Please Have a Safe and Happy New Year

Today is New Year's Eve, known in Japan by the odd-sounding name of o-miso-ka, which sounds like it means "Big Miso Day," although the miso here actually refers to the number 30, the number of days in most months under the old Lunar Calendar. Today is the day to eat Japanese soba (buckwheat) noodles, which supposedly helps everyone enjoy long lives because the noodles are long, and December 31st is the busiest day for restaurants that serve noodles. Another big activity for the last day of the year is watching Kohaku, the "Red and White Song Battle," a live show 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. Kohaku is "the" music event of the year, comparable to the Academy Awards in the U.S. in the buzz it generates, and virtually every top star will be there, from the venerable Saburo Kitajima to the red-hot R&B artist Thelma Aoyama, and even Jero, the first black enka singer in Japan, who really proved himself this year. (Fans of J-List's prepaid iTunes Japan cards can browse this year's Kohaku music on iTunes via this link.) 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, a Buddhist tradition tied to the 108 sins that mankind is subject to. Then, the TV display flashes "0:00," letting you know the New Year has silently arrived

Then comes Oshogatsu, New Year's Day, the most important day of the year in Japan. On that day we'll all sit around the house relaxing, eating mikan oranges with our legs in the kotatsu heater table and watching the big New Year's Marathon that's held every year in our prefecture, which is broadcast nationally on TV, since sitting around watching people run in the cold is apparently a good way to start the year. Part of the route for the marathon happens to go down the street we live on, so we can see our house on TV every year, which is always fun. It's important to relax as much as possible on New Year's Day because if you're busy on that day, it's said you'll be busy all year. Just as kids rush downstairs to see what presents Santa brought them in the U.S., Japanese children hurry to get the mail so they can see who sent them a nengajo or New Year's Card, a huge custom in Japan. These postcards are decorated with images of the Chinese zodiac animal for the new year, so this year's cards will feature many images of cows.

Of course we'll be making a trip to our favorite Shinto Shrine to pray for good luck in the new year. 2009 is my yakudoshi, my unlucky year according to a complex Japanese superstition that crossed over from China millennia ago, so I need to pay some money to have the Shinto priests say extra prayers to keep my bad luck away. According to this system, the ages of 25, 42 an 61 (for men) and 19, 33 and 37 (for women) are extremely unlucky, and you should avoid doing certain things like building a house, starting a business or otherwise making a major change in your life during these years. (The years before and after each unlucky year are also somewhat unlucky.) The tricky thing is that these years are calculated according to the old Japanese system of figuring ages, whereby a newborn baby was considered "1 year old" at birth. In other words, you should subtract a year from these dates when figuring your yakudoshi, hence the age of 41 for me (next year) is my big unlucky year. Of course, I privately laugh at some of the superstitions the Japanese come up with, like don't cut your fingernails at night or you won't be able to be with your parents when they die, but the yakudoshi belief is pretty much the primary superstition in Japan, so in the interests of experiencing Japanese culture to the fullest, I'll avoid building any houses in 2009.

 

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank you, J-List's wonderful customers, for making 2008 such a wild ride for all of us. We genuinely love bringing our unique brand of Japanese popular culture to the world, and we hope to do a lot more in the new year. The way to wish someone a Happy New Year before January 1st is yoi o-toshi o (yo-ee oh-toh-shi o, lit. "please have a good new year"), and when you meet them for the first time in January, you say akemashite omedeto (ah-kay-mash-tay oh-meh-deh-TOH, lit. "congratulations on opening the new year"). So, please have a very nice New Year's celebration with friends and family, and we'll see you next year. Yoi o-toshi o!

Time For Big Cleaning, Buddhist Temple Style!

As December draws to a close, Japan is getting ready for Oshogatsu (New Year's Day), by far the most important holiday in the country. But before we can start the new year there's plenty of work to do, beginning with osoji (oh-SOH-jee), the year-end "big cleaning" that everyone does here, scrubbing their home from top to bottom, re-papering the shoji doors, replacing the family toothbrushes with new ones, and washing the car so it's spic and span for the new year. This year-end cleaning isn't just a way to make the house presentable for company: it's based on a Japanese custom called susuharai, a year-end cleansing of dirt and cobwebs that's been done at Buddhist temples for centuries. Companies do "big cleaning" too, and tomorrow is the day when all J-List employees will stop work and spend several hours sweeping, vacuuming and wiping every inch of the office, washing the windows and even the front door. Between cleaning, Year End Parties and stocking up on food for the first few days of January when most stores are closed, people are extra busy this time of year. In fact, the old name for the month of December is Shiwasu (she-WA-su), which literally means "the month when Buddhist Priests are running around being very busy."

Japan and Sarcasm

Although I sometimes wish otherwise, my personality can be a little on the sarcastic side. For example, if I saw a movie that didn't meet my expectations for some reason, I might describe it as the best movie I'd seen all year just for the sake of irony. Or if my wife praised me for helping her aunt who runs an export business and who loves having an American in the family to check her terrible English for free, I might channel Homer Simpson: "Oh, look at me! I'm making someone happy! I'm the Magical Man from Happy-Land, in a gumdrop house on Lollipop Lane!" That brand of humor doesn't exist in Japanese at all, and when I started dating my wife we actually had to go through a period of "humor training" where she learned not to take my American sarcasm at face value. My style of wry humor naturally influences my kids, since children are constantly watching their parents and subconsciously copying them. When my son was suffering through a particularly boring lesson at his school, he remarked to his friend what an "interesting" lesson it was, and how the information they were learning was something they'd all treasure throughout their lives. His friend didn't understand him at first, and it took several seconds for them to realize that he was making a joke, but one that was culturally alien to Japan.

Wither Moé?

Moé (pronounced mo-EH) is one of the primary concepts driving much of the anime world today, essentially occupying an entire sub-section inside the larger genre of Japanese animation, manga and games. Written with the character for "sprout" or "bud," it has the same pronunciation as the word moeru "to burn," and in many ways the meaning is closer to this word, essentially being translatable as "burning with passion for my favorite two-dimensional anime character." Some consider the beginnings of moé -- of anime characters so lovely they become the focal point for fans, beyond the wider setting and plot of a series -- to be the character Claris from the classic Lupin III film Castle of Cagliostro by Hayao Miyazaki, and I agree: this is pretty much the point when venerable anime magazine Animage started increasing the number of color pages so they could print beautiful artwork featuring the popular female characters that fans demanded to see. It's interesting to compare Claris with the current high-water mark of the genre, Clannad After Story, the second series based on the popular PC dating-sim game by Key, a "harem" type story about a circle of girls who are all secretly in love with the main character, Tomoya. Just look into the eyes of the character Nagisa -- you can literally see galaxies swirling in them, and the emotions conveyed by the characters, including joy, sadness, love and anger, is really something to experience. Animation creators have never been better at pushing the emotional buttons of fans, and I hope they never stop.

Beat Takeshi x Hideki Tojo

On Christmas Eve Japanese television viewers got to see a rare historical drama in which internationally famous director and comedian Takeshi Kitano played Hideki Tojo, the Japanese general and former Prime Minister who is generally seen as the main force behind many of the actions Japan took during World War II, including both in China and Korea as well as Pearl Harbor. The drama, which also contained documentary portions including interviews with some still-living individuals from the era, was called "What Was That War All About Anyway? The Japan-American War and Hideki Tojo" and told the story of the general in the months leading up to Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor. I was surprised to see such a touchy subject as this taken up in a mainstream media channel since the name of Hideki Tojo and the topic of the war in general is an all but taboo, and only a director of Takeshi's stature could have made the project possible. I certainly hope for more open discussion of some of these events in the future.

Takeshi *totally* looks like Hideki. The resemblance is scary!

