All about Japanese TV, the fun of variety shows, and respect I've gained for American medicine

One of the fun things about living in Japan is getting to watch Japanese television. There are 5 national television networks in Japan, NTV, Fuji TV, TBS, TV Asahi, and TV Tokyo, and most viewers enjoy a variety of entertainment from these five channels. Our family watches news (Newsstation 23, World Business Satellite), dramas (my wife is watching the current Fuji drama with heart throb Mokomichi Hayami), sports (my wife's father watches baseball every day, and sumo when it's on), and anime (we never miss Sazae-san on Sunday nights). In addition to the traditional TV stations, there are upstart satellite broadcasting networks like SkyPerfectTV, which carries American programming like CNNj and Fox Japan (for fans who can't wait for the latest episodes of 24 to show up at the DVD rental shop).

A big staple of Japanese television is the variety show, which by definition features a wide variety of subjects, from asking non-bilingual Japanese to answer questions in broken English while a translation of what they're really saying appears on the screen, to shows that challenge people to live for a month on just $100, to "truth or dare" contests where they make popular actresses get into a bathtub of very-hot water for 30 seconds. Often these variety shows go for shock value, like the show I caught that made swimsuit idol Otoha climb to the highest point of the the 509-meter tall Tapiei 101 Tower in Taiwan -- on the outside of the building. Another show offered to grant wishes sent in by viewers, as long as they were interesting. One boy said he'd always wanted to take a bath in a giant vat of caramel custard pudding (aka flan), so the producers got a hundred volunteers from his town to prepare it for him; but in the end, the boy decided he didn't want to jump into the custard since everyone had worked so hard to make it, so they all ate it instead. Another man had always wanted to fly while holding helium balloons, but it takes hundreds of balloons to lift a man off the ground. The show constructed a giant net for him to wear on his back then filled it with balloons until he was able to "fly" 10 cm off the ground, finally fulfilling his dream. Variety shows like to capture bizarre moments of kawaii too, like when one show dressed cute-as-a-button Yuko Ogura as a baby seal took her to the polar bear tank at the zoo. The results were pretty hilarious -- see the video here (Windows Media required)

No matter how much I like living in Japan, there's just no replacement for good old American medicine when I'm sick, and whenever I go back the the States I always pick up Nyquil, Advil, Alka-Seltzer and other medicines I think I might need back in Japan. While my wife usually prefers Japanese medicine -- which is usually too weak for my big gaijin body -- she's starting to see the benefits of the stronger American remedies. Last month when she caught a head cold, she didn't waste any time asking me for "the strong stuff," and she was on her feet in no time. In addition to U.S. medicines being stronger than their Japanese counterparts, there's another difference: Japanese medicine bottles aren't required to have child-proof caps on them. As a result, Japanese almost never know how to open a child-proof cap, and I usually have to step in and help my wife when she's trying to get the bottle open.

When my children were small my mother bought us a book we've come to value a lot: Japanese Children's Favorite Stories, which contains English versions of all the famous children's stories that Japanese know, like Momotaro (Peach Boy) and the Old Man who made the Flowers Bloom. Happily, we've got this excellent book in stock in San Diego, and I heartily recommend it to all parents who want to treat their kids to some great stories from Japan. The book even comes with an audio CD, too!

Educational game shows, winter coming to Japan, and the eerie, sad story of Minako Honda

I've always been impressed with how serious Japan is about education, and a lot of energy is spent on coming up with ways to teach children more effectively, especially with so few of them popping out these days. Recently, Japan's test scores have been on the decline, indicating that the country is losing out to other Asian nations on the education front. Scores on the TOEFL, which tests academic English, were especially embarrassing, with Japan tied with North Korea at the bottom of the list -- although to be fair, 140,000 Japanese took the test, compared with just 50 students from the Kingdom of Bhutan, which isn't exactly comparing apples to apples. In order to combat the fall in Japanese test scores, there's been a slew of TV programs designed to improve knowledge of subjects like history, math, English and kanji. One show I caught a few days ago placed famous "talents" (actress/singer/idols) in a mock-up of an Indiana Jones-style ore car, hurling down a bluescreened mine shaft. Questions popped up in front of them, and the people in the ore car had to choose the answer by leaning left or right. If they chose correctly they escaped from the mine, but if they chose wrong, their ore car was cast into a pit of flaming CG lava.

Japan is grieving right now after the tragic death of Minako Honda, one of the brightest JPOP stars of the 1980s (right up there with Seiko Matsuda and Akina Nakamori). The 80s were a special time in Japan, when people were filled with an unstoppable optimism about the future of their nation, and the bouncy, fun pop stars of the era left a deep impression on everyone. Japan can be a superstitious place, and a lot of beliefs about how luck is generated revolve around a person's name. There are lucky and unlucky kanji, for example, and even the number of strokes in a person's name are believed to affect their karma. For example, when we named our daughter, my wife made sure to choose kanji that had the same number of strokes as her own name, so her daughter would share in her own good luck (since she was lucky enough to meet me, ha-ha). Last December, Minako officially changed her stage name to Minako Honda. (本田美奈子.), with a period as part of her actual name (similar to the way JPOP group Morning Musume is always written with a small circle at the end). Her goal was to improve her own personal luck and aid her stage career, but this was not to be: tragically, she was diagnosed with acute myelocytic leukemia a month later, which has many superstitious Japanese (including my wife) nodding knowingly about the dangers of trying to influence your own destiny through artificial means.

Winter is threatening to descend on Japan in earnest. Because Japanese homes lack central heating, it can be hard to keep warm, especially for a San Diego gaijin like me. We've turned on our kotatsu, which is a low table with a blanket over it and a heater inside; you put your legs in the kotatsu, which warms your whole body, and for the complete Japanese winter experience, drink hot green tea and eat mikan (mandarin oranges) at the same time. In lieu of central heating, we use stand-alone kerosene heaters called "stoves" (suto-bu), or electric-kerosene heaters that blow heated air (called "fan heaters"), the latter being better for you since they have a built-in 3 hour reminder to open a window and let some fresh air in. Kerosene heaters are economical, but the smell they make when you turn one on or off can give you a headache, and don't get me started on the freezing agony of having to go outside and refill the kerosene tank when it runs out.

Glico has declared that November 11 is Pocky Day, because of the way 11 11 looks like Pocky sticks lined up. In celebration (?) of this day, we've added stock of several flavors of Japan's most favorite snack. Remember, you can always buy Pocky by the shrinkwrapped case and get 15% off.

The challenge of the Japanese toilet, how place names work in Japan, and words for "I"

There are many challenges for foreigners who come to Japan: learning the unwritten social rules (which probably don't apply to you anyway, as a visitor); coping with large, easy to read signs explaining where you're supposed to go (too bad they're in kanji); and learning to enjoy food even though you might not know what it is. Another difficulty that must be overcome is the washiki toire, or Japanese-style toilet, seatless toilets usually found in restaurants, train stations and other public places that you squat over to use. Although Japanese love them because they keep your body away from touching anything dirty, foreigners generally have difficulty with them, since you can't exactly ask for instructions. Well, here's a handy link that that should give you some pointers in case you encounter one of these babies:

Place names in Japan are another interesting subject. The names of the various towns, cities and prefectures are nearly always written in kanji, however all name kanji tend to have many different readings, which can cause confusion. While almost all Japanese can read the standardized kanji everyone learns in school, it can be quite difficult to read kanji place names in another region of Japan. When I take a trip to Northern Japan or the Kyoto area, I know my wife will suddenly become unsure how to pronounce the names of the towns we're passing through, even though she's Japanese. There's another complication: most every part of Japan has both a modern name and an old (Edo period) name, the result of the massive changes during the Meiji Restoration, when the old feudal domains (han) were replaced by a modern system of prefectures (ken) patterned after France. Gunma's old name is Joshu, and neighboring Nagano's old name is Shinshu, and these names pop up from time to time (for example, a ramen shop advertising the "old taste of Joshu").

In Japanese, words can carry a lot of hidden nuances specific to each gender. There are different versions of the first person pronoun for men and women in Japanese, and which word a person chooses to use carries information about how that person views himself. For women, the words for "I" are watakushi (in formal situations), watashi (neutral, slightly feminine) or atashi (very feminine and cute). If a girl is tomboyish she might use a "boys" word for I, boku, and if she's trying to project an extremely cute image, she might even refer to herself in the third person. My daughter, who is eight, calls herself "Rina-chan," although some women in their 20s do this, to the annoyance of many around them. Men will use watakushi (formal), boku (neutral, slightly polite), or if they want to project a "manly" image, ore (OH-reh). Words for "you" include anata (slightly formal, and a little romantic if used by a wife to her husband), kimi (used when talking to someone younger than you), and for men only, the masculine word, omae (oh-MY-ae). A common alternative to using a second-person pronoun is to refer to the person you're speaking to by his name, e.g. Tomo or Fujita-san, if you were talking to Tomo.

We're proud to take the wraps off a new section on the J-List: Japanese textbooks & books about Japan, where we'll be carrying many great new books to help you study Japanese, learn grammar, practice your kanji and kana, and learn about Japanese culture. Look for books on contemporary Japanese home design, learn to play Go or Mah Jong, and much more! For your convenience, these new books are stocked in San Diego, and can be shipped to you in a very short time. Browse our new selection of Japan-related books today!

