Good things and bad about living in Japan, more ways Japanese look to the West, and social benefits of love hotels

There are a lot of good things about living in Japan. Good food, from sushi to sashimi to Indian curry. Wholesome, polite people, with that important "you know no one is horking in your food behind your back" factor. Kawaii Japanese girls. Reading a novel while taking an extended dip in the onsen bath. However, living in Japan is not all cherry blossoms and Mt. Fuji, and there are some downsides to being here too. One of the worst aspects to living in Japan for many is dealing with allergies. We have the Japanese government to thank for much of the problem, for standardizing all forestry around the sugi (Japan Cedar) and replacing natural forests with one easy-to-harvest tree, which means that when it's time for the trees to pollinate, they do it all at once, creating an unbearable situation for millions of people with allergies. In addition to the awful months of sugi pollen, Japanese homes can be quite high maintenance when it comes to removing dust. Much as I love our tatami mats, they're very difficult to keep clean, and dust mites love to live inside the fibers -- hyakushon!

I wrote recently about Japan's fixation with the West, which has been a consistent theme in the nation's history since it began modernizing in the Meiji Period (1868-1912). The phenomenon is known as seiyo suhai shugi, literally "worship of the West-ism," and it pops up in daily Japanese life in many forms. Most Japanese seem to take it for granted that the culture in the U.S. and Europe, while by no means perfect, is somehow on a "higher level" than Japan, and social and economic reforms generally seem to lag behind the West by about a decade as leaders take their cues from the U.S. and Britain. One way this fascination with the West manifests itself is the burning desire in many who have achieved a certain level of success in their fields to translate that success over to the West. When business leaders believe they've finally "arrived" and have achieved whatever goals they'd set for themselves, many invariably decide to expand into the U.S. market, and since this is driven by their own personal desire to "make it" in the USA rather than on dispassionately collected market data, it can lead to less than optimal results. Hideo Nomo changed the sports world forever when he proved that a Japanese could make it in Big Leagues, and now top players in every sport from Ichiro and Matsui to Nakamura kicking the ball over in Ireland feel incomplete if they don't play overseas. Likewise, it seems that once a Japanese singer attains a certain level of success, they'll often start to pine for a U.S. debut. This is what 80s superstar Seiko Matsuda did, trying to bill herself as the "Japanese Madonna" in her U.S. release, complete with her wearing an exact replica of the "Lucky Star" outfit on the CD cover. The most recent Japanese artist to try to make it in the West is Utada, aka Hikaru Utada, who recently released an all-English album for fans outside of Japan. I'm a longtime fan of her songs, and I hope it works out for her.

One of the more famous recent images of Japan are its "love hotels," those interesting establishments which provide privacy for couples who would otherwise have no place to go to be alone. They're known by many names, including avec, tsurekomi yado, and motel (which causes plenty of confusion when Japanese go to the U.S. for the fist time), but the industry seems to be encouraging the term "fashion hotel" to promote a more positive image for the 21st century. For $40 (a 3 hour "rest") or $80 (an overnight "stay"), couples can enjoy an intimate experience with total privacy, complete with separate elevators for incoming and outgoing guests and a pneumatic tube system that lets you pay without ever meeting anyone. Generally located around the outskirts of Japanese cities or near freeway on-ramps, love hotels are often centered around a theme, like the Taj Mahal or Cinderella's Castle or Alcatraz Prison. (I'm holding for a room based on the final scenes from 2001: A Space Odyssey, complete with Monolith and space pod.) While the pragmatic concept of love hotels might seem odd to some, I believe they serve an important role in society here, and even help keep families from disintegrating. In the U.S., an eighteen-year-old boy who gets a girlfriend has an incentive to move out with her, perhaps making mistakes that both will regret down the road. But in Japan, where kids stay in the nest well into their 20s (and if they're the oldest son or daughter, live with their parents forever, taking over the family home and business, if there is one), everyone has access to all the privacy they could need.

J-List carries an excellent line of original T-shirts and super-soft hoodies featuring amusing kanji messages and cool anime designs, which are great for anyone on your holiday list. We carry XXL and XXXL sizes of some of our major shirts, so our larger customers can get in on the run, too. We're happy to announce that we've lowered the prices on these extra sizes, to just $1 for the XXL shirts, and $2.50 for the 3XL shirts.

Thoughts on ordering "peanuts butter," a tasty Japanese treat in the winter, and a friend who can't receive New Year's Cards

You know you've been in Japan too long when your mother sends you a bottle of nutmeg spice for Christmas, and a Japanese person asks what it is, upon which you immediately answer, without having ever heard what the spice is called in Japanese, "This is nutsmeg, which is great in warm milk." For some inexplicable reason of phonetics, some English words are imported into Japanese in their plural forms. Words like shirt, suit, swimsuit, peanut, and sport always appear with the 's' sound on the end, even if you're discussing the word in its singular form. In Japanese, one refers to a suitcase as a "suitscase," and it takes the brain a few months to get over the weirdness of this -- ditto for learning to ask for "peanuts butter." Similarly, the anime Fruits Basket probably weirded a lot of fans out at first when they first heard the title. There seem to be three reasons for some English words being mapped to their plural versions in Japanese. First is the rather convenient lack of singular/plural in Japanese grammar -- saying hana ga kirei means either "the flower is pretty" or "the flowers are pretty" depending on how many flowers you happen to discussing. Also, the softer tsu ending on the plural forms is easier for Japanese to pronounce than a hard t consonant sound. Finally, converting some words to their plural forms also avoids the dreaded L/R confusion that can be a problem in the language. Because "fruit" and "flute" would have the exact same pronunciation when rendered in katakana, the writing system used for expressing foreign loan words, the musical instrument became furu-to and the edible stuff became furu-tsu.

A photographer that J-List has a relationship with came up in conversation in the office the other day. "Oh, he's mo-chu this year," my wife said, "so we can't send him a New Year's Card." It was a word I'd never heard before, so my ears perked up immediately -- it turned out to be formal state of mourning due to the death of a family member within the past year. By far, the most important holiday to the Japanese is Oshogatsu, New Year's Day, and part of the fun is receiving nengajo, or New Years Cards. But because of whatever sadness visited his family this year, we're unable to send him a New Year's Card. Also, when you see someone for the first time after Jan. 1st, you greet them with akemashite omedetou gozaimasu, literally "congratulations on opening the new year," but it's taboo to use this greeting for someone who has had a death in the family the previous year.

Do you hear that? It's the sound of our local "ishi-yaki imo" (ee-shee YA-kee ee-MOH, or stone-baked sweet potato) vendor, driving around outside my window now. Like an ancient Japanese version of the Ice Cream Man, baked sweet potato vendors meander through the streets with their special trucks which contain ovens that are constantly baking the sweet potatoes over heated stones so that they're steaming hot and delicious. Like getting a nikuman (meat-filled Chinese bun) from a convenience store or holding a hot can of coffee on a train platform, baked sweet potatoes are a great way to warm up when it's cold outside. When Americans see dead leaves raked into a pile, most probably think of taking a flying leap into the leaves. But in Japan, a pile of dead leaves is the perfect place to bake your own foil-wrapped sweet potatoes, and you can see this happening quite often in the cooler months. I love the sound of the song they sing (see video).

J-List is your source for cool T-shirts with aesthetically cool kanji characters, hilarious messages and cool original anime designs. We've posted our newest T-shirts today, featuring the cute image of the Kodama from Princess Mononoke by Hayao Miyazaki, on shirts for guys and girls. Like all J-List T-shirts, these new additions are hand-printed by our experienced staff in San Diego, and all sizes are full U.S. standard sizes. Why not browse our extensive line of cool original T-shirts and Hoodies? (They also make great holiday gifts.)

Do you have a blog or other website? Would you like to help us spread our brand of fun Japanese popular culture? If so, we hope you'll consider joining the Friends of J-List, our affiliate program (although we hate to use marketingspeak words like that). It's easy to show exactly the J-List products you want to show, and link to exactly the products you want to link to, and you get cash or store credit for every sale. For more information read this page.

Remember that J-List is having its first ever Domo-kun Free Shipping Sale, a great excuse for you to get that Really Big Domo-kun plush for your room and save big (yes, the sale applies to all Domo items, even big ones like that need to be sent via EMS). We personally think the Standard Domo-kun Plush is just about the coolest thing from Japan, and I'm sure friends or officemates would agree with us. Browse our Domo-kun selection now!

Thought I'd throw down some (way late) pictures. Here's our Thanksgiving turkey which was, incidentally, killed by hand with a sharp knife in keeping with Islamic teachings, according to the outside of the package.

Daughter Rina going horseback riding on her birthday. She loves horses.

I joined the Gainax keitai club so I get to download a bunch of Gainax related stuff for my phone. Here's the Asuka phone animation that has her saying, "Anta baka?!" (Are you stupid?)

This is my most favoritist bento in the world, from a store called Torihei.

Not sure how good it looks to you, but it's thinly sliced pieces of chicken on rice with a delicious sauce over the whole thing. Mmmm... I've been eating it for 15 years and they have never raised the price once.

And this is Yakiori, teriyaku chicken on a stick that's delicious. Why, I wonder, is this not very popular in the U.S.? It seems like a natural to me.

