Japan, China and the ghosts of the past on both sides

There are big problems in China as demonstrators in several cities engage in protests against Japan, calling for boycotts of Japanese products and even making threats of violence -- one protestor brandished a gun at some Japanese journalists, although it turned out to be a replica. In Beijing, thousands of protestors have been destroying Japanese businesses, wrecking Japanese cars and throwing rocks at the embassy. A big part of the issue are Japanese history textbooks which China and South Korea say gloss over the crimes of the Japanese military during World War II. I watched an interesting news report on the textbook issues which compared the eight history texts approved for use by the Ministry of Education, and explained the problem areas of each -- in general, only 2-3 pages were devoted to the issue of war crimes in each book. Chinese textbooks go to the other extreme, with half the content of one book shown devoted to the Sino-Japanese war, illustrated with many inflammatory pictures of corpses and emotional statements that have no place in the study of history. The Japanese textbook that caused the most anger is used in only 18 schools here and has been denounced by many Japanese educators, but this hasn't swayed the demonstrators. One theory about the current crisis put forth on Japanese TV is that after the Tiananmen Square uprisings, China increased "loyalty education" for children in schools, much of which focused on Japan as a national enemy. The generation that was in school in 1989 are now in their 20s, and they're the ones who are out demonstrating now.

The issue is a very difficult one to resolve. Although Japan has officially apologized to China seventeen times since 1974, it has mostly failed to show real reflection about the terrible things it did in the 1930s. Japanese are sometimes willing to say "that was a long time ago" about China and Korea, but never about Hiroshima. On the other hand, I've had American friends who dismissed American atrocities in Vietnam with the same argument, so maybe all of us are capable of a similar reaction under the right circumstances. Another problem that comes up often is the role of Yasukuni, a shrine for the remembrance of Japanese soldiers killed during the war, which wouldn't be a problem except that the Japanese military leaders most responsible for the war are also interred in graves on the shrine's grounds. In Washington D.C. there are many places where Americans can go and reflect on their own country's past, like Arlington National Cemetery or the Iwo Jima monument, but Japan has only Yasukuni to fill all of these roles. Maybe one solution would be the creation of a "secular" monument to honor Japan's soldiers without bruising the feelings of neighboring countries?

Four four K's that my prefecture is famous for, and all about pollen in Japan

Last week a woman looked out her window and saw smoke rising in some nearby mountains. She promptly called the fire department, who went up to fight the fire, only to find that it hadn't been smoke that the lady had seen, but massive sheets of pollen kicked up by the Spring winds. Yes, Japan can be a nightmare for people with allergies, with many pollen-producing plants that torment allergy sufferers at various times of the year. One of the worst offenders are sugi trees, Japanese cedars that pump pollen into the air from January to April. I'm sometimes asked why Japanese wear those white face masks which became prevalent throughout Asia during the SARS scare. The masks help protect others from a person's germs, and also hopefully reduce the amount of allergens breathed into the body.

If you ever travel around Japan, you'll quickly pick up on how each region of Japan promotes certain things that it's supposedly famous for, called meibutsu (lit. "famous things"), which are often types of food. Nagoya is famous for curry upon, fat noodles in a curry soup, and if you go to Osaka, be sure to eat takoyaki, balls of batter with octopus meat inside, and sauce and sliced bonito flakes on top. Kyushu is known for tonkotsu ramen, with a white pork-based soup, and our own Gunma Prefecture is famous for "four K's": katsudon (pork cutlet cooked in a delicious sauce), konyaku (a firm, gelatinous food known as Devil's Tongue in English), kara-kaze (the cold, biting wind that blows in the winter) and kakaa-denka (strong-willed women who run their households with an iron fist). Gunma is famous for another reason: the plane carrying singer Kyu Sakamoto crashed here in 1985 in a terrible accident that claimed 520 lives. Kyu was the singer of the Sukiyaki Song, known as Ue O Mite Aruko (I Look Up When I Walk), which became the #1 song in the U.S. in 1963. He also sang the popular song Ashita ga Aru Sa (There is a Tomorrow), which became the unofficial theme song of the Japanese economic recession.

Do you have a cat's tongue? If so, it means that you can't eat hot food or drink hot drinks, just like a cat. The Japanese say that anyone who avoids hot food has a cat's tongue (neko jita). What is you have a lazy eye? If so, then you are "rom-pari" which is Japanese for "Rome, Paris" -- i.e. one eye is looking at Rome and the other is looking at Paris. If you're thinning on top, you might have "bar code hair." And if you sneeze, the Japanese say that someone must be gossiping about you -- one sneeze means someone is saying something good about you, two means they're saying something bad, and three sneezes means you've caught a cold. Or something like that.

