The subject of international marriage in Japan, how foreigners live in Japan, and fully perceptions of other countries

One subject of interest in Japan is kokusai kekkon, or international marriage involving a Japanese and a person from another country. The fact that there's a defined word for this concept indicates that it's treated as a rather "special" idea, seemingly separate from normal marriage between two Japanese despite its increasing frequency. As Japan's society progresses, more and more men and women here seem open to the idea of finding spouses from other countries, especially in cities like Tokyo, where the rate of international unions can reach as high as 1 in 10. There are, of course, various hurdles to overcome when choosing to marry someone from another culture, be it Japan or anywhere else: you've got language issues, cultural barriers, and many other factors that must be kept in mind. The question of finding someone with compatible values is perhaps the biggest challenge, and keeping an open mind about alternate opinions and ways of doing things is important. An American woman I went to SDSU with married a Japanese man and ended up living very close to me here in Japan (small world). When she got pregnant, she made plans to go back to work soon after having the baby, which isn't uncommon in the U.S. but is quite rare here, and she was surprised at how strongly her Japanese husband and his family opposed her plan. A male friend of mine from the U.K. married a Japanese girl from Iwate, Japan, far to the North of Tokyo. After their wedding, his bride wanted him to try out the hot springs at the hotel, but he wasn't too keen on the idea of group bathing with other males (which no one thinks twice about here), and this caused some strain. Of course, there's no such thing as getting married a "country" -- every person is unique, and when you find someone you want to be with, each side must be flexible and open to new ideas.

There's an interesting show on TV every week that follows the life and times of a married couple, perhaps intended as a subliminal message to single people about the joys of being married in order to boost Japan's sagging birthrate. Recently they've been focusing on couples made up of Japanese husbands and foreign wives, and seeing how they went about their daily lives. One American woman who'd been here for ten years was quite interesting: she'd organized her apartment building into a co-op group so that they could buy food in bulk and save money, which is not something the average Japanese housewife would do. The show followed the couple around, discovering what subtle differences there were in their household compared to a normal Japanese one, how they did the shopping, what kinds of meals the wife prepared, and what friction she experienced with her Japanese husband (she hated his smoking). Language issues were also covered, including one that I could really feel for, how do you make your bilingual kids speak to you in English when they know you understand both languages?

It's funny how a person's perceptions work. Growing up in the 1970s, I knew nothing about Japan, except that Japanese people's lips didn't sync up with their mouths when they talked (this was due to the English dubbing of Godzilla and Gamera movies I watched). I distinctly remember thinking that Kimba the White Lion (Osamu Tezuka's Jungle Emperor Leo) must have been produced in Africa, not in Japan, because of copyright issues related to the animals, or something like that. Japanese people form some interesting perceptions about the U.S., too, and I've enjoyed learning about these during my time here. Japanese eat white rice with most every meal, and there's even a word that means "the main course of meat or vegetables that you eat with your rice" (okazu, also used to describe the main course you bring with your bento). The J-List Japanese staff reports that when they were kids, they thought Americans ate bread the same way, taking a plate of rolls or sliced bread with all three meals a day, no matter what you were having. It's common for famous American professional wrestlers to tour Japan, and J-List's Tomo says that his first impression of all Americans was based on those big gaijin wrestlers (it made no difference Andre the Giant was from France and Abdullah the Butcher was Canadian). I had a friend who was sure that Sony was an American company because of its English-sounding name, and once a housewife asked me in total seriousness if we had McDonald's in the USA. As always, it's fun to compare cultural differences.

J-List is proud to be cosponsoring the upcoming MusicFest 2006 at Fanime Con in San Jose this coming Memorial Day weekend (May 26-29). It's really a great event: six Japanese indies bands who will be performing on a live stage for fans at the show, several for the first time in the U.S. A once-in-a-lifetime chance to hear some great cutting-edge Japanese music live, a micro-Woodstock for the otaku generation, with all musical genres represented. If you want to hear some great JPOP/JROCK/JRAP, we hope you'll make it to the show. For information on this great convention, see this page.