Confusingly noble business practices in Japan, ideas on gift-giving in Japanese society, and how cotton masks made $4 billion for AFLAC

Japan is always ready to surprise you in one way or another, and some of the business practices employed here have caused me some confusion over the years. Once, an electronics retailer we used to frequent closed its doors suddenly, apparently having gone out of business. We were saddened to lose a shop we liked, but we found another retailer that served us just as well. We were surprised when the first store reopened a couple months later with new floors and a new sign -- apparently they had just closed for renovation, but as they didn't bother to make this clear to their customers, they inadvertently ended up losing our business. Also, there are times when salesmen don't act as you'd expect them to. When NTT finally brought fast hikari fiber (fiber optic) Internet to our part of the city, I was so overjoyed I was ready to sign up for the most expensive dedicated line they had. Instead of selling me the costlier service, the NTT salesman talked me out of it, telling me that the standard shared line would be more than fast enough for us -- and he was right. Then there was the time I was shopping for a Minolta camera, the old kind with the silly pre-programmed cards that enabled certain camera effects. I was so filled with camera lust that I was about to add several of the cards to my purchase, but the salesman at the store shook his head, telling me that they weren't worth the money, losing an additional sale but certainly gaining my trust. I'm not totally sure that similar salesmen in the U.S. would have worked to keep me from making an unnecessary purchase like that.

When founder of the AFLAC insurance company John Amos went to Japan for the Osaka Expo in 1970, something unique caught his eye: the Japanese custom of wearing a white cotton mask when they've got a cold, which keeps germs from spreading to others. From this he smartly deduced that the Japanese are very health-centric and might be open to buying his company's insurance products, and he decided to open up a branch in Tokyo. This turned out to be one of the wisest business decisions in history, as AFLAC now insures one in four Japanese households and nets $4 billion in sales annually here. Yes, the Japanese are quite focused on health issues, and it's common to see television shows interviewing 104 year old women from Okinawa on how they lived so long, and introducing strange foods you've never heard of that are guaranteed to change your blood from doro doro (doh-roh doh-roh, syrupy, thick) to sala sala (smooth- flowing and healthy). There are hundreds of products in the marketplace that promise to protect you from bacteria, too, from special soap you leave in your kitchen sponge to sterilize it overnight to my daughter's bicycle, which was marketed as being "germ resistant," whatever that means.

Although Christmas is a relatively recent import into Japan, the giving and receiving of gifts has always been a big part of life in Japan. Besides many formal and informal traditions of exchanging gifts, such as the "engagement presents" traded between the families of a couple about to get married, there are two big gift-giving periods in Japan, when families will give special pre-packaged gift sets such as canned coffee, laundry detergent, soy sauce, salad oil and sake to people who have helped them in some way recently. Companies also trade these gifts, and this year J-List will exchange "oseibo" presents with companies like Crowd (maker of the X-Change and Yin Yang! series), CD-Bros. (publisher of some of the cool new games we'll be bringing out next year) and our many toy, DVD and other distributors. While it makes sense to give something that everyone in the receiving company will be able to use like canned juice, it's also fun to receive something unique from another part of Japan, such as the interesting Hokkaido fruits and seafood that Crowd often sends us, or the delicious Curry Udon from Nagoya we sometimes get.

One of our favorite product genres are bishoujo games, the "pretty girl games" for PCs which let you interact with Japan in a whole new way. We've got the world's largest selection of dating-sim games, with titles for all tastes, whether you're interested in cat girls, maids, or extremely dramatic stories that may even make you cry, with many titles available as downloads, too. We're happy to announce that the new title Bible Black: The Game is now in stock and ready for your immediate order. A great title that explores the satanic side of the genre, it features outstanding art and characters and story that lets you choose either the light or dark side of the story.

We've got loads of great products for your holiday list, with hundreds of recently added or restocked products that anyone on your list would love to receive. We're sure that more than a few of them would love to get some cool Domo-kun products this year, and to help you out we're announcing our first-ever Domo-kun Free Shipping Sale. Here's how it works: order 3 or more Domo-kun items from our extensive seection and we'll give you free shipping on those items, even the rare big-ticket Domo-kun plush toys we've got limited stock of. Please note that in almost every case, the cool Domo-kun products we have are the last that will ever be available from Japan, so if you've been biding your time to round our your Domo-kun collection, now is the time to act, as long-time J-List readers know that a sale like this is a really rare event that won't come along again.

The role of trains in Japan, funny observations on society here, and Christmas comes early

Japan is a very rail-centric place compared to the U.S., and trains are a much larger part of society than they are back home, at least from the point of view of this California yank. Trains are more convenient the closer you live to a large city, of course, and you can get anywhere in Tokyo in a short time thanks to its complex network of rail and subway lines. Trains are nice to have when you're out drinking with friends, since you can all get home safely without worrying about driving. Out in the "inaka" (ee-NAH-KAH, i.e. the boonies) where we live, trains are only used to get from one city to another, and are only convenient if you happen to be going somewhere near your target station. Still, even in small cities like ours, train stations play a large role in defining the commercial and cultural identity of a city. Nearby Takasaki is a commercial hub for our prefecture, and their station is gleaming white, with many shops located right inside the station for convenience. Our own home of Isesaki is famous for having the lowest "cultural level" of any city in the area, as defined by membership rates in groups like the Japan Rotarians and the Lion's Club or something like that (it's all quite over my head), and our run-down, ugly train station reflects our city's mediocrity.

It's funny how east mirrors west sometimes. Many people from Europe and the U.S. are taken with Japan, with the mystery of the place and the many ways it delights us by never being predictable. In a similar fashion, the Japanese have had a fascination with the West ever since Commodore Perry sailed his black ships into Yokohama Bay in 1853. You can see Japan's tendency to look culturally to Europe when you look at iconic buildings like Tokyo Tower (an exact replica of the Eiffel Tower) and Tokyo Station (a recreation of the Amsterdam Centraal Station). Similarly, it's interesting to see the way they define their own land in relation to the West, declaring the seaside in Chiba to be the Dover Cliffs of Japan, the main mountain range in the country the Japan Alps, and so on. If I want to get out and feel like I've travelled the world I can go to Kronenberg, a replica of a German village complete with beer, sausages and embarrassed-looking Germans standing around; visit Western Village, an old west town that features cowboys and a miniature version of Mt. Rushmore looking down on the freeway; or even go see the replica of the Statue of Liberty down by Rainbow Bridge in Tokyo (it's quite a "date spot"). Comparing cultures is so much fun!

Christmas came a little early to the kids at a preschool near J-List as "Santa-san" dropped in for a visit this morning. It was really me in that suit (ssh, don't tell the kids), fulfilling my annual role as the cheerful St. Nick as I handed out presents to everyone. Christmas is a very bright and happy time in Japan, and no Christmas Party would be complete without a real live gaijin Santa Claus there to make everyone laugh. There was a question and answer time, where the kids asked me such questions as, "Where do you live?" (er, Norway), "What is your favorite color?" (red) and "What is your favorite food?" ("reindeer hamburg steak"). As usual, I made sure not to break character by speaking Japanese, and it was great to see them using the universal English phrases "Thank you," "How are you?" and "What is your hobby?" with me, so happy to be actually using English for communication.

We're still rolling out the new features to the J-List website. The (still beta) J-List Wish List is shaping up nicely, and we've added the ability to move items in your shopping cart over to your Wish List for later purchase, so you won't forget about it if you want it get it later. Wish Lists can be made public so you can tell friends or family what you'd like them to get for you, post it on your blog, or just show off your list of cool items for anyone who wanders in. One small warning though: many items at J-List are limited in stock, and if you leave an item in your wish list for too long, it might not be available next time you go to get it. Feedback on the new system

Multiple meaning of "wa," raising bilingual kids, and what cute culture has to do with the rock band KISS.

Many English speakers know the Japanese word wa (和） which means harmony and peace, and in some cases additionally refers to the country of Japan itself. But there's a similar word wa (輪） that's probably more important to daily life in Japan. The other wa means ring, hoop, or circle, and is the word most used to describe a circle of friends or some other group of mutual acquaintances. The Japanese are, of course, a very group-oriented people, and there are mechanisms in place for ensuring that relationships work smoothly all around. Back in my teaching days, I observed that every Japanese seems to have at least two sets of core friends: those they've known since elementary and junior high school, which are where compulsory education in Japan ends; and a different set of friends who they met in high school. Since everyone chooses a high school that's right for his or her own academic level and future goals, it's rare for groups of friends to make the jump from junior high to high school intact. If a friend from one group encounters someone from a different group, politeness shields go up on all sides, and everyone becomes very stiff and formal, since acting too friendly with someone not already known to you personally would come across as very cheeky.