Sprawling Tokyo and Standing Soba

Japan's capital city of Tokyo is a sprawling mass of concrete, asphalt and steel that holds 35 million people in its greater metropolitan area (the city itself including three surrounding prefectures), which is slightly less than the population of California. Because there are so many people living in close proximity, things are a little different in Tokyo compared with most other parts of the world. I'd never been in a McDonald's with multiple floors until I came to Japan, but in Tokyo it's quite common to see fast food restaurants with three stories, with the ground floor for the kitchen and two floors for patrons to eat on. Family restaurants are often built with the parking lots occupying the ground level and the restaurant essentially raised up on stilts allowing the cars to fit under the building, while convenience stores with apartments built over them for the owners to live in are common, too. The idea of "personal space" doesn't mean much in Tokyo, whether it's trying to squeeze behind the tiny tables at a coffee shop or traveling on a train so packed that breathing becomes difficult. J-List is located in a fairly small city about 100 km from Tokyo, so we're spared much of the stress of having too many people around us. But even our spacious city is quite different from back home, something I'm reminded of whenever I stop at the train station for a bowl of tachi-kui soba, the "stand-and-eat noodles" that are consumed while standing at a counter, since there's no room for seats in the tiny restaurant.

More on Tokyo

Tokyo is a large and complex place. Many areas of the city are famous for different things, like Akihabara for electronics and anime culture, Shibuya for urban street fashion, Kanda for used books and Shimbashi for old-style salaryman bars and open-air yatai food stalls. One of the more infamous parts of Tokyo is Kabukicho in Shinjuku, a dark area filled with bars, hostess clubs and other businesses of somewhat ill repute, making it the only part of Tokyo where a visitor might feel unsafe while walking. A trip down the main avenue in Kabukicho on a Friday night is quite an experience, with hundreds of yobikomi (guys who try to convince you to come into their bar to drink), including many Nigerians for some reason. The days of the area's status as the city's unofficial red-light district may be numbered, however, with Tokyo's Governor-who-can-say-no Shintaro Ishihara doing his best to clean up the shady region in order to strengthen his bid for the 2016 Olympics. The trend isn't new: ever since 44 patrons of a gambling hall died in a sudden fire in 2001, police have been watching some of the shadier businesses. Last week's closing of the historic Shinjuku Koma Theatre, where enka songs were performed live for half a century, has led to conjecture that a shiny new glass tower will be erected on the spot in the near future, further changing the face of Kabukicho. While cleaning up some crime is probably a good thing, some are concerned about the "Disneyification" of Tokyo's last rough spot.

Ai Iijima 1972-2008

Oops, one more post to the blog only. It's being reported that Ai Iijima, the former adult actress who pretty much defined the 1990s for me (um, long story) has died, apparently by suicide. Very sad. After joining the AV world, she had many ups and downs and amazingly landed on her feet, becoming an accomplished author and mainstream geinojin ("talent").

A Very Merry Christmas from J-List

T'was the night before Christmas and all through the house, not a creature was stirring, except at J-List, where we're still busy efficiently processing the hundreds of orders we're receiving from all corners of the globe. Let us know how we can serve you today, either with our always-fun products from Japan or our new, improved J-List Gift Certificates, which are printable PDFs that can be sent through email for speedy delivery to your lucky recipient, or to you (so you can present the gift certificate to them directly). Japan iTunes cards also make great gifts that can be sent quickly through email, in case you've run out of time this year.

Tokyo Tower Anniversary

Today is the 50th anniversary of one of Japan's most famous sights: Tokyo Tower, which serves as the primary broadcasting hub for the entire Tokyo region. It was back during Japan's period of high economic growth after the end of World War II that the government realized the need for a large, centralized broadcasting point for NHK and the various other private television networks that were emerging, to avoid Tokyo becoming littered with ugly towers. The company that took on the project took its inspiration from the Eiffel Tower in Paris, deciding to recreate the famous structure in a perfect 1:1 scale, although Tokyo Tower had to be designed with earthquakes in mind. Back in 1958, Japan was still underdeveloped economically, and couldn't produce enough steel for the tower's construction, so they purchased hundreds of scrapped tanks left over from the Korean War. Today the 333-meter Tokyo Tower is one of the most popular tourist attractions in the city, and thousands ascend to the observation decks every year to look out over the sprawling Kanto Plain. (Supposedly you can see Mt. Fuji on a clear day, but I've never been able to.) The fascination with the tower can be felt in anime, too, especially in the works of CLAMP, who always manage to work Tokyo Tower into each of their works. Sadly, the company that runs Tokyo Tower is in debt up to its eyeballs thanks to an especially bad investment in a golf course in the 1990s. With the potential loss of broadcasting customers who are scheduled to switch to the new Tokyo Sky Tree tower that will be completed in 2011, one wonders how the company will fare going forward.

Lucky Bags from Japan

After Christmas comes Oshogatsu, or New Year's, a very special time in Japan. While January 1st is usually spent relaxing at home, visiting with relatives or taking a trip to a shrine for hatsu-mode (ha-tsoo moh-day), the first prayer for happiness of the new year, it's a big time for shopping, too, with stores having start-of-the-year sales to get customers in the door. One of the more popular customs of the New Year's season is lining up to buy fuku-bukuro, sealed "lucky bags" filled with unknown contents which feature items valued at much more than the price of the bag. These bags are so popular, you can see lines of customers waiting to buy them at department stores, and everyone hopes to get something really cool for the discounted price. This year J-List is bringing this Japanese tradition to our customers, too, with four different "lucky bags" offering different anime toys and figures, traditional and bento items, and more. What mysterious items will your bag hold?

My Buddhist Santa Claus Reconsideration

I've always been a huge fan of Christmas, and when the season approaches you can always see me with a Santa hat on my head and Christmas music playing on my iPod. But my first Christmas in Japan was quite a surprise. When I got here, I didn't expect the Japanese people I would meet 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 kids. There's no greater thrill for Japanese children than to get presents from a real gaijin dressed up as Santa Claus, and when the church asked me to play "Santa-san" I was all too happy to oblige, ho-ho-ho'ing as I handed out presents and being sure to speak only English, to keep things properly authentic. I've since been asked to play Santa dozens of times, although one of my more memorable performances was at a Buddhist preschool. They had none of the trappings of the holiday like festive decorations of snowmen and reindeer, and in lieu of Christmas carols the kids sang a song about the happy birth of Buddha while holding candles, which was quite an interesting cultural experience. But Santa Claus knows no borders, and the kids were thrilled to receive presents from me. All of us at J-List sincerely wish you and your loved ones a wonderful and warm Christmas holiday this year!

The First Christmas in Japan

Christmas is nearly here, and throughout Japan children are looking forward to getting a present from "Santa-san" while guys plan that big date with their girlfriends on Christmas Eve. December 25th is a unique time in Japan, a special event imported from the outside world with very little in the way of local roots or traditions, making it feel in some ways like an adaption of a Japanese matsuri (festival) more than the most solemn holiday in the West. Did I say holiday? Of course Christmas is just a normal work day in Japan, and there's nothing like sitting in a traffic jam on Christmas Day to give you that "bizarre Japan experience." One of the big cultural differences between Japan and the U.S. is how the roles of Christmas and New Year's Day are reversed: here, Christmas is more often than not a time to have a loud Christmas party with your friends, complete with party hats, exploding firecrackers and maybe a karaoke machine, while New Year's is a solemn, holy day for visiting with family and going to the Shinto Shrine to pray for happiness in the new year. Christmas at my house is a bit of a hybrid affair, with plenty of American trappings like the Charlie Brown Christmas Special combined with Japanese Christmas Cake from the local cake shop. Hmm, maybe we'll go for a Hello Kitty one this year...

The first recorded Christmas in Japan took place in 1552, when missionaries who had accompanied Francis Xavier held mass in a newly constructed church in what is now Yamaguchi Prefecture, at the southernmost point of the main Japanese island of Honshu. Christianity would soon be outlawed by the Tokugawa Shoguns, who wanted to close the country to all outside influences, but Christmas was practiced for 250 years by kakure Kirishitan, the "secret Christians" of Kyushu who disobeyed the law on pain of death. The spirit of Christmas was also kept alive by the Dutch traders on Dejima, a man-made island in Nagasaki Harbor which was the only place foreigners were allowed to visit during the "closed country" era (as it wasn't considered part of Japan proper). They invented a fictional holiday called Dutch Winter Solstice so they could celebrate the season without raising the eyebrows of the authorities, although I wonder if anyone was really fooled. It wasn't until the early Meiji Period that the ban on Christianity was lifted, and slowly images of the holiday began to seep into the Japanese consciousness. These days Christmas is a fun affair, a time to walk under sparkling lights with someone special or buy a gift for your kids, but it's New Year's that's the real focal point of the year in Japan.

