My Narita Reconsideration, a very useful Japanese mantra, and an important virtue for Japanese to have

Like Tokyo Disneyland, the New Tokyo International Airport is not located in Tokyo, being situated in Narita City, Chiba Prefecture, about an hour's train ride from Japan's capital. Back in the 1960s, Haneda Airport became unable to handle the country's growing air traffic, and the government made plans to build a new airport in Chiba to handle the International side of things. The trouble is, no one consulted the farmers of the then-sleepy shrine town of Narita beforehand, and a massive fight over whether the nation has the right to force citizens to sell their land for the common good ensued, with plenty of violent protests by the farmers who didn't want to be told what to do. The idea of "eminent domain" was not an established legal concept in Japan at the time, and the case is still not completely resolved. Ever since the 1980s (read: ever since Japan has been exerting a major cultural influence on the outside world), Narita has been the setting for the final scene of many a manga, anime or TV drama, including several that I used to study Japanese with. In all of these scenes, the unique metal tile ceiling of the Narita departure terminal (which you can see on the J-List site) can be seen. Every time I step foot inside the airport I look up at that ceiling, remembering the many emotional scenes that had unfolded there before.

I talked about kokuminsei (if you want kanji, 国民性) last time, the short list of features that ties each of us to our home country. Another facet of this "national personality" in Japan is the widely-used mantra shikata ga nai (仕方がない、sh-kah-tah ga NAH-ee), which translates as "it can't be helped" and is used by Japanese whenever they face a difficult situation that they feel powerless against. Don't like the current policies the government is adopting? Is there some aspect of society that you dislike? Just say shikata ga nai, or its more common version, sho ga nai (しょうがない, "there's nothing I can do about that"), and you'll feel better. It's really the perfect excuse -- you can even say shikata ga nai about stupid foreigners who think Japanese say shikata ga nai too much. In a country that crams half the population of the U.S. into an area the 1/25 the size, getting along is very important, and I guess these magic words help facilitate that harmony. On the other hand, there are times when people could do something about a particular problem, be it racism or sexism or the government's wasting money on needless public works projects, but people are so used to saying that nothing can be done about a problem that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

A similar concept is the idea of gaman (gah-MAHN), which means to endure that which you can't change. The ability to tolerate a bad situation without complaint is considered a very good quality for Japanese to have, and much of life in Japan involves sucking it in and putting up with the little things we wish were different. Apartments in Tokyo, often re-branded with the Japanese-English term "mansion" to make them sound more grandiose, are too small to comfortably raise a family. Cities are urban jungles, prices for many necessary products are high, the population of the country is projected to be just 27 at the end of the current millennium, and our local bank pays 0.02% interest per year on a 1-year CD. The only thing you can do when faced with such adversity is gaman, just put up with it without complaint, or you'd go crazy. As with the phrase shikata ga nai, which helps Japan get along more harmoniously but also causes people to fail to take action when it's called for, gaman is both a stoic virtue as well as the source of problems. If you've got a pregnant wife and the restaurant manager apologizes that there isn't a no smoking section for you to sit in, as happened to me years ago, it's definitely not a gaman situation.

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.

I'm up here in the Santa Cruz area seeing some family (I love the Internet, it lets me work anywhere!), and we went to a grand place called Roaring Camp Railroad, a mountain with old growth redwoods that were just great to see.

Going through the parking lot. I stopped counting Honda Odyssey's (Odysseies?) when I got to 14. We were driving one, too.

They had a barbecue place and a general store with fun stuff, and various things for kids to do that was old west-style. The highlights were the path through the redwood trees as well as the trip up the mountain in a 1912 steam train.

This is a tree that had lived something like 3000 years. You could put your finger on the points where Rome was founded, when the Magna Carta was signed. I love doing stuff like that, touching really old things and see what vibes I get.

Here's the World Famous Tourists, puffing their way up the mountain. What was waiting for us? I'll post next time...