We stopped off at a PA, which is a Parking Area on the freeway, an enclosed place where you can buy gas, hot udon, or shop for omiyage, souvinirs for friends. Here are some Gunma limited dry ramen noodles. Sounds yummy.

Hello Kitty cream cakes, officially called Yokohama Chiffon Cakes.

Rice cakes with baked soybeans on them.

They also sell ice cream, since you can buy ice cream anywhere in Japan, in any season. Note Lotte's Crunky, Morinaga's Monaka, and my favorite, Suica Bar, a watermelon ice cream bar with chocolate seeds. Mmm!

I talked about pro wrestlers today, and this is the most famous one of all, Antonio Inoki, who (among other things) is credited with introducing Tabasco sauce to Japan. I happened to meet him at LAX once, and politely asked if I could take my picture with him. He was awfully surprised to see a foreigner speaking to him in Japanese (since he's fluent in English and Portuguese).

The subject of patriotism in Japan, bilingualism and the mystery of translation, and J-Culture in H-Games

One debate going on in Japan right now is what role patriotism should play in society. Currently, Japanese are perhaps the least patriotic people on the planet, with 47% of respondents answering that they didn't feel any particular sense of pride in, or love for, their country. This is something the government wants to change, but it's a sticky wicket, since an overabundance of patriotism coupled with a runaway desire to emulate Great Britain is what lead to the country running roughshod over its Asian neighbors seven decades ago. I caught an interesting TV show on this topic hosted by Japanese director Beat Takeshi, which featured Japanese-bilingual foreigners from a dozen countries including Korea, China, the U.S., Canada and Europe, who explained their own views on what patriotism meant to them. The show compared "patriotic" education in each country, including the lengthy steps countries like Korea and China take to produce loyal citizens who love their countries (including museums dedicated to Japanese attrocities). All nations do this to some extent, of course -- think of George Washington cutting down a cherry tree or throwing a silver dollar across the Potomac, for example -- but Japan has almost no mechanisms in place to make its people feel a reasonable sense of love-of-country, no Pledge of Allegiance. The Japanese flag and Japanese national anthem were only given official status by the Diet in 2000, and the national anthem isn't played regularly at sporting events like baseball and sumo wrestling, only at major events like the end of a championship or the last day of a sumo basho. I wonder what Japan can do to make its citizens feel more patriotic?

When you become bilingual in a language, you learn a lot about how your own brain works. Every act of learning involves a physical change in your brain, the creation of a new synaptic bridge from one cell to another, and sometimes it seems you can feel this at work in your head. The "mystery of translation" is also fascinating: the act of moving from one language to another takes place deep inside your brain, on a level below your conscious thoughts, almost like a background process in a computer. When I'm translating something from English into Japanese, I mentally place the phrase into my internal "translation buffer," wait half a second for the processing to complete, and then retrieve the result, without really being aware of how it's actually accomplished. The act of translation is actually quite separate from being able to speak a language, and really must be developed in tandem with general language skills. My daughter is quite fluent in both English and Japanese, and the other day I thought it'd be fun to ask her to translate some of the sentences from the book we're reading, Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events. Although she understood the English sentences I read to her, she was unable to render them in Japanese -- it wasn't a skill she'd ever had to develop in her nine years on the planet.

One reason I like the PC dating-sim games that we sell is that they offer an alternate window into Japan's culture that can't be experienced any other way, since the games are quite long and involved and are interactive -- you're in control of the story. In the soon-to-be-released Doushin - Same Heart, there's an amusing scene in which Cham, a girl from Thailand, comes over to see Maki, the middle of the three Suruga sisters. Ryoko, the youngest sister, is totally shocked to see a "gaijin" at the door, and tries to speak broken English to her despite the fact that Cham is speaking Japanese -- something that happens quite a lot here. One of our favorite restaurants in our city is La Bodeguita, great ethnic place run by Peruvians of Japanese descent, and the spit-roasted chicken they serve is to die for. We like to go for the international atmosphere, to enjoy beers from South America and eat food that's very different from what's normally eaten in Japan. Although the restaurant is popular with our city's foreign population, we seldom see Japanese people eating there, and whenever we invite Japanese friends to go with us, they're invariably nervous about trying anything as exotic as Peruvian cuisine. This timidness on the part of Japanese people to take life by the horns and try new things is captured in another scene, also in Doushin, in which one character is inviting another to eat ethnic food, but the person is nervous to try it. It's fun to see what interesting cultural elements you can find even in Japan's bishoujo games.

