The value of spending a year abroad, various definitions of "bilingual," and observations on Japanese females

If you ever find yourself in the position of giving guidance to a young person, try to turn them onto the idea of spending a year outside their home country, preferably as an exchange student in college. Dorothy was right -- there's nothing that can make you realize that "there's no place like home" than going away for a while and learning to deal with the differences found in other countries on a day-to-day basis. Just taking a trip for a week or two doesn't seem to do the trick -- you have to spend a few months or a year to get the full effect. Since I'm back in San Diego now, everything from Mexican food to Pop Tarts to Peter Pan peanut butter seems a little more precious to me than before I first went to Japan so long ago. Last night I pulled a Bud Lite out of the fridge and savored it slowly, just because I could -- there are hundred other beers I'd rather be drinking, but because you can only get Bud Light in the U.S. of A., it was somehow more special to me. I had the same experience when I lived for a year in New Zealand as a boy -- I remember when the first Pizza Hut in Aukland opened in 1976, and we cried tears of joy to eat something familiar from back home.

The concept of being "bilingual" in a language is an interesting one. After four years of studying at SDSU and fifteen years of living in Japan, I'm as bilingual as I could ever need to be -- I can discuss various subjects, read a newspaper, and so on. But no matter how much you study a language, there's always an undiscovered linguistic country waiting around the corner, a new aspect of the language that can throw you. My father was a nautical engineer, designing high-speed boats and writing books on the theory of marine dynamics, and once he asked me to translate a patent he had created, which was certainly an interesting journey into a bizarre world of arcane kanji and Japanese grammatical structures. Contracts are another highly specialized area of the language, with some features that are no doubt left over from ancient China. For example, when dealing with a contract in Japanese, you quickly become familiar with two kanji, koh (甲) and otsu (乙), which in Japanese law signify the concepts "your" company/entity, and "ours."

The subject of the Japanese female (feminas japonesas) is quite a complex one, and if I should ever find that I am immortal, I might have enough time to pen a book on the subject. I've known quite a few Japanese females in my day, between girls I've dated, students I've taught and my wife, and have come up with some general observations. First of all, Japanese females are usually so organized it's scary, and I've observed female friends whip out little diary books and set a time to meet a month or more in the future. This tendency towards organization is a big plus when managing the household finances, and if you ever marry a Japanese woman, by all means take advantage of this and let her handle the family's savings. Whereas most guys will not split hairs when dividing a restaurant check, I've known Japanese women to meticulously calculate the correct division down to the nearest penny, making sure that no one overpays. Most all Japanese females are constipated, no doubt since they eat so much rice (although they will deny that there is a connection). Finally, I've noticed that a high number of Japanese females have bizarre fetishes, like the urge to pull a man's whiskers out of his face by the roots with tweezers, or an obsessive-compulsive desire to make sure their boyfriend/ husband's ear canals are completely free of wax.

We've got two job openings at our San Diego location, for an experienced T-shirt silk-screener and a general order fulfillment assistant. If you're in the San Diego area and are interested in helping J-List spread our unique brand of Japanese pop culture, we hope you'll apply! For more info see this page (T-shirt printer) or this page (order fulfillment assistant).

A big shout-out to Playboy today, who plugged J-List's extensive line of Japanese snacks in their current issue -- thanks! Some J-List readers will note that we don't currently have some of the items shown in the picture in the magazine, like chocolate Pocky or Green Tea Kit Kat. Because summer in Japan is so hot and humid, we're forced to remove some chocolate items, or they'd turn into so much Melty Kiss, but we'll have these items and many more for you in September, when things start to cool down.

During the show we hit a supermarket, one we always hit in Anaheim. I just had to get my camera out.

I mean, they have marketing in Japan too, of course, but I'm not generally overwhelmed as much as I was in this store, which had tons of PotC stuff in my face, big time.

Another thing you don't see, pricing structured in a way to make you buy more. Which may explain why Japanese people are thinner than us...

This struck me as extremely cheesy for some reason.

