Japan and "acting your age," all about Japanese seaweed, and the official dictionary of Japan

I've written before about how the "eyes of others" (hito no me) can be a strong force in keeping Japanese people pretty much on the same wavelength, which can make them appear very homogeneous when seen from the outside. The desire to avoid being judged negatively by the people around you is present in all of us, of course -- "frown power" has been used effectively against KKK members in the U.S. -- but Japan seems to carry it to an art form. One of the biggest unwritten rules in Japanese society seems to be "act your age," and in all things, individuals should do what is expected of them based on their current stage of life. If you go to a Japanese university, you'll likely see a lot of students between the ages of 18-23, but it'd be somewhat rare for, say, someone in their thirties to be attending a four-year university in Japan. This wasn't the case at all when I went to SDSU -- there were people of all ages and backgrounds studying together, including an older woman in my Japanese class who was "restarting" her life after a divorce. Japanese men and women who are unmarried late in life also seem to be in violation of these subtle social rules, earning them the cheerful title of makeinu (mah-KAY EE-noo, meaning "loser dogs"), usually applied to women but sometimes to men as well. When the time came to choose the color for our new car, I wanted to go with white since I liked the way it looked, but my wife was adamant that we had to choose a color that was more jimi (plain). Choosing white, she reasoned, would make us look like thirtysomethings who were trying to pretend they were still in their twenties, driving a car that was too flashy. I acquiesced, and now we have a car that's "sparkling gold mica" which is supposedly plainer and more boring than white, for some reason I can't fathom.

Japan is an island nation that's heavily dependant on the sea, and the sea is very imporant to people here -- there's even a Japanese holiday honoring the sea, Umi no Hi (Sea Day). Japanese get a lot of their food from the sea in many forms including fish, which is served broiled, stewed in miso sauce, or cut as sashimi or sushi. Another staple the Japanese rely on are assorted forms of seaweed. The name "seaweed" isn't a very flattening term for the various plants that are cultivated in the ocean, and as you might expect, there are many names for different types of seaweed consumed in Japan. Among the most common are nori (the dark green seaweed that's used with many types of sushi, and which covers the outside of an onigiri rice ball); wakame (WAH-KAH-meh, which you often see in miso soup); and kombu (used to flavor soup stocks and sometimes given as gifts in formal settings). Recently there's been a lot of attention paid to the health benefits of eating seaweed, which includes lowering of blood pressure. The basic breakfast in the U.S. might be a bowl of Corn Flakes, but in Japan, it's white rice with nori seaweed and maybe some kimchi (Korean pickled cabbage, yum).

The "most official" dictionary of the English language is considered to be the Oxford English Dictionary, a very scholarly lexicon that provides the definitions and etymology of 300,000 English words. The Japanese version of this is the Koujien, a massive 3000 page dictionary that is seen by Japanese as the "official" store of words on the Japanese language. We take dictionaries for granted today, of course, but part of the process of Japan's modernizing during the Meiji Era (1868-1912) included coming to terms with the Japanese language as a "proper" language, and for that there needed to be dictionaries just like they had in the West. One effective way to learn Japanese is to make yourself use a Japanese-Japanese dictionary rather than a J-E one, which forces you to think about the definition of words in Japanese. The popular Wordtank dictionaries that J-List sells include full editions of the Koujien for just this purpose.

J-List sells many unique things from Japan, including delicious snacks like Pocky, Melty Kiss and Japan Kit Kat. Unfortunately, it's so hot and humid during the summer that we have to remove all chocolate products from the site to keep them from turning to chocolate mud ("melty kiss" indeed). If there some delicious chocolate item on the site that you've been wanting to try -- maybe that scrumptious dual-layered Rich Fran from Meiji, or the new Kit Kat Baby -- this is your official wake-up call, as the chocolate items will be disappearing from J-List at a rather fast pace over the coming weeks.

J-List brings you our unique line of wacky Japanese T-shirts, with amusing and aesthetically beautiful kanji messages, and we've got a new shirt for you to day. Although McDonald's is quite common in Japan, the original "fast food" here isn't the hamburger but something more traditional: beef bowl, called gyudon, basically a bowl of white rice with flavored beef on top that can be gobbled down in a very short time. The most famous chain of beef bowl eateries is Yoshinoya, with over 1000 restaurants in Japan and more in the U.S. and Asia. Our new shirt is the perfect parody of this company's well-known corporate logo, because we've replaced the name Yoshinoya with "Yokozuna," which is the name of the highest rank in Sumo wrestling, Grand Champion. It's both pleasing to look at for its aesthetic design and a great joke that will get chuckles from any Japanese who see it. Available in size S through 3XL.

Just some random images, sorry for the lack of cohesion. Here's my iMac running Windows -- pretty spiffy. I have to say, this box is really sweet -- faster at many things than my G5 quad, can be a PC and a Mac, is very quiet, has that remote and Front Row. I think I'm ni "nerdvanna."

Various flavors of soft-serve ice cream, or as the Japanese call it, "soft cream." Would you like azuki bean, or maybe matcha?

Or, would you like to challenge yourself to Black Sesame Seed ice cream?

Driving in our MPV with the navi feature. There sure are a lot of Nazis in our city! (Of course, the swastika mark denotes Shinto shrines here.)

Good, refreshing green tea. I am of the mind that they should sell bottled green tea in the U.S. without sweetener. Has anyone seen this? Every time I go to Trader Joe's (a god-like supermarket, if you don't know what it is) I see green tea, and it's got honey in it.

