Hello all. Apologies on posting this late -- I plum forgot to post the blog on Friday when I finished the J-List update, because I was in a hurry to take my kids to the onsen (Japanese hot springs) on Friday before it got too late. Boy is my face red!
Today's J-List post is below. You can also read it on the J-List website or the JBOX.com site.
When you learn a language, you also learn a lot about how your own brain works, especially how vocabulary words and concepts are accepted by the mind. I'm sure that most people have trouble memorizing Japanese names, as they can have a lot of letters and look strange to you if you're not used to them. As I studied Japanese I found that this got easier partially because I was able to "store" the names in my mind first as Japanese syllables, and later as kanji. If you learn a name like Matsushima, it looks like a jumble of letters, and this is very hard for the brain to fit into memory. All words in Japanese are made up of syllables, and if you're familiar with kana writing systems this name goes from ten symbols to just four: MA TSU SHI MA. Once you can read the actual kanji ("pine tree" and "island"), it's down to two, which is much easier for the brain to file away. So all you need to do to memorize a Japanese name is study the language for a couple of years. ^_^ Here's an example of how two common names look in romaji (the Roman alphabet), hiragana and kanji.
The Japanese do remove shoes before entering a house, but like other aspects of Japan, it's not quite as simple as that. Two core concepts in Japanese society are uchi (in-group, or inside a person's home) and soto (outside of the group, or outside of one's home); shoes are removed when you enter a house because you don't want to bring the dirt and mud from the outside into your uchi. Indoors, slippers are usually worn as a kind of "indoor shoes," but if crossing from a western-style room (with wood flooring, the Japanese can't get enough of wood flooring) to a tatami room, the slippers are removed, in effect making a Japanese-style room inside a modern house a kind of "uchi within an uchi" or a special place that's somehow more "inside" than the rest of the home. The toilet is also a special area, and there are special toilet slippers which you put on when you enter the bathroom, usually with little pictures of Cupid peeing printed on them. In Japanese schools, students arrive from home and put their shoes in their assigned shoes box, changing into special shoes for wearing inside the school. At my kids' school there's a place where kids must go from one building to another, and to solve the problems of having them change their shoes so often they cleverly covered the sidewalk with a roof, in effect defining the outdoor concrete walk as part of the "inside" of the two buildings. Students who play indoor sports like basketball always have two pairs of shoes: one for walking outside and a pair they only wear inside the gym.
The Japanese language has a great many kotowaza or old proverbs, recounting the wisdom of past generations. It's fun for gaijin to study these proverbs, because no one expects a foreigner to know archaic Japanese sayings. One of my favorite kotowaza is ningen banji saiou-ga-uma which means "All things are like Saiou's horse." This refers to an old Chinese story about a man named Saiou whose horse broke his leg -- making everyone say how unfortunate he was. Because he had no horse, though, he didn't have to go off to battle to be killed, so this was a good thing. The moral of the story is, when something good or bad happens, no one can say for sure if it is truly a good or bad thing in the end. Another proverb you hear a lot is ishi no ue ni mo san-nen which is translatable as "Three years sitting on a stone makes it comfortable." In other words, if you're going to try something new, keep at it for at least three years before you give up, so you know if you really liked it or not. If you want to see more Japanese proverbs, here's an interesting page.
Sunday, February 06, 2005
Wednesday, February 02, 2005
Let's build a space station with Legos!
Hello all. All is going well here in Japan, although it's on the cold side. I finally have a good connection between my home and work, so I can get work done at home almost as efficiently as when I'm at work, which saves me hauling my cookies out to J-List at midnight to do some database work. Every little bit helps.
One of the fun aspects of living in Japan is getting to watch Japanese television, which is always entertaining. One show we like is TV Champion, which pits contestants against each other to show off their amazing talents, whether it's remodeling a home using things people have thrown away, baking bread in the shape of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, showing off knowledge of Disney trivia or creating works of art with origami. Last week's show was a special treat, with three dedicated "Lego artists" making amazing creations with Lego blocks, everything from a Phoenix with flames coming out of its tail to a 3-D aquarium. For the finale, the winner created a giant car-shaped kid's meal found at family restaurants in Japan (it's called BuuBuu Lunch, BuuBuu meaning "zoom zoom"), which opens up into a complex underground world for little Lego children to play in. My own favorite entry was a 3-D space station made with Legos, with docking ports for the Space Shuttle, working lights, and compartments where Lego spacenoids could play "zero gravity soccer." See the fabulous creations here (the page is in Japanese).
Convenience stores (combini in Japanese) are fun to check out when you come to Japan. There are dozens of convenient store chains here, dominated by Seven Eleven Japan, which created the category in 1974 by adapting an American concept with Japanese-style distribution practices. Some other popular convenience stores are Lawson, MiniStop, Circle K Japan, Sunkus (the name is a merging of "sun" and "thanks"), and Yamazaki Daily Store. Convenience stores offer many products, including Japanese-style food (bento and onigiri/rice balls), various bread products (both sliced white bread and various specialty breads like Melon Pan and Curry Pan), drinks like canned coffee and bottled tea, all manners of candy and gum, aloe yogurt, and inexpensive toys for kids. The concept of personal checks doesn't exist in Japan at all, and most people pay their monthly bills by taking them to their local convenience store where they can be read by the cash register. In the winter, I love to go to a convenience store and get niku-man ("niku-mahn"), a Chinese bun which is basically meat inside steamed bread -- yum. There are microwave burritos to be had here, but be warned: with ingredients scrambled egg & ham or pizza and sausage, they might surprise you. Like Japanese banks, convenience stores here compete by trying to appear as similar to each other as possible, and by and large, you won't find something in one chain that's not available everywhere. Recently, Japan's combini industry has been moving towards large, customer-friendly parking lots, closing stores with smaller plots of land and creating dozens of dry cleaners, used car dealerships and "late night bookstores" located in buildings that obviously used to house convenience stores.
Most people know that in Japan, shoes are removed before you enter a house. This is done because to the Japanese, there's nothing dirtier than things associated with feet. Japanese houses always have a lowered section near the front door called the genkan, a convenient place to leave your shoes so they'll be there when you need to go out again (we built one into our house in America). Japanese know that Americans leave their shoes on inside the house from watching American television, and it looks very funny to them. While watching Shrek with my son, he commented on the fact that Princess Fiona was in bed with her shoes on, something unthinkable in Japan. Inside the house, Japanese usually wear slippers, and if a gaijin goes to a Japanese person's house, the Japanese person will give him slippers to wear, even if they're much too small for his feet. Although we try to "live like Americans" when we go to the U.S., most of my Japanese family (including myself) quietly leave our shoes near the front door when back home -- it just feels to odd to walk on carpet with shoes.
One of the fun aspects of living in Japan is getting to watch Japanese television, which is always entertaining. One show we like is TV Champion, which pits contestants against each other to show off their amazing talents, whether it's remodeling a home using things people have thrown away, baking bread in the shape of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, showing off knowledge of Disney trivia or creating works of art with origami. Last week's show was a special treat, with three dedicated "Lego artists" making amazing creations with Lego blocks, everything from a Phoenix with flames coming out of its tail to a 3-D aquarium. For the finale, the winner created a giant car-shaped kid's meal found at family restaurants in Japan (it's called BuuBuu Lunch, BuuBuu meaning "zoom zoom"), which opens up into a complex underground world for little Lego children to play in. My own favorite entry was a 3-D space station made with Legos, with docking ports for the Space Shuttle, working lights, and compartments where Lego spacenoids could play "zero gravity soccer." See the fabulous creations here (the page is in Japanese).
Convenience stores (combini in Japanese) are fun to check out when you come to Japan. There are dozens of convenient store chains here, dominated by Seven Eleven Japan, which created the category in 1974 by adapting an American concept with Japanese-style distribution practices. Some other popular convenience stores are Lawson, MiniStop, Circle K Japan, Sunkus (the name is a merging of "sun" and "thanks"), and Yamazaki Daily Store. Convenience stores offer many products, including Japanese-style food (bento and onigiri/rice balls), various bread products (both sliced white bread and various specialty breads like Melon Pan and Curry Pan), drinks like canned coffee and bottled tea, all manners of candy and gum, aloe yogurt, and inexpensive toys for kids. The concept of personal checks doesn't exist in Japan at all, and most people pay their monthly bills by taking them to their local convenience store where they can be read by the cash register. In the winter, I love to go to a convenience store and get niku-man ("niku-mahn"), a Chinese bun which is basically meat inside steamed bread -- yum. There are microwave burritos to be had here, but be warned: with ingredients scrambled egg & ham or pizza and sausage, they might surprise you. Like Japanese banks, convenience stores here compete by trying to appear as similar to each other as possible, and by and large, you won't find something in one chain that's not available everywhere. Recently, Japan's combini industry has been moving towards large, customer-friendly parking lots, closing stores with smaller plots of land and creating dozens of dry cleaners, used car dealerships and "late night bookstores" located in buildings that obviously used to house convenience stores.
Most people know that in Japan, shoes are removed before you enter a house. This is done because to the Japanese, there's nothing dirtier than things associated with feet. Japanese houses always have a lowered section near the front door called the genkan, a convenient place to leave your shoes so they'll be there when you need to go out again (we built one into our house in America). Japanese know that Americans leave their shoes on inside the house from watching American television, and it looks very funny to them. While watching Shrek with my son, he commented on the fact that Princess Fiona was in bed with her shoes on, something unthinkable in Japan. Inside the house, Japanese usually wear slippers, and if a gaijin goes to a Japanese person's house, the Japanese person will give him slippers to wear, even if they're much too small for his feet. Although we try to "live like Americans" when we go to the U.S., most of my Japanese family (including myself) quietly leave our shoes near the front door when back home -- it just feels to odd to walk on carpet with shoes.
Monday, January 31, 2005
Just another Manic Monday
Hello all. It's a cold Monday today, and we're all very busy at J-List, counting stock. Today is our inventory day, the last day of our fiscal year, so we had to count...everything. That means counting every gumball, every pack of Black Black, every bukkake DVD. It's quite a lot of work, although I had the update to take myself away from it.
Today's J-List post is below. You can also read it on the J-List website or the JBOX.com site.
February is almost upon us, and that means one thing to retailers in Japan: time to push chocolate molds, cake decorations and other Valentines Day products. Valentines Day in Japan is a little different from what you might be used to: here, women give chocolate to men, and February 14th is a day when a girl who has a crush on a boy can confess her feelings while giving him some home-made chocolates, a popular plot in anime. It's also a kind of day of giving thanks, when daughters and wives give something special to fathers and husbands as a way of saying otsukare-sama (oh-TSKA-rei-sah-mah, "thanks for working so hard for us"). In companies, women often feel the pressure to give chocolate to the males in the office, which is called giri choco (obligation chocolate). Starbucks jumps on the chocolate wagon, too, this year offering a limited Marshmallow Mocha Latte, with fluffy white marshmallows shaped like hearts. Men who receive chocolate must give a gift in return on March 14, dubbed White Day. J-List stocks a large variety of delicious things to eat, including many varieties of chocolate. Check out what we've got in stock!
February is also test-taking time in Japan, when millions of Japanese take juken, the dreaded entrance exams for high schools and universities. Because high school isn't part of compulsory education, students must apply there just like universities, with competition for the better schools very fierce. For the past year, students in their third years of junior high school and high school, respectively, have been cramming information into their heads as quickly as possible, usually attending juku (night schools) to help their studies. The juken tests are a big part of the reason why Japanese are often seen as intelligent but not always able to express themselves abstractly, since memorizing raw facts is what's important on entrance exams, not how they're linked together. My wife, for example, can tell you the date the Kamakura shoganate was founded (1192), but she can't explain what its overall importance in Japanese history (it was the first time Japan was unified under a feudal military society, which planted the seeds for the structure of the Edo Period later). On the other hand, I know first hand the motivational power of having a fixed goal can have, and got a lot out of passing each level of the Japanese Ability Test, even if it was a Japanese-style test.
Although most Japanese aren't fluent in English, the English language does play a big part in daily life, a source of new vocabulary, slang, and cute names for products like "Melty Kiss." When Japanese import words from English, they often simplify them so they're easier for them to digest. An athlete in Japan is a "sportsman," and a photographer is a "cameraman," even if he's using a still camera -- very logical if you think about it. Want to enjoy driving with the wind in your hair? Buy an "open car" like the Mazda Miata, called Roadster in Japan, although 100% of Japanese think the car is called Road-Star from the way it's pronounced. In 1999, Japan passed its first automobile child seat law, requiring that all parents put their child in a "baby chair" while driving a car. Cellular phones are everywhere in Japan now, but not so long ago most people carried "pocket bells" or pagers. And in the summer, I like to eat "soft cream" (soft-serve ice cream) and enjoy a trip with the kids in a "camp car" (RV). These words are dangerous for foreigners because we get too used to using them and then go home and embarrass ourselves by pulling them out in mixed conversation.
Today's J-List post is below. You can also read it on the J-List website or the JBOX.com site.
February is almost upon us, and that means one thing to retailers in Japan: time to push chocolate molds, cake decorations and other Valentines Day products. Valentines Day in Japan is a little different from what you might be used to: here, women give chocolate to men, and February 14th is a day when a girl who has a crush on a boy can confess her feelings while giving him some home-made chocolates, a popular plot in anime. It's also a kind of day of giving thanks, when daughters and wives give something special to fathers and husbands as a way of saying otsukare-sama (oh-TSKA-rei-sah-mah, "thanks for working so hard for us"). In companies, women often feel the pressure to give chocolate to the males in the office, which is called giri choco (obligation chocolate). Starbucks jumps on the chocolate wagon, too, this year offering a limited Marshmallow Mocha Latte, with fluffy white marshmallows shaped like hearts. Men who receive chocolate must give a gift in return on March 14, dubbed White Day. J-List stocks a large variety of delicious things to eat, including many varieties of chocolate. Check out what we've got in stock!
February is also test-taking time in Japan, when millions of Japanese take juken, the dreaded entrance exams for high schools and universities. Because high school isn't part of compulsory education, students must apply there just like universities, with competition for the better schools very fierce. For the past year, students in their third years of junior high school and high school, respectively, have been cramming information into their heads as quickly as possible, usually attending juku (night schools) to help their studies. The juken tests are a big part of the reason why Japanese are often seen as intelligent but not always able to express themselves abstractly, since memorizing raw facts is what's important on entrance exams, not how they're linked together. My wife, for example, can tell you the date the Kamakura shoganate was founded (1192), but she can't explain what its overall importance in Japanese history (it was the first time Japan was unified under a feudal military society, which planted the seeds for the structure of the Edo Period later). On the other hand, I know first hand the motivational power of having a fixed goal can have, and got a lot out of passing each level of the Japanese Ability Test, even if it was a Japanese-style test.
Although most Japanese aren't fluent in English, the English language does play a big part in daily life, a source of new vocabulary, slang, and cute names for products like "Melty Kiss." When Japanese import words from English, they often simplify them so they're easier for them to digest. An athlete in Japan is a "sportsman," and a photographer is a "cameraman," even if he's using a still camera -- very logical if you think about it. Want to enjoy driving with the wind in your hair? Buy an "open car" like the Mazda Miata, called Roadster in Japan, although 100% of Japanese think the car is called Road-Star from the way it's pronounced. In 1999, Japan passed its first automobile child seat law, requiring that all parents put their child in a "baby chair" while driving a car. Cellular phones are everywhere in Japan now, but not so long ago most people carried "pocket bells" or pagers. And in the summer, I like to eat "soft cream" (soft-serve ice cream) and enjoy a trip with the kids in a "camp car" (RV). These words are dangerous for foreigners because we get too used to using them and then go home and embarrass ourselves by pulling them out in mixed conversation.
