Back in Japan and getting ready for New Year's, my respect for hard work, and a great way to get money in 2008!

Hello again from J-List. Once again we've made the hop from San Diego to Japan, traveling the 5443 miles (8759 km) from our American home to our Japanese one. The flight was fine, although bumpier than normal due to the extra turbulence in the skies in winter. 

We've returned just in time for our favorite time of year, oshogatsu, or the New Year's Day holidays. Unlike the happy, boisterous fun that is New Year's in the U.S. and elsewhere, Jan. 1 is a very solemn day in Japan. Today is New Year's Eve, and everyone is rushing around doing everything they need to get done before the holidays, like finishing up their o-soji ("big cleaning") so they can face the new year with a clean house, and readying various decorations for the home. It's customary to eat Japanese soba (buckwheat) noodles on the last day of the year, which supposedly helps 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 most extravagant performances. The Kohaku show is "the" music event of the year, comparable to the Academy Awards in the U.S., and virtually every top star will be there, from Leah Dizon to Gackt to the singers in Hello! Project and enka greats Saburo Kitajima and Sayuri Ishikawa. After the Kohaku show ends at 11:45 pm, NHK broadcasts Yuku Toshi, Kuru Toshi (Year Going, Year Coming) showing solemn images of people making their way to beautiful Shinto shrines, Buddhist temples, Christian churches and Muslim mosques 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 a bell that chimes 108 times. Then, the TV display flashes "0:00," letting you know the New Year has silently arrived. 

Japan is nothing if not the land of the "boom," and you never know what will become popular next. Right now, thousands of cell phone users are displaying an image of the enigmatic Yoshihiro Miwa as their screen wallpaper, which is rumored to increase a person's luck with regards to money, what with yellow being the feng shui color for wealth and all. A survivor of the Nagasaki atomic bombing who went to Tokyo to become a famous cabaret singer, Miwa was very close to writer Yukio Mishima, the guy who tried to bring about a pro-Emperor coup by the military then committed seppuku when the soldiers laughed at him. Author of 20 books and an accomplished stage performer and director, Miwa-san may be most famous internationally as the voices of the wolf goddess Moro and the Witch of the Waste in Princess Mononoke and Howl's Moving Castle. If you're curious to see if this Japanese superstition is correct, try setting your cell phone's wallpaper to this picture and see if you get more money in 2008! 

One thing I really like about the Japanese is the tradition of kinben (KEEN-ben), or diligence and hard work, as an ideal for people to aspire to, essentially the local version of the Protestant Work Ethic. By and large, this diligence is usually measured in terms of time rather than raw effort, and doing an hour or two of overtime each day is probably the norm for most Japanese companies, allowing employees show their hard work to their colleagues in a unit that everyone can easily recognize, time. The highest expression of kinben is the tetsuya, the all-nighter, working so hard that you work all night long to finish your important project. If an employee in Japan works all night on a project, he will probably gain a lot of respect from his boss and coworkers (the term also applies to studying all night for a test). Recently I asked my wife what the "worst" job in Japan was considered to be, the one parents tell their kids they'll end up doing if they don't study hard (when I was a boy it was "ditch digger" but it may have changed since then). She told me that Japanese don't usually speak ill of a profession like that, since someone has to do it after all, and in fact, many of the jobs some might consider to be "bad" such as road construction or the guys that empty the BOT-ton toilets in older homes that don't have pluming yet, are actually good in a way, since they pay much higher due to the fact that few people are willing to do them. 

J-List would like to wish everyone a safe, warm and wonderful New Year's holiday tomorrow. Within the month of December, you wish someone a Happy New Year by saying yoi o-toshi o (YO-ee oh-TOH-shi oh), which literally means "[have a] good year." After January 1st arrives, you switch to akemashite omedeto (ah-keh-MASH-tay oh-meh-deh-TOH), literally "congratulations on opening the New Year." It's polite to use this second greeting the first time you see a Japanese person after the new year arrives. Well, until next time, yoi o-toshi o, everyone!

Comparing my kids Japanese and American personalities, more on what makes Japanese people tick, and all about sitting on the floor in Japan

We hope you had a wonderful Christmas holiday, wherever you are in the world. We had a great day, complete with turkey, lots of champagne and authentic Yorkshire Pudding.
It's interesting, being in the U.S. with my Japanese family and observing how my kids are taken over by their "American personalities" the longer they stay here. The Japanese have a saying to the effect that boys will take after their mother and girls will be like their father, an idea which I'd poo-poo'ed as a superstition until our kids were born. Our son is very Japanese, and although he has a lot of knowledge of English to draw on, he's often so shy about making mistakes that he'll refuse to open his mouth at all, a lot like his Japanese mother. My daughter takes after me, though: she seems very American in all that she does, and she's never shy about opening her mouth to speak English. While my son gets along quite well in Japan, my daughter's "American-ness" sometimes causes minor problems for her in her school, with the many meaningless rules she has to follow getting her down at times. All of these problems go out the window here in America, where (as seen from our Japanese life, at least), anything goes -- a person can do anything and be anything they want, and our daughter is positively glowing here in the States. One of the biggest rules in Japan is "act your age" (ii toshi shite), and generally speaking, people do what's expected of them according to their age group, which usually doesn't involve collecting Star Wars toys into their thirties. When my mother bought me a cool remote controlled R2-D2 toy for Christmas, my wife commented that it'd be very rare to find a Japanese man my age receiving a gift like that.

One aspect of living in Japan every foreigner must come to terms with is sitting on the floor. The Japanese do a lot of floor sitting, and even the most modern Western-style house will probably have at least one traditional Japanese-style room with tatami mats. One of my favorite things in Japan is the kotatsu, a low table with a heater inside and a blanket between the frame and the tabletop, which lets you get warm by sticking your legs inside. Since Japanese homes lack central heating, and it'd be far too expensive to heat the whole house anyway, kotatsu are very economical, as you're only heating a small space used by several people at once. They're also great for improving family life, since everyone will jam their legs inside and have a conversation rather than scattering around the house to do their own thing. The only negative to kotatsu? When Jiichan (grandfather) has flatulence inside the blanket part, causing a huge problem for everyone.

Each country in the world has what the Japanese call kokumin-sei, a kind of "national personality" or a list of traits that most people from that country tend to share. For example, Americans are seen by the Japanese as being optimistic almost to fault, believing that virtually any problem can be solved. We're also extremely friendly, even with people we don't know well, which can be hard for them to understand. The Japanese kokumin-sei is quite unique, too. In general, Japanese tend to be very peaceful, and go out of their way to avoid conflict with others. They're concerned with the image Japan presents to the world, and some major construction projects such as Japan's first bullet trains were done partially to make foreigners oo and ah when they came for the 1968 Tokyo Olympics. Also, most Japanese tend to be extremely modest, and it can be surprising when Westerners compliment a Japanese on their English ability, only to have them vehemently deny the remark. In my single days, I traveled all around Japan, hitchhiking or riding trains (there's a cool ticket called "Youth 18" which lets you ride as far as you want for $24, a bargain as long as you don't mind riding the slow local trains for 16 hours a day). Once, I encountered a boy and his mother while traveling near Hiroshima, and as we talked, the boy was going on and on about how baka (stupid) he was, so stupid that he'd never amount to anything at all. It surprised me to hear anyone talk like this about himself, much less an educated youth from one of the world's richest countries, but I realized later it was a kind of polite self-effacing that didn't mean much.

Thoughts on Christmas in Japan vs. America, my surprising first Christmas in Japan, and Japanese food for poor single men

Well, the stockings are hung by the chimney with care, and we're all getting ready for a wonderful Christmas around here. My family got in from Japan a few days ago, and the kids are fully into "American Christmas mode," shaking all the presents to try to guess what's inside. The holiday is a relatively recent cultural import to Japan, and Christmas there can be a little different from what you may be used to. To the Japanese, Christmas is usually more of an excuse to have a fun party than a solemn time for family, or more recently, an extra reason for parents and grandparents to spoil the kids by getting them something from Toys "R" Us. Christmas Eve is also a day for lovers to go on that special date, generally considered more important than Valentine's Day, and if you want to take your sweetheart out to a nice restaurant you might have to plan ahead a few months. 

I'll never forget my first Christmas in Japan. I'd not expected the Japanese to be very religious, so after arriving in my city I was surprised to find myself surrounded by a kind community of Japanese Baptists who ran a friendly church complete with a kindergarten for the local children. I enjoyed observing my new friends and seeing how similar they were to folks in the U.S. -- there seemed to be no differences at all, other than the language. In the grand tradition of Americans living in Japan, I was asked to play "Santa-san" for the kids, and I had great fun ho-ho-ho'ing as I handed out presents, as always being careful to speak only English, since that's what language Santa Claus presumably speaks. (I've since donned Santa suits dozens of times -- there must be something especially Christmassy about my personality as seen from the Japanese point of view.) I was of course surprised to find that Dec. 25th wasn't even a holiday in Japan, and driving in a traffic jam on that particular day takes some getting used to, I can tell you. One unfortunate aspect of Christmas for foreigners who haven't been "in country" too long is homesickness, since Dec. 25th is always a hard day to be away from family, no matter where you are in the world. Bottom line, Japan is a nice place, but the best place to enjoy Christmas is home with the people you love. All of us at J-List sincerely wish you and your loved ones a wonderful and warm Christmas holiday this year! 