The "eyes of others" as a social engine, interesting new directions for 7-11 in Japan, and fun with Japanese words part XXVI

One of the engines that drives Japanese society and makes Japanese people the way they are is called hito no me (HEE-toh no meh), which translates as "the eyes of others." In all that you do in Japan, there is the sense that you're being watched by everyone around you, and that if you stray too far outside the invisible lines of what is acceptable, you'll be judged harshly by your neighbors. This tendency to be concerned with appearances is a big part of daily life here, and it's part of the reason why Japan can seem a very homogenous place when viewed from the outside. In Japan, you throw your garbage out on set days, and knowing what kind of trash is okay to put out on any given day can require a Masters Degree in Trashology. But if you don't follow the rules and put exactly the right trash out that morning (not, by the way, the night before, even if you're a gaijin who works til 11 pm at an English school and prefers to sleep til noon), you'll suffer the ire of the ever-watching people around you, which subtly causes you to conform in ways that no threat of punishment could. Since most people in Japan are considerably thinner than they are in the States (at 100 kg, I am gargantuan for Japan, and have been asked if I was a professional wrestler), there is always that pressure to conform to the others around me and lose weight -- which is a good thing of course, if it improves health. In the U.S., we try to value adversity and individuality, and if we saw someone walking under an umbrella even though it wasn't raining outside, we might chuckle and say that he dances to his own tune. But in Japan there's less chance that doing something that no one else is doing will be viewed in a favorable light.

I think I found studying Japanese at SDSU enjoyable because it was so different from English -- there were so many linguistic concepts that didn't exist in my native language, which sometimes made constructing sentences easier in Japanese (no messing with past participle and present perfect tense, as they don't exist), and sometimes more challenging. One group of intriguing expressions that fall into the latter group are "repeating phrases" the are pregnant with meaning. The phrase soro soro adds the idea that the time for something has come to a sentence (e.g. soro soro ikimasho, "Let's go (because it's time we should be going)"). Another similar phrase is waza waza, meaning "to go to all the trouble" (waza waza motte kite kurete arigato, "Thanks for going out of your way to bring it to me"). If you have a sparkling new car, it's pika pika (pee-KA pee-KA, gleaming with newness), but if you don't take care of it, it'll be boro boro (old and rusty). These descriptive repeating words get blended with English, too, with words like rabu rabu (love-love, describing a couple that is very much in love), and ero ero (which describes most males I know, similar in meaning to ecchi).

As the Japanese economy limps on, some companies are having to reinvent themselves to survive, and one such company is the beleaguered Ito Yokado group. Their department stores has fallen on hard times, but the chain of 7-11 convenience stores that they own is still doing well, so the company decided to reorganize their whole group under the name "7&i Holdings," with a revamped 7-11 logo. Now while driving through our city we can see normal 7-11 convenience stores here and there, and one department store with the same logo, like a giant 5-story version of 7-11 that happens to sell clothes and furniture. The company also operates Denny's restaurants in Japan, and sure enough, these have all been "re-branded" with the new logo. While the food in Denny's in Japan is pretty good (they lack the 800-calorie strawberry shakes that they sell in the States, though), having a 7-11 sign stuck on the side of a restaurant can really make you think about food and we perceive it.

Here's the Ito Yokado department store in Maebashi, with its spiffy new 7-11 logo.

And their Denny's/7-11 logo.

Denny's in Japan is all about washoku (Japanese style food), and there's no Big Mac clone, no giant thick shake (with an extra stainless steel cup in case you didn't get enough the first time), no Grand Slam or breakfast menu.

The miso soup is good at Denny's ni Japan. Much better than the non-existent miso soup at Denny's in the U.S. And you know, if you can see from this pic, these are the coolest, most carefully carved balsa-wood chopsticks I've used in a long time.

The true bellweather for a restaurant is how good its ice coffee is, and Denny's was really good, right up there with Kizoku no Mori and Silk Road, two local restaurants whose ice coffee we revere.

Modern Japanese problems and "Amakudari," politeness in Japan, and when to show reflection for something

First of all, the J-List website was down for a few hours on Friday night due to a server glitch, which we solved by switching in a new machine. We're very sorry for the inconvenience if you were trying to use the site during that time window.

All modern democracies face various problems, including how to deal with aging populations, how to manage fiscal resources to provide the maximum benefit to the public, and so on. A major problem in Japan today is amakudari, which literally means "descending from heaven" and describes the tradition of high-ranking government bureaucrats retiring from public service then entering the employment of companies in industries they used to regulate, trading their name and kone (personal connections) in exchange for a high salary. There's a government-mandated two-year waiting period before outgoing ministry officials can work in the private sector, so the officials promote the creation of "special corporations" （特別法人） to fill various needs, for example building a beautiful glass-and-steel facility to provide services for the elderly in a rural part of the country (whether it's really needed or not). When the official retires, he can work at this "special corporation," whose finances come from the public purse but whose expenditures are almost completely free of outside inspection, then move on to his high-paying private industry job when his two-year waiting period is over. Japanese taxpayers are rightly upset by both the massive wasting of their tax dollars as well as the inability of Japan's politicians to tackle this huge problem.

