Reflections on Japanese TV, and the history of Loose Socks

One of our favorite Japanese TV shows is Trivia no Izumi (the Fountain of Trivia, a title that sounds similar to the famous Trevi Fountain in Rome), which brings totally unnecessary knowledge to viewers every Wednesday night on Fuji TV. Originally a late-night show with a large cult following, the show hit it big when it was moved to "golden time" (9 pm), reaching incredibly high ratings of over 20%. The trivia they present is always fun and always useless. Which Japanese snack would world-class pastry chefs in Paris choose as the most delicious? (Lotte "March of the Koalas") How fast does a piece of fingernail fly when you cut your nails? (39 km/hour) If you shot a Smith & Wesson .44 bullet at a samurai sword, which would win? (the sword cut the bullet in half every time, until they used a machine gun on it) Every week a panel of celebrities that includes popular swimsuit idol Megumi, half-Japanese/half-British actress Becky, and of course the Chairman, aka famous comedian Tamori, gives points to each bit of trivia by pressing buttons that make a sound like "hey!" (but in reality, heeh is a sound that Japanese say when they're told something thought-provoking, meaning, "You don't say?"). Incredibly, the show is showing in the U.S. as Hey! Spring of Trivia on Spike TV on Thursdays at 10 pm ET, and we recently caught our first episode on video. My son was thrilled to see the show in English, although he said the voice-overs were a little dasai (dorky). The official page for the show is here.

Another program we often watch is NHK's Eigo de Shaberanaito ("I've Got to Speak English"), an interesting show that helps Japanese trying to learn English stay motivated. Every week, actress Yumiko Shaku and (slightly annoying) American talent Patrick Harlan take up various topics related to language learning, usually featuring Japanese guests interviewing stars from the U.S. like Jodie Foster, Julie Andrews and Matt Damon. Because the show is produced by NHK, they're able to get many interesting guests, like former undersecretary of the U.N. Yasushi Akashi, and Natsuko Toda, the "Queen of Subtitles" who translates all the top American films into Japanese. It's always an interesting program for anyone interested in learning a language.

Loose socks are the bulky, oversized socks that are worn by millions of high school girls in Japan every day, which look sort of like leg warmers to the untrained eye. They were invented by Akira Tokita, the "God of Socks" whose created the trend at the beginning of the 90's, and they were an instant hit. The socks are so bulky and heavy that they'd fall down unless held up some way, so Japanese use water-based glue called "socks glue" to glue the top of the socks to their legs. J-List sells 70 and 120 cm length versions of these socks, which are very warm in addition to being a cool pop culture item from Japan. We've even got socks glue.

Japanese dentists and the food people in Japan eat

We woke up to a world of white this morning, as the Kanto area (the flat plain where Tokyo is located) got its third snowfall of the season. It was actually only a few centimeters of snow, but it managed to cause a minor panic, since snow is rare enough here that people aren't used to it. Fortunately (or unfortunately, if you like snow like I do), most of it has melted away.

Ask any gaijin living in Japan about dentists here, and you'll be sure to hear some complaints. While Japanese dentists are good at fixing teeth, they're famous for making you come back dozens of times to finish your dental work, instead of getting it out of the way in a few visits. I've finally finished having three teeth worked on, which somehow managed to take 18 months. I believe Japan's dentists take so long to work on teeth because of the way insurance is structured here -- they're only allowed to charge a certain amount to the system each day, so they spread it out as much as they can. Like men whose job it is to stand by the road and wave a flashlight to let you know there's road construction going on and NHK employees who knock on millions of doors to collect the $20 monthly fee from households in person, Japanese dentists are an unfortunate symbol of Japan's lack of efficiency in some areas.

