Trends in wealth in Japan, and comparing Dr. Pepper and Tootsie Rolls to Pocky

Each year in Japan, the list of who paid the most income taxes during the previous year is published in the newspaper. The actual incomes of individuals is private, but how much tax they paid is a matter of public record, and it's always fun to see who is making money (or who needs to hire better accountants). For singers, actors and "talents" (a Japanese catch-all word for any entertainer), JPOP star Hikaru Utada slam-dunked the top position, handily beating variety show host Minomonta -- those Nintendo DS commercials she's been in must be lucrative. Other famous names on the list include Ayumi Hamasaki (fallen to #7), Tsunk (producer of Morning Musume, at #10), pretty actress Takako Matsu (#23), Tamori ("the Chairman" from Hey! Spring of Trivia, if you watch it) at #24, and director Beat Takeshi at #33. Members of SMAP, the popular male idol/comedian team, are also well represented on the list, as usual. In the "cultural persons" category, there were several manga artists as well, including Rumiko Takahashi (Urusei Yatsura and Inu Yasha, #2), Gosho Aoyama (Detective Conan, #3), Ritsuko Kawai (Hamtaro, #9), and Masami Kurumada (Saint Seiya, #35). Two manga artists from our prefecture also made the list: Shuichi Shigeno, creator of Initial D, and Mitsuru Adachi, who defined sports manga with his 80s classic, Touch.

In addition to categories based on profession, the newspapers also list the top taxpayers in order of the actual amount they paid, which provides an interesting snapshot of the current state of wealth in Japan today. Over the years various trends come and go, such as in the late 90s, when all the money seemed to be coming from development of video games, based on the high number of game company presidents on the list. When the economy was at its lowest point, most of the top ten taxpayers in Japan got their money from the high-interest loan companies like Acom, Aiful and Yen Shop. Today the spread is more mixed, with two loan companies, a pachinko and vending machine maker, recently merged software producer Sega/Sammy, and a manufacturer of underwear, all on the list. The biggest surprise this year was that top earner wasn't a company president, but a normal "salaryman": Tatsuro Kiyohara managed to earn $93 million between his company salary and profits from his stock portfolio.

It's always interesting to compare the differences between Japan and the U.S. In America, many products like Coca-Cola, Dr. Pepper, Wriggley's gum and Tootsie Rolls have been around for over a century, some since the Civil War, and they continue to dominate in their respective categories. Japanese consumers, however, seem to favor new products when they shop, forcing manufacturers to come up with fresh ideas at a faster pace. While there are some solid Japanese standbys that never change -- Original Pocky, or Peko-chan Milk Candy -- any visit to a Japanese conbini (convenience store) is sure you bring you into contact with a dozen or so products you've never seen before. The red-hot Japanese beer industry is an example of this: even in the small-town liquor store that my wife's parents operate, I constantly see new twists on Japanese beer, like beer formulated for ladies, or beer with dietary fiber added, or beer that tries to recreate the beers brewed in the Meiji era. I've been told that this is because the Japanese themselves have short attention spans, and move onto the next big thing rather quickly. While it's always nice to find a new flavor of Pretz or a new blend of green tea on store shelves, it's also good to have a core of old favorites that never change.

China as the source of culture for Japan, and all about Japan's tendency to be seasonal about everything

Just as almost all aspects of modern European culture have their basis in Rome and Greece, much of Japan's culture was based on Chinese elements, either imported directly or filtered through the Korean Peninsula. Many areas of Japanese life, from the architecture to the writing system to the structure of early government, originally hail from China. The Japanese pay a lot of attention to the principles of feng shui, and try to design homes and cities so that the layout will promote the flow of positive energy -- the choice of Edo (Tokyo) as the national capital was made in part because it's exactly northeast of Kyoto, which has a special meaning according to feng shui. The Japanese also follow eto, the Chinese sexagenary cycle, the complex system of twelve animals that cycle through each year -- my wife and I were both born in the Year of the Monkey. Although the Japanese adopted the Western calendar in the Meiji Era, they still remember the Chinese New Year with Setsubun, on February 5, a day when Japanese kids throw beans at imaginary devils to chase them out of the house.