Christmas lights in Japan are so pretty!

December 22 is Domo-un no Hi!

Today is a special day for Domo-kun, the super-cute Japanese monster character who's become so popular throghout the Internet: it's his 10th anniversary, or his 10th birthday if you will. Domo-kun was created by Japanese production company TYO to star in a series of 30 second stop-motion animation films for NHK's "BS" (broadcast satellite) network, which would serve as station identification between feature shows. The character was only intended to be used for a year, but he became so popular that NHK made him a permanent fixture. The word domo is an all-purpose Japanese polite term that can be short for domo arigato (thank you very much), domo sumimasen (I'm really sorry to have inconvenienced you), or even domo hisashiburi desu (it's really been a long time since we saw each other last), and as such the term is especially useful for foreigners who want to be polite but aren't sure which word to use in a certain situation. These days Domo-kun gets a lot of work on children's TV shows, teaching kids to bow and speak politely to their elders. We've been carrying fun Domo-kun products since the very beginning, and are proud as punch as the way our little guy has grown up. To mark this special day, we've got some rare items for Domo fans, the last stock of the cool Domo Square Plush cubes, in stock in our San Diego location -- check them out!

Forget-the-Year Party

Tonight is J-List's bonenkai (boh-NEN-KAI), or Year End Party, a big tradition in any company in Japan. Literally meaning "Forget the Past Year Party," it's a time to look back on all that's happened over the past year and say otsukare-sama deshita! (ohts-KAH-ray-sah-mah deh-shta, "thanks for your hard work") to all employees. We'll eat a lot of good food, drink and then hit the karaoke box for some serious anime singing. 2008 was a busy year for J-List, and we all worked hard to bring many cool products from Japan to tens of thousands of customers all over the world. Things weren't always easy, and there are but they were always fun, and we sincerely thank you for being "Friends of J-List" and helping us grow.

The Happiest People in Japan

With the economy in the doldrums in Japan, people here are buckling down as they wait for the recession to sort itself out. The Japanese have a magical phrase that allows them to endure all manner of adversity, which is sho ga nai meaning "it can't be helped," and that sentiment is being expressed more than a little right now. Yet there's one group that never seems to notice economic hard times: the komuin (KOH-MOO-een), a class of national and regional government employees that are the last bastion of absolute job security in Japanese society. Komuin are modeled after the civil service traditions of Western nations, and a wide range of professions are part of the system, including police, fire fighters, and teachers at public schools and universities; before their respective industries were privatized, all employees of the JR train line, the Japanese post office and even Japan Tobacco were government employees. While I have memories from my college days of the hard choices the State of California had to take to make its budget stretch in rough times, including cutting a wide range of budgets, I can't say that I've seen any case when public employees here faced serious job or budget cuts in similar situations. These days criticism is being focused on eight so-called "independent government corporations" like JETRO, an agency that promotes trade between Japan and other countries, which were found to be giving their employees hefty "food allowances" of up to $90 a month amounting to $14.5 million since 2003. Considering how wasteful these agencies are under the best of conditions, I can certainly understand the ire of Japanese taxpayers when they heard of this special treatment lavished on beauracrats that no one else is entitled to.

Bowing Culture

It's well known that bowing is something done in Japan as a greeting or to express respect or apology. There are many kinds of bows, from the casual ojigi you make to a coworker to a deeper bow of thanks you'd do when accepting your salary envelope from your boss on payday to the always-fun "bowing to someone while talking to them on the phone," which I catch myself doing. When I went to work for a large English school I had my first experience with chorei (lit. "morning bow") which is a brief formal meeting where the employees stand in a circle and basically promises to gambaru, or do their best and work hard, followed by a deep bow. Bowing is done in Japanese public schools, too: when the teacher enters the classroom the students stand as one and bow, then take their seats again. I once had a class of students at a business school I taught at do this to me, which really freaked me out. I told them that since there were to learn English from me, I'd be happy if they treated me like an American teacher.

Way More Information on Japanese Grammer Than You Wanted To Know

I talked a couple weeks ago about how the Japanese language lacks definite and indefinite articles like "a" and "the" and how the many nuances of these ostensibly simple words can cause frustration even for Japanese who have studied English for ten years or more. (For example, why do we talk about being able to "play the guitar" if there's no actual guitar in the room that we're referring to?) While Japanese certainly is a challenging language to learn, I have to say that there were quite a few areas where the language was actually less complex than English. Right off the bat, the Japanese have only one verb form for simple present and simple future tense, so there's no need to differentiate between "I study [everyday]" and "I will study [tomorrow]" unless you need to for some reason. One of the banes of ESL students everywhere is the subjunctive mood, like "if I had known that yesterday, I wouldn't have driven the car," but happily this grammar doesn't exist at all in Japanese, so that's one less thing for gaijin to need to study. Japanese has no plurals for nouns, so there's no need to study strange phrases like "a pair of jeans" (which looks to Japanese people like a single object), and there are no issues with count/non-count nouns, although the different counters used for thin objects, small objects etc. used in Japanese can be challenging for foreigners to learn. The bottom line is that while kanji represents a big challenge for Westerners, there's nothing overtly difficult about the language itself. Why not start today?

Today we're doing a really good update, with tons of new and back-in-stock items for you to check out. The J-List staff is working hard to get everyone's order out in a timely manner, and we're ready to fill your order ASAP. We've got tons of great snacks, anime figures and toys, 2009 calendars, Studio Ghibli toys and bento boxes, and much more. Browse our product lineup now!

Education Shock

Of all the aspects of Japan I had to get used to when I came here, the educational system was one I remember being especially confused by. My very first morning in Japan was a Saturday, and to my surprise the children of the family I was staying with got up and rushed off to school. Compulsory attendance on Saturdays had been part of public education here for decades until it was abolished in 2002 under the yutori kyoiku or "Slow and Easy Education" reforms, but that first sight of students cheerfully walking to school instead of playing was hard for me to wrap my brain around. More confusion was waiting for me when I started teaching junior high students at a juku, an after-hours school to help students keep up with their schoolwork and prepare for future entrance exams. I was perplexed by the idea of children willingly studying in a classroom until 10 pm instead of watching TV and having fun like I did at that age. Another point of confusion for me was that mandatory education stops at the ninth grade here, and by definition all high schools are optional for students, although nearly everyone attends. Since students choose schools based on their academic level and future goals, high schools function like a miniature version of the university system, with top-ranked schools competing to attract the smartest students and other schools specializing in subjects like engineering, commercials skills like bookkeeping, or (since our prefecture is quite rural) agriculture. Speaking of schools, I've got some good news: my daughter passed her examination for the private junior high school she wanted to enter, and was accepted! I think I'll get some victory sushi on the way home tonight.

Super Convenience!

The Japanese have a reputation for being innovative and coming up with new ways to make everyone's life a little more convenient. I had my first taste of this phenomenon when I bought a crappy Datson B-210 back in college, which sported a single key that worked in both the ignition and the hatchback and didn't mind whether it was upside-down or not, which was a lot more convenient than the dual keys that came with the Mustang I'd owned before. When I came to live in Japan I was greeted with many more of these small but much-appreciated innovations. First there's the faucet that juts out of nearly every toilet here, giving you a place to wash your hands with the clean water as it runs into the tank after a flush, or the spring-loaded toilet paper holders that let you insert a new role with a flick of your wrist. The toilet seat heater/butt washers also fall into the "extremely convenient" category. I'm a big fan of margarine tubs in Japan, which have little holes in the lid that allows you to keep a butter knife half-in and half-out of the tub, so you don't have to get a clean one from the drawer each time you butter toast. They also have blocks of cheese that's already pre-sliced, so you can pull off a piece without cutting it. If I were in charge of coming up with new products at a company in the U.S., I'd mine Japan for ideas til the cows came home.