Successful foreign companies in Japan, and the story of Coca-Cola, vending machines and more

Japan is a unique place, and it's not always easy for foreign companies to succeed here. There are many barriers to making it in Japan, from the confusing multi-leveled tonya distribution system to the often-quirky tastes of Japanese consumers. Still, many famous gaishi-kei" (foreign capital") firms have built successful businesses here, with some companies like Nestle, Proctor & Gamble and Northwest Airlines having been in the marketplace for so long people often don't realize they're foreign (Northwest has been flying commercially to Japan since 1947). The Japanese have a lot of respect for the icons of America and Europe, and happily embrace brands such as BMW, Michelin, Jack Daniels and Harley-Davidson, all of which have found a great deal of success here, and when a famous brand finally claims "mind share" in the Japanese marketplace, it usually enjoys long-term success. On the other hand, Japan is a very competitive place to do business, with many companies actively pursuing every market, and Japanese consumers are especially demanding of high quality. But the benefits of succeeding in Japan can be enormous: some companies, such as Louis Vuitton and AFLAC, have encountered so much success when they expanded into Japan that it basically springboarded the rest of their company to new heights worldwide.

One of the most incredible success stories of any gaishi firm is that of Coca-Cola. Along with Hershey's chocolate and Levi's, Coke was an enigma to Japanese of the occupation era, a mysterious treat enjoyed by the victorious American soldiers. Over the course of a decade, Coca-Cola overcame the Byzantine, almost Soviet-style regulatory hurdles it had to to face in order to flourish in Japan, and now Coke has something like 90% of the cola market to itself (spikes from Pepsi Star Wars bottlecaps notwithstanding). The rise of Coca-Cola in postwar Japan went hand-in-hand with the popularity of vending machines (there's one for every 23 people here), and Coca-Cola solidified its position in part by taking the lead in developing the most innovative vending machines of any company (including one I saw the other day that let you watch current Coke TV commercials on a built-in LCD screen). Now Coke is somewhat analagous to Toyota in the U.S., a large, smart outside competitor to Japan's Big Four beverage companies (Asahi, Kirin, Sapporo and Suntory).

Foreign companies provide an interesting alternative to working at more traditional Japanese establishments. Foreign companies in Japan have an image of being more socially progressive than Japanese firms, and women interested in seeking serious careers might consider working for American or European firms operating in Japan. The idea of semi-guaranteed "lifetime employement" came to an end in Japan the 1990s, but it's still common for most full-time employees to expect to stay at the same company their entire lives. Japanese who decide to work for a foreign company generally expect more performance-based pay than they might find at traditional Japanese corporations, along with opportunities for advancement beyond those based on age and seniority, which is still quite rare in more traditional Japanese companies. On the other hand, there's apt to be less stability at a gaishi-kei company, which is an important factor in conservative Japan.

Among other things, J-List sells hundreds of amazing DVDs of all types from Japan. While most of our DVDs are issued as "region free" (meaning you can play them on any DVD player), many of the indies, anime and other discs are zoned for region 2, meaning you need a special player to watch them. Happily, J-List carries three excellent region free DVD players that make it easy to enjoy *all* DVDs from Japan, including PAL discs from Europe. We have the full-featured DIVX-compatible DVD-7050, the handy portable M280, and the great half-height Karaoke-enabled DVD-7880K. Just in time for the busy Christmas season, we've dropped our price on the affordable 7880K to just $68! All players are very well made, are manufacturered for the North American market, feature international power supplies, and come with full 1 year manufacturers warranties. Also, all players are shipped double-boxed by our loving San Diego.

Japanese vs. American houses, and lots of fun with Japanese onomatopoeia sounds

(It looks like Wednesday's update had some trouble going out to everyone. If you missed it, please go to the J-List main page and scroll down to read it.)

There are many differences between my house in Japan and our home in San Diego. My Japanese house includes a large genkan (a lowered area by the front door to take your shoes off), a tatami room (for receiving guests, although it's usually cluttered with stuff), and a wide veranda (for hanging clothes out to dry, as Japanese don't usually use clothes dryers). There's no basement or attic, as these are difficult to build in Earthquake-prone Japan, and we lack central heating, too. Another big difference is the lighting in our house: while our San Diego home is lit with a variety of lamps and a few built-in spotlights here and there, almost every room in our Japanese house sports at least one oversized fluorescent light in the ceiling, which makes the room very bright. The Japanese are big fans of fluorescent lighting, due (I've heard) to the government promoting the use of low-energy lighting after an Earthquake in the 1970s caused gas and electrical fires. I prefer to have lots of light when I'm sitting in a room, and the Japanese have developed soft yellow fluorescent lights that are very pleasant.

It's fun to learn Japanese onomatopoeia, which come up in anime quite a lot and are very colorful. If someone guesses the correct answer to a question, you can say pin-pon! which is a verbal represenatation of the "correct answer" bell on game shows (it sounds like the English word Ping Pong, but is totally unrelated). The opposite of "pin-pon!" is a low-pitched buuu! buzzer sound. Animal sounds also have onomatopoeia assigned to them, and they sound different to Japanese ears than they might to us: nya nya, wan wan and "kero kero" correspond to "meow meow," "ruff ruff" and "ribbit ribbit." Instead of saying "moo moo," Japanese cows say moh moh, and one of the classic jokes in Japanese is to draw a cow saying something like moh yamete! ("please stop, already"), since the cow sound moh sounds like the word that means "already." I've seen quite a few political posters making use of this famous Japanese pun.

Similar to onomatopoeia, which are based on our perception of actual sounds, are gitaigo, words which sort of assign a sound to describe a state or action. If you go to the doctor because you've got a headache, he might ask you if it hurts gan gan (a pounding pain), jiito (a constant, slow pain) or perhaps zukin zukin (a throbbing). If you're very happy about something, you might use the word uki uki (OO-ki OO-ki) to describe yourself, but the feeling of frustration would be ira ira (EE-ra EE-ra). Japanese are very health conscious, and there are TV shows informing people what they should eat if they want their blood to be sara sara (smooth-flowing) instead of doro doro (thick and syrupy). These words often add information about how how an action is performed, for example, koso koso (sneaking around), kotsu kotsu (slowly, one step at a time) and giri giri (doing something in the nick of time). Don't worry, these won't be on the test.

J-List brings you our amazing Japanese T-shirts and hoodies, with cool messages printed in kanji. It's really cooled off, which means it's a great time for you to consider one of our high quality hoodies, soft cotton hooded sweatshirts that will provide plenty of warmth during the cooler months. By customer request, we've added a new hooded sweatshirt
to our lineup: sake-bito ("alcohol-person"), a parody of the famous Okinawan shima-bito ("island-person") shirt which could be translated as "I love alcohol" -- great for anyone who likes to throw one back now and again. Our hoodies are soft, warm and very well made.

All about dogs and dog names in Japan, and many way to say "I like you" in Japanese

Yesterday was November 1, designated as Inu no Hi (ee-NOO-no-HEE), or Dog Day, the official day for dog owners and their pets, because 11/1 sounds like wan wan wan or a dog's bark. People here really love canines of all types, and it's quite common to see shoppers walking around with their "brand dogs" (famous breeds like Shiba Inu, Akita Inu, and Chihuahuas). Products that help you pamper your dog abound in Japan, right down to the Louis Vuitton Pet Carriers. The ranking for dog names in Japan, if you happen to be curious, is as follows:

10. Mocha
9. Sora (meaning sky)
8. Nana (meaning nothing in particular)
7. Rin (ditto)
6. Koko (ditto, just sounds cute)
5. Hana (flower)
4. Sakura (cherry blossom)
3. Marron (French word for chestnut)
2. Momo (peach)
1. Choco

Suki desu ka? One of the first useful words a student of Japanese learns is how to say "like" (suki), which is pronounced quickly so that it sounds rather like "ski," leading all students to immediately say Sukii ga suki desu ka? (Do you like to ski?), since the words sound similar. The word suki is often a student's introduction to the concept that a word or idea in one language might have many possible meanings in another language, depending on the situation. Right off the bat, suki can mean "like" (in the context of your favorite food or hobby) or "love" (when said in reference to another person). Like all Japanese words, there can be some ambiguity involved, which is the subject of more than a few melodramatic misunderstandings in anime or television dramas. "(I) like (it)" is Suki desu, and "Do (you) like (it)?" is Suki desu ka? Often Japanese speakers will fill in who is liking what (e.g. Boku wa ninjin ga suki desu, "I like carrots"), but it's usually too cumbersome to add all those words and grammatical particles when the person you're speaking to will understand what you mean anyway. Other phrases you might encounter include suki na hito ("a person you're in love with") and dai-suki (meaning "big like," for when you really like something), although guys should be careful about over-using the latter, since it tends to be onna-kotoba (language used by females). A couple of years ago I saw a variety show in which former JAV actress-turned-novelist Ai Iijima walked around New York, asking Americans Kyonyu suki? which sounds like "Can you ski?" in English, but is really asking if they prefer women with, er, shapely figures. It was funny to see the Americans on the show nodding their heads for the camera. Try it on your friends!

Mars is very close to the Earth right now, so I'm taking off early today, packing the kids into our Mazda Bongo Friendee and heading up to the mountains to visit the Gunma Prefectural Telescope, where we can go gaze at the heavens. See you when we get back!

A picnic up in the mountains. Our car is a Mazda Bongo Friendee, which is a really cool sort of MPV which has a top that opens up.

Us having our lunch in our car.

My son eating his bento. You can buy bento at convenience stores, which is quite convenience.

Trying to photograph my wife through the "communication hole" between the top section and bottom.

