Shrinking the Earth and watching Football, all about the word "sumimasen" and the four islands of Japan

That old planet Earth, she just keeps on getting smaller and smaller, and it's a lot of fun to sit back and watch the process unfold from the other side of the world. When I came here back in 1991, Japan was a lot farther away from the U.S. than it is now -- there was no Internet as we know it back when, of course, and calling home required biting the bullet and paying the $4-5 per minute to KDDI, definitely not a fun prospect. But since that time technology has really blossomed, pushing the "convenience quotient" for living in a strange place like Japan to dizzying new heights. The revolution in communication in the past decade and a half has been nothing short of incredible -- cheap international calling with "callback" services, the arrival of email, speedier communication with instant messaging and Internet video conferencing, and Skype -- I can even keep my cultural knowledge fresh thanks to Youtube. When I got here, there was exactly one source of news in English, the Far East Network radio station for the U.S. military, but now our cup runneth over with choices including podcasts from the BBC, NPR, NBC and more. Just as the maturity of the web has made it easy for people from all corners of the globe to order ninja boots or Black Black Caffeine Gum or Hello Kitty Mayonnaise Cups for your bento lunch from J-List, sites like Amazon.com are a huge boon to poor gaijin like me. I've finally attained the Holy Grail of Convenience for an expat in Japan, though, the absolute highest plane of Techno Nerdvanna -- being able to watch the Superbowl live, as it happens, courtesy of a Slingbox. It sure beats seeing the game with announcers giving the play-by-play in Japanese, something I just can't get used to.

You may know the Japanese word sumimasen, which generally corresponds to "excuse me" and is one of the more useful phrases to learn, but like most aspects of this place there's a little more to it than appears on the surface. First and foremost, sumimasen (soo-mee-mah-SEN) is used in any situation where you need to apologize for something small, such as causing someone inconvenience by bumping into them in the street, calling the wrong number, or ordering curry with fried beef intestines accidentally because you couldn't read the kanji in the menu, then asking for something else instead. Many situations which would call for a "thank you" in English work better with sumimasen in Japanese, something I learned at a public bath a few weeks after first arriving here. We'd stayed a few minutes after closing time, causing minor inconvenience to the staff who no doubt wanted to get home, and as we left my Japanese coworker said sumimasen to them ("we're sorry for taking too long in the bath") rather than the phrase I would have used, arigato ("thank you for letting us stay a few minutes past closing time"). When I asked about this, I was told that "'Thank you' sounds cheap. 'Excuse me' is a better word for Japanese people." The sumimasen phrase is also used when asking for service in a restaurant, and one difference between Japan and the U.S. is that here, it's okay to loudly use the phrase to indicate that you're ready to order, whereas in the States you usually close your menu and sit quietly to be noticed most of the time. Like many Japanese phrases, you can use the all-purpose word domo (which loosely means "very") to add a layer of politeness -- domo sumimasen! ("I'm really sorry!").

Yes, it was nice being able to watch the game. Although now it made my update late by two hours...

Isn't this car cute? It was in my Flickr window so I thought I'd show you. I think there are lots of things we can do to use less fuel, if we'd all just learn to love slightly smaller cars. This is made by Subaru.

We bought a new TV, an Aquos. Of course the first thing I had to do was hook up my Atari 8 bit emulator to it and play me some M.U.L.E.

It's also good for a virtual fishtank.

Looks pretty real, doesn't it!

Understanding world culture through Japanese hip hop music, thinking about thinking in a foreign language, and out with devils!

