"Yellow Sand" in Japan

Although I generally like my adopted country of Japan, there are a few aspects of life here that aren't so much fun. Hay-fever season and being so close to nuclear-happy North Korea are two of these, and a third would be 黄砂 kousa, the "yellow sand" that blows over from China. Known as Asian dust, yellow sand or yellow wind (I swear that's what it's really called), it's a weather phenomenon whereby fine dust is blown from the deserts of Mongolia eastward towards Japan where they irritate people's eyes and make our cars filthy. While the dust is usually not a major concern, this year has been extremely bad, causing the sun to disappear in the dust clouds and making actual sand dunes appear around J-List. Among other problems, jumbo jets cannot fly when contaminated with the dust and must be meticulously cleaned before they can fly, which costs several thousand dollars.

"Yellow sand" blowing from China is a problem in Japan.

Minorities In Japan

I often write about how Japan is a homogeneous place in which 98.5% of the people consider themselves to be of the same genetic "Yamato Japanese" stock, despite the obvious variations in skin color, facial shape and body type you notice if you actually pay attention to people. While Japanese like to propagate this "myth of Japanese uniformity" for socially convenient reasons (it eliminates all discrimination, in theory), the reality is that even "pure" Japanese contain varying amounts of Mongolian, Korean, Chinese, Ainu and other blood in their veins. (I contributed some American blood, too, through my kids.) No matter how far the happy social umbrella of a unified Japanese gene pool is stretched, though, there are certain groups within Japan that it just can't cover. These include zainichi ("residing in Japan") Koreans and Chinese, who were born and raised here and often speak only Japanese yet don't take Japanese citizenship for cultural reasons; Okinawans, who have a unique culture and language separate from Japan; the Ainu, the original residents of northern Japan; nikkei foreigners, usually Brazilians or Peruvians of Japanese descent who get special visas to immigrate to Japan; and regular gaijin like me, who have come to Japan from other countries for various reasons. While born-in-Japan Koreans have historically been the largest minority inside Japan, a few years ago zainichi Chinese overtook them to become the biggest group.

Yokohama is the center of Chinese culture inside Japan.

Anime Voice Actors Are the Best

One of the joys of watching anime is, of course, the incredible high quality of the seiyu, the voice actors that bring the characters to life for us. Often an anime series will succeed or fail based on the quality of its voice actors, and smart production studios will put a lot of effort into choosing the voice cast carefully. In the currently running love comedy Sakura-so no Pet na Kanojo, my favorite character is Nanami Aoyama, voiced by up-and-coming seiyu Nakatsu Mariko. Nanami has come to Tokyo from Osaka to follow her dream of becoming a voice actress -- woah, that's kind of meta -- and there she falls in love with the male lead Sorata and comes to live in the Sakura-so boarding house to be near him. Nanami's voice really communicates emotions -- or "feels," to use the modern term -- to viewers, and the way she falls into Osaka-ben when she gets excited is so charming. Voice actors lucky enough to get famous roles become household names in Japan, and almost everyone is familiar with names like Akira Kamiya (voice of Kenshiro from Fist of the North Star and Saeba Ryo from City Hunter) and Norio Wakamoto (who shows up in everything from Code Geass to Mirai Nikki to our own excellent Family Project visual novel). When Lupin III voice Yasuo Yamada died in 1995, it was a national tragedy that everyone felt. Last week Goro Naya, who voiced the undaunted Inspector Zenigata as well as Captain Okita from the original Space Battleship Yamato, passed away, causing an outpouring of sadness and fanart tributes.

Anime voice actors bring the characters to life.

The Song of Saya -- Now Golden Master!

In the history of Japan's highly developed culture of visual novels, a few games really stand out as being absolutely fresh and unique, and one of these is Song of Saya. It's the story of Fuminori, a medical student who's been in a horrible car accident which forever altered his perceptions of the world into one of abject horror. But there is one bright spot in the hell that he constantly perceives, that of Saya, the only girl who appears beautiful to him. What dark secret to Saya hiding, and who will deliver the world to safety? Written by Urobuchi Gen, creator of Madoka Magika and Fate/Zero! The game is gone "Golden Master" and will be shipping soon -- so order your copy now!

New Fears of a Super Earthquake

Even while it continues to help the Tohoku region recover from the terrible earthquake and tsunami of two years ago, the Japanese government is trying to prepare for future disasters. One great fear that's being planned for is a possible "Nankai Megathrust Quake," a particularly nasty kind of earthquake caused by contact between large tectonic plates located to the south of Japan. These have caused great damage over the past 1300 years, including a particularly bad quake and 28-meter tsunami in 1854 that killed 3000 people. For all the damage and loss of life caused by the March 11, 2011 quake, the Tohoku area of Japan is among the most lightly populated parts of Japan. Now the government is projecting damage and loss of life of up to ten times the 2011 quake's numbers if a similarly strong quake were to happen in Southern Japan -- among other things, as we learned in Kobe in 1995, building codes are less strict in the region, compared with the more quake-prone Tokyo. Which is one more reason we're happy to be in Gunma, as far from the sea as you can get in Japan.

Images from the big quake and tsunami in 1946.

Heir to the Soba Restaurant

The other day I went with my wife to eat at our favorite soba noodle restaurant. After a strapping young man who worked at the restaurant delivered our lunch, my wife said, "I'm really happy for the owner of this place, since he has a successor to take over this shop when he dies. That was him just now." She was talking about 後継ぎ ato-tsugi, meaning an heir or successor who takes over a family business, and it's quite an important concept here in Japan, at least in our more rural part of the country. One problem is that Japanese have been having fewer and fewer kids, often just one, and this places a strain on those children who may want to do something different with their lives than take over, say, their parents' rural liquor store (in the case of my wife). Looking at the young man who was following in his father's footsteps and making soba noodles the proper traditional way, it was hard to avoid feeling happy for the owner.