I'll have to do a post on ceral one of these days. America, of course, has as many varieties of cereal as there are species of insects in the Amazon basin, give or take. Japan has, like, 8 varieties, if that. This is my all time favorite ceral, Sugar Corn Pops.

Another product name that wouldn't fly in Japan...

They had Lotte Choco Pie! We had to get some of this and eat it with our Romulan Ale (Vodka + Blue Kool Aid). I hate to say it but the consistency was quite different from what is sold in Japan -- the only way I can say is, it seemed to be firmer inside, like, containing more lard. But they were good.

Fun in my Miata, all about Sake and what to avoid, and the sound of silence in Japanese

We're quite a Mazda family around here, with a Miata in San Diego, a Miata (or "Roadster," which Japanese think means "road star") in Japan, an MPV, and two previously owned Mazda vehicles. I like the engineering and the design, and I like their underdog status compared with Toyota and Honda -- they work harder since the Mazda brand is less famous. I especially love the two-seater Miata, the most excellent "open car" ever made, and I just got back from a wild run through desert roads around San Diego. It was a little odd, driving Initial D-style with the sandy color of California around me instead of the greener shades of Japan that I'm used to. It was great fun, but now I'm all sunburned (ouch).

Everyone is familiar with Japanese sake (酒, pronounced SAH-kay, never "saki"), or rice wine, the alcohol made from distilled rice, also known as "spring water" to Yamato/Star Blazers fans. Sake has been made for millennia, from 6000 years ago in China and 2000 years in Japan, and is one of the world's oldest fermented beverages. I like to drink hot sake, called atsukan, and I have many fond memories of drinking sake we heated with a camping stove, surrounded by friends while sitting under the cherry blossoms. As with wine in the West, sake has always been associated with religious ceremonies, and when we built our J-List office, a Shinto priest came out to purify the ground with sake and salt to ensure that we would have good luck in the future. One of the most famous brands of sake is Shochikubai, a word that literally means "pine, bamboo, plum" and which refers to three levels of achievement, like the belt colors in martial arts. Because it's widely available internationally, Shochikubai sake is often the first (and sometimes the last) sake that many people try, but truth be told, it's reputation among sake drinkers in Japan is not high -- consider it the "Bud" of sake, if not the "Milwaukee's Best." The J-List staff in Japan recommends that you try a brand called Koshino Kanpai or Shira-Yuki if you're going to sample some excellent quality sake.

I've always been fascinated with onomatopoeia in Japanese, with the differences in how "sound words" work between Japanese and English. Animal noises like "woof woof" (in Japanese: wan wan) are different, of course, but the mechamisms are the same, as with other words, like "twinkle twinkle" (kira kira) or "drip drop" (potsun potsun). The Japanese also assign sounds to odd actions, which we would never think of creating. The "sound" of eyes looking left and right is kyoro kyoro, and this term is applied to a guy who is being unfaithful to his girlfriend by looking at other girls. The sound of snow falling has a sound word, too, shin shin ("sheen sheen") which summons up pleasant images of whiteness outside a frosty window. There is a "sound of silence" in Japanese, too, which is shiiin ("sheen," with a lengthened vowel). When someone makes a joke that isn't funny, it's common for someone to crack wise by saying "Shiiin!" to highlight the lack of laughter from the first person's joke. It takes time to get used to concepts such as these, but it's all part of the wonderful mystery that is Japan.

J-List strives to bring you rare and unique products from Japan. One of our favorite products are the highly detailed miniature toys by Re-Ment, which recreate in fantastic detail famous foods from around the world, household items, home electronics, you name it. Re-Ment has made a cool new toy series that brings you the most famous Japanese foods recreated for you in perfect miniature, with the Washoku ("Japanese food") series that we have in stock today! (full sets are in stock)

Then, another special item for Ghibli fans from Japan: ceramic Ghibli planters for your garden, which you can place your favorite plants inside for a really amazing blending of Miyazaki's organic creations and your living plants. We've got a Totoro planter and a cool one featuring Jiji from Kiki's Delivery Service on the site for you now.

Okay, a few more od pics of AX to throw at you, then I can move on...

Asking "Can I take a picture of your T-shirt?" is a lot more socially acceptable than asking "Can I take a close-up picture of your breasts?"

