed the history of Guam, from the visit by Magellan, abuse by Spain for hundreds of years, the island's becoming a U.S. territory after the Spanish-American War, invasion by the Japanese, and re-invasion by the U.S. in 1944. Dig this seppuku action.

They had a good gift shop. I was compelled to get his for my son.

And for the record, the Japanese are bad at English, but other folks are bad at Japanese. This sign is terrible, advertising "Ice Cake" (whatever that is) and mis-writing the word for shaved ice. Course the English was universally bad here too.

The start of Japan's important Holiday Season, a local battle over a Ferris Wheel, and understanding Japanese humility through baseball players

Now that Christmas is past, Japan is getting ready for its own big season, Oshogatsu or New Year's Day, by far the most important holiday in Japan. But before we can start the new year, there's plenty of work to do, beginning with ohsoji (oh-SOH-jee, 大掃除), the year-end "big cleaning" that everyone does here, cleaning their home from top to bottom, re-papering the shoji doors, replacing the family toothbrushes, and so on. Companies do "big cleaning" too, and tomorrow is the day when all J-List employees will stop work and spend half the day cleaning everything, sweeping and vacuuming and wiping every inch of the office, washing all the windows, and even the front door -- you know a building is clean when the doors have been washed. It's also the season to eat one of my favorite Japanese foods, mochi, called rice cakes in English, essentially a block of white rice that's been pressed into a solid shape. Cook the mochi squares over a flame and they will become soft and chewy, just delicious wrapped in nori and smothered in soy sauce. Between cleaning and having Year End Parties and stocking up for the first few days of January when most stores are closed, people are extra busy this time of year. The old name for the month of December is Shiwasu (she-WA-su), and that word now describes the frazzled state everyone is in as they try to get everything done before the clock runs out.

J-List is based in Isesaki, a small city of 200,000 people that's located almost at the exact center of Japan's main island of Honshu, famous for the "Three K's" of konnyaku, kara-kaze and kakaa-denka (respectively, a traditional gelatin-like food made from boiled yams, the cold, the biting winds of winter and strong-willed women who are usually more competent than their husbands at getting things done). It's also famous for a giant Ferris Wheel that was for a brief time the tallest in Japan when it was erected in 1985. While eating lunch, I was surprised to see our little city appear on the TV news, with the home of the mayor (who by an amazing chance lives next door to us, hence our house was also visible on the news) talking about his big plans to tear down our perfectly good Ferris Wheel and build a new one about two km to the north, so that people driving by our town on the freeway can oo and ah about it and presumably get off the freeway to ride it. The plan, budgeted at a cool $9 million, is made possible by a grant from the national government, which is picking up 70% of the tab to encourage commercial activity. Japan is positively in love with construction, and every year brings an endless parade of pork-barrel projects that are extremely wasteful of the country's resources, like the infamous Aqualine Tunnel from Tokyo to Chiba, which takes longer than driving the long way around yet costs a whopping $30 to use. Although most residents oppose the new Ferris Wheel project, the City Council has already accepted the money from the government, and no one questions the fact that most of the councilmembers (and the mayor himself) either own or sit on the boards of local construction companies that are well positioned to capture a lot of that $9 million for themselves.

One of the most important qualities for a person to have in Japan is modesty, a reserved, unconceited nature, called kenson (ken-SON) in Japanese, and you need look no further than the Japanese baseball players active in the U.S. for an example of this concept. Observe the quiet pre-swing pose struck by Ichiro Suzuki before he meets the ball, the shy smile of Hideki Matsui and of course the pure self-effacing personality of the man who made the current wave of Japanese players possible, Hideo Nomo. Humility is important in the sumo world, too, and one of the reasons famous Hawaiian wrestler Konishiki failed to achieve the top rank of Yokozuna was that he was judged lacking in the humble spirit that a Grand Master of the sport must have. A reserved, humble attitude is tantamount during a Japanese-style job interview, too, and successful applicants will actually talk down their own past work achievements in ways that would be incomprehensible in the U.S., where resume-padding and a bit of exaggeration are all part of getting a job. You can really get a feel for Japan's respect for the conservative and reticent by comparing Japan's #1 fashion doll, Takara's Licca-chan, with Mattel's Barbie. Where Barbie is extremely tall and glamorous with a figure that most girls could only hope for, Licca is a petite, polite girl who helps her mother around the house and studies hard at school, traits which make her more popular with Japanese.

Some random images from Guam. We had to rent an "open car" for the island of course, so I decided to splurge and get a Mustang convertable.

One of the places we visited was a memorial park commemorating the places where the American troops came ashore in 1944. Many people died right where we were walking. Another island, Saipan, is even more famous for its battle scars, and there are many beaches you can't go in because there's ordinance and rusting tanks sitting out there. My son, American and Japanese, was curious about the entirety of the war, and asked how the hell tiny Japan thought they could somehow defeat a huge country with bajillions of natural resources like the U.S.? Good question...

Sugoi. (Amazing)

The kids.

This was our day in Cocos Beach or whatever it was called. Among other things, this beautiful beach serves as a major place where Japanese photobooks and "image videos" are shot.

Daughter Rina relaxes in a hammock.

My feet.

My view. It was good at the time but now I'm back in cold Japan :(

I guess people in warm places have fun in Christmas too, but we were tickled by all the Island Christmas stuff we kept seeing, Santa Claus decorations, plastic snowmen, that sort of thing. It was quite amusing.

Extremely warm Christmas greetings from Guam, comparisons of Christmas, and using a "contrite attitude" to get government documents

The warmest Christmas Greetings from J-List! We hope that everyone is having an great holiday wherever you are, surrounded by good family and friends. We're enjoying ourselves on the island of Guam, a tropical paradise located about 1500 miles from Tokyo, one of the few places where Christmas is less "Christmas-like" then sunny San Diego. Because it's a territory of the U.S. courtesy of the Spanish-American War of 1898, it's blessed with all the comforts of home, like Taco Bell and Tony's Ribs and what is likely the only K-Mart in Asia. Besides going on a dolphin-watching cruise and getting in some quality snorkeling in, we're stocking up on all those useful items like Pop-Tarts, Campbell's soup and Triscuits (go ahead, try living in a country that doesn't have Triscuits, you'll pine for them too). During one day trip, we passed near the portion of the jungle made famous by Shoichi Yokoi, a Japanese solder who remained in Guam, unaware that the war had ended for 28 years. He hid in a tiny cave, eating bugs and rats and making his own clothes out of jungle plants until he was eventually discovered in 1972. The jungle where he lived is quite a tourist spot now.

Christmas in Japan is a lot different from the rest of the world. Without a genuine tradition of celebrating yuletide, the Japanese often choose to import the more "fun" elements of the season, with Santa-san (yes, they really call him that) and presents and Christmas songs, and not so many of the solemn, pleasant themes found in America and Europe. Christians do celebrate Christmas, attending a special mass after they get off work (Christmas isn't a holiday in Japan). For my first Christmas in Japan, I attended mass at the local Baptist church, and was surprised at how similar everything was to what I'd seen back home, except that the Bible was in Japanese. But by and large religious themes play a small part in Christmas here -- instead, Christmas is something for kids, for couples to go on that special date, and for friends to have a fun Christmas party with lots of loud music and maybe firecrackers. This is a major difference between Japan and the U.S.: we are usually solemn on Christmas and have a blast on New Year's, but things are done in reverse here.

When you live in a foreign country and learn a foreign language, it's natural that you internalize the values of the people there. I'm sure that foreigners who emigrate to Canada tend to pick up the Canadian way of doing things, while my sister, who's lived in Germany for many years, is no doubt very Germanized inside (we've got the Axis languages covered quite well in my family). In Japan, there's a concept called hansei, which means to reflect on what you've done wrong and show the proper humble attitude, an important skill required for Japanese society to function smoothly. At the airport coming here, I had a problem with my passport -- I'd stupidly forgotten to get a re-entry stamp put in at the local Immigration Office, meaning that I might not be able to re-enter Japan when we returned, even though I have permanent residence status. My wife was beside herself with worry -- would she and the kids have to leave for Guam without me? I knew, though, that striking the proper contrite attitude (not faked of course, I was truly sorry for forgetting to get the stamp) with the immigration officials would somehow create a solution, and sure enough they come through for me. While they were working on putting the stamp in my passport, there was another gaijin with a similar problem in the office with me. He was acting angry and frustrated rather than apologetic, and was causing more problems for himself by doing so.

