Cultural reasons behind self-introductions in Japan, how to find good sushi, and Zeta Gundam III

A word you hear a lot in Japan is jiko shoukai (自己紹介) which just means "self introduction" but which has a special cultural meaning here. In almost any situation where people will be interacting, be it a classroom, a part-time job or the local PTA board, a new member will always stand and make a formal self introduction, telling the others their name (including how to write it in kanji), where they're from, what their hobbies or other interests are, and so on. Giving this information to the other members of the group allows them to categorize the newcomer properly, and in a country like Japan where factors like age and how long a person has been associated with an organization can determine their position in the senpai/kouhai (senior/junior) system, an official self introduction is important for everything to work properly. The new member of the group will usually use the phrase yoroshiku onegai shimasu, which is often translated as "nice to meet you" but is a lot deeper than that -- it carries with it a humble request that the current group members take the new person under their wing and aid them in the future. Jiko shoukai are used in ESL teaching a lot, too, and since formal self introductions are seen as the "most basic" form of human communication in Japan, the first thing a Japanese student of English leans to do is introduce themselves.

Our landlocked prefecture of Gunma is as far from the sea as you can get in Japan, but we love sushi nevertheless, and are always looking for good sushi restaurants. Japanese usually eat their most famous food mawari-zushi style, with plates of sushi moving along a conveyor belt, allowing you to take whatever you feel like eating as it glides by. Over the past half decade or so, Japan has experienced a deflationary spiral, with the prices for several everyday items actually falling. During that time, it seemed that the only sushi restaurants that could flourish were the cheapest ones, which offered plates of sushi for 100 yen or less. My wife and I disliked this trend, since the neta (the fish part of the sushi) at these places always left a lot to be desired, and life is too short to eat bad sushi, after all. Happily, we finally found a place that serves better quality fish at reasonable prices, with delicious red maguro and beautifully shaped ebi and tako, just the way we like it. As I've mentioned before, the very best sushi in Japan can be found in Narita City, near the airport. If you're ever in the area in the evening, take the train to Narita Station and ask any taxi deiver where Edokko sushi is (it's a three-minute walk from the station).

I took the day off early yesterday to go to a movie with my son. It was the third and final chapter in the Zeta Gundam: A New Translation movie trio, which compiles the 1985 Zeta Gundam anime series into three movies, adding new animation and various scenes in. As a card-carrying old school anime fan, I've always liked Zeta Gundam, the proverbial "Empire Strikes Back" of the Gundam world, when everything came together just so. It was great seeing the new designs for the characters as well as the new, improved ending. Being the father of a ten-year-old boy has given me a great excuse to experience a second childhood along with him. Oh, see the trailer here (Quicktime 6 req'd).

The Japan-only Kit Kat flavors have been extreme popular this year, and now we've got a new variety: delicious French Bretagne Milk, a white chocolate Kit Kat created by Le Patissier Takagi, who you may know from his appearances on Iron Chef. It's in stock on the site now! We've still got the excellent Green Tea Kit Kat for 2006 in stock, too, although we've sold through more than a quarter of our stock in just a week, so we recommend picking yours up sooner rather than later.

Spring is here, and there's no better way to deal with the constantly-changing weather than with one of our J-List hooded sweatshirts! J-List's hoodies are soft and warm, made of the best 80-20 blends available. We've got wacky messages like "Looking for a Japanese Girlfriend" and "Support the Emperor and Expel the Foreign Barbarians" as well as other aesthetically pleasing kanji. We're happy to announce reduced shipping on all our hoodies both inside the U.S. and for international customers, making it easy to pick up a hoodie!

Some shots from the film. If you're afraid of spoilers, stop reading now, although Zeta Gundam fans seem to extremely rare, well below the species threshold. Here's a shot of Camille, which according to Wikiedia is spelled Kamille (ugh).

This is Hamaan Kahn, the cool bitch of the Zeta universe. Damn, now I have to watch Gundam 0083 to see her 5 second cameo in that show.

The ending was reworked. While I won't give anything specific away, I'll say that "all the stupid stuff was undone" (and that goes for all of ZZ Gundam). Here's a money shot of Sayla, Char's sister and a character in the original series (famous for saying "Casval-oniichan!").

Mirai had to get a scene at the end, too. Amuro, too.

Another shot of Hamaan. God I love the redesign on her.

This totally snuck up on me! One of my favorite comics ever, coming to to a theatre near me. How thoughtful.

American magazines in the Japanese news marketplace, creases on your eyelids, and the truth about slurping noodles

Japan is a very literate nation, and there are many daily newspapers and weekly magazines that report and compile the news for Japanese readers. Over the past decade, as people here have gotten used to more and more participation in all forms of Japanese life by American and European companies, the American magazine Newsweek has worked to make a name for itself in the Japanese-language news market. Although most of us take the Time-Newsweek-U.S. News magazine format for granted, I'm sure it took some time for Japanese readers to get used to it. Compared with Newsweek's general approach to the week's evebts, most Japanese magazines are more specific, covering politics (AERA, Focus), business (Nikkei Weekly, President), arts and literature (Bungei Shunju), local events (Tokyo Walker, Pia), and so on. While color pages are always present, most Japanese magazines are still largely black-and-white, making Newsweek's all color printing a pleasant surprise for readers. There's one other big difference: it's common practice for some weekly news magazines typically read by men to include a few pages of beautiful models who appear au naturel, to give a little kick to the week's news, something that Newsweek doesn't emulate. The past week's issue had an interesting article asking "who owns English?" which discussed how the language is changing as it's adopted by countries all around the world. Japanese tend to obsess over "correct" English from America and the U.K. to the exclusion of all else, yet English is everywhere, in use in nearly all corners of the world, and always changing. So when the makers of Pocari Sweat come up with a new slogan for their sports drink ("Re-Body," click here to see the commercial I'm talking about), maybe it's not quite as weird as it first sounds.

Last night we had udon (oo-DON) noodles at my house, which are the fat, white noodles, as opposed to the thinner, grey soba (buckwheat) noodles. If you know anything about the way Japanese people eat noodles, you can probably guess that it was a very loud dinner, with everyone slurping away at full volume. We weren't being rude or anything -- you're supposed to slurp your noodles while you eat, bringing the little bowl of noodle sauce close to your mouth and sucking in both noodles and the sauce as you guide the noodles with your chopsticks (this makes it taste better). On several occasions I've found myself on the receiving end of comments from Japanese people that I eat "very quietly," not slurping my noodles enough, but after fifteen years here I think I've got the slurping thing down. While slurping ramen, soba or other noodles is perfectly okay, this doesn't extend to spaghetti, and every once in a while we see someone in a restaurant slurping his pasta like a vacuum cleaner, to the amusement of the other patrons.