Halloween in Japan, some funny Japanese English words, and all about Daylight Savings Time

Happy Halloween from all of us at J-List. Yesterday was the big Halloween Party at my son's experimental elementary school, where 70% of the classes are taught in English although the school itself follows the standard Japanese curriculum. Despite the fact that all the students are Japanese and Halloween is a very foreign idea here (the Japanese love of cosplay notwithstanding), it was a big success, and all the kids had fun dressing up in various costumes. When my kids were younger, we made a special trip to the U.S. in October so they could experience an American-style Halloween, and they just loved it. Somehow the school managed to rustle up some orange pumpkins (which are usually hard to find in Japan, as the Japanese idea of a pumpkin is green and squash-shaped) and the kids got to carve them. My son smelled that oddly sweet smell of candle-burning- pumpkin-flesh and declared that this smelled like America to him (kind of like the smell of Mr. Bubble bubble bath). I'm happy to report that my son, who was dressed as Obi Wan Kenobi, won the award for best hand-made costume.

Language is a fluid thing, and every country makes use of words that suit its particular needs and sensibilities. Often I've encountered "English" words in Japan which didn't make any sense to me for one reason or another, and it took me a while to remap the words in my mind. A person's fanny will often be referred to as the hip in Japan, while a woman who is well-endowed is called glamor (guramaa), which always sounded like the word grammar to my ear (quite unrelated). Like the British, the Japanese use the word "muffler" to describe what you wear around your neck to keep warn in the winter, what I'd always called a scarf. If it's hot out, you turn on the cooler (also known as aircon), and if you need to dial a # key on your phone, be sure and hit the "sharp" button (as in musical notation). When reaching for a screwdriver, you can choose between minus (regular) or plus (Phillips), which is quite logical, really. If you park your car so that it blocks your neighbor's driveway, he might come over and claim (kureemu) -- somehow the English word claim shifted slightly in meaning, so that it now refers to verbally complain about something. A mansion is Japanese-English for an apartment or condominium that is owned, not rented. And if you practice dema you are spreading lies about someone (from the English word "demagogery").

If you're in North America you probably set your clock an hour back on Sunday. Most people grumble about having to remember to set their clocks forward and back in the spring and autumn, this isn't a problem in Japan, the only industrialized country that has not adopted the Daylight Savings Time system in one form or another. Instead, we have to deal with the other extreme -- if I stay up past 3 a.m. watching Japan's bizarre late-night TV, I often have to fall asleep while ignoring the sun lightening the sky outside, which isn't much fun.

Calendar season is in full swing at J-List, and we've currently got over 200 great 2006 Japanese anime, JPOP, bikini idol, sports, and other calendars on the site. As usual, this year the anime calendars lead the pack, with the always popular Studio Ghibli 2006 Calendar (which includes twelve fabulous *all original* illustrations from Hayao Miyazaki's films) again our top seller. Other hit anime calendars this year are Mahou Teacher Negima, Howl's Moving Castle, and all the Naruto calendars. On the JPOP scene, Gackt is in the top spot, followed by Aya Ueto, and the always-cute Morning Musume. For our "beautiful women of Japan" category, Idols in Kimono is the surprise hit, followed closely by Yuko Ogura, Reon Kadena and Misaki Itoh. Finally, our "impressions of Japan" calendar category are very popular this year -- top sellers are Japanese Heritage (traditional scenes of Japanese culture), Haruyo Morita's amazing contemporary kimono girls, and Garden of Four Seasons and Castles of Japan.

Remember, you can easily check the top J-List products using any RSS reader via our XML/RSS feed, which is a very handy way to watch your favorite websites to see when they've been updated. The links to the J-List/JBOX feeds are along the left side of the screen.

Son hanging out with his friends

Pretty pathetic haul by American standards. I told the kids there how I used to take a pillow cover and fill it with candy, since it was the only thing sturdy enough to avoid ripping.

Kazuki won the contest for best hand-made costume!

Wow, what a great costume, I thought, seeing this mother with a Thing 1 shirt on. I am a bit Seuss fan. Sadly, it was just a shirt she bought somewhere.

Sometimes a single TV commercial can make long-term waves in Japan's culture. These horses are a reference to a TV commercial for some product (I can't remember what it was) that showed back in 2001 or so. They look really good...

On stereotypes, how and why words jump from one language to another, and trying to recall the term "gynecologist"

Stereotypes are really not good, since they cause us to make assumptions about people from other countries before we've gotten to know them. When I taught English as a Second Language, I used to do a lot of part-time work, going to people's homes to teach their kids once a week, and I was able to meet a lot of people this way. One family I taught seemed to be a pretty average Japanese family on the surface: bustling mother overly concerned about her kids' education; bright daughter; younger son who loved Pokemon; and a salaryman father who often worked late. The father surprised me one day by showing me pictures of his journey from Vladivostok to Moscow on the Siberian Railroad, which had been a lifelong dream of his, and I was immediately sorry I'd assumed he was such an average guy. On the other hand, sometimes stereotypes can be eerily accurate. When I went to Germany I asked a man to take my picture, and when he couldn't work my camera, he let out a frustrated Ach! just like a parody of a monacled villain from a 1960s spy movie. In Italy, the gentle, matronly mother of a friend of mine punctuated every third sentence with Mama mia! Japanese are famous for saying ah, so (short for ah, so desu ka? or "oh, is that so?"), and they really do say it a lot. I'm always embarrassed when I inadvertently say this in Japanese when my American family is nearby, snickering.

It's common for words to jump from one language to another, and the mechanism of how this works is quite interesting to me. The Japanese have imported many words from other languages, especially technical terms (from English) or medical terms (often from German), and some old reliable Japanese words like tempura are actually foreign in origin (from the Portuguese, in this case). People seem to reach for foreign words when a new concept comes along that current terms don't cover well; for example, the English word address (adoresu) is used to describe an email address, since the Japanese term (jusho) only refers to an actual home address. Sometimes, there seems to be an emotional element in using a term from another language, which provides a certain je ne sais quoi. For example, only the Spanish term aficionado could adequately describe Hemmingway's love of bullfighting, and only the Japanese word otaku can cover the depth of the current generation's fascination with Japanese pop culture. It's common for the meanings of words to shift slightly when imported into a new language, too. For example, English speakers use the word manga to refer to printed comics, but in Japanese the word covers animation you watch on TV as well; the English word "propose" is only used for marriage proposals in Japanese, a potentially dangerous situation for Japanese women who might suddenly blush when you start your next business presentation; and the other day I borrowed my wife's Bvlgari "body shampoo" and, reading the bottle, noticed that the French word for shower is douche, which opens up a whole world of potential linguistic confusion.

One of my favorites from the "YBIJTLW" list: "You've been in Japan too long when it takes you several seconds of deep thought to recall the first name of the President of the United States." It's true -- you'd be surprised what living in a foreign country can do to your ability to recall seldom-used information, or even remember certain English vocabulary words. Try going years without ever hearing or uttering difficult words, like "gynecologist" or "irreplaceable" -- they can be quite difficult to dredge up from the depths of your memory, even if English is your native language. It's a strange feeling, not being able to recall a word you know you should know -- you stand there with a dumb look on your face while your brain googles your hippocampus, trying to find the term. It's especially bad for English teachers in Japan, because you can go for months without hearing any English except the simplified utterances of your students, which invariably begins to affect your language. You find yourself speaking too slowly, pronouncing words too carefully (like clearly annunciating the t in party instead of making it sound like a d), and avoiding some words you know listeners won't be able to understand. Over time, this can change your English, although never fear, it's only temporary.

At J-List, we love to bring cool new things from Japan to you. Today, we're posting some really excellent items to our "traditional" section: famous Kutani Ware teacups (yunomi) and rice bowls (chawan) from Japan, from the Kutani region of Japan, famous for high-quality pottery since 1655. The new items we've got in stock will really allow you to touch and feel Japan in a totally new way. See the items now!

Next, J-List makes dozens of great anime, manga, fashion, toy, sexy idol and other magazines available to you through our revolving magazine subscription service. The magazines J-List offers are colorful, filled with beautiful pictures, and are great for people not lucky enough to live here -- and you can always cancel a subscription at any time, since they're month-to-month revolving subscriptions. Today we're adding two new subscription items for car enthusiasts: Car and Driver Japan, a great all-purpose magazine for fans of Japanese "car life"; and Car Goods Press, a special version of Goods Press that features tons of information on accessories and interior customization options for your wheels.

The Japanese and movies, learning Japanese through songs, and the famous food of Kyoto

The Japanese love movies, and watch a lot of them. Happily for gaijin like myself, they usually prefer watching U.S. movies in English with Japanese subtitles, rather than dubbed into Japanese -- quite different from countries like China, where all films are shown dubbed in the local language. Hollywood films are a staple of Japanese theatres, as you might expect, but except for big-budget productions that aim for global releases, movies often open in Japan several months after their debut in the U.S. -- for example, the Brothers Grim is just opening this week, no doubt repositioned as a Halloween film for the local market. There are always several Japanese films showing in our local theatre, such as the live-action adaption of Nana, a popular shoujo manga about two very different girls who share the same name, and the latest installment of the Masked Rider (Kamen Rider) franchise for the kids. Movies tied to anime are popular, such as the live-action version of Touch and the upcoming second Zeta Gundam movie (I've got to catch both of those). Japan's fascination with Korean film continues, with several films showing right now, including April Snow, which seems calculated to recapture the popularity of Winter Sonata. The trend towards foreign films seems to be widening -- in addition to one film in Cantonese, our local theatre is showing Heinahattu ja Vilttitossu, a film from Finland.