Remember that we've got less than a week in our first-ever free shipping sale on Domo-kun products going on this month, which allows you to bag a bunch of cool Domo-kun stuff and not pay any shipping (yes, even if you choose EMS and yes, even the Really Big Domo Plush that we've still got in stock). This sale will never be repeated, so you should get your order in before Dec 31st if you want to score some cool Domo-kun stuff.

Here's us on a banana boat. Merry Christmas from J-List!

What the Japanese think of Americans, our trip to Guam, and ah, the smell of kerosene in the morning

As an expat American living away from my home country, it's sometimes interesting to ask the Japanese people around me what their impressions of us yanks are, to see what stereotypes they might have. "I think they are very 'about,'" Tomo replied right away, using an imported English word (abauto, アバウト) that has come to mean broad, imprecise, and loose on details in Japanese. (Yes, that fits me to a tee.) He added that while some Americans might hold onto the famous image of the Japanese tourist with a camera around their neck, most of the Americans in Tokyo's famous Asakusa region fit pretty much the same description, so it all depends on a person's point of view. Yasu added that the Americans he's met are extremely friendly, ready to make conversation even though they've just met you. "Also, they love ketchup. It seems Americans are always putting ketchup on food." Um, okay. I've been told several times that Americans are optimists, always positive about any subject, and this was an especially important part of the reconstruction of Japan after World War II. This positive attitude is something we are apparently famous for here -- I once happened to draw a happy face on a note I was writing, and a Japanese friend of mine saw it and said, "Oh, that's very American."

Ah, the smell of kerosene in the morning. Now that it's starting to get really cold -- well, cold from the point of view of this pansy San Diegan, anyway -- we've broken out the kerosene heaters around here. Because homes and businesses generally lack central heating, the most common method of warming rooms is through stand-alone kerosene heaters called "stoves" (suto-bu, ストーブ), or electric-kerosene heaters that blow heated air (called "fan heaters," ファンヒーター) and have electronics to control the temperature and shut off after 3 hours (so you can ventilate the room). Kerosene heaters are economical, but they are not without their drawbacks. The smell they make when they start up is bad, but try kicking one accidentally as you walk by it -- the safety switch will trigger, shutting off the unit but filling the room with an acrid kerosene stench that's like being in a paint factory. They seem to leech oxygen from the air, too, making my wife fall asleep on the sofa more often while we're watching TV together in the winter. There's a special branch of Murphy's Law that deals with when the kerosene heaters will run out of fuel, requiring a trip out in the freezing cold to manually refill the tank. The usual place to keep your tanks of kerosene is the genkan, the recessed area of Japanese homes where shoes are removed. Naturally, it's all to easy to forget to notice that the tank is full and spill kerosene all over the place, soaking the entire family's shoes and landing me in the doghouse with everyone. Ah, the tribulations of brave gaijin who dare to live in Japan.

My family and I are off for a little vacation to the island of Guam, Where America's Day Begins (tm). We had so much fun when we took the J-List staff there two years ago that we wanted to go back. Guam is sort of a miniature version of Hawaii, with many of the same beautiful beaches and beautiful activities, on a much smaller scale of course (the population is just 170,000, less than our city in Japan). It's just a short three-hour flight from Japan, and since we cross only one time zone, we won't spend half our vacation fighting off jet lag. We plan to spend Christmas riding banana boats and jet skis, and getting in some good sea kayaking, too. We know it'll be crowded with Japanese and Korean and Chinese tourists all around us, but we'll have fun. All of us at J-List thank you for your support this past year, and wish you all a Merry Christmas, wherever you are in the world! (Since I've never known anyone from the mainland U.S. to know much about the place, here's some reading.)

Remember, we've got the perfect answer to your worries about what to give that special someone on your Holiday list, with our handy J-List Gift-Certificates, which can be sent by email for speedy delivery, and which come with a cool PDF gift certificate which can be printed out by your recipient (or you). You'll be able to rest in the knowledge that your recipient got exactly what they wanted, since J-List has so many cool products from Japan. J-List Gift Certificates never expire, and can be used on both the J-List and JBOX.com websites.

Remember that J-List carries some cool things you just can't find without hopping on a plane and coming on a plane to Japan. From excellent souvenirs that you could only find in Kyoto gift shops to the legendary high school uniforms (for both girls and guys) from Matsukameya of Nagoya, which J-List distributes exclusively (they don't speak that much English and were happy to have us handle all their outside-Japan orders). Another cool item we sell are the actual school bags used by high school students in Japan, a totally unique way to carry your stuff to school, or wherever.

Thoughts on raising bilingual kids, comparing of names between Japan and the West, and what Carl Sagan has taught me

It's hard raising bilingual children in a country where English isn't used on a daily basis, except on signs that say "SPLUSH is not only the problem of age" and T-shirts with bizarre slogans like "Let's enjoy with me." I've been using the Brain Quest flashcards with my kids quite a lot these days, since it's a fun way to motivate them and provide plenty of input with English -- also, the cards are coated with plastic which keeps them from getting too wet in the bath, our preferred place of study. My kids are good at figuring the answers to most of the questions, with the exception of cultural ones that only someone who grew up in the States would answer, like who cut down the cherry tree. Last weekend a question came up asking how many digits were in the number 76,315. When my son answered "six," I immediately knew why: because the Sino-Japanese numbering system is based on 10,000 (ichi mahn, written 一万) rather than 1,000, his brain has misheard 760,315. Translating numbers between the two languages is always a pain -- for example, the above number becomes 7 mahn, six thousand, three hundred and fifteen. This is why gaijin will often speak English but revert to Japanese for numbers; it's just too mendo kusai (a pain in the butt) to stop what you're doing and make the conversion.

When Japanese couples choose a name for a new baby, they often consult a Buddhist priest who will advise them on what characters are lucky for that year. The number of strokes used to write the name are important, too, and my wife took great pains to ensure that our daughter's Japanese name would have the same number of lines as hers, for some reason that's unfathomable to me. Names can be written in hiragana, foregoing kanji altogether for aesthetic reasons, but most parents choose kanji characters for the names of their children, being sure to choose from the official list of approved name kanji the government publishes. One big difference between the West and in Japan are the lack of Biblically-derived names here -- every country in Europe has a local version of "Peter" (Pedro, Pierre, Pietro), but not here. Because Western names are rare in Japan, they can easily become larger than any one person. You might know several people named Jason, but in Japan, there's only one: the famous killer from the Friday the 13th movies. Similarly, if Chuck E. Cheese wanted to open a restaurant in Japan, they'd have to find a new name due to the cult status of the old Child's Play movies and Chuckee. There are many Michaels in the world, but in Japan Michael Jackson is the name that springs to everyone's mind right away, and if you name is Clara, Japanese of a certain generation will probably identify you with the girl in the wheelchair from the famous anime Heidi, Girl of the Alps (the scene where Clara gets out of her wheelchair and walks brings tears to my wife's eyes 100% of the time).

I saw on BoingBoing that today is the meinichi -- the anniversary of a person's death that I talked about recently -- of Carl Sagan, who died in 1996. Considering that I happened to be watching some old episodes of Cosmos at that exact moment, MacBook Pro balanced on my lap, seeing the announcement was quite a surprise. I reflected that Mr. Sagan is probably more responsible than anyone else for my sense of wonder, of love of space and ability to say sugoi (soo-GOH-ee, "that's amazing") when I see something truly wonderful in the world. As a father I've tried to pass this quality on to my kids, and I think I've done a good job so far. It was a bit more difficult to try to bring that energetic spirit into the ESL classroom back when I was a teacher, with 18-year-old students who seemed bent on wasting the best years of their life doing baito (part-time job, from the German word arbeit) rather than actually getting out and, you know, living. Of course, Japanese expect foreigners to be overly expansive, emotional, and be full of pie-in-the-sky ideals, and they're usually not disappointed. Still, I hope I passed my love of life on to a few of them, at least.