One thing about Japan: it's a very seasonal place. Spring is beautiful with its short-lived cherry blossoms, summer is hot and humid with many festivals, fall is filled with crisp brown leaves, and winter is cold and frosty. I've met Japanese who tell me with great pride that, unlike America, Japan has four distinct seasons, and they enjoy every one of them -- apparently these people haven't ventured outside of Southern California. Japanese people tend to avoid being kisetsu-hazure (ki-SET-tsu ha-ZOO-ray), doing the wrong things for the wrong season. In an ESL textbook once there was a picture of a boy flying a kite in summer. But in Japan, flying traditional kites (tako) is nearly always done around New Year's Day, so my students were amazed at the picture.

Japan's tendency to be very seasonal extends to other aspects of daily life. Swimsuits are sold in the summer months, and calendars sold at the end of the year -- don't even bother trying to find something that's out of season, it won't be available. When fruits are in season, they're ripe and delicious, but since Japan doesn't import much fruit from other parts of the world like America does, when something is out of season it's not available for love or money. Strawberries are in season in Japan now, but they won't be for long, so last weekend we took the kids to a place in the mountains where you can eat as many strawberries off the vine as you want for $8 per person. They were delicious.

The origins of the Japanese flag, wacky theme parks found in Japan, and a whale who became an idol

The Japanese flag, with its red circle against a white background, has got to be one of the most recognizable images in the world. Called the Hinomaru (which means "circle of the sun"), this symbol of Japan has been around since the 12th century. Although it obviously represents the sun in the sky, since the name given to Japan by China (Nihon or Nippon) means "origin of the sun," the colors represent the ancient clans of Heike and Genji, who fought for control of of the country during the Genpei war (1180-1185). Eventually the Genji, who identified with the white star Rigel, defeated the Heike, who took red Betelgeuse as their symbol, which was expressed by larger area of white with the red center on the flag. The Hinomaru has another meaning in modern life: women draw little Japanese flags in their schedule notebooks to remember when their time of the month will be, and the word hatabi ("flag day") is a euphemism for this.

Japan may be famous for its ultra-cute teenage stars like Aya Ueto and Morning Musume, but marine animals sometimes make popular idols, too. When a 7.9-meter long grey whale swam into Tokyo Bay on April 28th, he became an instant celebrity, with parents making use of the Golden Week holidays to take their kids to the bay so they could see the natural wonder for themselves. Sadly, the whale, who was named Sora-chan, got trapped in some fishing nets and couldn't escape, and was found dead this morning. In 2002, a seal swam up Tokyo's Tamagawa river to find himself a media star, with daily news reports on the comings and goings of "Tama-chan."

Like other developed countries, Japanese like to go to theme parks to relax and have fun, and sometimes these parks can be quite, ah, original. In the mountains above our house there's a replica of a rural Bavarian town called Kronenberg, also known as Doitsu-mura, which means German Village. There you can find good beer, delicious sausages, and lots of embarrassed-looking Germans in traditional dress. If Hello Kitty is your thing, you should check out Sanrio World in Tokyo, which features the entire pantheon of Sanrio characters in life-sized versions. If you ever visit Nikko, a nice city north of Tokyo, there are several interesting attractions to check out, including Edo-mura, a replica of a samurai village; the slightly silly Western-mura, an Old West town complete with real gaijin cowboys; and Tobu World Square, where you can see famous sights from around the world recreated in 1/25 scale. In addition to these uniquely Japanese places, you can also take in Japanese versions of U.S. theme parks, such as Tokyo Disneyland and University Studios Japan in Osaka.