It's funny how culture criss-crosses the globe, never stopping at such laughable things as national borders as it flows to any place it can find a home in peoples' minds. You wouldn't think that a country as far removed from the West both physically and culturally as Japan is would have its own burgeoning hip hop and reggae music sub-culture, or that what's playing in clubs in Jamaica is being closely followed from Japan, but the world is an amazing place. Just as Americans and Europeans are interested in the unique ideas and general "otherness" found in anime, manga, JPOP and other forms of contemporary Japanese culture, people here are open to taking in music from outside Japan and remixing it into something unique that's all their own. A quick glance into any fashion magazine shows that Japanese are keen to embrace hip fashion from the West, too, to the point where it might be difficult to identify where one influence ends and another begins. Sometimes the Japanese embracing of American fashions can get a little ridiculous -- some years ago, the red and blue bandanas worn by the Crips and Bloods became all the rage in Tokyo's Ikebukuro district. That's taking things just a little too far...

One of the more interesting occurrences when learning a foreign language is becoming able to "think" in that language, when ideas or answers to questions come out directly as opposed to first being converted from English, a process that takes time and makes participating in quick-flowing conversations impossible. The brain is very much like a computer, but one that's capable of re-wiring itself as needed. Learning a language can cause some pretty interesting changes to take place on the old wet-ware, and there are times when you can almost feel that process at work. Another landmark is when you dream in your second language for the first time. I remember my first dream in Japanese very well: it was during finals week at SDSU and I was stressing out over informal verbs (Japanese has lots of verb forms, formal, informal, passive, suggestive, and so on). In my dream I was in a tall building, running up some stairs. I kept meeting Japanese people along the way, and I conversed with them in rapid nihongo despite the fact that I'd taken less than a year of Japanese at the time. I had no idea what I was saying, of course, but in the dream-world I was nevertheless able to communicate freely about any subject I cared to talk about. It was pretty cool, but of course it had to end when it was time to wake up.

Saturday is Setsubun, a fun day for anyone with kids in Japan. Originally falling on New Year's Eve of the old Lunar Calendar that Japan used until 1868, it's a day when oni (devils) will be symbolically chased out of the house so that happiness can reign during the New Year. The father of the house will assume the role of a devil, wearing a paper mask that makes him look scary. When the devil attacks, the children pelt him with baked soybeans and chase him off, shouting Oni wa soto, fuku wa uchi! ("Out with devils, in with happiness!"). When the devils are sufficiently vanquished, everyone is supposed to eat their age in soybeans to help guarantee good health in the coming year. This is easy for a child of eight or so to do, but quite a bit harder for parents getting up there in years, since 38 soybeans is quite a lot to crunch down. Another tradition of Setsubun is to eat maki-zushi, or roll sushi, so that the long roll of sushi can point the way to happiness for that year, or something like that.

2007 Japanese Calendar Season was a big success for J-List, and we sold more great anime, JPOP, cute idol, traditional photography and other calendars than ever before. We've gone through and removed some pending orders that hadn't been paid for, which means that several previously "sold out" 2007 calendars are -- incredibly -- available once again. This is really, really your last chance to pick up that cool JPOP, anime, cute idol or other calendar, so browse our selection now!

Thoghts on learning Japanese back in 1987, the many nuances of Japanese name suffixes, and being romantic under an umbrella

I sometimes find myself thinking back to my college days when I first started learning Japanese, and it never fails to make me feel natsukashii (nahts-ka-SHEE), meaning nostalgic. It was 1987 and the Soviet Union was still very much alive, yet year by year people seemed to be growing more aware of Japan instead, as the nation grew in stature in the world. During the first week of classes there were twice as many students wanting to take Japanese 101 than could fit in the room, but the teacher had a great solution to that problem: everyone who wanted to stay in the class had to learn the hiragana writing system within a week, which really got the number of students down to a manageable level in a hurry. In class, the teacher required us to call each other by our last names with the Japanese name suffix -san, e.g. Payne-san, Smith-san, and so on. The system of Japanese name endings is quite complex and interesting, and if you're curious, I'll tell you more.