As you know, J-List has tons of cool products from Japan for you this Holiday Season. The J-List staff on both sides of the Pacific has been working incredibly hard to make sure orders are shipped out in a timely manner, and they've really been working miracles on a daily basis. Unfortunately, due to circumstances beyond our control (including a slipped disc in one employee, ouch), we're seeing some delays for orders going out from San Diego, for which we apologize. We thank you for your understanding as we cut through the backlog of orders and get back to our normal speedy service.

We're loaded with 2007 calendars from Japan, of course, with 140+ excellent calendars to choose from, all printed exclusively for the Japanese domestic market but available through us. This year's hits so far have included the always-popular Studio Ghibli calendar with its all-original art; the incredibly popular Negima; the 10th Anniversary of Evangelion calendar; cute Japanese stars like Yuko Ogura, Jun Natsukawa and our famous 'onsen' calendars; the eternal Domo-kun, whose calendar will be sold out soon; and cool JPOP calendars like Gackt, Ayumi Hamasaki and Kumi Koda. Remember, Japan is a very seasonal place, and the time to get cool calendars is now, not later.

Remember that J-List stocks thousands of wonderful items from Japan, including bento boxes, cute electronic toys, tools to help you study Japanese, cool ways to bring a touch of Japan to your personal space, and much more. There are many great ways to browse our extensive selection of products, including with the "3 day" link on the front page that shows you items added or updated in the last 3 days; the alternate "view all" link, which shows all J-List products in newest-to-oldest order, and for slower connections, our handy "tree display." Remember that we've recently added a Wish List feature, making it easy for you to add items to the list that you can either use as a reminder of items you want to check out later, or else you can make it a public list and share it with others.

On the magical blending of features in "haafu," a Japan cell phone update, and some Japanese words I am passionate about

Somewhere between the staid features of futsu (normal) Japanese and the dizzying varieties of face, hair and body types seen in Westerners lie what many Nihonjin consider to be the perfect blending of the two, and I've always enjoyed analyzing the special status given to haafu (ハーフ） in the normally homogenous, in-group-or-out-group Japanese society. There's a sizeable segment of half-Japanese, half-Western singers, actors and other popular "talents," from actress/model Becky to TV commercial idol Emily Nakayama to half-Japanese, half-German American heartthrob Eiji Wentz, who make use of their "otherness" to create a strong niche with fans. Anime characters are sometimes created with mixed ancestry to add new dimensions to them as well, with the best example being the fiery Asuka Soryu Langley from Evangelion. You find this tendency to blend Japan and the West in other places too. Takara's Licca-chan is Japan's #1 fashion doll, sold since 1967, and this doll that's been idolized by so many Japanese girls over the years turns out to be half-Japanese and half-French. The ideal of haafu, it seems, blends all the mystique found in the West with all that's good and familiar in Japan, and thus serves as a bridge between the two. When my daughter was small, we got her ears pierced in the U.S., a custom that doesn't exist in Japan, where girls must wait til they graduate from high school before they're allowed to take such a "grown up" step. Once I was shopping with my daughter here and we were suddenly encircled by high school girls who were admiring my daughter and her pierced ears, clearly envious of this special child who was born with the best of both worlds, which presumably included American facial features, the ability to speak English and no need to follow all the meaningless rules they faced every day.

Like most of the world, the Japanese have embraced cell phones in a big way, and virtually everyone in Japan carries a "keitai," including a large portion of elementary school kids and the elderly. Recently my phone was acting up, so I took it to the "au by KDDI" shop to get it looked at, and while I was there I glanced over the new models. Since my family had bought new phones just three months before, I didn't expect to see that much that was new, but I was shocked to find that every handset the company made had been refreshed. The new offerings included a music phone that you could dock with an external subwoofer, a "dual style" phone that could be opened horizontally or vertically, and a phone made specifically for video chatting. Since the Japanese are very design oriented, many phones existed almost entirely for aesthetic reasons, like the "beauty x beauty" series with an exterior surface that lights up with snowflake patterns when a call comes in, or Toshiba's "Drape" concept, built around the keyword of "Emotional Electronics." The recently launched Wanseg system that allows you to watch TV on mobile devices was found in several phones, too. I had fun checking out what names they'd given the colors, like "stillness silver" or "moonlit black." As usual, there was nary a Smartphone in sight, despite many gaijin like me who would kill to have even a first-gen Treo they could use here, but since the phone system Japan uses is incompatible with the rest of the world, and since syllable- based Japanese can be quickly entered with a normal phone keypad, there's not much demand for phones with (admitedly ugly) QWERTY keyboards.

As you can imagine, learning a foreign language requires a sustained effort over several years. It also requires plenty of passion, and I've always observed that those who were able to jump into language study with both feet and really make it a part of themselves have the most success with their studies. It's quite natural for students of Japanese to develop a short list of "favorite" words which he or she likes for various reasons, perhaps because of the way the kanji is written or what the word means, or how it sounds to them. So I'll tell you some Japanese words I've become fond of over the years. First up is a word that's important to everyone at J-List, gambaru (gahm-BAH-roo、頑張る), which means to try one's best, to work hard, to give it your all, and is usually used as a request (gambatte kudasai、頑張ってください) or in a command form (gambare!, pronounced gahm-BAH-reh、頑張れ！). Two words I liked so much we recently made J-List T-shirts out of them are ganko (GAHN-koh, 頑固、meaning stubborn, obstinate, unchanging) and ore-ryu (oh-REY-ryoo, 俺流、lit. "my style," roughly translatable as "I'm doing things my damn way, so if you don't like it, too bad"). Some words sound so goofy they're fun to use, like dekopoko (deh-koh poh-koh、凹凸, and aren't those kanji funky?), which just means "bumpy" like the surface of an uneven road, or one of the first words I learned back at SDSU, tokidoki (toh-key-doh-key、時々), which means sometimes and had everyone in the class giggling over its resemblance to "okey dokey." As a fan of the Mazda Miata (I've got one in the U.S. and one in Japan), I like their slogan jinba ittai (jeen-BA ee-TIE、人馬一体) literally meaning "man and horse as one," which pretty much sums up what a Miata is like to drive. Finally, when I was going through a bad time in my life and feeling negative about everything, a Japanese friend taught me a word I've used to great benefit over the years. The word is mae-muki (ma-EH MU-kee, 前向き), literally meaning facing forward, and it carries a strong implication that everything will be better if you'll face forward, look straight ahead at the future and be positive, not negative, as you move through your life.

Christmas is upon us, and the hardworking J-List crew on both sides of the Pacific are hard at work getting products out the door at a furious pace. If you find you've forgotten to get gifts for anyone on your list, we've got a great suggestion: the J-List Gift Certificate, which can be sent to your recipient (or you) via email, and which includes a spiffy custom created PDF gift certificate which can be printed out by your recipient (or you). Giving the gift of Japan-style "gross national cool" in the form of a J-List Gift Certificate is a great way to share J-List's wacky brand of Japanese culture and give something you know will be appreciated. J-List Gift Certificates never expire, and can be used on both the J-List and JBOX.com websites.

This was the one we got for my mother-in-law, with big buttons for dialing pre-set numbers. Hopefully she'll start carrying it with her.

This series was very nice. Each different color had a unique pattern of illumination.

This is the one I'd have gotten it I were shopping right now. Course, only one of the phones will have Bluetooth, which I need for my mobile computing, so it's kind of pointless.

I like the "numbers embedded in a floating mirror surface" look on these.

This is the phone that opens both ways. Kind of useless but very cool.

Hairdresser located right outside the phone shop.

Looking up when you walk, the Japanese custom of name stamps, and the J-List Year-End Party

I recently talked about how many Japanese professionals from businessmen to musicians to athletes seem to consider succeeding in the U.S. to be the Holy Grail of their respective industry, a kind of cultural Oedipus complex that we non-Japanese can't ever understand. In the case of musicians wanting to make it big in the U.S., many are no doubt hoping to follow in the footsteps of of Kyu Sakamoto, who claimed the coveted #1 spot on the Billboard charts back in 1963. The song was Ue o Mite Ariko, or "I Look Up When I Walk," a cheerful tune about a decidedly un-cheerful topic, a man dealing with heartbreak. It was released in the U.S. as the Sukiyaki song, even though it has nothing to do with my favorite Japanese winter dish, and defied all expectations by turning into a smash hit despite being sung in the original Japanese language. Back in the days when I had free time (i.e. before starting J-List), I'd sometimes take extended bicycle trips around our prefecture of Gunma, camping along the way, and once I headed out for a remote village called Ueno-mura to explore some caverns I'd heard about there. My wife shuddered when she heard where I was going. "I could never go out there, that's where that plane went down in 1985." She was talking about JAL Flight 123, the terrible crash that claimed the lives of 520 people, including the singer Sakamoto. Sukiyaki remains one of the most famous Japanese songs throughout the world -- I once bumped into my old nisei high school teacher singing it in a restaurant -- and it's been covered many times and in many languages. Here are some you can download in MP3 format.