While I really tire of the "Got X?" slogans, this one made me laugh, as it caught me by surprise.

This was much funnier though ^_^

After we were done with the convention, I knew what I needed: a Denny's "too big for one gaijin who lives in Japan" shake. I gave the cup of extra shake stuff that they give you to Yasu.

What you can learn about public baths from Street Fighter II, Japan and Yellow Cabs, and the end of 0%

There are many things to like about Japan: beautiful temples, delicious food, cherry blossoms, and Hello Kitty bento boxes. But another really cool aspect of the country are the baths, which come in two flavors: sento, or public baths (like the E. Honda level in Street Fighter II), and onsen (OWN-sen), or natural hot springs. Sento are the public bathing facilities that everyone used to use, back in the days when no one had their own baths at home. The name refers to the old currency of "sen" (1/100 of a yen), which used to be common in the days before World War II, before being retired for having so little value. A sento is just a low-cost ($2-3) place where you can enjoy several large baths, and maybe a Western-style sauna, and they often have beautiful ukiyoe style art painted on the walls. If you're too poor to afford a nice house with its own bath, you have to hit the sento every day, and thus there's a kind of bohemian feel to the places. While the traditional sento have a Showa-era charm to them, most people would rather go to an onsen, a bath warmed by an underground hot spring, all too plentiful in volcanic Japan. Onsen can be found in all corners of the country, although our own prefecture sports several popular onsen towns known for the quality of their baths. The best kind of onsen bath is the rotenburo (roe-ten-BOO-roe), or outdoor bath, which allows you to bathe while looking at the "vibrant nature" all around you, or up at the stars high above. Once I took a bath at a very nice onsen in Niigata Prefecture (the "Snow Country" of Kawabata's famous novel), with the snow falling all around us while we were in the bath. It was quite an experience.

Japan has certainly had a rough decade and a half. During the 1980s the country underwent a massive real estate bubble, during which all the land in Tokyo was worth more than the entire USA, on paper. When the bubble burst in 1989, it brought on a massive economic hangover which took years to recover from. The bursting of the Tokyo land bubble brought many changes, including the end of the famous institution of lifetime employment (now few sararimen expect to hold the same job all their lives), and it also created an opening for American companies to assume a dominant position in several industries, from Coca-Cola joining the "Big Four" Japanese beverage makers to Toys "R" Us changing the face of the toy industry in Japan. During the off-again, on-again recession years, Japan took a "0%" approach to restarting the economy, lowering the interest rate for banks to nil, which allowed real interest rates to hover around 1.9-2.5% for many people. This summer, this policy will be officially ending, and Japan is bracing for a return of "real world" interest rates, and everyone is praying the change won't cause more economic hard times for the country.

It seems that Japanese people never fail to surprise you. You would think that they'd be horribly offended by slurs like "yellow monkey," and yet there was a well-known rock band in Japan that used that name to increase their fame. Similarly, Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto played in a band called the Yellow Magic Orchestra, a name which sounds a little odd to gaijin like me. In the 1990's, writer Shoko Ieda wrote a novel called Yellow Cab about the strange phenomenon of normally demure Japanese females going to New York and becoming nymphomaniacs when they find themselves suddenly free of Japan's restrictive society, and the term came to describe all Japanese females who are loose sexually. You might assume this term would be offensive to the Japanese, but again, you'd be wrong: one of Japan's most famous talent agencies is called Yellow Cab. They handle virtually all the top swimsuit idols in Japan, including Megumi, Eiko Koike and Eriko Satoh, and all girls who want to be "talents" (a catch-all word that refers to any kind of young swimsuit idol, singer or actor) dream of being scouted by them.

Every month we'll have a different "Dating-Sim Game of the Month," showcasing a game we think is really exceptional, which we'd like to recommend to everyone. This month the game is Little My Maid, a personal favorite of mine because of its excellent blend of beautiful characters, innovative interactive system and great story (based on a famous story by Hans Christian Anderson). You are transported to a mysterious mansion with three maids, who you can use any way you wish -- ring the gold bell for loyal Mari, and silver bell for headstrong Hina and the copper bell for the super-cute Mayu. You must solve the mystery -- what is the secret of these maids, who are thousands of years old? Special pricing on this outstanding game, this month only!