Understanding Japan through its cute characters, and duality in learning Japanese language

There are many ways to approach an understanding of Japan, through the classical aspects of the country, through its music, or else by immersing yourself in the joyful confusion of modern pop culture. If you are so inclined, you can also try to understand Japan through its "cult of cuteness," expressed in the endless stream of kawaii original characters that exist here. When Shintaro Tsuji started the Yamanashi Silk Center Co. to make cute greeting cards -- actively copying the business model of the Hallmark corporation, which he had great respect for -- he probably had no idea what a huge effect the company he'd later rename Sanrio was going to have on the world. Since the introduction of Hello Kitty in 1974, Japan has seen a near-constant stream of characters for every taste, including creations with "calculated cuteness" by Sanrio (Merry Melody, Bad Batz Maru), bizarre characters that are almost self-parodies (Afro-ken, the dog with a rainbow-colored 'fro and Kogepan, a character based on a burned roll at the bakery that no one wants to buy), anti-characters (the suicidally depressed Gloomy Bear), and characters that represent every day objects (Ochaken and Occhan, which capitalize on the popularity of green tea here). Characters are even made of objects you couldn't possibly consider cute: today we're posting a pen featuring a cute little pink unchi (poop) character. Kawaii!

When you learn a language that's as different from English as Japanese is, there are bound to be a lot of rough patches where the meanings of words don't fit together perfectly. In English we only need one word to express concepts like brother or cold, but in Japanese there are separate terms for older and younger brother (oniisan/ototo) and for the concepts of cold to the touch vs. coldness in the air (tsumetai/samui). Some basic household words like ojisan and obasan, meaning uncle and aunt, pull double duty as generic terms for any middle-aged man or woman you meet on the street, too. After you assign dual meanings to linguistic concepts long enough, your brain gets used to it and starts recognizing patterns, making it easier. Thankfully, there are times when two concepts in English will boil down to just one word in Japanese, such as the words shy and embarrassed, which can both be expressed as hazukashii in Japanese even though the nuances are slightly different in English. I remember back as an English teacher, trying to help my students grapple with the differences between the words ironic, sarcastic and cynical, all of which can be expressed with a single concept in Japanese (iyami).

All about guns in Japan, tatami mats, and the tyranny of the majority

One of the preconceptions I had before coming to Japan was that there were no guns here at all, so I was quite surprised when I went up into the mountains in my prefecture and noticed a NO HUNTING sign. It turns out that hunting of pheasant, wild boar and other animals is legal in many parts of Japan, although there's an intense licensing requirement that tests for both knowledge of gun safety and mental stability of the owner (members of radical political parties need not apply). I have a Japanese friend who builds custom frames for racing bicycles, and he once showed me his prized collection of Remington rifles, which he never gets to fire because he had a weak heart, he told me dejectedly. Outside of hunting circles, guns are very rare in Japan, only possessed by police and criminals. Gun crimes are also almost nonexistent -- in 2000, 8493 Americans were killed by firearms, vs. 22 in Japan, with most of those being violence between yakuza gangsters. The fact that guns are hard to get doesn't deter "gun otaku" who love all things military: instead of buying real guns, they collect the realistic toy replicas that shoot 6 mm plastic pellets. Back when I was teaching English, by far the most common question from my students was "Did you own a gun back in the USA?"

Most foreigners I've known have a bit of a fixation with tatami mats when they first come to Japan. A unique symbol of minimalist interior design, tatami are rectangular mats made of igusa straw, which are pleasant to sit or lie on, and smell nice. While older Japanese houses used to feature the mats in every room, tatami have become less and less common in modern homes. In most houses, such as ours, there's a single washitsu (Japanese-style room) with tatami mats and shoji paper doors, but the rest of the house is done in Western style. The decline in tatami mats is partially because of changes in Japanese tastes -- people prefer the convenience of chairs and beds to living on the floor -- but tatami are also very hard to keep clean, and they can become a haven for dust mites. Because tatami are always the same size, roughly the space one man needs to sleep, it's useful to think of a room in terms of how many mats it holds, or would hold if there were mats laid down. An average-sized room is 6-jo (jo is the Chinese pronunciation for the tatami character), and a small room for a poor college student would likely be a 4.5-jo. After living in Japan for 14 years, I am incapable of perceiving the size of a room in square feet, but I can picture how big a room is in tatami mats very easily.