It wouldn't be much fun if your job was to stamp documents all day long, but as usual everything works differently in Japan, and they take the idea of stamping documents very seriously. While signatures are the accepted way of indicating your approval in writing in the West, in Japan and much of Asia you usually use a hanko, or official name stamp that's registered with the city. This custom always strikes gaijin as odd -- after all, what's to stop me from stealing someone's stamp and taking all their money out of the bank? For some reason, you never hear of this happening, partially because for really important transactions you need to go to the local city office and get a document that proves that this stamp is the one that's registered to you, kind of a like a notary public for your stamp. Companies have official stamps, too, and when you order an Apple product your warranty card comes with an eerily cool red stamp that says Apple Computer Inc. on it in katakana and kanji. Japan can be quite a superstitious place, and when my wife made the official J-List hanko stamp she went out of her way to do it on one of the Buddhist "lucky days" (called Taian), paying I don't know how much for a hand carved stamp that would surely bring our company more luck than some "brand X" one.

 It's once again time for one of my favorite events of the year, the J-List Bounen-kai, or Year-End Party, in which the entire staff of J-List will gather for good food and drink and will look back on all that we've accomplished this past year. And what a year it's been! Besides filling more than 80,000 orders and hopefully bringing Japan a little closer to you, J-List turned ten years old, which is really a long time when measured in Internet Years -- we're even two years older than Google. This year we've rented a stylish sushi restaurant that specializes in maguro, which is tuna sushi and sashimi, which will no doubt be followed by a hearty dose of karaoke and maybe some good late-night ramen at a little place I know of. We'll be making many a kampai to you, our wonderful customers. Thanks for your support!
In other news, we're happy to announce that our newest blockbuster dating-sim Yin-Yang - X-Change Alternative is in stock and shipping now! An all-new take on Crowd's popular X-Change concept, made by all-new team including scenario writer Q-Tron and artist Nao Tajima (of Eve Burst Error fame), this newest X-Change focuses on Kaoru, a Japanese boy who possesses a unique form of "yin-yang" DNA that's both male and female. When he accidentally drinks a potion that serves as a catalyst, he's surprised to find his body transformed into that of a girl. What bizarre adventures will Kaoru-chan face as he struggles to find a way to return to normal? We're plowing through the many preorders now, and hope you'll pick it up now that it's available!

How Japan's writing system works, a summary of the past few years in kanji, and Japanese learning to deal with "hen na gaijin"

Kanji (KAHN-gee), the Chinese characters that the Japanese use to express most words in writing, is fascinating to Westerners because they're so unlike the Occidental way of doing things. Kanji may be meaningless to the untrained eye -- I've always liked looking at Van Gogh's copies of famous ukiyo-e paintings, wondering what thoughts went through his mind as he tried to replicate the kanji strokes in his own work -- but of course there's a lot more to kanji that's not immediately apparent. First, the characters are organized into groups based on meaning, with "radicals" (parts of the kanji, usually the left, top or bottom segments) giving a clue about the meaning. For example, words related to speaking, reading and recording of information have a unified part on the left that looks like a stack of books, and words like sea, fish, wave, and steam all share the same left portion which means "water." When you need to look up a character in a kanji dictionary there are three ways to do it: by the pronounciation (not so good as some sounds can be written with dozens of different characters); by the overall number of strokes it takes to write (tedious when trying to find a complex character with 20+ strokes); or by what radical it's written with (the recommended method). Of course this being Japan, there's one and only one correct way to write a given kanji, and children who don't follow the exact stroke order will get points marked off on their tests -- although in reality, no one writes kanji properly once they get out into the real world, and styles differ widely, just like handwriting variations in the West.

One cool thing about kanji is the way it can promote an idea with a picture, create an emotional response with a single image, something we have tried to capture with our line of original Japanese themed T-shirts. Every year the Japan Kanji Foundation, the organization that promotes regular testing of kanji skills to encourage students to study harder, holds a contest to choose one Kanji of the Year, the one character that best sums up the events of the past twelve months. It's quite an interesting way to look back at years past and reflect on what has gone before. Previous Kanji of the Year have included ai (愛, love, 2005) because of the Expo held in Aichi Pref. and the popular drama Train Man, the story of an anime otaku who finds love with a beautiful woman he meets on a train; wazawai (災, disaster, 2004) after the destruction of the quake in Niigata and far worse disaster in the Indian Ocean; ki (帰, homecoming, 2002), to commemorate the five abductees who returned from North Korea; and ikusa (戦, war, 2001), from the terrible events of that year. The Kanji of the Year for 2006 has been chosen, and it is....inochi (命), a word meaning life, in the sense of precious life, a thing to be treasured, in response to both good events (the birth of a new Imperial Heir) and very sad ones (the horrific number of ijime-inspired suicides by young people that has plagued Japan this year).

The Japanese have been dealing with gaijin for 153 years now, but it seems that they'll never get used to our strange ways. We do things like wearing bathroom slippers while standing on a train platform, riding mountain bikes with those funny helmets on, driving our "open cars" with the top down in December, sleeping in the tokonoma, the recessed part of a Japanese room that's used for displaying objects d'art, and buying chrysanthemums, a flower usually reserved for putting on gravestones, as a token of love for our wives. Although some Japanese think there are a lot of foreigners in Japan, I find this quaint, since only around 1.5% of the population of Japan comes from elsewhere, compared with 9% or more in Germany, and that figure includes a large number of Japan-born Koreans who choose not to take Japanese citizenship although they could easily do so. Of course, people aren't evenly distributed over the landscape, and there are communities in which the foreign population has clumped together enough to alter the local culture, such as the nearby town of Oizumi, where around 20% of residents are Brazilians, including many of Japanese descent. As the 21st Century progresses, I think Japan is going to have to take a long, hard look at its homogeneous traditions and learn to embrace alternative ways of doing things.

We're, ahem, a little busy these days, okagesama-de. This is Monday's invoices from Japan only. Hope you're having a nice holiday season so far ^_^

Thoughts on my father and Buddhism, the Mac-PC connection with being bilingual, and our cute American, Japanese daughter

Sunday was my father's meinichi, the anniversary of the day he died nine years ago (although Japanese are always puzzled that we use a happy-sounding word like "anniversary" to describe this). Peter Rowland Payne was an engineer who created many things in his 70 years on Earth, including high-speed boats and hydrofoils, early crash-test dummies, VTOL aircraft, and not least of all, me! (Thanks, Dad.) Although Japan blends many different religious traditions as they see fit, drawing on Shinto for baby naming ceremonies and prayers for happiness on New Year's Day, and Christian themes for that special "white wedding," at the end of the day it's a very Buddhist country. Japanese Buddhism, at least the Nichiren sect that my wife and mother belong to, tends to be focused on one's ancestors, your mother and father and those who came before them, and there are many ceremonies or daily customs that let the dead know they've not been forgotten, from burning a stick of incense at the Buddhist altar in the morning to visiting the family grave on a person's meinichi. Here's to my Dad, much loved and not forgotten!

I bought my son one of those spiffy new iMacs that can run Mac OS X and also function as a full PC for Windows-only applications and games. (Aside, if you're a Star Wars fan and haven't played Battlefront I and II, you don't know what you're missing). While taking our weekend dip in the local onsen bath my son and I were talking about how a bilingual individual's personality can change depending on which language he's using -- my own Japanese-speaking "self" is quite different from my American side, even capable of inadvertently bowing to the other party while speaking on the phone. My 11-year-old son agreed. "When I speak English, I'm one way," he observed, "but when I switch to Japanese, everything changes inside." It was, he concluded, a lot like his iMac booting from Mac to Windows. Intrigued, I had to ask him which language was Mac and which was Windows, and he answered that the Japanese side of his brain was like Windows because there are more rules, virus software you have to run and so on, but the English side is like the Mac because it's more "free." Interesting.