Succeeding at studying a language takes hard work, and one bit of advice I often offer to prospective students is, "find what floats your boat," i.e., try to come up with interests that will help move your study efforts forward a little each day. I worked hard to find Japan-related interests, including reading manga in Japanese, which gave me a constant stream of vocabulary words to absorb. Karaoke was another way to tackle the language -- it's always fun when a gaijin gets up to belt out a song in Japanese, and this feedback gave me a reason to learn more. If you're interested in learning Japanese through songs, I've chosen three excellent classics you might consider: Kampai (an emotional tear-jerker sung at weddings); Namida Sousou (a traditional Okinawan song turned into a pop hit); and the excellent Tsunami, which J-List's own Tomo is pretty good at belting out. See the songs and lyrics here.

If you ever make it to Kyoto, I hope you'll try kaiseki ryori, a memorable Japanese dining experience in which a great deal of care is taken with the presentation of the food, from the shape and color and texture to the elegant dishes everything is served on. The meal is very seasonal, and what you're served will depend on what time of year it is -- in the fall your meal with have a momiji (Japanese maple) motif, while sakura petals will adorn your food in the spring. Kaiseki meals are served in courses, similar to fine French dining, and includes sashimi, tempura, grilled fish, rice, and various other foods. To be honest, it's not uncommon to have no idea what you're putting in your mouth when you eat kaiseki, but don't worry, everything is good.

J-List carries Comic AG, an excellent magazine that brings you the best English-translated H manga ever seen outside of Japan. The publisher really has a passion for manga, and he features many of the most popular artists on J-List, faithfully translated into English. Best of all, he's recently accelerated his publishing schedule, with two issues coming out each month. We want to make it easier for fans to buy backissues of AG before they sell out, so we've created the new "AGSET" which lets you buy sets of 5 issues for a special discount. You can also get a subscription, and we'll send you each issue as they come in.

All about Commodore Perry, more on Japan's culture of "sho ga nai" and our "second house"

Hello again from Japan, the home of "rinse in shampoo" (which means shampoo that contains cream rinse in it).

One of the most dramatic events in Japanese history was the coming of Commodore Matthew Perry and his "Black Ships," who visited Japan in 1852 to demand that the country trade with the U.S. or face war. Perry and his ships forced the Tokugawa Shogun to open the country to the rest of the world, and forever burned themselves into the minds of the Japanese at the same time. Seeing how weak it was against foreign powers like the U.S. and Britain, the military government began a program of modernization with Western help, which caused the domains of Satsuma, Choshu and Tosa (now Kagoshima, Yamaguchi and Kochi Prefectures) to rebel. Under the famous slogan sonno joi or "Respect the Emperor and Expel the Foreign Barbarians" (see our line of T-shirts and hoodies with this slogan on them), they defeated the shogun and created a new government around the Meiji Emperor, in effect restoring the power of the Emperor, who had been a figurehead throughout most of Japan's history. It didn't take long for the new government to realize that, oopsie, it needed help from foreign powers too, if it wanted to modernize Japan and become a strong nation that could stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the rest of the world.

All countries have what the Japanese call kokuminsei, sort of a national personality or set of beliefs and features seemingly shared by all members of that country, which could be thought of as the essence of what is is to be American, Japanese, etc. Whether you're from Germany, Canada, or South Korea, there's a lot that connects to you everyone else from the same place. One facet of the kokuminsei of Japanese people is their ability to endure unpleasantness by using the magic words "it can't be helped" (shikata ga nai, or more commonly, sho ga nai), not unlike the French c'est la vie or the Borg's "resistence is futile." On the one hand, shikata ga nai is a mechanism that makes society operate more smoothly, without getting snagged on every little problem or injustice, and Japan's famous lack of litigious culture is probably directly related to this mind-set. On the other hand, there are many problems with contemporary society that could be handled if they were met head-on.

One of our favorite places in Japan is Karuizawa, a resort town about two hours up the freeway from Tokyo that's quite popular -- so popular, in fact, that you have to sit in a 5-hour traffic jam to get there during the Golden Week holidays. The town features shaded streets that are great for bicycling, lots of nice restaurants and little shops, and my wife's favorite place, an American- style shopping mall with dozens of outlet stores. Well-heeled Tokyo-ites might purchase a bessou (meaning "second home") in Karuizawa and spend their weekends up there, but employees of companies can often enjoy these benefits too, as it's quite common for Japanese companies to maintain facilities that employees are free to use whenever they like. J-List rents a small "resort mansion" (a Japanese-English word meaning a glofied apartment) for our employees with a real hot springs bath, a gym, and plenty of fun mountain activities -- it's a nice place to get away from it all. On our way back from the mountains yesterday, we happened to see one of IBM Japan's bessou for its employees here. I wonder if IBM does this in the U.S.?

J-List strives to bring you an authentic piece of Japan every day, and we carry many wonderful traditional items, from cotton yukata to bento boxes to cool traditional footwear and more. Something we've always wanted to sell are the traditional Japanese wood dolls called kokeshi, which are beautiful hand-painted dolls that are great for collecting and displaying, and now we've gotten some of these great traditional items on the site for you!

Incredibly, we've got another volley of excellent 2006 calendars for you, including artist Haruyo Morita, Famous Castles of Japan, Negima, lovely actress Misaki Itoh, and many more! We also have the Perfect Diary daily planners, which are excellent daily diaries that make it easy to keep track of everything you need to do over the whole year, while enjoying some beautiful photos as the year slides by.

Our "resort mansion" in all its glory.

The mountains are extra beautiful in the fall, when koyo season comes. Let's come to the mountains in koyo! Koyo! (this is a bad Japanese joke, since koyo can also mean "let's come")

Karuizawa is right at the foot of Mt. Asama, as in, the volcanoe that erupted last year. Here it can be seen practicing the Japanese tradition of "smokin' clean."

Karuizawa has lots of interesting shops and other stuff to check out. Here is a U.S. military surplus store selling all kinds of stuff, including Zippos from the Vietnam War era.

The joy of eating Cheetos, new crimes on the rise in Japan, and some really "radical" kanji for you

One of the benefits to living the expat life is coming to value the things from home you used to take for granted. But if you ever live in a place with no Root Beer, no Peter Pan Peanut Butter, and no Rold Gold pretzels (or whatever happens to be dear to you), you will learn to appreciate them in a hurry. The other day I got a care package from my mother which contained our Thanksgiving stuff (since Japan can be quite pumpkin-pie-and-mashed-potato-challenged when it wants to be), and there was a general work stoppage while the J-List staff stopped to check out the various goodies that Mom had sent along. The gaijiin staff of J-List was especially happy with the Cheetos that were in the box, and we eagerly devoured them. Sometimes it's the little things that mean a lot.
There's a new type of crime in Japan. A few days ago, a small battery-powered wireless camera was discovered attached to the wall above an ATM machine in a UFJ Bank in Tokyo. The device was capable of broadcasting out to a receiver located outside the building, where a man watched with a small television, recording the passwords people used to access their bank accounts. Happily, the culprit -- a 36 year old unemployed man -- was caught by police before he could do any damage. There are other types of updated crimes in Japan, one of the most famous being ore ore sagi ("it's me, it's me!" fraud), where a con-man calls an elderly man or woman, pretending to be their grandson and asking them to send money right away because of some trouble they're in. Then there's the related furikome sagi ("pay up" fraud), in which, say, a female con-artist might call the wife of a doctor and say that she'd been touched inappropriately (chikan sareta, for owners of our "Beware of Perverts" T-shirt) by her husband, and that she was about to go to the police. However, she might reconsider if the wife sends 2 million yen to the following account right away.

Kanji may not be the easiest thing in the world to learn, especially those who don't live in kanji-using countries, but neither is it the invention of the devil designed to confound students of Japanese. In fact, it's actually quite logical and organized. When you need to look a character up in a kanji dictionary, you have several ways to go about it, including looking it up based on the total number of strokes (the number of lines it takes to write that character), or using its pronunciation. The most logical way, however, is to use the radical, which are quadrants on the left, right, top, etc. of kanji, which group them together based on meaning. One common type of radical are kanmuri, which means "crown" (aside: Toyota Camry gets its name from this word, based on a strange fixation the company has for making cars with names that mean crown in various languages). One type is take-kanmuri (tah-KAY KAN-moo-REE) or "bamboo crown," and characters that contain radical this are often things made of bamboo, such as fude (writing brush) or hako (box). Similarly, the character for rain (ame, ah-MAY) appears as a radical in related words, such as snow, lightning, fog, cloud, and electricity. (The popular Wordtank electronic dictionaries that J-List sells have full kanji dictionary functions built into them.)

J-List is looking for a webmaster/blogger for our jmate.com review/interview website. If you've got experience with the products we sell, have good web skills and would like to write some interesting content, please contact us through the "contact J-List" link on the site.

On the creativity of children, social change in Japan, and what's up with Steven Seagal

Children are very creative, and it seems there's nothing that a child is incapable of imagining, especially when it comes to inventing new words. When I was learning Japanese in college, I discovered that you don't have to be a child to have a child's creativity with language. As I studied Japanese, I experimented with the language every day, completely mangling the grammar as I got each vocabulary word and useful phrase down, sometimes inventing something new and interesting in the process thanks to the universal phenomenon of "not knowing what can't be done." The process is not unlike the way a child experiments with its first language, often creating ingenious Dr. Seussian words for things. Just as most of us have a special place in our hearts for the things we loved when we were small, be they television shows or comic books or 8-bit video games, I still feel natsukashii (nostalgic) about the anime I was watching in my college years, which represent my childhood as far as learning Japanese is concerned. So if you ever want to enjoy a second childhood, consider learning a second language!