Since I'm very busy with J-List, I don't get time to watch television as much as I'd like, especially the news. One show I try to catch on weekends is Broadcaster, a show which encapsulates the news events of the past week by ranking how many minutes of coverage each received. Last week's show included such news items as Princess Aiko (the 3-year-old daughter of Crown Prince Naruhito) learning how to ski for the first time; the father of sumo wrestler Takanohana's battle with esophageal cancer; the tragic suicide of South Korean actress Lee Eun-joo; the latest on Michael Jackson, which is followed carefully here; and all the current goings on with maverick Livedoor president Takafumi Horie, whose recently separated wife was found working in a supermarket for $6 an hour to make ends meet despite the fact that her husband is incredibly wealthy.

When I came to Japan to live, I knew about the famous foods like sushi, sashimi and ramen, but I had a lot to learn about the finer points of Japanese home cooking. As with other Asian countries, noodles are eaten frequently, with soba (thin grey noodles) and udon (fat white noodles) being the most popular. Many dishes commonly served at home aren't Japanese at all, such as curry rice, a version of the mild, thick curry brought here by the British, or spaghetti, really good with tuna fish and asparagus on top (my Japanese father-in-law can't eat spaghetti because it looks too strange to him). A lot of Chinese foods like chow mein (yakisoba) and fried wonton dumplings (gyoza, known in English as "pot stickers") have been a part of Japanese kitchens for so long they're not thought of as having come from anywhere else. Soy-based dishes are also very popular, with miso soup, tofu and natto at the top of the list. While the Japanese have come to eat quite a lot of bread and even adapt it in interesting ways (curry-pan, bread with curry inside), when all is said and done, rice is a big part of the their daily life. The basic unit of "fast food" in Japanese homes is the rice ball, called omusubi or onigiri, basically a triangle shaped ball of white rice with nori on the outside and different good stuff (ume, salmon) inside. We have some cool new products celebrating Japanese food on the site today -- check them out.

Japanese Universities, and the Michael Dell of Japan

There are two types of universities in Japan, public (operated on a national or prefectural level) and private, and as you'd expect, public universities cost a lot less to attend than private ones. One big difference between Japan and the U.S. is that the top schools in the States are venerable private institutions like Harvard and Princeton, which cost a lot to get into. In Japan, however, the most popular universities are public ones like Osaka or Kyoto University, because the education is so much cheaper, and getting into one is such an accomplishment that it brings a halo you carry with you all your life. In the Japanese test-based system, the universities with the most applicants are the hardest to get into because of increased competition, and it can take years of preparation to get ready for your test. Although the system of "entrance exam hell" certainly has a lot of drawbacks, one big benefit is that it's almost completely meritocratic -- only students who study very hard will be able to get into the legendary Tokyo University, regardless of how much money your family has. There are probably some big changes in store for Japanese universities over the new decade or so. First of all, Japan's national universities are increasingly being administered as private institutions, forcing them to be more creative and competitive if they want to survive into the future. Also, despite the sharp drop-off of children in Japan, new public universities are being constructed every year.

Every country is unique, and each country's economy is unique, too. While the multi-tiered distribution system Japan is famous for has gone through a lot of changes over the past decade, resulting in the removal of many layers of unneeded distribution, the route that goods take from producer to consumer can still be hard for Westerners to comprehend. While efficiency has increased greatly during Japan's painful decade-long quasi-recession, many products, such as toys, books, CDs and computer software are still bought and sold through a strict system of distribution that adds significantly to the price to the end user. The distribution system for beer and alcohol is also very inefficient, with products changing hands two or three times before they come to the small liquor shop that my wife's parents run. In industries where inefficient middlemen have been removed, allowing, say, Hitachi to sell its products directly to electronics stores rather than through several distributors, I've noticed some other problems. Without a third party between supplier and reseller, the manufacturers are able to put restrictions on shops that would probably not be legal in other countries, such as forcing them to buy huge amounts of stock, requiring that they purchase unpopular products if they want to get the popular ones, and so on.