In Japan, there are often concepts that are very difficult for Westerners to grasp. One measurement of beauty here is related to the number of creases in a persons eyelid when their eyes are open -- one crease (hitoe, hee-TOE-eh) or two creases (futae, fu-TAH-eh). Single-creasers have slender, traditionally Asian eyes, while those with double creases have larger eyes that look European to the Japanese. Getting plastic surgery to change the appearance of your eyes is quite popular among TV stars and young Japanese (although not as much as South Korea). I have to admit, I'd never considered that people had different numbers of creases in their eyelids until coming here -- it was a totally alien concept to me. Incidentally, we sell a wacky item called Double Eyelid Makeup, basically eye makeup that's very sticky, which "glues" your eyelids so that your eyes look larger, more like a foreigners'. We love to bring you our trademark "wacky things from Japan," this this item certainly fits the bill!

The Final Fantasy XII Potion was a smash hit, the most popular item over the weekend by far. Happily, we've been able to get additional supplies of this great item, which is a blue-colored health drink loaded with herbs and caffeine that comes in a gorgeous blue glass bottle that looks like a health potion from Final Fantasy, with one of six different caps. Whether you want to recharge your hit points or just display this oh-so-cool item, we've got stock for you, and at a reduced price, too. Also, we've posted full sets of these great potions to the site now, at least until our stock of these sells out. Each potion comes in a special box and contains a foil-wrapped card, and will be carefully shipped to you by our dedicated Japanese staff.

I went up to Karuizawa again over the weekend, and decided to visit the outlet center they have there.

Being an outlet, they have lots of stuff like L.L. Bean, Levi's and Eddie Bauer, which may be boring to you, but when you live in Japan these are shops that are convenient to have around. Here you can see that the Nike shop keeps their English at the level of most customers.

I liked this restaurant name.

Among the many stores in this large shopping center, there's one that sells Bounty paper towels, which are a big hit with Japanese housewives, tired of their puny Japanese paper towels.

I wasn't ready for a big jolt of culture shock, when I saw all the Spam you could buy. I mean, the only time I ever had anything to do with Spam was when we played our annual game of Spamball (you hit a can of Spam until it breaks open) at the anime club at SDSU. I go to Japan for a while, and Hormel gets delusions of grandeur?

Good and bad foods from Japan, three Japanese words for you, and lack of "DIY Culture" in Japan

My diet has certainly changed since I came to Japan back in 1991. Like some Americans I wasn't too keen on fish back then, but in the last decade and a half I've really come to appreciate all manner of things from the sea. In addition to many broiled fish I know the names of in Japanese but not in English, I love all types of sushi and sashimi. Other dishes I dig on are donburi ("big bowl of rice") items like Oyakodon ("parent and child bowl" with chicken and egg cooked together over rice) or Tekkadon (slices of maguro on rice with soy sauce mixed with wasabi poured on); gyoza (Chinese dumplings, known as Pot Stickers in the U.S.); and udon and soba noodles. There are plenty of Japanese foods that I can do without, of course, including the infamous natto (fermented soybeans), shirasu (little tiny white fish with big black eyes, my wife loves them), nankotsu (a variety of chicken-on-a-stick made with chicken cartilage), ikizukuri (raw fish that's prepared while it's still alive), and cho (fried up beef intestines, popular in Kyushu). Lately I've been eating a lot of saki ika, which is basically dried, shredded squid you eat like beef jerky. It goes great with beer, and is very low in fat and calories. Maybe there's a squid jerky boom in America's future? (We have some cool cookbooks and saki ika on the site if you're interested.)

I'll teach you three words of Japanese that are fun to know, and which pop up in anime or our PC dating-sim games rather often. First is yappari (やっぱり, ya- PAH-ree, with a small pause where the double consonant is), a word that can be translated as "just as I thought" "as I suspected" or "now that I think about it." If you were to discover that a suspicion you had about someone was true, you'd shout out Yappari! Next is osana najimi (幼なじみ) or childhood friend, a close friend you've played with since before you can remember. In anime it's common for there to be a girl who grew up with the main character, who knows everything about him and who sometimes beats him to a pulp for comic relief. Third is the famous Japanese word gambaru (頑張る), which can be translated as "to work hard" or "try one's best." Japan has a country has great respect for hard work, and they gambaru to pass their college entrance exams, gambaru for the success of their companies -- cute girls will even gambaru to win the hearts of the boys they like. It often appears as a request, gambatte kudasai (gahm-BAT-tay koo-da-sai-ee, "please do your best") or as a command, gambare! (gahm-BAH-ray, "give it your all!").

Each country is different, and the way people buy goods in each country is different, too. One thing I've noticed is a lack of "DIY culture" in Japan, a tendency to take the comfortable route and rely on the services of established companies rather than doing things for yourself. If you're a college student needing an apartment in the U.S., there are probably a lot of places where you can go and read ads for people looking for tenants -- just call them up and make the arrangements. In Japan, though, you'd usually go through a real estate agent or other company who will take one month's rent as a fee. Want to sell a car? In most cities there are areas where people park their cars along the street with a price and a phone number posted, but when Yasu saw this in Philadelphia he experienced culture shock, since you always sell your old car to a professional dealer in Japan.

We've got two big announcements on the J-Snack front today, our first being a welcome one to Japan Kit Kat fans: the availability of the new Green Tea Kit Kat for 2006! This year's Green Tea Kit Kat is better than ever, with a delicious mild taste made with real Uji Matcha, grown near Kyoto. We've got limited stock of what was our single most popular snack item last year, a deluxe package containing 17 individually wrapped Kit Kat bars. We weren't able to get as many of these Kit Kat packages as we wanted to this year and are worried that we might sell out, so if you're a fan of Kit Kat, order yours now!

Then, by massive customer request, we've got another cool item for you: the Final Fantasy XII "Potion" Premium Bottle from Suntory, which are health drinks containing royal jelly, vitamins, herbs and caffeine, made into the shape of health potions. It's really a great concept: you get a one of six beautifully designed large bottles of hit point-healing health potion in a special box, great for displaying or drinking when out doing battle. Each box also has a cool foil-wrapped card, too. Please hurry though, as they are probably not going to last the weekend. If we do sell out, we'll be taking backorders and filling them on a first-come, first-serve basis as we try to get more stock.

Looking for something really unique to wear? J-List has dozens of our original "wacky Japanese T-shirts" featuring unique designs and funny messages, from the bizarre ("Looking for a Japanese Girlfriend") to the aesthetically beautiful. All shirts are full U.S. sizes, printed with loving care by our staff in San Diego. We've updated the photos of our T-shirts with larger images that hopefully make it easier for you to choose which designs might be right for you. Why not browse our wacky T-shirt page today?

Try living in a country with no real peanut butter and no guacamole chips. You'll beg to buy it when you find some. Note: I didn't eat them together.

Picture of a Really Big PC at Yamada Denki. This is like a 32 inch monitor with TV function. It was not actually terrible as far as these things go, but it was being closed out so I guess it didn't take off with customers.

DS Lite is making such a splash right now. I've got one on order for my wife, since she wants to try one out.

A boat of sashimi. This is the best thing in the world. Good with lots of wasabi.

Image of the pathetically small cereal aisle in a Japanese supermarket, not really something you could call an aisle at all. Special K has been on sale here for a few months, but it's just not the same thing as the real stuff back home.