Having an heir to take over the family business is important.

The Japanese Love Trains

One of my favorite aspects of Japan is definitely the train culture here, and it's always fun to take a trip somewhere by rail, whether it's to Tokyo for shopping or business or picking some random, lonely station in the mountains of Gunma and traveling there just because. There's a lot of pressure in Japanese society, and all too often people choose to check out of life early by jumping in front of a train as it pulls into the station -- these "human injury accidents" (as they're euphemistically called) can get so common in Tokyo that you'll sometimes allow extra time before appointments, just in case the train you need to ride is delayed because of a suicide. This situation will hopefully be improved soon, thanks to the installation of tall safety gates at stations in Tokyo which only open when the train is stopped and ready to take passengers. The pride and joy of Japan's rail system are the shinkansen or "bullet trains" which zip along at up to 300 km/hr. The newest of these is the brand new Super Komachi "Japan Red" train in Akita in Northern Japan. It's a beautiful train, and is being heavily promoted in part to attract train aficionados to the area to spend much-needed tourist dollars.

Train culture is important in Japan. This the official Shinkansen of Char from Gundam.

Sakura, Sakura Everywhere

Spring is in the air, a great time to remind you of all the fun sakura-themed products J-List stocks. We've got bento boxes decorated with sakura petals, real cherry trees that "bloom" on your desk over the course of a few hours, various sakura-themed Japanese snacks including the mystery of Hatsune Miku bread, plus popular Sweet Sakura Tea. Click to browse the top sakura-themed items from Japan!

My Career as a Japanese Civil Servant

I like to think I've made the most of my time in Japan, having a wide range of experiences in different fields of work. I've worked in education, teaching eikaiwa (English conversation) and more advanced subjects like writing and TOEFL test preparation at English schools, and I've experienced the harried-but-fun life of an entrepreneur thanks to J-List. But in between those two carriers, I had a third, that of a Japanese public employee, working as "coordinator of international relations" at my local city office. My job was essentially to be the bilingual gaijin in the city office who could translate emails and letters, meet with foreigners who visited our city in an official capacity and spend four hours on Fridays at a help desk for foreign residents who needed help with some problem or another. In Japan, all national and prefectural employees who administer the official business of the government, as well as all policemen and firemen, are 公務員 koumu-in, civil servants who can arguably be considered a unique caste in Japanese society. In exchange for a guarantee of lifetime employment, they agree be transformed into a certain kind of bland individual who will faithfully manage the business of government without ever interjecting their own personality or ideas into the process. It was fun to have the experience but I think I'm more suited to running J-List somehow.

My brief career as a Japanese public employee was very educational.

Japan Sakura Season 2013

Over the weekend I went to Tokyo to meet with some friends for beers and Osaka-style kushi-katsu (pork cutlet and other foods fried then dipped in a delightful sauce before eating). As usual, it was fun to go to Tokyo and feel the energy all around me. While I was there I read a news post saying that the cherry blossoms had officially opened in Tokyo, so I headed for Ueno Park to see them for myself. The start of sakura season is an important time in Japan, marking not just the symbolic end of winter but the beginning of many new things, since the school year and entrance ceremonies at Japanese companies begin at this time of year. For the next ten days people will gather under the cherry trees and contemplate their fleeting beauty while imbibing beer and sake, then the cherry blossoms will be gone. This year's sakura season start tied with 2002 as the earliest-ever since the government started keeping detailed records on cherry blossom blooming patterns in the 1950s.

The Season of the Sakura has come to Japan.

Thinking About Anime Logic

I've got a few hobbies, including reciting lines from all Tom Hanks movies in a Forrest Gump voice and trolling the Budweiser Lime Facebook page by telling them what "BL" means to most of us. I'm also a fan of analyzing anime logic, the unique set of physical rules that apply in anime but nowhere else. Like the way eyebrows happily exist on top of hair, or the strange properties of light that cause it to bend around the glasses of a meganekko character so we can see their large, expressive eyes even if the frames are in the way. Everyone can be clumsy at times, but only in anime do characters fall down in such as way as to accidentally kiss another character, or come in contact with their pantsu. Anime hair colors may seem random at first, but they follow several establishes patterns, with red hair being matched with fiery-spirited characters, blue for "pure" characters who are usually naive, gray/silver for characters who hide a mysterious secret or power, etc. Still, it's odd that some characters are perceived as being "foreign" (and possibly scary) based on hair color, like Kodaka from I Have Few Friends, yet no one wonders about a "Japanese" girl with luxurious blonde hair (Sena from the same show). Perhaps the strangest aspect of anime is how boring, mild-mannered males always end up with a half-dozen cute girls romantically in orbit around them -- maybe someone who's better at math than me can write an equation describing the attractive force produced by the main character in a harem anime so the rest of us can try to get in on it.

It's fun to deconstruct the physical laws of anime.

Great Time to get a PS Vita

Now that the Sony PS Vita has gotten its price drop in the U.S., we can really recommend that everyone who's interested in playing fun import anime games from Japan consider getting one. As with the PSP before it, the Vita is really shaping up to be the best ota-gaming platform we could have asked for, and all games are region free! Whether you want to play the best version of Fate ever made, dance to the pantsu of Hatsune Miku or get great Japan-only DLC via our prepaid PSN Japan prepaid cards, there are many great reasons to get a Vita. Incidentally, we're often asked about import games for other platforms. Sadly, both Xbox and Nintendo have chosen to region lock their current systems, so the only options available to fans of import anime games are the Sony PSP/PS3/PSVita and Windows platforms.