It's said that Japan is between ten and 25 years behind the United States and Europe socially, and viewed from a certain point of view, the statement seems to be eerily true. Various social institutions that you or I might take for granted have taken a while to appear in Japan, such as laws against "seku-hara" (harassment in the workplace) or laws protecting the privacy of individuals. Over the past few years, Japan has been renaming some job titles that had a sexist slant due to the kanji they were written with. For example, the old word for a preschool teacher, hobo (保母, literally "protecting mother") has been updated to hoikushi (保育士, a professional-sounding word that means care-giver), and the former term for nurse (kangofu, 看護婦, written with characters that meant "nursing wife") is now kangoshi 看護士, which makes no reference to male or female. Some words haven't been updated yet, though. A family with only one parent is often called boshi katei 母子家庭, which literally means "household of mother and child," but this word doesn't serve its purpose very well if the single parent is male. And Japanese who spend several years overseas then return to Japan are called kikoku shijo 帰国子女 or "girl-children who have returned to their home country." The term is used for males as well as females, despite the fact that the "girl" meaning is built into the word via kanji characters.

I was flipping channels while shaving this morning and happened to see Steven Seagal being interviewed in Japanese by Dave Spector, which was funny since they're both Americans. He was talking about his latest projects, including a Japanese detective film and an energy drink with his face on it. Seagal is popular in Japan because he's fluent in Osaka-ben, the dialect of Japanese that more or less corresponds to New York American English, and it seems I can't go a month without one of his action films being shown on Japanese television. For marketing reasons, most of his movies have been renamed into the "silence" series, for example, Under Siege is the Warship of Silence, On Deadly Ground becomes Fortress of Silence, and so on. I guess it makes it easier to sell a boxed set of his movies to Japanese fans.

J-List sells our wacky Japanese T-shirts, with messages like "Support the Emperor, Expel for Foreign Barbarians" (a political slogan from 19th century Japan, just about the most esoteric thing we could think of for a T-shirt). Our shirts are popular for their original wacky designs, but they're also excellent quality T-shirts, hand-screenprinted by our San Diego staff with 16 years of screenprinting. We use top quality 6.1 weight T-shirts, add a white under-layer which prevents the color of the shirt from showing through the design, and cure the shirt at 330 degrees to give it long life (far superior to the quickie heat-transfer printing used by those "other" online shops). Our hoodies are great too, made of 80-20 blends, much softer and luxurious-feeling than the cheap 50-50 blends sold elsewhere. Why not browse our T-shirts and hoodies today?

Community spirit, Japan style, and what to do with old schools you don't need anymore

J-List is based in a small city in central Japan, about 100 km north of Tokyo, and it has a real down-home feel to it. Yesterday the annual Green Festival was held, an all-day event where residents of our city could gather and engage in what's locally known as fure-ai (ふれあい, foo-RAY-aa-II). The word literally means "touching each other," and it calls up images of pleasant interaction with one's neighbors and getting to know each other a little better -- a very nice word (no sexual connotation). At the festival, a dozen groups set up tents with various activities that people could take part in. My daughter is in Girls Scouts, so we sat at their booth helping children make various crafts. Elsewhere, kids hammered away making wooden chairs or tables, learned tea ceremony, practiced outdoor activities with the Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts, ate local foods like yakisoba (the Japanese version of chow mein noodles), and browsed the flea market area (complete with the requisite misspelled sign proclaiming FREE MARKET). There were performances by several local clubs, too, including Japanese taiko drums, a brass band that played anime theme songs (that was pretty interesting to hear) and my favorite, the local Hawaiian Hula Club. It was a fun day of community-building, a regular Amish barn-raising, Japan-style.

At the festival, I was not surprised to attract a lot of attention, as I was the only gaijin present. Everywhere I went I ran into people who knew me, although in a few cases I couldn't remember who they were or where I'd met them -- but I smiled and used the all-purpose Japanese polite phrase, "Domo!" Kids, especially, flocked to me, curious about this strange foreigner who could speak Japanese, and before long I had a good group of Japanese kids trailing me, making me feel like the Pied Piper, or perhaps Jesus on the Mount. It sounds corny, but I'm always careful to present a positive view of America to Japanese children, answering any questions they have and asking what they know about my country. If I find myself around children when I'm wearing sunglasses, I take them off no matter how bright it may be outside. A big foreigner wearing dark sunglasses like a yakuza is likely to be a little scary for Japanese kids, and I'd hate for anyone to get a bad impression of foreigners because of me.

The festival was held in what used to be a local high school, which had been converted into a general-use community center. As Japan's population contracts, they need fewer schools to support the population of students, and so schools are decommissioned all too frequently. While many schools just sit there as creepy reminders of Japan's all-too-low low birth rate, this school had become quite useful, with the interior made available for community meetings and clubs and housing various municipal employees. They also turn it into a voting center on election days.

We've got a great new category of product for you at J-List: various types of traditional kimonos, which are still worn in a variety of places and situations in Japan. We have silky, stylish kimonos for men, great yukata (cotton kimonos) that can be worn anywhere or used as a bathrobe after a hot bath, and short cotton kimonos called happi (sometimes called "happy coats" for the benefit of foreign visitors) with colorful kanji designs on them. If you order with EMS shipping, you can get these items before October 31st, too (but hurry). See all our new kimono items on the newly renamed Traditional Footwear & Kimono category.

We've updated our "top 5" links which appear on the main J-List or JBOX.com pages, increasing the number of top-selling products that display when you click each category link. These links make it easy to browse the best-selling dating-sims, T-shirts, snacks, DVDs, Domo-kun toys, and other items on the J-List site, over the past 7 days. You can also browse all "top" items with the
new link we've placed at the bottom of the box. We'll also be updating the contents every other day, allowing you to browse different categories every time you stop by.

This is the school-turned-community-center. It's a nice use to put a building to. Remind me to post something on Japan's "neo Chernobyl" building style for schools and other public buildings sometime.

The drummers in the taiko group were very good.

One of the sellers warms yaki-manjuu, basically a bun cooked over coals and painted with delicious miso sauce.

They had some interesting food items for sale, including the first shrink-wrapped hamburgers I've ever seen in my life.

There was plenty of cool used stuff for sale. I bought a Tamagotchi for my daughter, a killer Ultraman toy for myself (natch), and I managed to find some Rose of Versailles figures for ten yen each for my wife. Here someone is selling clothes with wacky English messages on them.

My son goes to a "juku," funny English the Japanese create, and various Halloween related stuff

My son has joined the millions of Japanese kids who attend a juku, the famous cram schools where students go in the evenings to take extra lessons. Actually, "cram school" isn't a very good term, since it implies students do nothing but cram for tests, when in fact my son just takes extra lessons in math, social studies, and his worst subject, kokugo (Japanese language). There are tens of thousands of these after-hours-and-weekend schools throughout Japan, with different reasons for the existence of each. Some just help students keep up with their normal classwork, effectively giving them a place to do their homework with a teacher's supervision, while others lay the groundwork for future academic achievement, eventually helping the student get into a high-ranking high school or university. My son mainly wanted to go to juku because his friends were going, but he also enjoys studying. One of the most famous juku systems in Japan is Kumon, which has quite a good track record for helping students raise their academic scores. Kumon has even successfully brought their study method outside Japan, with Kumon Learning Centers (there's even one near my house in San Diego).

Mastering Japanese involves learning hiragaka, katakana, and kanji, but you also have to re-learn some English, since the Japanese sometimes change the language beyond recognition. If you ask your boss for a raise, but he says no, it's "NG," which stands for "no good." A "blooper" on TV is also called an NG. The letter "W" stands for "double" to the Japanese, and there's a TV commercial for a video camera starring Maria Sharapova in which she says "W-OK" ("double okay"), referring to the fact that you can take still pictures and video at the same time. If you want to check your weight, ask for a "health meter" -- the English word "scale" is used in Japanese, but only meaning something's size in relation to something else, not as a way to check your weight. We're putting the finishing touches on an Obi Wan Kenobi costume for my son, and my wife emailed my mother in America asking how to fasten the "magic tape" (she meant velcro). If you want to tell someone to not worry about something, you can say "Donmai, donmai!" which comes from "Don't mind." Similarly, when someone is backing their car up, you can tell them it's okay to come back further by saying "Orai!" which comes from "Alright." Sometimes Americans are confused by strange English that's really British in origin -- for example, the Japanese call the hood of a car a "bonnet" just like the Brits.

Halloween is not too far away, and J-List would like you to think of us when looking for that perfect or wacky costume. In addition to adding some great new costume-themed products to the site today (see below), we've restocked popular items, such as the Hello Kitty kigurumi (full head) mask, the Jizou Buddha mask, the Shinto Shrine Maiden (aka Kikyo from Inuyasha) costume, our tattoo shirt that makes you look like a yakuza, our wacky "unchi" hat and more! Of course we recommend that you order them via EMS to make sure the items arrive in time. We also have excellent stock of Japanese candy if you want to splurge on something special for the neighborhood this year.

J-List works hard to bring you great original T-shirts with wacky designs on them. One of our favorite recent designs is our "Japanese words" shirt that presents fifteen educational Japanese words of cultural value. To compliment this shirt, we've made a new limited edition design which teaches you every "naughty" Japanese word you've ever wanted to know. The shirt is designed so that people who have no idea what the words mean won't be offended, but those who do will laugh their butts off.

