Buddhist lucky and unlucky days in Japan, a funeral for a great anime character, and do you have a "good head"?

If you want to get married on the cheap in Japan, I suggest you do it on Butsumetsu ("Buddha's Death"), the unlucky day according to a 6-day cycle that can supposedly affect a person's luck, including cause you to get divorced if you aren't careful. This is one of the more prevalent Japanese superstitions, and it's common for people to consult a special calendar that indicates these Buddhist days before making big plans like getting married, starting construction of a house or taking delivery of a new car. People will always aim for the luckiest day (Taian, "Big Peace"), and avoid at all costs the unlucky day of Butsumetsu, and in certain industries, this can affect the cost of services provided, e.g. weddings get more expensive on Taian, but drop in price on Butsumetsu. Today (Saturday) is Sensho ("Early Victory"), when it's lucky to make important decisions in the morning but not at other times of the day. The other five days, which cycle in order, are Tomobiki ("Taking Away Together") when you must not have a funeral or the dead will take you away with them; Senpu ("Early Defeat") when the morning is considered unlucky; the all-around unlucky day Butsumetsu; lucky Taian; and Sekko ("Red Mouth") when the 12 o'clock hour only is considered a time of good luck.

Yesterday a Buddhist funeral was held for one of the most awesome fictional villains in Japan, Raoh, the ultra-strong oldest brother of Kenshiro from Fist of the North Star. One of the most popular (and violent) manga and anime series from the 1980s, Fist of the North Star is the tale of a post-Armageddon world in which all cities and technology have been destroyed and only those who can wield raw strength can survive. Amid all the destruction, four brothers battle each other using ancient Chinese martial arts techniques. The coolest of the bad guys of the series, Raoh has always been the most popular character, and his funeral came complete with a statue of Raoh on his horse, Kokuoh. The funeral was held at the Koyasan Temple in Tokyo and featured all the trimmings, from chanting Buddhist priests and incense and hundreds of fans who had gathered in the rain to pay their respects. It was part PR gimmick, of course, promoting the upcoming animated film that focuses on the death of Raoh. If you're a Fist of the North Star fan, whatever you do, don't watch The Road Warrior starring Mel Gibson or contemplate that the entire series is one big tribute/parody of the film, with various famous personas from the 80s (Stallone, Bruce Springstein, Boy George) added in for story content.

Has a Japanese person ever told you are "good head"? If so, it's a complement, although it might not sound like one. In Japanese, the phrase for "smart" (intelligent) is good head (atama ga ii), which sometimes gets carried over into English by Japanese who are still learning the language. The English word "smart" (sumaato) is used in Japanese to mean slender, well proportioned (as in, "That girl is very smart and stylish"). If someone says you have a bad head (atama ga warui), they're saying that you're stupid, the same meaning as that ubiquitous Japanese insult, baka. Some other phrases that make use of the word head include atama ga katai (hard-headed, stubborn), atama ga yawarakai ("head is soft" which means someone who is flexible and open-minded), and atama ga furui ("head is old," i.e. someone whose thinking is old-fashioned).

We've got a happy announcement for fans of Hirameki International's excellent visual novels and interactactive anime games. All games have been marked down in price by $10 or more, from the outstanding Ever 17 - Out of Infinity to the gorgeous gothic vampire tale Animamundi to the fantastic Ai Yori Aoshi double game and more. The interactive DVD games like Hourglass of Summer and Tea Society of a Witch are marked down too, to just $14.95. Why not pick up some of these great Hirameki titles today?

It's fun going to Tokyo and hitting the toy stores to look for things to order for J-List. This is the "Soft Tank" line of toys. They're awfully cute.

However, "you cannot know which toy is inside."

Really, really tiny manga that are actually printed correctly on those little pages.

Man, I am so ready to start smoking, just so I can carry around these cool Gundam lighters. Hyaku-shiki (the gold mech that Char/Quattro pilots)? A Zeon lighter? So cool.

Or if you want to be really esoteric, go for a ring with the Aniheim Electronics logo on it. This is the company that made the original Gundam RX-78.