Japan definitely has an affinity for all things kawaii (cute), which is often a source of entertainment. Yesterday I went to the local electronics store, Plug City, to buy a new digital camera for our staff. The camera I selected was Canon's EOS Kiss Digital X, the Japanese version of the Digital Rebel XTi. I was amused to see the box the camera came in, which featured four gaijin kids painted to look like the KISS musicians, with Godzilla in the background -- it was much more wacky and eye-catching than the subdued packaging I'm sure they use in the U.S. You can see this approach to cute culture in the normally dreary manuals for electronic products too, which show anime-esque versions of electronic components smiling with glee when operated correctly, wearing puzzled expressions for the help section and sweating profusely in the chapter that tells you not to use this device above a certain temperature. Another aspect of Japan's cute culture is the style known as "SD" or "super deformed," basically a subset of the standard anime character design that features exaggerated features like an oversized head on a body that's too small. TV commercials featuring actors with super-cute deformed bodies and oversized heads are likewise a staple of advertising in Japan.

One of the great things about having kids is, you get to watch them at various stages as they grow up. I've enjoyed seeing my son and daughter (currently 11 and 10) moving through each phase of their lives as they grow and change. Unlike most children, my kids have had to deal with learning two languages, English and Japanese. When kids are small, it's quite hard to separate which language is which -- I'll never forget the image of my daughter in a toy store in the U.S., trying to talk to another child in Japanese and wondering why they didn't understand her, or when my son commented that the cold-water bath at the hot springs we had just visited was "cold-katta," mixing the English word "cold" with the past tense ending for adjectives in Japanese. Of course once kids reach a certain age, learning languages becomes child's play ('scuze the pun), and it wasn't long before my wife and I found ourselves being surpassed linguistically by our offspring. Now my son won't let his mother help him with his English homework, since some of the answers she gave him before turned out to be wrong.

J-List carries an extensive line of popular T-shirts and hoodies that feature unique messages in kanji, cool anime character designs from Japan and more, a great way to bring an esoteric bit of Japan into your life. We've got a new design going up on the site today: the super-cute Soot Sprite from Totoro (in Japanese, Makkuro Kurosuke), one of the most loveable images from anime.

We've been working on improvements to the J-List website all week long, upgrading our server for increased speed and working on some new features we hope you'll like. First and foremost, we're happy to announce the much- requested Wish List system is going up today. Since we have so many products at J-List, it can be hard to find all the items you want to look at, and now you have the option of adding items either to your shopping cart, or instead placing them in your Wish List, a permanent list of products you can browse at any time. By default the list is private and only viewable by you, but you have the option of making your list public, and even adding your own text to the list, inviting readers to buy the items for you. Feedback on the new J-List Wish List feature is appreciated! (Note: the feature should be considered beta since we're still rolling it out. I decided to go home at 2 am...)

More info on how schools work in Japan, a sumo wrestling update and 40 years of Ultraman

Last time I talked about how education in Japan worked, especially high school, which is optional for students here -- they can choose not to go without any penalty, although most know they'd be fools not to get an education while they can. Since high schools operate like a miniature version of the university system, competition for students creates a real incentive for educators to offer a solid program, and any school whose academic reputation declines will face a drop-off in the number of students that choose to come there. High schools specialize, too, with "college prep" schools for students intending to go to university, "commercial" schools that offer a more practical education for those who'll be entering the work force, and even an agricultural high school near our city. As with universities, some high schools are run by a city or prefecture while others are private institutions, and it's the lower-cost public schools that are most in demand. (A brief aside: the Japanese staff of J-List just told me they had all assumed that the reason Harvard was so popular was because it was the cheapest school in America. Woah, culture shock.) The choice of which high school to apply for can be an important one for young people, and I've seen quite a few 15 year olds who seemed mature beyond their years as they reflected seriously on what high school choice would best serve them in the future. Currently many of Japan's college-oriented high schools are getting in trouble for not teaching all the required hours of coursework, offering lessons targeted at what students will face on their college entrance exams rather than what the Ministry of Education has ordered them to teach.

Happy Birthday to Ultraman, who turned 40 years old this year. Along with Godzilla, Astro Boy and Johnny Sokko and his darned Egyptian-looking Flying Robot that practically no one remembers anymore, Ultraman was of the most famous early ambassadors of Japanese popular culture to the world. Created by Eiji Tsuburaya, the mastermind behind the special effects in the Godzilla movies, Ultraman was very ground-breaking, with high budgets and gorgeous special effects, for 1966, anyway. The story of a rubber-suited hero from Nebula M78 who comes to Earth disguised as mild-mannered Shin Hayata, and who transforms with that cool "flying punch at the camera" effect whenever he's needed, the Ultraman series went on through a total of 20 generations, featuring such characters as Ultraman Seven (the most popular series with die-hard otaku), Ultraman Powered (he's from America, and has blue eyes to prove it) and evil Ultraman Agul. When my son was small we watched all the Ultraman series of the day together -- my favorite was Ultraman Gaia, which was cool because of its story arcs, including one about a TV reporter who suspected the main character's secret identity and kept trying to catch him as he did his transformation. Ultraman is so famous, even the monsters he banishes are household names here, from lobster-shaped Baltan to the metal-eating Kanegon and my own favorite, the psychedelic-looking Dada.

Well, Asashoryu (ah-sah-sho-RYU, and no, that's not the "shoryu" from "shoryuken" in Street Fighter II, I checked) has pulled another stunning victory out of his topknot. The Mongolian wrestler pounded 15 opponents in the Kyushu Tournament to receive his 19th win over the weekend. Sumo wrestling (just called "sumo" in Japanese) is the national sport of Japan, receiving special status and support from the government. It's an incredibly old sport, practiced since prehistoric times in Japan, and taking its more modern form in the Edo Period. There are six tournaments held during the year, four in Tokyo and one each in Kyushu and Nagoya three in Tokyo and one each in Kyushu, Nagoya and Osaka, each consisting of 15 days of bouts, with each wrestler going up against a different opponent each day. The current record holder is the famous Taiho, the half Japanese, half-Russian wrestler who won 32 bouts in his career from 1961-1971. I wonder if Asashoryu will be able to beat this score? (Note: if you're a sumo fan, our Yokozuna T-shirt is really a cool esoteric item.)

The holiday shopping season is upon us, and J-List is ready to get your order out to you with speedy speed -- whatever you need, make your order now and we'll get it on its way to you with no delay. I asked the J-List staff to come up with the items they thought were best for gift-giving, and they came up with the following short list of recommendations:

1. Case of Black Black caffeine gum (great for caffeine addicts)
   
2. J-List Best Seller Snack Set (or mix and match your own)
   
3. Hidamari no Tami or Unazukin toys (great for friends at the office)
   
4. Joke gift like our Japanese actress blow-up dolls (great gag item)
   
5. Totoro or Cat Bus plush (they're so soft, they'll be appreciated for years)
   
6. Huggable Domo-kun Pillows (Japan's cutest monster)
   
7. Toilet paper (Hello Kitty, kanji) (they'll never see this gift coming)
   
8. Subscription to a Japanese magazine (we now offer annual subscriptions)
   
9. "In emergency, commit seppuku along the dotted line" T-shirt (or choose from 70 other shirt items)
   
10. A handy J-List gift certificate

Some more pics from Japan, since I had them open. This is a trip to Toys R Us for a little girl's birthday. Here we see that Nintendo DS's are *still* sold out. If you have any Sony stock, dump it!

She wanted a Licca-chan doll so I had to pick one. I didn't get the one that said "Sweet Cherry" on the front, since it seemed a little too modern for me.

If I were a doll buyin' man, this is the one I'd have gotten for myself. In the end, I went for a Licca nurse since my daugher likes to pretend her stuffed animals are burn victims then heal them, or something.

Got any Micronauts fans reading today? It was a toy line from Mego, produced with Takara doing the Japan end. Micronauts faded into obscurity inthe 1970s in the States, but has been going strong here -- kind of like an alternate Micronauts universe. This is a rather twisted item, a female Acroyear (which isn't so odd if you read the outstanding Marvel Micronauts comics back in the day, but even fewer out there have to have read them).

Wow, dig that parasol, and those breasts.

Have they actually not exported this part of Japan to the U.S. yet? I mean, games where you put in 100 yen and get a card you can collect and play a game with are so huge here. I'm surprised they haven't put these in stores yet.

Hey' I've seen that before!

Education and high school dropouts in Japan, Japanese in touch with their history, and the biggest shock Japanese get when they go to the U.S.

I caught a post on Slashdot the other day about a surge in high school dropouts in the U.S., and was saddened at the news. In Japan, compulsory education covers six years of elementary school and three years of junior high school, and during that time the basics that everyone needs to know are taught -- math, social studies, kanji, morals, learning to respect your senpai, and so on. High school has never been required, and there's nothing keeping a sixteen year old who has something better to do with his time from not going on past the 9th year of school. Just the same, there's a heavy stigma -- the dreaded label chu-sotsu (中卒) meaning a graduate of junior high school -- against anyone who doesn't make it through high school, and the vast majority of students (96%) do go on. High schools in Japan function as a miniature version of the university system complete with entrance exams, and competition for the best schools -- Takasaki High and Maebashi Girl's School are the highest- ranked in our prefecture -- is fierce, requiring years of preparation to get in. Just as with universities, it's possible for students to aim too high and fail all their tests, and become a ronin, a word which used to mean masterless samurai but which now refers to a student who is in temporary limbo while he prepares for next year's tests.