Japan is a country that believes in getting along harmoniously -- a good idea, considering that they have half the population of the U.S. crammed into an area the size of New Mexico, if you go by habitable land. The Japanese have evolved a system of politeness that acts as a guide in many formal and business and some day-to-day situations, which consists of two parts. The first is that you should act in a humble way, keeping strong opinions to yourself in certain situations and deflecting praise others might direct at you away from yourself ("no, this cake I baked isn't delicious at all"). You then raise up certain others to a higher position than you -- say, someone you're doing business with, a customer in your shop, or a guest in your home -- with special language, called "exalting" speech. Certain common phrases, like irasshaimase (ee-RAH-SHAI-mah-say, meaning "welcome"), which is what employees in a businss say to customers as they come in, are based on this formal system of politeness. Of course, Japan isn't always such a well-mannered place, and you can verify this by going to a supermarket and watching the middle-aged women beat each other for the last tray of sashimi, but by and large, politeness plays a big part of getting along in Japan.

Related to the idea that humility is a good trait for people to have is the concept of hansei, which can be translated as reflection, introspection, and contemplation. Parents strive to bring their kids up so that they are able to honestly reflect on their mistakes, and the Japanese version of being taken out to the woodshed is to be made to sit seiza style (kneeling while sitting on your feet) for one hour and reflect on what you did wrong. I received a lesson in hansei soon after I came to Japan. I was riding my mountain bike (it's a requirement of the Geneva Convention that all gaijin in Japan ride a mountain bike) when suddenly an elderly woman scrambled out in front of me. She had been looking for cars, not bicycles, and didn't see me at all, which resulted in me crashing into her and careening over the handlebars. An ambulance came to take her to a hospital so she could be checked out, and the police came to make an official report. I remember being surprised when they immediately told me that the accident was completely my fault -- I figured that a collision between a bicycle and a pedestrian would be something like 50-50, since neither is an automobile. When I asked about this, the policeman got angry with me, and I realized that I had failed to show the proper attitude of reflection and concern for the woman I'd hit that was called for in a situation like that. Fortunately, the woman was fine, and I learned something about how to get along in Japan.

J-List loves to bring you things from Japan you can't find anywhere else, and one thing we love to sell are wacky J-Snacks. This year Nestle brought out a limited edition Green Tea Kit Kat made with Uji Cha, a delicious variety of green tea grown near Kyoto. While the deluxe-sized package containing 17 individually wrapped Kit Kats is great for keeping in your desk or putting in a bowl for everyone at work, it might be a bit much for those who just want to see what they taste like. Well, we've got a new Green Tea Kit Kat Half Set, with a more manageable eight individually wrapped packs of Kit Kat at a reduced price. Enjoy!

Traffic safety week, things you have to get used to in Japan, and all about the Yakuza

Japan has one of the lowest birthrates of any modern nation, with just 1.38 children born per couple, which will increasingly make Japanese people a rare commodity in the years to come. It is perhaps in this spirit of preserving every person they can that the Japanese national police agency is holding this year's Spring Traffic Safety Week, a time of increased police presence on the streets and general awareness of the importance of traffic safety. Everywhere you go you see flags promoting "safety driving" (sic) and creative thinking about ways to reduce traffic accidents and deaths. Kids in school get visits from the designated safety officer, who talks to them about how to make sure cars see them while walking home from school and how important seat belts are. Traffic Safety Week, which is also held in the fall, is quite an event, and various volunteer groups like the Lions Club, the Japan Rotary Club and the Girl Scouts all hold various related events.

Like most countries, Japan has its unsavory elements, including organized crime. Japan's version of the Italian mafia are the yakuza (YAH-koo-za), a name which literally means "8 9 3" and refers to a losing hand in a traditional Japanese card game. The yakuza have almost four hundred years of history dating from the Edo Period, when the nation was closed off to outside influence and able to grow free of the wars that had plagued previous eras. While yakuza have been seen as defenders of the weak in popular lore, in reality they're very smart criminals with excellent organizational skills who operate various businesses, from illegal high-interest loans to shady drinking establishments in Tokyo's Kabuki-cho district where simply going in can expose you to an exorbitant "sit down charge." Yakuza are famous for their incredible full-body tattoos, a popular art form in Japan, and since public baths are a favorite spot for both yakuza types and yours truly I've seen my share of these, even though virtually every public bath has a "no tattoos allowed" sign up. Although yakuza are gangsters, they're usually very polite, and it's considered good form for a well-connected person to have a few yakuza friends, just in case. Yakuza are often associated with "uyoku" (oo-YO-koo), Japan's famously loud right-wingers who drive around in huge trucks blasting World War II era songs and, occasionally, the theme from the classic anime Space Cruiser Yamato (it's always fun as an "enemy" American to sing along with them and watch the expressions on their faces). Once I was talking with a tattooed yakuza friend after a bath, and he asked me to teach his kids English once a week. I declined, but that would be been an experience worth blogging about...

If you ever come live in Japan, there are some fundamental things you need to get used to. First of all, if you're from a country that uses the English system of measurements, you'll need to get comfortable with centimeters, kilometers, and kilograms -- and before long you'll be annoying your friends back home by using the Metric system on them. Next, you'll have to get used to the Japanese era name system, which basically assigns a name to the reign of each Emperor (this year is Heisei 18, the 18th year of the current Emperor, Akihito). Sure, everyone knows the Western calendar, but on a day-to-day basis, it's actually more common to reference years using the traditional Japanese system -- for example, I was born in Showa 43, came to Japan in Heisei 3, got married in Heisei 5, and we started J-List in Heisei 8. Getting used to money can be a pain, too, since Japanese use the Chinese numbering system that's based on the unit of 10,000 (1 mahn), rather than 1,000 as in the West. While it's certainly possible to laboriously convert, say, 10 mahn to 100,000 every time you talk, before long you'll probably find yourself comfortable with the Japanese system.

