The Way of Kanji

You never, as they say, forget your first, and I've found this goes for studying kanji, too. While the first kanji I was consciously able to read was 子 ko meaning child, commonly seen in girl's names like Keiko or Aiko, I'd been exposed to another famous kanji character from a very young age without realizing it. In Star Blazers, the (pretty awesome) 1979 English dub of the classic space opera Space Battleship Yamato, the character Dr. Sane sits around drinking "Captain Avatar's spring water" while laughing, dancing and otherwise making merry, but it wasn't until I started studying Japanese that I could read the 酒 sake character clearly printed on his bottle. Another kanji that I learned early on became one of my favorites: 道, michi with its Japanese reading and doh using its Chinese reading. Literally meaning "road" "way" or "path," this character is used in such names as Hokkaido ("the northern sea route") and Tokaido (the great road from Edo/Tokyo to Kyoto). The 道 character is also used in traditional Japanese arts like 茶道 sa-doh ("the way of tea," e.g. tea ceremony) and 書道 sho-doh ("the way of writing," or brush calligraphy) as well as martial arts like 柔道 judo ("the gentle way") and 空手道 karate-do ("the way of the empty hand"). In the new moe anime Girls und Panzer, they create a fictional 戦車道 sensha-do, or the Way of the Tank, the ancient art of piloting a WWII era German tank. (Why not?) If you like kanji, we've still got stock of our 2013 kanji character, one of my favorites.

Girls und Panzer and the "Way of the Tank."

Viewing Japan Through the Internet

Before the Internet, Japan was a truly mysterious place, and it was difficult to access information about the country from the outside world. (Maybe if you were really lucky you could find a friend who'd send you third-generation VHS tapes of Japanese TV once in a while.) Now, of course, getting access to Japan is much easier, thanks to websites like YouTube and J-List. Still, while it's great to be able to find out about the latest in Gothic Lolita cat-ear fashions in Tokyo, viewing Japan through the lens of the Internet is not without its problems, because the stranger aspects of the country will tend to be magnified while the less-flamboyant details are lost. A good example of this phenomenon is ice cream, which can be found in bizarre flavors like miso, squid ink and basashi (that is, horse sashimi, try not to think about it too deeply) if you visit specialty shops in parts of Japan frequented by tourists. And yet 99% of the ice cream actually consumed by anyone is vanilla or possibly green tea. But since blog posts about the popularity of vanilla in Japan wouldn't be interesting to anyone, we're far more likely to be influenced by messages like, "OMG OMG the Japanese have seaweed ice cream!!!11!" when in fact hardly anyone here even knows this exists.

This is similar to the signs that say "no foreigners allowed" which are supposedly everywhere in Japan, at least according to the Internet and activists like Ardou Debit (who wrote a useful book for considering a move to Japan). And yet, in 21 years of living here I only managed to have service declined only once, at a video rental store that had unfortunately had a large number of videos stolen by a foreigner the week before, and when I calmly explained I would never do something like that to them they apologized and let me rent videos from them. The issue isn't about whether or not there's discrimination in Japan -- of course there is some everywhere, though gaijin enjoy a better situation here than foreigners in their own home countries -- but instead, why are certain aspects of Japan magnified so disproportionately when viewed through the Internet? Bottom line, while we all love fun and wacky tidbits of news about Japan, like the bacon and scrambled egg onigiri I saw in Seven-Eleven last night, a lot of the information about Japan we receive needs to be taken with several grains of salt.

The most popular ice cream flavor in Japan is...vanilla.

Our Chocolate + Tenga Sale Continues!

Valentine's Day may be over, but J-List chocolate-and-stress-toy sale is going on all month long! Whether you need some awesome Japanese Kit Kat or Evangelion Chocolate to pick yourself up or would prefer something more physical, J-List has a huge stock of extra-special items for you. Click to see all Japanese chocolate and personal stress toys now!

Slurp Your Noodles! Louder!

Japan is probably the only country where eating too quietly will get comments from people around you. The correct way of eating Japanese and Chinese noodles like ramen, udon and soba is to slurp them while holding your face near the bowl, sucking in the soup along with the noodles to make both taste delicious. There's no upper ceiling to how loud you're allowed to slurp, and making these noises is one way of letting whoever prepared the noodles for you know that you think they're good. When foreigners come to Japan, they usually eat their noodles without making these noises, prompting Japanese to say shizuka desu ne ("you eat very quietly"). There are some other areas where table manners differ between the Japan and the West. Here, it's perfectly okay to pick up your ramen bowl and drink the soup from it directly, though this would be frowned upon in the U.S. It's okay to slurp noodles, but spaghetti is another matter, and the image of an old Japanese man loudly vacuuming his pasta off the plate is very unsophisticated. Some table manner no-no's are related to Buddhism, including the taboo against sticking chopsticks straight up in rice or handing food to someone else chopsticks-to- chopsticks (both of which are part of funeral ceremonies here).

Do you slurp your noodles properly?