When Japanese people go to the U.S. they're amazed at the variety of foods available in supermarkets, especially the staggering number of breakfast cereals. "In SAFEWAY, many kinds of corn flakes about one hundred have overpowered me," one of my former ESL students wrote at the time. "I felt a difference of the staple foods." In Japan, gaijin might say the same about the instant ramen, with supermarkets and convenience stores brimming with various brands of noodles in every shape, size, and taste. Instant ramen came into being in 1958 with the introduction of Chicken Ramen by Nissin, and the convenience of noodles that could be stored easily and eaten anytime made them an instant hit, if you'll forgive the pun. Today many large companies compete to bring the best noodle products to market, including such favorites as Nissin's popular Cup Ramen line, the delicious Akai Kitsune Udon ("Red Fox" noodles with fried tofu in each package, yum), and even high-end brands that cost $5 or more per serving. Some numbers for you: Japan eats 5.4 billion servings of instant noodles per year (42 per person on average), the amount of flour used to make this ramen would fill up half of Tokyo Dome, and there are 983 registered brands of instant noodles on the market. I can personally attest to the profitability of instant ramen. During my ESL days, I happened to teach English to the wife of the former president of the Sapporo Ichiban Company, and her house was easily the most beautiful building I've seen outside of Kyoto. Instead of learning any English, we'd often sit in her unspeakably gorgeous tatami room speaking Japanese, drinking green tea and eating delicious manju cakes. This is basically the holy grail of ESL teaching, to find rich people and get them to pay you while they teach you Japanese rather than the other way around.

The other night I went downstairs to my parents liquor shop to get something -- the Japanese custom of building shops and homes together can be quite convenient when you run out of soy sauce or coffee filters or beer, since you've usually got what you need right there in the store. My wife's father and mother were watching a jidai geki, or a historical drama, in this case about the years leading up to the Battle of Sekigahara, where Ieyasu Tokugawa finally defeated his enemies and unified the country under his shogun banner. They were having a very deep discussion about the actions of the main character, an underling of Tokugawa, and how he narrowly saved the day for his lord. Like Westerns back in the 1950's, samurai period dramas are a popular genre of television, with many different shows produced for all ages. The most famous jidai geki on TV is the megabudget Taiga Drama that NHK produced each year, telling dramatic stories from a different part of Japan's past. Perhaps it has to do with higher average age of Japanese people, but it seems they have a lot more interest in their history than folks from the States could ever conceive of, and even younger people like my wife can take quite an active interest in events 400 or more years ago.

J-List carries hundreds of delicious and fun to eat snack items from Japan, including Pocky & Pretz, Pucca chocolate-filled fish-shaped pretzels, candy sushi, and unique varieties of Kit Kat only sold in Japan. Today we're posting this year's first Melty Kiss, the yummy fudge cubes from Meiji that are not only delicious, they've got one of the strangest names of any product we sell. This year's Melty Kiss is excellent, with the delicate taste of cocoa powder on the outside and rich fudge on the inside. Look for Precious Cacao and Strawberry on the site now.

Because I'm late with the daily post, I'll give you some pictures. Here is a giant offering to the goddess Yuko Ogura. Bummer that the power lines had to get in the way...

Outside our window the other day, a real rainbow! There is hope for us all!

Wao! It's a banana!

In reality, it's a banana shaped cake with banana cream inside, packaged in a gift box for giving as omiyage (souvinirs).

Christmas Cake. Do you have yours ordered yet? To our friends in the UK, I know the core concept for this comes from your side of the pond, or specifically from Scotland or something like that, but do you guys have shops marketing Christmas Cakes all over the place?

Being an American in Japan during Thanksgiving, subtleties of Japanese pronunciation, and a cultural lesson for PSP owners

By and large, an American expat living in Japan has two choices when it comes to celebrating Thanksgiving: completely forget about it, or get a bucket of "Kentucky" for the family and pretend it's delicious oven-roasted turkey. Thanksgiving is, of course, an event that's quite unique to the U.S., and since Japanese stores generally lack stuffing, gravy, pumpkin pie filling and all those other good things, it can be awfully hard to get into the spirit of the season. Just the same, you can give thanks for all the good things you have no matter where you live in the world, and this year my family and I are going to take on the challenge of having a real American Thanksgiving in Japan, with a turkey (imported from Australia), cranberry sauce (sent by my mother), sushi (brought over by a friend of ours) and other good things to eat. It won't be completely traditional, but we'll make do somehow. We hope everyone in the U.S. has a wonderful holiday!

When you live in a country as different from your home as Japan is from the U.S., the potential for culture shock is everywhere, even in video games. I ordered Lumines II from the States since I'd enjoyed first version so much, but when I slapped the U.S. release game into my PSP and started playing, something felt strange to me -- for some odd reason, I was having trouble navigating the menus, and kept jumping back to the title screen instead of starting the game. It turns out that, due to differences in how Japanese perceive the symbols X and O compared with the West, Sony had switched the button functions around. While X probably corresponds pretty easily with the idea of "execute" to most Americans, in Japan it's known as batsu and it means "bad" or "no" (as an esoteric aside, a person who's been divorced once is batsu ichi, if twice then batsu ni, and so on). Meanwhile, the circle (maru in Japanese) is the universal symbol for "correct" or "yes" or "good" in Japan, and is the natural choice to mean "accept this menu selection." When a teacher marks answers on a test, she draws circles over the correct answers, and if the student got a good grade, she draws a hana maru or a big flower with a circle inside, the highest praise a teacher can give. Maru sounds lucky, and ships are usually christened with the word as part of their names (although it wasn't all that lucky for the Kobayashi Maru). But perceptions are fleeting things. When a finance company called Maru-Fuku opened near our house, I commented that the name gave me a bad feeling, since mal means "evil" in Spanish, and fuku (good fortune) sounded like "hook" to me. My wife had exactly the opposite impression of the company, telling me that the name sounded to her like it would bring "happiness and good luck to every corner of your home."

Would you like a dorink with that cheeseburger? How about a pair of Edowin jeans? Last weekend I took my kids for a dorive. One of the unique features of Japanese is that it's a syllable-based language, which means that you can express syllables like ka, ki, ku, ke and ko but not a "k" sound by itself. This is part of the reason that the Japanese often have thick accents when speaking foreign languages, since everything must be filtered through this limited phonetic system. The syllable-based pronunciation also has an effect on how some words are used in Japanese, for example, causing the "d" consonant to be expressed as a separate sound, do (doh, as in a deer, a female deer, or what Homer Simpson says), which alters the sound of word like "drink" "Edwin" and "drive" (above) ever so slightly. Just as Japanese anime has been accepted all over the world, there are many fans of Japanese TV dramas, which are invariably called "doramas" by fans due to this slight quirk of phonetics in Japanese.

J-List's "reserve subscription" system is a great way to get the current issues of dozens of popular anime, manga, toy & hobby, fashion and other magazines sent to you each month. Whether you're thrilling at the amazing number of pull-out posters in each issue of Megami Magazine, feeling the pulse of Japan's gothic cosplay or Harajuku street fashion culture, or just checking out the latest in J-Rock, our subscriptions really make it easy to stay in touch with Japan. By customer request, we're giving you a choice now: in addition to the month-to-month revolving subscription we've always offered, you can choose our new annual option, pre-paying a discounted flat fee for one year worth of issues, with SAL shipping included in the price. We originally put the annual subscription in place for libraries and other institutions that prefer to pay once per year (and we're happy to serve these customers), but decided to extend the option to everyone to make it easier than ever to get great magazines from Japan.

Coming to Japan from San Diego, changing Japanese views on alcohol, and Japan Autumn Report

Coming to Japan meant adjusting to many new things, from vending machines that accept the equivalent of $100 bills then bow to you in thanks after you make a purchase to learning that there's a time and a place to pop that little baby octopus in your mouth without thinking about it. I also had to learn to live in a much colder place than my former home of San Diego, California. Of course, just about every place in the world is colder in the winter than Santa Ana-blessed San Diego, where the definition of "frigid" means having to wear long sleeves in the evenings, but learning to stay warm in Japan was a lot different than if I'd just moved to, say, Boston. Following my mother's sage advice about dressing in layers helped, but the problem was really more of a cultural one. The Japanese don't have central heating, and would consider the idea of heating an entire house wasteful. Instead, you heat just the room you're using, usually with a kerosene-electric "fan heater" or a wall-mounted air conditioner (and yes, it does take time to get used to the idea of an air conditioner producing heat). Another popular option is to use a kotatsu (koh-TA-tsoo), basically a table with a blanket over it and a heater inside. Stick your legs under the blanket and you'll be as toasty as you could want to be, which works great until a family member is flatulent inside the kotatsu (one of its few drawbacks).

Most weekends my family and I can be found up in the mountains around Karuizawa, soaking up the healing power of the onsen hot springs and enjoying the "vibrant nature" of central Japan. It's a nice time to drive in the mountains right now, since the leaves on the trees are exploding in fireworks of red, yellow and brown as autumn passes through the country. The Japanese are quite happy about having four distinct seasons, as if it were the only place on Earth to have that honor, and many people make special trips to remote regions to take in the beauty of the leaves as they change color, which is called koyo in Japanese (meaning "crimson leaves"). The other day I noticed that Yahoo Japan has an interactive "Koyo Map" allowing you to check the current leaf status of each part of the country so you'll know what kind of view you'd find there. Just as the symbol of spring is the sakura, or cherry blossom, the beauty of autumn is captured in the momiji (moe-MEE-JEE), the Japanese maple, a beautiful image of Japan in the Fall.