J-List offers many ways for people interested in learning the Japanese language, from flashcards to kanji practice notebooks to Japanese report paper. We have a great announcement for you: the return of Nihongo Journal, the excellent monthly magazine dedicated to serious students of Japanese. Each 126 page magazine is loaded with articles, kanji and vocabulary building exercises, and features content in English, Korean and Chinese. Best of all, you get the audio CD with each issue, which helps you learn to recognize spoken Japanese (highly recommended for people not lucky enough to live here like us). We have the January 2006 issue on the site now!

More fun at convenience stores. These are chocolate covered corn puffs. Yech!

Or would you like to go with coffee flavored marshmallows?

I've written before about vinegar and how Japanese will drink a glass after eating (it's very healthy, supposedly). Here's a packaged product you can buy: honey sweetened kurozu ("black vinegar").

A bug in our apartment already. I guess winter must be over.

I've finally finished reading Touch and Miyuki, two classic manga by the famous Mitsuru Adachi, who happens to be from our city (Isesaki). Both stories were excellent, although the ending to Miyuki really bowled me over (I won't talk about it here since there might be fans out there -- I mean, it is being fan-subbed).

The tradition of sitting on the floor in Japan, differences in business culture, and using non sequitors in Japanese

One tradition every foreigner living in Japan must come to terms with is sitting on the floor. The Japanese do a lot of floor sitting, and even the most modern house will probably have at least one traditional Japanese-style room with tatami mats and a low table that you use while sitting or kneeling in seiza style. My house is a two-story home with my Japanese wife's parents living on the first floor and all of us living upstairs. Whenever we're downstairs we sit around a low table with a heater inside called a kotatsu, sitting on little cusions called zabuton (which literally means "sitting futon"). Of course, it's not really all that comfortable to sit on the floor for long periods of time, and my wife and I are much happier upstairs in our Western-style living room with normal sofa and dining table.

Every country is different, and companies trying to do business in a new place have to change their strategy to fit local customs and expectations. 1992 was a great year for foreigners living in our prefecture -- the Subway sandwich chain, which was expanding into Japan at the time, had discovered our city and decided to put a store in. This was back in the days when the only taste of "back home" was McDonald's, and it was a major coup if a person could score some imported Doritos from an expensive department store. So the entire gaijin population of our city flocked to enjoy the novelty of eating Subway sandwiches in Japan, and everyone was happy for a while. Unfortunately the company had made a miscalculation: they had located their restaurant near the local university, which is no doubt where you put a Subway if you're in the U.S. In a country like Japan, though, it makes much more sense to locate a business across the street from train stations, where you can benefit both from increased visibility and plenty of foot traffic. Since the local university was far from the heart of the city, our precious Subway had a hard time getting enough customers and closed its doors less than a year later.

Asian students of English as a Second Language get a lot of flack for answering "yes" to questions even though they didn't understand what had just been said to them, but I can totally understand where they're coming from. Learning how to "fake" understanding in certain situations is an important part of learning a foreign language and interfacing socially with people from other countries. One strategy for communication that's used by Japanese when speaking English (and by me at times, in Japanese), is the non sequitur, a reply that can be used as a response to just about any question, including questions you might not have understood. Back in my bachelor days, I went to a live orchestra performance and was surprised to hear that the organizers had "randomly" chosen three people from the audience to get up and conduct the orchestra: a cute old woman, a little girl, and funny American who happened to speak Japanese, namely me. I got up on the conductors podium, trying to ignore the hundreds of people with their eyes focused on me, and lead the Maebashi Philharmonic Orchestra in the first few bars of Beethoven's 5th. I only got a little ways into the music, because my total lack of timing caused the musicians to ground to a halt soon after they started. When I was done, the MC asked me some questions about where I was from, how I liked my first time conducting an orchestra, and...something else, that I didn't happen to catch. Rather than embarrass myself in front of so many people by asking the MC to repeat herself, I gave her a very generic answer: So desu ne, which literally means "yes, that's so" but in practice, doesn't really mean anything at all (so it fit the bill perfectly).

We've got a wacky new T-shirt for you today, a parody of the famous ESRB rating logo for video games that rates the wearer as "Rated H" and warns others to stay away from this "very dangerous person." A really fun design that will bring many laughs, with another warning on the back that you are "extremely ecchi" and "supremely sukebe" -- great because people who get the joke will laugh, while everyone else won't know what the shirt means (always nice).

Do you love anime? If so, then why not subscribe the popular anime magazines direct from Japan, like Newtype, Animage and Megami Magazine through J-List's revolving magazine subscription system? These magazines are great for keeping your finger on the pulse of the Japanese industry and following the most popular shows and characters. And these issues are loaded with color pictures, posters and other fun stuff, even if you can't read Japanese. Best of all, all our subscriptions are month-to-month, and you can switch to other magazines or end a subscription at any time. You can also opt for credit card, check or money order or Paypal payments.

More pictures from Kusatsu. This is a cool old omiyageya-san (gift shop).

Get ready for your closs-up.

This is the official logo of the Barber's Association of Japan, the industry group that all barbers belong to. It's kind of cool and old-skool.

This is one of the little hot springs places that they set up for people to go in and bathe. There are plenty of places that cost money, but these free ones are more fun.

This was another one of the free bath places. It was hotter than a demon's arse in there, so hot that I could barely stay in for 20 seconds. I hated to be the typical "gaijin who can't get in the bath because it's too hot" but there was nothing I could do.