Weird Japanese food, and my collected wisdom from living in Japan

Japanese food is famous for containing things not usually eaten by Westerners, something which I was reminded of when my mother and nephew were staying with us. The Japanese eat a lot of raw fish in the form of sushi (raw fish on rice) and sashimi (cut raw fish eaten by itself), and such delicacies from the sea as ika (squid), tako (octopus) and ikura (salmon roe) are not on the menus in most American homes. Another interesting food the Japanese eat is natto, fermented soybeans, which are very good for you -- my kids know I hate it, so they come and breathe natto breath on me as a joke. Although not common, I've eaten basashi (raw horse meat), a delicacy from Kyushu, and I've also had deer, turtle and alligator at exotic Chinese restaurants, too. Some people also enjoy inago (cooked locusts) and hachinoko (bee larvae, ugh). My wife loves to eat miso soup with whole crab inside, and she scrapes the kanimiso or crab's brains out so that it mixes with the soup. Perhaps the most bizarre food in Japan is shiokara, the intestines of squid, sometimes pickled in saltwater. If you ever come to Japan, don't worry about these odd foods -- there are plenty of normal alternatives for you to eat instead.

During my time in Japan I've picked up various knowledge, some of it pretty useless. Totoro is originally based on the troll from Billy Goats Gruff, and Mei and Satsuki are both born in the month of May (Satsuki is the old Japanese name for the fifth month of the year, and Mei's name comes from the English word May). Alien Baltan, the crab-like creature that Ultraman battles, gets his name from the homeworld of Mr. Spock, since Vulcan and Baltan sound very similar in Japanese, and Godzilla's many-headed nemisis King Ghidorah's name comes from the fact that "Hydra" in Japanese is pronounced "hee-dora." Char's Counterattack, the film in which the two heroes of the Gundam universe have their final battle, should really be called Char Strikes Back, since its title in Japanese sounds similar to the Japanese title of the Empire Strikes Back. Spielber's film E.T. is almost certainly based on a Japanese fairy tale called Taketori Monogatari (Tale of the Bamboo Cutter), about a couple who find a baby in a bamboo forest which turns out to be a princess from the moon. And although I didn't know it at the time, the small hibachi we used to cook hamburgers on our apartment balcony when I was a child is a Japanese word -- but in Japan, a hibachi is a great hearth found in homes dating back a hundred years or more.

The most famous dog in the history of Tokyo is Hachiko, an Akita dog who was owned by a university professor in the 1920's. Every day, Hachiko accompanied the professor to Shibuya Station, and in the evenings, the man would come back to find the dog waiting faithfully at the station, a happy expression on his face. This continued for years, until one day, the man died suddenly. Loyal Hachiko waited for his master to return for ten years, wagging his tail in front of the station every day until he, too, died. Tokyo residents have erected a bronze statue in Hachiko's memory, which you can see at the Hachiko exit of the station if you're ever in Tokyo. It's so famous, it's very useful as a meeting point for friends -- "Meet me at Hachiko."

The Season of the Sakura in Japan, and all about motorcycling across Japan

It's sakura time in Japan right now, as cherry blossoms around the country explode in beautiful fireworks of pink. This year was very rare: because it was so cold last month, the cherry blossoms were at least two weeks late in opening. A few days ago the weather turned very warm, and the sakura bloomed with a vengeance, attaining zenkai (when the flowers are fully opened) in less than a day. Cherry trees are very common in Japan, and virtually every city has parks and avenues with beautifully landscaped sakura trees. In addition to weather forecasts, the TV news issues "sakura reports" that give information on the state of cherry blossoms in every prefecture, and over the weekend Japan was clogged with happy people doing hanami, or flower-viewing, basically an excuse to spread out a blanket and have a party with friends while enjoying the beauty of the flowers all around you. Although she's just eight, my daughter is a very spiritual person, and she remarked that there are a lot of sakura trees near the small graveyards that dot rural areas in Japan. It was good, she said, that the "hotoke-sama" (a word that describes both Buddha and the spirits of one's dead ancestors) can enjoy the beautiful flowers and be happy. Unfortunately the season of the sakura is all too short: already the flower petals are starting to fall, and in a week they'll be gone.

Japan has a lot to offer foreigners who come to live here, with something different for everyone. Some might experience the country through its martial arts, or submerge themselves in the study of its language. Some fall in love with the famous works of Japanese literature by Souseki Natsume or Yasunari Kawabata, while those with an otaku bent can enjoy a dream life here, surrounding themselves with the icons of their compulsions. And then again, there are the foreigners who experience Japan through motorcycles, cruising around the country and exploring the open road, and I have gaijin friends who find great satisfaction in putting thousands of kilometers on their Harleys or their Kawasakis, trekking to the tops of volcanic mountains to find naturally occurring hot springs and attending festivals in the mountains of far-off Hokkaido. If you'd like to see the travels of some free-spirited foreigners I know, check out this page.