Being a Champion of Justice, thoughts on "Image English" in advertising, and the perfect gifts for White Day

I remain convinced that the foreigners who live in Japan furnish an important service to the country, by providing a voice of criticism and pointing out things that need to be changed. Time and time again I've noticed the power the opinions of gaijin have to effect change in Japan, whether it's asking to have a non-smoking section added to a restaurant or pointing out that the restroom was not as clean as it could be (things Japanese would say "it can't be helped" about). Just today, while going to lunch, we spotted a young woman driving with her 4-year-old daughter who was standing up in the front seat. The idea of child carseats are still somewhat alien to Japan, a country that only passed its first carseat law in 1999, and children playing inside moving cars is something I've seen all to often. When we stopped at a light I went into seigi no mikata ("champion of justice") mode, got out of the car, and publicly reprimanded the mother, telling to put her damn child in a seat belt, at the very least. She immediately complied, embarrassed at being lectured while people in the surrounding cars looked on. Because it was an American doing the admonishing rather than a Japanese person, I'm sure that it's an event she won't soon forget, and hopefully she'll change her ways.

"You know you've been in Japan too long when you are jealous of your friend because the camera strap that came with his new Minolta camera says 'With you for the best scenes of your life' and yours doesn't." Japanese people do have a special relationship with the English language, since nearly all of them study six years, or up to ten years if they go to college. While most don't become fluent in the language, the fact that people are familiar with it is not lost on companies, who have gotten quite good at creating poetic "Image English" for their products. Just as the creators of the Swatch brand came up with that name because they didn't realize it sounded kind of silly in English, Japanese creators of English slogans can be quite creative, and the slogans can make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Some examples of Image English I like are:

For Beautiful Human Life (make-up company Iona)
A happy present from the earth (printed on stationery)
Fashionable Picture Magazine (on magazine masthead)
Urban Contemporary Wave (slogan of hair gel maker Mandom)
Inspire the Next! (slogan of Hitachi)
Drive Your Dreams (Toyota)
Feel Wood (Sumitomo Forestry)
For Precious Life (toilet maker Inax)
Young and Clean (political slogan for the LDP some years ago)

Are you ready for White Day, on March 14th? This is the day when men who received a gift of chocolate on Valentine's Day give some sort of return gift -- okaeshi in Japanese -- to the wives, girlfriends, daughters and female co-workers who gave them something. It's pure marketing fluff, of course, but kind of fun, and companies are happy to take advantage of the event by thinking of ways to sell products. Even Apple gets into the spirit of White Day their Japan store page, by suggesting that men buy engraved iPods for their better halves as a way of saying "Thanks for the chocolate!"

One of the most popular new products to come along recently has been Unazukin (oo-NA-zu-keen), a line of stylish electronic toys that look like a cross between Russian nesting dolls, Weebles and Easter Eggs. These electronic toys interact with you, by nodding (unazuku in Japanese, where the toys get their name from) or shaking their heads from side to side when you talk to them. Bandai has a great new idea for the toy line: Unazukin Gift For You, made specially for giving as gifts, with messages printed right on the toys and a place for you to write a personal note on the box. Today we've got Happy Birthday, Anniversary, and Thank You in stock (the last one might be good for White Day...?). Since they're quite inexpensive, why not buy several to keep in your desk at work for when you need a gift on short notice?

To be a foreigner in Japan is to be at peace with standing out in a crowd, since more often than not you're going to be the only non-Japanese around. Sometimes the best way to manage this is to embrace your differences openly, and show off your uniqueness for all to see. In this spirit, we used our wacky shirt-making minds to create Kiss Me, I'm Gaijin, a really cool design that that shows a stereotypical foreigner holding a cup of coffee, with a message that makes use of the blocky, uniquely Japanese style of the katakana writing system. A great potential conversation starter with cute Japanese exchange students on campus!

I snapped some pictures of the chick in the car before I got out and told her what for. She was very pretty, and appeared to spend a lot of time on her face and make-up. Doesn't she know that the Japanese are dying as a race, and each and every one of them is important? Jeez, stupid mothers...

Over the weekend we took a "Sayonara Bongo Friendee" trip to Numata, our favorite onsen spot. The car's sha-ken is up in a week or so so we have to give the car back to Mazda while we wait for our MPV to be delivered.

Although predictably we seldom opened the top (mainly because the kids would eat up there and spill food), we sure enjoyed this car. If you're in the U.K. and like the looks of this car, maybe you can find one for sale. I'd think they'd be popular in Australia/New Zealand, too.

Japanese city in respoe.

I'm surprised to say I've actually been using my iPod with Video to watch videos. I'm up to episode 13 in Mai Hime. I walk carefully holding the iPod and watching my vids. It works surprisingly well.

A new electronics law in Japan, fun with hi-tech toilets, and some words to live by

Japan is declaring war on used electronics with the upcoming "PSE law" that will take effect next month. Basically, it's a requirement that electronic devices such as televisions, computers or stereos have a special "safety sticker" on it, and since no products sold before 2002 have the sticker, their sale would presumably be illegal. It's a problem for stores that sell vintage video game systems, musical instruments and amplifiers, and other kinds of older electronic devices. Many older Japanese housewives prefer the old 2-tub washing machines to today's newfangled automatics -- you have one tub for washing/soaking and another for rinsing, which some say gets clothes cleaner. Since they're not made anymore, those who prefer the old way have to buy used, which would be hard to do under the new law. Happily, there seem to be quite a few loopholes, for example retailers may perform some inspections themselves, so maybe the effect of the new law won't be that big.

Japan is nothing if not technologically advanced, and living here is a lot of fun if you like gadgets. From phones with eye-poppingly advanced features to those dreamy chairs that massage away your daily stress, a trip to an electronics store in Japan is never boring. When I first came to Japan I was fascinated by those toilets that wash and dry your butt for you, which Japanese toilet maker Toto has named the washlet. In addition to providing a warm seat to sit on, so welcome on cold winter nights, the unit sends a stream of warm water to clean your nether regions, with options like a bidet (for ladies, although being a guy I'm rather fuzzy on all the bidet stuff), a water massage feature, and an air dryer for paperless operation. These washlet units are extremely popular here, with 60% of Japanese homes owning them -- the fact that they help constipated people get through their business is probably a major selling point, as all Japanese women seem to suffer from this problem. They're starting to appear in the U.S., too, although I don't imagine most homes come with convenient electric plugs installed behind their toilets as they do in Japan.

The Japanese spend a lot of time worrying about the welfare and education of their children, perhaps because there are so few of them being born. If you drive around our city you can see these metal signs put up by the local PTA, with thoughtful slogans like "those who don't show respect their parents won't receive it from their children" and "think of ways to make your household a bright and cheerful place for your child to come home to after school." I heard of a new slogan that adults teach to kids to protect them from some of the more unsavory elements of society: ika no osushi (ee-KA no oh-SOO-she, meaning squid sushi). The word breaks down into the following parts: ikanai ("don't go" e.g. don't go anywhere with a stranger), noranai ("don't ride," e.g. don't get into a stranger's car), okii koe wo dasu (yell for help if you need it), and sugu ni shiraseru (tell a grown-up right away if you have a problem). This feel-good Japanese message has been brought to you by the Sunday night "anime golden time" of Chibi Maruko-chan and Sazae-san, which are part of the end-of-weekend ritual at our house.

