Western Influence on Japan Through Europe

We hope everyone in the U.S. enjoyed a warm and pleasant Thanksgiving with family and friends. It's not a holiday you can easily get into the spirit of while living in Japan, a country in which few homes have an oven large enough to cook lasagna, let alone a large meal with all the fixings. I did manage to have a turkey sandwich from Subway, making it one of my more traditional thanksgivings since coming to Japan.

One of the themes I write a lot about is the way Japan likes to pretend it's part of Europe instead of Asia. There are many "homages" to Europe to be found here, from Tokyo Tower (a scale replica of the Eiffel Tower) to the "Japan Alps" to the stylish corner of Shibuya dubbed スペイン坂 Spain-zaka, e.g. Spanish Hill, in tribute to/parody of the Spanish Steps in Rome. The Japanese go crazy for beaujolais nouveau every year, too -- Japan is the largest market for the wine outside of France, and there's an onsen where you can actually bathe in the stuff. For some reason, the Japanese have chosen to fixate on mannekin pis, the famous peeing boy statue in Belgium, as a symbol representing all of Western civilization, and when Honda wanted to promote its new hydrogen-powered car it created Hydrogen Boy, a statue of a boy that "pees" pure water to show how clean the technology is. (You can also get a peeing statue earphone mascot for your phone, if you want one.)

Of course American culture is not without its influence. Friday, the biggest shopping day in the U.S., and I happened to notice that some companies are starting to promote Black Friday sales in Japan, despite there being no custom of Thanksgiving here. Incidentally, we've got good news for anyone looking to give the gift of fun products from Japan this year: we're extending our popular Pre-Christmas Sale through the end of Monday, with 12% off nearly everything on the site. So get shopping and score some awesome products from Japan! 

Pre-Christmas Sale through Monday, including Black Friday and Cyber Monday!

Don't Cause "Meiwaku" (Inconvenience) in Japan.

We're currently finishing up some construction on the land behind J-List, erecting a concrete wall to keep rainwater from running from our land to the neighboring field, which is owned by a local farmer. A few months ago the farmer came to tell about the drainage problem and ask us to fix it, so we called a construction company and had them give us a bid. If there's a "golden rule" to Japanese society it's that everyone should avoid causing 迷惑 meiwaku -- a word which means inconvenience, nuisance or bother -- to others, and once it became apparent we were causing meiwaku to our neighbor, we were required by unwritten Japanese social rules to fix the problem, even though it cost us $6000 to have the wall built. This "don't cause inconvenience to others" system is one of the fundamental building blocks of Japanese society, and one reason they can get along with one lawyer for every 5000 people compared with one for every 250 people in the U.S. By and large, Japanese go their entire lives without ever encountering a lawsuit in any form, in part thanks to this proactive social rule that encourages people to avoid inconveniencing others and to take responsibility for causing problems when asked to do so.

Actually I'd be okay with someone putting on yuri-play on the train.

J-List's Black Friday and Cyber Monday Sale Continues!

Great news: J-List has decided to extend our unprecidented Pre-Christmas Sale through the end of Monday. So for four more days, you can take an awesome 12% off of all items on the site*, including all bento and kitchen items, plush toys, figures, snack items, apparel and cosplay products, as well as the naughty stuff. In addition, the J-List staff has gone through and discounted some special items by up to 50%, including Sailor Moon, My Little Pony, and more. (Note that the 12% off sale doesn't cover grab bags, iTunes and PSN cards, gift certificates, or the specially selected sale items, though 99.5% of products are covered by the sale.)

America to China: Love is War

China has caused an international stir by unilaterally declaring a chunk of the East China Sea as its exclusive "Air Defense Identification Zone," and requiring that all other countries file flight plans ahead of time lest they trigger a "defensive" military response. The area includes the islands claimed by both China and Japan, and essentially promises more confrontations if Japan and other nations don't support China's growing claims for lebensraum. Several countries have denounced China's actions as a dangerous move that will destabilize the region, and America has come down solidly on the side of its ally Japan by flying two B-52s in a "training mission" through the region without informing Beijing ahead of time. As China has grown in economic strength it's become more belligerent, issuing territorial claims against several neighbors including South Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia and India, and it's even fought several limited wars. China has even made noises that Japan should "return" Okinawa to China based on the fact that the island kingdom paid tribute to China centuries ago. It's a dangerous situation, and I hope things calm down soon.

