The Mechanics of Kanji

Kanji is one of three writing systems used to write Japanese, used to express advanced cognitive concepts in sentences. (The other two are hiragana, generally used for grammatical particles and simpler elements of sentences, and katakana, for writing foreign words and names.) Since I'm interested in the mechanics of how languages work, I'll talk about the kanji 定, which is one of my favorites (in part because it's fun to write), and how it can be used to express some advanced vocabulary words. The character itself means specified, fixed, definite or ordered, and by itself it's usually pronounced 定め sadame, a poetic way to say fate or destiny. Hook the character up with other Chinese characters and you can express more advanced concepts, like 予定 yotei (in advance + specified = a person's schedule), 決定 kettei (to decide + specified = something that has been officially established or decided), or 設定 settei (to set + specified = settings, as in the settings in a software program). It all looks hopelessly complex at first, but when you have a base of 300-500 kanji or so, it's not that difficult to puzzle out the meanings of new compound words based on the individual characters. Once you've studied enough Japanese, you can go to countries like Hong Kong, Taiwan or Malysia and read 25-40% of the characters on signs and in menus, which can be surprisingly helpful.

The first rule is kanji is, you have to embrace its difficulty.

Japan Population + 1

A lot of people talk about the falling Japanese population, but the staff of J-List is doing something about it. While the world coos over the Royal Baby, J-List has had our own addition, with the birth of a healthy son named Liam to our French web designer and his Japanese wife. Japan, of course, has one of the lowest birthrates of the industrialized world, with just 1.39 children born per woman, and the government has been very proactive about trying to reverse this trend. Our own city gives a bonus of $4200 to any woman who becomes pregnant to help offset medical costs, and all parents receive $150 per child under the age of 15 each month to help encourage more babies. There's no better place to have a baby than Japan, too: the facilities at maternity hospitals are top-notch, and my wife got to spend five days eating French cuisine (a specialty of the hospital she'd picked to give birth at) while she recuperated and nurses provided training and guidance regarding the newly delivered bundle of joy. Still, the high costs of raising a child through university coupled with the stress of life in crowded Japanese cities keep most couples from having more than one or maybe two children.

J-List is doing our part to raise Japan's birth rate.

Do They Have McDonald's in America?

I'm safely back in Japan, the land where everything is extremely clean and well-ordered. Now I'm trying to get used to the incredible heat and humidity that was waiting to greet me, and keep my jet lag at bay long enough to finish this update...

"Do they have McDonald's in America?" This is a question an adult student of mine asked me once, and it was a strange one, since what could be more American than Big Macs and Happy Meals? Yet somehow the student had been sure McDonald's was a Japanese chain. It can be surprisingly easy to get the wrong idea about famous companies. A Japanese friend I knew decided to become an engineer so he could work for "the famous American company, Sony" (as a child he'd assumed that since Sony wrote its name in English, they must be American), and I myself spent several years certain that Motorola was a Japanese company for some reason. Sometimes this brand confusion is due to the companies themselves. You may think of Häagen-Dazs as a purveyor of delicious ice cream from Denmark, but the brand actually came from The Bronx, New York, and the name is just clever marking. When anti-Japan riots seized China last year, a mob burned down a "Japanese" Samsung factory, convinced thanks to the company's advertising that it was a Japanese brand. Have you ever gotten confused about what country a certain company is from?

"Do they have McDonald's in America?"

Hatsune Miku x Sony PSP, PS3 and PS Vita = Pantsu

If you've got a Sony PSP, PS3 or PSVita and like Hatsune Miku, you should browse the Hatsune Miku Project Diva titles we restocked today. They're awesome rhythm games with great costumes and music and sometimes, pantsu. And all Sony game platforms are region free, so you can play them no matter where in the world you're located.

Funny-Sounding Words of Japanese

While there are many innovative ways of studying Japanese, including self-study programs with flashcards and textbooks, online study programs and so on, I usually recommend the method I used, a formal language program in a university (in my case, SDSU). When you study Japanese in a classroom setting, there are several stages you go through, including massive shock when you first encounter the hiragana writing system, relief when you realize it's not that hard to get down after all, then amazement as your brain starts "reading" written Japanese without your conscious involvement, just as it does for English. You also learn that some Japanese words sound extremely funny to us, and the first time you encounter the word 時々 toki-doki (meaning "sometimes"), there'll always be some giggles since this sounds similar to "okie-dokie" in English. Other words that can cause sniggering include 母 haha, which means "my mother" but sounds like laughing, 父 chichi, which means "my father" but sound like something soft and warm in Spanish, and たこ tako, a delicious Mexican treat to most of us but meaning "octopus" in Japanese. It's easy to remember the Japanese word for "apple," which is 林檎 ringo, as in Ringo Starr, and then there's the word 貧乏 binbou, which means "poor" (as in lacking money) but is pronounced exactly like the English word "bimbo."

Okay, that's all for now. It's off to Japan for me!

Yayoi (right) is the binbou character in Idolmaster. She's also kind of a bimbo.

Japan Election Update

While I was busy meeting customers here in San Diego, Japan was having yet another election, this time for the upper legislative house. Japan has a British-style Parliamentary system which is terribly confusing to my American brain, but it seems to involve separate elections for both houses of the national legislature as well as for prefectural and city representatives...all of which translates into burst eardrums for me, thanks to Japanese politicians' penchant for driving around shouting from speakercars the week before the election. Sunday's election resulted in a big win for Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his Liberal Democratic Party, clearing the way for serious economic reform and deflation-busting, or at least that's the idea. One big change lying in store for the Japanese economy is a consumption tax (sales tax/VAT) hike from its current 5% to 8%, then to 10% a few years down the road. This is causing causing an economic boom right now as people rush to make big-ticket purchases before the rate goes up, but there's concern that things will crash whenever the tax hike finally goes into effect.

A big win for Prime Minister Abe and "Abenomics."

Advertising Tissues From Japan

It's the end of another San Diego Comic-Con, and as usual it was a blast. We sold tons of J-List T-shirts, kawaii plush toys and bottles of Tentacle Grape, and talked with many avid fans. I've been attending the show since the mid 80s, back when it was small enough to fit in the tiny San Diego Civic Center. I laugh as I look back at how "big" I thought the show was back then, at around 12,000 attendees, less than 1/10 the current number.

If you visited the convention and walked by our booth, one of our staff probably handed you some Japanese pocket tissue with our website information on it. Advertising businesses with printed pocket tissue has been popular in Japan ever since 1969, when a paper manufacturing company in Kochi Prefecture hit on the idea of using inexpensive packets of tissue to advertise products. Just about anywhere you go in Japanese cities, you'll see people standing on street-corners, handing tissues to passers-by and thanking them for considering the business that's being promoted -- usually a bank advertising this week's rates, or in Akihabara, the newest cat girl maid cafe. J-List has been printing these tissues and shipping them with orders for more than 15 years, and also brings them to conventions to hand out to people, sometimes getting ironic laughs for some reason. Of course you don't have to attend a convention to get free J-List tissues: just make an order from our site, and you'll get a packet included with your order, along with our super-cool "anime eye glasses." (Note that J-List tissues aren't included with orders that would be damaged by their inclusion, such as a thin doujinshi comic, and are subject to availability.)

You'll never be without tissue in Japan.

Manga Sale This Month on J-List

A reminder: this month we're having a very nice promotion for you, a 2x points sale on all manga on the site! This includes the gorgeous all-ages manga we have, from Evangelion to Yotsubato to Highschool of the Dead, as well as the ecchi manga products we have, with very genre you can think of and a few you can't. Click to browse all manga volumes on the site now!