My wife is a collector of Licca-chan, the cute fashion doll made by Takara that's been sold in Japan since 1967. This is a rare item, a Hina doll set made using Licca as a base.

This was a limited edition item, with just 200 made in the whole country. My wife really wanted the version with Licca sitting down, but had to settle for this one instead.

Licca is half Japanese, half French, which is kind of the risou (ideal) for Japanese doll fantasy building. She's the daughter of a Japanese fashion designer and a French musician, about as cool as you can get.

My wife kept insisting that Licca's boyfriend was named Ken, then she remembered his name is Takeru.

Trends in rural Japan, fun places to drink in Japan, and Japanese group photo psychology

Yesterday J-List's Tomo and Jun were residents of separate towns, called Omama and Nitta, but today they're neighbors in the newly created city of Midori, which means green in Japanese. One of the biggest trends in rural Japan is gappei (gah-PEI), meaning consolidation, as smaller regions join together to incorporate as cities. In Japan's system of land organization, cities (shi, 市) are regions that have 50,000 or more people, whereas towns (machi or cho、町) and villages (mura or son、村) have smaller populations. Japan's rural areas are being hit by the triple whammy of extremely low birth rate, lack of immigration and young people moving to urban areas, which is causing parts of the country to empty out at an alarming rate. As Japan's population peaks this year, some rural areas are trying to redefine themselves to maintain their attractiveness to their citizens. It's also quite common for rural areas to reward people who move there, paying a bounty of $10,000 for building a house, for example, or a monthly stipend if you have three or more kids. At current projections, the population of Japan in the year 3000 is going to be....only 27 people.

Whenever you study Japan's society you inevitably encounter concepts of uchi (in-group) and soto (out-group). Groups are very important in Japan, and care is taken to avoid making any member feel that he's not a full-fledged member, be it a class in high school or a group of friends at Tokyo Disneyland. I've learned a lot about Japan's group psychology by watching them doing a very common thing: taking photographs. When a group of Japanese takes a photo together, you can often observe one person in the group taking a picture of everyone else, afterwhich another member will take the camera from him and take another picture, with the first person included this time. The idea is that if it's a group photo, everyone needs to be included, and excluding someone from the group will be unfair to that person. Walking away without taking a second picture might make the unincluded individual feel like he was nakama-hazure (na-KOO-ma ha-ZOO-ray), or an exile from the group. Likewise, if that person said he didn't want to be in the second picture it might cause bad feelings in the other members, so the second picture is usually taken. This system saves hurt feelings, although it wasted a lot of film back in the old Kodak/Fuji Film days.

Drinking establishments vary from country to country, and Japan is no different. The English word "bar" is used to describe a Western-style bar where you can find Guiness or a shot of Suntory Hibiki. A pub, on the other hand, often means a drinking establishment where there's a hostess of some kind, basically a pretty women who make chatter with you as she encourages you to drink more. A Japanese business associate of mine once took me to a "cabaret club," a very expensive place where your bourbon will be mixed by a beautiful girl as she makes cute small talk -- in my case it was a lot of nihongo ga jozu" or your Japanese is very good," which gets tedious after a while. Out here in the inaka (the boondocks) there's a kind of bar called a "snack" (short for "snack bar" since they serve food), where you can drink, eat and sing karaoke. But my favorite kind of Japanese drinking establishment would have to be the izakaya (ee-ZA-KA-YA), translatable as "a place to drink saké and just be." It's basically a cozy Japanese-style restaurant/bar that serves cold beer in frosty mugs, with lots of good things to eat, from sushi and sashimi to edamame (soybeans you can just pop in your mouth) and more. We happen to have a cool set of toys from Re-Ment featuring all the amazing food, drink and other items you can get at an izakaya -- see how many items you can identify! Full sets or random boxes are in stock.

We've got two products for fans of our original Japanese T-shirts: a new hoodie in cool Army Green Fatigue color, and a fitted girls version of our Ecchi parody rhinoceros shirt in earthy Olive Green. Our Japan-related T-shirts will make you look great, and since they're "coded" with secret words like the word "ecchi" or with kanji messages, most people won't know what they say. Browse our T-shirt and hoodie selection now!

Signs of spring and "Haru Ichiban," different rules of economics in Japan, and surprising information on naughty words in Japanese

More signs of spring all around us in Japan, with warmer weather and lots of windy days, which are known as Haru Ichiban (the First of Spring). It's nice to see that winter is drawing to an end, but for people with allergies this in-between-seasons period can be a difficult one, as the extra-strong winds whip up lots of pollen and dust. Haru Ichiban marks the beginning of the "pollen mask season" when a large number of people will be seen walking around with SARS-style masks on their faces, trying to keep some of the allergens out.

Japan is a very different place from the rest of the world, and it operates under its own rules, even when it comes to good old Adam Smith. First of all, inflation doesn't seem to exist here, and except for a few core things like gasoline, prices don't move much at all. In fact, I've noticed very few things getting significantly more expensive over the past 15 years -- I think JR raised rail prices once, making the price of a train to Tokyo go from $16 to $18. The last decade has been mostly recession for Japan, as the country slept off the hangover from the bursting of the Tokyo land bubble in the early 1990s, and during that time the government has pursued a zero interest rate policy, effectively lowering the cost of money to banks to nothing in an effort to stimulate the economy. The result is that loans can be had in Japan for 1-2%, and sometimes for even less. I was walking by a bank the other day and noticed an advertisement for 0.78%, fixed at that level for three years (then presumably going to something like 4-5%). Of course, putting your money in the bank will generally net you a laughably low return of around 0.05%, so it's all relative, I guess. Japan may be an island nation, but it's not completely closed off, and many investors here take advantage of certificates of deposit, bond issues and other investments available outside Japan, usually offered through proxy companies.

When you learn a foreign language, the first thing you usually learn are the "naughty" words. However, people studying Japanese are often surprised to find that most of the bad words they're used to in English don't really exist. Popular Japanese insults include baka (BAH-kah, stupid), aho (ah-HO, this is the Osaka-ben version of baka) or shine (shi-NEH, meaning "go die"), and the "s-word" does exist (kuso), but it's hard to consider it a really bad word when it's used freely in anime watched by small children. It's funny how living in a society that doesn't use English changes one's perception of the what a "bad" word even is. For example, my kids are aware of all the bad words that exist in English ("those words that Dad says when he gets really mad"), but the words are all meaningless here in Japan, since using them doesn't cause a reaction out of the people around you. Language only has function when interfacing with others.