An Incredible Otaku Journey, Earthquakes can be Fun, and Weird Accounting Tricks in Japanese

I got a reminder that Japan is very much a part of the Pacific Ring of Fire yesterday when a 6.9 quake woke me up and gave me a good shake. At the time I was staying at our "mansion" (apartment) at the foot of Mt. Asama, one of the most potentially active volcanoes in Japan, and I quickly looked out the window to make sure the mountain hadn't decided to go all Mordor on us. Aside from jittery nerves, there was no damage where I was, although plenty of older homes collapsed close to the epicenter, and one poor woman was killed by a falling stone lantern, a very "zen" way to go, I guess. Learning to not jump at every little earthquake is all part of living in a place like Japan, and it goes hand-in-hand with developing a taste for seafood and tofu, learning to never pour your own beer, getting used to wearing slippers that are three sizes too small, and being at peace with confined spaces that would make a Space Shuttle astronaut claustrophobic.

Over the weekend a friend and I went on the ultimate geeked-out road trip, traveling to Lake Kizaki in Nagano Prefecture, the setting for the two moe (mo-EH) anime series Please, Teacher! and Please, Twins! The first series is about a beautiful Pocky-eating alien who secretly marries one of the students at the local school, and the sequel is a dramatic love triangle between a boy and two girls that's complicated by the fact that one of the girls is the boy's long-lost twin sister, but none of them is sure which it is. (Twins is the better series if you have to pick just one -- besides being a really good story, it's got the best fan service ever seen. Wow, looks like it's all up on YouTube if you're curious and can stand the English dubbing.) Just about everything seen in the two shows is based on real places in the Lake Kizaki area, and otaku from all around Japan and the world make pilgrimages there, visiting their favorite landmarks and eating Pocky and Pretz, the two signature snacks from the shows. My wife snorted when she heard what we had planned, but no self-respecting Japanese female planning a trip to Europe would miss the chance to visit the Palace of Versailles to see the grandeur first introduced to them in the famous Rose of Versailles anime, or re-enact their favorite scenes from Roman Holiday in beautiful Rome, and my wife's been to both several times.

One aspect of running a business in Japan is developing language skills that I might otherwise never pick up. In addition to needing to be able to read "legalese" for signing licensing contracts and what not, I've had to learn the basic mechanics of accounting in Japanese, which is difficult since I don't understand it in English. As a general rule, legal institutions that work in the U.S. are also present in Japan, and if you have a concept in one country it will probably translate into something similar on the other end. Part of this comes from countries following the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles so that their laws can interoperate, but a lot of Japan's lock-step movement with the U.S. comes from a deeper tradition of generally following behind us in all things -- for example, Japan's version of our 401(k) is ingeniously named the "Japan 401(k)." I recently found one concept that exists in Japan which is quite different from the States. It's called gensen choshu and it means withholding income at the source, which is what happens when you get your paycheck with tax already taken out, but in Japan, taxes are pre- deducted in a wider range of situations. If we were to hire a programmer to do some work for us, we're required by law to pre-deduct his taxes when we pay him, hence for a $1000 job we'd pay him $850 and send the rest to the Tax Ministry in his name, presumably to keep the payment from going unreported. This is a minor inconvenience, but I was surprised to learn that investment income is also pre-deducted in the same way. So when my wife puts money in a CD at 1% interest (still considered a fairly good return in the bizarro world that is Japan), she actually only gets .85% from it, which means she's potentially losing up to a year of earnable interest on other investments she might make that year. I'm sure taxpayers would rise up and revolt over something like this in most countries, but sadly the Japanese mantra of sho ga nai ("it can't be helped") keeps people from demanding change.

