The link between North Korea and Japan, Japan's many seasons, and imitation being the sincerest form of flattery

The major link between North Korea and Japan is a cruise ship called the Mangyonbon-go, which makes regular trips between the ports of Wonsan in North Korea and Niigata here. In addition to being the most difficult-to-pronounce word according to a poll of newscasters (trying saying MAHN-gyon-bone-goh five times fast), the ship represents the only normalized link between the two countries, and for many Japanese of North Korean descent, the only way to journey back and visit relatives. The ship has caused trouble between the two countries because of concern that it's being used to funnel forbidden electronics from Japan back to the communist state. North Korea has a nationally-sponsored program of printing U.S. and Japanese currency, and also manufactures industrial-grade drugs to smuggle into Japan, which they use to fund their government and destabilize their enemies. There are concerns that the ship is being used to smuggle these items into the country, and every time the Mangyonbon-go makes a call into the port at Niigata, there's a huge flurry of negative news reports about potential problems with the ship's visits, especially with all the anger here over the kidnapping of Japanese citizens in the 1970s and 80s.

"You've been in Japan too long when you believe that the country only has four seasons." The Japanese are exceedingly proud of the fact that their country has four distinct seasons, compared with only two in the U.S. (or so people who have never been anywhere but California believe), and there are many customs designed to enjoy each seasons in its own unique way here. In reality, of course, there are about 12 seasons in Japan if you count the in-between ones, like sakura season, a brief week in early April when the cherry blossoms are so beautiful; rainy season in June, when it drizzles most every day; hayfever season, when Japan's policy of using one tree and only one tree in its national forestry program (the Japan Cedar, or sugi tree) causes massive problems for allergy sufferers throughout the country as the trees pollinate; and typhoon season, when massive Pacific storms batter the country every few days in September. A few weeks ago we had a bad bout of "Asian Dust," a strange seasonal phenomenon throughout the region where "yellow sand" (kousa, in Japanese, 黄砂) blows from China's Gobi Desert across Korea and Japan, dirtying our cars and creating various health problems. Sometimes I wish there were only four seasons in Japan...

They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and if so, the Japanese are very polite indeed. Due to the tendency for people here to look up to Europe and America as "higher" cultures than their own (which is known as seiyo suhai shugi, literally meaning "worship of the West-ism"), Japanese have a great tradition of copying good ideas they find abroad. You can see signs of Japan's fixation with the West in many places -- Tokyo Tower is a scale replica of the Eiffel Tower that they built just for the fun of it, after all. If you go to Chiba Prefecture, east of Tokyo, you can see Japan's version of the beautiful Dover Cliffs. There's a range of mountains called the Japan Alps, and in Tokyo's Shibuya area, a hill called Spain-zaka (Spanish Hill), named after the famous Spanish Steps in Rome. Japan has its own Academy Awards ceremony where Japanese directors and actors receive awards for Japanese films (not that there are that many made). Most recently I stumbled across the website of the Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, which names itself MoMAT, in imitation of MoMA in New York.

Remember that Mothers Day is not far away (May 14 this year), and J-List has plenty of unique ways to say "thanks" to your Mom. From cool traditional items for the home to the amazingly cute toys like Hidamari no Tami or the adorable head-nodding Unazukin -- remember, there's one of these that has "thank you" written right on it. We also have J-List gift certificates, a super way to send the gift of wacky things from Japan to anyone -- let her pick her own gift!

So, they have these limited edition cars, see, not unlike the Harley Davidson Limited Ford F-150. This is a car branded with Miki House, an annoyingly cute makers of children's toys.

I mean, cute culture is good, I'm all for it. But this is just awful...

Maybe it's a rip-off job or something, someone made the stickers themselves and pasted them on.

"The mild flavor, carefully prepared from the high quality milk, will enrich the taste of cuisine." For the record, the English word "the" is really hard for people from other countries to use.