Remember that J-List makes it easy to enjoy DVDs from anywhere in the world, with our line of region free DVD players at great prices. Whether you want to watch the high-end indies or anime DVDs from Japan, or enjoy PAL DVDs from Europe, Australia or South America, the three region free DVD players we've got are all excellent choices for you. The players also play just about anything you can throw at them -- VCD, DVD-R/RW/R+, even MP3s burned onto CD-R or DVD-R. But best of all, they're incredibly affordable, starting at just $68 for the Karaoke-enabled DVD-7880K, $109 for the full-featured DVD-7050, and just $148 for the take-anywhere M-280, which has a 7-inch wide screen and battery. All players are shipped out of San Diego for your convenience and are fully warranted.

A trip to the Docomo shop. I've been yearning for an American-style smart phone, but no such thing exists here. Still, I thought it would be fun to see what Docomo had.

Lots of pretty phones. The main cell phone companies are NTT Docomo (very expensive, very stylish), AU (more affordable, also stylish, good 3G), Vodafone (so lame I read an article in the New York Times about how they were losing market share fast), and Tu-Ka (known for their PCS network). All phones are unique to each company though, so you have to shop carefully when buying or you'll miss a good phone.

This was the closest thing I saw to a smart phone, but it has no QWERTY keyboard. Plus, knowing NTT it will be a totally closed OS system, which I am not interested in.

'Course, the real reason to go into an NTT Docomo shop is to check out Chiaki Kuriyama's latest pictures. Chiaki in boxing gloves? Are they serious? The only thing cooler about this girl is that she's a shoushin shoumei (genuine, true) otaku, and I caught her on a talk show geeking out about how cool her Rei Ayanami figure with bandages was.

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Wacky Japanese holidays, gift-giving and Kobe beef receiving, and what's up with the word "gaijin"

Although the Japanese have a reputation for being diligent and hardworking, there are actually more legal holidays in Japan than there are in the U.S. -- fifteen, versus just ten in the States -- and unlike the period of high economic growth of the sixties and seventies, people actually take them off now. While some of these holidays are similar to special days in other countries -- for example, National Foundation Day, which commemorates the traditional founding of Japan in 660 B.C. -- most are culturally unique to Japan. Among these are Coming-of-Age Day, when 20-year-olds officially come of age in the eyes of society; Children's Day, a day for celebrating children; Marine Day, to celebrate the sea; and Respect for the Aged Day, when the country honors the 20% of Japanese who are 65 or older. It's popular for organizations to "brand" certain days, too, such as May 3rd, Trash Day, a day to think about environmental issues, set on this day because 5/3 sounds like gomi, meaning trash; August 2nd, Pantsu-no-hi, or Underwear Day, an important day for undergarment manufacturers here; Nov. 11, Pocky Day, since 11/11 looks like four Pocky sticks lined up; and the recently mentioned February 9th, Meat Day, since 2/9 sounds like niku meaning meat. Incidentally, today is Neko-no-Hi, or Cat Day, as 2/22 somehow sounds like nyan nyan nyan (a cat's meow) to Japanese ears.

Gift-giving in Japan is quite formal and complex. There are two gift-giving periods, Ochugen in July and Oseibo in December, when families will give gifts such as canned coffee, laundry soap or cooking oil to the people who help them in some way, such as teachers or others in the neighborhood. When you receive a gift, you're supposed to give a return gift, called okaeshi (oh-KAH-eh-she), worth about half the amount of the original gift. (Birthday and Christmas gifts are strangely exempt from this, perhaps because these customs were imported from the West.) There are times when a Japanese company gives cash "congraulations bonuses" (in Japanese, o-iwai kin) to employees for happy events like getting married or the birth of a child, and okaeshi gifts are also made in return. J-List's Jun (the guy who works hard to keep our J-Snack selection so well stocked) became a father last month, and his return gift to us was something very special: the famed Kobe beef, just about the most expensive steak you can buy. Coming from cows that get daily massages and are fed beer to bring out the famous marbling quality of the meat, it was certainly the most amazing steak I've ever tasted.

The word for foreigner in Japanese is gaijin (外人), written using the characters for "outside" and "person." While it simply refers to foreigners, the word is kind of harsh and can sound derogatory depending on how it's used. For this reason, it's common to hear the word gaikokujin (外国人) or "outside country person," a better term that sounds much softer to the ear. One thing about foreigners living in Japan: while they usually don't appreciate Japanese calling out to them by saying "Hey, gaijin!" they're more than likely to use the term amongst themselves openly without a second thought.

J-List strives to bring you thousands of fun and hard-to-find products direct from Japan, and we sell hundreds of snack and chocolate items, from the new Green Tea Pocky to delicious Melty Kiss and Japan-only Kit Kat varieties, with new and interesting snack items updated three times a week. Today we've posted an old favorite, Every Burger, which are chocolate hamburgers surrounded by cookie buns -- so fun to eat! By the way, all food items we sell are stamped with a "freshness date" and we unconditionally guarantee that everything we sell is within this date.

Getting ready to open the wagyu. It comes in a special box that looks like wood but is really styrafoam. Those Japanese are so talented.

Jahn! This meat was incredible to look at, marbeled with white throughout and very high quality. Of course, you have to like meat prepared this way -- this is a steak fit for a wealthy Japanese industrialist, not particularly someone who wants lean meat.

This meat comes with a certificate indicating where it was raised, what kind of Kobe beef it was, and amazingly, the name of the animal I was about to eat.

Building blocks of words in Japanese, on Japanese modesty, and

Studying a foreign language is fun because it helps you learn about your own language, too. I've always been interested in the idea of morphemes, which are the smallest units of meaning in a word, and how they work in other languages. A word like "unladylike" has three useful chunks of information, un + lady + like, while a word like "communism" consists of two morphemes, commune (a group of people sharing their possessions) + ism (indicating a doctrine or theory). Just as many of the words used in the West came from Latin or Greek, Japanese vocabulary are usually kanji-based. Indicating a nationality or a language is easy -- just add jin (人, meaning person; it rhymes with "seen") or go (語, language) to the country name. A word like "communism" is expressed by breaking down the original meaning, in this case kyousan (共産, produce together) and shugi (主義, main belief, which corresponds to the morpheme "ism" in English). All countries have kanji that represent them, allowing you to make some very efficient words, like Perry + come + sun (Japan) for "the coming of Admiral Perry to Japan"　（ペリー来日) or sun + rice (America) + relationship for "Japan-American relations" (日米関係） Although learning how to read kanji is no picnic, it's nice that there are no exceptions with kanji-built words. Suffixes for nationality in English can be confusing -- is someone from Burma a Burminian or a Burmite or a Burmese? -- but in Japanese, you only have to remember that jin character.

