Interesting Japanese History: Nakahama "John" Manjiro

Sometimes I like to pick random Japanese historical figures and write about them. Like Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the second of Japan's three "unifiers," who's interesting because he was a peasant farmer who rose to become the de facto ruler of Japan, or Chiune Sugiura, the "Japanese Schindler" who saved the lives of more than 6000 jews during World War II by issuing visas for them to travel to Japan. Another fascinating historical figure is Nakahama "John" Manjiro, the first Japanese to visit America and learn English. In 1841 the 14-year-old Manjiro was fishing when his boat was blown onto a deserted island. He was rescued by an American whaling ship and brought to the U.S. where he was educated in English and navigation in Fairhaven, Massachusetts. Although it was death for Japanese who had left Japan to return, he resolved to do so anyway, and became one of the few people in the country with any current knowledge of the outside world. When Admiral Perry arrived in 1852, "John" Manjiro was raised to samurai status so he could serve as the official interpreter. His amazing life inspired later Japanese, including Sakamoto Ryoma, the "George Washington" of modern Japan.

Manjiro was also the first Japanese to ride a train.

25 Year of Totoro

I saw that yesterday marked the 25th anniversary of the release of My Neighbor Totoro, one of my all-time favorite films. I was lucky to be one of the first people in the U.S. to see the film, as I happened to be hanging out in the anime room at the San Diego Comic-Con on Thursday morning back in 1988 when staff from Tokuma Shoten brought in a video so they could judge the likely reaction by American fans. I was instantly captivated by the magic of Totoro and the Catbus, so unlike anything I'd seen before, and resolved to create a Totoro cosplay the following year, though people thought I was a giant gerbil (I got my picture in Animage though). Totoro and Hayao Miyazaki's other films are very important to our family, and I've spent many evenings watching them with my kids over the years. (My wife once said, "Only children can see Totoro...but I think your father can see him too.") Yesterday was also the 25th anniversary of Grave of the Fireflies, which was released as a double feature with Totoro, with the latter film created almost as an afterthought to lighten up the heavy content of the first film.

Celebrating 25 years of Totoro.

"Shikishi" Writing Boards from Japan

When foreigners come to Japan, it's natural they'll encounter objects that are common and familiar to Japanese people yet strange and exotic to us. Like those bamboo mimikaki ear cleaners, which I thought were scoops for tea ceremony the first time I saw them, to the great amusement of my Japanese girlfriend at the time. Or those 'hanko' kanji name stamps, which are used on official documents and contracts in lieu of signatures in Japan, so mysterious to Westerners. Another example is shikishi, thick cardboard squares which are used for signing autographs, recording memories for posterity or capturing artwork you want to keep. As with most things in Japan, these writing boards have a long history, originally used to display haiku or waka poetry in Zen Buddhist tea rooms in the 12th century, though these days they're carried by fans at conventions hoping to get an autograph by their favorite artist, or as a way for people to record messages for a friend who's leaving, etc. Now J-List carries blank shikishi writing boards so you can bring them to the summer anime conventions and get proper autographs from Japanese guests you meet, or keep a few on hand for any time you want to send someone a really special message. In addition, we've brought back our custom kanji message writing service, allowing you to get any kanji character, name or message written in proper Japanese calligraphy by our native staff.

Shikishi writing boards are a great way to capture an emotion.

Reminder: Lower Magazine Subscription Prices from Japan

J-List has a popular lineup of monthly and quarterly magazines available via revolving monthly subscription, with everything from moe magazines with free posters and figures to magazines with 1000+ pages of awesome manga to magazines that teach you Japanese and more. The subscriptions are popular because they're charged on a monthly basis and customers can cancel or change subscriptions at any time. We have some good news today: announcing lower prices on all magazines, both for existing and new customers (of course). Why not start some Japanese magazine subscriptions today?

Kanji Products @ J-List

Like many of of our customers, J-List loves the aesthetic beauty of kanji characters, and stocks many cool products for our customers, from kanji T-shirts to hachimaki kanji headbands and more. In addition to books to help you learn kanji (including the new Moekanji card series from Culture Japan), you can order a custom hanko kanji name stamp with your name in kanji, chosen by our native Japanese staff (so you don't have to worry that it actually says "Diarrhea" or anything). By customer request, we've brought back our popular custom kanji message service, so you can get any Japanese kanji character, quote, message or name written so you can display it in your room or office.