Problems in Japan's business world, boneheaded moves by Seven-Eleven Japan, and all about futons

There's a fight brewing in Japan's business world, as investment fund Murakami Asset Management, the largest shareholder of the popular Hanshin Tigers baseball team, tries to take the team public. His goal is to allow Tigers fans to show their support by becoming shareholders, and of course earn his fund a nice return in the process. He's encountering significant resistance from the directors of the team, who don't want to see their crown jewel mishandled, and purist fans in Osaka are also angry about the cold world of business intruding on their love of baseball. The situation is similar to that of T-shirt-wearing president of Livedoor, Takafumi Horie, who had difficulties executing a leveraged buyout of Fuji TV, something that isn't done very often in Japan. The fact that there can be a controversy about something like this at all brings into question concept of "ownership" of a stock in Japan. The Hanshin Tigers won the Japan World Series this year and has been incredibly popular with Japanese fans.

In other business news, a staple of the Japanese retail industry is falling on hard times. Ito Yokado Group, the company that operates the national chain of department stores Ito Yokado as well as owning all Seven-Eleven and Denny's in Japan, has been having a bad couple of years. Sales at the company's flagship department stores have been falling, and 80% of the profit the $6 billion group earns comes from the 10,000 Seven-Eleven stores in Japan. There is nothing more finicky and hard to satisfy as a Japanese consumer, who demand both exceptional quality and low prices in everything they buy, and Ito Yokado is having a tough time of finding the right mix of fashion and value to delivery to its customers. It may be just me, but I think part of their problem might have to do with the boneheaded idea of changing the company name to "Seven & I Holdings" and replacing the famous dove logo on their department stores with the Seven-Eleven image. "Holdings" sounds like so much corporate felgercarb, and the idea of buying clothes from a building with a Seven-Eleven logo on the outside is just bizarre. Jack in the Box restaurants used to be operated by Ralston Purina, but if they put the famous dog food maker's logo on their restaurants, sales would fall pretty fast, I think.

Do you sleep in a bed or on a futon? Both are popular in Japan, although the trend is definitely towards Western beds among young people. Futons are sleeping mats large enough to sleep one person comfortably. They fold up into three sections for easy storage, and are useful to keep around when guests drop by unexpectedly -- just pull a spare futon out of the closet. Futons must be hung out to dry every few days or they'll accumulate moisture inside, which is unhealthy, and the Japanese believe the sun shining on your futon kills germs (they're certainly nice to sleep in after they've been hung out to dry). The Western "futon" is usually comprised of a large stuffed pad and a wooden frame, but like California Rolls, this is a completely made-in-the-the-West concept.

We've got another big volley of 2006 calendars in stock, with 40 or more anime, swimsuit idol, traditional and cultural, and men's calendars in stock and ready for your immediate order. Browse our stock right now!

December tests in Japan, my favorite place in my prefecture, and a cool Japanese artist

The month of December means many things: Christmas, spending time with loved ones, and what the Japanese call "shiwasu," that extra-busy two weeks at the end of the year when no one has enough time to do the things they need to do. December is also the month tens of thousands of foreigners will go to Tokyo or one of several other large cities in and outside of Japan to take the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (in Japanese, Nihongo Noryoku Shiken, 日本語能力試験). There are four levels to the JLPT, starting with level 4 (hiragana, katakana and around 100 kanji) all the way to level 1 (2000 "general use" kanji, along with listening, reading and grammar), and level 1 is what you need to get if you want to go to a Japanese university. I got level 1 a couple years after arriving in Japan, and it was nice to achieve that particular goal. I used to think of getting level 1 of JLPT was the ultimate goal a learner of Japanese could have, but I've had to revise this estimation as I encountered other challenges in the course of living in Japan. Currently, the most difficult thing I've had to do in Japanese is give the first (and longest) speech at the weddings of J-List employees, but one day I happened to witness what must truly be the ultimate test of a gaijin's Japanese ability, when I saw a foreign reporter asking a question of Emperor Akihito in Japanese at a press conference. Sadly, the poor gaijin didn't phrase his question well enough, and the Emperor had to ask him to repeat it in front of everyone. I could really feel that poor reporter's pain! (For anyone wanting to study for the JLPT, see our site as we have many resouces for you.)

Whenever I have friends visit from overseas, I take them to one of my favorite places, the Gunma Prefectural Museum of History, which takes visitors through the 50,000-or-so-year history of our little corner of Japan. Crane-shaped Gunma is located smack in the center of the main Japanese island of Honshu, and while the lion's share of the cultural points of interest can be found in the Kyoto/Nara/Osaka area, our prefecture can hold its own when it comes to stuff that's a little more old school. Back in the Jomon Period, when the inhabitants of Japan were using flint knives and making the first pottery, Gunma's culture was very strong, and a nearby town called Iwajuku contains the oldest human artifacts found yet in Japan. Gunma was also very big on burial mounds back during the centuries before Chinese characters were imported from Korea, and often as not, when you see a small hill in our prefecture it's really an 1800 year old burial mound.

I've always been fascinated by the art of Mitsuo Aida (1924-1991), who created beautiful poetry using Japanese calligraphy. He crafted his amazing works using Chinese writing brushes, making creations which are pleasing to the eye and which express Zen-inspired short observations and messages about life, the universe and everything. We've got the Mitsuo Aida Museum's 2006 calendar on the site right now and hope you'll consider this beautiful example of his unique art!

What ordering a "tako" in Japan will get you, fun ways to learn Japanese, and our new kanji T-shirts

There are many interesting foods in Japan. One of our favorite treats is takoyaki, especially popular in the Osaka region. In stark contrast to the English word taco, tako is is Japanese for octopus; to differentiate the crustacean from the Mexican food, the Japanese always use the plural word "tacos" (takosu) for referring to the latter, even if they're talking about just one taco. Takoyaki are basically fried balls of batter that contain a piece of cooked octopus meat inside, painted with a delicious sauce. If you ever find yourself in Osaka, be sure to go to Otakoya, a takoyaki shop near the famous Glico neon sign in the Dotonbori area. Be warned though: you may have to stand in line for a couple of hours to be served -- that's how popular takoyaki is. Once in rural Japan we happened across a takoyaki vendor who decided to call his shop Tako Bell. My wife and I were completely floored with laughter at this unexpected sight. (Incidentally, we have some takoyaki making supplies on the site today.)

There are many ways to learn a foreign language: the Grammar-Translation method, the Communicative Approach, the Natural Method, Total Physical Response, and so on. Another time-honored way to learn a language is to "get attention" method, which I've labeled the Social Feedback Method to give it a cool-sounding name. Using this method, you learn enough phrases and words to passably communicate with the target group in such a way that you always get positive feedback, be it getting laughs from Japanese at a party, impressing cute Japanese girls, what have you. I had a friend who had taught English as a Second Language all around Asia, and he got incredible mileage from the phrase Shumi wa nan desu ka? which means "What is your hobby?" Another phrase you might try out is naruhodo, which means "I see" or "that's right" and implies having been convinced that the opinion of the person you're listening to has just made an impression on you. Another staple is honto (HONE-toh), which means "really" and can be used as a question (Honto?) or as an affirmation (Honto!). Another phrase that can be fun to know is "hen na gaijin" (lit. "strange foreigner"), but more on that below...

In Japan, instead of signing documents, you usually stamp them with a red "name stamp," called a hanko, that features your name in kanji, or in the case of a corporation, the company's name in kanji. While these name stamps can seem pretty odd to foreigners -- after all, what's to stop someone from stealing your stamp and taking all your money out of the bank? -- all in all the name stamp system seems to work pretty well. We've made two cool Japanese T-shirts that feature the unique name stamp design. The first shirt is for everyone who secretly wishes they had been born in Japan: Nihonjin ni naritai, "I Wish I Were Japanese." The second T-shirt features a phrase that all foreigners who come to Japan manage to learn within 24 hours, Hen na gaijin, "I'm a strange foreigner." Both shirts are in stock in standard sizes and ready for your order!

What ordering a "tako" in Japan will get you, fun ways to learn Japanese, and our new kanji T-shirts

There are many interesting foods in Japan. One of our favorite treats is takoyaki, especially popular in the Osaka region. In stark contrast to the English word taco, tako is is Japanese for octopus; to differentiate the crustacean from the Mexican food, the Japanese always use the plural word "tacos" (takosu) for referring to the latter, even if they're talking about just one taco. Takoyaki are basically fried balls of batter that contain a piece of cooked octopus meat inside, painted with a delicious sauce. If you ever find yourself in Osaka, be sure to go to Otakoya, a takoyaki shop near the famous Glico neon sign in the Dotonbori area. Be warned though: you may have to stand in line for a couple of hours to be served -- that's how popular takoyaki is. Once in rural Japan we happened across a takoyaki vendor who decided to call his shop Tako Bell. My wife and I were completely floored with laughter at this unexpected sight. (Incidentally, we have some takoyaki making supplies on the site today.)

There are many ways to learn a foreign language: the Grammar-Translation method, the Communicative Approach, the Natural Method, Total Physical Response, and so on. Another time-honored way to learn a language is to "get attention" method, which I've labeled the Social Feedback Method to give it a cool-sounding name. Using this method, you learn enough phrases and words to passably communicate with the target group in such a way that you always get positive feedback, be it getting laughs from Japanese at a party, impressing cute Japanese girls, what have you. I had a friend who had taught English as a Second Language all around Asia, and he got incredible mileage from the phrase Shumi wa nan desu ka? which means "What is your hobby?" Another phrase you might try out is naruhodo, which means "I see" or "that's right" and implies having been convinced that the opinion of the person you're listening to has just made an impression on you. Another staple is honto (HONE-toh), which means "really" and can be used as a question (Honto?) or as an affirmation (Honto!). Another phrase that can be fun to know is "hen na gaijin" (lit. "strange foreigner"), but more on that below...