Googled Pixiv for images of B-52 bombers, was not disappointed.

Some New Words for 2013

Every year the Oxford English Dictionary chooses to bless a few new words by adding them to its hallowed pages, and every year people react, often strongly, because most of us make a distinction between "proper" language and the latest slang words we use when speaking. In the past words like tweet, hashtag, app and Googlegänger were added to the official listing of English words, and this year the word "selfie" joins them. There's a similar listing of influential words popularized this year in Japan, too. This year's words include アベノミックス Abenomics, the economic policies of Prime Minister Abe, also known as The Man Who Makes Our Anime Cheaper; パズドラ pazu-dora, the popular Puzzles and Dragons game that my son can't stop playing for five minutes; and 今でしょ！ ima desho! ("the time to do that is right now!"), the catchphrase of famous prep school teacher Osamu Hayashi which became so popular Toyota hired him to do a car commercial ("When are you going to buy a new Toyota? The time to do it is right now!"). Another word I've been hearing a lot is バカッター bakattaa, rendered in English spelling as "bakatter," which means "to do something really stupid on Twitter." Like the planking boom of a few years ago, it's become quite a thing, with people posting pictures of themselves sleeping in convenience store freezers, eating ramen in restaurants while naked or standing on top of police cars just for the lulz.

Some new words for 2013, from "selfie" to bakatter.

Pacific Rim vs Anime

The other day I watched Pacific Rim, a movie I'd not managed to catch in theaters due to my convention schedule during the summer. It was a great film, a well executed love letter to the classic Japanese kaiju (monster) movies of decades past, and it was a lot of fun to watch. Of course you can't make a serious movie featuring giant robots without a lot of comparisons with anime, and it was fun to observe the influence of classic robot series like Great Mazinger and Giant Robo on the film design. The ending especially felt like an extended homage to Aim for the Top: Gunbuster, which suited me just fine, old school Gainax fan that I am. I thought the film was great for another reason: having an actual Japanese actress (the lovely Rinko Kikuchi) play a Japanese character. All too often "Japanese" characters in mainstream American media are played by Koreans (Heroes, The Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift, Star Trek Enterprise, the new Star Trek film remakes), with the unspoken implication being that Japanese are so bad at English they can't perform the roles themselves. Pacific Rim went the extra mile and found a Japanese actress who was great for the part, and I appreciated the extra connection to Japan this brought to the film.

I enjoyed the Japanese pop culture references in Pacific Rim.

J-List's Pre-Christmas Sale Continues

Christmas is racing towards us, and as we do every year, J-List has prepared thousands of awesome items for our customers around the world. But there's a special problem this year: the traditional start of hardcore shopping season (Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving in the U.S.) is a week later than normal, meaning that our customers wouldn't be able to to take advantage of more affordable shipping options when purchasing, like First Class Airmail. We did the only thing we could: we're starting the sale a week early! Through November 29, you can take an awesome 12% off of all items on the site*, including all bento and kitchen items, plush toys, figures, snack items, apparel and cosplay products, as well as the naughty stuff. In addition, the J-List staff has gone through and discounted some special items by up to 50%, including Sailor Moon, My Little Pony, and more. (Note that the 12% off sale doesn't cover grab bags, iTunes and PSN cards, gift certificates, or the specially selected sale items, though 99.5% of products are covered by the sale.)

Did You Grab a Japanese Grab Bag Yet?

Remember that Fuku-bukuro Season has started at J-List, too. Every year J-List prepares traditional Japanese 福袋 fukubukuro grab bags filled with great products for you to discover, from random Japanese figures and plush toys to bento boxes and related products to some very ecchi items. This year we've got a great lineup, along with new San Diego-based grab bags posted today. Each grab bag contains a value of up to 2x its price, so why not grab some grab bags now and enjoy cool random stuff from Japan?