Got a few more cosplay pics from Anime Expo to show you. This is a group from Rayearth, one of my favorite shows.

Charging the iPod with the Domo-kun.

File this in the "kind of scary, but cute nevertheless" file.

If you haven't seen Burst Angels, hunt it down. It's quite a good show, the perfect blending of Bubblegum Crisis with Eva. Plus the robot that rollerskates on the freeway is pretty cool.

This is Gainax Boy, a fan who seems to be bucking to get himself added into a Gainax anime, Toren Smith-style.

A giant sized Voltron! Is this not the coolest thing you've ever seen!

The end of Anime Expo 2006, North Korea and their damn missles, and views on my ESL teaching days

Once again, Anime Expo has come to a close, and we're all going home, tired but feeling very energized. The show was a blast, a real matsuri (festival) in the Japanese sense, and we had more fun than than we thought possible. As usual, there was more than one event being hosted in the hotel we were saying at -- this year there were cosplay-clad anime fans alongside participants in the leading gay square-dancing convention in the U.S. ("When You Wish Upon a Thar"), and a conservative Christian group, all rubbing elbows with each other. By the time the weekend was over, the hotel staff's eyes were spinning like cute little manga characters. Once again, thanks to all readers who came by to say hi!

Japan is hopping right now over the missile that North Korea's Dear Leader has test fired. The Taepodong-2 is designed to reach all the way to the U.S., and it therefore causes a great deal of worry to Japan, who lie well within its range. The test appears to have failed, but it's still causing plenty of worry throughout Japan, with every channel reporting on the crisis. Yasu, here in San Diego with me, is filled with worry that the missle test might lead to something more serious, that would affect his wife and two daughters. We certainly hope for some sanity in North Korea already.

Before starting J-List, I did what most "white boy" gaijin in Japan to: I taught ESL, or English as a Second Language. I really enjoyed my time as a teacher, which allowed me to meet literally hundreds of Japanese students of all ages, and I got a lot out of my experience. One odd by-product from my teaching years was, I developed the innate ability to speak "easy English" to Japanese people, unconsciously altering my speech to make it easier for them to understand, by avoiding difficult words I knew would cause problems for them, or repressing some elements of my native California dialect ("gnarley tight, dude"). The problem is when this "reduced English" became my natural way of speaking, which would happen when I went for months without meeting any native speakers. Once I even met a Japanese person whose English was so good, she realized I was speaking "easy" English, and called me on it. It was rather embarrassing and I didn't quite know how to react.

We're happy to officially announce a new game today, which is being translated for future release in English: YUME MIRU KUSURI :: A Drug That Makes You Dream, a great title from RUF that explores life, love and growing up in modern Japan. Loaded with teenage angst, confusion, frustration and wonder, and beautiful artwork that draws the player in, this is a dating-sim like no other. We hope you'll preorder this game for free shipping when it's ready.

The longest-running movie series is Otoko wa Tsurai yo, or "It's Tough Being a Man," which told the story of traveling salesman Tora-san over 48 installments. In each movie, Tora-san goes to some region of Japan to sell his wares, and has an unlikely romance with a beautiful woman from the area, which invariably ends with him getting his heart broken. The movie is incredibly famous in Japan, and has fans all over the world. We've gotten in a cool T-shirt that features the well-known Otoko wa Tsurai yo logo, great for kanjiphiles who want to wear something cool and unique!

Whenever we do a con, we tend to go to the same places to eat every year. This is the somewhat cool restaurant at a mall near Disneyland we always go to.

Ceaser salad with, er, a wall of baked parmesan cheeze.

This is the drink of the Gods, Sangria, which I didn't know about before we came here. It's really good, if you haven't had it. It's basically wine, fruit, and fruit juice (and gin, if you're lucky).

Dude! This place has s'mores! Without Saltine crackers too! I feel like photoshopping in a little Calcifur into this picture but I am too tired.

The marshmallow roasting commences...