J-List strives to show you a new side of Japan every day -- if we didn't, we wouldn't be J-List! We stock some cool DVDs that help you learn about the country and its language and people. If you've ever wanted to visit the country but didn't have the opportunity, why not check out Seven Days in Japan, a documentary about one man who realized his dream of coming to Japan. Or if you'd like to learn some fun Japanese phrases (including "how to be annoying in Japanese" and "Date with Keiko" episodes), we recommend the Best of YesJapan, a 4 hour DVD of fun topics related to Japanese that's very approachable for people with no Japanese skills at all.

More pics from Joyful Honda, the big store that has lots of art related stuff, and also home interior related products as well. These are name plates that you have custom made and stick outside your front door. For some reason, I find them absolutely fascinating to look at.

There are many different kinds, some etched in stone or steel, some carved out of glass. This one is cute.

That's how you write Toyota in kanji, in case you were wondering.

They have acitate sheets for artists, too, for all the old school guys out there who aren't doing their shading in Photoshop.

Styrafoam hemispheres, for various art projects. I was of course compelled to wear obe on my head and walk around like a Buddhist priest, which I can get away with since I'm a gaijin...

Ways to save the Japanese from extinction, the darling of figure skating, and cell phones for kids?

With Japan's population having already peaked, the country is undergoing a national debate about how to raise its brith rate. There are a lot of reasons why Japan's birthrate is so low, at just 1.38 children born per couple, including the pressures of urban society and those "rabbit hutch" apartments in Tokyo, a less-than-optimal environment for kids, the general march of social attitudes and of course, the costs involved with raising a child. Add to these factors the reality that people no longer need to have eight kids to ensure that some will survive to take care of them in their old age, and you've got a crisis. The ruling LDP is suggesting paying all birth-related costs for couples and giving an additional $50-per-child monthly stipend to families. These might be good ideas, but I have another one: an American-style day-care system. The time-honored way for working parents to raise a child in Japan is to have Obaachan (grandmother) babysit during the day, since many families live with their parents, or else put your child in your city's municipally-run pre-school, if you can get in. Adding an American-style private day-care system to the country would give people more choices about how and when to have children. Although U.S. day-care system might not be perfect, it's still better than the nonexistent system here.

The Japanese have a great interest in sports, especially in international events where they can compete on the world stage and show their best to other nations. With Shizuka Arakawa's gold medal in Torino Olympics, figure skating has become hugely popular, and many Japanese skaters are featured on TV almost daily. Leading the pack is the charming and talented Mao Asada (no relation to the former Chinese leader or to a Carne Asada Burrito), who at just 15 has already won a huge number of accoladaes for herself. In yesterday's Japan Open 2006 skating event she aced her program, helping put Japan over the top to beat out Team Europe and Team North America. Competing on the ice since the age of 5, she and her older sister Mai (who is also an accomplished skater) are the current darlings of the Japanese media. In addition to her cute face and incredibly graceful style on the ice, she has oversized ears, which (according to my Japanese wife) means that she'll be very successful and wealthy in her life, since money is meant to pour into large ears, or something like that.