The Anime Industry as Seen from Inside Japan

The anime industry has certainly gone through changes over the years. You could break it down into different eras, perhaps with the Golden Age being when early shows like Space Battleship Yamato and Speed Racer were laying the groundwork for the future popularity of the genre; the Silver Age, as Macross, Sailor Moon and Akira (a.k.a. "the first anime guys could talk about with girls") exploded onto the scene; and the modern period, defined by the bursting of the licensing-for-broadcast-and-DVD-sales bubble, the rise of the Internet and the move from manual cel animation to digital production. The changes keep coming, of course, and these days anime companies have to learn to work with business models that didn't exist a few years ago, for example distributing new series through legal streaming sites and the future prospect of crowd-funding anime projects. One thing the great sci-fi franchises of the 70s like Planet of the Apes and Star Wars showed us was that the licensed goods related to a property are worth more than direct sales (movie tickets etc.) of the property itself, and animation studios have been embracing this, licensing their characters in new and innovative ways...including advertising everything from Lawson convenience stores to horse racing and Mitsubishi cars.

Treating the anime world as a proper industry to be tracked and analyzed like any other is very much in vogue in Japan these days -- there's even a new quarterly magazine called Anime Busience [sic], which features articles on how Japanese companies can profitably export anime and related "contents" (though I really hate that word) to other countries, how different regions of Japan might market themselves through anime as Hakone has done, etc. Because Japan's population has already started to contract, there's a lot of fear that the domestic market for anime and related pop culture will also contract, and if it continues, Japan will eventually see its "Gross National Cool" eroded by South Korea or China. So anime creators need to look overseas for new revenue streams, though this is often difficult for various reasons, including differences in culture, language, and of course 常識 johshiki, or "common sense." Taking a page from South Korea, which provides government money for marketing K-POP music and K-doramas around the world, the Japanese government is starting to be more supportive of anime creators, in part through NHK's "Cool Japan" TV series.

Anime is popular all over the world, though making it profitable can be a challenge for companies.

Ghosts and the Japanese

Last time I talked about how my Japanese wife didn't want to visit the Mt. Fuji area in part because she was scared of going near Japan's "suicide forest," sure she'd hear the spirits of the dead calling out to her. Japan can seem a very death-oriented place to outsiders -- several holidays here started out as Buddhist days of remembrance for the dead -- so perhaps it's not surprising that Japanese have a higher awareness of ghosts and the supernatural than people in other countries. Some individuals are said to be 霊感のある人 reikan no aru hito, that is, people with a greater than average sensitivity of ghosts and apparitions, and in our family my wife and daughter believe themselves to be part of this group. Once after my father passed away, my daughter (who was about five at the time) turned to empty air and shouted, "Stop watching me!" My wife thought I'd gotten out of bed and was standing there looking at my daughter while she ate her breakfast, but I was still asleep, and the general consensus was that she was "sensing" the spirit of my father who had come to visit us. There was another time when my daughter saw a man dressed in a dark suit who nodded politely to her, though no one else could see him. I have no reikan sense at all, and my wife often tells me how lucky I am to be so unaware of spirits all around me.

My wife and daughter seem more aware of ghosts than me.

Japanese Grab Bag Season is Here

Remember that Fuku-bukuro Season has started at J-List, too. Every year J-List prepares traditional Japanese 福袋 fukubukuro grab bags filled with great products for you to discover, from random Japanese figures and plush toys to bento boxes and related products to some very ecchi items. This year we've got a great lineup, along with new San Diego-based grab bags posted today. Each grab bag contains a value of up to 2x its price, so why not grab some grab bags now and enjoy cool random stuff from Japan?

J-List's Pre-Christmas Sale Has Started Early!

Christmas is racing towards us, and as we do every year, J-List has prepared thousands of awesome items for our customers around the world. But there's a special problem this year: the traditional start of hardcore shopping season (Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving in the U.S.) is a week later than normal, meaning that our customers wouldn't be able to to take advantage of more affordable shipping options when purchasing, like First Class Airmail. We did the only thing we could: we're starting the sale a week early! Through November 29, you can take an awesome 12% off of all items on the site*, including all bento and kitchen items, plush toys, figures, snack items, apparel and cosplay products, as well as the naughty stuff. In addition, the J-List staff has gone through and discounted some special items by up to 50%, including Sailor Moon, My Little Pony, and more. (Note that the 12% off sale doesn't cover grab bags, iTunes and PSN cards, gift certificates, or the specially selected sale items, though 99.5% of products are covered by the sale.)