Dekiagari!

Er, I hate to compare America and Japan here, but this little, lame-ass finger wipe is nothiing compared to the glory of a hot oshibori towel you'd get in Japan. So there .

Notes from Anime Expo, culture shock and toilets, all about MOS Burger, and fun in Graceland

Hello again from an extremely enjoyable Anime Expo, which is still going on here in "Animeheim, CA." We're having lots of fun, meeting customers and shaking hands and showing off a lot of our cool products -- X-Change 3 and Enzai are flying off the table, along with our T-shirts, Domo-kun and other items. If you are in the area, do try to make plans to come down to the show -- it rocks like no other event in the animeverse. We'll be here through Tuesday!

I've had many kinds of culture shock since I moved to Japan back in 1991. Vending machines selling beer, eggs and rice (as well as a few unmentionables). Advanced technology and old, dilapidated buildings set right beside each other. Squid on pizza. But when I married my wife and made plans to come live into her house -- since I am a son-in-law who did not take the last name of my wife, I am a "Masuo" (mah-suu-OH), named after the husband in the long-running anime Sazae-san, who is in the same situation as me -- I had another shock: the toilet in her house was a bo-ton (ボットン、pronounced bo-[small pause]-TON) (a "small tsu" if you know what that is), essentially a sceptic tank with a great hole over it. You squatted over the hole -- a Japanese-style squatting toilet, of course, not a sit-down toilet as we would have in the U.S. -- and did your business, waiting for several seconds until you heard the bo-ton (splat) sound. I wasn't too thrilled with living in a house with an old-style toilet like this, and laid down the law: if I was going to live there, we were going to have to "reform" (what they call remodeling) the house and put in a modern toilet, which we happily did.

When it comes to fast food hamburgers in Japan, you think of McDonald's, like most other places in the world. In addition to the usual hamburgers and "Biggu Makku" that you'd imagine, they sell Chicken McNuggets, (which are originally based on Japanese tempura), Teriyaki McBurgers, and the new Shrimp McSandwich, shrimp pressed into a patty and batter-fried, which is kind of gross to me. But according to many fans, the better fast food experience can be had at MOS Burger, the #2 Japanese hamburger joint. Established on March 12, 1972, MOS Burger set out to bring a higher standard of quality to the lowly hamburger, with better quality meat and organically-grown lettuce and tomatoes. Although the MOS in the name might give the occasional gaijin pause, it stands for "Mountain, Ocean, Sun" and does not make Japanese people think of moss being scraped off a tree trunk to be put on your burger. Every few months MOS Burger comes up with something new and interesting, like the Curry Naan Dog, a hot dog served on Indian naan bread with curry over the top. Although foreigners in Japan usually like the offerings of MOS Burger, the portions are so small that we usually need to order two sets in order to feel full.

Prime Minister Koizumi, hands down the coolest leader Japan has had in the past few decades, will be stepping down in a couple months, as his five-year term comes to an end. He's just finished his "sayonara tour" of the U.S. where he went with President Bush to Graceland to sing a duet of "Love Me Tender" with the President. A noted fan of Elvis, the Japanese Prime Minister thanked the U.S. for the great songs of The King.

Pics from the show. These guys were makin' us happy, wearing our kanji T-shirts.

Cool Clone Trooper. My son would have been thrilled.

A really cool person who let me take her picture. She reviews our "H" games for some websites. Not your typical H-gamer, or is she?

Miyazawa from Kare-Kano.

Hey, she's got poop on her head!

Lots of goth-loli types at the show, like, maybe 10% or more of all cosplayers.

Not sure who the character is, but we like her.

Another lovely cosplayer.

Three lovely cosplayers.

Domo-kun! Arrrrgh!

At J-List, one of the most popular products we've sold was the Yatta! comedy DVDs by a group called Happa-tai (Fig Leaf Squad). These guys were way funny.