The Japanese get a little happy about o-yu (hot water from a natural hot spring) and go on about how it cures arthritis, chills, muscle pain, and so on. This is an actual song about the water of Kusatsu, etched into the pavement.

I visited the Kusatsu branch of G-Collections to pick up some stock of bishoujo games. Psyche! This is just a store with the same name.

This is the car that was next to ours. I snapped a pic of their license in case they scratched our car or anything, since they were kind of rowdy and were parked very close to us.

Good bye, Kusatsu...

Spring vacation without kids, our trip to some hot hot springs, and all about Jidai Geki

It's spring vacation in Japan now, and rather than having the kids hanging around the house with nothing to do, we packed them up and shipped them off to someplace they could have more fun. My son is in Okinawa with some kids from his school, enjoying the sun and hopefully learning about the culture of the island (very different from mainland Japan). My daughter, meanwhile, is 8275 km away, in Auckland, New Zealand, with a group of kids and a tour guide from our city. I lived in New Zealand for a year in 1976, and have many fond memories of glow worms, One Tree Hill and Big Ben's Meat Pies. I hope she has fun there, too.

While we've got some time to ourselves with no kids (truly the Holy Grail for any married couple), my wife an I headed up into the mountains for some quality onsen ("own-sen"), Japan's traditional hot springs. Japan is a very volcanic place, with 10% of the world's 840 active volcanoes located here, and while this can be a bad thing when there are eruptions or earthquakes, it's certainly good for people who love bathing in natural hot springs (like me). There are many towns that are famous for their hot springs all around the country, but happily, our prefecture is home to Kusatsu Onsen, considered by many to be Nippon Ichi, the best in Japan. We had a nice time, roaming the streets of the town (which has been famous for 800 years, twice as long as there have been Europeans living in the New World), stopping to take a dip at the many town-operated free baths along the way. You can't go to a hot springs without eating some onsen manju, a kind of traditional cake with sweet beans inside that's served steamed -- it's delicious.

The world of jidai geki, or TV period dramas set in the era of the samurai, is an incredibly rich and complex one, and I've always thought that dramas about Japan's past fill roughly the same role for the Japanese as Shakespeare does for people in English-speaking countries. Japanese period dramas are incredibly popular, and there's one on most every night, either on Japan's public broadcasting channel NHK or one of the private networks. Just as there are many eras of Japanese history, there are different kinds of period drama, with highly dramatic and violent stories from the sengoku jidai ("warring states period" when different feudal lords sought to control the country) to semi-legendary stories from the more stable Edo Period, to stories about the turbulence experienced as Japan was forced open by Admiral Perry's Black Ships. Some of these dramas are fun stories about famous folk heroes with lots of swordplay, such as the popular Mito Komon, running for a mind-boggling 37 years without interruption. Over the years, there has always been a special class of jidai geki actors who distinguished themselves in this medium in the same way Laurence Olivier has in his various Shakespearean roles. Ken Matsudaira will always been remembered for his role as the Abarenbo Shogun, who loved to disguise himself as a commoner and roam the streets of Edo, and who could forget Katsu Shintaro as he original blind swordsman Zatoichi?

J-List makes a line of original "wacky Japanese T-shirts" and hoodies with fun messages in kanji, and we're very proud of how popular our creations have become with everyone who digs Japan. Our flagship T-shirt is the famous "Looking for a Japanese Girlfriend" design, which we were rather surprised to see featured in the current issue of Newsweek (April 3 issue, page 56). See a scan of the "Test your Geek Chic" here.

J-List sells many cool things from Japan, and one thing we love bringing people around the world are Japanese snacks. We sell hundreds of different kinds of unique Japanese snacks, going beyond the basics like Pocky (although we've got all flavors of that, too) to harder-to-find favorites like Melty Kiss, Morinaga Choco Ball, and the oddly-named Crunky and Asse. We also carry the amazing Japan-only flavors of Kit Kat, including the new Green Tea Kit Kat in deluxe sized packages. We're happy to bring you a new limited Kit Kat Spring Set, with samples of all the delicious Japan-only Kit Kat snacks made this year.

Heading out to Kusatsu in our new Mazda MPV.

I do think this is one of the best iPod-in-car setups I've seen. I can even pipe video to the front or rear monitors.

It was about a 3 hour drive. Because there were no kids this time, it seemed very quiet and peaceful.

This is the most famous part of Kusatsu, the Yubatake or "boiling water field."

A very beautiful scene. Of course, the air smells very strongly of sulfur.

Language reflects on culture, fun with kanji and English words, and the mysteries of April 1 in Japan

I've always thought that language both reflects culture and influences it, and part of the reason the French are so French or the British are the way they are comes from the language that they speak, and vice-versa. During my years of study, I've noticed that the Japanese language seems to be specially set up allow for the subtle nuances and indirectness that people here are famous for. First of all, it's common for various parts of a Japanese sentence to go unstated, and you might invite someone to go somewhere by only saying the verb "to go"-- Iku? -- with the who, what, where and other information assumed by both parties. When we write compositions in school we're taught to choose active over passive sentences -- "John said it" rather than "It was said by John." But Japanese uses passive voice quite often, since it's easy to create a sentence that carries all useful information but omits indicating who caused the action to take place (useful in work situations when you don't want to name the specific manager responsible for something). There are also phrases that don't really exist in English, such as "kimatta" ("it has been decided"), which describes with great finality that a decision has been made, and therefore, we all have to go along with it.