As with most other countries, cell phones have become ubiquitous in Japan, and more than 90% of high school students carry a "keitai" (portable phone) everywhere they go, with even higher rates of adoption in other age groups. The market has gotten so saturated that Japan's major cellphone companies have turned to elementary school-age children as the next potential area for growth. The idea of kids carrying phones around with them takes some getting used to, of course, but companies like KDDI have done a good job thinking up features that are important to parents, such as GPS sensors that let parents find where their children are by viewing a website, or a function that sends a parent an IM when their child reaches a preset destination, like home. A big reason for the popularity of phones by younger students is related to Japan's group-oriented culture -- there's nothing worse than being nakama-hazure (na-kah-mah ha-zoo-rey), excluded from the larger group by, say, being the only one unable to exchange emails with friends. One side effect of Japan's widespread use of keitai phones is that people think of email or instant messages as something you do with a phone rather than with a computer. I wonder if this will have have a long-range effect on Japan's technical skills down the road?

Manga is a big part of Japan's culture, and J-List carries the popular Comic AG, the leading English-language magazine of "H" manga. Each issue is a treat, with 80 pages of English-translated manga, faithfully produced from the artist's original pages (not scanned from the printed Japanese editions, like many translated works), and will full detail on all art. Each issue is jut $4.99, perhaps the best bargain in the manga world. In addition to offering regular subscriptions to AG, you can buy blocks of back issues at a special price with our AGSET offering. We've updated the AGSET with the next five issues of AG, making it easy to pick up the back issues you need and save.

After waiting, like, a year, I finally took my Star Wars posters to the store to be framed. The store we like to go to is Joyful Honda, basically a massive sprawling store that sells anything art related. Plus it's fun to say "Joyful Honda."

If something's worth hanging in your office, it's worth getting a nice frame for it, I always say.

Here they're selling massive slabs of beautiful wood for various projects. I guess most people would make tables out of these.

Artistst sit inside the store and hand-create stuff while you watch. Here a guy was carving stone wells for use in Japanese calligraphy.

Among other things, they had a corner where they sold replicas of old keys and locks ("key" and "lock" are the same word in Japanese) which was not something I expected to exist in the world.

A bunch of old stuff, some of it pretty cool.

How universities work in Japan, my fond memories as an ESL teacher, and battle of the sexes, Japan style

Some of the biggest differences between Japan and the U.S. can be seen in higher education. Japan has an extensive system of public and private universities which educate 44% of graduating high school students. In the U.S. the top universities are private schools like Harvard, Princeton and MIT, while State schools are lower in the rankings. In Japan this is reversed: the public universities are where everyone wants to go, in large part because they're much cheaper than their private counterparts like Waseda or Keio. Students study hard to get into top-ranked national institutions like Tokyo University at least in small part to lessen the financial burden on their parents and show oya koko (filial piety, e.g. thanks and respect to their parents for raising them). While Japan's national universities might offer a good education, they're dependent on the public purse for their operations and are generally running out of money all the time. A visit to some of these campuses with their drab brown concrete buildings built in the "Late Contemporary Chernobyl" style can make you think you've been transported to the old Soviet Union. The money problem has gotten so bad that some schools have started licensing their name -- if you want to try a Kobe University- brand steak, you can find them for sale in finer shops. One of the biggest problems with Japanese universities is that students must work so hard to pass the entrance exams that it's generally expected that they'll goof off once they get admitted. This makes me sad, considering all the ways my mind was challenged during my own time at college. Another problem: too many universities. Despite the sagging Japanese population and dearth of students, new universities continue to be built every year.

I really enjoyed my career as an ESL teacher, and during that time I came into contact with many different kinds of Japanese people, from kids who were being exposed to English for the first time to high school students who wanted to learn how to actually use the language they'd spend six years learning the grammar and vocabulary of. I always tried to show a positive, cheerful face to my students (Japanese people expect Americans to be "cheerful" at all times, I've learned), and let them know how great it is to learn English, since it allows you to make friends all over the world. I've met interested students, bored students, and housewives who thought that studying English was the most thrilling thing in their lives (clearly they needed to get out more). I'll never forget one student I had who drove a tanker truck delivering white kerosene to gas stations. Whenever he couldn't communicate something in English, he's try saying it in Japanese with an outrageous American accent. It's not considered good form for the teacher to laugh himself into a ball during class, but it was difficult keeping my amusement bottled up sometimes.