Japan can be a very strange place when it wants to be, as J-List readers are well aware. Now we've gotten in one of the most bizarre ever: a sexy "Girlfriend Knee Pillow" (hiza makura) made of soft injected foam, a perfect replica of a mini-skirted pair of legs for you to lay your head on when you need some care and understanding.

How Japan and America are different from each other, and Japanese government employees

My mother and nephew have gone back to San Diego after a nice visit. It was fun having them here, although difficult because our life in Japan is so different from what they were used to back home. Although there were a lot of challenges -- Japanese homes don't have central heating so they were always cold, for example, and food they could eat was not always easy to find -- they had fun, I think. Gunma Prefecture is the home of the creator of Initial D, a manga and anime about high-speed mountain racing, and the day before he was to go back, I took my nephew for a run up Mt. Haruna, on which the fictional mountain in Initial D is based on. It was fun to zoom over the real mountain roads in my Miata (sold under the name of Roadster here), and now he has some serious bragging rights with his friends back home.

America and Japan are very different from each other, a fact that I was reminded of all the more during my travels last week. While the Japanese not usually that proficient at English, except for exceptional individuals (like the Japanese staff at J-List) who make a special effort to master the language, a foreign visitor in Japan can still be reasonably sure that someone will come to his rescue if he has a problem of some kind. When Japanese go to the U.S., however, they're taught to speak up and ask for what they want in specific terms, since no one will help a person who is shyly sitting in a corner not saying anything. My son learned this to his cost one day last summer, while attending a week-long science day-camp in San Diego. His lunch had been left with the receptionist, but he didn't know this, and he was too shy to speak up loudly and ask where his lunch was. Because he didn't make an effort to communicate what he needed, he went hungry all afternoon, but I think he learned a lesson.

Japanese government employees, called komuin (KOH-mu-in), are an interesting part of society here. A huge caste of ultra-conservative individuals who work at Japan's city and prefectural offices, they are a massive non-political bureaucracy that are responsible for administering Japanese laws, collecting taxes, granting permits for various activities, and generally making Japan run smoothly. Unlike the private sector, where companies must work hard and show results, Japan's public employees enjoy incredible stability, and theirs is the last segment of society with de facto lifetime employment in Japan. Young people who want the comfort of the stablest possible job and a long, steady climb up the social ladder aspire to pass the difficult national test that allows you to work as a public employee, although of course, if your parents are friends with your local city councilman he may be able to get you a job even if you haven't passed the test -- Japan can be very flexible that way. More so than in the U.S., government employees here are defined as a single group, and some professions that you don't normally think of as a lifetime government job are described with the komuin term, such as police, firemen and teachers. While Japan's public employees provide a solid white-collar backbone of stability for the country, there are a lot of complaints about lack of fiscal restraint in Japan's public sector. For example, despite the decade-long recession in Japan, our prefecture found the money to build a 32-story skyscraper-style prefectural office that cost hundreds of millions to erect yet does nothing but provide government employees with a beautiful view.

Our trip to Hiroshima and the wrong places to bring electronics

It's good to be back home! We were only gone four nights, but traveling around Japan with your 65-year-old mother and two kids can be a lot of work. After seeing the sights in Kyoto, we rode the train to a town called Uji (OO-gee), famous for its green tea and for the beautiful Byodoin Temple, the 900 year old building which appears on the back of the Japanese ten yen coin. We then went on to Nara, a small city that was the capital of Japan hundreds of years ago, and took in the quiet beauty of Nara Park while feeding the deer that overrun the place.

In preparation for our trip, I had made sure to pack all the various electronic devices I'm accustomed to carrying with me: Powerbook, digital camera, cell phone, iPod, Canon Wordtank, PSP, and all associated chargers, of course. I have to admit, I felt a little odd, carrying electronic gadgets while going to see such beautiful and ancient places, such as Miyajima, a shrine established in A.D. 593, built above the beach so that it seems to float when the tide comes in. I wish I could have left all my electronic gadgets at home and gone on my trip with nothing to detract from the ancient beauty of what we were seeing, but I'm just too much a slave to electronics, I guess.

The last day we visited Hiroshima, something that's always a solemn experience for any visitor to Japan. Hiroshima was a bustling commercial port and wartime center when the first atomic bomb used against humans exploded over it at 8:15 on August 6, 1945. The destruction was devastating, killing at least 50,000 people instantly, including factory workers, soldiers, children, and Koreans and Chinese who were made to work in factories in the city. The Peace Park, located at ground zero, is a beautiful place to walk and reflect on what happened, and see the famous symbol of the city, the A-Bomb Dome, a former commercial building that managed to partially survive the bombing. It was important for me to show my children the site, as well as the sobering exhibits in the Peace Museum, which include before-and-after models of the city, glass bottles that had melted in the heat, and a wristwatch that had stopped forever at 8:15. My son asked me many probing questions about what he saw -- why did America and Japan start fighting? What happened to people like him, who were both Japanese and American, living in Japan at the time? I was glad that my mother and children were able to visit this important place with me.