I'll never forget my single days back in college, surviving on foods like frozen waffles, Campbell's soup, Kraft Macaroni and Cheese and that great friend to the pool college student, Top Ramen, which could be had for 3 for $1 back in the day. Japan has its own varieties of "bachelor food" too, so easy to make that even a single guy could handle it. First and foremost is the category known as "cup ramen," which seems to be as close to the hearts of Japanese consumers as cold cereal is to Americans. There are hundreds of varieties, from cheap noodles in a styrofoam bowl to the high-end "nama type" noodles which are fresh, not dehydrated, for a more authentic ramen experience. Next comes Bon Curry, boil-in-bag curry that allows you single men who can't prepare Japan's staple dish from scratch to enjoy it nonetheless. Poor men living alone love to eat "sea chicken" (tuna fish) mixed with mayonnaise spread over rice with a dollop of soy sauce, too. Japan is a country that puts great store in doing things the "proper" way, and when it comes to a single man (or woman) living alone, this is defined by cooking rice using a rice cooker on a daily basis. When I was living alone, everyone I knew would ask me "Are you cooking rice for yourself everyday, as you should?" almost as a greeting, not unlike "How are you?" They were invariably amazed that a foreigner could wash and prepare rice for himself without help.

Some thoughts on the series "Lost," how to brighten a Japanese salaryman's day, and how learning Japanese can get you fewer dates

I've caught the "Lost" bug, and am enjoying watching the series on DVD here in San Diego. One interesting aspect of the show are the sub-plots involving Jin and Sun, a Korean couple who are marooned on the island. Since the husband doesn't speak English, there are large swaths of dialogue in Koran, which makes me think I'm back in Japan with my wife watching Hanryu Dorama or the South Korean soap operas that are so popular these days. Although Japanese and Korean have a similar grammatical structure, with "particles" that mark the subject and object of a sentence, and similar word order, the two languages are quite different. The only words I can pick out of Korean are Chinese-derived words, like "promise" "goal" "air current" and so on -- not nearly the level of ability to read Chinese that I get for "free" by leaning Japanese (about 20%).

When I came to Japan in 1991, I was extremely motivated to learn Japanese, which was a good thing since the idea that you can learn a language through osmosis just by living in that country is flat wrong. I took advantage of every opportunity to advance my studies, listening to JPOP music and watching anime and Japanese dramas, which helped me get lots of vocabulary input. When I encountered a Japanese person, I'd engage in a brief "language battle" with them to determine which of us had the higher language skills, and thus which language I'd speak with that person -- and I hated to lose. Then one day I was in Tokyo, looking for a coin locker to put my bags in, and a middle-aged salaryman who was clearing his out said "Please use this one" to me in English. I thanked him in fluent Japanese, but after that I realized that I'd done him a real disservice. This man would probably have only have a few chances to use his English each year, and yet I had stubbornly refused to oblige him. Since that day, I've resolved to speak English to Japanese people more, which usually causes their face to brighten just a little. And if you really want to make a Japanese person's day? Compliment them on their English and ask if they've studied in the U.S. or England. It's usually pure B.S., but they'll be happy all day long.

One thing gaijin who attain fluency in Japanese can attest to, though, is that the more you learn Japanese, the more some doors close. Japanese often think of foreigners as fun to be around, and part of that fun flows from both sides not being able to understand each other perfectly, which somehow makes us more "exotic." If you go out to karaoke with Japanese, they'll enjoy themselves more if you sing a ridiculous version of "September" by Earth, Wind and Fire than if you're able to belt out the latest enka hit by Daisuke Kitagawa. At bars and clubs, too, foreigners who don't speak much Japanese can find themselves more popular with Japanese girls than gaijin who can read all 1945 characters of the joyo kanji (the characters designated for "general use" by Japan's Ministry of Education, which defines what it is to be literate in the language). Foreigners who learn too much Japanese might find the dating scene to be somewhat different, too, as some girls who might be interested in the exotic feel of a "real" gaijin might be turned off by our extensive knowledge of the late Edo and Meiji Restoration Periods (stuff that the average Japanese never cares about). Of course, I wouldn't want to go out with a girl who was turned off by me having too much interest in her country and language, and all people are different -- my wife was interested in me specifically because of my fondness for memorizing odd Japanese proverbs.

The interesting status of voice actors in Japan, shortening foreign words in English and Japanese, and ways that the Japanese aren't so polite

Anime has really gotten big in the U.S. in recent years, changing the face of popular culture as people are more in sync with the anime world. This isn't a new phenomenon in Japan, of course, where animation has been a part of everyone's lives since the old days of Mighty Atom, Giants no Hoshi and the original Gegege no Kitaro. One thing I've often noticed is that the voice actors -- seiyu in Japanese -- in anime are often extremely famous in Japan, with many of the top stars essentially becoming household names. When legendary voice actor Yasuo Yamada, who provided the voice of Lupin III, died in 1995, it was a national tragedy, and everyone grieved to lose the original voice of Lupin. (He was replaced by a comedian who did Lupin III impersonations on variety shows.) Some other voice actors who are well-known to the average Japanese person include Akira Kamiya, voice of Kenshiro from Fist of the North Star, the muscular Kinniku Man, and Ryo from City Hunter, and of course Tohru Furuya, who's played Amuro Rei from the iconic Mobile Suit Gundam along with a host of other roles. Perhaps the most famous voice actor of all is Nobuyo Oyama, the voice of the lovable robot cat from the future, Doraemon. When she retired in 2005, my kids stopped watching the show entirely, since they couldn't accept Doraemon with any voice other than the original. My wife watches lots of American TV dubbed into Japanese, and it's quite fun to play "pick the anime voice actor" while watching an episode of CSI: Miami with her. Oh, that's Inspector Zenigata!

One thing I've noticed is that people from all countries will reduce complex words into smaller chunks to make them easier to work with. In Japanese, it's common for various words to be abbreviated and reduced, to make them easier to say, especially English words which can be cumbersome when rendered into the Japanese phonetic system. For example, the Nintendo Entertainment System was sold here as the Famicom, short for Family Computer; similarly, if you want to go out to eat at a restaurant like Denny's or Coco's, just ask for the nearest famires (family restaurant). Words that are hip with young people tend to get abbreviated the most -- such as diji-kame (digital camera), ge-sen (game center) and sutaba (Starbuck's). Often companies will go out of their way to get people to think of their products in these abbreviated versions, advertising names as Pure-ste (Playstation) or Dora-Kue (Dragon Quest) to make them more familiar to customers.

The Japanese are famous for being polite, even when visiting Presidents throw up in the lap of the country's Prime Minister, as Bush I did on a visit here. It's quite silly, but when I first game to Japan, one small bit of culture shock for me was feeling that stop signs were "rude," because they used the informal command verb tomare ("Stop!") rather than some longer, more polite form. Although the Japanese generally are considerate, there are times when foreigners like me might consider what they do to be rude. First of all, the Japanese love to read over a person's shoulder, and if you're typing something in Japanese on a laptop, well, don't be surprise if a crowd gathers behind you. My mother taught me not to reach over people's plates when eating dinner together, but to ask for someone to pass the item to me; apparently the Japanese didn't get that memo, as it's common here to reach across the table to get what you need while eating. Similarly, Americans don't usually drink soup out of bowls, however it's almost a requirement that you do so here, since there are no spoons. Oh, and while eating any noodle dish like ramen or soba (not spaghetti!), you're expected to slurp your noodles as loudly as possible, and not doing so will likely elicit comments about how quietly you eat.

We've got some good news for fans of PC dating-sim games: the newest title from G-Collections, Snow Sakura, is in stock and shipping now. A super game that will appeal to a wide range of gamers, Snow Sakura puts you into the role of Yuuji, an average Japanese youth surrounded by a circle of beautiful girls (lucky guy). Although you grew up with your energetic cousin Saki, why Kozue, enigmatic senpai Rei, ditzy Misaki and your clumsy teacher Misato, for some reason you can't remember much about those days, only that you made a promise to one of the girls under the magical Snow Sakura tree, which somehow blooms year-round, even in the dead of winter. A great game in the tradition of the best interactive visual novels from Japan (*cough* Kanon *cough*), that we recommend for its great story and characters. Best of all, we've decided to give everyone a little present, and have lopped $5 off the price of the game for all new orders as well as existing preorders. This super game is now it's in stock -- make your order now!

Needing a sixth sense to communicate with people from other countries, this year's kanji, and all about "smorking"

Talking with people from other cultures often requires a sense for words that's quite unrelated to speaking a foreign language. Sometimes, someone says something to you that just makes no sense at all, and it's up to the deep part of your brain responsible for language processing to make the connection. Before I started studying the language, we had a Japanese foreign exchange student who stayed at my house. Once she praised me for something by telling me I was "good head." After more than a little confusion, I figured out that she was telling me I was smart, and this is indeed how you express this concept in Japanese (atama ga ii, lit. "good head"). Soon after arriving in Japan, I had a conversation with a student who was trying to tell me how good Mitsubishi vehicles were. "They are very good. They make...army's car. You know, boom!" My cranial density kept me scratching my head, until I realized he meant tanks. Whenever my wife comes to San Diego she has varying degrees of success communicating with my American family, who can't always figure out that when she says something about "the glass" being green all year round she's really talking about grass.

"I hate it when someone smorks in my face." For whatever reason, the English word "smoke" is often rendered as "smork" in Japan. The issue is how the Japanese perceive certain sounds, especially the "r" phoneme that's not familiar to them. Because Japanese is a syllable-based language in which you can express sounds like ka, ki, ku, ke or ko, but not the consonant "k" by itself, English words like "hello" "goodbye" or "beer, please" must be forced through this rather alien phonetic system, resulting in haroh (the final "h" representing an elongating of the previous vowel), guddobai and biiru puriizu. The very first fast food I ate in Japan was a McDonald's clone called First Kitchen (home of the world famous scrambled egg burger, yech), and I remember some confusion as to whether the company was First Kitchen or Fast Kitchen. Without the full repertoire of English sounds, the Japanese render the latter as fasuto and the former as fahsuto, with the longer middle vowel serving the role of the "r" in "first." This rule gets over-generalized in some words, which is why the long middle sound of the word sumo-ku (smoke) ends up as "smork."