Friday, January 28, 2005
Various ways to say "Menstruation" in Japanese
Hello all. Kind of tired today, as it's Friday and a rough one at that. But the weekend is near, so near...
Today's J-List post is below. You can also read it on the J-List website or the JBOX.com site.
It's been said that Japan is the only country that cares what its foreign population thinks, and I've definitely seen this to be true. Books about Japan written by foreigners who live here are often translated into Japanese and sell briskly, and the nightly broadcast of World Business Satellite wouldn't be complete without the nerdy gaijin analyst from Morgan Stanley giving his view of the recent movements in the market to round out the Japanese commentators. I've definitely seen that my own comments seem to carry a lot more weight than those of the average Japanese. Smoking is common in Japan, and it's not rare for restaurants to not even offer non-smoking sections, but two restaurants we frequent recently converted part of their space, almost definitely (according to my Japanese wife) because of polite comments I, being a foreigner, had made to the staff about cigarette smoke. Another time, I went to a restaurant and found the restroom to be a little on the smelly side. I carefully mentioned this to the manager, and when I went back a month later, I was surprised to find the restroom had been completely renovated (or as they say in Japan, "reformed"). Maybe my comment had nothing to do with this, but I have my doubts. Japanese people usually seem to hold the concept of gaman (patience, tolerance) to be a good one, stoically enduring a bad situation rather than trying to change it. Personally, I prefer to try to make the world a better place when I can...
Tokyo is the sprawling capital of Japan, home to 12 million people, a number which rises by several million during the day as people commute to their jobs from the surrounding areas. It's not a city at all, but one of Japan's 47 prefectures, although it's got a special status as a "metropolis," not unlike the District of Columbia in the U.S. Inside Tokyo there are 23 ku (wards), 26 shi (cities), 5 machi (towns) and 8 mura (villages), and my Tokyo friends tell me it's cooler to live in one of the wards since you get a phone number that starts with 03, not one of the inferior ones that start with 04. Some of the more famous areas of Tokyo are Shinjuku, a shopping and business area with many famous anime landmarks; Shibuya, a hip area for young people and home of Japan's most famous dog statue; Harajuku, where people dress like they do in FRUiTs magazine; stylish Ginza, home of Japan's only Apple Store; and Akihabara, where people come to buy electronics and eat in "cosplay cafes" (where the waitress dress in interesting costumes).
One of the interesting features of Japanese are the numbers of euphemisms they use for embarrassing things. Cute slang words are usually substituted for terms referring to various parts of the body, or else kanji characters are created to make a stand-in word, like combining the characters for "shadow" and "stem" to refer to that part of a man. There are so many ways to refer to woman's gekkei (menstruation) that I've actually never heard the normal term used even once. They include seiri (which simply means "biology"), okyakusama ga kiteiru ("I've got a guest staying with me"), hatabi ("flag day," in reference to the Japanese flag), and from a few years back, anne no hi or Anne's Day, something to do with the Diary of Anne Frank. A useful catch-all euphemism for just about anything is are (ah-rei), which literally means "that one over there" but can refer to any object you don't want to name openly. Another famous Japanese euphemism, as any anime fan knows, is the letter H, pronounced with a Japanese accent (ecchi), which refers to anything to do with sex.
Today's J-List post is below. You can also read it on the J-List website or the JBOX.com site.
It's been said that Japan is the only country that cares what its foreign population thinks, and I've definitely seen this to be true. Books about Japan written by foreigners who live here are often translated into Japanese and sell briskly, and the nightly broadcast of World Business Satellite wouldn't be complete without the nerdy gaijin analyst from Morgan Stanley giving his view of the recent movements in the market to round out the Japanese commentators. I've definitely seen that my own comments seem to carry a lot more weight than those of the average Japanese. Smoking is common in Japan, and it's not rare for restaurants to not even offer non-smoking sections, but two restaurants we frequent recently converted part of their space, almost definitely (according to my Japanese wife) because of polite comments I, being a foreigner, had made to the staff about cigarette smoke. Another time, I went to a restaurant and found the restroom to be a little on the smelly side. I carefully mentioned this to the manager, and when I went back a month later, I was surprised to find the restroom had been completely renovated (or as they say in Japan, "reformed"). Maybe my comment had nothing to do with this, but I have my doubts. Japanese people usually seem to hold the concept of gaman (patience, tolerance) to be a good one, stoically enduring a bad situation rather than trying to change it. Personally, I prefer to try to make the world a better place when I can...
Tokyo is the sprawling capital of Japan, home to 12 million people, a number which rises by several million during the day as people commute to their jobs from the surrounding areas. It's not a city at all, but one of Japan's 47 prefectures, although it's got a special status as a "metropolis," not unlike the District of Columbia in the U.S. Inside Tokyo there are 23 ku (wards), 26 shi (cities), 5 machi (towns) and 8 mura (villages), and my Tokyo friends tell me it's cooler to live in one of the wards since you get a phone number that starts with 03, not one of the inferior ones that start with 04. Some of the more famous areas of Tokyo are Shinjuku, a shopping and business area with many famous anime landmarks; Shibuya, a hip area for young people and home of Japan's most famous dog statue; Harajuku, where people dress like they do in FRUiTs magazine; stylish Ginza, home of Japan's only Apple Store; and Akihabara, where people come to buy electronics and eat in "cosplay cafes" (where the waitress dress in interesting costumes).
One of the interesting features of Japanese are the numbers of euphemisms they use for embarrassing things. Cute slang words are usually substituted for terms referring to various parts of the body, or else kanji characters are created to make a stand-in word, like combining the characters for "shadow" and "stem" to refer to that part of a man. There are so many ways to refer to woman's gekkei (menstruation) that I've actually never heard the normal term used even once. They include seiri (which simply means "biology"), okyakusama ga kiteiru ("I've got a guest staying with me"), hatabi ("flag day," in reference to the Japanese flag), and from a few years back, anne no hi or Anne's Day, something to do with the Diary of Anne Frank. A useful catch-all euphemism for just about anything is are (ah-rei), which literally means "that one over there" but can refer to any object you don't want to name openly. Another famous Japanese euphemism, as any anime fan knows, is the letter H, pronounced with a Japanese accent (ecchi), which refers to anything to do with sex.
Wednesday, January 26, 2005
Peter asks: what does America smell like?
Hello, all. It's mid-week and we're all doing fine. Although I got to work late today, I'm ahead of schedule on the update, which is okay by me. I've promised my son we'll paint his Gundam model today so I want to get out of here on time if I can...
Today's J-List post is below. You can also read it on the J-List website or the JBOX.com site.
What does America smell like? According to my nine-year-old son, it smells like Mr. Bubble, the classic bubble bath that I enjoyed when I was young and now buy for my kids. Whenever I take a trip back to the U.S. I come back loaded with good things from the States, like onion bagels, Cream of Wheat, Jello pudding and salsa, which are hard or impossible to find in Japan. Opening the bottle of Mr. Bubble for the first time really brings back the smell and imagery of life the USA, and we love taking bubble baths with it. (In Japan, having kids means never bathing alone.)
Part of the fun of learning Japanese is memorizing and using the onomatopoeic words found in the language. There are two kinds of sound-based words in Japanese, giseigo ("mimic-voice words") and gitaigo ("mimic-situation words"). Giseigo are words that imitate the sounds of animals -- wan wan for a dog, kokekokko for a rooster, and so on. Gitaigo, which describe abstract situations, are a little more interesting because there's nothing like them in English. Sometimes these words work as adverbs, modifying verbs: for example, kira kira describes the way a star shines in the sky, or the way a person's eyes glitter when they're overjoyed about something; an employee can work bishi bishi (fast and efficiently) or dara dara (slowly, lazily); and someone who is bilingual in a language speaks it pera pera (fluently). At other times, these descriptive words work as adjectives, expressing a state: pika pika is used to describe a brand-new toy, or as an alternate usage, a child who had just entered the first grade; an older person who has a lot of energy is pin pin (peen peen); and someone who is nervous or excited about something is doki doki.
The Japanese people are some of the longest-lived in the world, partly because Japan is a stable country with a good medical system. When you get sick in Japan, you either go to a large hospital (there are three or four near us), or to a smaller medical clinic. You must always bring your hoken-sho or insurance card, a little booklet that has all the information about your insurance printed inside. There are two systems of medical insurance in Japan: National Insurance, which is open to everyone including foreigners and self-employed, and Employee's Insurance, which is arranged through companies. In both systems, the patient bears 30% of the actual medical costs, with the insurance picking up the rest. Whenever I go to the doctor, I know he'll want to practice his English with me, since doctors usually learn English as part of their training; however, they're usually disappointed when I don't know what the difficult medical terms they use mean, since Japanese expect that every native English speaker knows every word ever created. Also, many of the English-sounding medical terms used in Japan are actually from German, which can cause more confusion. Japan has free health care for everyone under 5 and over the age of 60.
Today's J-List post is below. You can also read it on the J-List website or the JBOX.com site.
What does America smell like? According to my nine-year-old son, it smells like Mr. Bubble, the classic bubble bath that I enjoyed when I was young and now buy for my kids. Whenever I take a trip back to the U.S. I come back loaded with good things from the States, like onion bagels, Cream of Wheat, Jello pudding and salsa, which are hard or impossible to find in Japan. Opening the bottle of Mr. Bubble for the first time really brings back the smell and imagery of life the USA, and we love taking bubble baths with it. (In Japan, having kids means never bathing alone.)
Part of the fun of learning Japanese is memorizing and using the onomatopoeic words found in the language. There are two kinds of sound-based words in Japanese, giseigo ("mimic-voice words") and gitaigo ("mimic-situation words"). Giseigo are words that imitate the sounds of animals -- wan wan for a dog, kokekokko for a rooster, and so on. Gitaigo, which describe abstract situations, are a little more interesting because there's nothing like them in English. Sometimes these words work as adverbs, modifying verbs: for example, kira kira describes the way a star shines in the sky, or the way a person's eyes glitter when they're overjoyed about something; an employee can work bishi bishi (fast and efficiently) or dara dara (slowly, lazily); and someone who is bilingual in a language speaks it pera pera (fluently). At other times, these descriptive words work as adjectives, expressing a state: pika pika is used to describe a brand-new toy, or as an alternate usage, a child who had just entered the first grade; an older person who has a lot of energy is pin pin (peen peen); and someone who is nervous or excited about something is doki doki.
The Japanese people are some of the longest-lived in the world, partly because Japan is a stable country with a good medical system. When you get sick in Japan, you either go to a large hospital (there are three or four near us), or to a smaller medical clinic. You must always bring your hoken-sho or insurance card, a little booklet that has all the information about your insurance printed inside. There are two systems of medical insurance in Japan: National Insurance, which is open to everyone including foreigners and self-employed, and Employee's Insurance, which is arranged through companies. In both systems, the patient bears 30% of the actual medical costs, with the insurance picking up the rest. Whenever I go to the doctor, I know he'll want to practice his English with me, since doctors usually learn English as part of their training; however, they're usually disappointed when I don't know what the difficult medical terms they use mean, since Japanese expect that every native English speaker knows every word ever created. Also, many of the English-sounding medical terms used in Japan are actually from German, which can cause more confusion. Japan has free health care for everyone under 5 and over the age of 60.
Monday, January 24, 2005
Kabuki, Takarazuka, and more
Hello all. Today is Monday here, which is always busy for us, since we have to do all of Sunday's work too. Dennis and Daisuke are off today too, so we have to check their mail.
Today's J-List post is below. You can also read it on the J-List website or the JBOX.com site.
I'm often asked by readers who are planning a trip to Japan what they should see while they're here. I've travelled around Japan quite extensively, usually hitchhiking or riding the "Youth 18" ticket, which lets you go anywhere you want in a 24 hour period for $20 as long as you don't mind riding the slow local trains. While the Kanto (Tokyo) area has a lot to see, the Kansai (Osaka) area is honestly a lot more interesting for visitors, with the beautiful cities of Kyoto and the older, quieter Nara nearby, the grandest castle in Japan (Himeji), the New York-esque bustle of Osaka, and some nice hot springs. If you do find yourself in the Tokyo area and want to escape the asphalt and concrete, try going to Nikko, a nice collection of temples about 75 km from Japan's capitol, where Ieyasu Tokugawa (the first Tokugawa Shogun) is interred. Near Nikko is another attraction we like to visit every few years: Tobu World Square, an amazing theme park where you can see see famous sights from all around the world in 1/25 scale. Here are some pictures of this great place for you.
One of the most famous images of Japan are the bright costumes and imagery of Kabuki. A popular form of stage entertainment that's four centuries old, Kabuki features men playing both male and female roles on stage, with interesting stories from Japan's past. Because the speech is very stylized and old, it's hard for fans to understand what's being said, so you can rent earphones that allow you to listen to commentary in modern Japanese or English. Since women are not allowed to participate in traditional Kabuki, they have the Takarazuka Revue, an all-female performance company established in 1914 as a way for women to express themselves on stage. Just as men play both male and female parts in Kabuki, women play both roles in Takarazuka, and they do it very well, too. While Kabuki is very traditional, Takarazuka is lively and colorful, often borrowing themes and stories from Western stage and musicals. Takarazuka actresses are very popular, especially the stylish otoko-yaku (male role performers).
"You've been in Japan too long when it takes you several seconds of deep thought to recall the first name of the President of the United States." It's true -- you'd be surprised what living in a foreign country can do to your ability to recall seldom-used information, or even remember some English vocabulary words. Try going years without ever hearing or uttering difficult words, like "gynecologist" or "irreplaceable" -- they can be quite difficult to dredge up from the depths of your memory, even if English is your native language. It's especially bad for gaijin who work as English teachers in Japan, because you can go for months without hearing any English except the simplified speech of your students, which invariably begins to affect your English in a negative way.
Today's J-List post is below. You can also read it on the J-List website or the JBOX.com site.
I'm often asked by readers who are planning a trip to Japan what they should see while they're here. I've travelled around Japan quite extensively, usually hitchhiking or riding the "Youth 18" ticket, which lets you go anywhere you want in a 24 hour period for $20 as long as you don't mind riding the slow local trains. While the Kanto (Tokyo) area has a lot to see, the Kansai (Osaka) area is honestly a lot more interesting for visitors, with the beautiful cities of Kyoto and the older, quieter Nara nearby, the grandest castle in Japan (Himeji), the New York-esque bustle of Osaka, and some nice hot springs. If you do find yourself in the Tokyo area and want to escape the asphalt and concrete, try going to Nikko, a nice collection of temples about 75 km from Japan's capitol, where Ieyasu Tokugawa (the first Tokugawa Shogun) is interred. Near Nikko is another attraction we like to visit every few years: Tobu World Square, an amazing theme park where you can see see famous sights from all around the world in 1/25 scale. Here are some pictures of this great place for you.