Our expensive trip to Kyoto

Hello from beautiful Kyoto! I took a couple of days off work to take my mother, who is visiting from the U.S., to see Western Japan. While the Kanto region (where Tokyo and Gunma prefecture are) has a lot to see, it really can't hold a cultural candle to the Kyoto area.

Kyoto is one of the most amazing places in all Japan. The former capital of the country for 800 years or so, it's filled with many amazing temples, shrines, pagodas, and ancient streets that have been in use for centuries, despite the fact that Kyoto is also a modern, vibrant city. Yesterday we hit most of the most famous sites, starting with the Golden Pavillion (perhaps the most famous single building in all Japan) and Silver Pavillion (which isn't really silver). We took in the Hall of 33 Bays, a long building containing 1001 intricately carved Buddha statues, each with a unique face (supposedly, you can find one that has your face if you look hard enough) and Ryoanji, a temple with the most famous rock garden in Japan. The cherry blossoms are later than usual this year, so we've missed catching the "season of the sakura" here, however Kiyomizu-dera, a raised temple and pagoda overlooking Kyoto (which was nearly destroyed during Godzilla vs Mothra), was really lit up beautifully when we went there last night. Today we're off to another favorite place of mine, Nara, the first capital of Japan and home the amazing Todaiji, a huge wooden temple that houses the largest Buddha statue in Japan.

I've lived in Japan for thirteen years, so it shouldn't come as a surprise to me, but traveling in Japan sure is expensive. Although we're only to be gone four days, we're spending a small fortune, enough to live like kings in most other parts of the world. My wife is in Hungary right now with a friend who always wanted to visit Budapest, and they're spending a lot less than us, despite flying to the other side of the world. I dearly love Japan, but it can sure cost a lot to see it properly.

Japan's pagodas ("goju no toh") are an amazing part of Japan's architectural history. Usually containing five levels but sometimes more, these multi-tiered buildings on Buddhist temple grounds are fitted together with no nails or cements of any kind, and they're so perfectly balanced that they withstand earthquakes better than any other structure in Japan. We caught a TV show the other day in which scientists built a complete replicas of the pagoda at Horyuji, built in the 7th century, on top of a platform that simulated earthquakes artificially. No matter how they shook the pagoda, they couldn't make the balanced structure sway more than a few degrees from center. And in fact, there's not a single record of a pagoda collapsing in a quake in Japan's history.

And for the pictures and product images today I have...nothing! Yes, thanks to the stupid hotel I'm in now (the Hotel No Internet or something like that), which promises me broadband Internet and a ride on the train, there's something the matter with...oh nevermind. (Apologies to A.A. Milne) I have done my update with my trusty Bluetooth phone, which is packet-based and can get very pricey when it wants to, thus I am going "all text" today. Ever so sorry.

Pouring your own beer in Japan, and what we could learn from the Japanese

You know you've lived in Japan too long when you're incapable of pouring your own beer. It's true -- in Japan it's customary for friends to pour beer or sake (sah-KAY) for each other, and "lifer" gaijin like me get so used to this that anything else becomes impossible. Pouring your own drink is called "tejaku," and it's rarely done in mixed company -- although in enka, the traditional sad music of Japan that fills the same niche as country music in the U.S., the image of a broken man pouring his own sake while he cries his eyes out over his lost love, is quite common.

Living outside of my home country as I do, it's sometimes possible to see things I wouldn't be able to see otherwise. Sometimes I feel the U.S. doesn't look as hard as it could at other countries when trying to come up with solutions to its problems. Japan has an annual tax on cars that's based on engine size that makes a lot of sense -- if you drive a car with a huge, inefficient engine, you'll pay around $800 a year, but for drivers with small, efficient engines the tax is just $30, and hybrid cars are free. And when the topic of health insurance was big in the U.S., the model that Japan uses -- a health insurance system with a 30% deductible that's available to everyone without insurance through their place of employment -- didn't come up at all. Now, some people are discussing how to improve schools in the States, and I fully expect there to be little discussion of Japan's approach to education. The one thing that Japan does differently is create competition among students: competition to have the highest score in the class, competition to get into a good high school or university, and so on. By and large, Japan's competitive education system creates students who are serious about setting goals and working at them over several years, and because they spend more time studying, they have less time for getting into trouble. Since the best national universities are also the most affordable, it creates a class of people who succeed through their academic skills and hard work, not because their family had money, which is a great idea for every society to strive for.