Atsuhime

When I was six years old, I lived in New Zealand for a year. Besides falling in love with something called Big Ben's Meat Pies, I learned that the BBC makes historical dramas that really delve into the past, which was interesting to me since it's not something Americans are used to seeing. Japan's NHK follows the BBC model very closely, making many jidai-geki or "period dramas" -- this is incidentally where we get the word "Jedi" from -- that bring various episodes of Japan's long past to life for modern TV viewers. There are many productions shown over the course of the year, but the best is always the Taiga ("Big River") Drama, which runs from early January to the end of December and has the biggest budget and the most beautiful costumes. This year was the 47th Taiga Drama since the series started in 1963, and it told the story of Atsuhime, a girl who married the 13th Tokugawa Shogun. The period was an especially tumultuous one, which saw the arrival of Admiral Perry and his "Black Ships" then culminated in the Meiji Restoration, when the 250-year rule of the Tokugawa clan ended and a modern government was founded around the Japanese Emperor. It stared the popular actress Aoi Miyazaki, who gave a brilliant performance and won many fans for the show, which pulled in ratings of 28% last night.

I Bought 12 Boxes of Cereal

If you went to the supermarket recently, you might have picked up some cereal and put it in your cart. I bought some cereal recently too -- 12 boxes, in fact. Although breakfast cereal can be found easily in Japanese supermarkets, with familiar names like Corn Flake, Corn Frosty, Choko-wa (chocolate loops), Genmai Flake, and recently, Fruits Loops (the "fruits" is a fluke of Japanese phonetics, I love it for some reason), the boxes are so tiny that an American shopper would probably laugh out loud in the middle of the store, with just 1.5-2 "normal" servings of cereal in each box. So I occasionally decide to make an order from the Foreign Buyers' Club in Kobe, a service that lets foreigners living in Japan purchase anything from the U.S. (or Britain, or Australia), as long as they don't mind ordering by the supermarket case, which usually means 12 boxes. Having that much of any single brand of cereal is a little tiring, but it's nice to have the option of buying natsukashii (nostalgic) food from home when I want it.

It's quite interesting to see how Geoffrey Giraffe, Tony the Tiger and so on have been adapted to Japan. Creepy sometimes, but interesting.

J-List is humming along nicely both here in Japan and in our San Diego office, processing hundreds of orders daily and getting them out the door in a speedy manner. Whether you're looking for great Japanese snacks, anime figures and toys, Japanese study supplies, 2009 calendars or our Wacky Things from Japan, we've ready to get your order processed in record time. Browse our amazing stock of products now!

Kanji We Can Believe In

Each year the organization that publishes the Standardized Kanji Test announces the "kanji of the year," the single character that best sums up the events of the past twelve months. The kanji character is announced at a ceremony at the beautiful Kiyomizu Dera temple in Kyoto, one of Japan's most famous places, and it's fun to try to guess what it will be ahead of time. The character for 2008 has been announced, and it's truly a kanji we can believe in: hen 変, meaning "change," reflecting the many changes that Japan went through this year, including a new Prime Minister, plenty of economic turmoil and the election of a new American President with a similar message. The mechanics of individual kanji characters can be quite complex, and the hen character is used in many words, including normal verbs like kaeru 変える (to change [something]) or kawaru 変わる (to change [yourself]), and it's also the word for "strange," as in hen na gaijin 変な外人 (strange foreigner), something I've been called more than a few times. Anime fans may be familiar with some words that incorporate the hen kanji, too, like henshin 変身 (transform!), a staple of so many Japanese TV shows, taihen 大変(meaning "terrible" or "what a shame"), and that infamous "H" word hentai 変態, which has come to represent the more naughtier elements of anime, manga and computer games from Japan but which just means "not normal" or "perverted" in Japanese. Other characters that were considered this year included kin or "gold" to celebrate Japan's Olympic medals, raku meaning "fall" due to the stock market drop, and shoku or "food" in reference to the food scandals from China.

Coincidences in Japan

Today's interesting word of Japanese is guuzen (GOO-zen), which means "coincidence." I don't know why, but there seems to be something about Japan that brings out the most unlikely coincidences, at least for me. On several occasions I've bumped into people I studied Japanese with at SDSU in Tokyo and Yokohama -- quite a feat, considering the fact that I live far from these places myself. The guy who lives next door to us decided to run for mayor of our city of 200,000 and won, so my next-door neighbor just happens to be the mayor. When racing manga/anime Initial D got popular in the U.S., I was surprised to learn that the mountain roads I'd been zooming up and down for years were the setting of the story. But the biggest guuzen of my life would have to be the fact that the city I just happened to come to live in was the home town of Mitsuru Adachi, the creator of Touch, the classic baseball manga that I used to learn Japanese from, and which formed much of my early perception of Japan and its language. What's more, the artist just happens to share a birthday with my wife, another incredible coincidence.

J-List is primed great Japan-related products to you, and we've got an incredible stock of great toys, bento boxes, traditional and wacky items from Japan, snacks and more. If you're looking for ideas, why not browse the "Top 50" pages of the site, seeing what items other J-List customers are picking up? You can browse the top-selling toys (general), toys (Ghibli-related), anime figures, Hello Kitty items, traditional products, Wacky Things from Japan, bento boxes, snacks, magazine subscriptions, anime artbooks, Japanese study items, PC dating-sim games on CD-ROM or download, DVDs, T-shirts, and more. It's fun to browse J-List!

On Wedding Kimonos and Gaijin

In my city there's a bridal shop that sells the most beautiful wedding kimonos for happy Japanese brides to wear, and on the outside of their shop they've got a large sign showing models wearing the kimonos that they sell. The funny thing is that the models are all foreigners, something that always surprises me when I drive past -- if the company is selling products to Japanese women, why use gaijin models? The answer is that the Japanese have a rather deep complex about Westerners and seem to perceive them as being superior to Japanese on some unconscious level, just as Europe and America are considered more advanced politically and socially than Japan, despite our many faults. As a result it's effective to sell certain products by associating them with foreigners in some way. While beauty may be difficult for you or me to define, the Japanese seem to have no problem in this area: for a woman to be considered really beautiful she needs to be very tall (at least 175 cm), have an 8:1 ratio of head to body, and have a "high nose" (meaning a nose that juts out at a bold angle rather than being flat against the face).

A Certain Magical Kanji Trick

I've started watching an anime series with the rather unique name of A Certain Magical Index, which is about magic-using espers living in a futuristic place called Academy City, and a girl named Index who has 103,000 magical books stored in her memory. The name of the series is interesting because it illustrates a flexible aspect of written Japanese. Normally, kanji characters have "readings" (official pronunciations), and the general rule is that a character by itself will be read using the kun or Japanese reading, like the word for water (mizu), while two characters forming a compound word will use the on or Chinese reading, as in the words for seawater (kaisui) or cold water (reisui). It's permissible to "force" readings of kanji characters by assigning them an original reading of your own, which is called ateji. When foreigners want to write their names in kanji, perhaps for one of those cool custom Japanese name stamps, they usually turn to this system: for example someone with the last name of Lockwood might choose characters for "lock" and "tree" for their kanji. Another use might be in novels, to show multiple ideas in a single gestalt. For example, the translator of the Harry Potter novels could choose to write "flying broom sport" in kanji with "Quidditch" in katakana above as the reading, which would communicate both the meaning and the pronunciation at once. The character Light Yagami from Death Note also uses ateji for his name, assigning the English word "Light" to his kanji of "moon." The "Index" in the title of the anime I'm watching now is written with characters that mean "catalog of forbidden books" (kinsho mokuroku), which adds additional meaning for the reader to pick up.

iPhone Diet Update

My "iPhone diet" is going surprisingly well, and I've managed to lose 12 kg (25 lbs) so far. On this diet I'm basically eating anything I want, but making sure I record what I eat in an iPhone app called Daily Count, which gives me visual feedback about how many more calories I'm allowed for the day. The other day I went to the onsen (hot springs) with my son, and he suddenly started dancing while singing "Everybody Dance Now," which is what we do in our family when something good happens for some reason. I asked him why he was doing the victory dance, and he nodded towards one of the other bathers, who happened to be quite a big larger than me. At 93kg (205 lbs), my weight is slightly above average for the U.S., but in Japan where people are so thin, I'm really huge by comparison, making seeing someone larger than me in the bath a noteworthy event. I've actually been asked in the past if I was a professional wrestler -- sigh.