Every year a single kanji character is designated by the Kanji Examination Association which represents the events of that year, and this year the character is...itsuwari, which translates as falsity, lies or deceit. It was a big year for being lied to in Japan, with many scandals in the headlines. First, the problems with missing Social Security payments, which meant that thousands of workers wouldn't get credit for money they paid into the system decades ago. Learning that the freshness date on the food they order may not be accurate also shook the trust of consumers in Japan -- McDonald's got caught changing the dates on salads so leftovers could be sold the following day, and they'd been doing it for years. The scandal at the Ministry of Defense, in which Deputy Defense Minister Yoko Yamada demanded various perks in exchange for the awarding of lucrative contracts, resulted in a raid on the Japanese version of the Pentagon by prosecutors. Today there was an official ceremony at beautiful Kiyomizu Temple in Kyoto in which a famous Buddhist priest wrote the character with a large calligraphy brush while hundreds looked on. The kanji for previous years have included inochi (life) in 2006, during which so many young people committed suicide; ai (love), after the birth of Princess Masako's daughter Ai in 2005; sai (disaster), in tragedy-laden 2004; and tora (tiger), celebrating the Hanshin Tigers victory in the Japan Series in 2003.

And still, the crack team of J-List employees is churning out packages left and right, making sure that orders both in Japan and San Diego go out in a timely manner. J-List's unique position, actually being based in Japan, really allows us to bring you a huge selection of mind-blowingly unique products from Japan, like our good luck Poop Hat, or those cool Santa Lucky Cat display items, or the cool Christmas ornaments we have on the site now. You can browse all new items using this link. Having trouble making up your mind what to give? We've got a few ideas for you.

Goodbye to New York, examining Japan's Buddhism and Shinto religions, Buddhist Altars, and fun linguistic coincidences

Well, our fun time in New York is at an end, and now it's time to head back to San Diego, which is a far less Christmassy place to be, all things considered. I have many memories of this convention, although my favorite was no doubt being surrounded by Domo-kun booth babes. It was a lot of fun, spending so much time in this amazing city, and I'll never look at New York quite the same way after this trip...

Japan is a mix of traditions taken in from different periods of time, and you can see this when studying the religions of the country. The original religion of Japan is Shinto, written with the characters kami (gods or spirits) and way or road, making it similar to other "the way of" words like shodo (writing + way = calligraphy), sado (tea + way = tea ceremony) or the martial art judo (flexibility + way). Shinto essentially finds kami, or spirits, in things like mountains, trees and rocks, making it seem very much to me like a Native American belief with its strong basis in nature. In the sixth century Buddhism was introduced into the country, and amazingly the two religions generally learned to treat each as an aspect of the other, allowing for much less conflict than you'd expect. Now, the various sects of Buddhism (which are as confusing to me as understanding the nuances of the Protestant churches are for my wife) are by far the most important religious tradition in Japan, and most families will surround themselves with Buddhist traditions even as they visit Shinto shrines on January 1st to pray for good luck in the New Year, or get married in Western weddings in beautiful churches.

One of the most famous everyday symbols of Buddhism in Japan is the butsudan, or household Buddhist Altar, which nearly every head-of-family household will maintain, unless they specifically identify with another religion. As far as I've been able to tell, Japanese Buddhism is primarily about respecting and remembering your ancestors, since (as my wife has told me), without your ancestors, you certainly wouldn't be here. Every morning my mother-in-law wakes up and makes an offering to her mother and father, by ringing a bell and burning a stick of incense for them. I've always thought that the absolute knowledge that you'll be remembered and loved by those you leave behind is one of the most comforting aspects of Japanese-style Buddhism. A butsudan is only maintained by the head of a household, the father or oldest son in a family, and if, say, a family has five children who move into homes of their own, they won't keep one but will return to their parents home on special events like the O-Bon holidays in the summer. A Buddhist altar is quite complex, filled with tablets on which are inscribed the names of your ancestors and an image of Buddha meditating, along with various other symbolic images. If you asked me what the most bizarre thing I've seen since coming to Japan is, I'd have to answer opening the newspaper and seeing an ad from a Buddhist altar store advertising a big sale on all the latest butsudan and grave stones. Wacky!

It's always fun to see what natural coincidences occur between languages. A Swedish friend of mine who's married to an Indian woman mentioned that the word for "no" in both Swedish and Hindi happened to be the exact same. This happens between Japanese and English, for example in the word "so" which has the exact same meaning in both languages (so desu ka? = is that so?). You probably known that "thank you" in Japanese is arigato, which sounds suspiciously like the same word in Portuguese, obrigado, although the Japanese word was in use before the Portuguese came to the country, making them unrelated. Most adjectives in Japanese end in an -i ("ee") sound, such as takai (high, expensive), yasui (cheap) or tsuyoi (strong), which is odd since many adjectives in English end in the same sound, like friendly, early or heavy. For the linguistically minded out there, these are known as false cognates, an accidental matching up of languages which seems related but which are totally separate in background.

My hop to New York, narrowly dodging staying in the city's worst hotel, and comparing it to the Star Wars Cantina

I've made the long hop from Japan to New York, and I'm now enjoying the 19 degree (with wind chill) temperatures. We're here to attend the New York Anime Festival, Dec 7-9, and can be found either at booth #408 or #340, with our great Domo-kun T-shirts, hoodies and hats as well as manga, PC dating-sim games and more. This show is going to be a really excellent one, with thousands of fans of many great companies all coming together, and we hope to see you there! Update: if for no other reason, come for the Domo-kun booth babes!!!!!

Its fun to "surf the culture shock" wave when in a new city, and New York has been a great place for this so far. I've stood on freezing subway platforms that look like they came out of a level of the game Max Payne (no relation, by the way), done power-shopping at the multi-story Toys "R" Us in Times Square, and narrowly avoided staying in New York's worst hotel. It's been extremely exciting, and we haven't even gotten started with the convention yet. Everyone knows that New York is an extremely international city, but the Star Wars Cantina-esque variety of cultures and languages around me has really been a surprise. I've gotten into a political discussion over delicious pasta with a family from India, debated similar issues with a taxi driver from Pakistan, and gotten into interesting conversations with people from the top of the world (Sweden) and the bottom (Australia). I'm staying in a very Jewish neighborhood, so I'm getting to see what a real Hanukkah celebration is like, too. It struck me that New York must be the perfect opposite of clean, homogenized Japan, where even speaking your a regional dialect of the language is frowned upon, at least in Tokyo.

Transliteration is the act of transcribing from one writing system into another, for example from Japanese to the Roman alphabet, and it's not an exact science, which is why we have alternate spellings for words and names in other languages, like good old Muamar Gaddaffi/Khadafi/Quadhafi, Mao Tse-Tung/Zedong, or Hanukkah/Chanuka for that matter. There are several aspects of Japanese that make writing Japanese words in English an inherently vague and challenging process. For example, there are long vowels in Japanese that are meaningless when written out in English since they don't change how foreigners pronounce the words. The correct way to write "pretty girl" in Japanese is "bishoujo" with the extra 'u' in the middle, and yet it's often shortened to "bishojo" for brevity's sake. Is it better to leave the long vowels in the word, although it complicates pronunciation and makes the words harder to remember, or should they be omitted? There's no simple answer -- although writing long vowel words with the shorter spelling is "wrong," it's no worse than the way meanings and pronunciations changed when French melded with English after 1066. Famous place names like Tokyo and Osaka also have long vowels that are cut to avoid making the name needlessly long -- since no one wants to write Toukyou and Oosaka. Another area where there is vagueness about how to write Japanese words or names in English is L and R. Actress and Tokyo University graduate Rei Kikukawa's first name could be transliterated as Lei without it being wrong, so is it okay to do this? There's often little agreement and so both names might be used sometimes -- there's no "right" way to write it. It can be very confusing, especially to search engines that can't tell that two similar words are the same.

One of the amusing things about living in Japan is seeing what can only be described as "American branding," selling a product by draping it in red, white and blue and associating it as closely as possible with the USA. Japanese generally have the impression that America is kakko ii -- literally "good style" or cool -- and are often open to owning items like Zippo lighters, a set of Coleman outdoor cooking gear and clothes from L.L. Bean. Branding your product as American can often bring a boost in sales, which is why the American restaurant chain Coco's adds "The California Restaurant" to their signs here, and why when companies like Jack Daniels or KFC communicate their advertising messages to their customers, they wrap themselves in images of old Tennessee or Kentucky. Levi Strauss stumbled trying to build a name for themselves in Japan during the 1970s, until they hit on the of using iconic Hollywood stars like James Dean, John Wayne and even Marilyn Monroe to advertise their jeans (they came cheap, since they were dead), which has to have been one of the most successful advertising decisions ever. The other day I happened on a store called Way Out! American Spirit that offered a variety of interesting and somewhat mundane things from the U.S., including thick Charmin paper towels, BIC pens, hard-to-find-in-Japan delicacies like chips and salsa and Swiss Miss Cocoa, and T-shirts with the Union 76 logo on them. It was quite interesting to stand there and watch what American products the Japanese shoppers were picking up.