Funerals in Japan

A few days ago the father of a friend of ours passed away, so we had to go into "Japanese funeral mode," which I thought I'd write about today. First, men get out their reifuku, a standardized black suit that can be worn either to weddings (with a white tie) or to funerals (with a black tie, don't get these mixed up!), while praying that it still fits since the last time they wore it. You arrive at the funeral home and sign the register before making a cash gift of between $50-$500 depending on your relationship to the deceased, enclosing the money in a special envelope you can buy at 7-11. Depending on local customs you're supposed to use old, worn bills, since giving crisp, new bills implies you were actively preparing for the person to die. During the ceremony, the bozu (Buddhist priest, no relation to the stereo company) will utter incantations and read off a list of the deceased's lifetime accomplishments, then everyone lines up to bow to the bereaved family and make an offering of incense. Every gift in Japan must be countered with a "return gift" (お返し o-kaeshi), and as you leave you'll be handed a large bag containing sake, instant coffee and towels. There's also a packet of salt, which you open and throw all over your shoulders and legs before crossing the threshold into your home, which purifies your body and keeps out any dead spirits who might have followed you home.

A sudden funeral in Japan for a family friend.

Of Mexican Food and Foreigners

One thing you learn when living as an expat in Japan is how global the world can be. Recently my family sat down to have some Mexican fajitas, grilled beef and chicken with onions and bell peppers wrapped in flour tortillas I'd picked up at a nearby import food store. These weren't your garden variety tortillas, however: they were Old El Paso brand made in Melbourne, Australia for export to places like Japan, China and India, and they tasted perfectly authentic. (For extra strangeness we added cheese from Norway, which was all they had at the Japanese Costco near J-List.) Once I decided to have an American style Thanksgiving in Japan, and managed to find a frozen turkey to cook, not an easy task since the Japanese have almost no tradition of eating turkey, or of cooking in ovens for that matter. I was surprised to see that the bird (also from Australia) has been "killed in a single stroke with a sharp knife in accordance with the laws of Islam," which was done so they could export to countries in the Middle East. Yes, we definitely live in a very global world.

Another aspect of life in Japan is occasionally interacting with foreigners from countries you've never thought deeply about, or in some cases even heard of, like the time I met a guy from the Kingdom of Tonga and had to apologize for not even knowing where his country was located. In the same way that people in the U.S. tend to blend Japanese, Chinese and Korean cultural images together, especially the farther you get from either coast, Japanese aren't good at parsing the subtle differences between various gaijin, and it's not unheard of to find yourself grouped with foreigners from Scotland, Sri Lanka, Iran and Peru. One odd phenomenon is the "Three Stages of Gaijin Eye Aversion," where people who have recently arrived in Japan become overly aware of other foreigners they see in public and make sure to avert their eyes from them at all times. They then realize this is stupid, so they nod to the other foreigner or maybe go make conversation, perhaps using Japanese if the other person doesn't speak English...until they realize that this is stupid, too, so they just act normal in the future. There's a similar tension when I go to an Indian restaurant and order food from an Indian waiter, with both of us speaking Japanese. The guy almost certainly speaks English, so why don't we switch to that language? But we never do for some odd reason.

Mexican food can be a surprisingly global affair; interacting with foreigners in Japan is interesting.

Lower Prices on Magazine Subscriptions from Japan

J-List has a popular lineup of monthly and quarterly magazines available via revolving monthly subscription, with everything from moe magazines with free posters and figures to magazines with 1000+ pages of awesome manga to magazines that teach you Japanese and more. The subscriptions are popular because they're charged on a monthly basis and customers can cancel or change subscriptions at any time. We have some good news today: announcing lower prices on all magazines, both for existing and new customers (of course). Why not start some Japanese magazine subscriptions today?