Thinking Way Too Hard

For whatever reason, there are certain subjects I never managed to study during high school or college, including chemistry, philosophy, world religion or the history of classical music. I also never took Latin, which I've heard is a cool subject to study because you get a sense for how the words we use today have evolved from the languages of the past. While I may have no particular experience with the etymology of English words, I recall going overboard with my Japanese studies, trying to learn more about the grammatical structure of the language than was necessary to use it. For example, you probably know that arigatou gozaimasu is a polite way to express "thank you" in Japanese, but I'd catch myself going beyond the simple phrase, parsing the grammar and kanji to better understand why it meant what it did. Similarly, the phrase yoroshiku onegai shimasu (yo-roh-shkoo oh-neh-gai shee-MAHS) is used when meeting someone for the first time (making it similar to "nice to meet you"), or when asking something important of someone ("thanks for doing this for me"). I'd try to come up with the most accurate English representation for the phrase I could, which worked out to be something close to "I humbly beg your favor" -- potentially interesting on a linguistic level, but quite useless when trying to communicate with people. I also caught myself going overboard learning every kanji I encountered, despite the face that many weren't in active use in the Japanese language at all.

Poor Prime Minister Aso

Poor Prime Minister Aso is really getting beaten up in the press these days. His approval rating is in the doldrums having fallen to around 31 percent, a number that's being reported almost gleefully by the mass-komi (as the news media is called here, from "mass communications"). There's something about Japanese politics that compels people to attack anyone perceived as being a "standing nail" and try to hammer them back into place, and the minute any politician dares try to assume a leadership role the negative energy start flowing. The complaints being leveled against Aso and his cabinet include the PM's love of fine hotel dining (which he pays for himself), for occasionally misreading kanji characters in his speeches, and for his many slips of the tongue, like when he said that many doctors "lack common sense." Amazingly, plenty of the anti-Aso comments are coming from his own Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), a phenomenon that's related to the complex system of internal factions (habatsu) within the larger party: Aso-san lacks support from a strong faction, so few will defend him. The new vogue of "Aso-bashing" might spell good news for the main opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) and its leader Ichiro Ozawa.

Yaeba, the Cute Crooked Teeth

Have you ever noticed that Japanese girls sometimes have very crooked teeth? Because the Japanese really never got into the Western custom of fixing teeth with braces, Japanese girls often have teeth that are quite oddly shaped, almost like they had too many teeth for their mouths. Fortunately, these teeth (which are called yaeba in Japanese, YA-eh-ba) look cute to the Japanese, and many Japanese singers and idols including the famous Seiko Matsuda have made their oddly shaped teeth part of their appeal. Although Westerners probably look at the crooked teeth as a negative, I kind of like the appeal they add to a pretty face. Maybe I've been in Japan too long.

Hop We Can Believe In

Every time I turn on the TV, it seems, one of Japan's big four beer companies is releasing some groundbreaking "new" brew which they hope will appeal to customers and win them a few points of market share over their competitors. Recently Sapporo brought out a new variety of its high-end Yebisu brand called "Yebisu The Hop," a name which highlights the fresh ingredients of the beer, based entirely on Czech Republic-grown hops as opposed to other beers that use rice and corn for part of the fermentation process. I like the name because it shows Japan's long fascination with the English word "the," which is truly difficult for them to master no matter how many years they study as the concepts of definite and indefinite articles don't exist in Japanese. The word "the" (rendered as za due to the limitations of Japanese phonetics) is used in marketing quite often, from department store Ito Yokado's semi-annual "The Sale" event to a tea bag I happen to have on my desk right now, which has "The Drink Bar" written on it as it was liberated from a family restaurant beverage bar at lunch. As is usually the case, the new Yebisu beer also has an extensive English explanation on it which is part decoration (since English is kakko ii or "cool") and part statement of quality. The text on the can, which is only slightly mangled, reads, "The exquisitely refined aroma of this beer is from select fine aroma hops and aroma hops, Yebisu yeast and slow maturation." I think I'll sneak down to my father-in-law's liquor shop tonight and try one.

Benefits from Living in Japan

Although Japan is certainly not a perfect place, in general there are benefits for gaijin who come here to live. First, it's not uncommon for foreigners to receive certain kinds of attention or enjoy some small opportunities that wouldn't be available to the locals, like the time I attended a concert given by my favorite band (Psy-s, if you know your 90s J-Pop) and was able to become friends with the singer because she'd happened to notice me dancing in the audience. As a foreigner you're considered part of a group that's outside the larger society of Japanese people -- gaijin literally means "outsider" after all -- and as such, it can be said that no one expects a lot from you at first. This allows you to either a) live up to their expectations and be a slacker, if that's your thing, or b) surprise them by speaking their language, and if you're able, quote rare kotowaza (traditional Japanese proverbs) that they don't expect foreigners to know, for shock value. Since coming to live in Japan means being far from home, you can usually spread your wings a bit and let go of any social inhibitions you might have had in the past. Then of course there's the small benefit you generally get with the opposite sex, since being a foreigner in Japan is something close to speaking with an exotic accent. I've had many instances where females found me more interesting than I really was mainly because of my gaijin status, and this allowed me to be more outgoing and have more fun overall. And have woken up after a night out drinking with an odd phone number scrolled on a chopstick wrapper. Remind me to tell you about the time I went flower viewing and met a girl who was boasting about what a good kisser she was...

Kanji is, like, radical dude

Part of learning to read and write kanji involves learning about the building blocks (called radicals) that make up the characters. Although they can look like so much goobldygook when you're not used to them, most characters are built with parts of other characters which help guide their meaning. For example, characters for things like language, to read, to translate, and to speak all contain the same left half (called gomben), which is the character for "to say." Kanji characters are often tied to the elements, and there are radicals for characters related to water (found in characters for sea, fish, tide), fire (found in ash, smoke and to burn), or rain (which shows up in characters for cloud, snow, and lightning) -- all quite logical, really. When you study kanji for far too long, as I have, you start to imagine you can see the threads of thought that went into their creation. For example, the kanji for "second" (as a unit of time) has the same right portion as the character for "sand" and I imagine some scholars in ancient China millennia ago working out why it was logical for the two concepts to be linked in this way, because of the way time can be measured with an hourglass.

Announcing The J-List Anime Figure Sale!

J-List is having a very special sale on our most gorgeous prepainted anime figures, and you're invited! Because we're a bit overstocked on some of these gorgeous prepainted figures and flexible action figures we carry, we've lowered the prices on all items, a super chance for you to add to your collection. We've got some of the most popular figure lines on sale, including Figma and Nendoroid, too. Best of all, buy 2 or more figures from the sale and get another 10% off. Since we've gone out of our way to add figures in logical groups (e.g. Haruhi and Lucky Star), it's the perfect reason to buy them together and build a great shrine to your favorite anime.

The Most Popular Japanese Words of 2008

Every year dictionary publisher U-CAN announces the most popular buzzwords for the past year, slang which appears suddenly and is likely to fade away almost as quickly. One word that was on people's lips in 2008 was arofo, an abbreviation of "around forty" made popular by a television drama by the same name, and the word has come to symbolize the current generation of Japanese women in their forties. This has also been a good year for Japanese comedian Harumi Edo, who makes use of the fact that words in Japanese end in full syllables, e.g. ra-nin-gu instead of "running," and her popular comic routine that turns the final gu! sound into the English good! has won her a place on the list. Some words that were nominated for the award but not chosen include homuresu chugakusei (homeless Junior High School student) based on a book released by a media "talent" who spent some months living in a park as a boy, dokuiri gyoza (poison Chinese dumplings) due to the Chinese food scare, and asa banana (morning banana), reflecting the sudden popularity of a diet that promoted eating a banana for breakfast, which resulted in bananas being completely sold out and impossible to buy in supermarkets throughout the country.