The Japanese only started accepting Western culture only relatively recently, with the ending of the Edo Period and the Meiji Restoration of 1868, when the Emperor was theoretically "restored" to power after centuries of having things run by the Shoguns. One thing I've always found interesting is the number of words in daily use here that remind you of the differences between what is Western and what is Japanese, many of which employ the kanji yoh, meaning "Western." When you get up in the morning, you probably put on some clothes, but in Japan, you put on yoh-fuku, or "Western clothes," the word used to separate the shirts, trousers and other things you wear from wa-fuku, or Japanese style clothes like kimono or yukata. If you go to a restaurant that serves spaghetti and "hamburg steak," you're eating yoh-shoku, or Western-style food, which is treated as a separate category entirely from the various types of Japanese or Chinese dishes eaten here. Japanese film aficionados break into two groups, those who enjoy yoh-ga or films from American and Europe, and fans of hoh-ga, or Japanese film. And while I've become quite accustomed to living in Japan, I still prefer the good old yoh-shiki toilet with a seat I can sit on to the seatless wa-shiki toilets, which require just a little too much dexterity to use sometimes.

Before I started selling Hello Kitty ice cube trays and Totoro bento boxes, I was an teacher of ESL, or English as a Second Language. I taught English to students from the age of three all the way up to an elderly woman whose family business was running the local Buddhist temple, which was always an interesting conversation topic. During my years as a teacher I accumulated quite a collection of English textbooks, vocabulary cards, and various games I would play in class. One such game was "English baseball" in which teams of students would get "hits" if they answered questions using English, which I passed many a lesson with. Another is the popular Japanese game "fruits basket" in which you put, say, ten chairs in a circle and put one child in each chair, with one more standing in the center. This child must ask a question like "Do you like bananas?" and all kids who like bananas must change seats as quickly as they can. The one left in the center is "it" and must ask the next question to the group. Another fun game is the classic Simon Says, which is good because it allows kids to listen and react without actually having to produce any speech, which mimcs how children acquire language. I'd have to prepare my students for a shock, though, whenever I told them, "Simon says...touch your chin," since chin (or more accurate, chin chin) is a common word for a boy's private parts used by children. Which makes that line in the Three Little Pigs just a little too embarrassing...

A big scandal in the Japanese Pentagon, fine dining in Tokyo, and Japan and its Beverly Hills 90210 connection.

Maybe my post on Wednesday about the Japanese not seeming to care about government waste was read by someone important. Former Vice Defense Minister Takemasa Moriya is in trouble for a sling of violations, including taking bribes ('scuze me, "birthday gifts") and other improper favors in exchange for aiding defense contractor Yamada Corporation win lucrative single-bid contracts. Moriya, an important enough bureaucrat that he accompanied former Prime Minister Koizumi to Washington and posed in pictures with U.S. administration members, reportedly received millions of yen in free golf trips and other entertainment, and even got contractors to help his daughter get into a university in the U.S. (The daughter made headlines herself when she got a hose and sprayed water on news media and Diet officials who had come to deliver a subpoena to her father.) He isn't the only one in trouble: his wife Sachiko, who reportedly demanded even more free wining and dining than her husband, was also arrested. Today Japanese prosecutors raided the Defense Ministry -- the equivalent of the Justice Department raiding the Pentagon, if you can wrap your mind around that image -- to search for additional evidence of official corruption. They should have figured the guy was crooked -- he's got the same name (phonetically at least) as the Dwarven kingdom overrun by Orcs and a Balrog in Lord of the Rings...

You never know what will become popular on Japanese television. One year it might be former Chicago Bears lineman Bob Sapp making muscle poses while the Morning Musume girls squeal with delight, then comedian Razor Ramon shaking his hips in his "Hard Gay" persona. Currently the two-person Japanese "character unit" known as Dillan & Catherine seems to be popping up on TV a lot. Comedian Takeshi Nadagi plays a caricature of Dillan McKay from that bastion of 1990s goofiness, Beverly Hill 90210, which was extremely popular in Japan and which laid the groundwork for the current "overseas drama boom" of shows like Lost and 24. He sports poofed-up hair and jutted-out chin, and he speaks using expansive, exaggerated Japanese like the voice overs of the show, since Americans are expected to be overly-emotional about everything. Beside him, Catherine is the stereotypical American girl with a blonde wig, setting up Dillan's silly "American jokes" or getting mad at him for accidentally calling her Brenda or Kelly. The highlight of each stand-up routine is when Dillan zooms onto the set on an old curved handlebar 10-speed bicycle seen in the show. As usual, it's fascinating to see pop culture continue to grow and mutate into new forms as it moves around the world, and isn't it great that the Internet lets us see it all so easily? Maybe someone will cosplay Dillan & Catherine at an anime convention in the U.S., and the circle will be complete.

The influential Michelin Guide to restaurants has come to Tokyo, with its first-ever volume published ranking 150 establishments. The result? The city's restaurants received 191 stars, even more than Paris, causing the company to proclaim the city to be the world's best place to eat. The Japanese are nothing if not fascinated with how they're viewed by Westerners -- whenever an international event like the Olympics approaches there's a spate of renovation so that everything is nice looking for visiting gaijin -- and the first printing of the Michelin Guide sold out in days. Tokyo certainly is a fun place to eat, although it can be expensive, such as the time I spent $80 for dinner and margueritas for one at Tokyo's sole El Torito's location. But the variety of good things you can find in Tokyo, from traditional Japanese to ethnic foods of every variety and everything in between, almost makes it worth the higher cost. My favorite part of Tokyo is without a doubt the Shibuya area, home of the famous statue of the faithful dog Hachiko and a huge playground for young people, with thousands of food choices compressed into a tiny space, including my favorite Italian restaurant, which advertises itself with the slogan, "A lot of people talk about Mediterranean food, but we're doing something about it!"

Fans of PC dating-sim games, we've got more good news for you: the newest title by the creator of Bible Black is in stock now. Discipline: The Record of the Crusade is a fantastic game with a huge cast of characters and tons of beautiful artwork. This classic game is on the J-List site right now, ready for your immediate order, on the J-List side.

The plight of the poor Japanese taxi driver, finding government waste very close to home, and how to sound like a dirty old man in Japanese

I wrote a couple weeks ago that taxi fares were going to be going up 7%, a rare instance of inflation in a country where prices generally stay the same for years. Unlike the U.S., Japan is a very centralized place where change always happens from the top down, and I found it interesting to note that the decision to allow the raise in rates for the whole country was handled by a single government ministry in Tokyo, not decided on a local level as you might expect. The higher rates are to give drivers a long-overdue raise, since most of them are earning what they made in the 1980s, and with no custom of tipping in Japan to help make up the difference. Not every taxi company is raising their rates, however -- some are keeping them the same, which effectively introduces price competition in an industry where none existed before. While most of the world takes it for granted that taxi drivers will usually be from some often unpronounceable country, that's not the case at all here, where virtually 100% of drivers are Japanese -- after all, would you get into a cab driven by someone who couldn't read kanji? Once, I did catch a TV show about an American who had decided to become a taxi driver and had passed all the required tests, but the fact that this was rare enough to make national TV shows how uncommon this is.

Near our house, the powers that be have decided we need a new road, which would run alongside a neighbor's vegetable garden providing us with three routes out to the main street where we currently have two. They purchased the land, brought in machines to flatten the ground and laid gravel in preparation for the construction of the road. Next they did...nothing, allowing the half-built road to sit there for months. They're waiting, I'm told, for the next budgetary cycle to roll around, at which time they'll get more money from the central government to finish the project, and we'll finally have three ways to get out to the street -- yippie. The fiscal equivelent to unnecessary surgery, construction projects are often extremely wasteful in Japan, like a 500 meter ditch dug beside a road where a 20 meter one would have sufficed because budgetary aid is only available for projects of a certain size or larger, or a bridge and tunnel across Tokyo harbor that costs $40 to use yet takes slightly longer than just driving around on the normal roads. What's amazing to me is how little anger there is on the part of taxpayers when waste like this occurs, which is related to the Japanese tradition of saying shikata ga nai (or more colloquially, sho ga nai), meaning "it can't be helped," at the drop of a hat. To paraphrase Bill Watterson, I know the government is inefficient, but why isn't it ever inefficient in our favor?

The only constant is change, and Japan has had to deal with rather a lot of change over the past 150 years, essentially, going from a feudal country still in the Middle Ages to a modern, industrialized democracy in decades where other nations took centuries. This has brought about changes in the language, as Japan was forced to interface with the outside world more. Japanese is a linguistically impoverished language, with only 5 vowels usually paired into syllables with consonants (ka, ki, ku, ke, ko, etc.), and due to a quirk of phonetics, the sounds "ti" and "di" sound could not be accurately written using the normal kana system. Without a way to express these sounds, foreign words like "Disneyland" and "party" could not be correctly represented, and would be converted to "Desneyland" and "parteh," which sound strange to the ear. It seems a "patch" was introduced at some time in the last few decades, allowing the sounds to be expressed in katakana by combining two similar characters, but unfortunately there's a whole generation of older Japanese who learned a slew of foreign loan words with the older, strange-sounding pronunciations. Now a common caricature of an old Japanese man is one who is sukebe (dirty-minded) and tries to catch a glimpse of a girl's panteh while riding the train. Since the last thing in the world a Japanese person expects a foreigner to do is use these oddly-pronounced English words, I like to go out of my way to use them just for the shock value of it.

You should see the downstairs area of J-List: it's filled with about 500 packages of every size and shape, great anime toys and calendars and DVDs and other items that we're shipping out to customers around the world. J-List is primed and ready to serve you this Holiday season, so why not take this opportunity to browse the J-List site and see what cool new items we have for you?

All in all, "here are your gums" is not something you'd expect to hear outside a discussion of orthodontics, but a Japanese friend of mine said it to me once. She was handing me a big bag of gum I'd bought that day, and had assumed that since each piece of gum was individually wrapped, it was proper to pluralize the word. Without a doubt, telling which nouns can be counted (one apple, two cars) from ones that must be organized into groups first (one bag of gum, three pieces of furniture) is a big challenge for Japanese learners of English. There's nothing like count nouns in Japanese, a language where you don't even indicate plural vs. singular unless you need to be specific for some reason, and the often arbitrary nature of them -- why are jeans and underpants counted as "pairs" anyway? -- can be a challenge. My friend demonstrated this when she wrote on the outside of a folded-up note to me, "This is not a trash!" (to make sure I didn't throw it away accidentally).