In Japan, instead of signing documents, you usually stamp them with a red "name stamp," called a hanko, that features your name in kanji, or in the case of a corporation, the company's name in kanji. While these name stamps can seem pretty odd to foreigners -- after all, what's to stop someone from stealing your stamp and taking all your money out of the bank? -- all in all the name stamp system seems to work pretty well. We've made two cool Japanese T-shirts that feature the unique name stamp design. The first shirt is for everyone who secretly wishes they had been born in Japan: Nihonjin ni naritai, "I Wish I Were Japanese." The second T-shirt features a phrase that all foreigners who come to Japan manage to learn within 24 hours, Hen na gaijin, "I'm a strange foreigner." Both shirts are in stock in standard sizes and ready for your order!

Foreigners and Japanese living in Japan, all about name suffices, and more

Hello everyone! It's time for another slice of life from J-List.

It's fun living in Japan and observing Japanese life and society, and some days I like nothing better than to sit and watch the Japanese people around me while pretending to work on my Powerbook in a Famires (a "family restaurant"). It's also interesting to observe other foreigners living in Japan, and study the psyche of this "lost gaijin generation." First of all, it's been my experience that foreigners here are often jealous of other foreigners, especially of those who speak better Japanese than they do; hence, most are always willing to badmouth Dave Spector, an American "talent" who's been on TV for two decades and who speaks perfect Japanese (bastard). Lafcadio Hearn, one of the first Western writers about Japan, also had to endure more than a little criticism by other foreigners living in Japan at the time. There seem to be three or more "stages of eye eversion" that foreigners go through when meeting another foreigners on a train, which I haven't been able to understand. I've stuck up some interesting conversations with people from Ecuador to Iran to Sri Lanka, speaking Japanese when the gaijin in question didn't know English. As Japan's population continues to decline, the share of foreigners working in Japan can only go up, and I wonder how the dynamics of society will change when that happens.

You probably know some of the suffixes that are used at the end of names. The most famous is -san (SAHN, rhyming with "one") which is added to the last names for politeness (e.g. Fujita-san), and sometimes to the first name (Tomo-san) to show a little, but not too much, informality. The -san suffix is used in business settings, too: for example, when we call Canon to order more Wordtank electronic dictionaries, we refer to them as Canon-san, and they call us J-List-san. Two other suffixes that are heard often are -kun and -chan, for boys and girls respectively (e.g. Taro-kun, Hanako-chan). Someone who is older (senpai, or upperclassman) would generally use one of these with someone who was younger than him (kouhai, or underclassman); the younger person would use -san when speaking to the older person. One suffix that comes up in anime frequently is -sama, for addressing high-ranking persons, samurai lords and so on. Actually, -sama is rarely used in regular Japanese life except in certain situations (addressing letters, for example). There are several polite phrases that have the -sama suffix in them, though, such as otsukare sama deshita ("thank you for your hard work," said at the end of the work day) and gochisou sama deshita (lit. "it was a feast," said when you're finished eating).

One of the most popular category products in Japan right now are "candy toys," miniature models and figures that usually come with some kind of candy inside the box. Today we've got a great item for Star Trek fans everywhere: Star Trek Alpha, a new set of Federation and alien ships from Furuta, the premier miniature maker in Japan. We've got full sets of these amazing toys for you.

The new Download Editions of our PC dating-sim games are proving to be very popular with J-List customers, which makes us very happy. We've posted the rest of the download versions of the popular G-Collections titles, allowing you to choose between shrinkwrapped CD-ROM or download versions (whichever you prefer). All titles are ready for your immediate order!

All about weddings and wedding capitalism in Japan, and what it is to be "good head"

One interesting area of life in Japan is weddings, and Japanese really take the subject of getting married seriously. One of my first instances of culture shock in Japan happened when I was riding my mountain bike (gaijiin always ride mountains bikes here) and came across a sprawling palace that looked like it had fallen out of a time warp from Czarist Russia. Turns out it was a wedding hall, a giant facility created solely for marriage ceremonies and receptions, which are quite common in all corners of Japan. In our prefecture, various companies compete ferociously to capture the largest share of the local wedding market, coming up with interesting themes such as Georgia House, which recreates an Antebellum plantation house from the American South; Lockhart Castle, an authentic castle that was imported from Scotland; and Sharon Gospel Church, a U.S. style Baptist church in Japan.

Japanese weddings are divided into the ceremony (shiki) and the reception (invariably called a "wedding party"). The ceremony is usually either Western style, often with a gaijin minister reading the vows in heavily accented Japanese, or a traditional Shinto wedding with kimonos and ceremonial sake. The reception is usually a two-hour affair, which begins with a speech by the groom's boss and features speeches, karaoke or other performances by friends of both bride and groom. During the party, the happy couple disappear to change clothes several times, reappearing to show off new kimonos or beautiful wedding dresses, a custom called iro-naoshi (ee-ROH na-OH-shi, "fixing the colors"). In Star Wars Episode I, Queen Amidala has a new outfit for most every scene, which is clearly taken from this Japanese tradition. A Japanese wedding will always end with the tearful bride reading a letter to her parents, thanking them for raising her, apologizing for being so selfish, and promising to be happy with her new husband ("shiawase ni narimasu").

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

Announcing the return of Pocky to J-List! Since the summer is so hot and humid in Japan, J-List is forced to remove all chocolate items like Japan's popular chocolate-covered stick snacks when the heat is on. Now that it's starting to cool off, we've got Pocky back on the site in a big way, and we've got many of the new flavors for 2006 in stock for you!

We're also happy to announce that we've gotten our first batch of 2006 calendars in, and have posted them to the site now. These large-format calendars are printed exclusively for the Japanese market, and feature beautiful glossy printing and fantastic original art. We've got more than 50 different calendars featuring all the best anime, JPOP, Japanese idol and Race Queen, and more, on the site now! We're also going through adding pictures to the calendars, so you can see how good they look. Remember, calendars are a very limited-time item, and when they're gone, they will be gone for good. They make great Christmas gifts!

All about coffee in Japan, where cheap "low mileage" engines come from, and the psyches of students of Japanese

Have you ever strolled into a coffee shop an ordered an "American"? Although green tea seems as popular a drink as ever, the Japanese do enjoy their coffee, too. Traditionally, coffee is something you drink in a dim kissaten (key-SA-ten), or Japanese-style coffee and tea shop, where they serve coffee that's been hand-brewed by pouring boiling water over the grounds. Many coffee shops still do it this way, letting you enjoy the smell of the freshly brewing aroma while you wait ten minutes for it to be ready. If you don't like strong coffee, order an American, which is brewed less strongly. Of course, the local coffee scene has changed a bit since the coming of Starbucks, which opened its first store in Japan in 1996 and has 450+ currently. In contrast to the slowly savored coffee of most traditional Japanese establishments, Starbucks will get you your drink in a hurry, a convenience which has proved popular with many Japanese, especially Tokyoites who don't mind drinking their coffee while standing up (yes, there are tiny hole-in-the-wall Starbucks in Tokyo so small there's not even a place to sit down). Personally, I like a slow-brewed cup most of the time...

I remember back in college, I needed a new engine for the broken-down car I was driving. My mechanic sold me a "low mileage" replacement engine from Japan, which was very affordably priced yet had only something like 12,000 miles on it, making me wonder how such a thing was possible. I was living in San Diego, a place where you regularly put 150,000 or more miles on a car during its life, but Japan is very different from the U.S. Although it isn't exactly a small country -- it would take a week to drive its length -- the reality is that in Japan, you almost always find yourself driving on city roads, with lots of stop lights, one-way streets, and of course fumikiri, or train crossings, which everyone is required to stop at. Sometimes we take 45 minutes to drive somewhere then calculate how far we've driven, and see how long it would take us to drive that distance on the efficient freeways in San Diego. We take freeways whenever possible, of course, but they usually don't go where we need to be, and they're also not free (it costs $25 for us to drive to Tokyo, for example).

You've been in Japan too long when you get a nihongo ga jozu ("your Japanese is very good") and feel really insulted. It's an odd fact of life in Japan, but foreigners who are learning Japanese strive for that magic moment when Japanese will finally stop complimenting them on their Japanese. Being complimented on your language ability is a sign that your Japanese is good, but not quite good enough for the person to just shut up and talk to you normally. After four years of study at SDSU and almost fifteen years living in Japan, I am hopefully as bilingual as I'll ever need to be -- I can go the places I want and communicate with people as needed, although there's always the chance I'll encounter a specialized vocabulary word that I've never seen before, usually at the time and place that is most embarrassing to me.

One of the most popular 2006 calendars is always the Totoro desktop calendars, which always sell very well. This year's Totoro desktop calendar is especially nice, featuring PVC figures of all three Totoro creatures with Mei looking playfully at them over the top of the calendar. Best of all, when 2006 is behind you, you can still use this amazing and durable item as a photograph stand, putting pictures of your loved ones. It's in stock now!

J-List has been involved with bringing Japan's unique dating-sim games -- interactive games for PCs in which you interact with virtual on-screen girls and try to find virtual love -- for years, and we've got an amazing lineup of English-translated games for you. We're happy to announce that Ai Yori Aoshi, a great interactive game about two star-crossed lovers. Kaoru Hanabishi has been betrothed to marry Aoi Sakuraba since childhood, but now he's penniless while she's incredibly rich. A cool interactive PC game for all ages, based on the popular anime and manga, and one of the most well-known games of its type to be ported to English!