Trust me, this is funnier than it looks at first:

Japanese Food Can Kill You

One of the things I like best about living in Japan is the food. From traditional types of Japanese cuisine like sushi and sashimi to rice bowl-based foods like Oyakodon ("parent-and-child rice bowl," made with chicken and eggs) to local versions of Chinese dishes and all types of bento, eating in Japan is a joy. Japanese food has a reputation for being healthy, and in a lot of cases it is, containing less fat and fewer highly processed ingredients, but the reverse is also true: there are plenty of popular foods here that can kill you. The most famous deadly Japanese food is fugu (pufferfish), which contains a poison that paralyzes your body while you suffocate, but since fugu chefs must undergo years of training and be licensed by the government, deaths from it are quite rare today. A more dangerous food is mochi, or rice cake, essentially a square of extremely dense rice that's been pressed into a solid shape. Cook it over a flame and it will turn soft and chewy -- so chewy in fact that 30% of accidental deaths among the elderly supposedly come from choking on it. A similar food is konjac or Devil's Tongue, a kind of yam eaten throughout Asia that's grated, pressed and boiled until extremely firm, like gelatin made with very little water. Although the low-calorie/high-fiber food is popular with dieters, konjac is so firm that it must carry warning labels on the packaging, and no matter how careful people are, occasionally children or elderly manage to choke on it. All told, a staggering 4000 Japanese choke from overly chewy foods each year in Japan, a very sad statistic.

I love, LOVE this stuff, mochi. Sadly, it's about the most calories you can have in one meal.

Peter the Japanese Writing Teacher

I've been in "teacher mode" a lot these days, spending time helping my daughter write essays in Japanese. She'll be taking the entrance test for a private Junior High soon, and one of the requirements of the test is that she be able to write a good essay on a topic like, "What kind of Junior High School student do you want to be?" or "Name an event in your life that moved you emotionally." Historically, tests in Japan have been all about rote memorization, for example knowing that the city of Heian-kyo (modern Kyoto) was established in 794, or that the angles of a triangle always add up to 180, but as educators see that students lack written communication skills, essays and other kinds of writing have started to become more common. Like Japan's society itself, the essays have a strict framework to them, written on special "essay writing paper" with columns of squares to write characters in. In addition to writing kanji and kana correctly, the essay tests knowledge of how to properly write using the form, including some seemingly arbitrary things like knowing that the title must be indented three squares, and so on.

This is what the special paper, called genko yoshi 原稿用紙, looks like:

Recently spotted on Twitter: "Got my bento toys from J-List last night in the mail. Even cooler than advertised. My husband will never guess what's for Christmas!" That makes us so happy. J-List is a great place to search for really rare and fun items from Japan, whether it's anime toys and figures or bento boxes or unique 2009 Japanese calendars or our trademark Wacky Things from Japan.

Christmas Lights in Japan

Christmas is approaching, and in Japan that means one thing: lots of pretty twinkling lights. Throughout the country there are hundreds of romantic light displays that offer beautiful illumination and imagery for the Christmas season. In Tokyo, you can visit places like Roppongi Hills, Tokyo Tower or Shinjuku's Terrace City to take in these beautiful light displays, which are especially popular with couples, who plan a special evening at one of these "date spots" on Christmas Eve, considered the most romantic night of the year. In Yokohama's famous Yamashita Park you can visit Perry Joriku Hikari no Michi, translatable as the Shining Street of Admiral Perry's Landing, which commemorates the coming of Admiral Perry and his Black Ships with beautiful Christmas lights. This seems like an odd thing to celebrate, but I guss it's no stranger than the robot sister of Tetsuwan Atom (Astro Boy) being named Uran, meaning "uranium," an unexpected move for the only people who have experienced an atomic bombing first-hand. Just one of the many ways Japan confuses us foreigners.

Japan's 99% Conviction Rate

Last time I talked about the new Japanese "lay jury" system, which aims to have citizen jurors take part in the process of judging and sentencing serious crimes. This is quite an alien concept for Japanese, who have only 120 years of history as a Constitutionally-founded nation and no existing tradition of a trial by a "jury of one's peers." I mentioned that the conviction rate for criminal trials is over 99%, which compares to around 85% of in the U.S., and I received some questions about how this could be so high. First of all, it's considered an extremely serious offense to charge someone with a crime without being sure of his guilt, and it often takes Japanese prosecutors weeks or even months to bring formal charges in crimes while they sift through evidence and make sure they're not making a mistake. For example, it took several months for Aum Shinrikyo cult leader Shoko Asahara to be officially charged and arrested, despite his clear involvement in the 1995 subway nerve gas attacks and murder of a lawyer named Sakamoto and his family. The Japanese legal system is focused on getting suspects to confess their crimes, which is seen as the first step in rehabilitation, and police sometimes try so hard to their man to come clean that they end up with confessions by innocent people -- ack. Another big reason for the high rate of guilty verdicts is that there are a lot fewer resources in Japan for prosecuting crimes, which means that prosecutors must choose their strongest cases and decline to take action in situations where evidence is lacking, which inflates the numbers. Hopefully the various reforms the government is putting into place now, which include increasing the number of lawyers in Japan, will improve things in the future.

J-List Special Black Monday Sale!

J-List is just bursting with great products that would be appreciated by the special people on your shopping list this year, from anime calendars to plush toys to prepainted figures to bento and wonderful Japanese snacks. To celebrate Black Monday, we're doing something special: giving a $25 discount for any purchase of $200 or more. Considering the huge number of outstanding products we've got in stock, it'll be easy to pick $200 worth of great calendars, toys, figures and other items for the people on your list (or yourself). Offer good Monday and Tuesday!

8 9 3 = Yakuza

Like most countries, Japan has its unsavory elements, including organized crime. Japan's version of the Italian mafia are the yakuza (YAH-koo-za), a name which literally means "8 9 3" and refers to a losing hand in a traditional Japanese card game. The yakuza have almost four hundred years of history dating from the Edo Period, when the nation was closed off to outside influence and able to grow free of the wars that had plagued previous eras. While yakuza gangsters have been seen as defenders of the weak in popular lore, in reality they're very smart criminals with excellent organizational skills who operate various businesses, from illegal high-interest loans to shady drinking establishments in Tokyo's Kabuki-cho district where simply sitting down can expose you to an exorbitant fees. Yakuza are famous for their incredible full-body tattoos, a popular art form in Japan, and I've certainly seen more than my share of these, despite the "no tattoos allowed" sign. Although yakuza are gangsters, they're usually very polite, and it's considered good form for a well-connected person to have a few yakuza friends, just in case you ever need them. Yakuza are often associated with Japan's famously loud right-wingers who drive around in huge trucks blasting World War II era songs and, occasionally, the theme from the classic anime Space Cruiser Yamato. There's a whole subset of the Japanese language used by these gangsters, and part of the fun of living in Japan as a foreigner is seeing how good I can get at speaking the dialect.

Jury System Coming to Japan -- Alert Ally McBeal!

"Overseas dramas" are as popular as ever here in Japan, and thousands of fans follow American series like Damages or Boston Legal by renting DVDs from shops or watching the episodes that are broadcast on TV, usually late at night on NHK. There are many concepts in these courtroom dramas that must be hard for Japanese viewers to follow, however, due to the differences in the legal systems of Japan and the U.S. One of these differences -- the lack of cases being heard by a jury of average citizens -- will be changing soon, as the Japanese government prepares to roll out its "lay judge" system in 2009. Envelopes have been mailed out to 295,000 citizens informing them that they've been chosen as potential jurors in the new system, meaning that they can be called upon to appear in court to start hearing cases. The new system, in which groups of six jurors and three professional judges will decide the guilt or innocence in serious crimes like murder or arson, has been put in place in part due to Japan's embarrassment at its sky-high rate of convictions of 99%. The idea of whether average Japanese citizens can perform the duties of American-style jurors is a complex one. On the one hand, there is the school of thought that the group-minded Japanese might find themselves going with the opinion of the larger group for social reasons, rather than because they genuinely think the person in question is guilty or innocent. On the other hand, I've known many contrarian Japanese who would likely take an opinion different from everyone else just to show how headstrong they can be, which would cause all kinds of problems. Will the lay judge system work? I'm frankly not sure, but I think it'll be a useful exercise for every Japanese who takes part in it.