The subject of how men and women interact in Japan is a complex one, and I've come to realize how closely related it all is to language, despite the obvious "which came first, the social attitude or the linguistic term" question. For the most part, English is largely unisex, with the same words being used by both men and women, with a few exceptions (like profanity). Japan is quite different, and much of the language is "hard wired" for use by women or men only. For starters, there are different pronouns for boys and girls to use. Guys generally use the polite "boku" or the manly-sounding ore (OH-ray) to refer to themselves, but girls get the more feminine watashi or atashi (or if they're trying to be annoyingly cute, they refer to themselves in the third person, like characters sometimes do in anime). For the second person pronoun, men often use masculine omae (OH-mah-aye) or the slightly condescending kimi, both of which contain an element of talking to someone at a lower social level, like an underclassman. Women usually use the neutral anata, and both sexes will often substitute a name, e.g. Fujita-san, in place of a second-person pronoun. There are quite a few words which the Japanese use every day but which sound incredibly sexist if you analyze their actual meanings. The most common word for husband is shujin, which really means "master" if you look at its kanji. Two words for wife used by older Japanese are kanai (lit. "in the house") and okusan ("Mrs. Interior"), implicitly stating that wives never leave the home. Of course, these are just words and no one considers their meanings all that deeply, just as we don't tear English words apart for their Greek and Latin origins that much, but it's interesting what you can uncover when you dig deep into a language.

J-List loves to bring you the best PC dating-sim games from Japan, translated into English. We've got dozens of great CD-ROM and download games for all tastes, with hilarious stories, extremely dramatic love themes and all manner of cute characters. Our latest game is Doushin - Same Heart, a fascinating title in which you play from the viewpoint of the three Suruga Sisters, Ryoko, Maki and Miho. At any time in the game you can "zap" from one character to another and continue the story from their point of view, which adds an incredible element of depth to the story. A great game by Crowd, the company that brought us X-Change, X-Change 2 and Tokimeki Check in!, so we know it'll bring you many hours of enjoyment (and lots of in-jokes from the other games). It's being duplicated right now, but you can still order now and get free shipping on it!

The Japanese eat a lot of noodles, and we are no exception. This is a meal from our favorite udon/soba restaurant. Today I got the udon with the mini-bowl of curry that was delicious.

My daughter got Curry Udon, a delicacy of Nagoya, and we kept raiding her bowl because it was so good. It's basically a giant bowl of curry soup with udon boiled in, mmmmm!

It's nice to have a beer after a hard day's work (especially on update days). This is Asahi's invention, a one-serving "Steiny Bottle" with a pull top, a way to sell more beer to consumers.

These are a local famous food called sansai, a kind of edible wild plant found up in the mountains, and since we've got mountains coming out of our ears here, there are a lot of sansai. They are frankly delicious, although it took me a while to come to terms with them. If you've ever played the classic bishoujo game Season of the Sakura, Mio was going to the mountains to pick sansai, but since I didn' thave space to explain what the heck this was, I changed it to mushrooms.

Experiments with Japanese literature, my impressions on positives and negatives education in Japan, and squid ink pizza

Coming to Japan brought many surprises for me, and not just the usual things like beer vending machines and ikasumi (squid ink) pizza. One revelation I had was that Japan's education system, which back in 1991 seemed the envy of the entire world, was in fact far from perfect. Japan introduced compulsory education as part of the sweeping reforms of the Meiji Period, when the country abandoned its feudal system and became a Constitutional Monarchy trying to immitate the powers of the West. Currently, Japanese children are required to attend 6 years of elementary school and three years of junior high. High school is optional, although nearly all students go, and there is competition between the various city-run and private high schools in any given area, e.g. Maebashi Commercial High School is best for students who want to learn a business-related trade, but Takasaki Boy's High School has the best academic reputation, etc. Unlike schools back in the States in which each student had his own schedule of lessons for each hour, Japanese classes are always together for the duration of a school year -- the same students in the same classrooms, all day long -- while teachers come and go each hour to teach lessons. This difference alone is representative of the "individualism" of the U.S. (each student going to his own class on his own schedule) compared to the "group identity" of Japan (all students together as one defined group).