Back in the USA (and sleepy), English and my son's spelling, and a theory of macro-economics

I've made the hop from Japan to the U.S. once again, going from the world of sushi and bullet trains and the near-daily drizzle of Japan's Rainy Season to lovely San Diego, always a pleasure thanks to the near-perfect weather here (although today was a tad hot if truth be told). We're here to attend Anime Expo in Anaheim (or "Animeheim" as we like to call it around here), the most excellent anime convention in the world, held July 1-4. If you'll be at the show, we hope you'll come by and say hello! For information on the convention, see this page.

English is one of the hardest languages to learn because of its many conflicting rules for pronunciation, grammar and spelling, and the exceptions to those rules that abound at every turn. Hard as it is for someone to learn English in an ESL class in the U.S., it's much worse if you're trying to study while living in a place like Japan, where English is definitely a "foreign" language (as opposed to a "second" language, used in some fashion in daily life). My son attends an experimental elementary school in our prefecture which essentially teaches the normal Japanese curriculum, but with most classes in English rather than Japanese. Having class in English has been a great experience for my son, but spelling is still a chore, so he's come up with a way to keep his skills up: verbally pronouncing all the letters in words, like the usually silent "gh" in "enough" or the invisible consonant in "knife," to test his own spelling knowledge. The other day was my birthday and he wrote me a letter in really challenging English, thanking me for raising him and putting him in the new school, and promising to stop fighting with his sister and giving me grey hairs from stress. As a father, as well as a former English teacher, it was a very proud moment for me...

One theory of macro-economics says that countries should do things that they're especially good at and leave other jobs to nations with skills in those areas. For example, since China is able to manufacture goods cheaply, they should take charge of manufacturing, while Japan sticks to areas it's talented at, like designing advanced technology, engineering great products, and making extremely cute things like Domo-kun. Of course, pat theories like this don't stand up for long in the real world, which is why Japan engages in every kind of business imaginable, even if they don't make sense from a purely macro-economic standpoint. Agriculture is a big example of this, an incredibly inefficient endeavor when compared with the costs of growing food in other countries, yet one that's very important to the Japanese, who knew real starvation in the years during and after World War II, which is why they attempt to be self-sufficient when it comes to food (or, their main staple of rice, at least). As the population ages, fewer and fewer Japanese are interested in agriculture as career, so there are substantial tax breaks for those engaged in farming, to keep the base from disappearing. Because of this, you can sometimes see some people growing rice and other crops even in Japan's massive capital city of Tokyo, which really boggles the mind considering the cost of land there.

We do hope you'll be able to attend Anime Expo and see all the good things we've brought for you. If you can't make it, though, we've got a nice consolation prize: free shipping on all our PC dating-sim games to the U.S. and Canada (half price shipping for international customers) during the convention. This means it's a great time to check out our fabulous selection of bishoujo and yaoi PC games and choose some fun titles. Remember, you get 20% off if you buy 4 or more games together. This includes the brand new X-Change 3!

Went into the L.L. Bean store too. It's quite popular since the quality is good, whereas sometimes the stuff you buy in Japanese stores is not good. Especially for kids. L.L. Bean is excellent, my wife says.

Like any good company, they promote themselves with their version of the "two guys named Steve in a garage" legend.

On the way home, we stopped at a restaurant. This is the "men's room" symbol. A little freaky?

I found this one even weirder, for some reason.

Fun with my talking car, the act of reading Japanese, and new business ideas in Japan

First of all, we had a problem with our mail server, which caused Monday's emails to show up a day late for some readers. Very sorry about that.

I remember we bought a talking car back in 1984, a Chrysler that told us things like "a door is ajar" or "your headlights are on" -- and that was about it. Our Mazda MPV is much cooler, greeting me every morning and informing me of today's date, and also what "special day" it is. These interesting commemorative days include, for example "UFO Day" (June 24, from a major UFO sighting in Washington State in 1947), "Ice Cream Day" (May 9, after the founding of the first ice cream factory in Japan in 1869), "Natto Day" (July 10, because the numbers 7 and 10 sound like the name of Japan's famous fermented soybeans), "Arigato no Hi" (March 9, since "3 9" can be read "san kyu" or "thank you"), "Toilet Day" (Nov. 10, a day for thinking of how much benefit we gain from our, er, toilets), and "Married Couples' Day" (the 22nd of every month, since the numbers sound like the word for "married couple"). My car also tells me to drive carefully as I pull out of the driveway.