The First and Last Shinkansen

An era has come to an end in Japan: the "0-Series" Bullet Train, first launched back in 1964, has made its last run as the venerable series is officially brought out of service. It was during Japan's heady postwar growth period that the government made a proposal to build a high-speed train line to handle the increasing passenger load on the Tokaido Line between Tokyo and Osaka, and slowly things got under way. With the impending Tokyo Olympics only a few years off, the project was kicked into high gear so that the line would be opened in time for foreign visitors to oo and ah over. It was a big success, and the speedy trains helped improve Japan's international image like no other symbol of the postwar period. The 0-Series is considered the Mother of the Bullet Train by rail fans, and all told they've traveled enough miles to circumnavigate the globe 30,000 times -- wow! Tickets on the last 0-series were snapped up in record time by train otaku who wanted to be present on that last journey, and as the train pulled out, hundreds of fans were there with cameras to record the moment. During my years as an ESL teacher I had many students who loved train more than anything, and after school vacations they'd have all kinds of interesting stories for me about taking a long trip to some rural corner of the country to ride their favorite train.

iPhone [hearts] Emoji

One of the things I like about the iPhone 3G I use in Japan is now it updates itself with new software that usually adds new features for free, something my old cell phone certainly didn't do. Version 2.2 of the iPhone software was recently released, and one Japan-centric feature it offers is emoji, or "picture-characters," apparently so important to Japanese consumers that Softbank had Apple add the feature specially for them. With the update, Softbank users can call up an optional keyboard that features several dozen cute pictures which can be inserted into emails, with everything from an ikari mark (the mark anime characters get on their heads when they're mad) to images of food, buildings and apologetic boyfriends. Some of the symbols are downright puzzling (an eggplant? a rocket? smiling poop?), but I guess the idea is to give enough choice so that users can be as whimsical as they like in their emails. It's certainly a lot more expressive than using boring old ASCII to express one's self, like the word Orz which looks like a man on his hands and knees apologizine. I wonder if the new emoji feature will bring in a lot of new users in Japan.

Oh, and unfortunately this is only for users in Japan, and only when they send mail using their Softbank account, which no one uses. Happily there is a hack out there for Jailbroken phones.

Soybeans

Everyone knows that rice is the staple food of the Japanese, and it really is -- we eat it 2-3 times a day, and we're not nearly as traditional as some families. The "other" staple food in Japan would have to be soybeans, which are the source of a great variety of Japanese foods. Miso soup, a hot soup made from fermented miso paste, is an extremely healthy dish that's enjoyed with every traditional Japanese breakfast, and served with other meals. Tofu is another popular food, used in many Japanese and Chinese recipes, or good served chilled on a hot afternoon with soy sauce poured over it. Natto is the famous fermented soybeans that are popular in much of the country, although less so in the Kansai/Osaka area, to say nothing of my mouth. My kids eat it all the time, and when they want to tease me they come up to me and breathe Natto breath on me -- ugh. Japan couldn't get through a day without soy sauce, of course, the single most common condiment in Japanese kitchens, even more than salt and pepper. Finally, soybeans play an important cultural role each February on Setsubun, the traditional end of the year according to the old lunar calendar, when you throw them at imaginary devils to chase away evil and bring happiness into the home. (If you're looking for some good miso soup, we've got several varieties in stock, and miso soup bowls to go with then.)

The History of the Japanese Word Processor

I saw that Toshiba recently won a special award for its JW-10 Word Processor, a breakthrough product that allowed the Japanese language to join the modern age of computing when it debuted in 1978. The idea for a Japanese word processor came six years earlier, when Toshiba engineer Kenichi Mori talked with newspaper editors who complained that their writers took much longer to write articles than their counterparts in the U.S., and he realized that a computer-based workflow was needed in Japan. Since Japanese has thousands of kanji characters, creating a way for users to easily select the kanji they wanted to enter was needed, and they came up with the modern system in which the user enters hiragana characters then hits a button to cycle through possible characters for that word, with software that helps guess the correct character so there aren't a lot of embarrassing errors in the document. The JW-10 cost $63,000 and weighed 220 kg, but it proved that there was no fundamental reason why Japanese users couldn't embrace this new technology along with the rest of the world. This fundamental kanji input system is everywhere now, and any time a person enters Japanese on a Mac or PC or using a keitai (cell phone), they're using the fundamental algorithms developed by the Toshiba engineers. Unfortunately, creating the first word processor in Japanese had the unintended consequence of making just about every adult-aged Japanese person terrible at writing kanji, thanks to the computer interface that looks up the characters for you. In this age of convenient electronic devices, the average Junior High School student can probably write a lot more kanji than most adults.

Today is Good Bath Day

I have the most interesting car: when I start it in the morning, it greets me with ohayo gozaimasu (good morning) and tells me the date, followed by an interesting bit of "what day is today?" trivia. For example, August 15 is Instant Ramen Day, May 9 is Ice Cream Day, and November 22nd is Happy Married Couples Day, designed to help promote happy married couples (and hopefully get that non-dog birth rate up a little). Today is ii furo no hi or "good bath day," a day when people like me who love Japanese hot springs and open-air baths can feel good about getting very clean while bathing. While I do love going up to the mountains to experience a real volcanic hot springs whenever I can, I don't really have to go far to take a nice hot onsen bath, as there are three large public bath/hot springs establishments within 5 km of J-List, and one under construction that should be opening soon. Every weekend when we're trying to decide what we want to do, my kids know what my suggestion will be: heading to some hot springs to get really, really clean.

Dog Birthrate Update

Japan is experiencing a big increase in its birthrate...of dogs, that is. While Japan's rate of human births continues to sag, with just 7.87 babies born per 1000 persons, compared with 14.4, 12.4, 12.0 in the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom, respectively, there are plenty of dogs to go round -- about 12 million of them according to an annual study of a pet food industry group that was recently released. Dogs are changing Japan in subtle ways, something I noticed when I saw that a nearby home center had installed a dog run in its parking lot, essentially a fenced off grassy space where dogs who have come shopping with their owners can run, jump and play with other dogs. If you're a cat person (we'd qualify, as we have six in our house), you'll have plenty of company in Japan, too, as there are another 12.5 million cats living in Japanese homes. All told, there are dogs and cats in Japan than humans under the age of 15 here -- Japan is truly a paradise for pets.

A New Start for J-List

First of all, we've done a nice redesign of the J-List and JBOX.com websites, improving the look of the graphics of the site and making some changes to make things easier to find. We've also given our official mascot character Megumi-chan a refresh, just in time for the holidays, and we think she looks really cute in her "Santa-wear" (as a Santa suit is called in Japan). We've worked hard on the site refresh and we hope you like it! As always, feedback on the new site design is more than welcome! (Note that we are still tweaking the site.)

Pitty the Poor Gaijin

There are many important milestones that a foreigner trying to master Japanese will face. Ordering in a restaurant for the first time, for example, or communicating to the pizza delivery guy how to get to your apartment, not easy since streets are generally not named in Japan. Trying to get the hang of keigo (polite Japanese) is challenging since English speakers aren't used to the concept of using one form of language to raise up (exhault) the person you're talking with while using another type to lower (humble) yourself, and I remember crashing and burning many times due to getting the two confused. For many students of nihongo, the Japanese Language Proficiency Test is the primary goal they set for themselves, and whether you're trying the easiest level (level 4) to test your grasp of elementary written and spoken Japanese or are going all-out for the hardest level (level 1), required for foreign students to enter a Japanese university, having a goal and meeting it is a glorious thing. Some might consider passing level 1 of the JLPT to be the "ultimate" test of a person's Japanese, but I found an even higher goal gaijin can shoot for if they're so inclined: talking with the Emperor. I was watching a press conference with Japanese Emperor Akihito, and a foreign journalist stood up to ask him a question in Japanese. Unfortunately, the reporter garbled the question just enough that the meaning wasn't clear to the Emperor, who had to ask the poor man to repeat his question several times, while the cameras and everyone in the room stared on. Having been in many embarrassing situations myself, I felt terrible for the poor reporter. (Incidentally, J-List stocks dozens of excellent study aids for students learning Japanese -- browse our huge selection of items, now!)

Early Thanksgiving

On Sunday we had ourselves an early (and partially Costco-enabled) Thanksgiving, since Thursday is rather a difficult day to take off in the bustle of Japan, and since it was actually a local holiday called Labor Thanksgiving Day here, a day for giving thanks to people who work hard all year. It's not always easy to translate special cultural events to other countries, but we did our best to have a traditional holiday meal anyway, enjoying chicken and mashed potatoes and gravy, although there was sushi, too. It was up to me to explain the background of Thanksgiving to the Japanese friends we'd invited over, and I did my best to impart the history of the holiday to everyone, also explaining little details like, no, no one actually likes cranberry sauce, but we have to have it out because it's traditional. I've been careful to indoctrinate my kids in all the little things American kids must know, so we sat around watching A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving on DVD, which is always fun.