First, there's -san ("sahn" with a long vowel), the "basic" name suffix, used in polite situations with neighbors or car salesmen or business partners or coworkers, just about anybody. It can be used to refer to organizations as well, and when we order products from distributors in Tokyo they address us collectively as "J-List-san." The next two most common name endings are -chan and -kun, used for girls and boys respectively, for example Hanako-chan or Taro-kun. Although these terms seem straightforward, there's a lot going on under the surface that can be hard for a foreigner to grasp, since both name endings imply a certain closeness to the person being referred to, and confusion can ensue if you use them wrong. For example, if you called a girl you don't know very well by her name with -chan on the end, she might think you're being cheeky by acting like you're closer to her than you are, and calling a male you're good friends with using -san instead of -kun might make him think you don't really consider him a friend after all. The -chan ending is okay for girls who are below the age of 15 or so, but in office settings it can be considered sekuhara (sexual harassment) to add the ending to a female's name. Another name ending is senpai, which describes someone who is your senior in a school or company, although the corresponding term kouhai (junior, underclassman) is not used as a name ending. If you watch too much anime like I did, you probably know the name ending -sama, used for addressing high-ranking persons, samurai lords and so on, although in practice this word is almost never used in Japanese outside of certain phrases or when sending formal wedding invitations. There's an endless number of these name endings -- some others you might come across here include senshu (used for professional athletes), yogisha (suspect, added to the names of people who are officially under a police investigation), sensei (used with doctors, teachers and karate instructors), and one of the stranger ones, anaunsaa (announcer), the official name ending when referring to a TV newscaster.

When you're learning about Japan through anime or manga, it's always fun to pick up some of the small, unimportant details along the way. One of these I like is called Ai-ai-gasa, which literally means "walking together under an umbrella" but it sounds phonetically like it means "Love Love Umbrella." Supposedly, the idea of a boy and girl walking in the rain under the same umbrella is quite romantic to the Japanese (although I've always been more of a sitting-in-the-car-in-the-rain type of person, myself), and this concept is expressed by a cute little doodle that's drawn by elementary school students, the Japanese equivalent of a boy and a girl carving their initials in a tree surrounded by a heart or the old "...sittin' in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G" song. In this modern age that we live in, most cell phone are able to take pictures and overlay any image you like, and one of the options you can select is a cute Ai-ai-gasa umbrella so you can feel a special bond to the person you're posing with.

Are you looking for a Japanese Girlfriend? Then we've got just the T-shirt for you. Our oh-so-wacky T-shirt is the #1 selling design in J-List's history, and it's so cool it's been featured in a "test your geek chic" quiz in Newsweek. The exact translation is "Now accepting applications for a Japanese girlfriend," and it's a great potential ice-breaker between you and someone from Japan, even if it's just to banter about what the T-shirt says. We've got alternate versions of the design, including an oh-so-warm hoodie, a "Japanese boyfriend" version, shirts with the message written in a calligraphy brush style, and even a spiffy embroidered hat. Our Japanese Girlfriend T-shirts have even been known to work on a few occasions, and we've got a wall in San Diego showing customers who have sent in pictures of their newfound loves.

Culture shock for foreigners coming to Japan, reflections on the Japanese word "nantonaku" and test culture as a Great Democritizer in Japan

When a foreigner comes to live in Japan, he or she is in for some changes. I remember my first hours in this country back in 1991, gazing out the window of the train from Narita Airport to Tokyo and thinking -- stupidly -- how the beautiful "kawara" tiles on all the houses made them look, well, very Japanese. My next bit of culture shock was seeing more vending machines in one city block than were installed in my entire university back home -- and that's not even counting the ones selling beer. Japanese homes are smaller than those in the U.S. and make use of space more efficiently, however this means that stairs tend to be steeper and much more dangerous if you have a fall. There are plenty of other large and small surprises for a gaijin moving to Japan. People riding bicycles while holding an umbrella over their heads, or using umbrellas in the snow. Toilets with a faucet in the top to let you wash your hands with the clean water as it flows into the tank. The strange custom of crosswalks to play "Comin' Through the Rye" when it's time to cross, as an aid for blind people. Perhaps the biggest surprise of all is how used to Japan a person can get, a thought that occurred to me last night while I was sitting at the kotatsu wearing my yukata, enjoying a beer and some saki-ika, dried, shredded "squid jerky" that gets more delicious the longer you live here.