I'll be going to Kyoto over the weekend with my family, so we're doing a double-strength product update for you today. First and foremost, we've got the long-preordered Battlestar Galactica toys from Konami, and they are really something special for fans of the original series. In the tradition of Konami's previous sci-fi toy sets, this new set of all the vehicles and Cylons from the 1978 series -- known in Japan as Space Aircraft Carrier Galactica -- are extremely well made, a very special item for collectors. We've got both the basic set of 5 toys and the three "rare" items -- the Atlantia, the Pegasus and the gold Cylon commander -- available on the site. Since we know some fans will want extras of their favorite ships, such as sets of three Cylon Base Ships for display, we've posted individual items to the site too, with discount for buying multiples.

New adventures at a Japanese immersion school, and the end of Doraemon as we know it

My son has officially finished the third grade, and will be beginning his new adventure next month, at an experimental school in which half the lessons are taught in English, half in Japanese The new school is coming together nicely, and we attended the orientation on Sunday, meeting the teachers and finding out which class our son will be in. It was our first time inside this completely new facility -- which looks like it was designed by the Ikea company, not exactly something you expect when you go to a Japanese elementary school. Because a partial immersion school funded with public money is such a bold project, it's attracting a lot of media attention, and there were TV cameras everywhere, recording footage for future broadcasting on the news. Since I'm the only American parent in the entire school, I stand out even more than I usually do in my daily life here in rural Japan. When we met our son's new homeroom teacher, who's also from the States, I asked him some questions in Japanese, and the cameras were there to record it all: there's nothing more interesting than two gaijin speaking Japanese to each other. During the orientation, many parents were buzzing about a new product that security company Secom has released, a portable GPS device that makes it possible for parents to see where their children are, and to send a signal that they'd like a Secom employee to go pick up their child if they're worried about them. A number of recent incidents, including the kidnapping/murder of a girl in Nara in November of last year, have made parents and teachers especially aware of the potential dangers that lurk out in the world.

The end of an era has been reached: voice actress Nobuyo Oyama is finally retiring after over a quarter of a century of performing the voice of Japan's most famous anime character, Doraemon, the nekogata robotto ("robot of cat type") who comes from the future to help keep his friend Nobita out of trouble. The show has consistently been ranked as the favorite anime of all time by the majority of Japanese viewers. In addition to Oyama, the voices for Gian, Shizuka, and Nobita himself are retiring. The final episode with the original cast aired last week with emotional farewell messages by the voice actors.

We hope everyone had a Happy Easter. Like Thanksgiving, St. Patrick's Day and Superbowl Sunday, Easter is one of those special days that are easy to lose track of when you're a gaijin living in Japan -- it's just a lot harder to be aware of these special events when living in another country. This year we had a rather traditional Easter, however, thanks to my mother coming from San Diego. She brought Easter chocolate and baskets and dye to color eggs with. My kids had loads of fun enjoying some American traditions in Japan.

Video games in Japan, and information on tuxedos for Chihuahuas

Every few weeks my kids bug me to take them to the "ge-sen," or game center, and I give in and take them. Japanese video game arcades are fun, with lots of different things to do as long as you don't mind blowing $20 in a half an hour or so. In addition to the standard fighting, scrolling and sports-related games (which are always $1, and often $2, per play), there are usually some large-scale games that let you bang on Japanese taiko drums, play air guitar and even take a virtual dog for a walk. Lots of games are based on anime, like a Lupin the 3rd game in which you have to shoot fast to keep Inspector Zenigata from catching you, and a great driving game based on races from Initial D. My son and I have been hooked on a Gundam game in which you fight battles from the first two series, choosing any mobile suit you want. Gambling is a popular pasttime with adults, and many games give customers the thrill of betting on little mechanical horses that run around a track or let them put valueless tokens into slot machines. Japanese arcades are also well stocked with "UFO Catcher" machines, a.k.a. crane games with prizes you can grab, as well as Puri-kura, the "print club" machines that take your picture and print it on a sheet of stickers for you. It's common to find off-color games in arcades, too, like 1-on-1 video mahjong against a pretty anime girl.

As the number of children in Japan decreases, more and more people are turning to pets for companionship, especially dogs. Japan has been in the middle of a boom in "brand dogs" for the past few years, with famous breeds like Welsh Corgi, Shiba Inu and Miniature Dachshund commanding $1000 and up in pet stores. When high-interest finance company Aiful made a TV commercial about a man who needed to borrow money so we could buy a little dog tuxedo for his Chihuahua to attend his daughter's wedding, there was a huge explosion in Chihuahuas in Japan, and now you see them everywhere. The Groomy plush pets that J-List sells are a direct result of the popularity of dogs in Japan.

