Takasaki, Home of Daruma

Yesterday I took a drive to Takasaki, part of the Takasaki-Maebashi-Isesaki tri-city area in our home prefecture of Gunma. I was there to pick up a computer that had been repaired, but since Takasaki happens to be the location of the only Domino's Pizza in our prefecture, I decided to get some Hatsune Miku pizza and bring it back for the J-List crew to share. While I drove through Takasaki's unpleasantly narrow roads, I reflected on how history can affect the present day in interesting ways. Both Gunma's prefectural capital of Maebashi and J-List's home city of Isesaki are fairly pleasant places to drive in, with wide, well planned roads, but driving through Takasaki is usually an experiment in frustration. One reason for this is both Isesaki and Maebashi were bombed during World War II, which gave city planners a chance to rebuild with more forethought, but Takasaki was not. Also, Takasaki was an important castle town back in the Edo Period, so its roads are narrower and harder to navigate than if it had been a more modern city.

Takasaki is famous for its Daruma dolls. Which is pretty cool.

Japan Loves Disney

Over the years certain companies have found success here in Japan, including Nestle (they celebrate a century of selling coffee and interesting flavors of Kit Kat this year) and Aflac (they were a tiny regional insurance company until one of their founders visited Japan in 1970 and, impressed by the way people wore health masks in public, decided to expand into Japan). Another company to really win big in Japan has been Disney, which has become well established in the hearts of everyone here. Japan has the most profitable Disney theme park in the world (Tokyo Disneyland), which opened in 1983 and has broken all profit records thanks to the Japanese willingness to wait in 3-hour lines to go on rides and spend an average of $300 per guest on gifts. There are many "Disney otakus" in Japan, fans who hunt for rare Disney-themed products, and I've seen TV shows in which fans are quizzed on their knowledge of Disney lore. You can even get a Disney-themed smartphone with the new line of Disney-branded phones from Softbank which are being heavily advertised using the song from Cinderella ("A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes").

Disney is one of the most successful companies in Japan.

I'm "Kiwi Fruit Generation," How About You?

One thing I like about the Japanese is their interesting way of looking at things, which is often very creative. There's a fun new show called Generation Tengoku (Generation Heaven) which divides people into three groups, the Banana, Kiwi Fruit and Mango Eras. This is based on what fruits were rare and exotic in Japan at the time, with Banana Era being people currently aged 60 and above, Kiwi Fruit Era being in their 40s and Mango Era being the current generation of people in their 20s. Each episode presents nostalgic facts about the three groups which are interesting to compare and contrast. For example, people in the Banana Era grew up seeing images of spacious American homes on TV in the 1960s, spent the current equivalent of $40,000 to visit Hawaii for a week and were greatly influenced by English news and music broadcasts on the Far East Network, the radio station of the U.S. military in Yokosuka. People in the Kiwi Fruit group played "Invader Game" (what Space Invaders is called here), imitated the fashions and hair styles of Bobby Brown and MC Hammer at discos, and took part in the great "wine boom" of the early 90s, when everyone pretended to know about wine. The Mango Era has been defined by the rise of smartphones, flamboyant singers like Lady Gaga and of course the runaway popularity of hanryu, the "Korean wave" of dramas and KPOP singers, which caused a generation of women to start using random Korean slang despite puzzled looks from everyone around them. The best thing about the show is how accurately they recreate each era -- the ridiculously colored suits and overly-permed hair from the 1990s, the old timey tatami rooms of the Showa Period, and so on.

A new way of thinking about generations.

Interesting "Trap" Products from Japan

One popular theme in anime these days is "trap" characters who appear to be female but who might just have a surprise for you. Called 男の娘 otokonoko in Japanese, there are many characters who are interesting because of this odd ambiguous nature. J-List has tons of great "trap" products, from the new Otoboku ~ Maidens Are Falling For Me! English eroge to popular manga and magazines to cosplay products. Click to see the most popular "trap" products from Japan!

Japan, International Marriage and "Herbivore Men"

One thing about Japanese women which amuses my wife no end is their pre-conceived notions about what it's like when a Japanese woman marries a Westerner. They imagine that we're gentlemen in every way, holding doors and chairs, cleaning the house and cooking exotic meals for them once a week. Japanese men often have bad reputations for never showing feelings of love to their wives, some of which may be on purpose -- J-List's manga buyer Yasu says, "I only tell my wife I love her once every few years or so, so it makes a real impact when I do." In contrast, foreigners are thought to be much more passionate and romantic, and any child made from such a union must surely come out with beautiful golden hair just like those Licca-chan dolls.

The other day I met two female friends of my wife who are in their 20s, and they definitely seemed to fit this pattern, being openly envious of my wife for having found such a rare American to marry while she denied I had any good qualities at all. (This is a Japan thing: compliments made about one's family members must be countered with strong denials for the sake of politeness.) Both girls were extremely attractive yet lamented their inability to find boyfriends, and I cautiously asked how this could be possible. "Men of our generation are terrible," one of them told me, "more interested in reading men's fashion magazines and working part-time jobs than dating. They have no drive, no hunger." She was talking about the modern social phenomenon of 草食男子 soushoku-danshi or "herbivore men," the tendency for young Japanese males to have less ambition in life and to prefer a quiet evening in front of the computer to pursuing girls for dating and more. I'd known about the phenomenon of course, but hadn't imagined it had advanced so far. In response, many women are becoming 肉食女子 nikushoku-joshi or "carnivore women," more aggressive about getting what they want and more than happy to ask a man she likes out.

