Peter's Advice for Students of Japan

I received a request in my Twitter feed from a customer who was studying Japanese in preparation for a visit here, but having problem with her language study. Since I'm sure there are others who would like to read my comments, I thought I'd make a general Japanese Study Advice post here.

• First, consider your goals, whether it be to learn the basics of the language in order to gain a deeper appreciation for Japan, to travel and make friends, or to become fluent someday.
• While Japanese isn't really any harder than French or Spanish, learning the writing systems can bog you down, but learn to embrace it. Make sure to only use study tools that force you to learn using proper hiragana and katakana, as reading Romanized Japanese (Japanese written in the English alphabet) will harm your progress and give you a bad speaking accent. The Moekana/Moekanji, Genki and White Rabbit series are all excellent.
• If you've studied a foreign language before, learning Japanese will be easier because your brain "knows" it's possible to do, but if this is your first time learning a foreign language you'll have to get to that point.
• Everyone learns differently, and you should try to see what methods work for you. I had success with writing out sentences in my textbook multiple times, transcribing and translating JPOP songs for friends, and using mnemonic connections to "trick" my brain into learning, but your brain may work differently.
• Another approach I discovered was to treat Japanese sentences and grammar like mathematical equations that I could manipulate. Once I'd memorized a basic sentence like 私はアメリカ人ですが、彼女はアメリカ人ではありません Watashi wa America-jin desu ga, kanojo wa America-jin de wa arimasen ("I'm an American, but she isn't an American") I could substitute other words, making new sentences. This helps your brain interalize the information more smoothly.
• Reading manga is good because almost all the words you see are verbally spoken by the characters, and thus can be used by you in the same way. Don't go overboard with this though, and balance this type of studying a formal approach at the same time.
• There are study methods that didn't exist when I was learning back in the late 80s, from online teaching services to software programs to innovative approaches like using Twitter to practice your new language. That said, I still think a formal program, either at a university or language school, is the best route for most.
• I found studying for the Japanese Language Proficiency Test in December to be an excellent motivator, and have fond memories of obsessing over each year's test as it approached, which made me study harder. See info on how you can take the JLPT outside Japan here.

And remember, if you're trying to learn a little Japanese or a lot, J-List can help.

Poor Tomoko from WataMote can't catch a break; Japanese are masters at the art of gift-giving.

The Japanese Art of "Omiyage" Souvenirs

If there's one thing the Japanese are good at, it's gift-giving, and one of the most enjoyable kinds of gifts to give and receive are おみやげ omiyage (pronounced oh-me-yah-geh), or souvenirs given to friends, family and coworkers after returning from a journey. The other day I caught one of Japan's popular "ranking" shows on TV, which introduced the most popular omiyage gifts from each region of Japan. These included the top brand of "castella" cake from Nagasaki, those oddly named but delicious "chinsuko" cookies from Okinawa, and a delicious eclair sold only in Tokyo's Haneda Airport with the odd name of "Samantha Tabitha." (J-List's home prefecture of Gunma is much less famous, but we do have Initial D cookies.) Japan is experiencing a huge boom in yuru-chara or anime-style mascots who promote tourism in Japan's rural cities. One of the most popular is Kumamon, the official mascot of Kumamoto, Kyushu, and there are plenty of products bearing his cute face for sale these days.

Japanese are masters at the art of gift-giving.

Watamote, aka Breakfast Club for the Current Generation

I continue to enjoy Watashi ga Motenai no wa Dou Kangaetemo Omaera ga Warui!, aka No Matter How I Look At It, It's Your Guys' Fault I'm Not Popular!, shortened to WataMote to make it easier to remember. It's the story of poor Tomoko, a socially awkward fujoshi (female otaku) who's so into manga and romance-simulation games that has trouble making friends at school...and for Tomoko, there's no Light Music Club or Genshiken to help her find lifelong soulmates to connect with. She tries everything she can to turn her social situation around, hatching one crazy plot after another in order to become popular, but her plans always seem to backfire. Though the cruel situations she finds herself in make the show physically painful to watch at times, both as a former high school nerd from the days when the concept of "nerd pride" didn't exist and also as the father of an otaku daughter today, it's definitely a fun show. What I like best about it is how it might possibly affect some viewers in a positive way. Though Tomoko would love to blame her unpopularity on others, for example the "bitches" in her class who have boyfriends, in reality she has to take a large part of the blame for her social problems herself. Perhaps the show can be therapeutic to girls (and guys) who are battling the same kinds of social issues, if nothing else then by showing them they're not alone.