J-List is proud to carry the Canon Wordtank, the electronic dictionary for serious students which I used myself for many years. Japan is a country that takes studying seriously, and the Wordtank is loaded with useful features to make learning a foreign language easy. Unlike virtually every other manufacturer, Canon's Wordtank line goes out of its way to be friendly to gaijin, with features like an English menu mode, the ability to look up single or groups of kanji on the screen (useful because it's common for a word you look up to be written with kanji students can't yet read), an English manual, and of course the ability to save words and kanji for later study. I also like the feature that shows you how to write kanji by animating the stroke order -- very handy. Just because the Wordtank is small doesn't mean it lacks brains -- inside its memory you can find 11 complete dictionaries. We've restocked the popular Wordtank G55 on the site now, ready for your immediate order!

The weather wasn't that good for a road trip, especially in a convertible, but we didn't care.

We drove quite far -- the trip was 500 km round trip, taking us through many beautiful rural mountains and highways.

After only getting lost a little, we eventually arrived at the lake.

It was easy to find all the landmarks thanks to the various otaku sites that document where everything is.

This is the Lawson from episode 1 where Miina talks with Maiku for the first time. The premise of the show is that Maiku (Mike), Miina and Karen are half Japanese since they've got blue eyes. Yet only two are related...

The fumikiri (train crossing) from the opening credits was the next stop in our wacky little journey.

Umino Kuchi Station is the veeeery rural train station that services the place, and the final scene of the series.

Here's the inside. It was eerie being here, since everything in the show was done with perfect accuracy. Kind of like how cool it would be to be allowed to walk around in the Bag End set that they built for Lord of the Rings, but a lot less so.

There was a mini-shrine put there by fans and a notebook where people wrote messages to each other at having come to this spot. Pictures, poems, people's emotions were all recorded.

Then we went to the Daily Yamazaki Store, which was the model for Herikawa Shoten, where the twins worked.

This is the nice lady who owned the place. Basically, after Please Teacher was such a success, a representative from Bandai came by one day and asked her if they could have permission to "shoot pictures of" her shop. She thought it was for a documentary and said okay. A year later, suddenly her shop has been transformed into Otaku Central, but she didn't seem to mind. She was happy to have an American she could talk with, since I guess most of the ones who venture by don't speak the language.

She had a map where people can write where they're from, write messages and everything.

There was only one thing left -- to located the house where the three lived. It turned out to be pathetically easy since there are only about 30 houses in this village.

I wanted to go talk with them and ask how they felt about being the most famous inaka house in all otakudom, but I didn't have the nerve.

Finally, we swung back to the playground, where I shot a picture of the sliding board. Then it was time to go home, back to reality, at least for a little while.

The man who created the Yamato theme song, all about the traditional game Karuta, and thoughts on corn soup

I've written before about how the meinichi (命日), the anniversary of a person's death, is very important in a Buddhist country like Japan, and once a person has passed on those left behind will remember him or her on this day. Today happens to be the meinichi of Hiroshi Miyagawa, a person who's had no small impact on Japan's animation industry, as well as myself. He was the composer who wrote the music for Space Cruiser Yamato, shown in the U.S. as Star Blazers, essentially the first anime series associated with the now-familiar concepts of dramatic, sequential stories with problems that are resolved and multi-faceted characters who die, fall in love and generally act like real people. Several years before John Williams gave us the music for Star Wars, Maestro Miyagawa showed the world what could be achieved with extremely melodramatic and high-quality music even in something as mundane as an animated series. His single most famous creation was the Yamato theme song, which he composed after being asked by Producer Nishizaki to envision "an iron ballad," and the song is regularly performed by marching bands from the Maritime Self-Defense Forces to my daughter's 4th grade class. The Yamato franchise, with its Gamilon-planet-bombs-as-allegory-to-World-War-II themes, was incredibly campy, but for many it was a first wonderful bridge to Japan.