Compliment any Japanese on how good their English is, or how pretty they look if female, and you may experience that famous Japanese modesty: the recipient of your praise will likely deny your kind words vehemently. This is because in Japan, modesty is considered a good trait to have, and someone who flaunts his or her talents openly rather than hiding them politely would be seen in a negative light. Sometimes Japanese modesty can be quite ridiculous: if you bake a cake for someone, you usually give it to them while saying something like "This probably doesn't taste good..." I've noticed that Japanese modesty stops short when it comes to money, however. I once caught a talk show which featured a big slope, and various famous guests would come, make some small talk with the host, then go sit somewhere on the slope to indicate how much money they a made annually. Poor swimsuit idol Yoko Kumada was stuck near the bottom of the hill, while famous actor and former baseball star Eiji Bando was happy to saunter to the top, indicating his considerable wealth.

It's still February, but signs of Spring are popping up everywhere. Suntory has brought out their new Spring-limited Sawayaka Harunama ("Refreshing Spring Draft Beer"), specially formulated to taste good while sitting under the cherry blossom trees enjoying the beauty of the sakura petals falling all around you. Along with School Sports Day in the Fall, Spring is one of the primary seasons for buying video cameras, and Panasonic is pushing their lineup of products to parents of first-graders who will be entering school -- who wouldn't want to record that event for posterity? This year's Panasonic commercial is really beautiful, filled with images of children running through dancing sakura trees while a loving mother records the scene. See it here (Flash required).

More pics from Tokyo. Although Akihabara is a great place to go for electronics, they have almost no good food places, and no Starbucks at all. So I chilled in a Mr. Dounut, whic is pronounced Mr. Dounuts in Japanese for phonetic reasons.

You can never tell if something is for real in Japan. Here's a little lion whose mane is made out of a dounut, called Pon De Lion. Is this a joke on Juan Ponce de León, the colonizer of Florida, or a weird accident?

The Japanese word for bread is "pan," since the Porguguest brought it to Japan many centuries ago. In case you don't know what you're looking at, it's Melon Bread and Curry Bread. Melon bread doens't contain melon, it's just called that because it looks like a honeydew melon, sort of. It's also said to look like brains.

This is what's known as a kanban musume　or "signpost girl" because her cute face sells more melon bread. It certainly sold some to me. Man, I love living in Japan.

Thoughts on Tokyo, the truth behind internationalization, and the triumph of inefficiency

I went into Tokyo on business yesterday, and as is often the case, I was amazed that the city is able to function as well as it does with its massive daytime population of 14 million -- a whopping 5655 people per square kilometer. Just as New York is comprised of several boroughs, Tokyo is made up of various parts, including 23 wards (ku), 26 cities (shi), and even sections designated as towns and villages (determined by population size), in effect making the metropolitan area operate more as a prefecture than as a city. Although Tokyo has an extensive system of freeways and major roads, driving there is the most stressful thing you can imagine, and I nearly always take trains, since there's nothing more convenient. The end result of this is that I have no perception of the geographical layout of Tokyo at all, but only think of the city in terms of which train line will get me to Shinjuku or Akihabara. Yesterday I was delayed by the bane of Tokyo train riders, the jinshin jiko, which means "injury accident" but is a polite way of saying that someone decided to end it all by throwing themselves in front of an oncoming train.

One of the things any pop Japanoligist can tell you about are the Japanese traditions of tatemae and honne (TAH-tay-MAH-eh and HON-neh), two concepts which are woven into the fabric of Japan's society. Tatemae, meaning "facade," represents the the ideas expressed in public, or the way we pretend society is, while honne is the way we really feel, or the way the world really is. Ever since coming to Japan I've heard a lot about kokusai-ka, a word that means "internationalization" and which supposedly represents Japan's desire to open up to the rest of the world and experience other cultures and new ways of solving problems. Frankly, I've always felt that this was a prime example of tatemae in action -- something that sounds good in a newspaper article but is meaningless in practice -- since the average Japanese, just like the average American or Korean or Frenchman, has a natural tendency to believe that the way things are done in their country is intrinsically better than anywhere else. However, I was surprised to find a little honne after all, when my daughter told me the kinds of international foods they've been dishing up at lunchtime at her public elementary school: Korean bibinbap rice bowl, Indian kima curry with naan, Italian focaccio bread, French mille-feuille for dessert, and so on. The idea is to improve the kids' minds by exposing them to various foods from around the world, and I think it's a great one.

Sadly, one of the major economic themes of Japan today is the triumph of inefficiency. When you drive past road construction, there are sure to be several men whose job it is to stand by the road with orange flashlights, ostensibly directing traffic even though everyone ignores them. Then there are the ever-present "parking old men" who do nothing more than stand in parking lots and direct you to a parking spot that you could have easily found yourself. Japan is a very cash-centric country, and personal checks (or cheques, for our European readers -- internationalization!) don't exist here at all. When individuals or businesses need to send money to someone, they usually go to the bank and execute a manual bank transfer (furikomi), paying a $6 fee to the bank for this privilege. And just today I saw another classic example of inefficiency: people who are paid to sit by the side of the road and click a clicker as cars drive by, to count the numbers of cars using a given road at a set time. Japan is supposed to be a technically advanced country, so why don't they come up with a high-tech device that can do this?

Just a heads up: J-List stocks virtually every PC dating-sim game in English, including older classics like the Himeya games, Hobibox's Viper series and Love Love Show, and the collection of three classic games by G-Collections, DOR. Several games are close to selling out, so if you're a collector of Japan's unique H-games, you might consider picking them up before they go.

Pictures from my trip to Tokyo, hopefully with improved quality since I am using a camera now, not my phone. Thi sis the famous Yama-no-te loop line that goes around Tokyo.

Ad for Nova, the English school that promises you a "study abroad experience without leaving your local train station area."

Some parts of Tokyo are new and spiffy, like Shinjuku and Shibuya. Then there are the old places, which can't have changed that much in the past 50 years. Asakusa-bashi is one such place.

They've made a branch of the Yoyogi Animation School in Akihabra -- smart move.

Wanted!! Pinky Street...

The mathematical aspects of Japanese grammar, Japan and its environment, and ways to fluster a Japanese person

A show I like a lot is NHK's Eigo de Shaberanaito ("I must say it in English"), which helps motivate Japanese learners of English by, say, showing actresses with no special language ability taking on difficult challenges like interviewing famous Hollywood stars who visit Japan. In last night's episode, a Japanese fan asked Patrick, the token gaijin-who-can-speak-Japanese- really-well you see on a lot of television shows, how he learned to speak the language so well. His answer was that, to him, Japanese was a very "formulaic" language, with a simple sentence structure that's straightforward and "markers" for the various parts of the sentence, such as the subject (wa, in Japanese は), the object (o, を), the predicate (ni, に), and so on. I agreed with this statement 100% -- the grammar of Japanese is almost mathematical in its directness, and from my very first year at SDSU I found it a pleasant challenge, even taking into account the parts of sentences that get omitted because everyone understands that information already. Something that helped me a lot in the beginning was memorizing a particular sentence then "swapping out" the subject, object, etc. with other words, until I had internalized it.