As a rule, the Japanese are rather fond of their spirits, and enjoy a wide range of recreational alcoholic beverages, from sake to beer to one of my favorite drinks, a Grapefruit Sour, a glass of a gin-like alcohol called shochu which comes with half a grapefruit and a juicer, requiring you to extract the juice and pulp and add it to your drink. The last decade has seen a long-term boom in the popularity of wine in Japan, with many people developing a taste for red wines from all over the world, in part to promote good health. Even the humble liquor shop that my wife's parents run has seen quite a transformation in recent years, with the share of traditional sake in the store shrinking (partially due to our sake-buying customers dying of old age) and being replaced by imported wines. My wife and I are signed up with a company that sends us six bottles of wine from a different part of Europe every month, complete with information on the region -- I like to read through the newsletters they send and get a feel for how "winespeak" in Japanese compares with English (it's pretty funny, but not in any way I could ever communicate to you). Every year the Japanese go quite ga-ga over the beaujolais nouveau, a traditional wine from France that goes on sale at midnight on the third Thursday of November, which is transported in huge quantities to Japan by air cargo. I'll have to see about getting a few bottles and give this year's vintage a taste.

J-List has always supported Japan's PC dating-sim games, making sure we stock all English-translated bishoujo games so that fans around the world could experience this fun interactive media from Japan. We're extremely happy to announce that one of the most anticipated anime games to come along in years, Yin-Yang! X-Change Alternative, has been declared "Golden Master" and will be shipping very soon. In this game you play Kaoru, a Japanese boy who possesses a unique form of "yin-yang" DNA that is both male and female. When he accidentally drinks a potion that serves as a catalyst, he's surprised to find his body transformed into that of a girl, which is only the start of all the strange things that are going to happen to him.

A very Buddhist way of looking at your house pets, how to beat the Chinese at kanji, and thoughts on Japan's future

Pets are a part of our household in Japan, and currently we've got a dog (faithful old Sakura) and two cats (black-and-white Mix-chan and all-black Kuro). My wife once remarked to me, "It's important to keep pets in the home. They die in place of family members when the family runs into bad luck." My eyes become little black points like an anime character's at this, as I struggled to understand her statement. She was talking about the concept of migawari (me-gah-wah-ree), literally meaning "substitute for" or "sacrifice for." When our dog Chibi passed away earlier this year, the general consensus among my Japanese family was that he had died in order to protect someone in the family from injury or worse, and everyone loved him a little more for that. Originally a ninja term meaning to dress up a tree to look like a person so an enemy would think it was you and attack it mistakenly, the word refers to anything that takes bad luck in your place, protecting you as it does so. There are many kinds of objects believed to serve as "lightning rods" for bad fortune, including various types of omamori good luck charms or Buddhist statues -- we've even got a cool migawari charm up on the site today.

According to SF writer Isaac Asimov, the only constant is change, continuing change, inevitable change. Sometimes this change can take decades to become visible, and other times you can see trends happen right outside your window. The long-standing tradition of Japan trailing U.S. society by 10-20 years is continuing as the country faces the same kind of pressures on its manufacturing economy that the U.S. started experiencing in the early 1990s. The reasons are similar -- the high cost of building something in Japan leads to more companies outsourcing products to China as industries shift and change. One of the landmarks of the nearby city of Maebashi was a giant Daihatsu factory in the center of town -- they manufactured those cute midget-sized vehicles I used to see driving around on the SDSU college campus. The factory was closed last year, though, and in its place sprang up a new shopping district with supermarkets, clothing stores and restaurants, all of which seemed to mirror some of the changes that the U.S. has gone through over the last decade or two, moving from manufacturing to a service-based economy, and not always smoothly, either. Happily, although there is a trend towards larger, more convenient stores in Japan today, consumers are more concerned with overall quality of service rather than just price, and there are as yet no giant national retail chains that wield an unfair amount of influence over the economy, hopefully staving off "Wal-martification."

Establishing a rival relationship with someone is a smart way to motivate yourself, and I put this tactic to good use while studying Japanese. I had a Chinese friend who was taking level 1 of the Japanese Language Ability Test (JLPT) at the same time as me, and I made up my mind that I was going to beat her score. This was quite a task, since Chinese people have a natural affinity for kanji, the Chinese having invented them and all. But although my friend could read any Japanese sentence and get most of the meaning out of it, she was thrown off by the fact that there are two readings for most Japanese kanji, the Chinese one (based on how the character was pronounced in the 6th century when kanji came to the country), and the local Japanese one. The interplay between these two ways to read a character is subtle, like the Japanese people themselves, and it can be quite difficult to know how to pronounce a character in a given situation. In the end, I beat my friend by ten points, quite an accomplishment for a "white boy" foreigner.

We're having fun around here at J-List, playing with the new item we've posted to the site today: Moe (mo-EH) Soundrop, keychains that play super-cute anime voices when you press them. The latest step in the evolution of Japan's culture of "moe," roughly translatable as the burning, happy feeling you get when you see your favorite anime character, there are eight archetypal cute girls represented in the series, from cat girl to maid to younger sister who calls you "Oniichan!" and more. The recorded voices in the capsule toy keychains sound great, the batteries are replaceable, and best of all, they're very affordable, so you can get the girls you'd like to hear or pick up the whole set.

Interesting careers open to gaijin in Japan, getting used to strange words, and do you know what year it is?

I get a lot of mail from people who'd like to live in Japan someday, and I do my best to offer what guidance I can. Far and away, the most common job open to naive English speakers in Japan is teacher of English as a Second Language. Possible job avenues in this area include the national ESL school chains like AEON, GEOS and ECC; private-contract schools of varying sizes; jobs teaching English to employees of companies; more structured positions at high schools or universities; and the JET program. While it wasn't always a walk in the park, I did enjoy the years I spent teaching ESL before starting J-List, and I'd recommend teaching in Japan to anyone as long as they knew the limitations of the job (a four-year degree is required, and remember that "taught English in Japan" isn't always the best way to fill out one's resume). Still, I am invariably asked what other career paths are open to foreigners here. Other than the usual options you might think of -- translation, editing and checking of already translated works, becoming cast members at Tokyo Disneyland -- there is another up-and-coming career choice, that of a fake minister to perform weddings. While many Japanese get married with traditional Shinto ceremonies, Western-style weddings are still the most popular, and our prefecture has dozens of beautiful Western-influenced wedding halls, such as The Georgian House, which recreates an 18th century British manor so that couples can try to capture that elusive "Princess Diana" feeling at their wedding. In order for a white wedding to feel authentic, you just have to have a real-live foreigner there to say the nuptials. I ran into a friend of mind a few months ago, and he told me that he had almost given up teaching in lieu of his more profitable career as a wedding minister. At around $150-200 per ceremony, it's good work if you can get it, I suppose.

(Remember that I do have an article I've been writing over the past decade giving my now-oh-so-out-of-date advice on teaching ESL. See it here.)

You've been in Japan too long when you see a sign for a "mansion gallery" and know immediately that it's a building built to allow prospective buyers of high-rise condominiums (called "mansions" here) to see what the insides are like before making a purchase. Like every country, the Japanese take words and change them to fit their needs, so that sometimes a native speaker might not know what the original meaning was. For some reason only the Japanese can know, the letter "W" represents the idea of "double," and it's common for companies to use this letter in their product naming to communicate benefits, like the canned coffee I saw recently that promised "W" (double) the delicious coffee taste. The English word "service" often means "free" here, and if the owner of a ramen shop you're eating at uses the word as he hands you a free drink, you'll know what it means. Some other unique uses of English words including referring to screwdrivers as "plus" or "minus," labeling young people who decline to find full-time jobs "freeters," and one that threw me the first time I heard it, "number" for the license plate of a car.

I've talked before about how it's possible in Japan to lose touch with what year it is currently. In addition to the standard Western calendar, the Japanese have a unique system of counting years based on the reign of the current emperor. It's currently the 18th year of the Heisei era (Heisei means "Accomplishment of Peace," written 平成), which began when Emperor Hirohito died and was succeeded by his son, Akihito, so this year is Heisei 18. Before Heisei was the long Showa era (昭和, "Enlightened Peace," from 1925 to 1988), before that was Taisho (大正, "Great Righteousness," 1912-1924), Meiji (明治, "Enlightened Rule," 1868-1911), and so on. When you live in Japan, you quickly learn various dates in the Japanese system, since you need it to fill out forms -- I was born in Showa 43, e.g. 1968, my kids were born in Heisei 7 and 8, and so on. No doubt the Universal Century system of dates in the Gundam universe, which starts when humans first colonize space, is inspired by this system. It'd be kind of cool if we had names for Presidential eras, although we'd spend so much time arguing over what to use.