I wonder about my daughter sometimes, though. If my son has a dual-booting OS with Japanese and English sides, my daughter seems to be American all the way. The Japanese Ministry of Education is trying to be more effective at teaching Japanese kids English, so now all Elementary School kids get a few hours a week with a native speaker AET. Despite having 40 of her non-bilingual class- mates surrounding her, my daughter has no problem with conversing naturally with this teacher, a very un-Japanese attitude to have. One important mechanism in society here is enryo (EN-ryoh), which means to avoid doing things that will inconvenience others, and deferring to those who are older than you. But my daughter regularly does the impossible, turning kids who are older than her (and thus, her senpai) into friends, treating them as if they were the same age and thus eliminating the barrier between them. This is a rarity in Japan, a country where you use (slightly) more polite language when talking to someone who is your senior. She makes friends with kids she doesn't know, too, and when she was smaller and took baths with us in the men's onsen, my son and I would watch and see how long it would take her to organize the other kids in the bath and start playing games together. While there are occasional issues of "TPO" (a convenient Japanese word which means "time, place, occasion"), my wife and I totally support my daughter's desire to be an American girl in Japan.

Remember that J-List is loaded to the gills with great 2007 calendars printed for the domestic market, but available to you through us. The calendars feature large, poster-sized pages with gorgeous glossy printing, and they're a great way to bring a bit of Japan into your year. We've posted new stock of some of our most popular calendars, including Yuko Ogura, Bleach, Naruto, Evangelion, Rozen Maiden and this year's smash hit, Domo-kun! Why not browse our calendar selection now and find some great items for you or those on your gift-giving list this year?

Good things and bad about living in Japan, more ways Japanese look to the West, and social benefits of love hotels

There are a lot of good things about living in Japan. Good food, from sushi to sashimi to Indian curry. Wholesome, polite people, with that important "you know no one is horking in your food behind your back" factor. Kawaii Japanese girls. Reading a novel while taking an extended dip in the onsen bath. However, living in Japan is not all cherry blossoms and Mt. Fuji, and there are some downsides to being here too. One of the worst aspects to living in Japan for many is dealing with allergies. We have the Japanese government to thank for much of the problem, for standardizing all forestry around the sugi (Japan Cedar) and replacing natural forests with one easy-to-harvest tree, which means that when it's time for the trees to pollinate, they do it all at once, creating an unbearable situation for millions of people with allergies. In addition to the awful months of sugi pollen, Japanese homes can be quite high maintenance when it comes to removing dust. Much as I love our tatami mats, they're very difficult to keep clean, and dust mites love to live inside the fibers -- hyakushon!

I wrote recently about Japan's fixation with the West, which has been a consistent theme in the nation's history since it began modernizing in the Meiji Period (1868-1912). The phenomenon is known as seiyo suhai shugi, literally "worship of the West-ism," and it pops up in daily Japanese life in many forms. Most Japanese seem to take it for granted that the culture in the U.S. and Europe, while by no means perfect, is somehow on a "higher level" than Japan, and social and economic reforms generally seem to lag behind the West by about a decade as leaders take their cues from the U.S. and Britain. One way this fascination with the West manifests itself is the burning desire in many who have achieved a certain level of success in their fields to translate that success over to the West. When business leaders believe they've finally "arrived" and have achieved whatever goals they'd set for themselves, many invariably decide to expand into the U.S. market, and since this is driven by their own personal desire to "make it" in the USA rather than on dispassionately collected market data, it can lead to less than optimal results. Hideo Nomo changed the sports world forever when he proved that a Japanese could make it in Big Leagues, and now top players in every sport from Ichiro and Matsui to Nakamura kicking the ball over in Ireland feel incomplete if they don't play overseas. Likewise, it seems that once a Japanese singer attains a certain level of success, they'll often start to pine for a U.S. debut. This is what 80s superstar Seiko Matsuda did, trying to bill herself as the "Japanese Madonna" in her U.S. release, complete with her wearing an exact replica of the "Lucky Star" outfit on the CD cover. The most recent Japanese artist to try to make it in the West is Utada, aka Hikaru Utada, who recently released an all-English album for fans outside of Japan. I'm a longtime fan of her songs, and I hope it works out for her.

One of the more famous recent images of Japan are its "love hotels," those interesting establishments which provide privacy for couples who would otherwise have no place to go to be alone. They're known by many names, including avec, tsurekomi yado, and motel (which causes plenty of confusion when Japanese go to the U.S. for the fist time), but the industry seems to be encouraging the term "fashion hotel" to promote a more positive image for the 21st century. For $40 (a 3 hour "rest") or $80 (an overnight "stay"), couples can enjoy an intimate experience with total privacy, complete with separate elevators for incoming and outgoing guests and a pneumatic tube system that lets you pay without ever meeting anyone. Generally located around the outskirts of Japanese cities or near freeway on-ramps, love hotels are often centered around a theme, like the Taj Mahal or Cinderella's Castle or Alcatraz Prison. (I'm holding for a room based on the final scenes from 2001: A Space Odyssey, complete with Monolith and space pod.) While the pragmatic concept of love hotels might seem odd to some, I believe they serve an important role in society here, and even help keep families from disintegrating. In the U.S., an eighteen-year-old boy who gets a girlfriend has an incentive to move out with her, perhaps making mistakes that both will regret down the road. But in Japan, where kids stay in the nest well into their 20s (and if they're the oldest son or daughter, live with their parents forever, taking over the family home and business, if there is one), everyone has access to all the privacy they could need.

J-List carries an excellent line of original T-shirts and super-soft hoodies featuring amusing kanji messages and cool anime designs, which are great for anyone on your holiday list. We carry XXL and XXXL sizes of some of our major shirts, so our larger customers can get in on the run, too. We're happy to announce that we've lowered the prices on these extra sizes, to just $1 for the XXL shirts, and $2.50 for the 3XL shirts.

Thoughts on ordering "peanuts butter," a tasty Japanese treat in the winter, and a friend who can't receive New Year's Cards

You know you've been in Japan too long when your mother sends you a bottle of nutmeg spice for Christmas, and a Japanese person asks what it is, upon which you immediately answer, without having ever heard what the spice is called in Japanese, "This is nutsmeg, which is great in warm milk." For some inexplicable reason of phonetics, some English words are imported into Japanese in their plural forms. Words like shirt, suit, swimsuit, peanut, and sport always appear with the 's' sound on the end, even if you're discussing the word in its singular form. In Japanese, one refers to a suitcase as a "suitscase," and it takes the brain a few months to get over the weirdness of this -- ditto for learning to ask for "peanuts butter." Similarly, the anime Fruits Basket probably weirded a lot of fans out at first when they first heard the title. There seem to be three reasons for some English words being mapped to their plural versions in Japanese. First is the rather convenient lack of singular/plural in Japanese grammar -- saying hana ga kirei means either "the flower is pretty" or "the flowers are pretty" depending on how many flowers you happen to discussing. Also, the softer tsu ending on the plural forms is easier for Japanese to pronounce than a hard t consonant sound. Finally, converting some words to their plural forms also avoids the dreaded L/R confusion that can be a problem in the language. Because "fruit" and "flute" would have the exact same pronunciation when rendered in katakana, the writing system used for expressing foreign loan words, the musical instrument became furu-to and the edible stuff became furu-tsu.

A photographer that J-List has a relationship with came up in conversation in the office the other day. "Oh, he's mo-chu this year," my wife said, "so we can't send him a New Year's Card." It was a word I'd never heard before, so my ears perked up immediately -- it turned out to be formal state of mourning due to the death of a family member within the past year. By far, the most important holiday to the Japanese is Oshogatsu, New Year's Day, and part of the fun is receiving nengajo, or New Years Cards. But because of whatever sadness visited his family this year, we're unable to send him a New Year's Card. Also, when you see someone for the first time after Jan. 1st, you greet them with akemashite omedetou gozaimasu, literally "congratulations on opening the new year," but it's taboo to use this greeting for someone who has had a death in the family the previous year.