Japan is a unique place, and the economic forces that cause this kind of business or that to spring up can be interesting to observe. During my 16 years in the country, I've seen quite a few businesses that don't exist in the U.S., or if they do, I've certainly never come across them. First and foremost, Japan has a lot less space than the U.S., and in especially crowded areas like train stations it's common to see people eating tachi-gui soba, or noodles that you eat in a tiny noodle shop while standing up, with nary a stool to sit on in the whole place -- which becomes part of the fun, after a while. Normally remodeling bathrooms presents a challenge because you can't bathe during the construction, but not in Japan, where there are at least three large public bath / sauna / hot spring baths within easy driving distance to my house. If you are out and find you've had a little too much to drink, you can call a daiko, essentially a taxi service with a spare driver who will follow you home in your car, so you have it the next morning. Similarly, I've recently seen izakaya, cozy Japanese bar-restaurants, advertise a pick up and drop-off service: an employee from the company will pick you up and then drop you off at home when you're done with your party. Finally, for those times when couples feel the need to be alone, there are always Japan's famous Love Hotels, where you can enjoy a clean, private environment, with or without the Arabian Nights theme or Alcatraz theme.

You don't often think of Japan as a miltary power, but the three branches of the Self Defense Forces represents one of the largest militaries the world, ranking behind the U.S., Great Britain, France and Germany in size. Due to its warlike past, the existence of Japan's armed forces is a potentially touchy one, and the government takes certain steps to avoid having its military appear threatening to its neighbors. For example, it shortens the range of all Japanese fighters by giving them smaller fuel tanks, and never uses the word "military" (in Japanese, gun, pronounced "goon") in any official capacity to refer to itself. The Japanese are an extremely peace-loving people, so much so that there were huge demonstrations when the government decided to send unarmed peace-keepers to Cambodia in the 1990s. Japan also sent 600 SDF personnel to Iraq to assist with rebuilding efforts despite heavy political opposition, but since the soldiers are forbidden from combat, they're being defended by units from other countries. Just about everything in Japan, it seems, has to have a cute mascot associated with it, and the JSDF is no exception: Prince Pickles and his girlfriend Parsley-chan are on the job, defending peace and acting as the official face of Japan's military. Or if you prefer, check out the popular line of Female JSDF members rendered in little anime-style PVC figures, a very popular toy line in Japan now.

On speaking a language without using sentence subjects, the joy of funny English all around me, and a golden "Santa-san"?

One thing you don't hear very often when speaking English is someone saying, "Wait, what's the subject of your sentence? Oh, okay." But in Japanese, a language that often omits the subject since it's understood by both parties anyway, it's possible to be in the middle of a conversation and suddenly need to verify what the other person is actually talking about. While cutting down a sentence like "Shall we go to lunch now?" to just "Go?" may sound odd to English speakers, it's usually not a problem in Japanese -- if you were talking about someone specific going somewhere, you'd put that in the sentence, but if the meaning is obvious from the context, it makes sense to shorten things. I've noticed that when Japanese speak English they sometimes use the wrong third person singular pronoun, saying "she" when talking about a man and so on, and this seems to be related to the fact that in their native language they never have to consciously specify a gender-based pronoun for a person when referring to them. There's nothing more embarrassing than when the invisible Japanese subject causes you to lose the thread of what's being said around you, and one skill smart learners master early on is how to B.S. others, making them think you're following along when you have no idea what's being said. Phrases like so desu ne, which should mean "Yes, that's so," but often means nothing at all, are a good place to start.

Without a doubt, one of the most enjoyable things about living in Japan is taking in all the funny English that comes my way. Although mistakenly-used English is often the result of translators with more self-confidence than actual linguistic ability, a lot of amusing English comes in the form of products sold by companies that can presumably afford to hire native speakers to check things. Some of these wacky product names are known to people outside Japan, for example, the most popular brand of powered milk for your coffee is Creap, short for "creamy powder," and Pocari Sweat, which brings to mind the image of floating on a cloud (pokkari) after a hard day's exercise. (Note: the product contains no sweat ^_^) Some other products that have caused snickering by gaijin living here have included Beaver and Woody, two separate air conditioning systems sold by Mitsubishi, which apparently has some wise guys working in their new products department. Japanese snacks are often named strangely, with Crunky, Asse or Meltykiss being good examples. Some other funny-sounding products that I've seen include Birdy, a canned coffee apparently aimed at golfers; Toyota's Carina ED, which was taken out of the market when ED came to stand for something else entirely; and the popular homogenized fish sausage from the Maruzen Corporation with the unbelievable name of Homo Sausage. Ah, Japan, don't you ever stop being so wacky.

The world is officially in "Holiday mode" now, and Japan is no exception. Here you can celebrate the season in a unique way, with your very own solid gold statue of St. Nicholas. A famous shop in Tokyo's Ginza area is selling the 24-carat gold image of "Santa-san" (as the Japanese usually call him), complete with a gold-mesh bag full of gold coins, to well-heeled collectors. The idea is that owning something made of gold will bring good luck, although it seems to me if you can afford the $1.8 million for the golden Santa you've already had more than your fair share. The Japanese have historically been big fans of gold -- Hideyoshi Toyotomi, who rose from a peasant farmer to the de facto ruler of Japan, built a tea room made of gold -- and you can see that many of the omamori and other traditional good luck charms that J-List sells have gold imagery incorporated into them in some way, for example the gold coin (called a koban) around the neck of the famous Lucky Cat.

J-List has more than 4000 excellent reasons to check the site this weekend, as we're just loaded to the gills with great products and gift ideas for your loved ones, from Totoro blankets to plush toys to delicious Japanese snacks to our Japanese T-shirts and warm hoodies and more. J-List has the fun and exciting items that the people on your list will really love and remember all year long. We've beefed up our stock of virtually every product we carry and have also added extra staff, allowing us to ship items out to you as quickly and efficiently as possible. Let J-List help make this a really great Christmas for everyone important to you this year!

All about "joshiki" (Common Sense) and the Japanese, negative aspects of this, and some thoughts on turkey

Unlike the U.S. or most of Europe, Japan is a very homogenous country, where people tend to consider themselves part of the same genetic stock despite the sometimes obvious differences in facial features and hair and skin tint due to the presence of Korean, Mongolian, Ainu, Russian and other blood in the veins of "pure" Japanese. Somehow this tradition of "one-ness" has amalgamated into the unifying body of knowledge known as joshiki, things that any reasonable Japanese person is expected to know. Just as all Japanese take it for granted that chrysanthemums are a flower reserved for laying on gravestones rather than giving to one's wife, as I accidentally did to her great amuseent, we foreigners often have our own joshiki that can seem alien to the Japanese. We have a friend who owns a company and once complained that he had rather a lot of debt, including several different bank loans at different interest rates. I made the obvious (to me) suggestion that he get one new loan at as low a rate as possible and use it to retire all the other loans, and this was the most brilliant idea he'd ever heard -- apparently no one thinks of things like that here. When it comes to saving for a rainy day, the common sense of many people is to put their money in the bank, even if it pays a paltry 0.2%, or a whopping .75% if you opt for a 10 year CD. I once tried explaining one American joshiki of investing -- that the younger a person is, the better it is to hold stocks, since you have more time to recover from any problems you run into -- to my conservative mother-in-law, who has never owned stock in her life because some people have lost money in stocks in the past. Suffice it to say that she didn't see the point I was trying to make.

While this Japanese tradition of most people being on the same wavelength is usually a positive thing, there are downsides, one of which I call the "tyranny of the majority." My wife made breakfast for me the other day, which included two eggs fried "eyeball" style (what fried eggs are called in Japanese) and several strips of bacon. "This is turkey bacon, right?" I asked her, and she gave me a sidelong glance at my sarcasm. While Japan is a great place, with warm and friendly people and many beautiful sights to see, it lacks some of the choices you'd expect to find in a wealthy, modern country, including any kind of healthier products made with turkey meat. Whenever I go back home to San Diego I bask in the many choices around me, from the variety of imported beers available in stores to authentic Rold Gold pretzels to delicious whole-grain breads, and bagels, oh those bagels. I drink skim milk most of the time when I'm back home, not because I like it, but because it's all but impossible to find here in Japan, a country where the majority has decided that milk should be thick and creamy, with 4.7 per cent milk fat. This can make it a challenge for people with special needs to live in Japan, for example vegetarians often have trouble finding food that is completely free of animal products. Before I started J-List, I worked for a few months at the local city office as a "Facilitator of Internationalization," basically helping other foreigners who needed help getting city services. The person who had been in the job before me had left early due to various frustrations that reportedly included not being able to drink anything, since everything from cola to green tea has caffeine in it, which was against his religion.

All of us at J-List wish everyone in the U.S. a warm and happy Thanksgiving on Thursday. This is one of those holidays that can be hard to follow when you're far from home, and it's quite common for our entire Thanksgiving to consist of a bucket of "Kentucky," as KFC is called here. It's possible to find frozen turkeys imported from Brazil (which contain guidance about how the turkeys were prepared in accordance with the laws of Islam, since they are also exported to the Middle East), although the bird we got last year was so small we had to modify the cooking instructions downwards. This year we've got a box of good American stuff like mashed potatoes, gravy, cranberry sauce and of course pumpkin pie, but we've decided to substitute turkey with pollo a la brasa, spit-roasted chicken from our favorite Peruvian restaurant. While you're recovering from dinner, remember that J-List stands poised and ready to help you with any and all shopping needs this long weekend, and we've got thousands of rare and amazing products for the Japan-focused person on your list this year.