J-List brings you a little piece of Japan every month in the form of our revolving magazine subscriptions for popular anime, fashion, toy beautiful idol and other magazines from Japan. We're adding to our already excellent selection of subscription items, including SHOXX, a beautiful magazine devoted to Japan's "visual rock" bands with lots of great photography in every issue; Tokyo Journal, an avante-garde English magazine of life and culture in Tokyo; and Kateigaho ("Home Art Report"), a fabulous English monthly that captures the world of traditional art and culture for non-Japanese readers. When you subscribe to these magazines, we'll send you the current issue as it comes in, until you tell us to stop sending them to you.

What's popular in Japan right now, and how to put your foot in your mouth in Japanese

Japan is the land of the "boom." One year it's health drinks laced with amino acids, the next it's ring tones for cellular phones that mimic sounds of the office, like the whining of a fax machine or fingers typing on a calculator. Currently Japan's experiencing a "coffee boom" as a result of a popular drama on Japanese TV, Yasashii Jikan (Gentle Time), the story of a middle-aged man whose wife is killed when his teenage son has an accident with her in the car. Unable to forgive his son, he moves to Japan's northernmost island of Hokkaido and starts a small coffee shop called Mori no Tokei (Clock of the Forest) where people come to find peace and calm. In the show, the customers at the coffee shop grind their own coffee with hand-turned mills, which gives them a chance to relax as they take in the slow aroma of the coffee wafting up. As a result of the show, sales of coffee beans and mills are skyrocketing, and coffee shop used in the filming of the drama is a hit with tourists.

Before I came to Japan in 1991, I took four years of Japanese at my alma mater, SDSU, so compared to most first-time gaijin here I spoke quite a lot of Japanese. I could do many useful things, like ask directions when I got lost (which was a frequent occurrence, as there are no street names in Japan), and I knew just enough Japanese for me to put my foot in my mouth really well. Yes, I've committed many faux pas during my time here, such as trying to impress a pretty girl by speaking Japanese to her, but accidentally using onna kotoba, words that women use which are the bane of male students of Japanese, or committing a deadly slip when ordering mango juice, since "mango" is dangerously close to another word (the word is manko, and it refers to the female reproductive area, but don't use it as it's really bad). In Japanese hospitals, thermometers are always used in the armpit, but I put one in my mouth, causing much shock among the nurses, who had never seen anyone do such a thing. And then there was the time I bought my wife some pretty flowers, only to find out that I'd bought kiku no hana (chrysanthemums), which are only used as offerings to the dead on special Buddhist days -- that really got a laugh out of her.

Ah, my days as a single man in Japan

Hello again from Japan! Today is a holiday here, Shunbun no Hi, or the first day of spring. It's nice to say goodbye to winter, but it's still bitterly cold outside, and the wind is howling so loudly I have to use my noise-cancelling headphones to get any work done...

I remember with fondness my single years in Japan. There was an izakaya -- kind of a bar, but with good traditional Japanese food, too -- with the odd name of AIUEO, which was a favorite hang-out of gaijin in our city. You could always find us there on Friday nights, drinking enormous beers and eating such fare as yakitori (Japanese chicken, skewered and cooked over an open flame), grilled "hokke" fish (which my dictionary tells me is arabesque, but we never knew what it was called in English at the time), and fresh sashimi (raw fish without rice, i.e. the top part of sushi, served on a plate). Those were fun times when we'd unwind with a few drinks then I'd ride home on my mountain bike -- it was the height of gaijin fashion in the 1990s to have one. Then there was the thrill of waking up the next morning to find a girl's pocket bell ("beeper") number scribbled on a chopstick wrapper and try to remember how it got there. But time marches on: even though the old drinking district where we use to roam is still there, they tore down AIUEO a few years ago to make more room for parking. (Incidentally, we have some cool miniatures of sake and izakaya food on the site today.)

The Japanese love of saving money is world famous. Although the annual savings rate has dipped a bit in recent years, the average household still has an incredible US$100,000, usually held in cash in normal bank accounts making a laughably low return -- my own bank account gives me just 0.04% per year. Getting a 1% return on savings is considered great in Japan, what with the governments "zero interest policy" of keeping money practically free to borrow to try to keep the economy moving, and my wife is especially good at sniffing out better investments. There are some interesting cultural reasons why Japanese seem to enjoy saving money, and I think it starts with "otoshidama," the custom of receiving money from relatives on New Year's Day, roughly equivalent to getting presents on Christmas (although thanks to Toys R Us, this has become a part of Japan's culture, too). I've watched as my wife has carefully cultivated an interest in saving money in my son, and now he's got $500 in his bank account from carefully saving his allowance and New Year's Day money.

The history of the Pocky company and Japan's tiny land mass

Hello again from Japan, the home of such products as Mapple (map book), Crunky (crunchy chocolate) and Quickle Wiper (floor cleaner).