Low Tech Japan (And Japanese Police)

While quaint shopping arcades are certainly nice, the flip-side of life in Japan is that things can be rather backwards technologically, despite the image some may have of Japan as an advanced nation of gleaming glass and steel. My wife discovered this when she volunteered as a parental representative at our daughter's school, which entailed maintaining contact lists and doing simple document creation. She was shocked to find that none of the other parents had any computer skills, and several didn't even own computers, forcing her to do all the work herself. There are other examples of Japan's lower level of technology, including Yahoo Japan's still-thriving Geocities community and the way whenever we do a major print job in Japan, we know we'll be asked to save our Illustrator file in a format from 12 years ago so the printer can work with it. Last year Japanese police made several arrests of people making online death threats, including the director of Gundam 00. It turned out that the threats had actually been sent via a computer virus created by a lonely guy who really liked cats, yet the police had not been aware that knowing the IP address associated with a certain crime was not iron-clad proof of guilt.

Japan can be surprisingly low-tech.

Tamako Market, an Anime About Rice Cakes on Nostalgia

One thing about the Japanese is that they seem hard-wired to appreciate nostalgia, whether it's eating the traditional candy they grew up with during the Showa Period or appreciating the wabi and sabi (translatable as "the tranquil simplicity and beauty found in the old and imperfect") of an old sento public bath. The new Kyoto Animation series Tamako Market draws on this tendency for people to feel natsukashii (nots-ka-shee, meaning nostalgic) about the good old days, centering around a family selling mochi rice cakes in an old-timey shopping street of the type that were popular two decades ago but which are now generally quite deserted. It's kind of K-On! meets Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi with a touch of Angry Birds thrown in, and it's an entertaining snapshot at a simpler side to Japan, back when there were talking birds. If you're interested in seeing what Japan was like back in the Showa Period, we've got some great photobooks and 2013 photo calendars you might like to explore. And we even have mochi.

Tamako Market is an anime about rice cakes and nostalgia.

Children of Men: Japan Edition

My Japanese mother-in-law once remarked that, "I sure don't see many women with big stomachs these days." At first I thought that women were getting thinner, but my wife said no, her mother had been referring to the lack of pregnant women in Japan. It's true -- the birthrate here is among the lowest in the industrialized world, just 1.39 children per couple, and it's more and more common to see companies offering products and services to those over 65 rather than baby-related items. While the falling population is felt most in less-populated parts of Japan -- in rural Mie Prefecture, for example, the maternity wards of three separate hospitals were combined into one location to more efficiently utilize resources, which caused no small inconvenience for expectant mothers in the area -- now it's starting to affect Tokyo, which posted the first-ever drop in population since 1956, as deaths outpaced births for the first time. Last week my wife visited her gynecologist for a check-up, and got a shock. "It's totally different from when I was pregnant with the kids. Back then there were about ten pregnant women in the waiting room, but now there were only two. There were more women there getting fertility treatments than having babies."

"Children of Japan," now a major motion picture.

The "Indirect Kiss" Meme

It's fun to analyze different memes (anime-related or otherwise) as they evolve and change. While some have wide appeal no matter where you're from, like shimapan or the always-goofy horse head mask, some memes are tied to langauge and don't necessarily translate well across borders. Two good examples would be the Dragonball Z "over 9000" meme, which is totally unknown to Japanese fans since they're not watching the English version, and the classic Amuro line from the original Gundam, "You hit me! N- Not even my own father hit me!" well-known in Japan yet not so much among international anime fans. One gag you see in anime a lot is the 間接キス kansetsu kisu or "indirect kiss," which is what happens when a character drinks from a glass or can that someone else has used, or shares the same spoon, chopsticks etc. It's a silly joke, of course, which only elementary schoolers would actually be concerned with, yet in anime it pops up as a plot device quite often.

One long-running anime meme is the "indirect kiss."

Amazing Cat-Related Products from Japan

If, like the Japanese, you really love cats, then J-List has some interesting products to show you, from plush cat toys to cute cats that live in your iPhone or Android phone to awesome cat-related cosplay and fashion items, to those brain-activated Necomimi Neurowear cat ears (now just $69.95!). Click to see the most popular cat-related products from Japan!

TV Commercials in Japan

One of the more enjoyable aspects to living in Japan is the constant stream of entertaining TV commercials, and I love seeing what random "CM" (as TV commercials are called here) will come up next. Japan's advertisers are good at getting your attention, whether it's through dance routines with business-suited salarymen singing about stomach medicine or cute idols dressed as panda bears while they talk about insurance -- the randomness is one way they break through all the noise. Companies hire popular faces like AKB48 or Kyary Pamyu Pamyu to promote their products, and if they can find a way to put cats in an advertisement, they will, like the popular ad that features cats eating at a "conveyor belt sushi" restaurant with plates of cat food instead of sushi. In addition to being less "talky" than American TV commercials -- often an ad will show a car being driven with no words other than a beautiful woman shouting the car's name as it zooms past -- I believe Japanese advertisers try to show more honesty. For example, an ad for toothpaste will show CG imagery of a toothbrush sweeping away 98% of the food stuck on your teeth but will always leave a tiny amount behind, to avoid making a claim of 100% effectiveness.

TV commercials in Japan are always entertaining.