One of the most famous images of Japan are the bright costumes and imagery of Kabuki. A popular form of stage entertainment that's four centuries old, Kabuki features men playing both male and female roles on stage, with interesting stories from Japan's past. Because the speech is very stylized and old, it's hard for fans to understand what's being said, so you can rent earphones that allow you to listen to commentary in modern Japanese or English. Since women are not allowed to participate in traditional Kabuki, they have the Takarazuka Revue, an all-female performance company established in 1914 as a way for women to express themselves on stage. Just as men play both male and female parts in Kabuki, women play both roles in Takarazuka, and they do it very well, too. While Kabuki is very traditional, Takarazuka is lively and colorful, often borrowing themes and stories from Western stage and musicals. Takarazuka actresses are very popular, especially the stylish otoko-yaku (male role performers).
"You've been in Japan too long when it takes you several seconds of deep thought to recall the first name of the President of the United States." It's true -- you'd be surprised what living in a foreign country can do to your ability to recall seldom-used information, or even remember some English vocabulary words. Try going years without ever hearing or uttering difficult words, like "gynecologist" or "irreplaceable" -- they can be quite difficult to dredge up from the depths of your memory, even if English is your native language. It's especially bad for gaijin who work as English teachers in Japan, because you can go for months without hearing any English except the simplified speech of your students, which invariably begins to affect your English in a negative way.
Saturday, January 22, 2005
Green tea or bust
Hello all. It sure is nice to be back home, even if Japan is a bitterly cold place, with wind that bites into your bones. I'm happy now though, since I've got both kerosene heaters full, so I don't have to go out in the middle of the night to fill them again, at least for a few days.
Today's J-List post is below. You can also read it on the J-List website or the JBOX.com site.
Japan's current Emperor is Akihito, the 125th ruler in an unbroken line that stretches back for thousands of years. The reign of each emperor has a name, with the current one being Heisei ("peace everywhere"), which started when the last emperor died in 1989. The previous modern eras were Showa ("enlightened peace," 1926-1989), Taisho ("great truth," 1912-1926) and Meiji ("enlightened rule," 1868-1912). Years can be expressed either in seireki (the standard Western calendar) or using the Japanese era dates; for example, this year is Heisei 17, since it's 17th year since of the current emperor. Over time, it's surprising how comfortable you can get with this alternate calendar. I was born in Showa 43 (1968), came to Japan in Heisei 3 (1991) and started J-List in Heisei 8 (1996).
Fawning over Japan's royal family is a national pasttime in Japan, and the media never stop thinking of nice things to say about them. Linguistically, there's a whole level of polite language reserved exclusively for talking about the Emperor and his family, which is of course pretty difficult for foreigners to ever have occasion to learn. In sharp contrast to the U.K., Japan's press practices near total self-censorship when it comes to the subject of the royal family, never publishing anything negative. When Masako-sama, the wife of Crown Prince Naruhito, disappeared from public life for several months only to be diagnosed with clinical depression soon after, the press didn't know how to react to this delicate news. In Japan, to be "right wing" is to love and revere the Emperor and to hark back to the "good old days" of Japan's Imperial glory. Many older Japanese who lived through the war still have pictures of the Emperor in their rooms, and Tomo's grandfather, who fought in the war, used to yell at Tomo when he used the word tenno (Emperor) without using the full title, tenno heika ("His Majesty, the Emperor").
You may be familiar with the Japanese word otaku. A formal word which originally means "you" or "your family," it's come to describe people who go all-out in pursuit of their hobbies. The most famous otaku are the anime otaku, aficionados of Japanese animation, but there are many other kinds of otaku, from military otaku to perfume otaku to train otaku, and so on. There seems to be something about the Japanese psyche that opens them up becoming extra obsessive when it comes to their hobbies. Unfortunately, while foreigners are often happy to use the word otaku to describe themselves as a lover of all things Japanese, I really have to advise against referring to yourself as an otaku front of Japanese people. In Japan, the concept of people getting carried away collecting doujinshi, Zippo lighters, and Disney plush toys is cute, but the idea of being an otaku is not always a positive one -- just as you might not know what to think about a person who boasted about what a "Trekkie" he was. If you're an otaku, my advice is to hide your otakuism from Japanese people until they know you better, and not show it right away.
We're extremely happy to announce that we've finally gotten our stock of Lasonic DVD players in! Once again we've got the small-footprint DVD-800 and the Karaoke-enabled DVD-7880K, in addition to our low-cost half-height DVD-7890 and DIVX-capable DVD-7050. All of these players will play discs from all regions, will allow you to watch PAL discs from Europe or South America on an NTSC (North American) TV, and work great for all your DVD-viewing needs. They're made for the U.S. market and feature one-year warranties too. They ship daily out of our San Diego office!
Here are today's "really cool products" that I thought were especially noteworthy. Note: the J-List links below may be for adult products and should probably be considered "not safe for work." See the JBOX.com site if under 18 or offended by this kind of stuff.
Today's J-List post is below. You can also read it on the J-List website or the JBOX.com site.
Japan's current Emperor is Akihito, the 125th ruler in an unbroken line that stretches back for thousands of years. The reign of each emperor has a name, with the current one being Heisei ("peace everywhere"), which started when the last emperor died in 1989. The previous modern eras were Showa ("enlightened peace," 1926-1989), Taisho ("great truth," 1912-1926) and Meiji ("enlightened rule," 1868-1912). Years can be expressed either in seireki (the standard Western calendar) or using the Japanese era dates; for example, this year is Heisei 17, since it's 17th year since of the current emperor. Over time, it's surprising how comfortable you can get with this alternate calendar. I was born in Showa 43 (1968), came to Japan in Heisei 3 (1991) and started J-List in Heisei 8 (1996).
Fawning over Japan's royal family is a national pasttime in Japan, and the media never stop thinking of nice things to say about them. Linguistically, there's a whole level of polite language reserved exclusively for talking about the Emperor and his family, which is of course pretty difficult for foreigners to ever have occasion to learn. In sharp contrast to the U.K., Japan's press practices near total self-censorship when it comes to the subject of the royal family, never publishing anything negative. When Masako-sama, the wife of Crown Prince Naruhito, disappeared from public life for several months only to be diagnosed with clinical depression soon after, the press didn't know how to react to this delicate news. In Japan, to be "right wing" is to love and revere the Emperor and to hark back to the "good old days" of Japan's Imperial glory. Many older Japanese who lived through the war still have pictures of the Emperor in their rooms, and Tomo's grandfather, who fought in the war, used to yell at Tomo when he used the word tenno (Emperor) without using the full title, tenno heika ("His Majesty, the Emperor").
You may be familiar with the Japanese word otaku. A formal word which originally means "you" or "your family," it's come to describe people who go all-out in pursuit of their hobbies. The most famous otaku are the anime otaku, aficionados of Japanese animation, but there are many other kinds of otaku, from military otaku to perfume otaku to train otaku, and so on. There seems to be something about the Japanese psyche that opens them up becoming extra obsessive when it comes to their hobbies. Unfortunately, while foreigners are often happy to use the word otaku to describe themselves as a lover of all things Japanese, I really have to advise against referring to yourself as an otaku front of Japanese people. In Japan, the concept of people getting carried away collecting doujinshi, Zippo lighters, and Disney plush toys is cute, but the idea of being an otaku is not always a positive one -- just as you might not know what to think about a person who boasted about what a "Trekkie" he was. If you're an otaku, my advice is to hide your otakuism from Japanese people until they know you better, and not show it right away.
We're extremely happy to announce that we've finally gotten our stock of Lasonic DVD players in! Once again we've got the small-footprint DVD-800 and the Karaoke-enabled DVD-7880K, in addition to our low-cost half-height DVD-7890 and DIVX-capable DVD-7050. All of these players will play discs from all regions, will allow you to watch PAL discs from Europe or South America on an NTSC (North American) TV, and work great for all your DVD-viewing needs. They're made for the U.S. market and feature one-year warranties too. They ship daily out of our San Diego office!
Here are today's "really cool products" that I thought were especially noteworthy. Note: the J-List links below may be for adult products and should probably be considered "not safe for work." See the JBOX.com site if under 18 or offended by this kind of stuff.
 | Furuta Gamera Figures. When I was 5, Gamera, the radioactive turtle from Japan's movie monster world, was the coolest thing I'd ever seen. I wished I had my own flying Gamera monster for a pet. Here's a very cool toy set from Furuta (one of our favorite companies). |
 | Harumi Nemoto - N2. Harumi Nemoto is one of the foremost "sexy idols" (e.g. a girl so sexy that you could probably want to her even with her clothes on). A member of the honorable Yellow Cab talent agency, she wrote a letter to the president of the agency asking to be made a star. He was impressed with her body and gave her a contact. |
 | Sex Evolution -- Mariko Kawana. Mariko Kawana is an adult video actress from Japan, a "jukujo" (lit. ripened woman), a mature woman aged 40, who has had quite a career. Now she's pregant and she's captured her, ah, amazing condition in a very tasteful photobook. |
 | Real Amateur Wrestler -- Mizuho Kawasaki. Another "zenra" (all nude) sports production, this features a girl who is supposedly the personal rival of one of the gold medalists of the Greece Olympics. She engages in Western-style wrestling and, ah, some interesting other sports. |
 | The Battleship Yamato. Okay, here's something bizarre yet cool -- a perfect recreation of the original Battleship Yamato (without Wave Motion Gun), allowing you to see what the great ship looked like when she was fighting during the war. Very nicely done, if a tad expensive. |
Tuesday, January 18, 2005
Still enjoying San Diego
Hello all. I actually did the blog from two days ago yesterday, and so I decided to bump posting the latest update to today.
Today's J-List post is below. You can also read it on the J-List website or the JBOX.com site.
The world has been shocked and awed by the terrible disasters of the Indian Ocean tsunami and before that, by the earthquake in Niigata, Japan, near where J-List is located. Today Japan solemnly marks the 10th anniversary of another terrible disaster, the Great Hanshin Earthquake, which did an incredible amount of damage to the city of Kobe a decade ago. Before the 7.3 magnitude quake struck on the morning of January 17, 1995, Japan had felt pretty secure that they were safe from strong quakes because of their strictly-enforced building codes. However, the nature of the quake and the age of many of the buildings combined to cause a huge amount of destruction, and over 6400 people lost their lives. I had happened to visit Kobe a few months before the earthquake and made friends with the manager of the Old Spaghetti Factory there. Happily, no one at the restaurant was injured in the quake and they reopened soon after.
When a person learns a foreign language they actually develop a second personality, which takes over when they're speaking that language. In Japanese, my personality is very different, and I'm often surprised at how different both halves are. Japanese tend to be humble, and in Japanese you often use the word sumimasen (excuse me) in situations where Americans would say "thank you." My wife is much more assertive in English than she is in Japanese, since English is just built that way -- you always say the subject of sentences and use "yes" or "no" to clearly indicate your opinion, unlike in Japanese where meanings are often more vague and nuanced. It's been very interesting watching the development of an "English personality" in my children, too. In English, my daughter is cute and feminine, since she usually plays with other girls in English, but in Japanese, she's a pure tomboy, even using the male first person pronoun (boku used by boys, instead of atashi which is used by girls).
I'm enjoying my time here in San Diego. As usual, I'm stocking up on things I can't easily get in Japan, like shoes, clothes, and English books. You don't think about things like cough syrup until you live in a country where you can't find the brands you want. Japan is a great place, but the medicines they have are far too weak to work on a big gaijin like me, so I stock up on Nyquil, Alka-Seltzer, and other things I think I might need in the coming months. Soon I'll go back to freezing Japan, but until then I'm getting as much enjoyment out of the balmy San Diego T-shirt weather as I can.
Today's J-List post is below. You can also read it on the J-List website or the JBOX.com site.
The world has been shocked and awed by the terrible disasters of the Indian Ocean tsunami and before that, by the earthquake in Niigata, Japan, near where J-List is located. Today Japan solemnly marks the 10th anniversary of another terrible disaster, the Great Hanshin Earthquake, which did an incredible amount of damage to the city of Kobe a decade ago. Before the 7.3 magnitude quake struck on the morning of January 17, 1995, Japan had felt pretty secure that they were safe from strong quakes because of their strictly-enforced building codes. However, the nature of the quake and the age of many of the buildings combined to cause a huge amount of destruction, and over 6400 people lost their lives. I had happened to visit Kobe a few months before the earthquake and made friends with the manager of the Old Spaghetti Factory there. Happily, no one at the restaurant was injured in the quake and they reopened soon after.
When a person learns a foreign language they actually develop a second personality, which takes over when they're speaking that language. In Japanese, my personality is very different, and I'm often surprised at how different both halves are. Japanese tend to be humble, and in Japanese you often use the word sumimasen (excuse me) in situations where Americans would say "thank you." My wife is much more assertive in English than she is in Japanese, since English is just built that way -- you always say the subject of sentences and use "yes" or "no" to clearly indicate your opinion, unlike in Japanese where meanings are often more vague and nuanced. It's been very interesting watching the development of an "English personality" in my children, too. In English, my daughter is cute and feminine, since she usually plays with other girls in English, but in Japanese, she's a pure tomboy, even using the male first person pronoun (boku used by boys, instead of atashi which is used by girls).
I'm enjoying my time here in San Diego. As usual, I'm stocking up on things I can't easily get in Japan, like shoes, clothes, and English books. You don't think about things like cough syrup until you live in a country where you can't find the brands you want. Japan is a great place, but the medicines they have are far too weak to work on a big gaijin like me, so I stock up on Nyquil, Alka-Seltzer, and other things I think I might need in the coming months. Soon I'll go back to freezing Japan, but until then I'm getting as much enjoyment out of the balmy San Diego T-shirt weather as I can.
Monday, January 17, 2005
Ah, Sunny San Diego
Hello all. I am still in San Diego, enjoying the January warmth, which until I got here was the January Rain, complete with rain so bad that the San Diego river (usually a laughable thing) was threatening to flood big time. I don't know what all the fuss was about though -- it's lovely here now.
I am having so much fun in San Diego, as usual. Lots of shopping, buying things that I can't get in Japan easily, like shoes, clothes, and good American cough medicine. (You don't think about medicines you're familiar with until you can't buy them easily.) Here are some pictures of our favorite mall in San Diego, Fashion Valley (where the Apple store is, too ^_^). Also, my car in San Diego, the spiffy Miata that I let my mother drive when I'm not in town. Great to be able to drive it with the top down in January.
Today's J-List post is below. You can also read it on the J-List website or the JBOX.com site.
It never fails -- making the hop from Japan to the U.S. is a prescription for reverse culture shock, as I am reminded again of how different the two countries are. The "small" size of frozen yogurt? Ha, it's huge. Even in Southern California with its high population, there are plenty of wide-open spaces that you don't have in Japan. Crossing over from Japan to the U.S. also feels like traveling through a time warp. In some areas, such as cell phones, televisions, and elements of design in electronics and cars, Japan seems to be five years or more ahead of the States. The Sony PSP handheld gaming system is still months away from release in the U.S. and Europe, but I've had mine since November (lucky me).
Duck! Oh! That's! These are examples of some of the more bizarre English that we see daily in Japan. Since all Japanese study six years of English in school (or up to ten years if they study it in college), most people have a general working knowledge of English, even if they can't always communicate fluently. Duck! is the bizarre message a moving company prints on their trucks. Why? It gets attention, I guess. Oh! is the message printed on a warehouse near us, why we're not entirely sure. And That's! is a line of media products, CD-Rs and videotapes, manufacturered in a factory in our prefecture. Every time I go to my dentist I pass a building that says "Splush is not only the problem of age." I've puzzled over this for hours, and I think it means something like "you're never too old to make a splash in life."