Japan's train culture, all about rice and the Japanese, and the Japanese word "ne"

Japan is a very rail-centric place, and trains are a big part of life here. In big cities like Tokyo, trains and subways run everywhere you want to go, and many Tokyoites forego owning a car, especially faced with the prospect of spending $300-500 a month on a parking space for the vehicle. The largest railroad companies in Japan are the six Japan Railway ("JR") entities, which were created as private companies out of the wreckage of the old state-run National Railroad in a breakup not unlike AT&T. There are numerous other train lines operating in various parts of the country, run by companies that usually operate department stores and own baseball teams, for some reason I have yet to figure out. I have fond memories of traveling around Japan on the Youth 18 ticket, which lets you go anywhere you want on any JR line for around $20 -- a great way to see the country, as long as you don't mind riding the slow local trains. Japan's train network is a well-oiled machine, operating so efficiently that you never even think about it until something goes wrong. Something did go wrong yesterday, when construction crews working under the Yama-no-te line's tracks caused the tracks to become elevated, so JR shut down the entire line while they checked into the problem. The closing of this important train line, the loop line that runs around Tokyo, was a huge mess, and a whopping 320,000 people were unable to ride to their destinations for five hours.

You can't live in Japan without eating rice, the staple food of the Japanese, usually consumed with each meal. Rice is usually prepared in an automated rice cooker, a device that's as important to Japanese households as the refrigerator or television. Take a trip to a denki-ya (electronics store) and you'll see that many companies competing to bring the best rice cookers to market, from Mitsubishi to Sanyo to Zojirushi. Just as the Eskimos have more words for "snow" than the rest of us, there are quite a few words for rice, like uncooked rice (kome), unpolished rice (genmai), steamed rice (gohan, which also refers to all food), newly cultivated rice (shinmai, also used to refer to a new employee at an organization), and so on. The kanji for "rice" is one of the most basic ones and includes the characters for the numbers 88 inside it, a Buddhist concept that represents the 88 steps that go into each grain of rice. The essence of "living life as you should" seems to be to eat rice each day, and back when I was single and living in an apartment, I was often asked Chanto gohan taiteiru no? (Are you cooking rice for yourself properly?) -- i.e. was I making healthy food for myself, and not just eating cup ramen every night.

If you've paid attention while watching Japanese anime, you've probably picked up on the word ne. This is an interesting Japanese grammatical particle that usually goes on the ends of sentences and serves several purposes, mostly related to asking for confirmation of information or agreement with an opinion. Here are two examples:

Aisu kohii futatsu desu ne? Two glasses of ice coffee, is that right?
Kyou wa atsui desu ne. It's hot today, isn't it?

Other functions of the all-purpose Japanese particle ne include softening a sentence so its meaning it less harsh (Chotto furotimashita ne. You've gained a little weight, haven't you?); emphasizing what you want to say (Kondo chanto kiite kudasai, ne. Please listen closely next time, alright?); working as a pause in sentences; and to get the attention of the listener before saying something. Girls use ne more often than guys and with a higher intonation, so males should use the word with caution lest they appear effeminate.

We had a few problems with the website on Monday and Tuesday evenings, which caused products to disappear from the site for a couple hours (all categories reported "no products found"). We're very sorry about the interruption -- everything's working now, and hopefully the problem, a glitch in our server setup, will not come back.

J-List is hiring again in our San Diego location. We've got a job opening for a shipping clerk to fill web and wholesale orders, handle receiving of products, and so on. If you're interested in helping evangelize our brand of Japanese pop culture, we'd love to work with you. See here for details. (Unfortunately, we can only consider people currently in the San Diego area for this position.)

It was Easter last Sunday for us, even though we're well past the real date. I brought some Easter Egg decorations to share with the girl scouts here in Japan.

The eggs came out quite good, although I am not much of a teacher when it comes to these things.

I bought cheap baskets for the kids to decorate. My mother had also dutifully sent chocolates from the U.S. which I passed along.

The Hello Kitty stickers I had brought along were also quite popular.

We wanted to have an Easter Egg hunt, but Japanese aren't too big on putting food that you're going to eat on the ground (the eggs). So we had a Kit Kat hunt instead, and it was a big success.

