Some Japanese Grammar: Iru and Aru

I often talk about the various unique aspects of the Japanese language, in part because I just think languages are cool, but also in the hopes of helping anyone interested in learning Japanese get their bearings. Naturally Japanese is very different from English, featuring a different word order (SOV instead of SVO as we use in English), the ability to casually omit the subject and object in sentences if the meaning is clear from context, and so on. One aspect of Japanese grammar that proves challenging for students early on are the verbs います imasu and あります arimasu, which both mean "to exist [in a place]." The catch is that imasu (pronounced ee-mahs) is used for animate objects, anything that's alive ike a person or a cat, and arimasu (ah-ree-mahs) is for any inanimate object. A good basic sentence might be, 私は東京にいますが、家は大阪にあります watashi wa Tokyo ni imasu ga, ie wa Osaka ni arimasu, which means "I am in Tokyo, but my house is in Osaka." I remember tormenting my teacher with questions about these verbs, asking which I should use if referring to an android that was indistinguishable from a human, or an undead zombie, or a Venus Fly Trap, as my brain sought to define the boundaries of the new concepts I was learning. When I came to Japan I happened to meet a small child who mistakenly referred to cars driving down the road with imasu instead of the correct arimasu (the cars move, though they're not alive). I felt a strange kinship with her, since I might have made the same error myself. (For the record, the Japanese staff of J-List reports that zombies and robots would use imasu since you can interact with them, but all plants would use arimasu.)

Another example: Where is the scary clown? He's standing right behind you.

Evangelion vs Kill la Kill

"The distance from Earth to space is the same as from Tokyo to Hakone, about 50 miles/80 km." This was a tidbit from a Japanese trivia show which illustrates that outer space isn't really all that far away, about the distance of a short drive from Tokyo to Hakone, a pleasant area near Mt. Fuji. I'm planning a trip to Hakone with a friend next week, and since it's the setting for Evangelion, I thought I'd re-watch the Rebuild of Evangelion movies so I can figure out what 聖地 seichi "holy lands," e.g. real places that appear in anime, we want to visit. There are a lot of changes in new movies compared with the original 1995 series, including tightening the story and tweaking the characters. (Asuka is less of a classic tsundere, for example.) Another change is the arrival of Hollywood-style product placement, and everything from Lawson Convenience Stores to Yebisu and Kirin Beer to UCC coffee and Doritos is clearly visible to viewers in the new films. No company benefited from the trend towards product placement and anime cross-marketing than Pizza Hut, who signed promotional deals for everything from Code Geass to Oreimo to the new Eva movies, raking in money whenever otakus in Texas or the U.K. or Santiago, Chile get hungry for some pizza while watching anime. I'm quite happy when they put real products in anime, like the official Totoro caramels or those Grave of the Fireflies candies, since it allows us to share an emotional connection with products the Japanese also love.

After finishing up with Eva for the evening, I was still in a Gainax-ey kind of mood, so I turned on a few episodes of the new Kill la Kill. (It's not actually a Gainax show, but is made by the director of Gurren Lagann and some animators from Hideki Anno's animation studio Khara, so it sort of is, spiritually.) Kill la Kill is a hard anime to describe: it's basically Gurren Lagann meets Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt meets スケバン刑事 Sukeban Deka, aka Delinquent Detective Girl, an 80s TV series about a street-tough high school girl who fights crime undercover using her "battle yo-yos." Everything about Kill la Kill is meticulously designed, from the low frame-rate style of the retro animation to the outrageous battles in each episode, and it's just what the doctor ordered for fans who are feeling a touch of "harem anime fatigue." A lot of the references in the show will doubtless fly over the heads of most foreign viewers, such as the character Mako, whose design is based on a 1982 anime called Macchingu Machiko-sensei, and the flamboyant fighting scenes are an homage to a 1986 series called Hono no Tenkosei, or Blazing Exchange Student. Of course, "Gainax" has a long history of extensively referencing classic anime series: one of my favorite shows is Gunbuster, the story of the battle between humans and an alien race that spans 12,000 years...yet it's all one big homage to a 1970s tennis anime called Aim for the Ace.

I'm a fan of the frenetic "Gainax" anime Kill la Kill; the trend of product placement in anime.

J-List Loves PS Vita!

Remember that J-List stocks the cool PS Vita TV, a super-awesome "micro-console" that plays anime games and visual novels for the PS Vita on your big screen TV. Like Sony's other platforms, the Vita TV is region-free and will play compatible games from any region, though please note that currently it's not possible to log in with PSN accounts from the U.S. or Europe. You can of course create a Japan PSN account with one of the handy prepaid cards we sell, which gives you access to demos and other Japan-only content, or play compatible shrinkwrapped Vita games from the U.S., Japan etc.