For me, studying Japanese has always been great fun, but there are were difficult patches, to be sure. One area that proved challenging for me while I was studying is an interesting category of four-syllable adjectives (the 2nd syllable is a small pause that counts as a syllable in Japanese) that have interesting meanings that can be quite complex. Sokkuri (soh-KOO-ri) is a word that means "to look exactly like [someone else]," so if you meet a Japanese man and his son, and they look very similar to each other, you can point and say sokkuri! and watch their reactions. A similar word is pittari (pi-TAH-ri) which means "it's a perfect fit," so if you're trying to find the right size shirt and you finally find it, this is the word you'd use. Bikkuri (bi-KOO-ri) means "to be greatly shocked" (sometimes Japanese substitute the English word "shock" for this word), and so on. There are about 50 of these words, all with hard to learn but well-defined meanings.
I am having so much fun in San Diego, as usual. Lots of shopping, buying things that I can't get in Japan easily, like shoes, clothes, and good American cough medicine. (You don't think about medicines you're familiar with until you can't buy them easily.) Here are some pictures of our favorite mall in San Diego, Fashion Valley (where the Apple store is, too ^_^). Also, my car in San Diego, the spiffy Miata that I let my mother drive when I'm not in town. Great to be able to drive it with the top down in January.
Today's J-List post is below. You can also read it on the J-List website or the JBOX.com site.
It never fails -- making the hop from Japan to the U.S. is a prescription for reverse culture shock, as I am reminded again of how different the two countries are. The "small" size of frozen yogurt? Ha, it's huge. Even in Southern California with its high population, there are plenty of wide-open spaces that you don't have in Japan. Crossing over from Japan to the U.S. also feels like traveling through a time warp. In some areas, such as cell phones, televisions, and elements of design in electronics and cars, Japan seems to be five years or more ahead of the States. The Sony PSP handheld gaming system is still months away from release in the U.S. and Europe, but I've had mine since November (lucky me).
Duck! Oh! That's! These are examples of some of the more bizarre English that we see daily in Japan. Since all Japanese study six years of English in school (or up to ten years if they study it in college), most people have a general working knowledge of English, even if they can't always communicate fluently. Duck! is the bizarre message a moving company prints on their trucks. Why? It gets attention, I guess. Oh! is the message printed on a warehouse near us, why we're not entirely sure. And That's! is a line of media products, CD-Rs and videotapes, manufacturered in a factory in our prefecture. Every time I go to my dentist I pass a building that says "Splush is not only the problem of age." I've puzzled over this for hours, and I think it means something like "you're never too old to make a splash in life."
For me, studying Japanese has always been great fun, but there are were difficult patches, to be sure. One area that proved challenging for me while I was studying is an interesting category of four-syllable adjectives (the 2nd syllable is a small pause that counts as a syllable in Japanese) that have interesting meanings that can be quite complex. Sokkuri (soh-KOO-ri) is a word that means "to look exactly like [someone else]," so if you meet a Japanese man and his son, and they look very similar to each other, you can point and say sokkuri! and watch their reactions. A similar word is pittari (pi-TAH-ri) which means "it's a perfect fit," so if you're trying to find the right size shirt and you finally find it, this is the word you'd use. Bikkuri (bi-KOO-ri) means "to be greatly shocked" (sometimes Japanese substitute the English word "shock" for this word), and so on. There are about 50 of these words, all with hard to learn but well-defined meanings.
Thursday, January 13, 2005
Report from America: Sumo wrestling, annual snowfall and more
Today's J-List post is below. You can also read it on the J-List website or the JBOX.com site.
Hello from a very cold Japan. As usual, January on the Kanto Plain (the large plain around the Tokyo area) is bitingly cold, with cold winds that race down the mountains, called kara-kaze, the harsh "empty wind" that our prefecture is famous for. Except for the snow we got on Dec 31st, which melted soon after, we've had clear skies, courtesy of the Japan Alps, which act as a barrier to the precipitation, if not the wind -- the poor people who live on the Sea of Japan side of the country endure lots more snow than we do. When it's as cold as it is in Japan, there's nothing like going someplace warm, like San Diego, California, which is where I'm off to today. Although Southern California has been getting beat up by bad weather, I'm sure it's warmer than Japan.
Learning a new language means dealing with concepts that can't always be fit into your native language. One of the first examples having to fit a strange linguistic concept my brain came with the words kore, sore and are (koh-REI, soh-REI and ah-REI), which correspond to "this" (something near me), "that" (something new you, or a short distance away) and "that one over there" (something far from both of us) Having three location concepts where there are only two in English was a challenge, and my brain felt uncomfortable with this at first. What was the exact distance in inches where something went from being sore to are? We bugged our teacher with many questions like this. The above three words are demonstrative pronoun, e.g. "this one, that one." Another set -- kono, sono and ano -- are articles and require a noun after them, e.g. kono tamago "this egg," sono hon "that book [near you]" and ano onna no ko "that girl [over there]." If you've ever heard a Japanse person over-using "this one" instead of the word "this" it's because the concepts are different in Japanese.
Sunday was the start of the Hatsu Basho, the first tournament of the New Year. Sumo wrestling is the national sport of Japan, enjoying special sponsorship by the government. There are six tournaments during the year, four in Tokyo's Ryogoku area and one each in Nagoya and Kyushu. Sumo wrestlers from 54 training houses, called heya (meaning "room") but oddly translated as "stable" in English, compete against each other as they try to climb in rank as a wrestler. The six ranks in sumo are Juryo, Hirameki, Komusubi, Sekiwake, Ozeki and Yokozuna, with Yokozuna ("Grand Master") being the top rank. For a time, the sumo world was dominated by American wrestlers from Hawaii, like Konishiki, Akebono and my own favorite, Musashimaru, but one by one they retired as leg injuries and age slowly caught up with them, and they all retired. Currently the only top-ranked wrestler is Mongolian-born Asashoryu, who is one powerful wrestler. He often wins using the yorikiri technique, pushing his opponent straight out of the ring, but is also known for using tsuriotoshi, picking his opponent up and bodily dropping him inside the ring.
Hello from a very cold Japan. As usual, January on the Kanto Plain (the large plain around the Tokyo area) is bitingly cold, with cold winds that race down the mountains, called kara-kaze, the harsh "empty wind" that our prefecture is famous for. Except for the snow we got on Dec 31st, which melted soon after, we've had clear skies, courtesy of the Japan Alps, which act as a barrier to the precipitation, if not the wind -- the poor people who live on the Sea of Japan side of the country endure lots more snow than we do. When it's as cold as it is in Japan, there's nothing like going someplace warm, like San Diego, California, which is where I'm off to today. Although Southern California has been getting beat up by bad weather, I'm sure it's warmer than Japan.
Learning a new language means dealing with concepts that can't always be fit into your native language. One of the first examples having to fit a strange linguistic concept my brain came with the words kore, sore and are (koh-REI, soh-REI and ah-REI), which correspond to "this" (something near me), "that" (something new you, or a short distance away) and "that one over there" (something far from both of us) Having three location concepts where there are only two in English was a challenge, and my brain felt uncomfortable with this at first. What was the exact distance in inches where something went from being sore to are? We bugged our teacher with many questions like this. The above three words are demonstrative pronoun, e.g. "this one, that one." Another set -- kono, sono and ano -- are articles and require a noun after them, e.g. kono tamago "this egg," sono hon "that book [near you]" and ano onna no ko "that girl [over there]." If you've ever heard a Japanse person over-using "this one" instead of the word "this" it's because the concepts are different in Japanese.
Sunday was the start of the Hatsu Basho, the first tournament of the New Year. Sumo wrestling is the national sport of Japan, enjoying special sponsorship by the government. There are six tournaments during the year, four in Tokyo's Ryogoku area and one each in Nagoya and Kyushu. Sumo wrestlers from 54 training houses, called heya (meaning "room") but oddly translated as "stable" in English, compete against each other as they try to climb in rank as a wrestler. The six ranks in sumo are Juryo, Hirameki, Komusubi, Sekiwake, Ozeki and Yokozuna, with Yokozuna ("Grand Master") being the top rank. For a time, the sumo world was dominated by American wrestlers from Hawaii, like Konishiki, Akebono and my own favorite, Musashimaru, but one by one they retired as leg injuries and age slowly caught up with them, and they all retired. Currently the only top-ranked wrestler is Mongolian-born Asashoryu, who is one powerful wrestler. He often wins using the yorikiri technique, pushing his opponent straight out of the ring, but is also known for using tsuriotoshi, picking his opponent up and bodily dropping him inside the ring.
Monday, January 10, 2005
Coming-of-Age Day, Godzilla's end and more
Hello all. It's Monday but because today is Coming-of-Age Day (see below), the kids have school off, even though they should by all rights be in school by now. So my poor wife is spending another day taking care of them insted of getting her own work done. Ah, but that ends tommorrow...
Here are some pictures from Japan, with no theme to them at all. First is a picture of my wife's uncle, who fought in World War II on the battleship Ise. This is what he looked like when he was young. All his other pictures were lost when the ship was sunk in the harbor by the U.S. forces. Next, a New Year's Day shot of Darumas (decorative little Buddhist paper statues that are popular in Japan, especially in Gunma Prefecture where we live), about to be burned since they're from the previous year. Finally, a shot of the recent snow we had, very frosty and cold. As always, snow in the Kanto area (the flat plain around Tokyo) melts right away, so it's lucky we went out to play in the snow before it was gone.
Today's J-List post is below. You can also read it on the J-List website or the JBOX.com site.
Today is a special day in Japan: Seijin no Hi, or Coming-of-Age Day, when Japanese youths who have reached the age of twenty celebrate their entry into adulthood, since this is considered legal age in Japan. In the morning, they gather at their City Office, the girls wearing beautiful kimonos that their proud parents have bought for them and the boys in smart-looking suits, and endure long speeches by the mayor and other pillars of the community about their futures. In the evening, the new adults will generally smoke, drink and otherwise celebrate their new legal status as adults any way they can. Previously the holiday was held on January 15th, but a few years ago it was changed to the nearest Monday so that people could enjoy a three-day weekend (this is known as "Happy Monday" in Japan).
The Japanese film world is all abuzz these days. Hayao Miyazaki's latest film, Howl's Moving Castle, is playing in theatres now, and we took our kids to see it over the weekend (we had to wait a while for the crowds to die down, which is normal for a Miyazaki film release here). As usual, Japan's most famous animation director has created yet another fabulously original world which thoroughly delighted us. Based on a British novel by Diana Wynne Jones, it's the story of Sophie, an ordinary girl who is changed into a 90-year old woman by an evil witch's spell and seeks the help of the handsome wizard Howl and his magically moving castle. As usual, the soundtrack by Joe Hisaishi, the composer who has created the music for every Miyazaki film, is superb.
The other Japanese film getting a lot of attention recently has been Godzilla Final Wars, the "final" Godzilla movie by Toho has they retire the 50-year franchise, at least until they un-retire it at some point in the future. We caught a documentary on television about the making of this film, which features a somewhat Matrix-ified sci-fi story and lots of monsters for Godzilla to cut through. There were more than a few tears as actor Tsutomu Kitagawa got inside the massive Godzilla suit for the final cut of the film, and then it was a wrap. They showed the final shots of Godzilla from each of the films, intercut with comments by the staff who had worked on the movies over the years, including Eiji Tsuburaya, the special effects cinematographer for the original film, who went on to create Ultra-Q and Ultraman for television. They then showed the demolishing of the historic Dai Pool, the giant pool of water at Toho Studios where the ocean sequences have been shot for the past half-century, which is being cleared to make way for new studio construction. It was very moving.
Here are some pictures from Japan, with no theme to them at all. First is a picture of my wife's uncle, who fought in World War II on the battleship Ise. This is what he looked like when he was young. All his other pictures were lost when the ship was sunk in the harbor by the U.S. forces. Next, a New Year's Day shot of Darumas (decorative little Buddhist paper statues that are popular in Japan, especially in Gunma Prefecture where we live), about to be burned since they're from the previous year. Finally, a shot of the recent snow we had, very frosty and cold. As always, snow in the Kanto area (the flat plain around Tokyo) melts right away, so it's lucky we went out to play in the snow before it was gone.
Today's J-List post is below. You can also read it on the J-List website or the JBOX.com site.
Today is a special day in Japan: Seijin no Hi, or Coming-of-Age Day, when Japanese youths who have reached the age of twenty celebrate their entry into adulthood, since this is considered legal age in Japan. In the morning, they gather at their City Office, the girls wearing beautiful kimonos that their proud parents have bought for them and the boys in smart-looking suits, and endure long speeches by the mayor and other pillars of the community about their futures. In the evening, the new adults will generally smoke, drink and otherwise celebrate their new legal status as adults any way they can. Previously the holiday was held on January 15th, but a few years ago it was changed to the nearest Monday so that people could enjoy a three-day weekend (this is known as "Happy Monday" in Japan).
The Japanese film world is all abuzz these days. Hayao Miyazaki's latest film, Howl's Moving Castle, is playing in theatres now, and we took our kids to see it over the weekend (we had to wait a while for the crowds to die down, which is normal for a Miyazaki film release here). As usual, Japan's most famous animation director has created yet another fabulously original world which thoroughly delighted us. Based on a British novel by Diana Wynne Jones, it's the story of Sophie, an ordinary girl who is changed into a 90-year old woman by an evil witch's spell and seeks the help of the handsome wizard Howl and his magically moving castle. As usual, the soundtrack by Joe Hisaishi, the composer who has created the music for every Miyazaki film, is superb.
The other Japanese film getting a lot of attention recently has been Godzilla Final Wars, the "final" Godzilla movie by Toho has they retire the 50-year franchise, at least until they un-retire it at some point in the future. We caught a documentary on television about the making of this film, which features a somewhat Matrix-ified sci-fi story and lots of monsters for Godzilla to cut through. There were more than a few tears as actor Tsutomu Kitagawa got inside the massive Godzilla suit for the final cut of the film, and then it was a wrap. They showed the final shots of Godzilla from each of the films, intercut with comments by the staff who had worked on the movies over the years, including Eiji Tsuburaya, the special effects cinematographer for the original film, who went on to create Ultra-Q and Ultraman for television. They then showed the demolishing of the historic Dai Pool, the giant pool of water at Toho Studios where the ocean sequences have been shot for the past half-century, which is being cleared to make way for new studio construction. It was very moving.
Friday, January 07, 2005
Yon-sama and variations on the word "Gambarimasu"
Hello all. Finishing a busy week, and am looking forward to taking the kids to the onsen, that is, hot springs.
Here are more pictures from Japan. Before Dec 31st you can have a "End of Year Party" (Bounen-kai, lit. "forget the past year party"), but after Jan 1st you have a New Year Party (Shinen-kai). I had a New Year party with a friend from college, and here are some pics.
The place is an "Izakaya" or a kind of traditional beer restaurant with good food. The food was great -- especially the fish, not an easy thing to say considering we're in the middle of Japan, far from the ocean. Below see my New Year's Beer, the first beer of 2005; a Grapefruit Sour, a drink with alcohol in it which you squeeze fresh grapefruit juice and pulp in to make a delicious drink; and a picture of a Beer Girl, the lovely girls who promote beer drinking in Japan.
Today's J-List post is below. You can also read it on the J-List website or the JBOX.com site.