More on language and values, and a bunch of Japanese words that are fun to learn (?)

The study of language is never merely about learning vocabulary words and grammar -- if done right, those who acquire a second language will also learn plenty about the beliefs and ideas of speakers of that language. The Japanese tend to have a strong sense of the way things should be done, and often these convictions are reflected in the words that they use. In Japan, people seem to have a shared "common sense," called joshiki (JOH-shki、常識) that they can all access, which is one reason Japanese are more in harmony with each other than people in other parts of the world. In Japan, it's quite an insult to say joshiki ga nai 常識がない about someone -- saying that a person lacks common sense that everyone should have. There's usually a "right" way to do things here, and this is embodied in the words chanto ちゃんと (properly, as it should be) or chanto shita ちゃんとした (proper, correct), as seen in sentences like, chanto shita shigoto ni tukinasai ちゃんとした仕事に就きなさい (find yourself a proper job) or, chanto benkyo shite kudasai　ちゃんと勉強してください (please study [like you're supposed to]). Finally, one of the best compliments you can make of a person is that they are shikkari shiteiru　しっかりしている (she-KAR-ree sh-TE-ee-ru), which means someone who is steady, hardworking, and does what is expected of them.

The word shikkari しっかり (stable, reliable) is actually one of a complex class of very descriptive words that can be quite challenging for foreigners to learn because they're all so similar to each other, yet their meanings are so different. Another word from this group is sappari さっぱり (sa-PAH-ree, fresh, clean), as in the phrase "Sappari shita!" さっぱりした！ (I feel so refreshed!), said after you get out of a hot bath. If you closely resemble someone else in your family, you could use the word sokkuri そっくり to describe how similar you are, for example anata wa John ni sokkuri desu　あなたはジョンにそっくりです (you are the spitting image of John). Other words from this group include gakkari がっかり (gah-KAH-ree), the feeling of being let down or disappointed; kossori こっそり (koh-SOH-ree), doing something secretly; and pittari　ぴったり (pi-TAH-ree), describing a perfect fit.

For all fans of our new G-Collections Download Edition games, we're happy to announce that even more titles are now available for purchase as downloads. Now you can opt to buy six more titles either as downloads (with Virtual Mate 2.0) or on CD-ROM (with no online registration requirement at all). The new download versions are great for people with broadband connections, and are designed to be easily backed up on CD-R so you can keep your game securely for years to come. And the convenience of download your game directly can't be beat!

Leaving Tokyo now. I like to take the Shinkansen (i.e. the Bullet Train) when I can, since it's so fast and comfortable.

This was soon after the London bombings, and Japan had carefully closed all trash cans to keep people from putting bombs inside them.

These trash cans were still in use on the platform. They have been augmented somewhat to make it easy to see inside them, to improve security.

The stability of the Japanese people, and how words from English are "plugged into" Japanese

Japanese have always impressed me as a very stable people, often living their entire lives in the same area and having strong local communities. My wife's family has been living in our city for as long as records exist, and she grew up knowing everyone in our neighborhood. There's a word that describes a close friend you've had since childhood, osana-najimi 幼なじみ (oh-SAH-NAH NAH-gee-mee) and now our children play with the kids of neighbors my wife used to play with when she was small. When our kids started elementary school, they went to the school that my wife went to 30 years ago...which was also the school that her mother went to before that, something that totally boggles my American mind. I've moved many times during my life, living on the East Coast of the U.S., New Zealand, San Diego and ultimately Japan, and the idea of having roots that go back that far is really amazing to me.

There's nothing more interesting than studying a foreign language, of learning the way its unique grammatical rules work so you can form sentences and ideas and communicate with others. Language is always rule based, and even dialects like Ebonics and Cockney which may sound "wrong" to speakers of standard English are formed around their own suites of unique grammatical rules. The Japanese make heavy use of foreign loan words, usually borrowed from English, but since the grammar of the two languages is different, something is needed to "bridge" the two. Conveniently, there are two such grammatical aides built right into Japanese. The first is the adjective particle na which allows an adjective to be plugged into a Japanese sentence without breaking any rules, and you can hear phrases like surimu na onna スリムな女 (a slim, slender woman), dandii na otoko ダンディーな男 (a "dandy" or handsome man), and torendii na dorama トレンディーなドラマ (the latest trendy drama on television). I've even heard the word "epoch-making" used in this fashion -- as in, epokkumeekingu na ibento エポックメーキングなイベント (in case you are wondering, the word also comes up automatically in the Japanese input method), presumably meaning an event that is truly Earth-shattering in nature. The other tool to help foreign words be used in Japanese is the catch-all verb suru which means "to do." Words you might hear in Japanese include getto suru ゲットする (GET-toh suru, to get or find something), doraibu suru　ドライブする (doh-RAH-ee-bu suru, to go for a drive), kamingu auto suru カミングアウトする (kah-min-GU ah-OO-toh suru, lit. to do "coming out" or to come out of the closet about something), and of course, sekkusu suru セックスする (to have, well, you know). The staff at J-List uses lots of English in their Japanese, too, and you can hear terms like sukyan suru　(to scan something), pikku suru (to pick products in preparation for shipping) being used everyday.

Remember, J-List now sells our English-translated dating-sim games by direct download, allowing you to get great interactive H games right on your computer, without waiting for the CD-ROM to be delivered in the mail. See our extensive selection of downloadable games today.

Hanging around Akiba. This is an advertisement for a pachinko machine company. His hair is a big pachinko ball, see?

An ad for AU's newest service, auctions you can participate in with your keitai (cell phone). They were posting some Star Wars items that people could bid on.

This is something I'm interested in reading. It's the story of how Char Aznable (formerly known as Casval Rem Daikun) and his sister survived the assassination of their father by the Zabi Family, by Yasukazu Yoshikazu. It's up there with Char's Deleted Affair, the story of Char's secret love with Hamaan Kahn. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you're not an old school anime fan.

I went to Shibuya with some friends. This is one of the top ten famous buildings in Tokyo, the Shibya 109 building. We were hunting for...

Guinness, at a very nice Irish pub we found. The beer was good, the fish and chips were tasty, and we were among friends.

On the inability of people living in Japan to fix their own cars, and days of the week in Japanese

For some reason, living in Japan robs a person of the ability to open the hood of their car. When I lived in the U.S., I was quite comfortable giving my car a tune-up, changing spark plugs and so on, but since coming to Japan I find I haven't touched my car's engine in over a decade. My wife is indicative of most Japanese on the subject of auto maintenance -- she recently said to me, "I opened my hood once, but I didn't know which one was the engine." This is partially due to excellent Japanese service -- a helpful uniformed employee will cheerfully check your oil and air when you buy a tank of gas -- but another reason is "sha-ken," a government-mandated automobile maintenance check-up you have to get every two years. Since sha-ken is expensive, costing $800 or more, which includes various road taxes, foreigners generally hate it, but the upside is that cars are safer and you get your regular maintenance done for you as part of the deal. The sha-ken check-ups have a somewhat cynical purpose too: since new cars get three years without having to get the check-up, it provides a useful excuse for Japanese to buy a new car sooner than they otherwise would, and no doubt contributes millions to car manufacturers' bottom lines. Motorcycles also have sha-ken, although those with 250 cc and smaller engines don't, which creates more demand for small-engine motorcycles than would exist in other countries.

One of the most respected positions in Japanese life is that of shacho 社長, or company president, and like some other terms such as sensei 先生 (which literally means "the one who was born before me" and is said to teachers, doctors and politicians), it indicates a high level of respect. As in America, business leaders are looked up to, and the news media regularly reports on leaders like Goshn-shacho (the man who turned Nissan around), the hardworking Masayoshi Son-shacho of Sofbank, and of course charismatic Livedoor president Takafumi Horie, who recently tried to win his first seat in the Japanese Diet but failed in the last election. The term shacho is sometimes thrown around with little care for its actual meaning. If you go into a Japanese bar, the lady who pours your drink will likely call you shacho to make you feel good.

Memorizing the names of the months in English must be difficult for Japanese, but it's easy going the other way -- the months in Japanese are all just numbers followed by the kanji for month (e.g. ichi-gatsu 一月　is January, ni-gatsu 二月 is February, etc.). They get their revenge, though: although the days of the month in Japanese are expressed with numbers, just like in English, there are special names for the first ten days of the month, which must be memorized, always a chore for gaijin learning Japanese. The days of the week are interesting, too -- each is associated with a kanji that represents the original European origin. The days of the week are getsu-yobi (月曜日, lit. "moon day"), ka-yobi (火曜日, "fire day" since the first character for Mars is "fire"), sui-yobi (水曜日, "water day," from the Japanese name for the planet Mercury), moku-yobi (木曜日, "wood day," from the name for Jupiter), kin-yobi (金曜日, "gold day," from Venus), do-yobi (土曜日, "earth day," from Saturn), and nichi-yobi (日曜日, "sun day," from good old Sol).

Scenes from a Japanese convenience store. This is the famous aloe yogurt, yogurt made with the fully edible plant aloe. It's nice, not to sweet, and prevents dryness and cracking in the stomach lining.

Another fave of mine, Nata de Coco yogurt, made with bits of nata de coco, a firm geletin-like food from the Phillippines. It's so much fun to chew on the bits as you eat the yogurt.

Lest you think aloe is just a fluke, here's another company's brand of aloe yogurt.

Yogurt with...marshmallows? I thought the Japanese were supposed to eat healthy food?