April 1 is right around the corner. Aside from its status as Shigatsu Baka (April Fool, a custom imported from the West during the occupation), April is an important time for a lot of people in Japan. First and foremost, April traditionally marks the start of the school year, and all throughout the country first graders will be timidly marching off to their first day of school while proud parents film the event with the latest Sony Handycam. April 1 is the start of the fiscal year for the nation, too, and it's customary for new laws to take effect on this date. Finally, April is the beginning of the new business year for many companies, and major firms like Toyota and IBM Japan hold large Company Entrance Ceremonies to officially welcome the new crop of employees into the company.

Every rule has an exception, and the Japanese writing system is riddled with so many exceptions, it's almost as complex as English. While the standard way to write Japanese is to use hiragana for basic words (words like "this" "is," and grammatical particles), kanji for words with definable meanings, and katakana for foreign loan words like "creap" (cream powder for your coffee) or "nice middle" (a handsome middle-aged man). Sometimes, however, katakana is substituted for hiragana in order stress a point, as we'd use bold or italics in English (this comes up in manga quite a lot). Also, there are some English words that have been in use in Japan for so long, they've gone and gotten kanji assigned to them, in violation of those neat-and-clean rules. Four examples of these somewhat archaic words are coffee, tobacco ("smoke straw," actually "smoke grass" but that's too hilarious to try to tell you with a straight face), kirishitan (the early Japanese Christians), and club.

Remember, J-List stocks the excellent Domo-kun products from NHK. The official spokes-monster of Japan's public broadcasting network, Domo-kun gets his name from the Japanese word domo, an all-purpose word that can mean thanks, hello, or just about anything else. From Domo-kun straps for your phone to Domo-kun pens to our most popular item, the Domo-kun plush from the "whenever I ... God kills a Domo-kun" graphic, we've got a great selection of rare items you can only find in Japan.

A note of caution: we're down to the last few sets of our popular Final Fantasy Potions, with only a dozen or so in stock. If you want to pick up a full set of these amazing collector's items, which come with beautiful blue glass potion bottle, different caps, foil-wrapped trading cards and protective boxes, order soon!

Had to go to Tokyo to get my son's passport renewed yesterday. The sakura were pretty, but weren't fully opened yet.

They were even blooming inside Ueno station (although I think this might have been fake).

There's a nice shrine near the government buildings, and we stopped by to pray for good luck.

Advertisement for a sale at a local department store.

Had Loco Moco for lunch. This is my favoriteist food in the world! It's a Hawaiian dish, basically teriyaki hamburg steak ("Salsbury Steak," whatever), with egg and other goodies over rice, that you mash up to eat.

Green, thanks.

The new Tokyo Tower, an experiment in conformity, and classics of Japanese literature

There's a perception that the Japanese are more conformist than people in Europe or the States. Leaving aside the question of whether someone who is into a form of "indies" subculture is in fact just choosing a more specialized group to conform to or not (no matter what country you're from), I will say that there are times when I've felt that the Japanese choose the comfortable path of doing what everyone else is doing a little more than we might back home. Some of the sillier fashion trends to come along here, like the 8" thick sneaker soles or the "pair look" boom of the late 80s (when every couple would dress in matching outfits while on a date) would not have happened without the pressure on people to follow the larger group. When I came to Japan in 1991, the idea of a Japanese person owning a piece of "used" clothing was unthinkable, but a few years later, the rise of a trend called ame-kaji (that's "American Casual" in case you were wondering) caused the used clothing market to take off -- and suddenly all the Japanese were wearing faded jeans that had belonged to American college students a few weeks before. For the past week I've been engaging in a little "conformity experiment" of my own, using a Bluetooth headset to talk to people on my cell phone -- something that's not done in Japan at all. I've been having fun, talking to "myself" while Japanese people gasp at me as they walk past, not realizing I'm on the phone. I'm feeling a lot of pressure to give in and hold my phone to my ear like everyone else, but I'll stick it out a few more weeks and see if I can't learn something more about human nature from it all.

Every country has a unique relationship with its own past as expressed in history and literature. In English, we all have to read the classics like Beowulf (written in Old English), the Canterbury Tales (Middle English), and of course plenty of Shakespeare (which is Modern English, even though some 11th graders struggling through Macbeth might not agree). Japanese students have to undertake the same studies, wading through famous works of Classical Japanese that are far removed from the language of modern-day Japan. Kanji entered the country along with Buddhism in the 8th century, and it was the first writing system the Japanese had ever known -- the mound-builders of past ages had no way to write down their history. Early Japanese works like the Kojiki, the first record of Japan's history, were written in kanbun, an archaic form of writing that assigned Japanese readings to written kanji. The Heian Period saw the creation of hiragana, a syllable-based writing system derived from kanji, and Murasaki Shikibu used it to pen the Tale of Genji, considered to be the world's first novel -- it's about as hard to read as Chaucer is for English speakers (i.e., really hard). To help bridge the gap and make the literature of the past more accessible, it's common for the stories to be recreated as educational manga, which can capture and hold the interest of young people much more effectively. The question of when Japanese entered its "modern" linguistic phase is a little dicey, but one answer might be the Meiji Restoration of 1868, when Japan started modernizing and introducing compulsory education. Still, I find that trying to read a Japanese newspaper from the World War II era is extremely difficult -- even just 60 years ago, the language had yet to be standardized officially, meaning that text might be printed horizontally from right to left rather than the more common left to write, and archaic versions of kanji were used randomly here and there, making it all very hard to read.