Comparing cars in Japan and America, culture shock I get in my home country, and Americans don't like to say "goodbye"

Japan and the U.S. are very different places, and the cars that people choose to drive are different, too. In the U.S. the top-selling cars tend to be sedans like Civic (#1) or Camry (#3) or larger vehicles like Toyota's RAV4 (#9) or the Chevrolet Tahoe (#10). The top selling cars in Japan are usually small and stylish, often of the type known as "one box" (basically, boxy hatchbox cars), like the Suzuki WagonR (#1), the Daihatsu Move (#2) or the Honda Fit (#4), all very stylish cars that are marketed to hip young people who want to buy an inexpensive car but still have something fun to drive or pimp out. These cars tend to be "K" class vehicles, meaning that they have engines of 1000 cc or smaller, making them very fuel efficient -- the standard-gasoline WagonR gets 47 mpg/21 kpl, not bad at all. Besides the obvious fuel savings, another reason people are buying more efficient cars is that Japan's road taxes are set up to encourage them. Drivers of vehicles with large engines would pay a "road tax" of almost $1000 every year, but drivers of "K" cars pay around $60. Not all cars on the roads in Japan are small and efficient, of course, and you can see a huge range, from BMWs to the really big Land Cruisers, and even a surprising number of Cadillacs and Jeep Cherokees on the roads. But it's nice to have a choice.

Because I live outside the U.S. and only come back to visit a few times a year, it's interesting to see what changes I notice. During the 15 years I've lived in Japan, I've often been on the receiving end of culture shock in my own home country, feeling like Rip Van Winkle, or perhaps his Japanese counterpart, Urashima Taro. When I went to Japan, it was not that common for manufacturers to print Spanish or French on their products, but then one year I came back home and bam, every package was shouting New! Nuevo! Nouveau! at me. Back in 1991, you completed a credit card transaction by signing a piece of paper, but overnight (from my point of view, anyway), everyone went and got those computer terminals you sign on directly. Today we ate dinner at a favorite restaurant of ours, Gaetano's Pizza in Tierrasanta, one of the few businesses to change very little over the past 30 years (despite Walmart, etc.), and I noticed that the sign had been replaced since the last time I'd been there, something I probably wouldn't have spotted if I'd been seeing it on a daily basis.

Something about living in another country makes a person think introspectively about themselves. The features that make Americans Americans and French French are collectively called kokiminsei" in Japan, translatable as national personality." Basically, this word refers to the list of traits that people from a certain groups tend to share, some of which are certainly stereotypical but which may nevertheless be largely accurate. When I started J-List back in 1996, I started tapering off my ESL teaching, saying goodbye to my students as J-List grew to devour all my waking hours of free time. One school I taught at held a party for me, with karaoke and all the trimmings. Afterwards, I got a ride home with one of my students, an interesting lady in her 40s who was studying English because she wanted to live abroad for a few years. "Well," I said as we neared my house, "I'll see you later." "No, you won't," she replied. "A person has the same number of 'sayonaras' in their lives as first meetings, and we won't see each other again. But please be 'genki' in your future life." For some reason, being told "goodbye" in such absolute terms was more honesty than I was used to, and I was somewhat unsettled by her words. It seemed to me that Americans (or at least, this particular American) tended to substitute light-hearted parting words ("see you later") even when this clearly wasn't the case. Maybe we as a people don't like to say goodbye?

Remember that X-Change 3, the excellent dating-sim game by Crowd, is in stock and shipping now. One of the most popular interactive "H" game series ever, the X-Change trilogy follows the life and times of poor Takuya, who has a habit of changing from male to female at various points in his life. If you haven't ordered the third chapter in the series, we hope you will, as it's one of the best games Crowd has done in a long time. Of course, all our PC dating-sims are fully translated into English and mosaic-free, so you can enjoy everything about the story. Why not browse our game selection now?

Pictures of the Miata run. It was a lot of fun, although no matter how I cranked the Initial D soundtracks, it didn't transport me back to Mt. Akagi.

A gaggle of Miatas.

Went to a newphew's birthday party. He was ten. If he were Japanese I'd make a job about him being tensai which means "ten years old" but also "genius" (therefore, everyone who is ten years old is very smart).

My newest nephew Nick wasn't the birthday boy, but he was the star of the show.

"So, why does this guy keep speaking Japanese to me?"

That was quite a good picture. Nick has five brothers and sisters so he will never be alone, even when I'm back in Japan.

Heh, we asked Joey, the birthday boy in question, if he had any profound wisdom to pass on to little Nick. He said: "All I know is, that in ten years of life, I've never learned what the word 'profound' means."

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.