The "Common Sense" of Japanese Anime Companies

A couple of updates ago I wrote about the word 常識 joshiki, meaning 'common sense,' and how one of the worst things a company can do is attempt to do business in one country while operating under the joshiki of another. Doing this creates a kind of "perceived schizophrenia" which causes stress among fans, who wonder what in the hell Japanese companies are thinking when in reality they're just operating by a different set of mental rules. While J-List is loaded with awesome 2014 calendars from Japan, don't bother looking for AKB48, Kyary Pamyu Pamyu or Johnny's-kei calendars, as the companies that manage these artists have found it more profitable to force fans to join fee-based fanclubs and sell calendars to them directly. (No, non-residents of Japan are never allowed to join these clubs.) The reason for those $100 Sailor Moon T-shirts is similar: Bandai decided to sell these direct to customers, jacking the price way up and removing distribution to third-party shops like J-List. (It's not our fault!) I remember hearing that Japanese companies excelled at "long-range thinking" but this is a real knee-slapper: in reality they're terribly conservative and would rather make too few of a product than risk it sitting around in a warehouse, which is why we encourage fans go get your Sailor Moon preorders in as early as you can, lest the item(s) you want be removed from the site. Other things that can be frustrating to dedicated fans include when Japanese companies sell products via lottery, or when they make limited edition Gundam models or Pokemon 3DS units but make no way for people outside Japan to buy. The Japanese companies aren't trying to frustrate us on purpose, they're just handicapped by trying to operate a global business with fans all over the world while maintaining a "common sense" that's only compatible with the Japan domestic market.

Sometimes it's impossible to figure out what companies like Bandai are thinking.

Japan Jobs Best Done by Gaijin

In Japan there are certain jobs that best performed by gaijin, a word that means foreigner, though in practice it nearly always refers to Westerners rather people from nearby Asian countries. Someone playing Santa Claus for Japanese children will have more of an aura of wonder and mystery if he's a foreigner, and the same is true of the cast members at Disneyland, since having an American or European actress playing Cinderella is just more magical than a Japanese person would be. Near J-List there's a wedding hall called Georgian House which attempts to recreate the splendor of early 18th century England in its architecture. In addition to having real gaijin ministers to marry couples (though they're just English conversation teachers making some money on the side, I know a few of them), the photography staff is also made up of foreigners, which lends an extra je ne sais quoi to the atmosphere of the place. Recently Japanese consumer products company Sunstar started running TV commercials for fluoride-enriched mouthwash. The commercial features a foreigner wearing a white lab coat and holding a clipboard, so you know the product must be effective.

Certain jobs should be done by gaijin.

More Ships, Moe Problems

I've been watching an anime about naval ships represented by super-cute moe girls. You may think I've gotten my hands on a pre-release version of the upcoming anime for Kantai Collection, the popular game in which the Japanese ships of World War II are reborn as anime girls, but in fact I'm talking about the new anime Aoki Hagane no Arpeggio, aka Arpeggio of Blue Steel. In the year 2039, several fleets of mysterious sentient warships suddenly appeared, laying waste to the navies of the world with unearthly weapons and blockading all trade between countries. Each of the advanced ships is represented by kawaii anthropomorphic avatars called "Mental Models," who naturally come in twintail, tsundere and similar varieties. No ship can stand against the invaders, except for I-401, a submarine with a mysterious girl named Iona as its avatar, who seeks out Gunzo Chihaya, the son of the famous commander who was victorious against the invaders 17 years ago, and asks him to become her captain. It's quite a good show with a unique world-view and enjoyable characters, and I'll keep watching for sure.

Did you think it was KanColle? Too bad, it was just Arpeggio of Blue Steel!

The PS Vita TV is Here!

Everyone is excited about the newest game console to be released. We're not talking about the Playstation 4 or Xbox One, mind you, but the brand-new PS Vita TV, a super-awesome "micro-console" that plays the many, many anime games, visual novels and Hatsune Miku pantsu viewers rhythm games on any HDTV in gorgeous quality yet is very inexpensive itself. As with all Sony game platforms, the PS Vita TV is fully region region free and very otaku friendly, allowing you to play any game you life from anywhere in the world. The PS Vita TV also supports streaming and remote playing of PS4 games, as well as Internet video streaming, though compatibility with these services might not be supported outside Japan. It'll also play anything the Vita plays, including PSP and PSOne, and will work with U.S. PSN accounts. So why not order a PS Vita TV from J-List, along with some awesome games?