Since Japan is such a small country, with half the population of the U.S. yet only 1/25 the area, people here have to be somewhat innovative when it comes to how they use their land. I see this smart use of space quite often: building a baseball field in the floodplain of a river or creating gas stations with pumps built into the roof, with a long hose reaching down to the car. They also have these funky tall parking garages that are basically giant elevators which store cars vertically. Graves are very space-saving, too: a small plot can hold the bones and ashes of dozens of family members. Think of old castles or temples and Kyoto might come to mind, but the culture of Gunma, where J-List is based, is ancient, too. Gunma has the highest number of "kofun," or burial mounds, which were built between the 3rd and 7th century, before kanji and Buddhism entered Japan through Korea. Since it's forbidden to build on land occupied by a burial mound, the Japanese often erect parks around them, which provide children with a fun place to play while instilling them with a sense of their country's past, another innovative way to make use of land.

The history of Japanese companies can be interesting. One famous company is Glico, purveyors of Pocky, Pretz and many other delicious snacks from Japan. At the start of the 20th century, the son of Riichi Ezaki died suddenly. Saddened, Ezaki went a seaside fishing village where he happened upon some children playing. They were exceptionally healthy, which caused Ezaki to look into the reason for their good health. He determined that a compound found in oysters called glycogen was a factor, and in 1919 he resolved to found a company that would manufacture sweets for Japan's children that would improve their health, to be named Glico, after the glycogen compound. The now-famous image of the Glico Running Man was adopted because one piece of candy contains the energy you need to run a 100 meter dash. He had trouble gaining traction against the other two large confectionery companies, Meiji and Morinaga, until he thought of an idea: package an omake (oh-MAH-kay) or small toy with the candy, which greatly increased sales. Pocky was created in 1965 and was in instant hit. The name comes from the sound the biscuit sticks make when broken (pokki!). J-List sells over 100 varieties of snacks including all flavors of Pocky (at least until Japan's humid summer arrives, when we temporarily remove them from stock).

J-List loves to bring you hard-to-find products from Japan, and we've been happy to make the DVD films of Hayao Miyazaki available to you over the years, like My Neighbor Totoro, Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind and Spirited Away. Now there's a great new Ghibli DVD that features a documentary of the Ghibli Museum in Tokyo, interviews with the creators, and shows the actual locations in Europe that the director has based his films in. The DVD is fully subtitled so you can enjoy all the great information. The disc is region 2, another great excuse to get a region free DVD player if you don't have one already ^_^

The nature of competition in Japan, and all about Japanese bathing

One unique aspect of Japan is how many industries have to deal with competition from the government, which interferes with the private sector in ways that wouldn't be acceptable in the U.S. When you think of your local post office, you probably think of stamps and mail delivery, but the government-run Japanese Post Office does a lot more: it's the world's largest bank with some $3.2 trillion in cash deposits in postal savings accounts. The Post Office has so much money sloshing around that it uses it to build subsidized entertainment facilities around the country, like hotels and a giant sprawling indoor pool near Nikko which never has anyone using it. It also sells life insurance, something that's totally unnecessary in Japan, a country with a strong and competitive insurance industry. Prime Minister Koizumi aims to convert the Japan Post Corporation into a private company, hopefully repeating the successful privatizations of the Kokutetsu railroad monopoly (now known as the six JR companies), Japan's largest tobacco company JT (once operated directly by government, ugh) and Japan's old telephone company (now known as NTT, one of Japan's most vibrant businesses).

My son just finished with his final tests, his last of the third grade. He did really well in his science final, only missing one question, which was about the shadow cast by a stick in the ground. Over the course of several hours, the position of the shadow moves -- why? My son, who is no fool, wrote that the Earth is moving, but he was disappointed to find this marked wrong, however -- "the sun moves in the sky" was what was in the textbook, and that's what he was expected to write. We took the teacher to task on this, which surprised him, since questioning educators is seldom done in Japan. In the end, I think we taught our son an important lesson about not automatically accepting what he hears.

I love Japanese public baths (sento) and hot springs (onsen, pronounced OWN-sen), and take my kids almost every week -- sometimes twice a week. Public baths hail back from the Edo period when people didn't have private baths in their homes, and had to go to community facilities to bathe. Volcanic hot springs also have a long history, and popular onsen towns like Kusatsu, located in the mountains near J-List, have been in use as resort towns for hundreds of years. Once my son saw a young boy in the bath and asked me why he had a blue bruise on his rear end. This is the Mongolian Spot (mokohan in Japanese, "the Old Spot of Mongol"), a blue bruise-like spot which is found on Chinese, Japanese and Mongolian children, including my own kids when they were young. The spots go away when the children reach age five or so. In Japanese, the word for someone who is still a wet-behind-the-ears greenhorn is ao ni-sai (AH-oh NEE-sai, "still blue 2-year-old"), which probably has something to do with this spot.