When you learn a language as different from English as Japanese is, you sometimes run into words or phrases that can't be easily translated from one side to the other. My wife, who is not mechanically inclined, bought an Alpine car stereo for her BMW but complained to me that it didn't have a CD player. It took me less than a full second to look at her stereo, guess that there must be a front panel that hides the CD slot, and verify this by pushing the panel out of the way, revealing the slot. "How did you know to do that?" she asked me, and I replied, "Nantonaku." This is a word that's very hard to pin down in English, and itself speaks volumes about how full of subtle nuances the Japanese language can be. Literally meaning "somehow" or "some way," nantonaku (pronounced NAHN-toh-NAH-koo) is used in vague situations when you can't pin down a concrete reason for something. It could be translated as "without thinking about it" "without deep consideration," or in the case of me figuring out my wife's car stereo, "I just knew." If you love movies directed by Ron Howard but aren't sure why, you might use the phrase "nantonaku suki," or if the dreamy art of Japanese illustrator Range Murata calms you, you might use the phrase in that situation, too. It's probably a word most Japanese wouldn't expect a foreigner to know, so if you want to surprise a Japanese person, try pulling out the word and watch the look of shock on their faces.

February is month of Valentines Day, when girls and women throughout Japan will be thinking about which chocolates to give to their boyfriends, husbands and fathers. It's is also the height of Juken Season, when millions of Japanese students will be taking their college entrance exams that will determine what university (for current high school students) or what high school (for current junior high students) they will attend. It's one of the most important moments in the life of a Japanese person, and students aiming for the best schools have studied for years in preparation. Japan has had a long tradition of requiring tests to gain admittance to universities, government jobs, and other high-ranking positions, and while the system isn't perfect, it's certainly better than letting the son of whoever has the most money or power get special treatment -- by and large, the tests are a real mechanism of Democratization here. Another benefit of Japan's test culture is the effect it has on young people, forcing them to set goals and really reflect on their education during some very impressionable and potentially dangerous years. I'm convinced all human beings have a "bad judgement gene" that kicks in between the ages of 16-22 or so, when young people will be compelled to do things that aren't in their overall best interests (apologies to young people reading this, who will insist that there is no such gene, but will then realize that I was right when they get to their mid-20s or so). Because of the focus on tests, a large number of Japanese are busy dedicating themselves to their studies when they might otherwise be out getting into trouble.

We've got a new wacky Japanese T-shirt for fans of Japan's "otaku" culture, a word which describes the current generation of fans of Japanese anime, manga and other forms of popular culture from the Land of the Rising Sun. Our new shirt features a replica of a sign visible in every train station in Japan, showing "Otaku" as the current train station, with O-Daiba (the area where the famous Comic Market doujinshi convention is held) displayed as the previous station and Akihabara (Tokyo's electronics and otaku culture Mecca) as the next stop. A great new kanji shirt design for otakus all over the world -- check it out now!

More pictures from Japan, just for you, Dear Reader. This is the view of Asama-san, just about the biggest volcano in the Kanto area, as srrn from our balcony in Karuizawa.

Testing the zoom on my new digital camera. Yes, that's smoke rising from the cone.

Daughter Rina enjoying some snow.

Japan's "Strawberry Boom" is in full swing!