Do you hear that? It's the sound of our local "ishi-yaki imo" (ee-shee YA-kee ee-MOH, or stone-baked sweet potato) vendor, driving around outside my window now. Like an ancient Japanese version of the Ice Cream Man, baked sweet potato vendors meander through the streets with their special trucks which contain ovens that are constantly baking the sweet potatoes over heated stones so that they're steaming hot and delicious. Like getting a nikuman (meat-filled Chinese bun) from a convenience store or holding a hot can of coffee on a train platform, baked sweet potatoes are a great way to warm up when it's cold outside. When Americans see dead leaves raked into a pile, most probably think of taking a flying leap into the leaves. But in Japan, a pile of dead leaves is the perfect place to bake your own foil-wrapped sweet potatoes, and you can see this happening quite often in the cooler months. I love the sound of the song they sing (see video).

J-List is your source for cool T-shirts with aesthetically cool kanji characters, hilarious messages and cool original anime designs. We've posted our newest T-shirts today, featuring the cute image of the Kodama from Princess Mononoke by Hayao Miyazaki, on shirts for guys and girls. Like all J-List T-shirts, these new additions are hand-printed by our experienced staff in San Diego, and all sizes are full U.S. standard sizes. Why not browse our extensive line of cool original T-shirts and Hoodies? (They also make great holiday gifts.)

Do you have a blog or other website? Would you like to help us spread our brand of fun Japanese popular culture? If so, we hope you'll consider joining the Friends of J-List, our affiliate program (although we hate to use marketingspeak words like that). It's easy to show exactly the J-List products you want to show, and link to exactly the products you want to link to, and you get cash or store credit for every sale. For more information read this page.

Remember that J-List is having its first ever Domo-kun Free Shipping Sale, a great excuse for you to get that Really Big Domo-kun plush for your room and save big (yes, the sale applies to all Domo items, even big ones like that need to be sent via EMS). We personally think the Standard Domo-kun Plush is just about the coolest thing from Japan, and I'm sure friends or officemates would agree with us. Browse our Domo-kun selection now!

Thought I'd throw down some (way late) pictures. Here's our Thanksgiving turkey which was, incidentally, killed by hand with a sharp knife in keeping with Islamic teachings, according to the outside of the package.

Daughter Rina going horseback riding on her birthday. She loves horses.

I joined the Gainax keitai club so I get to download a bunch of Gainax related stuff for my phone. Here's the Asuka phone animation that has her saying, "Anta baka?!" (Are you stupid?)

This is my most favoritist bento in the world, from a store called Torihei.

Not sure how good it looks to you, but it's thinly sliced pieces of chicken on rice with a delicious sauce over the whole thing. Mmmm... I've been eating it for 15 years and they have never raised the price once.

And this is Yakiori, teriyaku chicken on a stick that's delicious. Why, I wonder, is this not very popular in the U.S.? It seems like a natural to me.

Confusingly noble business practices in Japan, ideas on gift-giving in Japanese society, and how cotton masks made $4 billion for AFLAC

Japan is always ready to surprise you in one way or another, and some of the business practices employed here have caused me some confusion over the years. Once, an electronics retailer we used to frequent closed its doors suddenly, apparently having gone out of business. We were saddened to lose a shop we liked, but we found another retailer that served us just as well. We were surprised when the first store reopened a couple months later with new floors and a new sign -- apparently they had just closed for renovation, but as they didn't bother to make this clear to their customers, they inadvertently ended up losing our business. Also, there are times when salesmen don't act as you'd expect them to. When NTT finally brought fast hikari fiber (fiber optic) Internet to our part of the city, I was so overjoyed I was ready to sign up for the most expensive dedicated line they had. Instead of selling me the costlier service, the NTT salesman talked me out of it, telling me that the standard shared line would be more than fast enough for us -- and he was right. Then there was the time I was shopping for a Minolta camera, the old kind with the silly pre-programmed cards that enabled certain camera effects. I was so filled with camera lust that I was about to add several of the cards to my purchase, but the salesman at the store shook his head, telling me that they weren't worth the money, losing an additional sale but certainly gaining my trust. I'm not totally sure that similar salesmen in the U.S. would have worked to keep me from making an unnecessary purchase like that.

When founder of the AFLAC insurance company John Amos went to Japan for the Osaka Expo in 1970, something unique caught his eye: the Japanese custom of wearing a white cotton mask when they've got a cold, which keeps germs from spreading to others. From this he smartly deduced that the Japanese are very health-centric and might be open to buying his company's insurance products, and he decided to open up a branch in Tokyo. This turned out to be one of the wisest business decisions in history, as AFLAC now insures one in four Japanese households and nets $4 billion in sales annually here. Yes, the Japanese are quite focused on health issues, and it's common to see television shows interviewing 104 year old women from Okinawa on how they lived so long, and introducing strange foods you've never heard of that are guaranteed to change your blood from doro doro (doh-roh doh-roh, syrupy, thick) to sala sala (smooth- flowing and healthy). There are hundreds of products in the marketplace that promise to protect you from bacteria, too, from special soap you leave in your kitchen sponge to sterilize it overnight to my daughter's bicycle, which was marketed as being "germ resistant," whatever that means.

Although Christmas is a relatively recent import into Japan, the giving and receiving of gifts has always been a big part of life in Japan. Besides many formal and informal traditions of exchanging gifts, such as the "engagement presents" traded between the families of a couple about to get married, there are two big gift-giving periods in Japan, when families will give special pre-packaged gift sets such as canned coffee, laundry detergent, soy sauce, salad oil and sake to people who have helped them in some way recently. Companies also trade these gifts, and this year J-List will exchange "oseibo" presents with companies like Crowd (maker of the X-Change and Yin Yang! series), CD-Bros. (publisher of some of the cool new games we'll be bringing out next year) and our many toy, DVD and other distributors. While it makes sense to give something that everyone in the receiving company will be able to use like canned juice, it's also fun to receive something unique from another part of Japan, such as the interesting Hokkaido fruits and seafood that Crowd often sends us, or the delicious Curry Udon from Nagoya we sometimes get.

One of our favorite product genres are bishoujo games, the "pretty girl games" for PCs which let you interact with Japan in a whole new way. We've got the world's largest selection of dating-sim games, with titles for all tastes, whether you're interested in cat girls, maids, or extremely dramatic stories that may even make you cry, with many titles available as downloads, too. We're happy to announce that the new title Bible Black: The Game is now in stock and ready for your immediate order. A great title that explores the satanic side of the genre, it features outstanding art and characters and story that lets you choose either the light or dark side of the story.

We've got loads of great products for your holiday list, with hundreds of recently added or restocked products that anyone on your list would love to receive. We're sure that more than a few of them would love to get some cool Domo-kun products this year, and to help you out we're announcing our first-ever Domo-kun Free Shipping Sale. Here's how it works: order 3 or more Domo-kun items from our extensive seection and we'll give you free shipping on those items, even the rare big-ticket Domo-kun plush toys we've got limited stock of. Please note that in almost every case, the cool Domo-kun products we have are the last that will ever be available from Japan, so if you've been biding your time to round our your Domo-kun collection, now is the time to act, as long-time J-List readers know that a sale like this is a really rare event that won't come along again.

The role of trains in Japan, funny observations on society here, and Christmas comes early

Japan is a very rail-centric place compared to the U.S., and trains are a much larger part of society than they are back home, at least from the point of view of this California yank. Trains are more convenient the closer you live to a large city, of course, and you can get anywhere in Tokyo in a short time thanks to its complex network of rail and subway lines. Trains are nice to have when you're out drinking with friends, since you can all get home safely without worrying about driving. Out in the "inaka" (ee-NAH-KAH, i.e. the boonies) where we live, trains are only used to get from one city to another, and are only convenient if you happen to be going somewhere near your target station. Still, even in small cities like ours, train stations play a large role in defining the commercial and cultural identity of a city. Nearby Takasaki is a commercial hub for our prefecture, and their station is gleaming white, with many shops located right inside the station for convenience. Our own home of Isesaki is famous for having the lowest "cultural level" of any city in the area, as defined by membership rates in groups like the Japan Rotarians and the Lion's Club or something like that (it's all quite over my head), and our run-down, ugly train station reflects our city's mediocrity.