There's another difference between Japan and the rest of the world -- hostile takeovers of companies just aren't done here. But that's what up-and-coming Internet provider Livedoor is attempting as it makes a bid for controlling interest in Nippon Broadcasting and through its holdings, Fuji TV, the most influential television network in Japan. The brainchild of Japanese whiz kid Takafumi Horie (ho-REE-eh), a Michael Dell-like persona who started his first company in his Tokyo University dorm, Livedoor has been buying Internet startups left and right as it elbows its way into the business headlines. Horie, whose nickname is Horiemon (ho-REE-eh-mon) in parody of the anime character Doraemon, is famous for working alongside his employees at a desk that's placed in a long row of identical desks, the Japanese version of a cubicle farm. He also doesn't even own a suit -- my wife hates him because he's a multi-millionaire yet dresses worse than I do.

Bullying in Japanese schools, and the giving of gifts

One of the biggest problems facing Japanese schools is ijime (EE-gee-may), or bullying, when a group of kids gangs up on weaker kids to torment them. The bullying can be open, like hiding a person's shoes so he can't go home or putting a sharp push-pin on his chair for him to sit on, or more subtle and psychological, like group ignoring. Every school in every country probably has some of this going on, but there are special reasons why ijime is so bad in Japan. First of all, students stay in the same classroom all year long -- teachers come for one hour to teach, then leave, but the students are always together. Also, the concept of counselors who listen to students' problems is quite alien here. My own daughter, who stands out because she looks very American, has been the target of more than a few incidents of bullying by bigger kids, so my wife and I are always trying to come up with proactive ways to handle problems. Hurdle, an anime movie that discusses the causes of ijime with kids, is playing in Japan right now, and we took my daughter to see it. Seeing the story of boy from Yokohama who moves to a rural city, only to be picked on by the local kids because he is so different, was a very moving one, and I hope that the film helps bring about changes for the better in schools here.

Gift giving is a highly developed custom in Japan, and there are many subtle rules about how gifts are exchanged. Gifts are given at happy events, such as at the birth of a child, when a new house is built, or when someone gets out of the hospital after an illness. The money that guests take to weddings -- $200 per person and up -- is also part of this gifts-as-congratulations system. Gifts are sometimes given to those who are helping you in some way, such as from parents to juku (private school) teachers who want extra attention paid to their children, although it's against the rules for licensed teachers, doctors and politicians to accept such gifts. Whenever you receive a gift from someone, it's customary to give them o-kaeshi, a return gift that's worth approximately half the amount of what you received. A major time for gift-giving is in August and December, when people and companies exchange seasonal gifts, everything from soy sauce to canned coffee to frozen lobster. Re-Ment, the amazing company that makes miniature versions of Japanese food, has a new series that captures the spirit of Japanese seasonal gift-giving with miniatures of popular gifts given in Japan, rendered in every detail (right down to the cardboard box). Full sets are in stock now!

All about Japanese girl & guy idols

One of the more interesting aspects of Japan is the effect Japan's "idol culture" has on everyday life. You can't turn on the television or go into a CD store without coming into contact with Japan's various idols, which are also known as "talents" (a generic term for a popular actor/singer/comedian). Whether it's Yuko Ogura appearing in the new commercial for Georgia Coffee Morning Shot, Harumi Nemoto guest-starring on my son's favorite show in which people have to live for a month on just $100, or a cardboard cut-out of Aya Ueto selling the latest Panasonic products in an electronics store, the culture of "cuteness" that Japan has refined to an exact art is a major source of pop culture imagery in Japan. The idea of stars being pre-packaged for national consumption is often hard for Westerners to accept, but Japan's idol world is refreshingly open and honest about how the popularity of top stars is created. Resistance is futile when you live in Japan -- no matter how you try to resist, your eyes will lock on to one pretty face or another, and you'll soon belong to them.