One of the great mysteries of learning Japanese was the physical mechanism of reading. The act of bringing written information into the brain is something we all take for granted, but when you live in a country like Japan where road signs are labeled in English only occasionally, just getting around can be a challenge. The first step in reading Japanese is mastering hiragana, a syllable-based writing system that uses simple characters to express sounds, for example three characters to express a word like maguro (まぐろ、tuna). Learning a language that wasn't based on the Roman alphabet was a big hump for me to get over, but after a week or so of quizzing myself with flashcards I got the hang of it. After learning katakana (a "mirror" of hiragana that's used for writing foreign words and names) comes the long, slow march of kanji, the characters that provide actual meaning in Japanese sentences. You could theoretically write Japanese in hiragana only, although it would be all but unreadable, since the eye has nothing to focus on (try reading The Hobbit in Japanese and you'll see what I mean). As you learn to read more, it's really a thrill when your brain gets used to ingesting the chunks of written Japanese just as it does for any other language.

One of the time-honored approaches to business in Japan is, look what crops up in the U.S. and Europe then adapt the business idea locally as quickly as you can. In the U.S., eBay may be the #1 auction site, but they were slow to move into foreign markets, allowing Yahoo to steal the top slot here. Dominoes brought the concept of home-delivered pizza to everyone, but Pizza Hut was able to build the largest network in Japan before Domino's could get established over here, and now they are the market share leaders. Recently I've been seeing companies trying to copy Netflix's DVD-by-mail business concept, allowing Japanese consumers to select DVDs online and then have them sent to them automatically in the mails. I guess there's a lot of success to be found in copycat businesses.

It's our pleasure today to announce today that X-Change 3, the long-awaited third anf final part of Peach Princess's top-selling PC dating-sim game, is in stock and shipping! The game features the further adventures of Takuya, the unfortunate university student who'd been changed into a girl twice before through bizarre chemistry accidents. This time, it's the fault of Kouji, who's been in love with Takuya's female half for years and has finally gotten his hands on a potion to change him into a girl again. Takuya has to change back in one week or less, or the transformation in his cells will become permanent. Will he turn to the capable Asami-senpai to help him change back, or gamble on the school's mad scientist Chisato? Will he be able to save his love with Asuka, or will she study abroad in America and leave him forever? An extremely rich and exciting adventure, this is our first title published on DVD-ROM (due to the immense size of the game). Features game soundtrack and voice files for you to use freely, too.

We've been going to Karuizawa, the little town about 100 km from us that's kind of like, oh, a posh and stylish island far from Tokyo (I'm trying to think of what it might be like in Los Angeles terms -- San Luis Opispo?). In Karuizawa they have a mall with lots of American brands, stuff we can't buy easily anywhere else, like L.L. Bean. And a Lego Store, too!

This is actually a replica of the mall area we were standing in, recreated with Legos.

Here's the Shinkansen station. Karuizawa gets some of its mystique because the cool Shinkansen comes there, but no other normal train lines. Not sure why that adds to the status of the place, but it does somehow.

Oh, Fall has come! Look at the Lego leaves changing colors!

Here the Lego store, where we were standing. Right across from Eddie Bauer. To the right is the bottom of the mountain where little Lego people are skiing down.

Learning to count chopsticks in Japanese, the meaning of GOD HAIR & MAKE, and Japan's new yaoi boom