We've got an announcement for fans of our PC dating-sim games today: the upcoming Snow Sakura has been declared "Golden Master" and is now being duplicated, just in time for the start of winter (don't you love our timing?). This is a really special game of love and "H" in Japan's northernmost island of Hokkaido, in which you play Yuuji, an average Japanese youth surrounded by a circle of beautiful girls, Saki, Kozue, Rei, Misaki and Misato. Although you knew the girls when you were small, for some reason you can't remember much about those days, only that you made a promise to one of the girls under the magical Snow Sakura tree. The mystery is, which girl was it, and why did you forget? This game has it all -- great characters, a long story with lots of depth, hilarious comedy scenes and a huge number of beautiful "ero" game CG. You can still preorder it and get free shipping when it ships!

My family treating me like an "American," thoughts on learning a foreign language, and the pain of sitting in "seiza" style

Being an American in rural Japan can be a challenge, and while I do my best to fit in with the larger society around me, sometimes I just gotta be me, which incidentally is known as "going my way" in Japanese. It's common for my wife to get on my case about my being "too American," which (to her) is usually about my tendency to be loose with my schedule, to forget important dates because I know she'll remind me anyway, and to say "yes, I'll be there in fifteen minutes" then show up three hours later. But my wife isn't the only one who takes me to task for being such a Yankee -- my kids do it too, which never ceases to amuse me, since they're, y'know, American as well. A few weeks ago I was driving in the mountains with my daughter, and we stopped at a restaurant that serves the most delicious thin-crust pizza, although we had to hunt around for the place since they have no sign indicating which road to turn at. When I mentioned my intention to tell the owners that they might consider investing in a lighted sign, my daughter said, "Why do you have to say anything to them at all? You always say whatever comes into your head without thinking -- you're such an American." One of my most embarrassing moments as a parent was when my son was three or so, at the playground. It was time to go, but of course he wanted to stay, so I had to gently insist that he go now. He got mad, and in front of dozens of amused parents shouted, "Don't you know there are rules grown-ups have to follow when they want a kid to leave the playground? You're an American, and Americans don't understand rules!" It's always interesting to see one's self through the eyes of a child.

Naturally, mastering a foreign language requires hard work and many hours learning things like grammar and vocabulary, but you also have to develop a "sense" for the language itself, internalizing the "real meanings" behind what you hear. Two handy words students of Japanese encounter soon into their studies are sukoshi (su-KOH-shi) and chotto (CHO-toh), both of which essentially mean "a little bit." If it's a little cold, you could say either chotto samui desu or sukoshi samui desu and your meaning would be communicated properly. One slight difference between the two words, however, is that chotto sometimes has a negative context, especially when used by itself without an adjective after it. If a girl makes a not-too-delicious bento lunch for you then wants to know how it tastes, you might reply "chotto..." which essentially means, "it doesn't really taste that good, but I'm too polite to come out and say it directly." Or, if there was someone you disliked, you could imply something bad about them without actually saying anything, by using "ano hito wa chotto..." ("That person is kind of..."), with the details of what you were going to say left up to the imagination. Although the Japanese have perfectly good words for "yes" and "no" -- hai and iie, pronounced HA-ee and EE-eh -- they're not really used that often. Instead, agreement or disagreement is more commonly expressed with softer, more nuanced and less direct words and phrases.

One of the banes of foreign visitors to Japan is seiza (SAY-za), the traditional way of sitting on your knees. Written with the characters for "proper sitting," it is an important part of many traditional Japanese cultural activities, from tea ceremony to flower arrangement to martial arts, and somehow sitting that way seems to encourage reflection and calm the mind. To sit seiza style, kneel with your knees together, then sit back so that your rear end is planted on the bottoms of your feet. Unfortunately, sitting this way for more than a few minutes can be quite a challenge for those not born here, and Japanese always chuckle amusedly at the sight of a gaijin trying to keep his legs from going to sleep while he kneels. One of the wackiest items we've ever carried at J-List is the Girlfriend Knee Pillow, a soft set of knees siting seiza style that's great for single guys to lay their head on after a hard day's work.

The joy of "onigiri" rice balls, observations on cooperative elements of Japanese language, and man, that's a really Nice Boat!

If you were to plan a picnic, you might pack a basket containing things like sandwiches, potato salad or maybe some pickles, but a Japanese person would almost certainly bring along onigiri, the delicious rice balls from Japan. Formed using the honorific o prefix that can be seen on many Japanese words and nigiri, meaning "to squeeze," onigiri are a popular way to grab a quick snack in Japan. Although they can be as simple as a hunk of salted rice pressed into a shape, there's usually a bit of fish, konbu seaweed or ume plum inside, and nori covering the outside. Onigiri are a major product category for convenience stores in Japan, and even before a new gaijin learns to start reading the language around him, he often memorizes the all-important onigiri color code at Seven Eleven -- red for salmon, blue for "sea chicken" aka tuna mayonnaise, and so on. Onigiri are a staple of bento culture, and Japanese housewives get up extra early to press rice balls to include in lunches for their kids or husbands. Onigiri can be heated but are usually eaten cold, but there's a subset called yaki-onigiri that's basically a triangle of white rice that's roasted over a flame while being painted with soy sauce -- delicious. Along with popular bento items, we sell a lot of onigiri related products on the site -- I thought today's Hello Kitty Onigiri Maker is especially cool.

A language reflects the character of the people who use it, and vice-versa, and I'm sure that if I were to study German, I would see that the precision and attention to detail that Germans are famous for would be evident in their speech. One interesting area of Japanese grammar students learn early on is the verb ending masho, which corresponds to "let's..." as in "let's eat" (tabemasho), "let's go" (ikimasho) or "let's not smoke" (tobacco wo yamemasho). In situations where verbal or written warnings would be worded in a command form in English (do not smoke, do not ride on the escalator backwards), it's common for Japanese to express the same message with this softer "let's..." verb form, making statements like "let's put our telephones into vibration mode" (maanaa modo ni shimasho) or "when a pregnant woman or elderly person gets on the train, let's give our seat to them" (seki wo yuzurimasho). These statements subtly create a warm and fuzzy "let's all cooperate" atmosphere that make people want to do their part for the good of everyone, an important pillar of Japanese society. Every year, the Japanese tax office sponsors commercials featuring famous TV personalities walking to their post office to mail their income tax forms -- "Let's fill out our tax forms accurately and honestly," is the message. Language like this presents a challenge for translators -- if translated literally, the message might not convey the same meaning to everyone.

The various forms of popular otaku culture in Japan and around the world continue to grow, making barriers like geographic location mean less and less, and the recent events surrounding the broadcast of the last episode of the popular anime School Days were a further example of this. School Days is an anime series based on a dating-sim game about a love triangle between Makoto, his girlfriend Kotonoha and their friend Sekai, which combines beautiful characters and a complex (and fairly violent) story. The day before the last episode was to air, a girl killed her father with an axe, and fearing that the act might have been inspired by the show somehow, the TV studios decided to replace the much-awaited last episode with soothing classical music and images of a boat somewhere in Europe, which fans immediately dubbed "Nice Boat!" spreading images all over YouTube. The boat is now a part of pop culture history, and because we love to make esoteric things for otaku, we've made a limited-edition T-shirt to commemorate this really excellent boat.

Thoughts on Japan and group culture in anime, hard and difficult areas of Japanese, English etc., and various mysteries of life in Japan

Japan is famous for its cooperative group culture, and you can see this in many places, from clubs in schools to doujinshi circles to more formal organizations. In the past few years I've noticed that many anime series have been made by groups rather than individual creators or companies, for example the Ikki Tousen Committee, the Claymore Production Committee, and the School Days Production Committee. These groups are generally made up of a variety of members working on the project, including producers, artists, representatives from companies like Bandai, and quite often, major anime retailers like Toranoana or Animate, who can give input that will help make the project successful with fans. One reason these committees come into being is financial -- having a group of experienced individuals be responsible for a project and makes it easier to raise funds -- but it also spreads responsibility around to more members. When Steamboy, the most expensive anime film ever made, failed to make back even half of its $26 million price tag, I'm sure Akira creator Katsuhiro Otomo was glad to have had the Steamboy Promotion Committee to take some of the blame off him.

Each language is unique, and presents special challenges to learners coming in from other language groups. For example, Chinese or Thai are tonal languages, Romance languages have noun gender to keep track of, and so on. According to the J-List staff, the most difficult areas of learning English are the "helping verbs" that fly around English sentences ("she shouldn't have been able to drive, should she have?"), or knowing whether to answer a statement with a tag question on the end in the positive or negative ("You're Japanese, aren't you?"). The Japanese language also has some rough patches, beyond the obvious challenge of mastering kanji, which include getting used to grammatical particles that "mark" the parts of sentences, including the often-confusing "topic marker" (wa) and "subject marker" (ga) of a sentence; getting used to verbs coming in formal and informal forms; and (as a male) learning not to imitate female speakers too much, since you can easily find yourself speaking effeminately. Happily, Japanese is not an especially difficult language to pronounce, once you train the muscles in your mouth to say the five vowels, which are "a" (ah), "i" (ee), "u" (oo), "e" (eh) and "o" (oh). These sounds are so tightly formed compared to the "lazy" sounds of American English, though, that I've actually experienced muscle pain in my mouth from speaking too much Japanese.