Japanese often have stereotypes about international marriage.

Japan Loves Green Tea

When Japanese visit a supermarket in the U.S., they're often amazed at the huge variety of breakfast cereals available there. One of my former ESL students wrote, "In SAFEWAY, many kinds of corn flakes about one hundred have overpowered me. I felt a difference of the staple foods." If you go into a Japanese convenience store for some bottled iced tea, you might experience a similar surprise at the more than 80 varieties of Japanese, Chinese and Western teas competing for your 150 yen, with everything from green tea to jasmine to oolong and proper British "Afternoon Tea" available. As with breakfast cereals, manufacturers come up with gimmicks to entice customers to buy, for example attaching Madoka Magika or K-On! phone straps to the bottle as a cross-promotion. The other day I found a cool new idea by green tea manufacturer Itoen: a "Matcha Powder-in Cap" bottle with Kyoto-grown green tea in a special compartment at the top of the bottle which was released into the water when you opened it for the first time. Of course, one of the biggest differences between Japan and the U.S. is that here people nearly always reach for unsweetened tea like green tea or mugi (barley) tea instead of sugary soft drinks. If you want to get into drinking healthy Japanese tea this summer, we've got great varieties of hot or cold brew tea bags in stock now.

Japan takes its tea seriously.

Get Hatsune Miku On Your Phone

Hatsune Miku is now the official spokes-idol of Domino's Pizza, and there's a cool app for iPhone that lets you interact with Miku in a lot of fun ways, including taking "augmented reality" pictures with a CG miku in many cute poses and performing a concert on your pizza box (you might need to grab an image of one from the Internet for this to work). To purchase, get one of our iTunes Japan prepaid cards and create an iTunes Japan account if you don't have one already (the app itself is free, of course), and if you need help using the app, see here for instructions. We love Hatsune Miku and have dozens of products featuring her in stock -- click here to see the most popular products as ranked by our customers!

Shiniji Kagawa's Great Achievement

One thing I write about often is how the Japanese are very sensitive to how they're viewed internationally, and how making a good impression in the eyes of other nations is very important to them. Whenever a Japanese athlete becomes famous in the world stage their popularity at home instantly soars, with extra bonus points awarded if they're able to speak an exotic European language like Italian. Last week Japanese soccer player Shinji Kagawa, playing for Manchester United, scored a hat-trick (scoring three goals in one game), a first for any Asian player in that league. Japanese TV cameras showed a pub overflowing with happy British fans shouting Kagawa's name, which will surely get him a lot of attention here in Japan, and maybe some sponsorship contracts.

Celebration for Kagawa's hat-trick. Japanese fans are definitely pleased.

Domino's Japan x Hatsune Miku

One big trend over the past few years has been "otaku marketing," tying product brands to anime series that fans will get excited about. Whether it's placing Lawson's or Family Mart convenience stores in the Evangelion and Macross Frontier movies, showing Tiger and Bunny characters drinking Pepsi Nex or the constant on-screen eating of Pizza Hut pizza in Code Geass, companies tying their products to anime is here for good. (We even posted Skal, the meme-drink from the new Nitroplus anime Robotics;Notes, which many customers had asked for.) Now Domino's Pizza hopes to follow in Pizza Hut's footsteps by licensing the famous virtual singing idol Hatsune Miku for their line of home-delivered pizza. In addition to cool Vocaloid-themed pizza boxes that are delivered on Miku-decorated motorcycles, there's an iPhone app that lets you enjoy your pizza while an "augmented reality" version of Miku sings and interacts with you.

(Currently the Domino's Pizza iPhone app is experiencing some issues, perhaps due to its popularity with users in Japan. We'll eventually be releasing instructions on users of our iTunes Japan prepaid cards can use the Hatsune Miku pizza app from outside Japan.)

Domino's hopes to score a marketing win with Hatsune Miku.

A Time for Remembrance

Today marks the second anniversary of the terrible magnitude 9 earthquake that struck northern Japan and triggered deadly tsunamis, transforming the coastal regions into a sea of sadness as the waters pushed up to 10 km inland. Though earthquakes are fairly common in Japan, we knew immediately that this one was different from the way the ground jerked beneath us, "surging" at an odd angle, and Twitter immediately lit up as people shared news and emergency information. Though Wikipedia tells me the initial quake lasted six minutes, we had little awareness of any ending, as aftershocks were felt every minute or two for hours afterwards. In the end, 15,881 people would be confirmed dead and another 2668 as "missing" (even worse than being dead, from the viewpoint of many survivors). It was a time of unbelievable sadness, yes, but also a time when the world came forward to help Japan, from the U.S. military's much-appreciated "Operation Tomodachi" relief efforts to the great help everyone through the charitable organizations. I was personally in awe of the Japanese around me, how they calmly followed official instructions with no looting or hoarding; J-List didn't even miss a day of shipping, as the post office came to pick up outgoing packages the following Monday as if nothing had happened. Two years on, most of the debris has been removed and things are recovering slowly, though many rural areas are still largely deserted. In the end, the disaster was a reminder that we should all be a little nicer to each other every day, since you never know what life holds in store.

The healing of Tohoku continues slowly.

Anime Snacks & Drinks from Japan

J-List loves to find fun anime-related snacks and drinks for you, and we carry everything from the official Sword Art Online pizza snacks to One Piece Gummy candy to Star Wars Darth Vader Pepsi. By customer request, we're stocking Skal, the popular energy drink seen in the currently running anime series Robotics;Notes. Order some today!