It seems that a Japanese city can't be complete until it has a big tower for tourists to visit and take pictures of. Virtually every major Japanese city has a big tower in its midst, to serve as a popular spot for visitors and couples out for a romantic late-night drive. Kyoto Tower resembles Seattle's Space Needle. Marine Tower in Yokohama was the largest lighthouse in the world when it was built in 1961. Osaka Tower was built in 1887, but was melted down to make tanks during World War II, and rebuilt it in the 1950's. But the most famous tower in Japan is Tokyo Tower, a 333 meter replica of the Eiffel Tower, built because the Japanese secretly wish they were part of Europe rather than Asia. An attractive icon located near Roppongi, Tokyo Tower serves many purposes, including being a popular tourist destination and "date spot," housing an aquarium underground, and broadcasting television and radio signals to Tokyo residents. Now it looks like there'll be a new tower on the block, amazingly to be called New Tokyo Tower, a massive 600 meter ziggurat that will blanket the Tokyo area with even more radio, television, and cell phone waves. Among its benefits will be enabling "Wanseg" ("1-Seg"), a new application of terrestrial digital broadcasting that will allow people to receive crystal clear TV on cell phones, laptops, or in their cars.

Fans of Kit Kat, we're got great news for you: a cool Spring Sampler Pack of Japanese Kit Kat that includes all the delicious flavors available this year, including the delicious Green Tea Kit Kat, Strawberry Kit Kat, French Bretagne Milk, and original Kit Kat by Nestle. Stock is limited so hurry! (Remember, we remove all chocolate items from the site during the summer months because of the high humidity in Japan.)

Funny English used in Japan, Japanese subject particles, and understanding culture through shoes

Perhaps more than any other people, the Japanese import words from other languages for their daily use, nearly always taking them from English. But after they've changed the words to conform to their unique sensibilities, what's left isn't always English that you or I could identify. First of all, long English words can be unwieldy in katakana, so they're often shortened to four syllables that encapsulate the core meaning, which is where words like risutora (corporate restructure, i.e. layoffs), sekuhara (sexual harassment in the workplace) and ganpura (Gundam plastic models) come from. Then there are words that the Japanese create because they don't know how silly they can sound to naive speakers. Some of these words include "fancy shop" (a store that sells cute character goods like Hello Kitty); "guts pose" (the manly pose an athlete might make); "car navi" (a GPS system for your car); "charm point" (a person's positive features); and "skinship" (the good skin-on-skin feeling of a father holding his baby in the bath). So when you come to Japan, you need to do more than learn Japanese -- you may need to learn some English, too.

Part of the reason I enjoyed learning Japanese in college is that the grammar and structure are so very different from English -- there was less potential for confusion than if I'd studied, say, French (or at least it seemed that way to me at the time). The word order of Japanese is subject-object-verb, compared with the subject-verb-object in English, which took some getting used to. Something that seems unique to the Japanese language is the existence of grammatical "particles" or verbal markers for parts of sentences, such as the object, conveniently o (as in sushi o taberu, to eat sushi); no, a marker for showing ownership or association (Keiko no okaasan, Keiko's mother); and ni, a particle showing direction (anata ni ageru, I will give it to you). Two of the more troublesome grammatical elements for students are wa and ga, which mark the topic and subject of a sentence, respectively, and which many students never seem to quite figure out on a conscious level -- in fact, I am one of them, even though I'm fluent in the langauge. Although the two are often interchangeable, wa is the wider subject of the sentence (often omitted), and ga acts like a "second subject" or object -- it's easy to think too much about it. A sentence that uses both would be watashi wa sushi ga suki desu, literally "As for me, I like sushi." Japanese people seldom know anything about their own grammar so if you want to confuse one, ask them to explain the difference between wa and ga. (Oh and by the way, this is a different wa than the wa (和) meaning harmony.)

One of the rules of Japanese cleanliness is that anything related to feet or shoes is kitanai (dirty, unclean), and shoes are always left at a special recessed area near the front door called the genkan. The custom of putting shoes near the front door can lead to some interesting social interaction that we couldn't conceive of in the States. For example, a genkan full of shoes is an immediate signal that a party is going on, and if a girlfriend drops by her boyfriend's apartment and sees a strange set of woman's shows there, she knows without going inside that he's fooling around. In Doushin - Same Heart, a dating-sim game that will be released in English soon, there's a sub-plot where one of the characters sees her sister's shoes in the genkan despite the fact that the lights in the house are off -- she immediately knows that her sister must be up in her room, and that something must be wrong.

Some shots of coming back from Karuizawa a couple weeks ago. My friend is into touring around Japan on his bike, therefore he has a copy of Touring Mapple. Incidentally, you've been in Japan too long when you can hear a word like "mapple" and not break out into hives.

One of the long-term problems about living in Japan is learning enough kanji to say, tour around the countyside with a map only in Japanese, becuase no English or bilingual map would be reliable enough. The solution is to just learn to read it all.

The snow was largely melted when we were up there two weeks ago. I'm sure it will all be gone this weekend. That's Mt. Asama by the way, the volcanoe that erupted lasat year.

Having some beer? Nothing goes better than peanuts & rice crackers and French Toast sticks.

Random shot of a poem by Mitsuo Aida. It says, "Happiness is always decided in your own heart." I really respect the work of Aida-san, who is one of the most famous calligraphers of postwar Japan and has done great things with using characters as poetic design elements.