Poor Tomoko from WataMote can't catch a break.

Kawaii Fashion Products In Stock at J-List

J-List stocks fun Japanese apparel and cosplay products from Japan, with hundreds of products for you to browse. We've got kawaii Japanese "over knee socks," T-shirts for Totoro fans, anime cosplay glasses that will make you look like an anime character and authentic shimapan. Why not browse all our Japanese apparel and cosplay products now?

Yakuza and Saunas in Kyoto

One of the best things about Japan is the way a foreign visitor will generally never have to feel fear about anything, as you'll generally be safe no matter where you find yourself, though I did manage to find an exception to this rule. I'm a big fan of public baths and hot springs, and I learned early on that you can travel around Japan cheaply by staying at "saunas," which are 24-hour public baths that also offer traditional saunas as well as a communal room for customers to sleep in. They're cheap, costing around $35 to stay in the heart of a large city, and it can be fun to strike up conversations with the other patrons, who are often so surprised to see a gaijin in a place like that that they'll buy you a beer. The first time I went to Kyoto, I thought it'd be fun to stay in a sauna, but I hadn't realized at the time that Kyoto is a hotbed of yakuza, and the sauna I'd decided to stay at was filled to the brim with scary-looking gangsters with full-body tattoos and various scars. I tried to make the best of the situation, pretending not to notice the sideways looks I was getting while I enjoyed the baths. It was easy to pick out which man was the oyabun (yakuza boss), since he was the one getting his back washed vigorously by his underlings (kobun), who fell over themselves to do anything he wanted.

Note, the yakuza you see in saunas almost never look like this.

Unique Speech Patterns in (Super) Anime Characters

I've written before that, while anime and manga can be useful tools for studying Japanese, it's important to avoid relying on them too much. When anime creators go to design a new character, they work hard to differentiate them in various ways, adding visual features like the iconic yellow hair ribbon Haruhi wears, or Yotsuba's prehensile pigtails, which move in response her mood. Increasingly, animators use language to make their characters stand out, giving their creations unique speech patterns that can be as separate from natural Japanese as Yoda's speech is from Galactic Standard English. Nowhere is this more common than in A Certain Scientific Railgun, a series in which virtually every character has a unique way of talking, for example "rich girl" Mitsuko, who speaks in a parody of how aristocrats talk, often using the phrase ごきげんよう go-kigen-yoh, an archaic way of saying "good luck." Then there's the "super" girl Saiai, a level 4 esper who has to show you how "super" her powers are by inserting the word 超 cho (meaning "super") into every "super" sentence. Another show that uses language that's quite far removed from "real" Japanese is Bakemonogatari, in which characters speak in a way that's overly formal yet very elegant-sounding to the ear. So while using anime and manga to study Japanese is okay, you should balance things with a more formal study program at the same time.

Some (super) Railgun side characters.

The Japanese Love "Peace"

One of my first impressions of the Japanese people as I was growing up was that they love photography and always make the "peace" sign when getting their picture taken, which was one of those rare times when a stereotype turned out to be completely true. The origin of the ubiquitous Japanese pose is not 100% clear. It could have come from the Winston Churchill's famous "V for victory," or (according to another theory) from a 1972 TV commercial for a Konica camera in which an actor ad-libbed a peace sign at the end, which happened to resonate with viewers. Supposedly, there are different variations on how Japanese (specifically females) will perform the gesture, depending on what era they come from. Women in their 40s will make a fairly orthodox peace sign, while ones in their 30s grew up being told the gesture was stupid by their parents, and thus tend to make shy "V" gestures that are less noticeable. Japanese women in their late 20s make "double peace" signs near their chin in a compact but cute gesture born from the popularity of "Purikura" photo booths in the 1990s, while the trend among the youngest Japanese females is "reverse peace," done with the palm facing towards the person making the gesture. Which happens to be a rude gesture in much of the U.K., Australia and New Zealand...oops.

Japanese girls do "peace" differently according to age.