If you love "corn potage," then get to Japan as fast as you can, since people here just can't get enough of creamed corn soup. Right now I'm sitting in Steak House Miya, a Japanese restaurant that serves both regular and "hamburg" steak, famous for a tangy daikon sauce that the server pours over your sizzling plate, then a napkin is draped over the whole thing to keep it from burning you as the sauce cooks into the meat. Beside my steak and plate of rice is a bowl of corn soup with corn flakes sprinkled on top, which tastes good enough, I guess. As an American, when I think of soup I think of the Campbell's classics like chicken noodle, tomato, and vegetable beef, but these are as alien here in Japan as Green Tea Butterscotch and Rose Flavored Gum are in most parts of the world. Types of soup that the Japanese prefer instead include creamed pumpkin or carrot soups, healthy wakame (seaweed) or miso soup, or if at an Italian restaurant, perhaps some minestrone. When you get sick in the U.S., most people think of eating chicken soup, but in Japan the most common remedies are drinking a tea with ginger in it or swallowing down a raw egg in sake -- yum.

I wrote last time about the traditional Japanese card game karuta, which gets its name from the Portuguese but is based on games played in the Imperial Court in ancient Kyoto. Karuta consists of two decks of cards, one featuring hiragana characters and another with poems or phrases that correspond to cards in the first deck. Two players scatter the hiragana cards on the floor randomly and assume a position that allows them to grab cards easily, then a third person starts reading the poems one by one. The most famous karuta game is the Hyakunin Isshu, which features poetry about one hundred historical figures in short tanka form. As kids hear one of the 1300-year-old poems -- perhaps the one about the poet Ki no Tomonori, which goes "In the peaceful light/Of the ever-shining sun/In the days of spring/Why do the cherry's new-blown blooms/Scatter like restless thoughts?" -- they grab the card that corresponds with that phrase before their opponent can find it, and whoever gets the most cards wins. Another popular variation played in our prefecture is Jomo Karuta, which substitutes poems about the beauty of Gunma, from the fiery Mt. Asama to the bustling hot springs resort at Ikaho. Playing karuta is good on many levels, since it teaches children to read, is competitive and fun to play, and it also instills them with a link to the past that I think Americans can't easily comprehend. It can be used to teach many things, too. For example, my daughter is learning the flute, and her teacher cleverly makes the kids play a version of karuta that teaches them musical terms, like da capo and staccato.

J-List has been involved with licensing and translating Japan's amazing PC dating-sim games for years, and we've built a great lineup of really amazing story- and character-centric games for bishoujo gaming fans that allow you to take your relationship with Japan to a whole new place. Our games are available in shrink-wrapped CD-ROM packages as well as Internet Download Editions, and there are titles for every taste, from cat girls to maids and highly evolved dramatic stories and more. We're happy to announce that we've completed our initial testing with Microsoft's new Windows Vista operating system (32-bit), and are happy to announce that all our games are compatible with the new platform. So whether you're using Vista now or plan to in the future, our great dating-sim games will be compatible.

Remember that J-List carries the extremely high-end school uniforms for guys and girls made by Matsukameya of Nagoya, a company with an outstanding reputation in Japan. Our sailor uniforms are all custom made to your exact size specifications and available in many styles, making it easy for you to have the coolest costume for the summer anime conventions. We also carry a really cool item: authentic Japanese school bags, the kind high school girls carry to school, made of high quality materials and loaded with pockets to hold all your stuff.

All about Mt. Fuji, how taking responsibility can lead to cleaner bathrooms, and thoughts on bathing and how the brain works

You can't think of Japan without also thinking of the country's tallest and most famous mountain, Mt. Fuji. An active volcano 12,388 ft (3,776 meters) high that rises gracefully from the prefectures of Shizuoka and Yamanashi, Mt. Fuji is an incredibly beautiful image of Japan. In Japanese its name is Fuji-san, with 'san' being the correct pronunciation for the character for mountain, although it's read 'yama' in other situations according to a secret code that foreigners can never seem to figure out. Along with taking pictures of beer vending machines and making that first pilgrimage to Kinkaku-ji, the Golden Pagoda of Kyoto, climbing Mt. Fuji is a popular activity among visitors to Japan, and if you're ever planning to be here during the climbing season (July 1 to August 31), you should give it a try. You start from the 5th level, the highest point that vehicles are allowed on the mountain, and take one of three paths up to the topmost 10th level. As you ascend, you go rapidly from the middle of summer to the middle of winter, so you have to have lots of extra clothes with you to put on as the temperature drops. You continue to climb, passing the various stations along the way and rasping as the air gets thinner and thinner. When I did my ascent, I slept for a few hours at one of the little inns that are at each station, and woke up at 4 am to finish the rest of the climb and arrive at the top at dawn. It was, of course, a breathtaking experience. Traditionally mountains are associated with Shinto, the indigenous religion of Japan, and Mt. Fuji has been considered a holy place for thousands of years.