A great day for Japanese baseball, all about the Cherry Blossom, and March construction season

Japan is ecstatic over its 10-6 win over Cuba, which allowed the country to clench the first-ever World Baseball Classic championship at Petco Stadium in my own home town of San Diego. All through the country Japanese stopped what they were doing to watch the game, and in Tokyo's Akihabara electronics district, all display TVs were tuned to watch while hundreds gathered to cheer. The victory was celebrated in all corners of the country, and the fervor got so heated there were some injuries among people lining up to buy copies of the newspaper proclaiming Japan's win. Watching it all on the news, I remember thinking that Japan needs more of this kind of positive national feedback to stay healthy as a people. Sometimes I think that Japan is too reserved, and when I look at my wife and her mother -- who have never shared an emotional embrace, even after my wife came back from years of studying in the U.S., since it's just not done here -- it seems to me that Japan needs more positive ways to show their emotions. Anyway, congratulations to the Japan team!

The national flower of Japan is the chrysanthemum, but anyone visiting the country could be forgiven for assuming that it was the cherry blossom, or sakura. At the beginning of spring each year the sakura bloom beautifully throughout Japan, and during that time, tens of thousands of people will descend on parks with sakura trees to engage in hanami, or flower viewing, basically an excuse to spread out a blanket with some friends and get drunk while sakura petals fall all around you. During this "season of the sakura," the Japanese news features daily "sakura reports," letting cherry blossom enthusiasts know the current condition of flowers in various parts of the country as the trees bloom from south to north. It all comes to a head as the flowers reach mankai, becoming fully opened and at their most beautiful. Yesterday marked the official opening of the first sakura in Tokyo, coming a full week earlier than most years. Flower viewing has been popular for centuries, beginning with nobles in the Nara period (710-784) and catching on with commoners in the subsequent centuries.

Today I had to drive across town, and it took me about an hour to get there due to all the traffic. It wasn't because of an accident, but instead a normal phenomenon found in Japan this month: the end-of-year road work, when government agencies hurry to use up their budgets before the Japanese fiscal year ends March 31. Japan is a country addicted to construction, and by law all car- and gasoline-related taxes must be used to build roads and only roads, even if there's no particular need for more roads this year. As a result, March always marks a huge increase in road work throughout the country, with no actual benefit visible to anyone. If Japan wants to devote so much of its budget process to construction, why don't they use it in ways that are more useful, like burying those ugly power lines underground, or bringing fast Internet to more parts of the country?

Bilingualism and "English wars" between my kids, the American-or-British question, and 4-kanji phrases

I've always been fascinated with the subject of bilingualism, of how the brain adapts to thinking in two languages, and I watch this process in my kids whenever I can. The other day I caught an interesting exchange between my son and daughter, who both speak both Japanese and English, but with different areas of expertise. For some reason, they were having a fight, and Rina (whose pronunciation of English is excellent) asked teasingly, "Kazuki, can you say the word 'perfect'?" This word, like "girl" "jewelry" and "It's the rich aroma and full body of Excella that wakes the morning all around the world" (from Meg Ryan's Nescafe commercial), seems to be difficult for Japanese to say, and my son has a complex about having a "katakana" accent when he speaks English. Kazuki knows a lot more vocabulary than his sister, though, and fired back, asking if she knew what "condensation" meant (a word he picked up in his science class). He scored a victory when she didn't know the word. I was having great fun eavesdropping on their "English wars."

When I was studying Japanese at SDSU, I enjoyed hunting down and learning a certain kind of phrase that exists in Japanese (and Chinese) called yomoji jukugo 四文字熟語 or four-character idiomatic compounds. Similar to the concept of idioms in English, these phrases are always written with four kanji characters, and Japanese people usually don't expect foreigners to know them, which makes them extra-fun to learn. The phrase happo bijin (八方美人, ha-POH BE-jeen) literally means "eight-direction beautiful person" and describes someone who tries to be liked by everyone but is trusted by no one. Next, nana-korobi ya-oki (七転八起, na-na koh-ROH-bee yah-OH-kee) could be translated as "fall down seven times, get up an eighth" and is similar to "if at first you don't succeed, try, try again." Jigo jitoku (自業自得, ji-GOH ji-TOH-koo) is written with kanji that mean "self-enterprise, self-profit," and the phrase corresponds to "you've made your bed, now sleep in it" or "it serves you right." One of the most famous 4-character compound words is the slogan of the Meiji Restoration, when pro-Emperor reformers worked to overthrow the Shogunate and "restore" the Emperor to power as a monarchy, sonno joi (尊王攘夷, sone-NOH JOH-ee), or "Respect the Emperor, expel the foreign barbarians" (just like our T-shirts). Finally, there's a word I like a lot, issho kenmei (一生懸命, ee-SHO KEN-mei), which literally means "risking your only life" and corresponds to "trying hard with all your might."

Almost all Japanese study six years of English by the time they're done with high school, but there's a question with no official answer: do they study American or British English? The Japanese have always had great respect for England, a brethren island nation with a strong culture, and have patterned much of their government after the U.K., right down to NHK, which is essentially a clone of the BBC. Still, the Japanese tend to study American pronunciation and spelling ("color" not "colour"), as a general rule, in part because of the long influence of the postwar occupation but also because of the "Hollywood factor" -- the cumulative effect of all those rented episodes of '24.' I've got a singer friend named Chaka who went to Australia and was told she had an "American" accent, which really surprised her, since she never thought much about what kind of English she was learning.

J-List is hiring! We have a full-time opening in our San Diego office that involves packing orders, working at anime conventions and assisting printing of T-shirts and hoodies. If you're in the San Diego area already and are interested in helping us spread our brand of Japanese pop culture to others, we hope you'll consider applying. For more information and an application, see this page.

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?