Sword Art Online Products from Japan

J-List loves the popular anime Sword Art Online, and we're loaded with fun SAO products you might want to browse, from figures to parody T-shirts and the new 2014 calendar, with gorgeous glossy pages and totally original art. We also have parody "dolphin polishers" for solo players who need to replenish their personal mana level.

Japan's Kawaii Automobile Market

Japan's automobile market is quite different from what you may be used to in your own home country. For starters, every car is sold through factory-owned dealerships rather than through third-party dealers, a model famously copied by GM's Saturn division, and when you buy a new car you generally wait 2-3 months for the factory to build it rather than driving it off the lot that day. There's a cycle of "lucky" and "unlucky" Buddhist days in Japan, and it's important to make sure you take delivery of a new vehicle on one of the lucky ones lest some tragedy befall you and your family. In addition to car models you may be familiar with -- the Honda Odyssey, the Toyota Prius, the Mazda CX-5 -- there are many models sold only in Japan, with names like Nissan Elgrand Homy, Honda That's, Mazda Bongo Friendee and Daihatsu Naked. One of my favorite categories of automobile is the subcategory of extremely kawaii cars marketed to females, with cute names like Nissan Moko, Suzuki Chocolat and the Daihatsu Mira Cocoa and Move Latte. They sound delicious.

The Japanese automobile industry has been greatly affected by two social trends over the past decade or so. The first is 自動車離れ jidosha-banare or the trend of young people being less and less interested in owning a nice car, which began around the turn of the millennium. Whereas previous decades saw young people saving their money for that first set of wheels, the current generation of young Japanese places more emphasis in other areas of their life, such as keitai (cell phones) or social media, and don't see car ownership as the status symbol it once was. This has caused Japan's domestic car market to shrink, and forced car companies to get creative at making cool-looking "kei" (light) cars that can be purchased for the equivelent of $12,000 or so. A related trend is 草食化 soushoku-ka, the so-called "herbivorification" of males in Japanese society. In days of yore, a guy would be happy to work extra hours so he could save up for a really nice car that would impress girls, which is called a nampa-sha or "girl hunting car." Over the past decade or so, more men have mellowed and are less interested in dating and making sexual conquests, happy to sit at home watching YouTube or working on hobbies than in more "carnivorous" eras.

There's a complex ecosystem of cute cars for girls in Japan.

A Very Akira Olympics

All Japan is in rapture right now over the announcement that Tokyo has been selected to host the 2020 Olympics. While Madrid and Istanbul put up a great fight, the strong presentation by Tokyo coupled with the improving economic position of Japan and large number of facilities already in place enabled Tokyo to carry the day. While Prime Minister Abe won points with his speech about Japan wanting to "repay its debt to the world in full" for all the help the country received after the deadly earthquakes and tsunamis of March 11, 2011, a lot of the credit for the win went to Takigawa Christel, a half-French, half-Japanese TV announcer who was able to pitch the benefits of holding the Olympics in Tokyo to the IOC in French, which absolutely turned Japanese fans to jelly. The announcement was made a 5:20 am, Japan time, and many dedicated fans stayed up all night to be the first to hear the news. The selection of Tokyo for the 2020 Olympics is more than just a big win for Japan, it's the fulfillment of a destiny for otaku-dom. Fans of the classic anime Akira will remember that the film is set a few months before the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, and the final battle takes place in the newly constructed Olympic stadium.

Congratulations to Tokyo and Japan!

More Yumina the Ethereal Character Data

You can't have a good eroge without a meganekko, an extremely cute girl who wears glasses, and there's a really nice one in our new ero RPG Yumina the Ethereal. Her name is Honma Maino, and she's a shy, mild-mannered girl who loves to read books and take care of the school library. At Jinbu Academy, where athletics are king, culture clubs like the Library Committee occupy the bottom of the social pecking order, but she always works hard anyway. She's one of the super cute characters you can romance in the game, and one of my favorite girls. Visit the official Yumina site, or go order the game from J-List in shrinkwrapped package or Internet download form now!

2014 Calendars Posted to the Site!

We were happy that 2014 calendar season got off to an early start with the Kantoku, Tony Taka and other calendars we'd posted last month, and now we've got more good news: the main bulk of anime calendars has come in and are available for order now. This year looks like it'll be a great one, with large, glossy calendars for fans of Hatsune Miku, Sword Art Online, Attack on Titan, Oreimo and more. Browse the newly posted Japanese calendars now and get your preorders in early!