The Christmas season is fast approaching, and J-List is loaded with many outstanding products that the people on your list would love to receive. From our lineup of Japanese toys to our bento boxes and accessories to our kanji T-shirts and study supplies and more, J-List is the place to come when you want to find something that will really be appreciated by the person on your list. Remember, too, that there is no sales tax of any kind when you buy from J-List, and that we've got some great specials going on to save you money. Help J-List make this Christmas a little more special for the Japan-focused people on your list this year!

A Little Safer For Vice Ministers of Health and Welfare

The biggest news in Japan these days has been the murder of a former Vice Minister of Health and Welfare and his wife, an event which shocked the usually peaceful country with its violence. Last Monday, a man disguised as a delivery company employee entered the home of Takehiko Yamaguchi (66) and his wife Michiko (61) and stabbed both to death with a "survival" type knife, and the next day, the individual attacked the wife of another former head of the ministry, although she fortunately survived. Since the attacks were both directed at former heads of the Welfare Ministry's Pension Bureau, there was widespread speculation that the crime might have been perpetrated by someone angered over the loss of millions of pension records in the 1980s, which effectively robbed a huge swath of workers of some of the pension benefits they'd receive later in life. The real motive for the slayings may have been a bit more mundane, however. According to an email sent to the Tokyo Broadcast System, which had been reporting on the incidents, the killer committed the murders because his dog was put to sleep at the "health care center" (aka the dog pound), also operated by the Welfare Ministry. "This was revenge for having 'my family' [dog] killed at the health care center 34 years ago," the man said in his email, which also complained that Japanese municipal authorities are putting 500,000 stray dogs and cats to sleep each year. When I saw that police had arrested one Takeshi Koizumi (46) and recovered the murder weapons from his car, I knew instinctively that his occupation would be listed as mushoku, or unemployed, since the Japanese news always announces what job a certain suspect does (even if it's no job), so that viewers can categorize him in their minds properly. With this dangerous killer behind bars, hopefully the world will be a little bit safer for Vice Ministers of Health and Welfare for a while.

My Trip to America, er, Costco

Over the weekend we had a bit of an adventure: we made a trip to a Japanese Costco, the membership club that offers the American warehouse shopping experience to consumers in Japan. Costco has been operating stores here since 1999, but until recently all the locations were on the other side of Tokyo from where we're located, and I would rather fly all the way to California to buy something rather than drive through the chaos that is Japan's capital, if I have any choice in the matter. When we walked through the doors we were instantly transported to a world of shopping convenience where we could find all sorts of things not usually available in Japan, from American hot dogs to breakfast cereals to fabric softeners and more. We were quite pleased with how much effort the company had put into bringing the standard Costco experience to Japan, and we knew where everything was right away because the layout was exactly the same as the stores we shopped at in San Diego. (My existing Costco card even worked.) While Japanese consumers have gotten more comfortable with buying bulk over the past two decades or so, Costco still has some work to do to adapt its business model to the country, and many of the products they were offering in the store seemed confusing to me, from the bake-at-home pizza that was too big for tiny Japanese ovens to a full selection of children's books in English, which no one was even picking at, or American pickles, which I am happy to buy but which most Japanese dislike. Paradigm shifts in buying habits always present opportunities to certain companies, and I could see that a lot of American brands were getting a toe-hold with Japanese shoppers who had never seen Downy or Tide or Duracell batteries in the past. It'd be interesting to see if these companies can increase their market share in Japan, using Costco as a springboard. There was a downside to my little shopping trip, however: the feeling of being back in the States was so complete that I had real trouble staying on the correct side of the road while driving home. You should have heard my wife scream.

I really can't explain why Japanese people would be taking picture of this

Japan [hearts] Britain

One of the themes of being an American living in Japan is discovering how much the country has taken various cues from Britain. It starts out with cars, getting used to "strange" car-related words, like the hood of the car being called a bonnet, or seeing your first Toyota Super Saloon, a car with a name that makes Americans think of the Old West until they learn that saloon is just the British word for sedan. Americans might make a visit to the bathroom or the restroom, but in England (I'm told) they are more likely to use the word "toilet," which is the same in Japan -- and I've gotten some funny looks in stores in the States asking the cashier where the "toilet" was. Then there are clothing-related words that the Japanese imported from Britain, like a jacket or sweater being called a "jumper," and of course the infamous word "pants," which refers to trousers, jeans or slacks in the U.S. but underwear in Britain and Japan. It seems that the Japanese have looked to Britain in other ways, too. For example, I can't think of a single situation where I'd call a friend or acquaintance by his last name, but it's common for classmates in Japanese schools to do this, for example saying, "Nagashima, let's go" instead of using the person's first name of Takeshi. When reading the Narnia books with my son, I saw characters referring to each other by last names, and it made me think that Japan and Britain were somehow closer than it seemed on the surface.

More Thoughts on Kanji

There's no doubt about it: the most complex part of learning Japanese is kanji, unless you're fortunate enough to already be fluent in Chinese, and if you are, I envy you. An educated Japanese person generally uses around 2000 kanji, compared with 3500-5000 for the same person in China. Because the Chinese writing system was basically grafted onto the existing Japanese language in the 5th century, there are fundamentally two ways to read any character, the on (rhymes with bone) or Chinese reading, and the kun (rhymes with spoon) or Japanese reading, the latter being an existing Japanese word that's been assigned to a kanji based on the character's meaning. As a general rule, you use the Chinese reading for compound words made up of two kanji (for example, the word for "hibernation," toumin, written with the characters for winter + sleep), and there are quite a few Chinese and Korean words that are the same in Japanese for this reason. The Japanese reading is usually used for characters that appear by themselves (e.g. the character for winter written all by itself, fuyu), or in special cases like names of people or places. It's hard to believe, but it's easier to memorize Japanese vocabulary words through kanji than, say, learning from a book which prints Japanese in the Roman alphabet. For example, the character for "most" can be combined with a variety of other kanji to describe ideas like tallest, shortest, etc., like saikou (most + high = highest, also meaning the best), saitei (most + bottom = the lowest, meaning a real jerk when applied to a person), saisho (most + begin = the first), saigo (most + after = the last), and saishin (most + new = the newest). Memorizing these words in kanji only takes two "bytes" of your brain's memory once you've gotten used to the characters themselves, but memorizing the words in the Roman alphabet would be harder since they're just a jumble of letters.

My Knock Knock Joke Reconsideration

What if you met a Japanese person who went around telling "knock knock" jokes in English all the time? It would be pretty strange, I'd wager, and you might not know what to make of them. But that's essentially what I do in Japanese: making wry Japanese jokes called dajare (da-jah-reh), although in my family we call them dadajare, since I'm the Dad. As a strange side-effect of learning Japanese, my brain has developed the subconscious ability to come up with strange jokes whenever I hear a word or phrase that acts as a trigger, quite unrelated to what I'm thinking about at the time, and when the family does something together they know I'll probably be making little puns until they're groaning for me to stop. For example, one way to say "I don't have it" or "there aren't any" in Japanese is nashi, which also happens to be what those delicious Japanese pears are called, so naturally I might reply "Japanese pear" if my wife asks me if I have her car keys. In Japanese, the Leaning Tower of Pisa is called Pisa no Shato, and since the final word sounds like the French word for castle, I might make a bad joke about how I've always wanted to go see the famous Chateau di Pisa. The other day I was watching TV and needed to switch the sound from Japanese to English, and as I looked around for the remote control, my wife asked me what I was searching for. The Japanese word for "sound" is onsei (OWN-sei), which my brain told me is similar to the word for "eleven" in Spanish (once). So I said, "I'll give you a hint," and proceeded to count from one to ten in Spanish. The next number was eleven, and suddenly everyone knew that I was looking for the remote control so I could change the sound on the TV. For some reason, telling dajare jokes is the domain of middle-aged men in Japan.