Being more health-conscious in aging Japan, Japan's prefectural system, and what does "3LDK" mean

Japan as a nation is getting older, and is having to come to terms with this fact sooner than other countries. I've noticed a high awareness of the changes that are coming for Japan, whether it's companies talking about "barrier-free" products or every automobile maker promoting new wheelchair-friendly vehicles in their product catalogs. I caught an interesting show on TV the other night that basically submitted a panel of famous "talents" (a catch-all word meaning any actor, singer, model or comedian) to the grueling full-body check-up known as ningen dokku ("human dock"), which checked their entire bodies from head to toe for irregularities, including full MRI body scan. Then, different doctors came out to discuss various problems found with each person. Attractive model Yasu Megumi got by with some eating and stress-related problems, while actress and dancer Aya Sugimoto ran into trouble over her after-work wine drinking. Tomiyo Umezawa, a kabuki actor famous for his female roles, got dinged for his 50 cigarette-a-day smoking habit, while comedian Razor Ramon scored poorly on his mental health exam due to the great stress of wearing his public "HG" (which means "Hard Gay, although he isn't) face 24 hours a day (he can't even take his sunglasses off, as they're part of his public persona). The biggest health problems were found in pro wrestler Choshu Koriki, who had never gone to a doctor in his life and had built a media personality around his big gut and bicycle shorts.

In the Japanese system of prefectures and cities is quite different from what we're used to in the States. The current Japanese system, which was based on the French prefectural system (or at least that's what the Japanese believe), came about when Japan modernized its infrastructures during the Meiji Restoration. Basically, there are 47 prefectures (ken), along with Hokkaido and the Tokyo Metropolitan Area, which like the District of Columbia in the U.S. is separate from the normal system of prefectures. Inside each prefecture, there are three kinds of incorporated areas: cities (shi), towns (machi or cho, two readings for the same kanji character) or villages (mura). Inside the large city areas, such as the city we live in, there are small "town" areas designated, so that a person may live in Sakura Town, Takasaki City, Gunma Prefecture, Japan. Streets are not generally named in Japan, so a physical address will just be a numbered block inside that part of the town. If you think it's terribly confusing to have a whole country with no named streets or numbered houses, you're right! Basically, if you don't have a clear map to wherever it is you're going in Japan, you're probably not going to get there. As populations rise and fall in Japan (usually fall, it's sad to say), sometimes a new city is born, as small municipalities join together to try to make their region more attractive for tourism and industry. The idea, I guess, is that if people are leaving the rural areas for cities, we'll redefine some of the areas to be "cities" (even if they're not very urban).

Here are the answers on the Japanese "English" (quote unquote) abbreviations from last time. 3LDK means a 3-room apartment with a "living-dining-kitchen" (i.e., one main room for cooking, eating and relaxing). PA is a Japanese term meaning "parking area," and refers to the rest stops you see along the freeway. If someone asks you to check their HP, they're inviting you to see their homepage. OA means "office automation," and buying an "OA desk" means you're getting a desk that's designed to work with computers (perhaps it has a power strip built into it, or a special rail in the back for organizing cables). Baseball fans know that an FA is a "free agent" who isn't a part of the players union, but represents himself in contract negotiations. And IC means "interchange" and is just a freeway on-ramp.

Among other things, J-List works hard to bring Japan's PC dating-sim games to English-speaking fans, and we carry virtually every game in print, from great companies like Peach Princess, JAST USA, G-Collections and more. We're happy to announce that the latest game from Peach Princess, Doushin - Same Heart, has gone "golden master" and is being duplicated right now. The three Suruga sisters have a strange power: whenever one of them feels a sensation, the feeling is transferred to the other two immediately. If one girl were to prick her finger, the other two would feel the same pain...and if one of them were to get, er, excited, the same thing would happen to the other two, no matter where they were. This is a great new game, the first "zapping" adventure seen in the English language, which allows you to play the game from the viewpoint of the three sisters and move from one character to another freely. In a way, the game is quite similar to one the very first "H" game we ever brought out, Three Sisters' Story, and I'm very glad to be making it available to fans. (By the way, you can still preorder it and get free shipping!)

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.

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