It's funny how east mirrors west sometimes. Many people from Europe and the U.S. are taken with Japan, with the mystery of the place and the many ways it delights us by never being predictable. In a similar fashion, the Japanese have had a fascination with the West ever since Commodore Perry sailed his black ships into Yokohama Bay in 1853. You can see Japan's tendency to look culturally to Europe when you look at iconic buildings like Tokyo Tower (an exact replica of the Eiffel Tower) and Tokyo Station (a recreation of the Amsterdam Centraal Station). Similarly, it's interesting to see the way they define their own land in relation to the West, declaring the seaside in Chiba to be the Dover Cliffs of Japan, the main mountain range in the country the Japan Alps, and so on. If I want to get out and feel like I've travelled the world I can go to Kronenberg, a replica of a German village complete with beer, sausages and embarrassed-looking Germans standing around; visit Western Village, an old west town that features cowboys and a miniature version of Mt. Rushmore looking down on the freeway; or even go see the replica of the Statue of Liberty down by Rainbow Bridge in Tokyo (it's quite a "date spot"). Comparing cultures is so much fun!

Christmas came a little early to the kids at a preschool near J-List as "Santa-san" dropped in for a visit this morning. It was really me in that suit (ssh, don't tell the kids), fulfilling my annual role as the cheerful St. Nick as I handed out presents to everyone. Christmas is a very bright and happy time in Japan, and no Christmas Party would be complete without a real live gaijin Santa Claus there to make everyone laugh. There was a question and answer time, where the kids asked me such questions as, "Where do you live?" (er, Norway), "What is your favorite color?" (red) and "What is your favorite food?" ("reindeer hamburg steak"). As usual, I made sure not to break character by speaking Japanese, and it was great to see them using the universal English phrases "Thank you," "How are you?" and "What is your hobby?" with me, so happy to be actually using English for communication.

We're still rolling out the new features to the J-List website. The (still beta) J-List Wish List is shaping up nicely, and we've added the ability to move items in your shopping cart over to your Wish List for later purchase, so you won't forget about it if you want it get it later. Wish Lists can be made public so you can tell friends or family what you'd like them to get for you, post it on your blog, or just show off your list of cool items for anyone who wanders in. One small warning though: many items at J-List are limited in stock, and if you leave an item in your wish list for too long, it might not be available next time you go to get it. Feedback on the new system

Multiple meaning of "wa," raising bilingual kids, and what cute culture has to do with the rock band KISS.

Many English speakers know the Japanese word wa (和） which means harmony and peace, and in some cases additionally refers to the country of Japan itself. But there's a similar word wa (輪） that's probably more important to daily life in Japan. The other wa means ring, hoop, or circle, and is the word most used to describe a circle of friends or some other group of mutual acquaintances. The Japanese are, of course, a very group-oriented people, and there are mechanisms in place for ensuring that relationships work smoothly all around. Back in my teaching days, I observed that every Japanese seems to have at least two sets of core friends: those they've known since elementary and junior high school, which are where compulsory education in Japan ends; and a different set of friends who they met in high school. Since everyone chooses a high school that's right for his or her own academic level and future goals, it's rare for groups of friends to make the jump from junior high to high school intact. If a friend from one group encounters someone from a different group, politeness shields go up on all sides, and everyone becomes very stiff and formal, since acting too friendly with someone not already known to you personally would come across as very cheeky.

Japan definitely has an affinity for all things kawaii (cute), which is often a source of entertainment. Yesterday I went to the local electronics store, Plug City, to buy a new digital camera for our staff. The camera I selected was Canon's EOS Kiss Digital X, the Japanese version of the Digital Rebel XTi. I was amused to see the box the camera came in, which featured four gaijin kids painted to look like the KISS musicians, with Godzilla in the background -- it was much more wacky and eye-catching than the subdued packaging I'm sure they use in the U.S. You can see this approach to cute culture in the normally dreary manuals for electronic products too, which show anime-esque versions of electronic components smiling with glee when operated correctly, wearing puzzled expressions for the help section and sweating profusely in the chapter that tells you not to use this device above a certain temperature. Another aspect of Japan's cute culture is the style known as "SD" or "super deformed," basically a subset of the standard anime character design that features exaggerated features like an oversized head on a body that's too small. TV commercials featuring actors with super-cute deformed bodies and oversized heads are likewise a staple of advertising in Japan.

One of the great things about having kids is, you get to watch them at various stages as they grow up. I've enjoyed seeing my son and daughter (currently 11 and 10) moving through each phase of their lives as they grow and change. Unlike most children, my kids have had to deal with learning two languages, English and Japanese. When kids are small, it's quite hard to separate which language is which -- I'll never forget the image of my daughter in a toy store in the U.S., trying to talk to another child in Japanese and wondering why they didn't understand her, or when my son commented that the cold-water bath at the hot springs we had just visited was "cold-katta," mixing the English word "cold" with the past tense ending for adjectives in Japanese. Of course once kids reach a certain age, learning languages becomes child's play ('scuze the pun), and it wasn't long before my wife and I found ourselves being surpassed linguistically by our offspring. Now my son won't let his mother help him with his English homework, since some of the answers she gave him before turned out to be wrong.

J-List carries an extensive line of popular T-shirts and hoodies that feature unique messages in kanji, cool anime character designs from Japan and more, a great way to bring an esoteric bit of Japan into your life. We've got a new design going up on the site today: the super-cute Soot Sprite from Totoro (in Japanese, Makkuro Kurosuke), one of the most loveable images from anime.

We've been working on improvements to the J-List website all week long, upgrading our server for increased speed and working on some new features we hope you'll like. First and foremost, we're happy to announce the much- requested Wish List system is going up today. Since we have so many products at J-List, it can be hard to find all the items you want to look at, and now you have the option of adding items either to your shopping cart, or instead placing them in your Wish List, a permanent list of products you can browse at any time. By default the list is private and only viewable by you, but you have the option of making your list public, and even adding your own text to the list, inviting readers to buy the items for you. Feedback on the new J-List Wish List feature is appreciated! (Note: the feature should be considered beta since we're still rolling it out. I decided to go home at 2 am...)

More info on how schools work in Japan, a sumo wrestling update and 40 years of Ultraman

Last time I talked about how education in Japan worked, especially high school, which is optional for students here -- they can choose not to go without any penalty, although most know they'd be fools not to get an education while they can. Since high schools operate like a miniature version of the university system, competition for students creates a real incentive for educators to offer a solid program, and any school whose academic reputation declines will face a drop-off in the number of students that choose to come there. High schools specialize, too, with "college prep" schools for students intending to go to university, "commercial" schools that offer a more practical education for those who'll be entering the work force, and even an agricultural high school near our city. As with universities, some high schools are run by a city or prefecture while others are private institutions, and it's the lower-cost public schools that are most in demand. (A brief aside: the Japanese staff of J-List just told me they had all assumed that the reason Harvard was so popular was because it was the cheapest school in America. Woah, culture shock.) The choice of which high school to apply for can be an important one for young people, and I've seen quite a few 15 year olds who seemed mature beyond their years as they reflected seriously on what high school choice would best serve them in the future. Currently many of Japan's college-oriented high schools are getting in trouble for not teaching all the required hours of coursework, offering lessons targeted at what students will face on their college entrance exams rather than what the Ministry of Education has ordered them to teach.

Happy Birthday to Ultraman, who turned 40 years old this year. Along with Godzilla, Astro Boy and Johnny Sokko and his darned Egyptian-looking Flying Robot that practically no one remembers anymore, Ultraman was of the most famous early ambassadors of Japanese popular culture to the world. Created by Eiji Tsuburaya, the mastermind behind the special effects in the Godzilla movies, Ultraman was very ground-breaking, with high budgets and gorgeous special effects, for 1966, anyway. The story of a rubber-suited hero from Nebula M78 who comes to Earth disguised as mild-mannered Shin Hayata, and who transforms with that cool "flying punch at the camera" effect whenever he's needed, the Ultraman series went on through a total of 20 generations, featuring such characters as Ultraman Seven (the most popular series with die-hard otaku), Ultraman Powered (he's from America, and has blue eyes to prove it) and evil Ultraman Agul. When my son was small we watched all the Ultraman series of the day together -- my favorite was Ultraman Gaia, which was cool because of its story arcs, including one about a TV reporter who suspected the main character's secret identity and kept trying to catch him as he did his transformation. Ultraman is so famous, even the monsters he banishes are household names here, from lobster-shaped Baltan to the metal-eating Kanegon and my own favorite, the psychedelic-looking Dada.