Male idols are big business in Japan, too, and the primary force behind this profitable corner of the industry is Johnny's Entertainment, the management agency started by Johnny Kitagawa to promote male stars. In the same way that the "Komuro Family" of music producer Tetsuya Komuro -- the man responsible for such English lyrics as "Body Feels EXIT" and "Get Chance and Luck" -- defined a chunk of the 1990s with singers that he discovered, Johnny's has created a slew of popular male stars that have universal popularity. The list of Johnny's-kei (Johnny's affiliated) JPOP bands include V6, TOKIO, the oddly-named Kinki Kids, a duo who hail from the Kinki region, where Osaka is located, and SMAP, whose lead singer Takuya Kimura is regularly voted the sexiest man in Japan. (He did the voice of Howl in Howl's Moving Castle, which matches his personality quite well.) The planners at Johnny's have made careful use of the popularity of yaoi in Japan today, promoting stars that are very close to the image of bishounen ("beautiful boy") that are especially popular with female fans.

Japan's in a minor uproar over an incident in which a deranged man with a baseball bat started chasing police officers, who ran for their lives while cameras watched on. Then man then took over their police car and tried to start it before being overpowered and taken away. The comical image of police fleeing the man they're supposed to capture was very humiliating, and Prime Minister Koizumi criticized the police force openly, asking for a review of all training procedures.

Japanese period dramas and Yoshitsune, and how to say "Nostalgic"

Hello from J-List! We're hearing the first rumblings of Spring here in Japan, a time that's called Haru Ichiban. On the Kanto plain that means strong, dusty winds blowing everywhere as high pressure and low pressure zones fight it out for control of the skies. The J-List office is shaking so much it seems like another earthquake, but it's just the wind outside.

When I was a boy, I lived for a year in New Zealand, and one of the things I remember about my time there was watching historical dramas on the BBC about the kings and queens of England. Japan also has a strong tradition of reliving history through jidai-geki (period dramas). Last year, everyone was buzzing about Shinsengumi, the popular NHK drama that detailed the struggle between the old Shogunate and the rebellious reformers who would eventually go on to modernize Japan. The new show everyone's watching now is Yoshitsune, about the charismatic young warrior Yoshitsune (1159-1189) who lived during the Kamakura Period, as told in the Tale of the Heike, one of Japan's historical records. One episode I watched featured a famous battle between young Yoshitsune and a 7-foot-tall warrior monk Benkei on Kyoto's Gojo Bridge. Yoshitsune beat the larger Benkei by whacking him in the shin, and to this day that part of the body is known as Benkei no Nakidokoro or Benkei's Crying Place -- kind of like a Japanese version of the Achilles Heel.

The subject of Japanese group dynamics never ceases to amaze me. In general, the Japanese tend to prefer harmony to confrontation, and getting along is important to people here. From time to time, I've noticed that Japanese will often have a spirited discussion about a subject that everyone already agrees on, with each person adding comments that echo what everyone has already said. I often see my wife's mother doing this with her obatarian (middle-aged female) friends -- they'll be debating, say, the shortcomings of the woman that someone's son has married, with each person throwing in their opinion even though they are all already in perfect agreement with each other. Another odd tendency I've seen is the putting down of family members in front of others as a way of showing humility, since politeness in Japanese is based on raising up the status of those you want to be polite to while pushing your own status lower. For example, my mother-in-law might say to her friends that our kids are stupid (baka) and never study. We've had to go out of our way to forbid this kind of negative talk in our house.

Expensive to live in Japan, but expensive to die too

Japan can be an expensive place to live, but it can also be an expensive place to die, as well. In a crowded country like Japan, it can be very difficult to purchase a burial plot and gravestone for your future resting place, especially in the cities where population is concentrated. Many people are eager to find rest in famous places, and the most popular burial sites have been transformed into "brand graveyards" which fetch incredibly high prices, like Aoyama Reien, a graveyard dating back from the Edo Period which will set you back an incredible $1.1 million for an average-sized family plot -- but since there are 61 applicants for every available space, good luck getting in. There are even "grave mansions" or buildings that are basically multi-level apartments for the dead (the word mansion has come to mean a high-rise apartment in Japanese). When it comes time for haka-mairi, or making a visit to your family grave, you press a button and the box storing your family's remains and gravestone is delivered by a computer-controlled hydraulic system.