How the iTunes Japan store reflect Japan's oddities, my mother-in-law and our old sofa, and understanding Japan through Big Macs

Slate.com ran an article yesterday on Apple's Japanese iTunes Music Store and how frustrating it was that fans of J-POP music around the world couldn't use the service unless they had a credit card registered to an address in Japan. The article mentioned that certain "underground shops" were providing the prepaid cards to get around this restriction -- gee, I wonder who they were talking about? Besides causing the near-total "Slashdotting" of the J-List server while thousands of people followed links to buy the cards from us (which is why the server was sluggish if you were online yesterday, sorry about that), the article made me grin knowingly, really feeling the author's pain. Japan is an island nation in almost every sense of the word: geographically, of course, but also culturally and socially, and mainstream society here seems perfectly happy to live on a slightly different plane of existence from the rest of the human race. When Japanese record companies negotiated with Apple to make the Japan iTMS, making sure that Japanese bands like Gackt or X Japan or the dreamy voice of Okinawan vocalist Rimi Natsukawa were only available to domestic customers probably made a lot of sense to them. Part of the reason for this is the Japanese fear of the unknown, the terror that there might be a downside lurking in some new idea, requiring that any response should be delayed for as long as possible while the situation is thought through. But I'm convinced another big reason for Japan's unwillingness to interface with the rest of the world more is its "English Complex," the quiet embarrassment that many adult Japanese feel over not being able to communicate effectively in English despite six to ten years of study. The whole situation is so silly -- I mean, these sprawling corporations were the ones pushing for a truly global world economy, and now that it's arrived, they want to change their minds? Anyway, if you'd like to become a customer of Apple's Japan iTMS and browse and buy great Japanese music, we've got the prepaid music cards you need. The cards work with the iTunes that's already installed in your Mac or PC, operate in your native language (except for some Japanese bands and song titles which are in Japanese), and best of all, you can listen to your music on any iPod in the world.

One phrase you learn pretty quickly after coming to Japan is mottai nai (mo'-TIE-NIGH), which translates as "what a waste," which is short for, "what a waste to throw this perfectly good sofa away, I think I'll put it in my hallway instead." Back in my ESL days I did a lot of private teaching, visiting peoples' homes to tutor their kids in English, and so I got to see how a lot of Japanese families lived. One of the most common trends I noticed were homes that were filled with clutter, with books and mail-order catalogs and portable electronics and fish tanks covering every inch of the home, and nary a table or shelf left empty. The combination of high population, tiny land mass and economic prosperity seems to have lead to too much stuff floating around most homes. Exacerbating the problem is the tendency of older Japanese, who remember when they were lucky if they had plain white rice to eat once a day, to never throw anything away. This is the case with my mother-in-law, who can't get into her bedroom because our old sofa is in the hallway, blocking the door -- it would have been mottai nai to throw it away, so she kept it.

I talk a lot about how Japan is said to trail behind the West socially, following about a decade or so behind while the U.S. and Europe blaze trails in new directions. Many areas of Japan's society, from laws governing child safety seats in cars to sekuhara (sexual harassment) at work to rules about who can smoke and where, regularly take their cues from the West. In some ways it's a good strategy -- I mean, it makes sense to wait a decade and see how the U.K.'s "big bang" banking reforms play out before implementing a similar program yourself, and there's a Japanese proverb that advises us to "strike a stone bridge three times with your walking stick before crossing" to ensure that it's safe. The newest area of Japan's society to look towards the Occident might just be eating habits, if the recent release of McDonald's "Mega Mac" (a Big Mac with four meat patties instead of two) is any indication. The limited-edition burger sold a whopping 3 million units in just a few days, and some stores had to stop selling them lest they run out of meat for their other hamburgers.

All about Japan's most enigmatic food natto, how reading your Hemingway can help you under modern otaku culture, and a happy day for a town in Japan