Well, Asashoryu (ah-sah-sho-RYU, and no, that's not the "shoryu" from "shoryuken" in Street Fighter II, I checked) has pulled another stunning victory out of his topknot. The Mongolian wrestler pounded 15 opponents in the Kyushu Tournament to receive his 19th win over the weekend. Sumo wrestling (just called "sumo" in Japanese) is the national sport of Japan, receiving special status and support from the government. It's an incredibly old sport, practiced since prehistoric times in Japan, and taking its more modern form in the Edo Period. There are six tournaments held during the year, four in Tokyo and one each in Kyushu and Nagoya three in Tokyo and one each in Kyushu, Nagoya and Osaka, each consisting of 15 days of bouts, with each wrestler going up against a different opponent each day. The current record holder is the famous Taiho, the half Japanese, half-Russian wrestler who won 32 bouts in his career from 1961-1971. I wonder if Asashoryu will be able to beat this score? (Note: if you're a sumo fan, our Yokozuna T-shirt is really a cool esoteric item.)

The holiday shopping season is upon us, and J-List is ready to get your order out to you with speedy speed -- whatever you need, make your order now and we'll get it on its way to you with no delay. I asked the J-List staff to come up with the items they thought were best for gift-giving, and they came up with the following short list of recommendations:

1. Case of Black Black caffeine gum (great for caffeine addicts)
   
2. J-List Best Seller Snack Set (or mix and match your own)
   
3. Hidamari no Tami or Unazukin toys (great for friends at the office)
   
4. Joke gift like our Japanese actress blow-up dolls (great gag item)
   
5. Totoro or Cat Bus plush (they're so soft, they'll be appreciated for years)
   
6. Huggable Domo-kun Pillows (Japan's cutest monster)
   
7. Toilet paper (Hello Kitty, kanji) (they'll never see this gift coming)
   
8. Subscription to a Japanese magazine (we now offer annual subscriptions)
   
9. "In emergency, commit seppuku along the dotted line" T-shirt (or choose from 70 other shirt items)
   
10. A handy J-List gift certificate

Some more pics from Japan, since I had them open. This is a trip to Toys R Us for a little girl's birthday. Here we see that Nintendo DS's are *still* sold out. If you have any Sony stock, dump it!

She wanted a Licca-chan doll so I had to pick one. I didn't get the one that said "Sweet Cherry" on the front, since it seemed a little too modern for me.

If I were a doll buyin' man, this is the one I'd have gotten for myself. In the end, I went for a Licca nurse since my daugher likes to pretend her stuffed animals are burn victims then heal them, or something.

Got any Micronauts fans reading today? It was a toy line from Mego, produced with Takara doing the Japan end. Micronauts faded into obscurity inthe 1970s in the States, but has been going strong here -- kind of like an alternate Micronauts universe. This is a rather twisted item, a female Acroyear (which isn't so odd if you read the outstanding Marvel Micronauts comics back in the day, but even fewer out there have to have read them).

Wow, dig that parasol, and those breasts.

Have they actually not exported this part of Japan to the U.S. yet? I mean, games where you put in 100 yen and get a card you can collect and play a game with are so huge here. I'm surprised they haven't put these in stores yet.

Hey' I've seen that before!

Education and high school dropouts in Japan, Japanese in touch with their history, and the biggest shock Japanese get when they go to the U.S.

I caught a post on Slashdot the other day about a surge in high school dropouts in the U.S., and was saddened at the news. In Japan, compulsory education covers six years of elementary school and three years of junior high school, and during that time the basics that everyone needs to know are taught -- math, social studies, kanji, morals, learning to respect your senpai, and so on. High school has never been required, and there's nothing keeping a sixteen year old who has something better to do with his time from not going on past the 9th year of school. Just the same, there's a heavy stigma -- the dreaded label chu-sotsu (中卒) meaning a graduate of junior high school -- against anyone who doesn't make it through high school, and the vast majority of students (96%) do go on. High schools in Japan function as a miniature version of the university system complete with entrance exams, and competition for the best schools -- Takasaki High and Maebashi Girl's School are the highest- ranked in our prefecture -- is fierce, requiring years of preparation to get in. Just as with universities, it's possible for students to aim too high and fail all their tests, and become a ronin, a word which used to mean masterless samurai but which now refers to a student who is in temporary limbo while he prepares for next year's tests.

When Japanese people go to the U.S. they're amazed at the variety of foods available in supermarkets, especially the staggering number of breakfast cereals. "In SAFEWAY, many kinds of corn flakes about one hundred have overpowered me," one of my former ESL students wrote at the time. "I felt a difference of the staple foods." In Japan, gaijin might say the same about the instant ramen, with supermarkets and convenience stores brimming with various brands of noodles in every shape, size, and taste. Instant ramen came into being in 1958 with the introduction of Chicken Ramen by Nissin, and the convenience of noodles that could be stored easily and eaten anytime made them an instant hit, if you'll forgive the pun. Today many large companies compete to bring the best noodle products to market, including such favorites as Nissin's popular Cup Ramen line, the delicious Akai Kitsune Udon ("Red Fox" noodles with fried tofu in each package, yum), and even high-end brands that cost $5 or more per serving. Some numbers for you: Japan eats 5.4 billion servings of instant noodles per year (42 per person on average), the amount of flour used to make this ramen would fill up half of Tokyo Dome, and there are 983 registered brands of instant noodles on the market. I can personally attest to the profitability of instant ramen. During my ESL days, I happened to teach English to the wife of the former president of the Sapporo Ichiban Company, and her house was easily the most beautiful building I've seen outside of Kyoto. Instead of learning any English, we'd often sit in her unspeakably gorgeous tatami room speaking Japanese, drinking green tea and eating delicious manju cakes. This is basically the holy grail of ESL teaching, to find rich people and get them to pay you while they teach you Japanese rather than the other way around.

The other night I went downstairs to my parents liquor shop to get something -- the Japanese custom of building shops and homes together can be quite convenient when you run out of soy sauce or coffee filters or beer, since you've usually got what you need right there in the store. My wife's father and mother were watching a jidai geki, or a historical drama, in this case about the years leading up to the Battle of Sekigahara, where Ieyasu Tokugawa finally defeated his enemies and unified the country under his shogun banner. They were having a very deep discussion about the actions of the main character, an underling of Tokugawa, and how he narrowly saved the day for his lord. Like Westerns back in the 1950's, samurai period dramas are a popular genre of television, with many different shows produced for all ages. The most famous jidai geki on TV is the megabudget Taiga Drama that NHK produced each year, telling dramatic stories from a different part of Japan's past. Perhaps it has to do with higher average age of Japanese people, but it seems they have a lot more interest in their history than folks from the States could ever conceive of, and even younger people like my wife can take quite an active interest in events 400 or more years ago.

J-List carries hundreds of delicious and fun to eat snack items from Japan, including Pocky & Pretz, Pucca chocolate-filled fish-shaped pretzels, candy sushi, and unique varieties of Kit Kat only sold in Japan. Today we're posting this year's first Melty Kiss, the yummy fudge cubes from Meiji that are not only delicious, they've got one of the strangest names of any product we sell. This year's Melty Kiss is excellent, with the delicate taste of cocoa powder on the outside and rich fudge on the inside. Look for Precious Cacao and Strawberry on the site now.

Because I'm late with the daily post, I'll give you some pictures. Here is a giant offering to the goddess Yuko Ogura. Bummer that the power lines had to get in the way...

Outside our window the other day, a real rainbow! There is hope for us all!

Wao! It's a banana!

In reality, it's a banana shaped cake with banana cream inside, packaged in a gift box for giving as omiyage (souvinirs).

Christmas Cake. Do you have yours ordered yet? To our friends in the UK, I know the core concept for this comes from your side of the pond, or specifically from Scotland or something like that, but do you guys have shops marketing Christmas Cakes all over the place?