Japan is truly the land of contradictions, and sometimes it seems impossible to know the real Japan. Take the issue of the environment, for example. On the one hand, Japan is an ultra-industrialized country that has sacrificed a huge portion of its limited land mass to the twin Gods of Asphalt and Conrete, covering much of the country with roads and dams and Shinkansen tracks. An over-reliance on public works to stimulate the economy has led to a staggering amount of waste, with many projects of dubious benefit, such as mummifying the sides of mountains with concrete to guard against possible rockslides. When you point out that Japan has caused harm to its environment, the argument is made that the country's large population -- 1/2 that of the U.S., crammed into 1/25 the space, or even less if you take away all the uninhabitable mountain areas -- makes it impossible for Japan to be as concerned with environmental issues as the U.S. or Europe, and the inevitable Japanese mantra shigata ga nai (it can't be helped) is trotted out. And yet, there are many ways the Japanese show real vision when it comes to the environment. Gomi (garbage) is always separated into "burnable" and "non-burnable," with the former incinerated in high-tech facilities that burn the trash and trap most of the harmful gases that result -- and heat the local town's swimming pool at the same time. Cars are taxed annually on the sizes of their engines, with a gas-guzzling Toyota Crown owner paying around $800 per year while owners of fuel efficient small cars or hybrids pay a mere $30. Every few days a guy drives around our neighborhood calling for old newspapers to recycle, which he'll trade rolls of new toilet paper for. And when you go to the store to buy more Charmy Green dishwashing liquid, you have the choice between buying a regular bottle or a refill pack that costs slightly less and doesn't add to the gomi problem.

Want to know how to fluster a Japanese person? Ask them pronounce difficult English words, such as the word "jewelry," which twists L and R sounds in unnatural ways. Other words the J-List staff reports as being difficult are "McDonald's" (which takes six syllables to say in Japanese, Makudonarudo), "strawberry daiquiri" and that old standby, "election." There are two words for love in Japanese, too, and if you want to have some fun ask your Japanese friends what the difference between them is -- they'll stumble as they try to come up with a way to explain the difference. The two words are koi (恋, which usually describes romantic love) and ai (愛, a higher kind of love that is used for family or anyone who's very dear to you, or the steady, slow-burning love of marriage). Incidentally, these two words are combined into a compound word to make a general word for love, which is ren'ai (恋愛）.

The "top 20" links on the main J-List and JBOX.com pages are a good way to browse the most popular products we sell, allowing you to quickly see what other manga, DVD, magazine, photobook, toy, Japanese study and other items other J-List customers are buying that week. Now we've updated our scripts so that you get to see the top 50 products in each category, a great way to see the most popular products neatly organized for you. We also recommend hitting the "3 days update" link which makes it easy to browse items updated in the last 3 days only, so you can see what's new and updated at J-List!

I bought a new camera, the very nice Canon Ixy LI3 and the smallest one they make (almost the smallest camera sold in Japan). This camera purchase came about after I finally realized I hate my phone's camera, which had been significantly downgraded from the previous model, and I was tired of taking blurred photos with it. So readers who have requested that I post more pics, hopefully you will get more pics.

Wow, Mac technologies taking up two of the three icons. That's not bad. As a long time Mac user, it's not always been easy to take stupid manufacturers who take a generic product like an EIDE hard drive and then mark that it's only compatible with Windows. Come on, guys.

Home made Valentine's Day cake for me, yum! It's nice having an appreciative wife and daughter in the home.

Also, some really yummy homemade chocolates.

This is Hayami Mokomichi, pretty much the #1 heartthrob in Japan right now, something that is bound to happen if your name is weird like "Mokomichi." He adorns my wife's wall.

Valentine's Day and Chocolate in Japan, learning about Japan through "fighting five team" shows, and Japanese linguistic poverty

Tomorrow is Valentine's Day, and all throughout Japan men are looking forward to receiving the gift of chocolate from females around them, in keeping with the custom here. There are two kinds of chocolate a man can receive, the first of which is giri choco or "obligation chocolate." which female coworkers might give to males they work with because they feel it's expected of them. Then there's the stuff that we all really want to get, honmei choco or "true heart chocolate," hand-made chocolates, cakes or other treats from our wives, daughters or girlfriends which show their love and appreciation for us. Of course, when you are given a gift in Japan you always have to give something back (this is called o-kaeshi), and so Japan's marketers have created White Day on March 14, a day when men who received chocolate must give something back (often white chocolate or, if she's okay with it, sexy underwear).

There are many ways to approach an understanding of Japan -- through its anime, or JPOP music, or perhaps through Japanese television dramas, which are quite interesting. Another way you might enter into an exploration of Japan's pop culture is through the Super Sentai TV show series, the "fighting five team" shows in which color-coded heroes do battle with evil minions, invariably combining into a giant robot to finish off the giant monster-of- the-week in a big explosion at the end. Ever since creating Secret Sentai Goranger three decades ago, Toei has created a new series every year, making adjustments to the stories and characters along the way -- changing them to ninja or galactic police officers, for example. Since most every Japanese person watched these shows when they were small, you can ask them which "sentai generation" they belonged to. J-List's Daisuke and Tomo loved Electronic Team Denjiman (1980), while my wife was there for the original Goranger series (1975). I got to experience these shows alongside my son as he was growing up, too. He loved Emergency Rescue Team GoGo-V (1999) more than anything else, and it was a real eye-opening experience for him when we got a tape of Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue (the U.S. version of the same series) and got to see the fire engine that transformed into a robot to do that corny "ladder punch" in English. I'll never forget the last episode of Time Ranger, when the characters took their Time Robo back in "time" to visit all the past five-team shows. The Super Sentai series has links to other shows, of course, such as the venerable Kamen Rider (Masked Rider) and anime classics like Science Ninja Team Gatchaman and Voltron.

One of the curses of the Japanese is their unique kana-based phonetic system that breaks every sound down into consonant+vowel or vowel-only syllables, which leads to Japanese being very phonetically impoverished and is the reason why Japanese often have thick accents when speaking English. One of the simplest words to you or I is probably the word the, yet the closest you can come to this pronunciation in the katakana writing system is za -- the dental fricative sound is quite alien to the Japanese vocal system. The Japanese Ministry of Education has recently started teaching English in elementary schools, but since there aren't enough native English teachers in Japan, the special classes are being taught by my daughter's normal homeroom teacher. The kids had to learn to sing Puff the Magic Dragon by writing katakana characters over the English lyrics, which came out as Pafu, za majikku doragon, livedo by za shee... Fortunately, my bilingual daughter was there to help them with the pronunciation, and she was a big hit.

J-List carries the amazing DVDs of Yulia Nova, an amazing Russian model who was discovered by Japanese photographer Satoshi Kizu and became a huge success here in Japan, as well as across the Internet, where her amazing body and matching charm made her a hit on the Internet. J-List carries all of Yulia Nova's DVD releases, and just for you, we've lowered the price of the first three DVDs to just $19.95 each, making this a great chance for you to pick up her first three discs and experience her loveliness.