Today my wife and I ate at a restaurant that serves my favorite food, Hamburg Doria, which is a hamburger (Salisbury) steaks baked inside a rice and white sauce casserole. (Aside: one of the more bizarre aspects of Japan is that hamburger meat and a frankfurter without a bun are called hamburg and frankfurt respectively.) I used the bathroom and was pleasantly surprised to find it very clean. I saw the reason for this immediately: there was a clipboard hung by the door with the name of the employee in charge of cleaning, with an indication of when the room had last been checked along with his initials. It was an example of the Japanese word sekinin (seh-ki-NIN), meaning taking responsibility for something: by making sure that not only the manager but the customers see how often good old Negishi-san has cleaned the bathroom, the management could ensure that he'd do his darnedest to make everything was done right. I've seen this system used in other places, too, for example in the Gainax Phone Club I belong to, which lets me get little Flash animations from Gainax anime shows for my phone, such as one of Asuka saying "Anta baka?!" to me when I go to make a call. Each section of the club's site displays the name of the Gainax employee responsible for creating interesting content, which no doubt plays a role in making sure each employee does his best. I'd have to say that taking responsibility is something the Japanese are very good at.

Being so busy with J-List, it seems I never seem to have enough time to unwind in the evenings. Fortunately, bathing is a big part of daily life here, and by taking a good book into the bath with me I can get clean and get my reading done at the same time, although it makes for some funny looks in the public bath. I'm currently working on a fascinating book by Carl Sagan in which he explores the brain and how it evolved. In a chapter about how memory works, he discusses how its possible to wake up after a dream so vivid we're sure we'll be able to remember in the morning, yet due to the way that our brains are wired, the memory of the dream invariably slips away from us, unless we write it down to talk about it with someone. I can certainly say that studying a foreign language like Japanese enables you to discover of these interesting limitations of the brain, too. For example, merely thinking about a kanji character or a vocabulary word won't force it to be stored in longer-term memory. To internalize new information you need to attack it from several directions, perhaps by recalling the information from flashcards or a system like the "Zebra Check Set" study system, writing example sentences, or the hands-down best way to never forget a new word or grammatical point: try to use it in casual conversation but fail miserably, embarrassing yourself in the process. It's not fun, but at least you'll never forget that word.

Do you have a blog or website, and do you like dig J-List's brand of fun Japanese pop culture? If so, then we hope you'll join the Friends of J-List affiliate program, a great way for you to link directly to products you think are cool and get paid back from J-List either in cash or store credit, your option. Our affiliate members tell us our program is outstanding, very easy to use, with all orders listed very clearly. Since all graphics are hosted by us, you don't even need to spend any bandwidth, and best of all, J-List's commissions are the best in the industry. We'd love to have you join the Friends of J-List! For more information, see the link on our site.

Here's the Hamburg Doria. This is at a restaurant called Flying Garden.

Hmm, can you feel the heat of the ceramic bowl as the rice bakes to the sides? Juwa juwa juwa... (that's the sound of the meat still cooking)

Here's the clipboard in the bathroom. Negishi-san is really doing a great job.

Confusing sign. It doesn't have anything to do with men, or soul, or Seoul, or Menthol. The Japanese title translates as "Soul of Noodles" (men in Japanese).