I've talked before about Japan's tendency to give in to the "tyranny of the masses" -- for example, skim milk is impossible to find in Japan because most Japanese like thick, creamy milk with 4.7 per cent milkfat, so only the majority gets what it wants. Similarly, there are virtually no vegetarians here, so vegans visiting from overseas are often unhappy to find meat or animal products in almost every kind of food prepared in Japan. In a similar show of over-uniformity, Japanese parents sometimes "fix" children who show signs of left-handedness, and force them to use their right hands. The rationale used to be that kids need to learn how to do math using an abacus, which can only be used with the right hand. Supposedly they don't fix lefties anymore, but I distinctly remember my wife gently "correcting" our son when he was a baby and tried to do something with his left hand. Incidentally, my wife has the equivalent of a brown belt in abacus calculation, and can sit there and add up complex numbers even by moving her hand over an imagery abacus -- she doesn't need a real one.

More on Japan's vertical society, wisdom from Japanese manga, and an airplane that's feeling "upset"

Japan's tendency to rank individuals in groups as senpai (sem-PAI, a senior member of a group, or upperclassman) and kouhai (koh-HAI, a junior member, or underclassman) can be puzzling to outsiders. Although it's endured for centuries, the Japanese vertical social system is often put under pressure due to recent social changes. In the old days of Japan's high period of economic growth, nearly everyone enjoyed lifetime employment: you joined a company at age 23 and slowly rose up the ladder as you got older, so senpai/kouhai relationships nearly always progressed parallel to the age of employees. In Japan today, however, it is quite possible for a 35 year old to experience risutora (Japanese for being laid off from a job, from the English word "restructure") and find himself working under a 25 year old at a new company. This creates a new problem: which has seniority? In the context of the workplace, it's the employee who joined the company first that is considered to be the senpai, even though he may be younger in age.

You can learn a lot about Japanese social relationships by reading manga comics, and one of my personal favorites was Maison Ikkoku, the Rumiko Takahashi classic that tells the story of a Japanese man, Godai, and his attempts to woo the manager of the apartment he lives in, the recently widowed Kyoko. During the rocky courtship of Godai and Kyoko, he always speaks to her with polite Japanese, attaching the formal -san to her name (e.g. Kyoko-san) because she's two years older than him. Only at their wedding reception, after he's become her husband and thus on the same level as her, can be bring himself to drop the formal -san ending and call her by her name, Kyoko. While many of the invisible social rules at work in Japan may seem odd, they do exist in English, too. I'm currently reading the Harry Potter novels to my son, and last night there was a scene in which Professor Dumbledore called Professor Snape by his first name, Severus. Why did he do that? my son wanted to know, since he could never conceive of calling his teachers by their first names. So we talked about the differences between how names are used in Japanese and English.

A person's environment really shapes how they perceive the world. Once we took my daughter to an eye doctor in the U.S., who showed her some pictures and asked her to identify them so he could check her vision. The pictures included basic objects like a telephone, a shoe and so on, but some of the pictures looked so odd to her Japanese eyes that she couldn't identify the objects correctly, even though she could see them fine. The other day she found a toy airplane I'd had sitting around the house, a model of an experimental weapon made by Germany during World War II. "This airplane looks upset," she said to me. She had seen the iron cross on the German plane as the anime mark for being angry or upset.

Various surprises that were waiting for me when I went to live in Japan

Before I moved to Japan, I had a lot of preconceptions about what life would be like here, based on watching Japanese animation and dramas. But when I arrived here back in 1991, I was actually surprised at some of the things I didn't find, starting with the near total lack of anything bearing the name teriyaki -- the flavoring is used but is never referred to with that name, except the McDonald's Teriyaki McBurger. I'd read a few James Clavell novels, and subliminally expected the Asian idea of "face" to be at least a small part of Japanese life -- yet the concept is so rarely mentioned here, it took me several years to learn how to express it in Japanese. I thought of Japan as being an ultra-modern country, yet when I got here, my life resembled the year I spent in New Zealand back in the 1970s -- things that most Americans take for granted like dishwashers and electric dryers were extremely rare in Japan. There were plenty of things I didn't expect to see, too, like Jehovah's Witnesses (yes, they have them here), grown-up women who act kawaii (cute) like silly anime characters, whole city grids without a single named street, Japanese translations of Harlequin Romance novels, and more vending machines within walking distance of my house than on the entire SDSU campus.