Graves work a little differently than they do in the U.S., too. For one thing, a grave is really part of a household, and there's only one for the whole family. When a woman gets married and comes to live with her husband, she's erased from her father's family register and moved to her husband's. When she dies, she'll be buried in her new family's grave (unless she gets divorced), and a famous if old-fashioned way to propose to a woman is to say "Let's be buried in the same grave together" (onaji ohaka ni hairimasho). Part of the complex system of customs that kick in when a person dies involves cremation, and in each city there is a municipal crematorium to handle this important job. When a person's body is cremated, it's common to include items that were important to the person, such as a beloved book, photographs of loved ones or his favorite brand of cigarettes, so that the ashes are mingled together; some items, such as golf clubs, can't be cremated because they give off dioxin when burned. After the cremation, the bones are removed using long chopsticks by family members and placed in a special box, with the nodo-botoke or Buddha-of-the-throat, the Adam's Apple, removed last. Recently, the graves of famous people are being outfitted with strong locks to foil thieves who seek to steal the bones or ashes of their favorite celebreties. Yasu's family grave has had pieces chipped off -- because his grandfather fought in World War II and came back safe, his grave is considered to be lucky, so people chip off pieces so they can take some of the good luck with them.

When you learn a language, some things are hard and others are easy. To study Spanish or French, for example, I'd have to deal with feminine and masculine nouns, which may be difficult for English speakers. Poor Japanese have to memorize the names of the twelve months in English, but in Japanese, the months are very easy to learn: just use the number (ichi, ni, san) and the character for moon (gatsu). The Japanese get their revenge for this linguistic ineqality though: in English, we use the simple words "wear" or "put on" for clothes and other items, but the Japanese have several different words for this concept. For anything going on your legs or feet (shoes, pants, etc.) the verb for to wear is haku. For shirts or dresses, the verb is kiru (the "ki" from this verb is part of the word kimono, which really just means "thing that you wear"). Put something on your hands, like a ring or gloves, and you use suru (which means "to do"), and anything worn on the head is kaburu. Gaijin invariably get these words wrong, to the quiet amusement of everyone around us.

Right wingers in Japan, and what is the most popular anime?

Hello all. I'm running later than usual because my dentist needed to fix my teeth today, Wednesday, rather than Tuesday, my normal dentist day. The good news is, the two plastic caps are off my teeth and I've got real ceramic teeth that look great. Those guys in Sweden know how to make teeth!

Today's J-List post is below. You can also read it on the J-List website or the JBOX.com site.

For the past week we've been treated toa little freedom of speech, Japan-style: the local right-wing group, angry for some reason at our city's major, has been driving their loudspeaker truck up and down the street calling for his resignation and generally howling bloody murder. By unhappy chance, we live right next to the mayor, which means we've gotten to hear all the ruckus. Exercising one's freedom of speech by broadcasting through loudspeakers is a uniquely Japanese phenomenon, and right wingers (closely associated with the yakuza) can often be seen rolling through Japanese cities playing patriotic World War II songs to the general amusement/annoyance of everyone. During election season, politicians spend hours giving speeches from cars with loudspeakers mounted on top, and in Tokyo, political groups opposing anything from higher taxes to Japan's participation in Iraq park their speaker trucks on a streetcorner and voluminously share their political views with everyone else.

I receive a lot of questions from people interested in living in Japan someday. While it certainly is difficult to come to a country as different from the U.S. or Europe as Japan is, it's certainly doable if you are determined. Many foreigners come to Japan on a tourist visa (3 months) and use that time to look for a job. When you find one, you have to leave the country once to process your working visa then re-enter on that visa -- most gaijin travel to nearby South Korea and do some sightseeing. Alternately, citizens of some lucky nations like Canada, Australia and New Zealand can come on "working holiday" visas instead. Westerners are usually shocked by the difficult system of "key money" you must pay when renting an apartment. Between a security deposit (2 months), a finders-fee (paid to the company that got the apartment for you), first months' rent and "thank you money" (a move-in bonus for your landlord), it can cost $2000-4000 just to move into a small apartment. Of course, any discussion of how to work in Japan is precluded by the fact that to get a working visa at all, you must have a degree from a four-year university. So whenever young people interested in Japan ask me how they can come here, I invariably advise them to find a good, well-rounded university and get a degree -- do that, and you'll be surprised how easily the rest can fall into place.