The star of South Korean actor Bae Yong-joon, who appeared in the Korean drama Winter Sonata, just keeps on rising in Japan. The talented actor is on the way to becoming this year's "CM king" (the star appearing most in TV commercials), advertising everything from Lotte chocolate to mobile phones with cross-country calling features to small cars for women. The biggest group of fans of "Yon-sama" (as he's called these days) are middle-aged women in Japan, who apparently have lots of free time and excess income. When he arrived in Narita to promote his photobook, there were so many fans waiting for him that several people were hurt in the crush of bodies. The locations that appeared Winter Sonata are a popular tourist spot for Japanese women these days, with Korean Airlines offering special charter flights to handle the load of Japanese tourists. You can even make folded paper origami of Yon-sama with a book that's been released in Japan.
One word that comes up in anime a lot is gambaru (gahn-BAH-roo, alternately written ganbaru). A happy, cheerful word which means to do one's best, to work hard, to give one's all and so on, it seems to find its way into a variety of situations. Usually heard in its formal form gambarimasu (gahn-BAH-ri-mass, "[I will] do my best!"), or else as a request, e.g. gambatte or gambatte kudasai (gahn-BAH-tay koo-da-sai, "please try hard"), or alternatively in its "command" form, gambare (gahn-BAH-ray, "Do your best!"). Like Turkish, Finnish and some Native American languages, Japanese is an "agglutinating" language, which means it puts a lot of information (past tense, passive voice, polite language etc.) in the forms of the verb being used. The bad news is that students of Japanese have to memorize these forms (informal present, informal past tense, passive, and so on). The good news is that they're not hard to learn, and you never have to mess with confusing helping verbs like "he would have been able to come if he had received the call" in Japanese.
To successfully study a language, one thing you need to do beyond learning the grammar and vocabulary is to craft overall strategies for communication, even if it means using hand gestures or drawing pictures to show meaning. One strategy for communication that's probably used by all speakers of foreign languages is the non sequitur, a reply that can be used as a response to just about any question, whether you understood it or not. Back in my bachelor days, I went to a live orchestra performance and was surprised to hear that the organizers had "randomly" chosen three people from the audience to get up and conduct the musicians: a cute old woman, a little girl, and funny American, namely me. I got up on the conductors podium, trying to ignore the hundreds of people behind me, and lead the Maebashi Philharmonic Orchestra in the first few bars of Beethoven's 5th. When I was done, the MC asked me some questions about where I was from, how I liked my first time conducting an orchestra, and...something else, that I didn't happen to catch. Rather than embarrass myself in front of so many people by asking the MC to repeat herself, I gave her an answer that would fit just about anywhere in Japanese: so desu ne (literally "Yes, that's so"), which in Japanese usage can act as a neutral reply to just about any question.
Here are more pictures from Japan. Before Dec 31st you can have a "End of Year Party" (Bounen-kai, lit. "forget the past year party"), but after Jan 1st you have a New Year Party (Shinen-kai). I had a New Year party with a friend from college, and here are some pics.
The place is an "Izakaya" or a kind of traditional beer restaurant with good food. The food was great -- especially the fish, not an easy thing to say considering we're in the middle of Japan, far from the ocean. Below see my New Year's Beer, the first beer of 2005; a Grapefruit Sour, a drink with alcohol in it which you squeeze fresh grapefruit juice and pulp in to make a delicious drink; and a picture of a Beer Girl, the lovely girls who promote beer drinking in Japan.
Today's J-List post is below. You can also read it on the J-List website or the JBOX.com site.
The star of South Korean actor Bae Yong-joon, who appeared in the Korean drama Winter Sonata, just keeps on rising in Japan. The talented actor is on the way to becoming this year's "CM king" (the star appearing most in TV commercials), advertising everything from Lotte chocolate to mobile phones with cross-country calling features to small cars for women. The biggest group of fans of "Yon-sama" (as he's called these days) are middle-aged women in Japan, who apparently have lots of free time and excess income. When he arrived in Narita to promote his photobook, there were so many fans waiting for him that several people were hurt in the crush of bodies. The locations that appeared Winter Sonata are a popular tourist spot for Japanese women these days, with Korean Airlines offering special charter flights to handle the load of Japanese tourists. You can even make folded paper origami of Yon-sama with a book that's been released in Japan.
One word that comes up in anime a lot is gambaru (gahn-BAH-roo, alternately written ganbaru). A happy, cheerful word which means to do one's best, to work hard, to give one's all and so on, it seems to find its way into a variety of situations. Usually heard in its formal form gambarimasu (gahn-BAH-ri-mass, "[I will] do my best!"), or else as a request, e.g. gambatte or gambatte kudasai (gahn-BAH-tay koo-da-sai, "please try hard"), or alternatively in its "command" form, gambare (gahn-BAH-ray, "Do your best!"). Like Turkish, Finnish and some Native American languages, Japanese is an "agglutinating" language, which means it puts a lot of information (past tense, passive voice, polite language etc.) in the forms of the verb being used. The bad news is that students of Japanese have to memorize these forms (informal present, informal past tense, passive, and so on). The good news is that they're not hard to learn, and you never have to mess with confusing helping verbs like "he would have been able to come if he had received the call" in Japanese.
To successfully study a language, one thing you need to do beyond learning the grammar and vocabulary is to craft overall strategies for communication, even if it means using hand gestures or drawing pictures to show meaning. One strategy for communication that's probably used by all speakers of foreign languages is the non sequitur, a reply that can be used as a response to just about any question, whether you understood it or not. Back in my bachelor days, I went to a live orchestra performance and was surprised to hear that the organizers had "randomly" chosen three people from the audience to get up and conduct the musicians: a cute old woman, a little girl, and funny American, namely me. I got up on the conductors podium, trying to ignore the hundreds of people behind me, and lead the Maebashi Philharmonic Orchestra in the first few bars of Beethoven's 5th. When I was done, the MC asked me some questions about where I was from, how I liked my first time conducting an orchestra, and...something else, that I didn't happen to catch. Rather than embarrass myself in front of so many people by asking the MC to repeat herself, I gave her an answer that would fit just about anywhere in Japanese: so desu ne (literally "Yes, that's so"), which in Japanese usage can act as a neutral reply to just about any question.
Wednesday, January 05, 2005
The Three States of Eye Aversion in Gaijin
Here are today's pictures for all who care to see them. Today I'm showing you some of my recently cleaned-out Star Wars figure display. I have a few hundred figures, bought from 1997 through today, and they're really fun to collect. I tend to go for the well designed figures, and shun the crappier ones -- I'd gladly buy another Gamorean Guard or one of the recently released good Stormtroopers, for example, but I passed on the poorly designed re-issues of the original figures with 1977 Kenner packaging because the figures looked horrible.
Today's J-List post is below. You can also read it on the J-List website or the JBOX.com site.
One could write a book studying the psyche of gaijin living in Japan -- for example, the "three states of eye aversion" they seem to go through when it comes to looking at other foreigners around them. There are many gaijin from countries like America, England, and Brazil who appear regularly on Japanese TV speaking fluent Japanese and giving an "outsider's view" on things -- it's common for one of the commentators on a news show to be a foreigner, for example. Foreigners living in Japan often hate these TV personalities, if for no other reason than because their Japanese is better than ours. Among the foreign-born "talents" you can see on TV here are Wikki-san, a Sri Lankan man who passed the entrance exam for the famous Tokyo University even though he's a foreigner and who's become a spokesman for tsunami disaster aid in the past few weeks; Patrick Harlan, who speaks his annoying macho English on NHK's hit English study show "Eigo de shabera-night"; and the eternal Dave Spector, former ABC television producer who become the most famous American in Japan, appearing on hundreds of variety shows (he dyes his black hair blonde because it makes him look more "foreign" on television).
During my time in Japan, I've had certain "gaijin shocks," real out-of-body experiences that you could only have in this country. American Football is followed by some Japanese fans, and I managed to find a game being broadcast late at night -- half an hour into the action, I realized I'd been listening to the sportcasters give the play-by-play commentary in Japanese without even noticing it. There have been other times when I found myself quite surprised by something, such as when I had that first dream in Japanese, or realizing I understood what the opening words to the Mr. Roboto song meant ("Thank you, Mr. Roboto, until we meet again...Thank you, Mr. Roboto, I want to know your secret"). Once, while eating pancakes, I couldn't find a fork so I made do with chopsticks, aware of how silly I'd look to friends back home. Finally being able to read the "sake" (sah-KAY, rice wine) character on Dr. Sane's "spring water" in Yamato/Star Blazers was another enlightening experience for me. Ah, it's fun to live in Japan!
Breakfast cereal is one of the major staple foods in the U.S., and it's slowly growing in popularity here in Japan, too. It was slow going, though -- Japanese consumers preferred Japanese food, like fish, miso soup and natto (fermented soybeans) to what looked to them like "bird seed." Now, several brands of cereal compete for share the Japanese cereal market, lead by Kellogg's, who markets Corn Flake, Corn Frosty, Choko-wa (chocolate loops), Genmai Flakes, and recently, Fruits Loops (the "fruits" is a fluke of Japanese phonetics). Unfortunately, Kellogg's products are very expensive here -- about $4 for a box that contains only 2-3 American-sized bowls of cereal, so I usually choose Ciscorn or Calbee's cereal products when I go shopping. Another option for gaijin living in Japan is to order supermarket cases of American cereal from the Foreign Buyers' Club in Kobe (http://www.fbcusa.com) -- it's a convenient way to buy food from back home, if you don't mind having 12 boxes of Cheerios sitting around for a year.
Today's J-List post is below. You can also read it on the J-List website or the JBOX.com site.
One could write a book studying the psyche of gaijin living in Japan -- for example, the "three states of eye aversion" they seem to go through when it comes to looking at other foreigners around them. There are many gaijin from countries like America, England, and Brazil who appear regularly on Japanese TV speaking fluent Japanese and giving an "outsider's view" on things -- it's common for one of the commentators on a news show to be a foreigner, for example. Foreigners living in Japan often hate these TV personalities, if for no other reason than because their Japanese is better than ours. Among the foreign-born "talents" you can see on TV here are Wikki-san, a Sri Lankan man who passed the entrance exam for the famous Tokyo University even though he's a foreigner and who's become a spokesman for tsunami disaster aid in the past few weeks; Patrick Harlan, who speaks his annoying macho English on NHK's hit English study show "Eigo de shabera-night"; and the eternal Dave Spector, former ABC television producer who become the most famous American in Japan, appearing on hundreds of variety shows (he dyes his black hair blonde because it makes him look more "foreign" on television).
During my time in Japan, I've had certain "gaijin shocks," real out-of-body experiences that you could only have in this country. American Football is followed by some Japanese fans, and I managed to find a game being broadcast late at night -- half an hour into the action, I realized I'd been listening to the sportcasters give the play-by-play commentary in Japanese without even noticing it. There have been other times when I found myself quite surprised by something, such as when I had that first dream in Japanese, or realizing I understood what the opening words to the Mr. Roboto song meant ("Thank you, Mr. Roboto, until we meet again...Thank you, Mr. Roboto, I want to know your secret"). Once, while eating pancakes, I couldn't find a fork so I made do with chopsticks, aware of how silly I'd look to friends back home. Finally being able to read the "sake" (sah-KAY, rice wine) character on Dr. Sane's "spring water" in Yamato/Star Blazers was another enlightening experience for me. Ah, it's fun to live in Japan!
Breakfast cereal is one of the major staple foods in the U.S., and it's slowly growing in popularity here in Japan, too. It was slow going, though -- Japanese consumers preferred Japanese food, like fish, miso soup and natto (fermented soybeans) to what looked to them like "bird seed." Now, several brands of cereal compete for share the Japanese cereal market, lead by Kellogg's, who markets Corn Flake, Corn Frosty, Choko-wa (chocolate loops), Genmai Flakes, and recently, Fruits Loops (the "fruits" is a fluke of Japanese phonetics). Unfortunately, Kellogg's products are very expensive here -- about $4 for a box that contains only 2-3 American-sized bowls of cereal, so I usually choose Ciscorn or Calbee's cereal products when I go shopping. Another option for gaijin living in Japan is to order supermarket cases of American cereal from the Foreign Buyers' Club in Kobe (http://www.fbcusa.com) -- it's a convenient way to buy food from back home, if you don't mind having 12 boxes of Cheerios sitting around for a year.
Monday, January 03, 2005
New Years in Japan
Hello all. Had a nice weekend. A friend from Tokyo came up and we had a New Year's Party (Shinenkai, as opposed to a Forget-the-Past-Year Party, which you have in December). I've posted the new update and some pictures of what we did on New Year's, so you can learn about Shintoism in Japan.
Today's J-List post is below. You can also read it on the J-List website or the JBOX.com site.
Hello and akemashite omedeto from all of us at J-List! We had a quiet, traditional New Year's here in Japan, getting up and watching the big Oshogatsu Marathon on TV -- by an odd coincidence, a huge nationally televised marathon is held in our city on January 1st, with runners racing past streets near our house while all of Japan watches. In the afternoon we went to the Shinto shrine to pray for happiness and health this year, then did what we do every year, go to my wife's uncle's house to sit around and eat delicious food and play old Japanese card games. My wife's uncle, who is 82, fought on the battleship Ise and has a bullet mark across his face from an American gun, and I like my children to talk with him so they can know what happened in the past between Japan and America. Now it's time for every store to have its hatsu-ichi, the first sale of the New Year, and the streets are clogged with shoppers looking for bargains.
Japan is a small country, with about half the population of the U.S. squeezed into four islands that are about 1/25 the land mass of America. This requires the Japanese to utilize their space more efficiently, and they're very good at coming up with ways of making do with less land. In cities like Tokyo, there often isn't enough space to put a vending machine along the side of the road, so they've developed ultra-thin vending machines that are up to 1/3 as deep as normal ones. Gas stations locate their pumps on the roof, with hoses that can be pulled down to refuel cars, so no space is lost. Japanese futons are also very space-efficient, since they can be folded up and put in the closet during the day. We had so much snow on Friday that I took off work early to play with the kids, and we went to a place that was perfect for our toboggans: a park that had been built around several of the ancient burial mounds (kofun) that dot Japan, in another example of wise use of space. The burial mounds were perfect for sliding down in the snow.
Japanese generally write their names using kanji, Chinese characters, with the family name always written before the given name, e.g. Yamada Hanako instead of Hanako Yamada. When a baby is born, the parents file the paperwork at their local city office, and the child is added to that family's official register. Parents are required to choose characters from a list of "name kanji" that the government has approved, and every few years there are problems because some parents want to use an out-of-date character that's not on the list. Because names in kanji have some meaning that's not necessarily present in Western names, it's often interesting for foreigners to find out what those meanings are. Many Japanese are made up of kanji for some of the simplest words -- ta (rice field, also read da), ishi (stone), naka (inside), yama (mountain), kawa (river), hashi (bridge), and so on. Again and again I find myself amazed at how often Japanese are unable to read some of the more difficult kanji, both names of people and of places. Because each character has at least two ways to read it (the Chinese and Japanese pronunciations), and because readings are often shoehorned into some kanji (for example, Ainu place names in northern Japan have had kanji assigned to them, which no one outside of the region can read), knowing how to read some characters can be a big challenge.
Today's J-List post is below. You can also read it on the J-List website or the JBOX.com site.