One unique aspect of the Japanese language is the high number of foreign-loan words used in daily life. The Japanese even have a writing system that's used exclusively for writing foreign words, katakana. Like its sister hiragana, katakana lets you express sounds as syllables, like ka-ki-ku-ke-ko, but never the consonant "k" by itself. Modern written Japanese is a constantly churning mix of kanji (for core meaning), hiragana (for grammatical particles) and katakana (for expressing words from other languages). Certain categories of words tend to be borrowed from English -- anything having to do with cars or technology, and many occupation titles (engineer, illustrator, programmer). Often foreign words are imported with slightly altered meanings -- for example, the Japanese use a Japanese word for a street address (juusho), but use the English word adoresu for referring to an email address. The problem is that more and more words are written in katakana these days, which creates a "comprehension gap" between young and old Japanese, with people over 40 understanding less and less. The problem is so bad that there are actually "katakana dictionaries" you can buy in stores, which help explain what these strange foreign words mean. (The Wordtank electronic dictionaries that J-List sells also include katakana dictionaries.) Just as some English speakers throw a dash of French into their writing to show off their intelligence, Japanese businessmen and news commentators love to pepper their speech with English words like "consensus" and "manifesto" and "initiative" which can cause plenty of confusion.

Golden Week, and thoughts on Japan being a "vertical" society

It's time once again for Golden Week, a series of Japanese holidays that happens to fall more or less within the same week. Japanese use the long holiday period to travel, and millions of city-dwellers make a mass exodus away from their homes, visiting family or taking a vacation in other parts of the country. Unfortunately, anyplace that we'd like to take the kids during Golden Week -- the mountains, hot springs, Tokyo Disneyland -- is packed with refugees from Tokyo, making it virtually impossible to go anywhere fun.

It's said in Japan that the U.S. is a "horizontal" society (yoko no shakai) while Japan is "vertical" (tate no shakai), supposedly due to the fact that life in the U.S. is merit-based whereas progression up the social ladder in Japan is founded on age and seniority. While I don't believe that this statement is accurate anymore -- Japan has become a lot more meritorious over the past decade -- it's certainly true that relationships here are very up-down, with a clear idea that the older you are (or the longer you've been in an organization), the more erai (eh-RAI, meaning high-ranking) you are compared to others. This concept of established rank in human relationships is all around you when you're in Japan, you can't get away from it -- it's even built into the language. When a younger person speaks to an older person, even if he's just one year older, he must use keigo, or polite Japanese, which effectively organizes everyone in the room according to level in a way that is impossible to conceive of in English. To not use the "right" language for your level (say, speaking informally to your boss) is disconcerting to others, especially in business or school settings, and makes you sound cheeky. The whole system of vertical relationships may sound odd, but it actually makes interaction work more smoothly, because everyone knows what to expect from everyone else -- it's almost like TCP/IP for humans.

A lot of these "vertical" concepts are encountered by anime fans. Take the idea of a senpai (also written sempai), an upperclassman in a school or senior employee in an organization, and in anime, often the label used by a girl who has a crush on an older boy. Being senpai brings respect from kouhai (underclassmen, younger members of the organization), but it also comes with a requirement that you play the part, helping and guiding those underneath you and doing things like paying for their meals at restaurants. Virtually every kind of group in Japan follows these senpai/kouhai rules, even sumo wrestlers -- I once went to see a daily sumo practice at a stable and was surprised to see how roughly the older wrestlers handled their underlings, slapping them around as a way of reinforcing the up-down relationship. There's a third grouping, too, doukyusei, which are people who are on the same level as you, i.e. classmates at school. Doukyusei relationships are basically neutral in terms of rank or level.