A Brief History of Eroge

J-List has been involved with licensing and translating visual novels -- in their ecchi form they're known as bishoujo games, dating-sim games or eroge, though the genre encompasses all manner of games -- since we started out back in 1996, and we think they're a great way to connect with Japan. The basic concept, of course, is that you play a main character (usually male, but not always) and work through a game story, interacting with characters and making choices that cause you to reach different (sometimes sexy) endings, and the stories and characters can be incredibly well developed. The category got its start with Koei's "Nightlife" published in 1982, which was followed by the then-iconic Tenshi-tachi no Gogo published by the original JAST (our first licensing partner), then ToHeart, Graduation, Dokyusei, Alice Soft's Sengoku Rance and so on. Japan's visual novel culture is extremely popular, spawning popular mainstream anime series like Fate/stay night, Higurashi no Naku Koro ni/When They Cry and Steins;Gate. It's quite common for the language of visual novels to leak into anime series. In Aria of the Scarlet Ammo there's a scene in which Riko tempts Kinji by saying, "Don't you understand? This is an 'event scene,'" (meaning an intimate scene from a game illustrated with full-screen graphics), and in the finale of Haganai Rika gets mad at Kodaka for "raising flags" with other girls (e.g. clearing parameters required to romance the girls, like characters in an eroge).

Kirino is the queen of eroge.

The Cuteness of "Haafu" Characters Who Can't Speak English

It's fun to analyze the way anime, game and manga companies go about creating characters that will win the hearts of fans. One common approach is to mix up an all-Japanese cast by adding in a character of mixed ancestry, called ハーフ haafu ("half") or クォーター kuo-ta- ("quarter"), who naturally speaks Japanese thanks to some convenient plot device, usually having been raised by a Japanese grandmother. There's a long list of these half-Japanese characters in anime, including Asuka and Mari in Evangelion, Yomiko Readman from R.O.D., L from Death Note and many more. One joke that comes up quite a lot is characters who are unable to speak English properly despite being haafu, as if language were something that was passed along to children via DNA. Some examples of this joke include Tina Foster from Aoi Yori Aoshi (a full American but raised in Hakata, Kyushu), Aisha from the Da Capo series, the half-British Kobato-chan from I Have Few Friends and Rebecca Miyamoto from Pani Poni Dash!, a child savant who graduated from M.I.T. at the age of eleven yet can't pronounce the word "Massachusetts" without messing up in a ridiculously cute way.

Another example of this joke is the ridiculously kawaii Kudryavka Noumi from the Little Busters! anime and games, who is three-quarters Russian and one quarter Japanese yet cannot speak English. (Nevermind that English is not the native language of Russia, this is anime logic!) In one scene poor Kud is called on to read out loud from the textbook, but she can't even pronounce simple words correctly, making the class laugh. Her friends resolve to help her out by giving her a sentence to translate, which is displayed on the screen in English text which melts into kana syllables as Kud pronounces the words. This is a good example of what's wrong with the way Japanese learn English, allowing their brains to "think" in kana sounds that can only express syllables like ka, ki, ku, ke and ko but never the consonant "k" by itself. This is one big reason why Japanese often have thick accents when speaking English, since coming from katakana words like "warehouse" or "weekend" contain six syllables each instead of two as in English. The reverse version of this is when foreigners learn Japanese from a textbook that uses "Romanized" Japanese (e.g. written in the English alphabet) instead of proper hiragana, katakana and kanji. Study tools like Danny Choo's Moekanji , the Genki textbook series and those outstanding White Rabbit flashcards teach you using only proper Japanese characters, never Romanized Japanese, which is why we recommend them to our customers.

Haafu characters who can't speak English is a fairly common joke.

Get All Three Anime Posters When You Make an Order

J-List has worked hard to license and translate visual novels and eroge from Japan for fans around the world. We'll be printing new catalogs w/cool game posters in time for Anime Expo this year, but for fans who want to collect our current set of promotional game posters before they're retired, we've got a nice offer: order any shrinkwrapped dating-sim game or T-shirt/hoodie that ships from San Diego and get the full set of all three current game posters for free -- so make an order now! The posters are large and show art from School Days, Demonbane and Django. Offer valid while supplies last.