Hello and akemashite omedeto from all of us at J-List! We had a quiet, traditional New Year's here in Japan, getting up and watching the big Oshogatsu Marathon on TV -- by an odd coincidence, a huge nationally televised marathon is held in our city on January 1st, with runners racing past streets near our house while all of Japan watches. In the afternoon we went to the Shinto shrine to pray for happiness and health this year, then did what we do every year, go to my wife's uncle's house to sit around and eat delicious food and play old Japanese card games. My wife's uncle, who is 82, fought on the battleship Ise and has a bullet mark across his face from an American gun, and I like my children to talk with him so they can know what happened in the past between Japan and America. Now it's time for every store to have its hatsu-ichi, the first sale of the New Year, and the streets are clogged with shoppers looking for bargains.
Japan is a small country, with about half the population of the U.S. squeezed into four islands that are about 1/25 the land mass of America. This requires the Japanese to utilize their space more efficiently, and they're very good at coming up with ways of making do with less land. In cities like Tokyo, there often isn't enough space to put a vending machine along the side of the road, so they've developed ultra-thin vending machines that are up to 1/3 as deep as normal ones. Gas stations locate their pumps on the roof, with hoses that can be pulled down to refuel cars, so no space is lost. Japanese futons are also very space-efficient, since they can be folded up and put in the closet during the day. We had so much snow on Friday that I took off work early to play with the kids, and we went to a place that was perfect for our toboggans: a park that had been built around several of the ancient burial mounds (kofun) that dot Japan, in another example of wise use of space. The burial mounds were perfect for sliding down in the snow.
Japanese generally write their names using kanji, Chinese characters, with the family name always written before the given name, e.g. Yamada Hanako instead of Hanako Yamada. When a baby is born, the parents file the paperwork at their local city office, and the child is added to that family's official register. Parents are required to choose characters from a list of "name kanji" that the government has approved, and every few years there are problems because some parents want to use an out-of-date character that's not on the list. Because names in kanji have some meaning that's not necessarily present in Western names, it's often interesting for foreigners to find out what those meanings are. Many Japanese are made up of kanji for some of the simplest words -- ta (rice field, also read da), ishi (stone), naka (inside), yama (mountain), kawa (river), hashi (bridge), and so on. Again and again I find myself amazed at how often Japanese are unable to read some of the more difficult kanji, both names of people and of places. Because each character has at least two ways to read it (the Chinese and Japanese pronunciations), and because readings are often shoehorned into some kanji (for example, Ainu place names in northern Japan have had kanji assigned to them, which no one outside of the region can read), knowing how to read some characters can be a big challenge.
Friday, December 31, 2004
Wednesday, December 29, 2004
Bad words in Japanese & the Prefectural System
Hello again. Another update, and another post for you. Can't write much now, I'm off to print my damned New Year's cards. Of course my printer broke when I went to use it, so I was supremely hosed -- had to buy a new Canon Pixus just to print all of 17 stupid cards. Perhaps this is a sign of too much technology?
Here are some pictures from Japan. First, there's OFF!, a store that sells rubber stamps and, since this is Japan, hanko stamps, which are what people carry around to stamp document, which you do in place of signing them. Supposedly, no one thinks of stealing someone's name stamp and selling their house out from under them. Then, I've posted the Nimbus 2000 that Santa brought my 9 year old daughter. She was so happy to see it, even though Santa forgot to put magic in it to make it fly. Kids are so cute on Christmas.
Today's J-List post is below. You can also read it on the J-List website or the JBOX.com site.
The clock is ticking down to the end of 2004. Today we did our oh-soji (big cleaning), stopping work for a few hours to scrub the J-List office from top to bottom. I even found time to rearrange my Star Wars figures, which had collapsed after the earthquake in Niigata (amid jokes of a "disturbance in the Force"). We're getting ready for a nice, quiet oshogatsu (oh-SHO-ga-tsu, New Year's Day) and we wish everyone a happy and safe holiday, wherever you are in the world.
Going to live in a new country can be a stressful experience, the proverbial paradigm shifting without a clutch. Something I was quite surprised at upon coming to Japan was the lack of street names, which made it very difficult to learn my way around in my new city. The Japanese layout, which is supposedly based on the French prefectural system, separates the country into 47 prefectures (ken), which includes the Tokyo metropolitan area, the special prefectural areas of Osaka and Kyoto (fu) and the island of Hokkaido, a system which was created after the Meiji Restoration and the elimination of the old feudal system. Inside each prefecture, there are three kinds of incorporated areas: cities (shi), towns (machi or cho, two readings for the same kanji character) or villages (mura). Inside the large city areas, such as the city we live in, there are small "town" areas designated, so that a person may live in Sakura Town, Takasaki City, Gunma Prefecture, Japan. In lieu of a numeric address on a street, houses are assigned a number for the "town" it's located in, like 2-19-15. If you think it's terribly confusing to have a whole country with no named streets or numbered houses, you're right -- it's virtually impossible to find any location in Japan without a written map or directions using plenty of landmarks. As populations rise and fall in Japan (usually fall, it's sad to say), areas sometimes merge with each other to create new cities (called gappei), to try to attract investment and tourism. Our prefecture is currently engaged in gappei mania, with several smaller towns combining to form new cities. The towns that J-List's Tomo and Jun live in are going to disappear next year, joining part of the newly established Midori [Green] City.
Whenever you study a language, one of the first things you generally learn are the "bad" words -- that's just plain human nature. Most students of Japanese are surprised to find that there are almost no really bad words in the language -- if you define bad as in, words that kids aren't allowed to use. Kuso (the "s" word) is used regularly on children's anime in Japan, and most kids use it normally while playing with nary a rebuke from their parents. Baka (stupid) is the catch-all insult, used in almost any situation (people from the Osaka region say aho instead). Variations on the above two words include baka-jijii (stupid old man) and kuso-babaa (sh--ty old woman). The various applications of the "F" word don't translate into Japanese at all -- the word doesn't exist in Japanese, although virtually all Japanese know the English word, along with the English word sekkusu. The only really "bad" word in Japanese is manko (referring to a woman's reproductive organ) -- a word as embarrassingly close to "mango" as election and another word are for Japanese speakers of English. As always, exercise caution when using these words so that you don't offend any Japanese around you. For more information on Japanese terms, see the J-List glossary (link on the left of the main page).
We continue to be shocked at the terrible destruction in Asia after the earthquake and tsunamis, and are very saddened at the loss of life. Thailand's Phuket island is especially popular with tourists from Japan and Europe, and my wife and I spent an enjoyable honeymoon there ten years ago. Among the thousands of tourists feared dead in the disaster were hundreds of Japanese tourists who had gone to escape the freezing weather in Japan. Our hearts go out to everyone affected by this terrible international tragedy.
Here are some pictures from Japan. First, there's OFF!, a store that sells rubber stamps and, since this is Japan, hanko stamps, which are what people carry around to stamp document, which you do in place of signing them. Supposedly, no one thinks of stealing someone's name stamp and selling their house out from under them. Then, I've posted the Nimbus 2000 that Santa brought my 9 year old daughter. She was so happy to see it, even though Santa forgot to put magic in it to make it fly. Kids are so cute on Christmas.
Today's J-List post is below. You can also read it on the J-List website or the JBOX.com site.
The clock is ticking down to the end of 2004. Today we did our oh-soji (big cleaning), stopping work for a few hours to scrub the J-List office from top to bottom. I even found time to rearrange my Star Wars figures, which had collapsed after the earthquake in Niigata (amid jokes of a "disturbance in the Force"). We're getting ready for a nice, quiet oshogatsu (oh-SHO-ga-tsu, New Year's Day) and we wish everyone a happy and safe holiday, wherever you are in the world.
Going to live in a new country can be a stressful experience, the proverbial paradigm shifting without a clutch. Something I was quite surprised at upon coming to Japan was the lack of street names, which made it very difficult to learn my way around in my new city. The Japanese layout, which is supposedly based on the French prefectural system, separates the country into 47 prefectures (ken), which includes the Tokyo metropolitan area, the special prefectural areas of Osaka and Kyoto (fu) and the island of Hokkaido, a system which was created after the Meiji Restoration and the elimination of the old feudal system. Inside each prefecture, there are three kinds of incorporated areas: cities (shi), towns (machi or cho, two readings for the same kanji character) or villages (mura). Inside the large city areas, such as the city we live in, there are small "town" areas designated, so that a person may live in Sakura Town, Takasaki City, Gunma Prefecture, Japan. In lieu of a numeric address on a street, houses are assigned a number for the "town" it's located in, like 2-19-15. If you think it's terribly confusing to have a whole country with no named streets or numbered houses, you're right -- it's virtually impossible to find any location in Japan without a written map or directions using plenty of landmarks. As populations rise and fall in Japan (usually fall, it's sad to say), areas sometimes merge with each other to create new cities (called gappei), to try to attract investment and tourism. Our prefecture is currently engaged in gappei mania, with several smaller towns combining to form new cities. The towns that J-List's Tomo and Jun live in are going to disappear next year, joining part of the newly established Midori [Green] City.
Whenever you study a language, one of the first things you generally learn are the "bad" words -- that's just plain human nature. Most students of Japanese are surprised to find that there are almost no really bad words in the language -- if you define bad as in, words that kids aren't allowed to use. Kuso (the "s" word) is used regularly on children's anime in Japan, and most kids use it normally while playing with nary a rebuke from their parents. Baka (stupid) is the catch-all insult, used in almost any situation (people from the Osaka region say aho instead). Variations on the above two words include baka-jijii (stupid old man) and kuso-babaa (sh--ty old woman). The various applications of the "F" word don't translate into Japanese at all -- the word doesn't exist in Japanese, although virtually all Japanese know the English word, along with the English word sekkusu. The only really "bad" word in Japanese is manko (referring to a woman's reproductive organ) -- a word as embarrassingly close to "mango" as election and another word are for Japanese speakers of English. As always, exercise caution when using these words so that you don't offend any Japanese around you. For more information on Japanese terms, see the J-List glossary (link on the left of the main page).
We continue to be shocked at the terrible destruction in Asia after the earthquake and tsunamis, and are very saddened at the loss of life. Thailand's Phuket island is especially popular with tourists from Japan and Europe, and my wife and I spent an enjoyable honeymoon there ten years ago. Among the thousands of tourists feared dead in the disaster were hundreds of Japanese tourists who had gone to escape the freezing weather in Japan. Our hearts go out to everyone affected by this terrible international tragedy.
Monday, December 27, 2004
Culture shock in Japan - Yamato Nadeshiko
Hello all. Back to work for the J-List crew, although it's time for the nenmatsu rush of people taking days off, so not everyone is here. Japan really slows down during New Year's, which is the big holiday in the country. Everything is closed, except for convenience stores. Just two more updates after today before 2004 is history.
Today's J-List post is below. You can also read it on the J-List website or the JBOX.com site.
I experienced many forms of culture shock when I first came to Japan, and one area that surprised me a lot was the place of women in Japanese society. While women do enjoy equality in terms of legal rights here, it is true that Japan is definitely a very male-dominated country in which the roles of men and women are very different than they are in the West. Here, women tend to occupy a slightly lower tier than men, and this is not, as far as I can see, due entirely to any sexist maneuverings on the part of Japan's males. When a company hires a 23-year-old girl to work at a full time job, it's joshiki (common sense) that she'll quit within a few years to get married, and the number of career-minded women in Japan is far fewer than in the U.S. This tendency on the part of Japan's females to defer to men seems to be the root of much of the famed Japanese social stability. It's certainly true that, while the man in the family is the daikoku-bashira or the big, black pillar that supports the family, the woman of the house will handle all finances, expertly putting money away for when it's needed and ensuring the family's future happiness. There's a Japanese word that describes the "perfect woman," called yamato nadeshiko, which represents the traits that are ideal for a wife and mother to have: femininity, chastity, loyalty to her husband, the skill to change her husband's mind when he's wrong, and inner strength. Both men and women buy into this image of the ideal Japanese woman to some degree.
In Japan, there are various first- and second-person pronouns, and which word a person uses says a lot about their social roles. For example, for the word corresponding to "you," Japanese men will usually use a name with -san or -kun after it (polite), the word kimi (somewhat familiar, used among friends) or the masculine word omae (oh-MAI-eh), depending on who they're talking to. This third word is quite interesting to study. It's generally only used by men (or in anime, ultra-Tomboy type females), and generally from a superior to someone below him, i.e. senpai/upperclassmen to kouhai/underclassman, parent to child, dog owner to pet, etc. Choosing to use omae to refer to a person verbally reinforces a certain relationship, i.e. that you are above them in status, so the potential to offend someone by using it improperly is great. If a man says omae to a woman he's romantically involved with, he's basically implying that she belongs to him, in effect saying omae wa ore no mono da, or "You belong to me." Some Japanese women find this term very romantic and get all fluttery inside when they hear it, while others -- Japanese women who've lived in America or Europe, I am told -- dislike having men refer to them with this word.
It's often said that Japanese society follows behind the U.S. by 25 years or so, and this seems to be true quite a lot of the time. The divorce rate in Japan is currently around 2.2 people per thousand people, about half the rate of 4.1 in the U.S., but still higher than countries like Italy (0.6). Japan lacks a "no fault" divorce system, and courts often assign blame to one party, especially if one side can prove unfaithfulness on the part of the other. Usually when a couple lands in splitsville, the women will go back to her jikka, her "real house" where her parents live, and go back to using her maiden name. It's common for the former couple to never see each other again for the rest of their lives, and fathers are often separated from their children forever, too, especially when the woman gets remarried. As Japan ages, an increasing number of older couples are calling off their marriages, once children grow up and move away. When a woman gets divorced, she may not get married again for the next six months, to avoid problems with determining the father of any children she may be carrying.
Today's J-List post is below. You can also read it on the J-List website or the JBOX.com site.
I experienced many forms of culture shock when I first came to Japan, and one area that surprised me a lot was the place of women in Japanese society. While women do enjoy equality in terms of legal rights here, it is true that Japan is definitely a very male-dominated country in which the roles of men and women are very different than they are in the West. Here, women tend to occupy a slightly lower tier than men, and this is not, as far as I can see, due entirely to any sexist maneuverings on the part of Japan's males. When a company hires a 23-year-old girl to work at a full time job, it's joshiki (common sense) that she'll quit within a few years to get married, and the number of career-minded women in Japan is far fewer than in the U.S. This tendency on the part of Japan's females to defer to men seems to be the root of much of the famed Japanese social stability. It's certainly true that, while the man in the family is the daikoku-bashira or the big, black pillar that supports the family, the woman of the house will handle all finances, expertly putting money away for when it's needed and ensuring the family's future happiness. There's a Japanese word that describes the "perfect woman," called yamato nadeshiko, which represents the traits that are ideal for a wife and mother to have: femininity, chastity, loyalty to her husband, the skill to change her husband's mind when he's wrong, and inner strength. Both men and women buy into this image of the ideal Japanese woman to some degree.
In Japan, there are various first- and second-person pronouns, and which word a person uses says a lot about their social roles. For example, for the word corresponding to "you," Japanese men will usually use a name with -san or -kun after it (polite), the word kimi (somewhat familiar, used among friends) or the masculine word omae (oh-MAI-eh), depending on who they're talking to. This third word is quite interesting to study. It's generally only used by men (or in anime, ultra-Tomboy type females), and generally from a superior to someone below him, i.e. senpai/upperclassmen to kouhai/underclassman, parent to child, dog owner to pet, etc. Choosing to use omae to refer to a person verbally reinforces a certain relationship, i.e. that you are above them in status, so the potential to offend someone by using it improperly is great. If a man says omae to a woman he's romantically involved with, he's basically implying that she belongs to him, in effect saying omae wa ore no mono da, or "You belong to me." Some Japanese women find this term very romantic and get all fluttery inside when they hear it, while others -- Japanese women who've lived in America or Europe, I am told -- dislike having men refer to them with this word.