The most popular anime in Japan isn't Inu Yasha and it isn't Naruto. The anime Japanese identify as their favorite year-in and year-out is Doraemon (do-RAH-ey-mone), the blue "robot of cat type" who came who came from the 22nd century to modern-day Japan to save his friend Nobita-kun, a bit of a slacker, from marrying a different girl than history intended. Together they have many adventures, usually using the many magic items that Doraemon carries in his fourth-dimensional pocket, like the Dokodemo Door ("anywhere door") that lets him teleport to any place, a "small light" that shrinks anything it shines on, and his trusty time machine, the cause of many Back to the Future-style plot twists. The current staff of the long-running series including legendary Nobuyo Oyama, the voice of Doraemon since 1973, is due to retire soon, ending an era for Japanese fans of the show.

Valentines Day in Japan, and dialects

Hello all. Finished the update a little late today. I'm in a hurry to get home (see below for the reason why) so I'm rushing.

Today's J-List post is below. You can also read it on the J-List website or the JBOX.com site.

Hello and Happy Valentines Day from Japan! Today is the day that men of all ages look forward to, when they get chocolate from wives, girlfriends or daughters. My son and I caught the smell of something delicious cooking in the kitchen last night, and we're both looking forward to eating some hand-made chocolates when we get home. There are many customs that have to do with gift giving in Japan, and one of them is that you must always give a gift in return (o-kaeshi) when you receive something. March 14th has been designated White Day by Japan's chocolate-and-gift industry, the day that men can return the favor to women who gave them chocolate on Valentines Day by giving them something in return. If you've got someone special to give a gift to, why not consider a J-List gift certificate? It's not chocolate, but it's almost as good.

In the same way that English spoken in New York or Boston can be quite different from California or Texas, the dialects used in the various parts of Japan can be quite unique, a situation exacerbated by the fact that Japanese tend to be less mobile than Americans, often living all their lives in the same region. Standard Japanese is defined as the dialect spoken in Tokyo, and Tokyo Japanese corresponds to "boring white guy English." Far more colorful is Kansai-ben, the dialect of the Osaka area, spoken by entertainers in Japan for the same reason that Jerry Seinfeld wouldn't be Jerry Seinfeld without his New York accent. Other famous dialects include Okinawa-ben with its unique intonation, the elegant-sounding Kyoto-ben, and Tohoku-ben, the impossible-to-understand Japanese spoken in the cold land north of Tokyo. Another well-defined dialect is "gaijiin-ben," the oddly over-intoned Japanese spoken by foreigners, which sounds cute to Japanese ears. It's common for DJs and TV announcers to speak with "gaijin" accents in order to sound cool to young people, and foreigners speaking oddly-accented Japanese are a staple in TV commercials.

When a person learns a foreign language, they tend to be very creative in that language because they lack the inhibitions that native speakers have developed over time. After all, the famous Swatch brand name was created by Swiss who didn't realize that it sounded dorky in English until it was a household name. I've seen this tendency to be creative using English time and time again in Japan, for example in the many products that use English to invoke an emotional response, like Melty Kiss (chocolate fudge sold only in the winter). The other day I was eating some Triscuits which I had brought from the U.S., and offered one to my son. He turned up his nose, though, saying that he didn't want to eat a "tatami cracker" (since it looked to him like a Japanese tatami mat), which struck me as an interesting observation. Back when I taught ESL, I used a list of road signs to create a discussion with some students about what the signs might mean. One sign, a picture of a footprint over a leaf, was giving them trouble, but one student came up with a possible meaning: "Don't despise Canada." The correct answer was "nature walk" but his answer was a lot more creative.