It's hard to come up with an exact list of the issues I have with education here, since nothing is as simple as it looks at first glance. On the one hand, the near-absolute stress on "uniformity" of education, of treating every child as if they were exactly the same, rubs me the wrong way as an American. Japan's top-down education structure, in which almost all cirriculum is decided in Tokyo and followed to the letter from Hokkaido to Okinawa, is somewhat necessary if for no other reason than because of kanji, which has to be learned in a standard order for people to become literate. But what about "special" kids, like my daughter, who is fluent in English? When she enters junior high she'll have to take English along with all the other kids, starting with the phrase "this is a pen," despite the fact that she'll probably know more than the teacher. On the other hand, having students stay together as a cohesive unit for the entire school year teaches students the importance of wa (harmony) and gaman (putting up with things they might not necessarily like), important skills to have in any society. This group- based learning tends to foster lifelong friendships among classmates, too, and my mother-in-law still gets together with the people she went to high school with 50 years ago. (For a good look at how class relationships work, I recommend the excellent Ghibli film Ocean Waves, one of my favorites.) While I've come to see the many standardized tests for subjects like kanji, abacus and even penmanship as a positive force on kids -- my son really wants to pass the next level of the Step test, and this motivates him to study his English -- I am fearful of the effect of the dreaded entrance exams on my kids. Also, Japan's education system relies too much on facts and too little on overall understanding. My wife can tell you what date the Kamakura Shogunate was founded (1192, which the Japanese memorize using the phrase ii kuni o tsukuro or "let's make a good country"), but generally can't explain how it was important to Japan's history as a whole.

I've undertaken many areas of study in my quest to understand Japan from as many angles as possible. I've hitchhiked from one end of the country to the other, meeting various people along the way. I've toured hundreds of kilometers on my bicycle, explored Japan's culture of onsen bathing in a dozen prefectures, and learned (or tried to learn) traditional calligraphy. I've delved into Japan's manga culture, from true works of literature by Osamu Tezuka to the lighter offerings of more contemporary mangaka (manga artists). I even went through a phase when I wanted to study Japanese literature, exploring the classics of the Meiji and Taisho eras using a book intended for junior high school students (much more approachable for me). I enjoyed reading through some excellent books, like Kokoro by Souseki Natsume (the tragic story of a love triangle between two friends and a landlady's daughter, told from several points in the story) and the short stories of Dazai and Akutagawa. One day I got it in my head to read my favorite novel, Flowers for Algernon, in Japanese, which was a bizarre experience -- in places where Charlie makes spelling mistakes in the English edition, he makes kanji errors in the Japanese version. Hemmingway also translates very nicely into Japanese.

Do you want to help J-List evangelize its unique brand of Japanese pop culture? Got a website? If so, we hope you'll consider joining the Friends of J-List, our affiliate program set up to help give back to people who link to us. The program is excellent, with many ways to link to either the J-List or JBOX.com websites using graphics (hosted by us, so there's not even a bandwidth cost to you), text links, category links, and more. Go here for more information!

Thomas Bento Box -- Thomas & Friends. Thomas the Tank Engins is very popular in Japan, and this is a great and very rare item for collectors.

Took the kids to McDonald's, which I dislike a lot less now that you can order a "shaker salad" instead of french fries. McD, which has been having to reinvent itself in Japan as well as elsewhere, has started making ebi, er, shrimp products, like a new Shrimp McSomething (some kind of chicken fillet with shrimp substituted, I forgot the name) and the new Shrimp McNuggets, pictured here.