There are certain mysteries associated with living in Japan, as any gaijin will tell you. Why does your boss say so desu ne ("Yes, that's so") right before shooting your idea down? Why are some trains called nobori (climbing) trains and others kudari (descending) trains? (Trains headed in the direction of Tokyo are the former, and away from the capital, the latter.) Why do stores suddenly start playing Auld Lang Syne from speakers fifteen minutes before closing? (To politely let you know you should complete your purchase and leave.) Then there's the great mystery of the kanji characters for "small" and "big" (sho and dai) which you see on most toilet flush handles. Although Japan is generally wasteful when it comes to its natural resources, often covering the sides of mountains with concrete just in case there might be a rock slide someday, it has a green side too, taxing less efficient car engines at a higher rate, selling refill versions of products to cut down on trash volume and promoting low-energy lighting. Japanese toilets are set up to conserve resources, too: you can turn the handle to the right to perform a normal flush ("big"), or hold it to the left for a few seconds to just let out a little bit of water ("small"). It took me a few years to make the connection, but of course the "small" character stands for shoben (meaning number 1, literally translated as "small convenience"), while the other turn of the handle stands for daiben (number 2, or "big convenience"). One more mystery solved.

As you probably know, J-List sells a wide range of delicious Japanese snacks, with the newest releases from companies like Glico, Meiji, Morinaga and more always on the site. Although our Japanese snacks are fun to much on any time, they can also make great gifts for the upcoming holidays, and what's why we've added a new Best Snacks Stocking Stuffer set, featuring a selection of the best snacks we carry, from Meltykiss to Kit Kat to Pocky to Meltykiss and that delicious Charcoal Roasted Coffee Candy.

All about Japanese swords, thoughts on the "horse with a heart mark" and government, and, can you ski?

Japanese swords are famous around the world, up there with ninjas and Hello Kitty as a symbol of the country. Like the kanji writing system and Buddhism, sword-making was imported from China, and was immediately embraced by Japanese craftsmen who sought to perfect the art. Most famously worn by the samurai warrior class between the 14th and 19th centuries, it was common to carry both a long katana sword and a shorter blade, called a wakizashi. The law that governs carrying of weapons in Japan is known as the Firearms and Swords Control Law, something I've always been amused by, since one doesn't usually worry about something like the need for "sword control." While samurai swords are quite common in Japan -- my wife's parents have a pair of swords on display in their bedroom -- it's rare for one to be used in a crime. But that's just what happened in Tokushima Prefecture, where the president of a construction company who was known for his collection of ancient Japanese swords seems to have gotten into a heated argument with his son about something. Things got out of hand, a sword was drawn, one managed to kill the other before taking his own life. (Police are still investigating the details.)

There's a new "horse idol" in Japan's racing world that's claiming the hearts of fans. Her name is Treasure Smile and she's popular because she's got a natural heart shape on her head, which has caused thousands of fans to flock to Iwate Prefecture in Northern Honshu to take pictures of the "horse with the heart mark." The local track is milking Treasure Smile's popularity for all its worth, advertising that anyone wearing a heart on their clothes can get into the races for free. Along with boat and bicycle racing, horse racing is popular in Japan, and there are thirty tracks in various places around the country. It's also one of the many areas of society that the Japanese government is heavily involved in, much to the confusion of gaijin like me who wonder why the government needs to be operating race tracks at all. Unlike the U.S. with its tradition of individual sovereign states, Japan's history since the Meiji Restoration has been one of modernization from the core outward, with the government taking an active role in a range of industries from the publically-run Japan Tobacco which once controlled the distribution of all cigarettes and salt in the country, to the sprawling Japan Post Office, which operated as the world's largest savings bank and also sold life insurance on the side. One by one, these industries have been slowly privatized, with the old Japan National Railways becoming JR and the inefficient government-run phone company becoming the modern NTT. Presumably these moves have improved efficiency and competition, although the invisible bonds between these former public entities and government are still significant.

Suki desu ka? One of the first useful words a student of Japanese learns is how to say "like" (suki), which is pronounced quickly so that it sounds rather like the English word "ski," leading all students to immediately make the joke Sukii ga suki desu ka? (Do you like to ski?), since the words sound similar. The word suki is often a student's introduction to the concept that a word or idea in one language might have many possible meanings in another language, depending on the situation. Right off the bat, suki can mean "like" (in the context of your favorite food or hobby) or "love" (when said in reference to another person). Like all Japanese words there's some ambiguity involved, which is the subject of more than a few melodramatic misunderstandings in anime or television dramas. For example, if a woman was looking at a cake and said suki desu, she could theoretically be expressing her love of cake, or else she could be confessing her feelings for a boy who was also in the room. A couple of years ago I saw a variety show in which former JAV actress slash novelist slash TV talent Ai Iijima walked around New York, asking Americans Kyonyu suki? which sounds like "Can you ski?" in English, but is really asking if they prefer women with, er, large oppai. It was funny to see the Americans on the show nodding their heads for the camera at her question. Try it on your friends!

Foreigners' relationship with Japanese slippers, International Pocky Day, and reading my wife's English homework from 20 years ago

I'm often asked how I can come with so many observations about Japan, to which I usually respond that it's hard to filter them out, since Japan is literally all around me. Like most people who love onsen (hot springs) and sento (traditional Japanese public baths) here, I keep a basket in my car that contains all the bath related things I need: razor, toothbrush, small towel, a tape-covered paperback novel that I don't mind trashing. I also have a small notebook and pen for scribbling down ideas that come to me while sitting in the tub. For example, the other day I realized how complex something as basic as slippers can be. In Japan, shoes are removed at the front door in all homes and many businesses (including J-List), and slippers are worn while indoors. When you visit a Japanese family at home, they'll usually put out a pair of slippers for you to use, which can be problematic when since only Ewoks could wear the tiny things comfortably. Thus, every foreigner living in Japan must choose what kind of relationship he will have with Japanese slippers -- will he politely accept them, or refuse and wear his socks, knowing that he's breaking a minor social rule? Incidentally, did you know that the modern concept of slippers is actually a Japanese invention? Back in the early Meiji Period, when Westerners would visit a Japanese home they'd walk right in without taking their shoes off. So in 1907 (or 1876, according to another theory), a shoemaker named Risaburo Tokuno came up with an "outer shoe" that covered the dirty boots of foreigners, keeping the house clean. These supposedly evolved into the modern concept of slippers as an indoor shoe.

The other day we found an old English textbook my wife had used in Junior High School. My kids and I delighted in reading her English homework from 20+ years ago, especially rejoicing in finding any errors she made at the time (we're kind of mean that way, I'm not sure why). One thing we noticed were little numbers written above words in her textbook. For example, in the sentence "Jane's arrival livened up the party," there was a 1 above "Jane's," a 3 above "arrival" and so on. My wife had been doing what a lot of Japanese do when learning English, being consciously aware of the number of syllables in correctly pronounced words. The Japanese language is based on syllables rather than individual sounds represented by letters, and as a result they unconsciously extend the limited repertoire of sounds from their own language into English, which is where the often thick Japanese accents come from. You and I know that the word "weekend" has two syllables, but to a Japanese who hasn't internalized the rules of English pronunciation, it sounds like "oo-EE-koo-EN-doh," a five-syllable word. If you're a native speaker of English, thank your parents next time you see them -- you don't know how fortunate you are to not have to go through the difficulties of learning English.

Pocky has gone from being a wonky snack that a few anime fans knew about to being a major representative of Japanese snack culture all around the world. The chocolate-covered pretzel stick, which gets its name from the pokki! sound you hear when you snap one in half, was first introduced in 1965 by the Glico Confectionery Company under the not-so-cool name of Chocoteck, where it was an instant hit. Glico was founded by Riichi Ezaki, who after the death of his infant son swore to improve the health of Japan's children by introducing sweets containing glycogen harvested from oysters, which is where the name Glico comes from. There are many different flavors of Pocky released each year, from traditional chocolate to half-bitter "Men's Pocky" to delicious variations like Pocky Crush (almond, cookies n' cream) to Green Tea Marble Pocky to the new Pocky Dessert, essentially a cake wrapped around a biscuit stick. The Glico corporation has declared that November 11 (11/11, which looks like four Pocky sticks lined up) to be International Pocky Day, and to help everyone celebrate, J-List is having a special sale this weekend, with an extra 5% taken off any purchase of ten or more boxes of Pocky (cases included). It's a great time to score some delicious Pocky!

Finding the geographic center of American English, adventures in New Zealand with plenty of sheep, and getting complimented on chopstick use

One question I've been asked by my ESL students in Japan is, just where is "standard" American English located geographically? Most countries define a given region as the "official" dialect of their language, which is then used in textbooks nationally. In China the standard language is the Beijing dialect of Mandarin, in Italy its based on the regions of Florence and Tuscany, and in Britain it emanates from the twin pillars of "Queen's English" and the BBC. The "official" English used in the U.S. is a bit harder to pin down, and it's sometimes referred to as Standard Midwestern, since it tends to flow from that part of the country. In 1868, Japan's capital was officially moved from Kyoto to Edo, which was renamed Tokyo meaning "east capital," in imitation of China's cities of Beijing and Nanjing, the "north" and "south" capitals. This meant that the "standard" Japanese language changed from the colorful, intoned speech of the Kansai region to flatter, more robotic-sounding dialect of the Kanto Plain, something that Osaka hasn't quite forgiven Tokyo for yet. Like the U.S. and Great Britain, Japan does not have an "official' body to define its language is like the Acadmie franaise, and it's generally up to the publishers of the Kojien, Japan's answer to Oxford and Webster as the most prestigious dictionary, to bless new words by including them in its pages.