Desserts in Japan: from Coffee Jelly to Purin and beyond

Hello all. If it isn't one thing, it's something else. Today the update is working fine, but the mail server is down with a dead hard drive. I've got our tech in Edmonton, Canada working on it now. Heh, I love the Internet -- I live in Japan, work with my staff in San Diego, have a programmer in Las Vegas and a web designer in Sweden.

Today's J-List post is below. You can also read it on the J-List website or the JBOX.com site.

Desserts in Japan can be a little different from what you might expect. One popular dish in Japan is coffee jelly, coffee flavored gelatin that's really good with cream poured over it -- Starbucks sells a Coffee Jelly Frappe in the summer which is delicious. Another popular dessert in Japan is purin, basically egg custard flan with caramel sauce on top, popular in Spain and Mexico. If you've ever seen that yellow/brown dog character from Sanrio named Purin and wondered what that was, he represents flan and his brown hat is the caramel sauce. Nata de Coco is a well-known dessert in the Philippines with firm, chewy squares made from coconuts, and it's popular in Japan, really good in yogurt. Cake is big here too, and most cake shops are small, highly professional outfits who bake fabulous delicacies and sell them for $5 a piece (you almost never buy a whole cake in Japan, it'd be too expensive). Finally, there are many kinds of ice cream in Japan, from matcha (green tea) and azuki (sweet Japanese beans) to variations on Italian gellato and "soft cream" (what soft-serve ice cream is called here). We even have a 31 Flavors in our small city.

It's well known that the Japanese can be quite group oriented, with more awareness of in-group (uchi) and out-group (soto). A lot of this seems to come about through the Japanese education system, which exists not only to teach information to students, but also to create Japanese citizens who can all identify with society on the same level, more or less. In my schools in California, each student had a different schedule, with math this period, English the next, and P.E. after that, so we never had all the same kids in our classes with us. But in Japan, classes are together all day long over the course of the school year, with the teacher coming and going each period, which creates a strong sense of being a part of the class as a group, although it has downsides too. Clubs are another machine for creating a sense of being in a group, and in junior high school, students are usually required to join one of the clubs at the school, even if they don't want to, as a chracter-building excercise.

Today is a holiday in Japan, Kenkoku no Hi or National Founding Day, one of many holidays that come and go without anyone realizing here what the heck they were all about. Established in the Meiji Era as the coronation day of the first Emperor of Japan, Jimmu, the day used to fall on the first day of the year according to the Lunar calendar. Commemorating the start of Japan's Imperial line was frowned upon after World War II as the wrong kind of patriotism, but the holiday was reestablished in 1966.

Manga Cafes in Japan, and the Green Tea Belt

Oopsie -- once again I see I've forgotten to post my after doing the J-List update. Sorry!

Today's J-List post is below. You can also read it on the J-List website or the JBOX.com site.

One type of business that's sprung up over the past decade is the manga kissa, or manga cafe, a place where you can get coffee and kill a few hours leisurely reading through all the comics on the shelves, for a per-hour fee. Manga cafes have adopted to the age of the net, offering the functionality of an Internet Cafe too, with computers and wireless LAN. I went to an interesting place the other day that offered just about all the leisure you could want: each customer was assigned a private cubicle with a comfortable chair, which contained a computer with broadband connection and Playstation in addition to a desk. There were manga to browse, DVDs to watch, and online games to play, all within my personal leisure space. It felt like something out of a William Gibson novel, come to life.