American uniqueness vs. Japanese uniformity, a new debate on "beautiful Japan" and the little joys of living in Japan

Just as Americans are accustomed to thinking of our country as a union of semi-soverign states, each with its own unique history and traditions, one of the hallmarks of Japan is "uniformity." During my bachelor days I travelled around the country quite a bit, going from cold but vibrant Hokkaido in the north, through the barren Northern Honshu area where sad enka songs were born, and all the way down to modern, bustling Hiroshima, and one thing that has always stood out for me was how similar many thing were. Roads, signs, telephone poles, the way schools are constructed, all seem to be following one master blueprint, with little or no variation between regions. There are exceptions of course -- the cold climate of Northern Japan requires sturdier architecture to withstand the heavy snowfall compared to the rest of the country -- but by and large many aspects of life in Japan are remarkably similar whether you're in Tokyo or Kyushu or wherever. The educational experience is uniform, too, with less variation across regions than I experienced in the seventh grade when I move from a school in Maryland to one in California. I was reminded of this fact when I picked up an item we're posting today, Re-Ment's Pucchi Elementary School series, detailed miniatures of objects found in schools in Japan, from the ubiquitous Japanese "randosel" backpack to textbooks and bento boxes those yellow hats that first graders wear so cars can see them. It's amazing that the company can create a set of miniature toys that virtually every Japanese will recognize and feel nostalgic over, no matter what part of the country they're from.

It's fun to live in Japan. You get to enjoy many good things, like the warm feeling of hot canned coffee on a cold train platform, or the thrill of finding a girl's phone number scrawled on the back of a chopstick wrapper after a night at an izakaya bar. Just as a Hemmingway aficionado might get a thrill out of retracing the road from Paris to Pamplona, it can be fun for those gaijin of the otaku persuasion to visit some of the locations in their favorite anime series. Tokyo's a good place for this, since the images of the city are well-represented in anime and manga, from Tokyo Tower (a regular fixation of the CLAMP artists) to the famous "Scramble Intersection" to iconic buildings like Shibuya 109 or the inverted pyramid at Tokyo Big Sight. I remember my first trip to Tokyo back in 1991, when I stood before the famous Studio Alta giant TV (giant for 1991, anyway), realizing I had finally arrived in Japan for real. Last weekend I went with a friend up to Karuizawa, a nice mountain town that happens to be the setting for the outstanding series "Please, Twins!" It was a lot of fun, roaming around the town and seeing what places from the anime series we happened to come across.

One of the first words of Japanese I learned was utsukushii (oo-tsoo- koo-SHEE), which means "beautiful" (and the kanji, 美しい, is also quite nice to look at). It's a word that's on a lot of lips in Japan these days, thanks to Shinzo Abe, who declared in his first speech as Japan's 90th Prime Minister that the goal of his cabinet was to create "a beautiful country, Japan." This has gotten everyone from J-Bloggers to pundits on television debating just what a "beautiful country, Japan" should be. Beautiful, as in cleaner, and respecting the natural environment more? Beautiful as in, a society where people value kindness to others, and swear off cynicism? A country that holds on to its culture and history? I've always been impressed with the way Japanese can debate subjects in a lively way, and many TV shows are built around this concept, taking, say, a panel of lawyers or doctors or politicians and throwing out topics for them to debate and discuss on camera, even daring to openly debate weather Japan should arm itself with nuclear weapons to counter North Korea. I hope the new debate on a how the new "beautiful country, Japan" can be realized produces some good suggestions for the future.

What Japanese think of foreigners who learn their language, odd ways to get cell phone customers, and American politics seen through Japanese eyes

I'm often asked what the Japanese think of foreigners who go out of their way to learn the language. I guess the idea is that Japan, with its long and unique history that included 250 years of isolation from the rest of the world, might not always be happy that "foreign barbarians" are taking in their linguistic secrets. I've found that nothing could be further from the truth, and by and large, Japanese are always pleased to meet a foreigner who has learned their language. Most of them have gotten over the silly idea that Japanese is the most difficult language in the world, and they can even handle the idea of "white boy" foreigners being able to write kanji. Popular variety shows often include a token Japanese-bilingual foreigner who can make witty banter with the other "talents" and add a bit of spice to the show. Some of the more interesting guests include godfather of gaijin Dave "dyes his hair blonde, ha-ha" Spector, the attractive former model Caiya, and Wikki-san, a Sri Lankan who studied so hard he got into Tokyo University using the test that normal students take (not the easier one for us foreigners). Of course there is one downside to learning "too much" Japanese, that more than few gaijin out there will back me up on, I'm sure. It seems that the more nihongo you know, the less mysterious and attractive you can seem to some members of the fairer gender, and I've known foreigners who spoke less Japanese than I do to be more popular with girls than me (although YMMV, of course). Since this phenomenon doesn't seem to have an official name, I'll christen it Peter's Inverse Law of Japanese Learning and see if the label sticks.

Well, the U.S. elections are over, and the dust has been settling all week long. American politics are covered closely in Japan, as they are all over the world, and once again I got a strange out-of-body "gaijin experience" watching the coverage in the local language, not unlike the bizarreness of seeing an American football game with sportscasters giving the play-by-play in Japanese. America's system of government is quite unique in the world, and isn't well understood by most people here, so there was plenty of explanation about how the various aspects of our system works. In Japan, elections called immediately after, say, a vote of no confidence by the Diet, or the Prime Minister dissolving the Diet himself, as he did when he ran into opposition to his privatization of the post office last year. Only familiar with this system, my Japanese father-in-law mistakenly though the election meant a immediate change in President, which would have been the case here.

The decision to allow cell phone users to take their phone numbers with them when they change carriers has had a big effect on the industry, with Japan's "big three" phone companies trying to take market share away from each other. Mammoth NTT DoCoMo has the largest piece of Japan's multibillion portable phone industry, and they're under attack by rivals who are daring to actually compete head to head with them. Newly christened Softbank/Yahoo hired the sexy Cameron Diaz to pimp their new phones, which worked so well that the company had to stop taking new applications, as their system was quickly getting overloaded. But it was AU by KDDI that stole the most users away from competitors, grabbing 200,000 new customers in two weeks by directly touting their leadership in customer satisfaction. However, their choice of a hip rock song by the Stones for their commercials was a little odd, since "I can't get no...satisfaction" has the opposite meaning from what they seem to think it does -- which tells you how carefully Japanese listen to song lyrics. This reminds me of the time I went to a friend's wedding and they were playing "Alone Again, Naturally" by Gilbert O'Sullivan, basically the last song you'd ever expect to hear at such a setting.

You may have noticed those phone straps that we sell on J-List. These are "netsuke" (net-TSOO-keh), a Japanese tradition that started out as hand-carved good luck charms carried on the end of a draw-string money bags back in the Edo Period. When portable electronic gadgets like cell phones came along, Japanese adapted these traditional cute objects for the modern age, attaching them to just about anything from cameras to keys to Nintendo DS and Sony PSP. Today we've got some attractive "Kimono Netsuke" on the site, in a variety of colors and styles, with a single beautiful printed on each.

We're big fans of Dan Kim, creator of the many quality webcomics over at Clone Army. In addition to his "serious" works like Penny Tribute and Kanami, he does hilarious parody comics his classic take on the relationship between Sakura and Tomoyo from the CLAMP anime, called Tomoyo42's Room. Check out a great tribute to his creative works with two new shirts we've just released, a standard size and fitted girl's cap sleeve, featuring his great art.

The Three Great Views of Japan, howling winds and volcanoes in my prefecture, and my wife's strange link to Monty Python

Quick, do you know how many Great Lakes there are on North America? The answer is five. The reason I know this is, the official name of the Great Lakes in Japanese is Go-daiko or the Five Great Lakes (五大湖 in Japanese). The Japanese can be really organized at times, and they like to codify things into little lists to make them easier to manage, not unlike the classic Seven Wonders of the World ranking. Have you read the Four Great Tragedies of Shakespere (四大悲劇）? I didn't know there only four of them, but this is the term the Japanese use to describe Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello and King Lear. These "most famous" mini lists are positively legion in Japan, and no matter what subject you're interested in, there's probably a "best three" list for you. If you're planning a trip to Japan, you might want to hit the Nihon Sankei　（日本三景）, the Three Most Beautiful Views of Japan, which are the gnarled Japan Pines of Matsushima, the view from the top of Amano Hashidate Mountain in Kyoto and the floating arch at Miyajima. How about the Three Rare Delicacies of the World? Caviar, foie gras and truffles. The Three Great Soups? Bouillabaisse, Shark's Fin and Tom Yan Kung. How about the Three Great Guitarists of the world? Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page. There is even an official listing for the Three Great Brands of Ham in the world. There's a Japanese Wikipedia page on this if you want to delve in deeper.

Right now the wind is howling outside my window, as winter lets us know that it's on its way. This wind is called kara-kaze, the dry, cold gale that races across the Kanto Plain this time of year. Gunma is a mostly mountainous prefecture in the center of the country's main island of Honshu, dominated by three large volcanic mountains, Akagi, Haruna and Asama. We're quite thankful for these mountains, since in addition to providing us with beautiful scenery, great skiing and a fun place to drive mountain roads while listening to Initial D background music with track names like "Speedy Speed Boy," they keep the majority of the winter snow on the Sea of Japan side of the country, away from Tokyo. The most active volcano around here is Mt. Asama, a hulking mass that can always be seen venting steam out of its cone. Mt. Asama had a major eruption in 1783, turning the local village of Komochi into "Japan's Pompeii" (and possibly one of the Three Great Volcano Disasters of Japan? I'll have to look that up). It erupted gain two years ago, essentially picking the entire Kanto area up and dropping it a meter or so down. There's something about living in Japan that makes you understand where the Shinto concepts of kami spirits who reside in mountains comes from...