$70 for a Captain Santa T-shirt, and parent's day at my son's new English school

You've been in Japan too long when you pay over $70 for a Captain Santa T-shirt and realize a few days later how much you really spent. It's true: despite the "deflation" you might have heard about -- which was mainly companies increasing their efficiency during the recession years and passing the savings on to consumers -- Japan can be an expensive place. Virtually everything, from construction materials to gasoline (which is the equivalent of $4.50 a gallon now), is priceier here then in other parts of the world, and food costs consume a quarter of the average household budget. One problem is that the ways goods are sold in Japan is still too structured, with products coming into the hands of consumers through established routes and multiple levels of distribution, which adds to the prices. But there's something about living in Japan that compels a person to want to own things he wouldn't otherwise bother with, like the above-mentioned T-shirt I bought in 1992 featuring Captain Santa, a line of high-end clothing featuring images of Santa at the beach. It was the best T-shirt I've ever owned in my life, but at $70, I probably should have had my head examined. From toilet seats that wash your butt to the 20+ varieties of massage chairs they sell here, there sure are a lot of ways to spend your money in Japan.

Part of raising kids in Japan means attending sankanbi, or parent's day, a day when mothers and fathers can come see their kids in class. Today was the first parent's day at my son's new school, so I took half a day off to go see what his classes were like. The experimental school, which is taught 70% in English and 30% in Japanese, is a completely new concept in Japan, and there's been a lot of anxiety over whether the city could pull it off. My biggest concern was, how can you make a roomful of Japanese kids learning from an American teacher who understands Japanese actually use English? The answer was the "Japanese mat." If a child wants to say something in his native language, he has to ask "May I speak Japanese?" then after getting permission, go stand on the Japanese mat and say what they need to say. I was very impressed. Like all such school events, most parents were armed with the latest video camera for recording their child for all eternity. Most Japanese parents really go overboard when it comes to their kids -- which is called oya-baka or "parent-fool" if you want to know -- but I am exactly the same way myself.

We've got some happy news: we're finally ready to announce the Friends of J-List Affiliate Program! We receive many requests from J-List fans who want to help evangelize our brand of wacky Japanese pop culture, and after many months, we're finally able to launch the program officially. If you've got an established website and want to help people find J-List, you can receive cash commissions or store credit for every order. We've taken an extra-long time to launch the program because we wanted to make sure everything was done right, and we're very happy with the robust affiliate system we've got in place now. To read more about the Friends of J-List Program or sign up, see this page.

The lack of pregnant women in Japan, more about how kanji works, and my karaoke pictures

My Japanese mother-in-law remarked the other day that, "You don't see women with big stomachs very often these days." At first I thought that women were getting thinner, but my wife said no, her mother had been referring to the dearth of pregnant women in Japan. It's true -- the birthrate here is the lowest in the industrialized world, just 1.38 children per couple, and it's getting more and more common to see companies offering products and services to those over 65 over baby-related items. Many products for the elderly that might be taboo to advertise openly in some other countries, such as incontinence products or baldness treatments for women, are advertised on TV regularly here. Part of the reason for the falling birthrate is the high cost and extra stress of raising a child in Japan, especially for Tokyoites living in their usagi-goya (rabbit hutch) apartments. However, not all couples have only one or two children: it's quite common to see variety TV shows documenting the daily lives of families with 12 or 15 children, showing what they do to help each other get through their day. Our favorite Japanese TV show, Hey! Spring of Trivia, had an interesting bit of information: according to current projections, the number of Japanese in the world in the year 3000 will be...7 people.

Japan's writing system can be the most complex aspect of the language, since it combines three separate systems: hiragana and katakana, two syllable-based systems used for expressing Japanese and foreign words, respectively, and around 2000 kanji from China. While the two kana are not hard to master (although they look difficult when you first start), the real neck in studying Japanese is usually kanji, at least for "white boy" gaijin like me. But while kanji can be a challenge, it's not nearly as hard as it looks. First of all, there's a structure to kanji that's quite logical -- for example most characters that have to do with water or liquid have the same left half, called a "radical," that refers to water. Kanji can usually be memorized by cutting them into four quadrants and writing them repeatedly, although be sure to pay attention to learning the correct stroke order. I knew that I would never be able to master something as difficult as kanji unless I really enjoyed studying it, so I came up with ways to reinforce my studies, for example reading manga or going to karaoke bars and reading the kanji on the screen. I had a Chinese friend who was taking level 1 of the Japanese Language Ability Test at the same time I was, and I made it my personal goal to get a higher score than her, despite her natural advantage in already reading kanji. I was lucky -- I managed to beat her score by ten points.