It's often said that Japanese society follows behind the U.S. by 25 years or so, and this seems to be true quite a lot of the time. The divorce rate in Japan is currently around 2.2 people per thousand people, about half the rate of 4.1 in the U.S., but still higher than countries like Italy (0.6). Japan lacks a "no fault" divorce system, and courts often assign blame to one party, especially if one side can prove unfaithfulness on the part of the other. Usually when a couple lands in splitsville, the women will go back to her jikka, her "real house" where her parents live, and go back to using her maiden name. It's common for the former couple to never see each other again for the rest of their lives, and fathers are often separated from their children forever, too, especially when the woman gets remarried. As Japan ages, an increasing number of older couples are calling off their marriages, once children grow up and move away. When a woman gets divorced, she may not get married again for the next six months, to avoid problems with determining the father of any children she may be carrying.
Saturday, December 25, 2004
Merii Kurisumasu
Hello all. Actually this is a repost because I deleted this post somehow. GRRR...
Here are some pictures from Japan. One is the Christmas Cake my kids baked this year. The other is the computer room of a Japanese friend. As you can see, he really likes America ^_^
Today's J-List post is below. You can also read it on the J-List website or the JBOX.com site.
Hello and the warmest holiday greetings to everyone! We hope that everyone has a very "merii kurisumasu," wherever you are in the world. Since we're seventeen hours ahead of California, we've already finished our Christmas morning, and are enjoying a nice calm day with the kids, playing with all the great stuff we got.
Christmas in Japan is a lot different from the rest of the world. Without a genuine tradition of celebrating yuletide, the Japanese often choose to import some of the more "fun" elements of the season, with Santa-san (yes, they really call him that) and presents and fun Christmas songs, and few of the solemn, pleasant themes found in America and Europe. Christians do celebrate Christmas, attending a special mass after they get off work (Christmas isn't a holiday in Japan). For my first Christmas in Japan, I attended mass at the local Baptist church, and was surprised at how similar everything was to what I'd seen back home, except that the Bible was in Japanese. But by and large religious themes play a small part in Christmas here -- instead, Christmas is something for kids, for couples to go on that special date, and for friends to have a fun Christmas party with lots of loud music and maybe firecrackers. This is a major difference between Japan and the U.S.: we are usually solemn on Christmas and have a blast on New Year's, but this is done in reverse here.
Now that Christmas is beyond us, Japanese will be looking forward to the most important holiday in Japan, New Year's Day. New Year's is a time to visit the Shinto shrine and pray for happiness in the new year, and reflect on what kind of year you want to have. Over the next week, Japanese will rush to finish their nengajo or New Year's cards, which are sent out to friends and family as a greeting and to wish everyone a happy new year. People like me, who wait til the last minute, always have a problem getting their nengajo printed in time. We'll also be cleaning the house from top to bottom (oh-sohji or "big cleaning), so that we can start the new year with a clean slate.
We're extremely happy to announce that Little My Maid, the long-awaited dating-sim game from Peach Princess, is finally in stock and shipping now. This is one of the best-ever Japanese bishoujo games to be released in the English language, and we're very happy to finally have it in our hands, ready to ship out to everyone. Featuring a great story based on a centuries-old Japanese tale, memorable female characters, beautiful art and full mouth animation when characters talk, we hope everyone will try this fantastic new game. We've also got lots of cool free stuff to give out with each copy sold, while supplies last.
It's still not too late to send that special someone a J-List gift certificate, which can be delivered within hours to anyone with an email address. J-List gift certificates are a great way to gift wacky and fun things from Japan to anyone on your list. We'll be processing gift certificates every few hours, so if there's someone you forgot to get a gift for, they can take their pick from the over 2000 cool products we have on the site.
Well, that's all for now. Once again, have a super-duper Christmas holiday!
Here are some pictures from Japan. One is the Christmas Cake my kids baked this year. The other is the computer room of a Japanese friend. As you can see, he really likes America ^_^
Today's J-List post is below. You can also read it on the J-List website or the JBOX.com site.
Hello and the warmest holiday greetings to everyone! We hope that everyone has a very "merii kurisumasu," wherever you are in the world. Since we're seventeen hours ahead of California, we've already finished our Christmas morning, and are enjoying a nice calm day with the kids, playing with all the great stuff we got.
Christmas in Japan is a lot different from the rest of the world. Without a genuine tradition of celebrating yuletide, the Japanese often choose to import some of the more "fun" elements of the season, with Santa-san (yes, they really call him that) and presents and fun Christmas songs, and few of the solemn, pleasant themes found in America and Europe. Christians do celebrate Christmas, attending a special mass after they get off work (Christmas isn't a holiday in Japan). For my first Christmas in Japan, I attended mass at the local Baptist church, and was surprised at how similar everything was to what I'd seen back home, except that the Bible was in Japanese. But by and large religious themes play a small part in Christmas here -- instead, Christmas is something for kids, for couples to go on that special date, and for friends to have a fun Christmas party with lots of loud music and maybe firecrackers. This is a major difference between Japan and the U.S.: we are usually solemn on Christmas and have a blast on New Year's, but this is done in reverse here.
Now that Christmas is beyond us, Japanese will be looking forward to the most important holiday in Japan, New Year's Day. New Year's is a time to visit the Shinto shrine and pray for happiness in the new year, and reflect on what kind of year you want to have. Over the next week, Japanese will rush to finish their nengajo or New Year's cards, which are sent out to friends and family as a greeting and to wish everyone a happy new year. People like me, who wait til the last minute, always have a problem getting their nengajo printed in time. We'll also be cleaning the house from top to bottom (oh-sohji or "big cleaning), so that we can start the new year with a clean slate.
We're extremely happy to announce that Little My Maid, the long-awaited dating-sim game from Peach Princess, is finally in stock and shipping now. This is one of the best-ever Japanese bishoujo games to be released in the English language, and we're very happy to finally have it in our hands, ready to ship out to everyone. Featuring a great story based on a centuries-old Japanese tale, memorable female characters, beautiful art and full mouth animation when characters talk, we hope everyone will try this fantastic new game. We've also got lots of cool free stuff to give out with each copy sold, while supplies last.
It's still not too late to send that special someone a J-List gift certificate, which can be delivered within hours to anyone with an email address. J-List gift certificates are a great way to gift wacky and fun things from Japan to anyone on your list. We'll be processing gift certificates every few hours, so if there's someone you forgot to get a gift for, they can take their pick from the over 2000 cool products we have on the site.
Well, that's all for now. Once again, have a super-duper Christmas holiday!
Thursday, December 23, 2004
Japanese Corporate Fashions & More
Hello all. Another slice of life from Japan for you. It will be nice to have Christmas again, and my kids are looking forward to it, as kids are wont to do. My wife, who never celebrated Christmas until she married me, always goes through a period where she pooh-poohs it all, but she comes around when the time comes.
Here are some pictures for you to check out. These are pictures I had handy from Daisuke's wedding a month or two back. Japanese weddings are BIG affairs and this one probably cost $50,000. It was great fun. The glasses seen below are interesting glasses we were given which turn any pinpoint of light (such as a candle) into a heart in your vision. If people tell me they like the pictures I'll try to post them every post. I got a much improved phone with a camera in it, so the ability to go somewhere and say, hey, I should take a picture of this, is greatly improved.
Today's J-List post is below:
Hello from all of us in Japan. We hope everyone is having a great holiday season. We're all getting ready for a nice Christmas here in Japan, with presents under the tree and our Christmas Cake reserved from our favorite bakery. We thank everyone for your kind support this past year and wish you all the best holidays ever.
Japan can take the strangest things and turn them into a fashion trend. Over the past few years there's been a bizarre minor trend towards wearing corporate symbols on clothes, usually famous companies like Texaco and British Petroleum which aren't active in the Japanese market at all. The mini-boom in corporate casual wear is attributed to Japanese pro wrestler Sakuraba, who made a shirt that replaced the famous Union 76 logo with "39," numbers which stand for "saku" according to a Japanese number code that I have yet to figure out, the first two syllables of his name. Today, it's quite common to see people sporting the "76" logo on their clothes here, despite the fact that they probably have no idea what the company sells (since Union 76 doesn't exist here).
One concept that comes up a lot in anime or dating sim games is the childhood friend, called osana-najimi (oh-SA-NA NA-ji-mee), a word which seems impossible to remember until you break it down (osanai means young, and najimu is a verb meaning "to become friendly with"). At least in rural parts of the country where we live, Japanese tend to not be very mobile, and my wife's family has lived on the same land for generations, since the Edo Period at least. My son goes to the same elementary school that my wife went to when she was a child...which is the same elementary school her mother attended, too, back during World War II. Because everyone in our city has been here for years, my wife has many osana-najimi friends who she's grown up with, people she's known for years and years. In my family, we moved frequently whenever my mother got a new job or bought a new house, living in several states and in New Zealand before settling down in San Diego, so the concept of having roots that go back that far is really staggering to me.
Are you looking for the perfect gift for that hard-to-buy person on your list? We humbly recommend J-List gift certificates. The spiffy J-List gift certificate system allows you to gift the gift of cool things from Japan to anyone with an email address. We'll send them their gift certificate, complete with a warm message from you and a PDF file that they can print out, or send it to yourself, print out the gift certificate, and present it to them in person. It's the perfect last-minute gift for the Japanophile who has everything. We'll be processing these gift certificate orders every 8 hours as we get close to December 25th.
Here are some pictures for you to check out. These are pictures I had handy from Daisuke's wedding a month or two back. Japanese weddings are BIG affairs and this one probably cost $50,000. It was great fun. The glasses seen below are interesting glasses we were given which turn any pinpoint of light (such as a candle) into a heart in your vision. If people tell me they like the pictures I'll try to post them every post. I got a much improved phone with a camera in it, so the ability to go somewhere and say, hey, I should take a picture of this, is greatly improved.
Today's J-List post is below:
Hello from all of us in Japan. We hope everyone is having a great holiday season. We're all getting ready for a nice Christmas here in Japan, with presents under the tree and our Christmas Cake reserved from our favorite bakery. We thank everyone for your kind support this past year and wish you all the best holidays ever.
Japan can take the strangest things and turn them into a fashion trend. Over the past few years there's been a bizarre minor trend towards wearing corporate symbols on clothes, usually famous companies like Texaco and British Petroleum which aren't active in the Japanese market at all. The mini-boom in corporate casual wear is attributed to Japanese pro wrestler Sakuraba, who made a shirt that replaced the famous Union 76 logo with "39," numbers which stand for "saku" according to a Japanese number code that I have yet to figure out, the first two syllables of his name. Today, it's quite common to see people sporting the "76" logo on their clothes here, despite the fact that they probably have no idea what the company sells (since Union 76 doesn't exist here).
One concept that comes up a lot in anime or dating sim games is the childhood friend, called osana-najimi (oh-SA-NA NA-ji-mee), a word which seems impossible to remember until you break it down (osanai means young, and najimu is a verb meaning "to become friendly with"). At least in rural parts of the country where we live, Japanese tend to not be very mobile, and my wife's family has lived on the same land for generations, since the Edo Period at least. My son goes to the same elementary school that my wife went to when she was a child...which is the same elementary school her mother attended, too, back during World War II. Because everyone in our city has been here for years, my wife has many osana-najimi friends who she's grown up with, people she's known for years and years. In my family, we moved frequently whenever my mother got a new job or bought a new house, living in several states and in New Zealand before settling down in San Diego, so the concept of having roots that go back that far is really staggering to me.
Are you looking for the perfect gift for that hard-to-buy person on your list? We humbly recommend J-List gift certificates. The spiffy J-List gift certificate system allows you to gift the gift of cool things from Japan to anyone with an email address. We'll send them their gift certificate, complete with a warm message from you and a PDF file that they can print out, or send it to yourself, print out the gift certificate, and present it to them in person. It's the perfect last-minute gift for the Japanophile who has everything. We'll be processing these gift certificate orders every 8 hours as we get close to December 25th.
Tuesday, December 21, 2004
Fun at Disneyland and beyond
We had fun at Tokyo Disneyland. It was threatening to rain the whole time, but it didn't, so we knew we had gotten away clean. As told in the post below, we went on a Monday, on the 21st, assuming that the really big crowds would be there on the 23rd, which is the Emperor's Birthday and hence a holiday. The best time to go to Tokyo Disneyland, if you're wondering, is the non-holiday after a 3-day holiday, e.g. a Monday after a 3 day weekend. Then you'll have the whole place to yourself.
Today's post is below. It was cool sharing about a Dog of Flanders, which is a really cool movie. By all means, please go to Amazon and get this great anime. The link is here.
The Japanese believe a person's blood type foretells a lot about his personality, and Japan is having a "blood type boom" right now, with regular variety shows that report on what characteristics each blood type group share. In one recent show, they placed hidden cameras and watched a group of people eating all-you-can-eat Korean barbecue, in which you cook your food together on a big grill in the center of the table. A type people tend to be organized and neat, and the A types took just enough food and cooked it in a small corner of the grill. Type B people, who are "going my way" (a word the Japanese use for anyone who is in their own little world, like me), took too much food and hoarded it from everyone else. AB types, known for doing things differently from others, chose things like vegetables when everyone else was eating meat. In another experiment, they showed the last episode of one of the most moving anime shows of all time, A Dog of Flanders, based on a famous Belgian children's story, to rooms full of people separated by blood type. In the last minutes of the show, as young Mello goes into the St. James's Church to see the three famous Rubens paintings uncovered, allowing him to gaze at them for the first time, he finally knows happiness. As angels come to take him and his faithful dog Patrache up to heaven, the camera cuts back to the roomful of people who were watching the scene. 7 out of 8 of the type O people were bawling over the touching scene, while only 2 out of 8 of the type A and type AB people were in tears. For most of my life I didn't know my own blood type, something which is unthinkable in Japan, where the address book functions on cell phones have a place to record the blood type of the people you're calling.
We wanted to do something special for the kids this winter, so we took them down to Tokyo Disneyland. Tokyo Disneyland has been one of the most successful amusement parks in the world since it opened in 1983, raking in tons of money for the Disney empire. It recreates the original Disneyland in almost every way, although there's no Matterhorn and there actually seems to be more room to walk than at the California park. Knowing how bad the crowds can be during weekends and holidays, we went on a Monday, and were rewarded with a moderately pleasant Disneyland experience -- the longest wait was an hour or so. Of course we were obliged to buy lots of omiyage (oh-mee-YAH-geh) for people back home -- the ubiquitous souvenirs that prop up the Japanese economy. Disneyland's nickname is "nezumi-land" (nezumi = mouse) among Japanese fans.
There are some classic jokes in Japanese that I'll pass along to you. One stems from the words "oneesan" which means older sister but can also refer to a woman aged 18-25 or so, and "obasan" which means aunt but also any middle-aged woman. A classic joke in anime or manga features an innocent child who calls a woman "obasan" even though she's still young, and how she reacts to the label -- kind of like my reaction at being called "sir" for the first time in my life. Another classic joke you encounter every once in a while is a cow saying mou yamete (lit. "please stop it already"), which is amusing because the "moo" sound a cow makes sounds like the word mou ("already") in Japanese. Finally, the equivalent of the stale old joke "roadkill on the information super highway" in Japanese is dohto komu which means "...gets very crowded" but sounds like dot-com. So you can say, Amazon wa dohto komu, "That Amazon site sure has a lot of users." If you want to make a really stupid joke in Japanese, that is.