This year's Meat Day celebration in Japan, my lust for American cell phones, and the meaning of "recycle" in Japan

The Japanese often play with numbers in interesting ways, converting the numerals into sounds to make messages. Through a phonetic system I still don't understand completely, the number 084 can be read ohayo (good morning), 39 can be san kyu (which sounds like the English word "thank you"), and 4649 can be yoroshiku (pleased to meet you). Yesterday was February 9th, and since the numbers 2 and 9 can be read niku (which means "meat" in Japanese), butcher shops across Japan have decided to label the day as Meat Day, a special day to celebrate meat in all its many forms. February 9th is also my wife's birthday, and rather than getting the big plate o' sushi that we usually get on birthdays, we decided to head out for some yakiniku, a fun category of restaurant in which everyone sits around a grill built into your table and cooks meat and vegetables over a flame. Yakiniku (which just means "cooked meat") is a traditional Korean barbecue meal, slightly customized to Japanese tastes of course, and in addition to various kind of beef, chicken and vegetables, you can order kimchee and various Korean favorites. As with other Japanese dishes like sukiyaki or chanko-nabe (both basically pots of food you cook in the middle of a table, with everyone taking what they want to eat out), eating your dinner as a family together is one of the most enjoyable aspects of yakiniku.

Well, the unthinkable has happened: I'm starting to feel envious of cell phone users in the U.S. Oh, Japan still leads the design wars when it comes to making thin, stylish phones with cool 3G features like high-speed Internet, GPS, 3.2 megapixel cameras and even a phone with a 4 GB hard drive for listening to tunes. However, more and more I find myself looking at those cool Treo-type smart phones with those little keyboards and wish they sold things like that here. Part of the problem is that it's quite easy to enter Japanese text with a phone, since it's all syllable based -- entering arigatou （ありがとう） takes just five characters, which you enter by hitting the number keys (the 1 moves you through the A-I-U-E-O line, the 2 key is the KA-KI-KU-KE-KO line, and so on). Japanese who are used to keypad text entry can go very fast, and knowing Japan, somebody will have come up with a standardized test for fast and accurate typing using this method. Entering English text on a keypad is hell, though, and it takes several minutes just to peck out a simple sentence. Since there's little demand for phones with Blackberry-like features here, there isn't a single such device on the market in Japan, meaning that if I want get some email done out of the office, I have to bring my whole Powerbook with me.

One category of business that really took off over the past decade is the "recycle shop," Japanese parlance for a shop that buys stuff that people don't need anymore, cleans it up, and sells it for a profit. Today, everything from rice cookers to washing machines to skis to console games are bought and sold in Japan's new retail underground. The most successful of these stores is BookOff, a chain of used book stores that has hundreds locations in Japan. His shops include spin-off brands such as ToyOff (they sell "almost new" children's toys), PetOff (used stuff for your pet), and the very oddly named HardOff (used computer hardware and electronics). The other day I was eating Indian curry and noticed a store across the street called Golf Partner, a similar chain that took the "recycling" approach to selling golf clubs, allowing golf fans to buy used clubs cheaply. They seem to be doing well -- they have a national network of stores and promise to be able to search for any type of club from any manufacturer.

Among the many unique products J-List brings you are Comic AG, a super magazine of English-translated "H manga" that comes out about every two weeks. Each issue overflows with 80 pages of manga from top Japanese artists like Tohru Nishimaki, Fujio Okamoto and Yumisuke Kotoyoshi. While we have a huge selection of back issues, we're running low on some of the past issues like vol. 8-12, and when they're gone they won't be available again. Why not browse our selection of Comic AG issues, or go for a regular subscription?

Explore a new side of Japan with the unique PC dating-sim games that J-List sells, a great blend of story, characters and "H" done as only the Japanese could. With game concepts ranging from the hilarious (X-Change series) to the dramatic (Kana My Sister, who is dying of a terrible disease) to explorations of various interests like maid cosplay (I would have to recommend Little My Maid, a favorite of mine). Since the games all have multiple endings you can play agan and again and get a new ending each time, as you try to find all the endings and graphics in each game. Browse our incredible line-up of our "H" games now!

History and our "national personality," famous Japanese of the world stage, and putting dogs to sleep in Japan

History is in all of us, and each nation has its own unique quirks or features that come about as a result of its own past. For the Japanese, the arrival of Perry's black ships in 1853 brought them face-to-face with the fact that Japan couldn't stand against nations like the United States and Great Britain. After the "respect the Emperor and expel the foreign barbarians" revolution that ejected the last Tokugawa Shogun in favor of a government formed around the Emperor (which "restored" the Emperor to power, hence the term Meiji Restoration), the country underwent an unprecedented crash program of modernization, retiring the old system of feudal domains (han) for a modern prefectural system based on that of France and introducing education to the people. One of the forces driving this was Japan's desire to be seen in a positive light by foreigners from the powerful countries of the West, and today, the Japanese are still very concerned about how they appear to gaijin (usually translated as "foreigner," although a more accurate translation of the term would be "outsider"). Many large-scale public works, such as the first Shinkansen line, seem to be created to coincide with international events like the Olympics, when foreigners would visit Japan in large numbers and "oo and ah" over their technical achievements. It's like Japan is still trying to prove to the West that they've left the backwards feudal nation they were 150 years ago behind.

This tendency to be concerned with the opinions of the International Community manifests itself in many interesting ways. For one thing, the Japanese love nothing more than to have one of their own number recognized internationally. From writers like Kawabata and Mishima to directors like Kurosawa and Miyazaki and the many Japanese athletes who have made names for themselves abroad, the Japanese are always tickled when a local boy makes good. One of the most respected Japanese today is Etsuro Soto, one of two main sculptors working on the Sagrada Famila cathedral in Barcelona, Spain, which gives people here enormous pride. Another Japanese active on the world stage is Ken Okuyama, one of the main designers at Ferrari and the lead force behind the Enzo, who has won design awards for his creations, to the great happiness of Japanese.

Every country is different, and I bump into these little differences just about every day in Japan. Our family dog Chibi passed away last week, but a few months before I remember having a discussion about him with my wife's family. Although he was old, Chibi was still quite genki (a word that can mean many things, from "I'm fine" to "cheerful" to "energetic," but in this case "healthy"). But if Chibi were to really get sick, so that he were in pain, I asked, would we have him put to sleep? The room suddenly got very quiet -- apparently this is one of those topics you just don't bring up in Japan, much like estate planning for people before they die or how a person who's last name means "the rice field by the mountain" can actually believe his ancestors were samurai. Chibi is happy to be alive, I was told, and we would never think of interfering with the number of his days by ending them early. In this, I sensed an incredible respect for life, although the issue of euthanasia for a beloved pet in pain is certainly a difficult question.

More random pics from my Flickr account. These are the buttons that call waitresses to your table in restaurants. WHY??? do they not have this in the U.S.?

Hanging out in a bookstore. The latest Mazda fun book.

Beat Takeshi, who is really quite famous (it must be all those fans of Johnny Mnemonic), has a new book out

The #1 busybody in Japan, this is (sort of) fortune-teller Kazuko Hosoki, who is on TV five nights a week.

Cool clothes from a "frea market."