When you learn a language as different from English as Japanese is, some things are going to be challenging, such as the tendency for Japanese to leave the subject off a sentence, and sometimes the object and predicate, since they'd just get in the way. There are grammatical markers that define the subject, object, preposition and other parts of sentences, which helped me to "parse" the grammar of Japanese in an almost XML-like fashion (not that I knew what XML was back in 1987). Another unique area of learning Japanese are the "counters," the words you use when counting different objects based on their shape. If you're counting flat objects like sheets of paper, you use mai (ichi mai, ni mai, san mai, 一枚、二枚、三枚). For any long, cylindrical object, you use hon (ippon, ni hon, san bon、一本、二本、三本). (Roppingi, if you want to know, means "six trees" -- roku plus the hon/pon counter, and ki is Japanese for tree.) There are some difficult ones to get down -- for example, an umbrella is counted with hon/pon because it's long and cylindrical when closed, but when it's opened, it's in a different shape. How do you count it? Does a comatose body or freshly-killed corpse get counted with the same counter as the one for people? Incidentally, the counter for pairs of chopsticks is zen (no, not that zen, a totally different one, 膳　not 禅), which works out to be ichi zen, ni zen, san zen. Since knowing the proper way of counting pairs of chopsticks is somewhat archaic, I've always found that Japanese are shocked when a foreigner knows how to do it correctly. If you want to impress someone from Japan, pull this out on them and watch the surprise on their face.

You've been in Japan too long when, while driving by a new building with a sign that says GOD HAIR & MAKE, you know exactly what kind of establishment it is (a hair dresser that also does make-up). All languages have jokes or puns "hard wired" into them that are unique to that language -- I'm sure the famous "Who's on First?" comedy routine by Abbott and Costello could only work in English. The word kami can have three meanings (with appropriately differentiated kanji, of course), God, hair and paper (神, 髪 and 紙), which gives rise to little puns about God's Hair and the like. Another (bad) joke is related to counting words, above. The word for ribs is rokkotsu (roh-KOTSU、肋骨), which sounds to the ear like a counting word for "six bones" （六骨), so if you pretend to count someone's ribs and stop at six, it can be funny. Iruka means dolphin, but also "does [it] exist?" which causes learners of the language to make jokes like Iruka iruka? (Are there any dolphins?). Similarly, ikura refers to the salmon roe that tastes so good on sushi, but also "how much is this?" leading to Ikura ikura? (How much is the salmon roe?). Finally, rakuda means "camel" but also "it is comfortable," which means you can be sure to see TV commercials with camels relaxing while selling you some product. There, now you know some useless Japanese jokes.

Japan is certainly the land of the "boom," and when something starts to get popular, you'd better watch out because it can really take off. The newest trend this summer is supposedly megane dansei, (眼鏡男性） or "men with glasses," a wave of men going out of their way to wear attractive-looking glasses for the sharp, intelligent style it gives them. In the past, Japan has gone through several "glasses booms," generally centered around women, which saw stylish Tokyo females sporting the most bizarre-looking horn-rim Librarian-esque eyewear you can imagine, just because it had become fashionable. The Summer of 2006 may be time for men to take their turn in the center of svelte glasses fashion in Japan. Over the past 15 years I've often observed that men seem to be moving in on the territory traditionally occupied by women, with the rise of marketing of make-up and hair care products to men and magazines that appeal to the slightly effeminate, yaoi-esque side of males. I wonder if the summer's men-in-glasses boom is part of this larger trend?

Among the many hard-to-find Japanese products that J-List brings to you are the DVD releases of Yulia Nova, the fabulous Russian model who was discovered by Japanese photographer Satoshi Kizu. She's hugely popular here in Japan and all throughout the Internet, one of the most incredibly (and all-natural) models of the past generation. We're happy to announce three new Yulia Nova DVDs will be released soon, the dynamite Yulia & Friends series, which feature all-new footage of Yulia and other popular models appearing together. The region-free DVDs are completely mosaic-free as well. They new Yulia releases will be out in August, so preorder your copies now!

Here's a "Gambare" Daruma for Japan. I guess they're pretty cheap now...

If you're rooting for Brazil, here's your Daruma too!

My kids and I go to the onsen (OWN-sen, hot springs) quite often, and sometimes we eat at the little eating place they always have. Here's the shokken hanbaiki (食券販売機) from the place we went to over the weekend. One of the challenges to living in Japan is being able to put your money in the machine then read the little buttons and decide what you want quickly, since there's always a line of people angry that you're going to too slow.

Ah, the green tea and water machine. Couldn't have a restaurant and not have one of these.

I had the big beer, which is called biggu biiru　(just kidding, it's just called a "Dai"), and edamame on the side. Not a bad combination.