Japan is all about politeness, and there are several linguistic and social mechanisms the Japanese have evolved to make human interaction go more smoothly here. One important concept is modesty (in Japanese, "kenson"), a trait that most everyone here values, which is why complimenting a Japanese person on how good their English is will generally result in strong statements of disagreement by the complimentee. The other day I was sitting in a coffee shop with my wife when we happened to see a neighbor who runs a small toy shop near us. What ensued was a brief war of politeness between my wife and our neighbor, with each side trying to verbally humble themselves before the other. "You have so many cars parked at your company. You must be doing well, to have so many employees," he'd say, and my wife would reply with something like, "Oh, but it's very hard running an online business since the Internet never stops for a holiday." She would then compliment him on the recent renovations to his shop and how nice they looked, whereupon he'd shoot back with, "But there are no customers, since few people pass our store, and every month we operate in the red." It went on for a while, both of them unknowingly channeling Monty Python's Four Yorkshiremen sketch while I watched in amazement. The practice of putting one's self down as a way of raising others up is a fine art in Japan, and should only be attempted by skilled professionals -- don't try it at home.

Things that can always freak a gaijin out, the Japanese penchant for talking over songs on the radio and what is a "real house"?

No matter how long a person lives in Japan, there are always things that can bring on what expats here call a "Japan moment," the feeling of utter amazement at something you've just encountered. Maybe it's something cute, like a big truck playing the Main Street Electrical Street Parade song as it backs up instead of a boring beep-beep-beep sound, or that first time seeing the plastic Colonel Sanders in front of KFC wearing his "Santa Wear" (Santa Claus Suit). Maybe it's a food item, like strawberry and whipped cream sandwiches, or one I saw a few days ago, ham and cheese on French Toast, complete with syrup pre-applied to the bread. You never know what will bring on that sense of "only-in-Japan" next -- driving through an extremely rural town and coming across a replica of the American Statue of Liberty? Seeing a nondescript building with "Oh!" carefully painted on it? Meeting someone who has taught English for 30 years yet has never been outside of Japan, and who asks you "Where is your domicile?" instead of "Where do you live?" Of course, it's always important to remember Obi Wan's Law, that our perceptions depend on our point of view. Once we were having a rare feast of fajitas, and we'd invited a friend from Peru. Silly American that I am, I assumed that he'd be familiar with Mexican food, but it was all totally alien to him, and he'd never even seen a Mexican tortilla nor did he have any idea how to eat one.

There's another minor area of "gaijin shock" that has to do with listening the radio. The other day I was driving in my Mazda "Road-star" (Miata), and thought I'd give FM Gunma a listen. The announcer was about to play a famous song by singer Momoe Yamauguchi called Cosmos, supposedly the "most requested song in the Autumn." It was quite a beautiful tune, or it would have been, if the girl on the radio would have been so kind as to shut up and let her listeners hear the song. Instead, she yapped away, giving a detailed background of the song (it topped the charts in 1977), talked about the singer's career (debuted in 1972 on a talent show, retired in 1980, singing her live single "thank you for your kindness, thank you for your tenderness" amid many tears), and read some of the requests from listeners asking to hear the song. Call me a picky foreigner, but if the song's that good I'd like to actually hear it, not some radio personality talking while it's playing. I've asked Japanese people about this, and have been told "the Japanese don't listen to music all that carefully" and no one really cared if someone was talking while a song was playing. This is probably why no one but me takes exception to the Christmas music that invariably plays in February...

Oh goody, I managed to find the song in question in case you're dying to know what kind of song it is. The link is here (WMV and Windows required, it looks like, since I had to run this page in Parallels on my MacBook Pro to get it to work).

All societies go through changes as the decades march by, and Japan is no exception. While the U.S. has wrestled with shifts in the "post" nuclear family due to increases in divorce and single parenting, one rock that has helped Japan's society is the importance of the jikka (JI-kah, pronunced with a small pause between the syllibles, a "small tsu"). Literally meaning "real house," a jikka is the house where one's parents live, or where they lived if they've passed on. It's also the location of the family's Buddhist Altar, a wooden altar with a figure of Buddha inside that's used for saying prayers and lighting incense for dead ancestors and let them know they haven't been forgotten. At certain times during the year, mainly New Years' Day and the August Obon holidays, people return home to be with family at their jikka, and so on, not unlike going home for Thanksgiving but with a lot more cultural formality.

For fans of the interactive dating-sim games published by Hirameki International, we're happy to announce that Yo-Jin-Bo -The Bodyguards- is in stock and shipping now. A great English-translated anime game for your PC or Mac, in this game you take on the role of Sayori, an ordinary high school student who is magically transported back in time to Japan in the feudal ages. Your goal is to save the lovely Hatsuhime, princess of the Mochizuki clan, from assassination, and you'll have three eccentric but loyal bodyguards ("yojimbo" in Japanese) to help. It's an incredibly deep game with a huge cast of interesting characters and a great story. Get your copy now!

Remember, now is the best time to select your 2007 Japanese calendars, since we've just gotten in a huge volley of items in stock, including many calendars that won't be coming in again before they sell out for the season. In case you were wondering what the top-selling calendars are this year, we'll tell you. For anime calendars, the Ghibli calendar is in the lead as usual, followed by the Shirow Masamune offering (the first in several years) and strong showings by Negima and Bleach. For traditional and art calendars, the beautiful kimono paintings of Haruyo Morita is in the lead, followed by Traditional Scroll Illustrations, the Joy of Bento and Famous Castles of Japan. We sell plenty of cute Japanese idol calendars, and this year Aki Hoshino, Yuko Ogura and Yua Aida are all doing great. Finally, "other" calendars that are very popular this year include Domo-kun, Gackt and that old standby, Japanese women in traditional onsen hot springs. Check out our stock of calendars now!

A delicious food that brings people together, naughty words in Japanese, and the tragedy of "ijime" in Japan

Last night we went to a friend's house to have one of my favorite dishes, nabe (NAH-beh), a word that just means "pot" and refers to any kind of food you make in a big open pot and eat with everyone gathered around, conversing while taking things out (boiled meat, fish, tofu, vegetables, etc.). There are many varieties of nabe, from the spicy Kimchee Nabe that our friends made for us last night (as they are wont to do, the Japanese have adopted the national food of Korea as one of their own) to the Kiritanpo variety enjoyed in Northern Japan, and the famous Chanko Nabe from Nagasaki, huge pots containing many different ingredients which are traditionally eaten by sumo wrestlers. Another famous variety of nabe food is Sukiyaki, one of my all-time favorite dishes. Aside from being delicious and a great way to warm up in the colder months, nabe is a genuine "social food" which makes for great conversation, since everyone sits around the pot to take food out of it rather than eating from their own hoarded pile. It also allows uniquely Japanese concepts like enryo, the tendency for people hesitate when taking, say, the last piece of tofu before asking of anyone else would like it, to work in the group. (We do have some great bilingual books on how to make Japanese food like nabe, although most are out of stock due to their popularity. You can backorder any of them and we'll send the when they come in.)

One sad aspect of Japan's society is ijime (ee-jee-MEH), the cruel bullying that happens in school and other situations. We're all human, of course, and various forms of hazing can be found in any group, from college fraternities to West Point to making the new guy at McDonald's count all the pickles in the pickle bucket as an initiation ceremony. There are some reasons why ijime is an especially bad problem in Japan, including the strictness of the top-down senpai-kohai relationship system and the practice of having students sit in the same class with the same members for an entire year rather than giving each student a different hourly schedule, which means that any problem between students is magnified many times. You can see examples of ijime in Japanese animation stories, too, such as the classic tennis show Aim for the Ace, which is closely parodied by Gainax's Aim for the Top: Gunbuster (which we have paid no small tribute to). When the main character is chosen for the tennis team even though she barely knows how to hold a racquet, she becomes the target of teasing by the other members, who do things like put thumbtacks in her shoes. Of course, ijime can happen to anyone, and my wife even had problems with some of her co-workers at a company she used to work at. Once, everyone was going out to eat at a French restaurant, and they told her to dress in plain clothes. When she arrived in jeans, she saw that everyone else had secretly dressed up, just to embarrass her. Sad to say, but my half-American daughter has been the target of ijime in her almost-homogenous school from time to time, for example when the other girls cruelly say "What's that? I can't understand English" when she speaks to them in Japanese. We make sure we're supportive and let her know she shouldn't pay any attention to what some silly kids say. She is Japanese, and American, and has both passports to prove it.