It's not very politically correct to say that all Japanese look the same, but when I first came to live in Japan, it took some time for my brain to get used to seeing so many faces with Japanese characteristics, which in some cases did look very similar to me at the time. After I'd taught English for a month, I took a train to Yokohama to see the sights of the city, and while there I kept thinking I was seeing my new students on the street, despite the fact that I was quite far from home. In reality, there's a lot of variation in the faces of Japanese people, with Mongolian, Korean, Ainu, Portuguese and other blood coursing through the country, but it took me time to get used to my new environment. For the record, gaijin can look the same to Japanese, too, and I've been mistaken for other foreigners on several occasions, usually by older Japanese who haven't had much experience with us. I usually smile and avoid correcting their mistake since it would embarrass them.

J-List drink party, funny phrases you can try at home, and thoughts on Japanese English

Japanese students study a total of six years of English, even more if they go on to college, and even though most people don't attain real conversational fluency, English does seep into the culture here in many interesting ways. The Japanese use thousands of foreign-loan words in their daily lives, mostly from English, but sometimes the meanings get changed a little. In Japanese usage, "milk" (miruku) always refers to powdered creamer for your coffee, and some words for makeup are shifted in meaning: "rouge" means lipstick and "manicure" means nail polish. Sometimes the Japanese will use words from languages other than English for style or phonetic reasons. For example, to avoid problems with similar words such as "crown" and "clown," they turn to French for the latter term: pierrot. Gaijin living here often pick up Engrish words like phone box (phone booth), cash corner (ATM) stand and pocket bell (beeper) and regularly embarrass ourselves using these words with other foreigners.

There are some interesting expressions that the Japanese use a lot in speech, which can be fun for foreigners to pick up and use since no one expects us to know them. If something is too small, like your end-of-year bonus or your bank account, it's suzume no namida (soo-zoo-meh no nah-mee-da), which means the tear of a sparrow. To express the concept of flattering or brown-nosing someone, there's the phrase goma-suri which means to grind up sesame seeds -- so if you laugh at a dumb joke your boss makes, you're grinding his sesame seeds for him. If you're hiding something but your secret is discovered, the Japanese would say shippo ga deta which means that your tail has popped out from inside your clothes -- somewhat similar to the phrase "a wolf in sheep's clothing" in English. And if someone is kao ga hiroi they literally have a "wide face" -- which means that everyone knows them and that they have a lot of influence.

The J-List staff had fun last night at a "welcome party" for two new employees. We gathered at our favorite beer restaurant and had a nice time welcoming the new staff members to our little group. We ate and drank, then all went out for a few hours in a karaoke box. Having official "drink parties" is an interesting aspect to company life in Japan, and there are several events throughout the year where the J-List staff gathers to have fun and relax outside of the workplace.

One of the most popular products we sell here at J-List are the original Japanese T-shirts with messages like "I'm looking for a Japanese Girlfriend." Our two newest T-shirt designs are bizarre parodies of famous Japanese products, Pocky chocolate stick snacks and Black Black caffeine gum. Very wacky and off-color, the shirts look great, and are sure to get giggles from any Japanese who see them. See the new shirts on the site now.

New and old in Japan, and listening to the armed forces radio from Yokosuka

Japan can really be a place of contrasting images. On the one hand, it's a modern, technologically advanced country that makes some of the most amazing products in the world. On the other hand, other aspects of Japan can look -- at least to my outsider's eyes -- quite backwards sometimes. Up until three years ago, when my son entered the first grade, students were assigned a number in alphabetical order, and all the boys were numbered before all the girls. Starting with the year my son started school, however, the system changed, allowing boys and girls to be numbered and seated together. Before my wife went to the U.S. to study English, she worked as an OL, an "office lady" in a Japanese company, where she was required to put in several hours memorizing which green tea cups went with which male employees, which male employees liked their green tea served a certain way, and what order to hand the tea cups out in. Sometimes the tendency of Japan to preserve the old ways is good, though. Although I can buy incredibly advanced electronics less than a kilometer from my house, it's not uncommon to hear the voice of our local ishiyaki imo (EE-she-YAH-kii EE-moh) seller, who drives his truck around selling delicious stone-baked sweet potatoes.