The origins of Japan's cult of "studying," more warm weather for Tokyo, and the latest in Otaku Culture from Japan

Japan is a very seasonal place, with specific things done only during the appropriate times of year. August is when you wear a yukata (cotton kimono) and hit the summer festivals, and if you want to enjoy tsukimi or sitting outdoors and taking in the beauty of the full moon, October is the time for that. Right now it's "desk season," when furniture retailers throughout Japan display high-quality study desks for the new crop of first graders who start school in April. Japan is very much a meritocracy, and the way to get ahead in life is benkyo (studying), and so kids are taught from a very early age that hitting the books is a good way to show your thanks to your parents for bringing you into the world. The desks themselves are really very well designed, made of higher quality wood than the desk I have at J-List, featuring built-in bright lights for reading and many small drawers for kids to organize their study materials. They're also designed to grow with the user, with cute plastic mats with anime character art that can be removed when the child gets older. Buying a study desk is event in every child's school life, and it's a cold-hearted parent or grandparent who can resist buying the best for little Taro or Hanako. Is $700 a lot for a study desk for a first grader? I've lived in Japan so long I'm really not sure.

Speaking of seasons, Japan's warmest winter in living memory continues, with many a balmy afternoon -- I was even able to put the top down on my Miata a few times last month, usually unthinkable in February. It's been so warm that the kaika or first blooming of the sakura trees, which is reported on as a point of national pride by the news media here, happened a full month earlier than usual. Except for the strong winds called kara-kaze that blow down from the Japan Alps every few days -- which sound so similar to the F/A-18 jets that race over our house in San Diego from the former "Top Gun" airbase that I sometimes forget whether I'm in Japan or the States -- it's been really turn-off-the-computer-and-go-play-catch-with-my-son weather.

As Japan's general fascination with otaku culture continues to grow, one word you hear a lot is Akiba-kei, which literally means "related to Akihabara," the region of Tokyo traditionally known for its electronics stores but increasingly coming to serve as a center for anime, manga and cosplay culture. There are dozens of "Maid Cafe" establishments where you can go and have cake and coffee served to you by a beautiful girl in a maid outfit, and this category is always morphing into sub-genres, such as Imoto Cafe where all the girls pretend to be your younger sister and call you Oniichan, and Tsundere Cafe where the girls act like stereotypical bitchy-but-cute characters found in most every anime series these days. The latest potential boom in Akihabara might be the Mimikaki Cafe, where a beautiful woman will lay your weary head on her lap and spend thirty minutes with a traditional bamboo ear pick, gently scraping the ear wax out and taking all your cares away. If you're not lucky enough to be in the Akihabara area this week, we've got some substitutes available at J-List that might help you experience this fun side of Japan.

J-List carries PC dating-sim games, fun anime games, all carefully translated into English and compatible with English Windows computers, with stories for all tastes and genres. Today we're happy to announce that the latest title from Hirameki International, Pieces of Wonder, is in stock and shipping. A bold and interesting game in which you must guide three girls -- Amane, Syouko and Taki -- as they battle an alien race intent on taking over our world. A great RPG+ADV with real combat as well as adventures to resolve with each of the girls. Get it now!

This month's Japanese adult video actress is the delicious Arisa Kanno, the elegant and stylish actress performing exclusively with Soft on Demand and their related companies. Arisa-chan was born December 9, 1984, in Tokyo. She's 160 (5'2"), and her "three sizes" are 82 (B), 56 (W) and 82 (H), making for a fabulous hourglass shape that's incidentally called kubire (koo-BI-reh) in Japanese. Her hobbies are running and playing volleyball, her favorite type of man is the strong, self-confident type, and her dream is to run in the Honolulu Marathon someday and study abroad in America.

Also, we've picked the new "H-Game of the Month" and it's a really fun title, Gibo: Stepmother's Sin, a dark exploration of some great themes from Guilty and Peach Princess. You grew up a happy boy, until the day you came home and found your mother in the arms of a man who wasn't your father. Her unfaithfulness destroyed your happy home, and now you are mistrustful of the very word "mother." But one day your father announces that he's getting remarried, but instead of being old, your new stepmother is young and beautiful. How will you test her to see if she's any different from the rest? Available this month only at a special price!