My son is back from New Zealand, and he had a great time there, doing homestay with a local family and getting to use his English a lot. New Zealand is a beautiful country, very similar to Japan if you take away 96% of the people, concrete and asphalt and add a lot of rolling hills and sheep, and the students loved it there. It's funny how social barriers can be laid low through the power of shared popular culture. For example, the kids Kazuki was staying with were into Yu-Gi-Oh battle cards, and since he had remembered to bring his collection with him, everyone immediately became fast friends, doing battle and comparing the English and Japanese cards. The students at my son's school generally learn North American English, and several of the kids in New Zealand commented on their "American" accents, something that no one from the U.S. would ever perceive. The kids at the school were interested to hear that Kazuki's father had gotten to meet Temura Morrison, the Kiwi actor who played Jango Fett and all the Clone Troopers in Star Wars episodes 2 and 3, at the Star Wars Celebration IV convention this year, and had in fact sung the New Zealand National Anthem to him. Sometimes I think that I might not be the most representative American my son could have had for a father...

Although Japanese kitchens are well stocked with spoons, forks and knives, most meals in Japan are eaten with chopsticks. Children usually learn to use chopsticks around the age of 4, when they start attending preschool, and this is quite possibly the first of many adjustments to the larger Japanese group that children have in their school lives. Every foreigner living in Japan knows the embarrassment of being told by a Japanese person hashi ga jozu ("you use chopsticks very well"). While one popular response is to compliment the speaker on their use of a knife and fork, I've found you can have more fun telling them okagesama de (oh-KA-ge sah-mah deh). This is a complex phrase which literally means "Yes, thanks to you," almost as if you had leaned how to use chopsticks from the person, even though you've never met them before. The phrase is a useful way of showing Japanese-style humility whenever someone compliments you on something, and since few would expect a gaijin to know it, it's fun to see their surprised expressions when you whip this phrase out. (If you're trying to learn to eat with chopsticks, we recommend the training chopsticks we have on the site.)

J-List is the best place to find Domo-kun related items, from plush toys to wacky T-shirts and warm hoodies to our great 2008 Domo-kun calendar that's in stock right now. Today we're happy to announce a line of cool Domo-kun hats, professionally embroidered with cool images of the official mascot of NHK, Japan's public broadcasting channel. We've got not one, not two but three new Domo-kun hats, the "Domo face," our popular "outlined Domo" design and a new one featuring Domo saluting you as he greets you. All hats are made of stone- washed cotton denim by American Apparel and are extremely well made, and are also fully size adjustable. Browse our new items now!

A useful Japanese slang word, changing in the Japanese savings rate, and one "key" to understanding Japan and America (?)...

Recently we took our daughter to a resort hotel in Kusatsu, a hot springs town in the mountains with more than 1000 years of history. When we checked in, the hotel employee handed us a standard old-fashioned metal key for our room, which made me realize another difference between my home country and Japan. Most hotels in the States employ a computer-control card-key system, which allows the hotel to assign a unique code for each card then change it the next day. While these convenient hi-tech devices give the hotel a more modern appeal with guests, the main driving force behind their adoption has been litigation, with hotels often liable for theft or other crimes that occurred inside their rooms. With the ability to prove exactly when an individual (including hotel staff) entered a given room, hotels in the U.S. can better control their liability for such things. Since Japan is for all intents and purposes a country in which no one sues anyone else -- remember, I've never met a single lawyer in my 16 years living in Japan, they're so rare -- it's not a problem for hotels to keep using the old metal key systems.

I'll teach you a word of Japanese that can be quite useful. The word is -kei, part of the word kankei, meaning "relationship." Basically, you take a word and put -kei on the end and you've essentially widened its scope, for example cha-kei would mean any kind of tea-like beverage, from Western iced tea to green tea and so on. The suffix is often used to create slang words related to fashion and popular culture, and new words are created almost daily to describe the ever-changing world we live in. One buzzword you hear a lot these days is Akiba-kei ("related to Akihabara"), describing anything that can be found in this popular area of Tokyo, from anime to manga to electronics and maid cafes. More specific otaku-related slang words might include moé-kei, i.e. related to moé (mo-EH) or "the warm, happy feeling you get when you look at your favorite anime character," or otome-kei (oh-toh-meh-kei), used to refer to anything related to yaoi or BL. The -kei suffix is used in music as well, for example the visual-kei rock bands pioneered by X Japan and now represented by the likes of Gackt or Malice Mizer, or the currently popular genre of club music known as Shibuya-kei. One slang word for the hip-hop culture that Japanese young people often like to imitate is B-kei, for black, while the type of man most Japanese females would like to date would probably be Johnny's-kei, men who are attractive in the way that Japanese male idols like SMAP or KAT-TUN are. Japanese magazine publisher Recruit publishes Gaten, a job magazine for workers in physically-demanding fields like road construction or moving, and a popular slang term for strong men who can work in these jobs is Gaten-kei, similar in meaning to the word "blue collar."

One aspect about living in Japan I like very much is the custom of a family's finances being handled by the woman of the household, a good thing since Japanese females generally tend to be very organized and level-headed, a lot more than me anyway. In past decades, Japanese households have been famous for their high savings rate, with the average family keeping around US$120,000 in standard cash savings accounts. Now that Japan finally seems to be permanently past the terrible period of recession that followed the bursting of the Tokyo land bubble in 1991, known officially as the Great Heisei Recession and unofficially as the "Lost Ten Years," some are seeing signs that this era of high savings may be coming to an end. In 1973 the average Japanese household managed to put away a whopping 23% of their annual salary, but this number has fallen to around 2.7% today. A lot of changes are afoot in Japan these days, with many households remodeling their homes to make them "barrier free" so that elderly parents can live at home safely, and of course those aging Japanese workers are retiring, reducing the income available to save. Lifestyles are changing too, with people getting married later and later, living at home into their thirties and forties. Some Japanese households are no doubt fed up with the miniscule interest paid on savings here in Japan -- the rate paid by a major bank in our area is just 0.2%, if you can believe that -- and are looking for other vehicles than straight savings. Unlike the old days when Japan had many barriers to entry for foreign firms, many investment companies are active in Japan, offering a range of more interesting alternatives for families wanting to save for the future.

Funny moments in Japan, Tokyo's famous Asakusa district, and limitations of Japanese "humility"

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Today was my ningen dokku or "human drydock," an annual health check-up that tests every part of your body with assembly-line precision, a modern tradition that's one reason why Japanese have such long life spans. While I was waiting for the next test I saw on the TV that Enola Gay pilot Paul Tibbets had passed away at the age of 92. He was the pilot who flew the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, something that made him rather infamous here in Japan. It was an interesting moment to be an American surrounded by Japanese people, and the room suddenly seemed to get a little quieter around me -- I probably had one of those big drops of sweat on my head like in anime. It can be hard to know how to feel about the bombing of Hiroshima, an event so terrible it's hard to comprehend, yet it helped end a war that might have gone on for two more years and claimed another million lives. When I took my kids to see the excellent museums in Hiroshima I tried to present the complexity of these problems to them so they can make their own decisions about the past, since they're both American and Japanese.

One of the most famous spots in Tokyo is Asakusa (ah-SAH-ku-SAH), home of the Senso-ji temple and a nice place to eat, drink or take part in a festival. Several famous corporations also happen to be located in the district, including the Bandai Company and Asahi Beer, which has a giant golden, er, shape on top of its headquarters which is supposed to remind you of the head on a cold beer...but everyone agrees it looks like a giant golden unko (poop), which the president of the company probably did for good luck purposes. Asakusa is a popular destination for foreign visitors to Japan, the last time I was there I was impressed to see a local shop owner barking prices at various customers in English, Chinese, German, French, Korean and occasionally Japanese. I'm sure more than a few foreign visitors have been surprised to see the beautiful lanterns that line Nakamise Dori with big, bright swastikas on them. They're nothing to do with the Nazis, of course -- the hooks go to the left, not to the right -- but seeing to this symbol in daily life takes some getting used to. Look on any map in Japan and you're sure to see many of these symbols indicating the presence of a Buddhist temple. Other symbols used on Japanese maps include a Japanese arch which marks Shinto shrines, and one of my favorites, the "onsen mark" or registered symbol indicating a volcanic hot springs. All of these characters are included in Japanese fonts and can be produced on any Mac or PC. (We've got a few cool T-shirts incorporating some of these designs on the site.)

From a certain point of view, the Japanese are all about "kenson," or modesty, and there are many customs related to avoiding appearing boastful to others. Right off the bat, this tendency towards humility is built into the language, and to speak very polite Japanese is to alter between using words that lower your own status while raising up the person you're talking to, actually changing the verb depending on whether you're talking about yourself or the person you're trying to be polite to. For example, the normal verb for to eat is taberu, but if you were speaking very polite Japanese, you'd use meshiagaru when referring to your teacher, boss, etc., and itadaku (as in "Itadakimasu!" which is said when you start a meal) when indicating your own lowly self. Modesty works like am umbrella, covering everyone in your respective in-group, and it's common for a mother to talk "badly" (as seen from my American point of view) about their own children to other mothers in the neighborhood -- they never study, the read manga all day, and so on -- as a way of appearing self-effacing to others. I've noticed that Japanese modesty stops short when it comes to money, however, and like most people in the world, they know how to flaunt it when they've got it. I once taught English to the wife of the former president of the Sapporo Ramen Company, who lived in a traditional Japanese house that was so fine, I thought I had been transported back to Nara Period Japan. There's a variety show on TV called Minna-san no Okage ("All Thanks To You") which features a chair that rises along a big slope. Famous idols, actors and athletes come onto the show, make some small talk with the host, then the chair moves up the slope to indicate how much money they make annually. Poor swimsuit idol Yoko Kumada was stuck near the bottom of the hill, while famous actor and former baseball star Eiji Bando was happy to be carried all the way to the top, indicating his considerable wealth.