How Japanese Grammer Works

Grammatically, Japanese is quite interesting, seemingly unrelated to all other languages, though one theory suggests a link to languages like Hungarian through a 40,000-years dead hypothetical linguistic ancestor. One interesting aspect of Japanese is the use of grammatical "particles," words that denote the topic and subject (wa and ga), the object (o), whether or not the sentence is a question (ka on the end), and so on. One use particle is の no, a particle with a "glue-like element" (to use the words of my Japanese teacher from SDSU) that binds two words together, for example to show possession. ピーターの車 Peter no kuruma ties the words Peter and kuruma (car) together, therefore denoting the car that belongs to Peter. Back in the Golden Age of anime fandom, the first Japanese most of us learned was ダーリンの馬鹿 Darling no Baka, the words Lum says before she gives Ataru a lightning bolt. This phrase ties the words darling and baka (stupid) together to produce an insult to Ataru. (Fun fact: Lum's pet name for Ataru is a reference to Bewitched, which was a huge hit in Japan. The Japanese mis-translated Samantha's husband Darren's name as "Darling.") When Japanese retailer "Gentleman's Fashions no Aoki" opened branches in Taiwan, they inadvertently altered the local language: the の particle is so convenient to write it caught on with the Taiwanese, who started substituting it for 的 teki, the character that performs the same grammatical function in Chinese.

It's also Azusa-no-Tanojobi today.

Japan, Karuta and Culture

The Japanese are masters when it comes to committing information to memory, like the man who memorized pi to 100,000 decimal places by using mnemonic hooks that made it easier for his brain to visualize each successive number. My wife regularly amazes me by being able to call up archaic information from her mind, such as the square root of 5 or the first two dozen or so elements in the periodic table, which she's able to do thanks to phrases all Japanese memorize in school. For example, the square root of 5 is 2.2360679 which maps out somehow to 富士山麓にオウム鳴く Fuji-sanroku ni ohmu naku, or "at the base of Mt. Fuji, a parrot squawks." Another fun information memorization tool is a 500-year-old game called Karuta (from the Portuguese word for "card") in which players will line up cards with phrases on them, and when a "reader" starts to speak that phrase the players will try to grab the corresponding card before anyone else. It's used to teach hiragana to small children, though you can teach just about any information using the game -- my kids learned the vocabulary of music notation using a version called Musical Karuta, for example. The most famous Karuta game is 百人一首 Hyakunin Isshu ("100 people, 100 poems"), a collection of waka poems based on historical figures from the Heian Period (794-1185) making it something like Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, but there's a local version for J-List's home prefecture of Gunma called Joumou Karuta, which teaches respect for the various cultural treasures of our prefecture. Before switching to computer games, Nintendo manufactured these cards, and until 1963 they were known as the Nintendo Karuta Corporation.

Karuta, a game for learning hiragana and culture.

Japan and Mexican Food

When you come to a country like Japan, it's normal that you'll give up some things you might be used to having back home. This includes having access to ridiculously cheap buy-1-get-1-free delivered pizzas, having more than two varieties of cheese to choose from at the supermarket and enjoying things like turkey, Nutella or American-style peanut butter, all of which are difficult to find here. The joy of walking into a bookstore and leisurely browsing for something to read in your native language is generally denied to you, and certain rare drinks like Mountain Dew are all but nonexistent here, though availability of Dr. Pepper has improved steadily thanks to Steins;Gate. You also have to say goodbye to pretty much all Mexican food, as it's just something the Japanese never got the hang of eating. I'm from San Diego, where no one goes a week without getting delicious Mexican food from Roberto's or one of the other copycat chains, and it was surprisingly hard to give that up. The closest thing to Mexican food in Japan is Taco Rice, an Okinawan dish consisting of taco mean and salsa eaten over white rice, or possibly the chicken wraps from KFC, which aren't too bad if you close your eyes while you eat.

One does not simply eat Mexican food in Japan.

Happy Pocky Day from J-List!

Today, November 11, is a special day for Pocky fans, designated by the Glico company as Pocky Day, since 11/11 looks like four Pocky sticks lined up, ready to be eaten. Let's all enjoy some delicious Pocky today, or better yet, find someone cute and try "the Pocky Game" with them. J-List carries all varieties of Pocky (and Pretz) from Japan, including the exotic seasonal kind you've never seen anywhere else. Why not browse our lineup of Japanese Pocky right now and see the new flavor offerings?