The U.S. is divided up into various sections, which reflect the industries that are strongest in those areas. Idaho is potato country, and the midwest is the grain belt that feeds most of the nation, for example. This exists in Japan, too. First of all, the northernmost island of Hokkaido (ho-KAI-doh) is the breadbasket of Japan, providing corn, potatoes, and delicious dairy products, many of which use the shape of the island to sell themselves. Niigata is famous for rice, and companies advertise the fact that they use rice from the prefecture to get customers to buy. Shizuoka Prefecture, next to Mt. Fuji, is the Green Tea capital of Japan, but there are also factories and industry there. If there's a Bible Belt in Japan, it'd have to be the westernmost island of Kyushu, which was the first to be Christianized back in the 16th century, and is home to some of the oldest churches in the country. And I've always though that the Tohoku region of Japan, the prefectures north of Tokyo on the main island of Honshu, was sort of parallel to the American South -- it's strongly identified with enka, the "country music" of Japan.

Whenever you learn 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 word from their parents. Baka (stupid) is the catch-all insult, used in almost any situation (Japanese from the Kansai 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) -- embarrassingly close to "mango," not unlike the word election for Japanese speakers of English. This word is so bad, it's usually written with a circle or "X" or a circle in place of the middle letter. 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 glossary (link on the left side of the J-List site).

At J-List, we love to promote interest in Japan with everything we do, including the study of the language. We have a new "reserve subscription" magazine for those who want to try their hand at reading Japanese, as well as anyone who wants to read news and topics on life in Japan: Hiragana Times. As with all our revolving magazine subscriptions, we'll send each issue to you automatically until you tell us to stop. We carry more than 30 popular anime, manga, fashion, toy and other magazines.

About the Japanese word "about," and an update on robots in Japan

Hello all. I remembered to do the blog posting this time!

Today's J-List post is below. You can also read it on the J-List website or the JBOX.com site.

Japan invests heavily in robotics, and it's common to see TV shows about robots, often with competitions or "robot battles" with machines created by university engineering students to promote the growth of the technology. Last night we had a special treat: a fight to the death between the original Gundam mecha and Tetsujin 28, aka Gigantor, both highly advanced remote-control robots with the ability to balance themselves and stand up if they fall over. Despite an amazing rolling attack by Tetsujin 28, the Gundam, which had the weight advantage, managed to push his opponent off the table and win the match.

The Japanese have adopted the English word "about" as an adjective meaning vague or inexact, e.g. kare wa abauto na hito desu ("he is a very vague person"). The term applies perfectly to the Japanese language itself, which can have a lot of nuances, unspoken words, and omitted meanings. Subjects are regularly left off of sentences, since the meanings are usually clear to both parties, and other parts can be omitted as well. When my wife comes into my office at 12:30 and says "Iku?" (lit. "Go?"), I know she means "Shall we go to lunch now?" Some of the vagueness of Japanese comes from the way that the kanji writing system has been grafted onto the language. As a general rule, kanji have two pronunciations, the Japanese one and one based on Chinese. The words hara-kiri and seppuku (both terms for ritual disembowelment practiced in Japan) are actually written with the same kanji, although switched around; the former is the Japanese reading and the latter is the Chinese one, but the meaning is exactly the same. Names can be very vague, too, with different ways to read them, just as there are alternate spellings for names in the West. To this day, I'm not sure if a family we've known for years is named Kimishima or Kimijima, since both are valid ways to read their kanji. My Japanese wife admits she's not sure which it is, either.

After four years, the residents of Miyakejima, an island 150 km from Japan that's little more than a massive volcano rising out of the sea, have been allowed to return to their homes. The entire population was forced to evacuate when Mount Oyama erupted in 2000, but are being returned now, despite sulfur gas still erupting from the mountain. Much of the island has been damaged by falling ash and mud, but the residents are hopeful they can rebuild and eventually reclaim their status as a popular tourist spot for the Tokyo area.

We've been asked by the chairman of the Lions Youth Exchange to mention their excellent Youth Exchange Program, which sends students aged 17-21 on international exchange programs to many countries, including to Japan. They're especially interested in finding young people who want to visit Japan because they usually have trouble filling all the slots for the Japan program. If you or someone you know is interested in applying for the Youth Exchange Program, contact the Lions Club in your area and ask for details and an application. The deadline for applications is March 31st.

Everything you wanted to know about shoes and the Japanese

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

	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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.