White Day in Japan, and the many ways to learn Japanese

Today is White Day, the day that Japanese confectioners and retailers have decreed that men give a return gift (o-kaeshi) to women who gave them chocolate on Valentines Day, one month ago. While white chocolate is a favorite, other popular items include candy, cute character goods that say "thank you" and more. As with many aspects of gift giving in Japan, there's often a lot of giri (obligation, what you're expected to do) and very little kimochi (feeling, what you earnestly want to do), so that there's a built-in falseness to the whole thing -- but of course, no one is supposed to take a day like White Day too seriously. If you're a man and got some chocolate from a woman on Valentines Day, be sure and give her something today to show your gratitude!

Ever since the first steam locomotive started operating between Tokyo and Yokohama in 1872, trains have been a large part of Japan's transportation system and economy. Rail lines run everywhere in Japan, and if you live in a large city, it's usually quite easy to forego owning a car entirely. During my time as a teacher, I've taught English to many young people who were huge train otakus, who loved to travel around Japan to take photos of and ride on famous trains, like the famous Yufuin no Mori express in Kyushu, the Tsubasa, the only shinkansen that can also run on normal tracks, or the Nozomi 800, the fastest train in Japan. Like all boys here, my son went through a phase when he decided that he loved trains more than anything else, and I had a lot of fun learning all the names of Japan's famous trains with him. Our favorite one of all is the double-decker MAX, which stands for "multi amenity express" in case you were wondering.

There are many approaches to learning a foreign language -- the Army Method (stress on learning through memorization), the Grammar Translation Method (learning a language by parsing its grammar), the Communicative Method (leaning by speaking and listening in the target language), and the Natural Approach (trying to replicate the steps that children go through when they learn a language). Then there's the "get attention" method, which I'll label the Social Feedback Method to give it a proper name. Basically, you learn whatever vocabulary and phrases that will make you the life of the party among your new linguistic group, be it cute ways to begin conversations with attractive Japanese girls or interesting phrases that will amuse people around you. I have a friend who worked his way across Asia using this method, learning just enough of the local languages to be social and have fun with his hosts, and he swears by it. For myself, I learned Japanese at the excellent language program at SDSU, and added to my studies by reading manga, transcribing songs to memorize them for singing at karaoke bars, and making friends at the Japanese-American Friendship Club at our university.

What the month of March means to the Japanese

The month of March means different things to different people. In Japan it's a time of partings (wakare no kisetsu), the end of the school year, when young people who are going on to different schools make teary farewells to their friends. It's also the time of year that drivers have to endure Japan's "road construction hell," as local governments hurry to use up their budgets before the end of Japan's fiscal year. Everywhere I drive, I know I'll face constant delays as roads are torn up and put down again, in an eternal cycle of government-sponsored inefficiency. The main problem is a law that dictates that 100% of the taxes collected on cars and gasoline must be used to build more roads, with no exceptions, despite the fact that Japan already has plenty of roads that work just fine. It's a major political issue here, with most of the old guard in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party supporting the ongoing wasting of resources because of effective lobbying by construction companies. Japan spends a whopping $9 billion a year on its roads, an amazing sum considering that the U.S. spends $11 billion yet is 25 times as large. The idea that Japan's leaders are so ineffectual that they can't fix this terrible situation makes me grieve for my adopted country.

Besides Akihabara, Japan's electronics and "otaku culture" hub, there are other parts of Tokyo that are popular with foreign visitors. Akasaka is one such place, the home of one of the most famous Shinto shrines in the area, the Hie Shrine. A fun corner of the city that sports hundreds of shops and restaurants, it's a good place to visit if you're coming to Tokyo. Another famous shrine is Meiji Jingu, a beautiful and solemn island oddly located in Harajuku, a hip playground for the FRUiTs generation. Finally, one of my favorite spots in the Kanto area is Kamakura, a small city south of Yokohama that features the second largest statue of Buddha in Japan (the largest is in Nara). The capital of Japan during the Kamakura Era (1185-1333), the city is just beautiful, with many fabulous shrines and temples to explore. Make sure you ride the Enoshima train line, an old-style train from the early Showa era that's as famous as the cable cars in San Francisco.

Japanese love to wear American brands on their clothes, because sporting corporate logos for U.S. companies is very kakko ii (cool). Now you can do the reverse, with our latest wacky Japanese T-shirt, an elegant parody design based on the "i-Mode" mobile telephone service of NTT Docomo -- one of the most famous corporations in Japan -- with the kanji for the love (pronounced the same, ai) in place of the capital "I." We've got a beautiful gold men's shirt and stylish pink-and-sparkly fitted tee for girls. Gaijin usually seem to be especially fascinated with the kanji character for "love" (which is one of the most complex and aesthetically beautiful characters), and we hope you like this new original design.

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.