Moseying around the kids' desks while shopping for a new chair for myself. A cute little girl came up to me and said "Hello!" then ran back to her parents. This desk is for little fans of One Piece.

Here's a Super Mario desk for studious gamers.

This being Japan, there's silly English all over the place.

When my son was smaller, he was a Mushi King type, definitely. In case you don't know it, all Japanese kids just love beetles of all types.

Understanding Japanese society through business cards, some fun Japanese words that are pregnant with meaning, and all about Shinjuku

I was making up some Japanese business cards for one of my employees yesterday, trying different layouts and fonts to see what looked best. As I worked on the design for the "name card" (as business cards are called here), something seemed wrong to me, but I couldn't put my finger on it. Then it hit me: I'd left off one of the most important parts, the job title. Organization is very important in a place like Japan, and just as the entire country is ordered into prefectures, cities, towns and villages, with no unincorporated areas anywhere, people are generally expected to fit into pre-defined slots, e.g. programmer, graphic designer, accountant, city employee, and so on. Everyone must have an occupation associated with their name for people to know how to categorize them, and when proper categories aren't available, allowances are made, such as the recent additions of sub-groups like "freeter," a person who only works part-time jobs without ever officially joining a company as a full-time employee or starting a career; or NEET, a term for a young person living with their parents and "Not in Educational, Employment or Training," i.e. loafing and surfing the net all day. When I started J-List, I encountered some opposition from my wife's family, who didn't think it was a good idea to trade a secure career teaching English for the uncertainty of starting a business on the Internet. I realized later that this was because the concept of an "entrepreneur" was not defined as a valid category in their minds, and they didn't know how to feel about a son-in-law who didn't fit neatly into one of the pre-defined slots...which suited my American sense of individualism just fine.

Any way you look at it, English is a convoluted language, with grammar and vocabulary taken haphazardly from many sources, including Olde English, French, Greek, Latin and listening to young people these days, Japanese. The Japanese language is much the same, originally based on the indigenous (pre-6th century) language of the Yamato people dwelling in the Nara Valley, influenced by 1500 years of kanji and 250 years of national isolation, and then exposed to a huge amount of foreign loan words in modern times. There's a category of four-syllable (or four kana) words used here that are so pregnant with meaning they boggle the mind, and as is often the case with nihongo, you can't ask yourself why they mean what they mean but must instead just accept them as gestalt units. First is sekkaku (seh-KAH-koo), which carries the implication of having gone to great trouble to do something for someone only to have them not appreciate your efforts. Another fun word is yappari (yah-PAH-ree), which means "just as I thought" or "as I expected" or "Aha! I knew you'd be trying to peek into the girl's bath!" When you learn something that surprises you, you might use the phrase naruhodo (nah-roo-hoh-doh), which can be translated as "wow, I didn't know that" or "I see your point," and on a TV drama, a character picking up some information from subtle, unspoken clues might mutter this word to themselves as a signal to viewers that he'd found another piece of a puzzle. Finally there's tonikaku (TOH-ni-kah-koo), which just means "at any rate" "regardless of that fact" or just "anyway." When my bilingual son was growing up, he got confused and accidentally combined English and Japanese stems to create the hybrid word "toni-way" (tonikaku + anyway), which has been a running joke in our family ever since.

One of the first things I did after arriving in Japan back in 1991 was hop on a train to Tokyo to explore Shinjuku, one of the most famous parts of Japan's sprawling capital, which I'd only glimpsed through the window of manga and anime until that time. One of Tokyo's 23 wards, Shinjuku is a bustling mini-city unto itself, with sprawling department and electronics stores, restaurants and drinking establishments. Because it happens to contain some of the only stable land in the earthquake-prone area, virtually all of Tokyo's high-rise buildings are located in Shinjuku, including the monstrous 48-story Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building (Tokyo's "city hall") and virtually everything seen in the film Lost in Translation. Shinjuku Station is the busiest in the world, with a mind-boggling 2 million passengers passing through each day as they rush to get to work or home. The station is so massive that the only thing to do is divide Shinjuku into quadrants based on what train exit you're using, e.g. take the east exit to score some good Indian food, or the south exit to get to that one good bookstore, and so on. Shinjuku's Kabuki-cho section is one of Japan's leading drinking districts, too, and a complex economy has formed around the thousands of tired salarymen who get rid of their daily stress there, throwing some back with co-workers before heading home.