One of the sad things about the Japanese is, they're not that charitable. It's hard to see, but this Donald McDonald Foundation (yes, Ronald's name is Donald here, deal) is filled with 1 yen coins.

They have these cool video games kids get to play for free (with purchase), which spit out trivia cards. One of the questions was, what is maneki neko called in English? "Lucky Cat" sounds so funny to the Japanese.

So, we're driving in our MPV, enjoying out navi system, as they're called here. Somehow, the computer seems to know when traffic is slowing, and it colored our road red for us. How does it know to do that?

Technology is sure amazing.

Golden Week in Japan, "indoctronating" my bilingual kids, and all about the otaku

We're right in the middle of Golden Week, a cluster of Japanese holidays that usually fall near each other. One of three extended holiday periods in Japan (the other two being the Obon holidays in August and the first few days of the New Year), Golden Week has become sort of a national icon of Japan's success in evolving to the point where its salarymen can actually stop working for a while and be with their families. It can be a difficult time for parents, though, with kids home from school, complaining loudly that they want to go somewhere fun. The problem is that there are potentially millions of other families in exactly the same situation, wanting to enjoy some quality leisure time during the holiday week, which means long traffic jams and lines everywhere. Tokyo Disneyland, for example, closes its doors very soon after opening each morning as it quickly reaches its occupancy limit. It can be just as bad out here in rural Japan, since Tokyoites are eager to get away from their asphalt and concrete jungle, so they come here. The other day I heard that the traffic jam to get to Karuizawa, a pleasant resort town in the mountains, was a whopping 27 km long. On Sunday there will be a mad rush to get back to the Tokyo area, with ten hours or more of sitting in traffic for everyone. Poor blighters.

My wife and I raise our two kids to respect both their Japanese and American halves, and we go out of our way to expose them to both cultures. I've made sure to "indoctrinate" my kids in various ways, introducing them to School House Rock and Star Wars and Raisin Bran and the Charlie Brown Halloween Special ("I got a rock" is a huge joke in our family). My wife handles the Japanese side of things, making sure they've got all the requisite cultural knowledge expected of them here, from how to say proper aisatsu (greetings) to people on the street to how to clean the family grave when doing haka-mairi (visiting the family grave to pay respects to family members who have gone on). She also handles their education, including drilling them in kanji writing. The day we feared as parents of bilingual children has arrived, though: our kids are starting to eclipse our own language abilities. My wife helps my son study for his Step test at level 2.5, usually only attempted by Japanese ten years older them him, and he often shocks her by knowing (or sensing) the correct answer to problems that completely stump her. I'm not off the hook, either: we sometimes have "kanji battles" between me and my kids, and all too often they eat me for lunch.

As awareness of Japanese animation and manga has grown over the past few decades, the word otaku has become quite well-known. Originally a polite word meaning "you" or "your family," otaku has come to stand for anyone with a strong interest in anime, manga, cosplay, or any other aspect of Japan's popular geekish sub-culture. Being an otaku in Japan does have its negative side, of course -- in the new Apple commercial with "that new digital camera from Japan," the Japanese woman says "Who is this person? He looks like an otaku" of the man representing the PC. There are several theories about how this everyday Japanese word attained this unique alternate meaning. According to one, the fact that "otaku" was spoken frequently by characters in the original Macross series caused fans to start using it, creating the beginnings of the otaku movement. Alternately, many of the employees of General Products, the model company that would go on to become the mighty Gainax, hail from Tottori Prefecture (the only part of Japan to sport its own desert), and in the local dialect, otaku is the most commonly used second-person pronoun.

Speaking of otaku, we just happen to have a cool new Japanese T-shirt that parodies the famous Oakley logo, changing it into a proud otaku badge you can wear for all to see. If you're in touch with your inner geek and appreciate Japan's unique pop culture, this is a great shirt for you!

Here are today's "really cool products" that I thought were especially noteworthy. Note: the J-List links below may be for adult products and should probably be considered "not safe for work." To see all the J-List products, check out J-List or the JBOX.com updated products link.

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).