Today's post is below. It was cool sharing about a Dog of Flanders, which is a really cool movie. By all means, please go to Amazon and get this great anime. The link is here.
The Japanese believe a person's blood type foretells a lot about his personality, and Japan is having a "blood type boom" right now, with regular variety shows that report on what characteristics each blood type group share. In one recent show, they placed hidden cameras and watched a group of people eating all-you-can-eat Korean barbecue, in which you cook your food together on a big grill in the center of the table. A type people tend to be organized and neat, and the A types took just enough food and cooked it in a small corner of the grill. Type B people, who are "going my way" (a word the Japanese use for anyone who is in their own little world, like me), took too much food and hoarded it from everyone else. AB types, known for doing things differently from others, chose things like vegetables when everyone else was eating meat. In another experiment, they showed the last episode of one of the most moving anime shows of all time, A Dog of Flanders, based on a famous Belgian children's story, to rooms full of people separated by blood type. In the last minutes of the show, as young Mello goes into the St. James's Church to see the three famous Rubens paintings uncovered, allowing him to gaze at them for the first time, he finally knows happiness. As angels come to take him and his faithful dog Patrache up to heaven, the camera cuts back to the roomful of people who were watching the scene. 7 out of 8 of the type O people were bawling over the touching scene, while only 2 out of 8 of the type A and type AB people were in tears. For most of my life I didn't know my own blood type, something which is unthinkable in Japan, where the address book functions on cell phones have a place to record the blood type of the people you're calling.
We wanted to do something special for the kids this winter, so we took them down to Tokyo Disneyland. Tokyo Disneyland has been one of the most successful amusement parks in the world since it opened in 1983, raking in tons of money for the Disney empire. It recreates the original Disneyland in almost every way, although there's no Matterhorn and there actually seems to be more room to walk than at the California park. Knowing how bad the crowds can be during weekends and holidays, we went on a Monday, and were rewarded with a moderately pleasant Disneyland experience -- the longest wait was an hour or so. Of course we were obliged to buy lots of omiyage (oh-mee-YAH-geh) for people back home -- the ubiquitous souvenirs that prop up the Japanese economy. Disneyland's nickname is "nezumi-land" (nezumi = mouse) among Japanese fans.
There are some classic jokes in Japanese that I'll pass along to you. One stems from the words "oneesan" which means older sister but can also refer to a woman aged 18-25 or so, and "obasan" which means aunt but also any middle-aged woman. A classic joke in anime or manga features an innocent child who calls a woman "obasan" even though she's still young, and how she reacts to the label -- kind of like my reaction at being called "sir" for the first time in my life. Another classic joke you encounter every once in a while is a cow saying mou yamete (lit. "please stop it already"), which is amusing because the "moo" sound a cow makes sounds like the word mou ("already") in Japanese. Finally, the equivalent of the stale old joke "roadkill on the information super highway" in Japanese is dohto komu which means "...gets very crowded" but sounds like dot-com. So you can say, Amazon wa dohto komu, "That Amazon site sure has a lot of users." If you want to make a really stupid joke in Japanese, that is.
Friday, December 17, 2004
Wednesday, December 15, 2004
Greetings from J-List 12/15/04
Japanese television is always interesting, with a broad mix of entertaining things to watch. Variety shows, which feature popular "talents" (entertainers) like cute-as-a-button Yuko Ogura, are a major staple of the airwaves. One show, called World's Greatest TV, brings clips of television from around the world, including bizarre TV commercials from America, Europe and Asia, and has famous people try to guess what will happen next. Another popular genre of television here is the "trendy drama," and love stories starring top stars like Yuji Oda and Akiko Yada are always near the top of the ratings charts. With the opening of cultural ties between South Korea and Japan, this year has also seen a huge explosion of interest in tear-jerking South Korean soaps, as well. Another popular genre of television here are classic Agatha Christie-style mysteries in which detectives have to solve a murder. There are many twists on the standard mystery formula, such as "Stewardess Deka" (a trip of crime-solving flight attendants) and one series in which they tell you who committed the murder right at the beginning, and then let you watch as the expert detective follows the trail right to the killer.
Like Cherry Blossoms in the Spring, words are fleeting things, and it can be surprising how their meanings change when they're imported into other languages. Many of the English words the Japanese use don't match up perfectly with their Japanese counterparts. When I had to replace a cooling fan in one of our Macs the other day, I went to the local computer store ("Power Up Computing Life") and asked for a fan, using the English word. Other concepts that we use the word "fan" for go by very different names in Japanese, such as senpuuki (an electric fan), uchiwa (a fan you use to fan yourself, non-folding) and sensu (a traditional folding Chinese fan). There are some other English words that the Japanese use, but only in limited ways. If there's a girl you're secretly in love with, a Japanese might advise you to "attack" her (meaning, go and win her love). The English word "camouflage" often refers to a gay man and woman marrying to hide this fact from others. And the English word "propose" is used in Japan only to mean a proposal of marriage, which certainly presents the potential for confusion in international work settings.
For whatever reason, Japanese men are fond of urinating outdoors. When driving around Japan, it's not at all uncommon to happen on an older man relieving himself by the side of the road -- even walking from my home to J-List, a mere 100 meters or so, I sometimes see one of our neighbors peeing in the ditch. It's partially a rural thing -- with a population of 140,000, our city is not large, and there's a lot of agriculture -- but I've seen friends from Tokyo and Yokohama do it when the need took them. It can get so bad that people occasionally put signs that say "It is forbidden to urinate here" (tachi-shon kinshi) in front of their homes. This bizarre and uniquely Japanese message is captured on one of our wacky T-shirts, too - a little piece of Japan for everyone.
Do you love the anime films of Hayao Miyazaki? Remember that J-List stocks all the excellent region 2 DVD releases for Studio Ghibli movies like Spirited Away, The Cat Returns, My Neighbor Totoro, Castle in the Sky Laputa, Princess Mononoke and his Lupin the 3rd classic, The Castle of Caliostro (a favorite of mine). These DVDs are released in Japan directly by the studio and include many features that make them great for collectors. All discs feature English subtitles and/or dubbed tracks and are great for fans who want the definitive versions of these anime classics overseen by Mr. Miyazaki himself. The only catch is, they're Japanese releases (region 2), so you need a region free DVD player to watch them -- and J-List humbly recommends the three excellent units we currently sell.
Like Cherry Blossoms in the Spring, words are fleeting things, and it can be surprising how their meanings change when they're imported into other languages. Many of the English words the Japanese use don't match up perfectly with their Japanese counterparts. When I had to replace a cooling fan in one of our Macs the other day, I went to the local computer store ("Power Up Computing Life") and asked for a fan, using the English word. Other concepts that we use the word "fan" for go by very different names in Japanese, such as senpuuki (an electric fan), uchiwa (a fan you use to fan yourself, non-folding) and sensu (a traditional folding Chinese fan). There are some other English words that the Japanese use, but only in limited ways. If there's a girl you're secretly in love with, a Japanese might advise you to "attack" her (meaning, go and win her love). The English word "camouflage" often refers to a gay man and woman marrying to hide this fact from others. And the English word "propose" is used in Japan only to mean a proposal of marriage, which certainly presents the potential for confusion in international work settings.
For whatever reason, Japanese men are fond of urinating outdoors. When driving around Japan, it's not at all uncommon to happen on an older man relieving himself by the side of the road -- even walking from my home to J-List, a mere 100 meters or so, I sometimes see one of our neighbors peeing in the ditch. It's partially a rural thing -- with a population of 140,000, our city is not large, and there's a lot of agriculture -- but I've seen friends from Tokyo and Yokohama do it when the need took them. It can get so bad that people occasionally put signs that say "It is forbidden to urinate here" (tachi-shon kinshi) in front of their homes. This bizarre and uniquely Japanese message is captured on one of our wacky T-shirts, too - a little piece of Japan for everyone.
Do you love the anime films of Hayao Miyazaki? Remember that J-List stocks all the excellent region 2 DVD releases for Studio Ghibli movies like Spirited Away, The Cat Returns, My Neighbor Totoro, Castle in the Sky Laputa, Princess Mononoke and his Lupin the 3rd classic, The Castle of Caliostro (a favorite of mine). These DVDs are released in Japan directly by the studio and include many features that make them great for collectors. All discs feature English subtitles and/or dubbed tracks and are great for fans who want the definitive versions of these anime classics overseen by Mr. Miyazaki himself. The only catch is, they're Japanese releases (region 2), so you need a region free DVD player to watch them -- and J-List humbly recommends the three excellent units we currently sell.
Monday, December 13, 2004
Greetings from J-List 12/13/04
Before I started J-List I was an English teacher, and taught ESL to a wide range of Japanese students, from kids to the elderly and everyone in between. Although my students tried hard to learn, the sad reality is that most of them won't become really good at the language in their lifetimes. There are dozens of reasons why Japanese usually don't attain proficiency at English despite six years of education (more if they study English in college), but some major ones stand out. First, the Japanese draw a line between "English" (grammar and vocabulary) and "English conversation" (an ethereal thing which can't be defined), and since only the former can be measured in tests, students tend to be more concerned with demonstrable English skills rather than communication. Second, Japan's system of education is very rigid, and most teachers in the system aren't that capable at speaking themselves, which creates resistance to reform. Finally, just as a computer needs a "killer app" to justify its existence, Japanese need a consuming reason to study English if they're to attain real fluency. If you're in the U.S., you probably don't need German to get through your day, and it's the same for most Japanese -- there's little actual need to use English in their daily life. Currently, Japan's Ministry of Education, which decides the curriculum from for the entire nation, is trying to promote English and "internationalization" (an buzzword that gets thrown around a lot in official circles) by having kids start learning English from the third grade. However, I'm not hopeful that this will have any meaningful effect on English education in Japan.
When I was growing up, I remember thinking that they had arranged marriages in Japan, probably something I got from watching the episode of Happy Days where Arnold gets married in a traditional Shinto wedding ceremony. In reality, they have "arranged meetings" called omiai, a kind of formal meeting between prospective partners, usually organized by busybody aunts who can't leave well enough alone. At an omiai, both parties talk about their interests and background and if they hit it off, they go out on more conventional dates to see where things lead. Before my wife met me, she had had omiai meetings with a few men, for example the son of a sake distributor that our liquor shop buys from, hence she couldn't refuse -- fortunately for me she didn't hit it off with any of them. As time marches on, the old-style formal omiai meeting is giving way to more modern methods, with companies that organize "omiai parties" (gatherings of marriage-minded people who interact with each other in a fixed space) and services that are like online dating but with a Japanese twist.
Like most gaijin, I had a fixation with Japanese vending machines when I came to live here, and took many silly pictures of them. Vending machines are quite advanced here, and often accept 10,000 yen notes (the equivalent of a $100 bill) and give change, verbally thanking you for your purchase. In Tokyo, where land is scarce, there are vending machines that are incredibly slim, so you can fit them in small spaces. You can buy just about anything from vending machines here, including canned coffee (hot in the winter, cold in the summer), canned corn soup, and cigarettes. Eggs and rice are sold in areas where there are no shops around, and I've seen machines that sell frozen meals and microwave it for you. Beer has been sold in vending machines for decades, and I have many fond memories of sitting in front of the local vending machine with friends, throwing a few back and talking with people who came by on their way to the station. Beer vending machines are being phased out, though, due to concerns about minors buying alcohol -- although the machine we have at our liquor store features a slot which reads your drivers' license for verification. Adult products are sometimes sold in vending machines, too, since customers like the privacy a machine affords.
We couldn't be happier with how popular the Japanese 2005 calendars have been this year. We've moved tons of these unique and beautifully printed calendars to people all over the world. Every day, a few more calendars sell out forever. We still have 80+ different items in stock, including the really cool Totoro and Kiki's Delivery Service desktop calendars, other gorgeous anime items, popular swimsuit and JPOP idol calendars, and cool traditional offerings like kimono idols, sushi and bento. Remember, buy 4 or more and get 15% off automatically.
Remember that J-List carries dozens of amazing Domo-kun products for you, more than any other company in the world, we're pretty sure. Domo-kun is the ultra-cute spokesmonster for the "BS" (broadcast satellite) TV network operated by NHK, the BBC of Japan, and he's as cute a monster as you could ever hope to see. We've got tons of amazing Domo-kun toys on the site, from the famous classic plush toys to the limited-edition Shinsengumi Domo-kun toy and much more.
When I was growing up, I remember thinking that they had arranged marriages in Japan, probably something I got from watching the episode of Happy Days where Arnold gets married in a traditional Shinto wedding ceremony. In reality, they have "arranged meetings" called omiai, a kind of formal meeting between prospective partners, usually organized by busybody aunts who can't leave well enough alone. At an omiai, both parties talk about their interests and background and if they hit it off, they go out on more conventional dates to see where things lead. Before my wife met me, she had had omiai meetings with a few men, for example the son of a sake distributor that our liquor shop buys from, hence she couldn't refuse -- fortunately for me she didn't hit it off with any of them. As time marches on, the old-style formal omiai meeting is giving way to more modern methods, with companies that organize "omiai parties" (gatherings of marriage-minded people who interact with each other in a fixed space) and services that are like online dating but with a Japanese twist.
Like most gaijin, I had a fixation with Japanese vending machines when I came to live here, and took many silly pictures of them. Vending machines are quite advanced here, and often accept 10,000 yen notes (the equivalent of a $100 bill) and give change, verbally thanking you for your purchase. In Tokyo, where land is scarce, there are vending machines that are incredibly slim, so you can fit them in small spaces. You can buy just about anything from vending machines here, including canned coffee (hot in the winter, cold in the summer), canned corn soup, and cigarettes. Eggs and rice are sold in areas where there are no shops around, and I've seen machines that sell frozen meals and microwave it for you. Beer has been sold in vending machines for decades, and I have many fond memories of sitting in front of the local vending machine with friends, throwing a few back and talking with people who came by on their way to the station. Beer vending machines are being phased out, though, due to concerns about minors buying alcohol -- although the machine we have at our liquor store features a slot which reads your drivers' license for verification. Adult products are sometimes sold in vending machines, too, since customers like the privacy a machine affords.
We couldn't be happier with how popular the Japanese 2005 calendars have been this year. We've moved tons of these unique and beautifully printed calendars to people all over the world. Every day, a few more calendars sell out forever. We still have 80+ different items in stock, including the really cool Totoro and Kiki's Delivery Service desktop calendars, other gorgeous anime items, popular swimsuit and JPOP idol calendars, and cool traditional offerings like kimono idols, sushi and bento. Remember, buy 4 or more and get 15% off automatically.
Remember that J-List carries dozens of amazing Domo-kun products for you, more than any other company in the world, we're pretty sure. Domo-kun is the ultra-cute spokesmonster for the "BS" (broadcast satellite) TV network operated by NHK, the BBC of Japan, and he's as cute a monster as you could ever hope to see. We've got tons of amazing Domo-kun toys on the site, from the famous classic plush toys to the limited-edition Shinsengumi Domo-kun toy and much more.
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