Sometimes it does seem that the often-repeated idea that Japan runs a decade or more behind the West socially might be true. At least, Japan always seems to be in a state of imitating the U.S. and Europe in its institutions rather than taking the lead. Laws requiring child safety seats or forbidding sexual harassment in the workplace seem to have come a steady 10-15 years behind the U.S., and when Japan implemented a 401(k) type of system they gave it the original name of "Japan 401(k)." The next social change seems to be smoking: over the past few years, Japan has done a lot to limit where people can smoke, although usually tying this to politeness and good manners rather than fear of legal penalties. Now in most parts of Tokyo it's illegal to smoke while walking outdoors, and as a result, there are special "smoking corners" in parts of the city, establishments where all you do is walk in, sit down and light up, happy in the knowledge that you're "Smokin' Clean" (Japan Tobacco's slogan for smoking with good manners).

You've been in Japan too long when you air-drum in your car while listening to the U.S. Military radio news opening, which goes "here's what happening...around the Kanto Plain." The only English radio available in the Tokyo area is the Far East Network, the AM radio station that serves the U.S. military forces stationed in Japan, and it's a staple of civilian gaijin here, especially when driving somewhere. In addition to NPR news and other programming, FEN serves up top forty and country music countdowns on the weekend, an hour of Rush Limbaugh every weeknight, and the occasional football game. Because it's a non-profit station, in place of radio commercials they play short pieces on "our proud military heritage" which give interesting tidbits of military history from the past. As a result, I know quite a lot about the history of the U.S. armed forces.

New and old in Japan, and listening to the armed forces radio from Yokosuka

Japan can really be a place of contrasting images. On the one hand, it's a modern, technologically advanced country that makes some of the most amazing products in the world. On the other hand, other aspects of Japan can look -- at least to my outsider's eyes -- quite backwards sometimes. Up until three years ago, when my son entered the first grade, students were assigned a number in alphabetical order, and all the boys were numbered before all the girls. Starting with the year my son started school, however, the system changed, allowing boys and girls to be numbered and seated together. Before my wife went to the U.S. to study English, she worked as an OL, an "office lady" in a Japanese company, where she was required to put in several hours memorizing which green tea cups went with which male employees, which male employees liked their green tea served a certain way, and what order to hand the tea cups out in. Sometimes the tendency of Japan to preserve the old ways is good, though. Although I can buy incredibly advanced electronics less than a kilometer from my house, it's not uncommon to hear the voice of our local ishiyaki imo (EE-she-YAH-kii EE-moh) seller, who drives his truck around selling delicious stone-baked sweet potatoes.

Sometimes it does seem that the often-repeated idea that Japan runs a decade or more behind the West socially might be true. At least, Japan always seems to be in a state of imitating the U.S. and Europe in its institutions rather than taking the lead. Laws requiring child safety seats or forbidding sexual harassment in the workplace seem to have come a steady 10-15 years behind the U.S., and when Japan implemented a 401(k) type of system they gave it the original name of "Japan 401(k)." The next social change seems to be smoking: over the past few years, Japan has done a lot to limit where people can smoke, although usually tying this to politeness and good manners rather than fear of legal penalties. Now in most parts of Tokyo it's illegal to smoke while walking outdoors, and as a result, there are special "smoking corners" in parts of the city, establishments where all you do is walk in, sit down and light up, happy in the knowledge that you're "Smokin' Clean" (Japan Tobacco's slogan for smoking with good manners).

You've been in Japan too long when you air-drum in your car while listening to the U.S. Military radio news opening, which goes "here's what happening...around the Kanto Plain." The only English radio available in the Tokyo area is the Far East Network, the AM radio station that serves the U.S. military forces stationed in Japan, and it's a staple of civilian gaijin here, especially when driving somewhere. In addition to NPR news and other programming, FEN serves up top forty and country music countdowns on the weekend, an hour of Rush Limbaugh every weeknight, and the occasional football game. Because it's a non-profit station, in place of radio commercials they play short pieces on "our proud military heritage" which give interesting tidbits of military history from the past. As a result, I know quite a lot about the history of the U.S. armed forces.

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!