All about Japan's most enigmatic food natto, how reading your Hemingway can help you under modern otaku culture, and a happy day for a town in Japan

The fermented soybeans known as natto (NAT-toh) are one of the most famous foods in Japan, enjoyed throughout the country, although people from Osaka supposedly dislike it. Eaten by a wide swath of Japanese from children to the elderly and everyone in between, the sticky beans are usually mixed with yellow mustard and eaten over white rice. There are many legends about how natto was first discovered, but the most famous seems to be that in the year 1083 the general Yoshiie Minamoto was on campaign with 100,000 troops near a town called Mito, and stopped at an inn to rest. Some soybeans had been steamed and wrapped in straw for the horses to eat, and these fermented naturally while sitting on the floor of the stable. Some of the soldiers tried the beans and liked the taste, so they offered some to their lord, who loved it, which is where the name natto ("offered beans") comes from. Last week a TV show created an instant rush on natto when it broadcast a report that said that, based on hard data from the U.S., eating natto twice a day would lead to losing 2-3 kg per week. Although natto does have various health benefits such as reducing blood clots and lowering cholesterol, the show's fabrication of actual data was another example of the Japanese media's love of yarase (yah-rah-say), or faking on the air to get good ratings. If you're "natto curious" but don't think you can get past the unique smell, we recommend miso soup instead, which possess most of the health benefits and is generally more palatable to gaijin (and we've got it in stock).

"Aficion means passion. An aficionado is one who is passionate about the bull-fights. All the good bull-fighters stayed at Montoya’s hotel; that is, those with aficion stayed there. The commercial bull-fighters stayed once, perhaps, and then did not come back..."

It's always interesting to study how language and the brain interact to create our perceptions. It seems that every once in a while an idea comes along that's so new and unique that it can't be described with an existing word, and the only solution is to import a more fitting one from another language. No word could illustrate Hemingway's views on bullfighting as well as the term aficionado, one who has aficion for the sport, and his use of the term gives an unforgettable flavor to his fiction. In a similar way, the rise of Japanese pop culture in the 1990s brought with it a slew of new words, like otaku (an aficionado of Japanese pop culture), anime (animation from Japan, as separate from animation from other countries) and doujinshi (fan-created comics that pay tribute to popular TV shows), which capture the spirit of new Japan-focused culture better than any English term could. There are many examples of the reverse occurring, too, situations when Japanese are forced to reach into English to find a word that will describe just the idea they want to express, and it's common to hear nihongo peppered with words like innobeeshon, kurietibiti, taagetto, and appiiaru pointo (that's "innovation" "creativity" "target" and "appeal point" in case it wasn't clear). These concepts could be expressed using Japanese words, but the nuance would be totally different.

The city of Tomioka, Gunma Prefecture, just down the road from J-List, is overjoyed right now: the sprawling Tomioka Silk Mill has been officially designated a World Heritage Site by United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. One of the first modern factories of its kind in Japan, the silk-reeling mill was a built using French know-how in 1871 during Japan's march towards modernization, and is a symbol of the country's early industrial days. If you know anything about the Japanese, it's that they like to be recognized internationally, and getting the official nod from UNESCO brought great happiness to the people of the city. The television news was filled with images of people dancing in the streets and shooting off fireworks in the middle of the day over their new official status.

Remember that J-List carries a very warm, fuzzy thing from Japan: Totoro and Kiki's Delivery Service blankets that are great for curling up with on the sofa. Japan's acrylic blankets are incredibly soft to the touch and will provide your family with years of great service (we use them at my house too). However, our stock of these blankets is very limited and when they're gone they'll be gone for good. Check our J-List's lineup of anime blankets from Japan now.