When you learn a foreign language, the first thing you usually learn are the "naughty" words. However, people studying Japanese are often surprised to learn that most of the bad words they're used to in English don't "map" over very well. The most common Japanese insults include baka (BAH-kah, stupid), aho (ah-HO, the Osaka version of the same word), and boke (BOH-kay, basically meaning "nim-wit"). Almost all the anatomical words you may be used to just don't work in Japanese, nor does the "F" word, which doesn't even exist, except occasionally in English as a foreign loan word. The most basic Japanese swear word is probably kuso (KOO-soh), the "s" word, yet it's interesting to note that it's not considered a bad word, as it's used in children's anime like Yu-Gi-Oh quite often and no one thinks anything of it. It addition to the primary meaning, the word kuso can also refer to various bodily products. The stuff that comes out of your nose is hana-kuso (nose-sh--), and ear wax is mimi-kuso (ear-sh--). Sleep in your eyes that builds up while you sleep is me-kuso (MEH-kuso), and plaque on your teeth is called ha-kuso. Now you know some interesting Japanese vocabulary words!

Good news for fans of our Japanese calendars: we've gotten in a huge shipment of our most popular 2007 anime, JPOP, idol/actress, traditional, art and other calendars, and we've posted them to the site, complete with updated photos so you can see how good the insides of these calendars are. There's no better way to spend the coming year than with a slice of Japan on your wall. Since J-List goes far behind carrying merely the top 20-25 releases, instead carrying a huge selection of these great poster-sized glossy calendars, you've got a huge selection to browse through while you decide which you'd like to by. But fair warning: our current stock represents the last stock we'll get of many calendar items, so we recommend that you order sooner, rather than later, to avoid the agony of not getting that Ghibli or Domo-kun calendar you had your eye on disappearing from the site.

J-List would like to remind you that we've got a huge selection of cool and wacky products from Japan, which would make great gifts for the anime fan or general Japan-lover on your Christmas list this year. If you're wondering what to get the anime fan on your list who has everything, we're sure we've got some great products, from our above-mentioned calendars to great toys and Totoro blankets and wacky T-shirts and our patented "wacky things from Japan." It is of course best to buy early so you can take advantage of cheaper shipping -- why not browse the site and make your order now?

The triumphant return of an old Japanese favorite, a milestone for my son, and a source of sadness in Japanese society

Imagine if a food you ate every day were suddenly unavailable, say, hamburgers, just to pick an example. With no more hamburgers available, restaurants would do their best with alternatives, bringing out, say, pork burgers or lamb burgers or veggie burgers. Consumers would probably be bummed about not being able to order their favorite food, but they'd muddle through somehow. This is basically what happened when Mad Cow Disease fears caused Japan to halt all imports of beef from the U.S., which rendered one of Japan's most popular dishes, gyudon or beef bowl, extremely rare. Beef bowl is the quintessential home-grown fast food in Japan, a simple dish of stewed beef and onions on steaming hot rice that costs around $3.50 and can be wolfed down in about two minutes -- I like mine with raw egg poured over it so the rice sticks together nicely while eating with chopsticks. Restaurant chains like Yoshinoya served millions of bowls every day before it all came to a screeching halt two years ago, when the ban went into effect. Finally, though, beef imports have resumed and you can get a delicious bowl of the artery- clogging stuff once again. I was so happy to have my old friend back again, I had to snap a picture for posterity.

Japan is a great country, with beautiful temples and shrines, friendly people and a fascinating culature. Sadly, not everyone can see how wonderful Japan is, and far too many here choose the easy way out by committing suicide. It seems that every day brings bizarre news of people who make this sad choice: a family of four in a strange suicide pact...a woman who lost her fiancee in the terrible train derailment last year and wanted to be with him...one of guards at the Imperial Palace. One terrible source of anguish are students who are the recipients of ijime or bullying, such as one 13-year-old who took his own life as a result of abuse from the other kids on his basketball team. School-related suicides aren't always limited to the students, though. Last week, the principal of a high school in Ibaraki Prefecture, just up the road from us, committed suicide when it was reported that his school was foregoing teaching some required G.E. courses to better prepare students for the specific subjects that they'd need for the upcoming college entrance exams. I'm not sure what's different about Japan and most other countries when it comes to looking out for No. 1. Some odd symptom of post-industrial society? Latent cultural memories from the time when samurai committed seppuku? I personally think the answer lies in the lack of open communication and resistance to adopting a system for counseling people in need.

Now for some good news: my son passed level 2 of the Step Test, the primary test for measuring English ability in Japan. Like the Japanese Language Ability Test (JLPT) that foreigners study for, the Step Test is organized into multiple levels, with levels 4 for elementary school kids, level 3 for junior high, level 2 for high school and level 1 for college-age and professionals. My son hates it when people at his school assume that his English is good because he was born haafu (half), so he went all out to study for the test, despite the fact that he had to cover both English and the kanji for the Japanese parts of the test, as he's only in the 5th grade and hasn't learned high school kanji yet. As is often the case in Japan, the existence of a rival helped motivate him: he wanted more than anything to beat Kimishima-kun, a very smart boy in his class who has been studying at Kumon schools, which have a very good reputation here. Although I have been critical of Japan's reliance on testing and measuring in the past, I've come to see that having a series of goals for self improvement, be it learning a language, mastering typing or learning to use an abacus, is really a good thing. It'd be nice if a universal system of tests like this existed in the U.S. (other than in Boy and Girl Scouts, which is actually somewhat similar, in the way they encourage students to aim for higher ranks).

There's nothing quite as mysterious as kanji, the writing system used in Japan to express ideas, and Westerners are often fascinated with how this aesthetically beautiful pictographic system works. We've posted two new wacky Japanese T-shirt for kanji lovers, a great way to wear something really unique. The first shirt reads "Ganko," which means stubborn and hard-headed and unwilling to sacrifice one's ideals, a cool shirt if this describes you. Then there's "Ore-ryu," a word that literally means "My Style" or "Going My Way" (or alternately, "I'm doing my own thing my own damned way," depending on how deep you want to get with the translation). Two great new Japanese T-shirts for you!

It's here! It's here!

Ahhh, delicious, stewed beef on rice...

Time to show you some of the pictures from the Halloween bash that I've been forgetting to post. This girl was so cute!

The one on the right is Mozart.

Other students show off their costumes.

Here are my own. Anakin and Leia.

Here my son reinacts an exciting scene from Star Wars Episode II.

Foreign accents and how they work in Japan, daylight savings time in Japan, and the joy of root beer

A recent commercial featured a voice saying, nihon-jin wa urusai! which means that Japanese are loud and obnoxious and fussy. Was this an insult to Japanese consumers? Not at all -- the commercial, for Nescafe instant coffee, was actually saying that Japanese were picky when it came to how their coffee tasted, a good thing from their point of view. The voiceover was done using a foreigner speaking accented Japanese, which results in an interesting "otherness" that's just what the doctor ordered for advertisers looking for a way to subliminally tie their product to the image of exotic foreign lands. Just as different dialects can bring up different emotional responses in listeners -- the Imperial officers in Star Wars wouldn't seem so evil if they weren't speaking with British accents -- Japanese pronounced in a non-standard way can create unique settings for listeners. Another example is Suntory using a Chinese-accented voice to talk about how authentic its oolong tea is, or Lotte using a little girl speaking Finnish-accented Japanese to promote its gum with xylitol (which comes from Finland). It's quite common for radio DJ's to speak a strange English-influenced form of Japanese that makes them sound like foreigners, inflecting the usually flat tones with emotional highs and lows that makes the ear think it's listening to English even though the content is in Japanese. In this way, they've essentially created an artificial dialect of the language to go along with traditional ones like Osaka-ben, Kyoto-ben and so on.

There are two kinds of people, those who drink root beer and those who don't. Generally, Japanese fall into the second category, as the venerable American beverage tastes to them like Salonpas, a muscle cream similar to Bengay. My family loves the stuff, even my Japanese wife, who got tired of being teased by her kids and me as a nakama-hazure (nah-kah-mah HA-zoo-ray), or outsider, because she was the only one who couldn't drink root beer. Thanks to a company Kobe, the Foreign Buyers' Club, gaijin who live in Japan can get access to just about anything from the U.S., from Rice Crispies to Campbell's Soup to American peanut butter (they have Brit and Aussie stuff too). The only catch is, you have to buy in supermarket cases, which usually means buying 12 cans of refried beans, sixteen boxes of Hamburger Helper, that sort of thing. We just got our most recent order in, so we've got plenty of Raisin Bran, Aunt Jamaima pancake mix, and A&W for making root beer floats. Like most Asian countries, the Japanese are fond of their pickles, which include such varieties as pickled daikon radish, eggplant and the pickled kimchee octopus I had for dinner last night (really). Still, there's just no replacement for good old Vlassic dill spears from home, so I'm very happy to have a supplying my refrigerator right now.

If you're in North America you probably set your clock an hour back on Sunday. Most people grumble about having to remember to set their clocks forward and back in the spring and autumn, this isn't a problem in Japan, the only industrialized country that has not adopted the Daylight Savings Time system in one form or another. Instead, we have to deal with the other extreme -- if I stay up past 3 a.m. watching Japan's bizarre late-night TV or downloading the new episode of Battlestar Galactica from iTunes, I often get to go to sleep with the rising sun peeking in through the curtains.