The fermented soybeans known as natto (NAT-toh) are one of the most famous foods in Japan, enjoyed throughout the country, although people from Osaka supposedly dislike it. Eaten by a wide swath of Japanese from children to the elderly and everyone in between, the sticky beans are usually mixed with yellow mustard and eaten over white rice. There are many legends about how natto was first discovered, but the most famous seems to be that in the year 1083 the general Yoshiie Minamoto was on campaign with 100,000 troops near a town called Mito, and stopped at an inn to rest. Some soybeans had been steamed and wrapped in straw for the horses to eat, and these fermented naturally while sitting on the floor of the stable. Some of the soldiers tried the beans and liked the taste, so they offered some to their lord, who loved it, which is where the name natto ("offered beans") comes from. Last week a TV show created an instant rush on natto when it broadcast a report that said that, based on hard data from the U.S., eating natto twice a day would lead to losing 2-3 kg per week. Although natto does have various health benefits such as reducing blood clots and lowering cholesterol, the show's fabrication of actual data was another example of the Japanese media's love of yarase (yah-rah-say), or faking on the air to get good ratings. If you're "natto curious" but don't think you can get past the unique smell, we recommend miso soup instead, which possess most of the health benefits and is generally more palatable to gaijin (and we've got it in stock).

"Aficion means passion. An aficionado is one who is passionate about the bull-fights. All the good bull-fighters stayed at Montoya’s hotel; that is, those with aficion stayed there. The commercial bull-fighters stayed once, perhaps, and then did not come back..."

It's always interesting to study how language and the brain interact to create our perceptions. It seems that every once in a while an idea comes along that's so new and unique that it can't be described with an existing word, and the only solution is to import a more fitting one from another language. No word could illustrate Hemingway's views on bullfighting as well as the term aficionado, one who has aficion for the sport, and his use of the term gives an unforgettable flavor to his fiction. In a similar way, the rise of Japanese pop culture in the 1990s brought with it a slew of new words, like otaku (an aficionado of Japanese pop culture), anime (animation from Japan, as separate from animation from other countries) and doujinshi (fan-created comics that pay tribute to popular TV shows), which capture the spirit of new Japan-focused culture better than any English term could. There are many examples of the reverse occurring, too, situations when Japanese are forced to reach into English to find a word that will describe just the idea they want to express, and it's common to hear nihongo peppered with words like innobeeshon, kurietibiti, taagetto, and appiiaru pointo (that's "innovation" "creativity" "target" and "appeal point" in case it wasn't clear). These concepts could be expressed using Japanese words, but the nuance would be totally different.

The city of Tomioka, Gunma Prefecture, just down the road from J-List, is overjoyed right now: the sprawling Tomioka Silk Mill has been officially designated a World Heritage Site by United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. One of the first modern factories of its kind in Japan, the silk-reeling mill was a built using French know-how in 1871 during Japan's march towards modernization, and is a symbol of the country's early industrial days. If you know anything about the Japanese, it's that they like to be recognized internationally, and getting the official nod from UNESCO brought great happiness to the people of the city. The television news was filled with images of people dancing in the streets and shooting off fireworks in the middle of the day over their new official status.

Remember that J-List carries a very warm, fuzzy thing from Japan: Totoro and Kiki's Delivery Service blankets that are great for curling up with on the sofa. Japan's acrylic blankets are incredibly soft to the touch and will provide your family with years of great service (we use them at my house too). However, our stock of these blankets is very limited and when they're gone they'll be gone for good. Check our J-List's lineup of anime blankets from Japan now.

About police and "police boxes" in Japan, learning to mispronounce your own language, and various meanings of "genki"

The subject of Japan's police is an interesting one. Japan's boys in blue are organized under the umbrella of the National Police Force, one of the first areas of society to be modernized in the European model when the country began its transformation from a feudal backwater into an industrialized nation in the 1870s. As with the Ministry of Education, Japan's police are a very top-down organization, and there's very little in the way of variance between police in different parts of the country, from Hokkaido to Okinawa. One big difference between the police in Japan and in the U.S. is the network of koban, the so-called "Police Boxes" or small police stations situated around Japanese cities. If you have a problem or need to ask for directions, there's usually a Koban nearby where you can get help. Police in Japan are komuin (KOH-mu-een), part of the sprawling caste of life-long public employees originally modelled on Britain's Civil Service system, who must pass a challenging regimen of tests in order to achieve that enviable status, just like firemen, teachers and employees at government offices here. Because komuin by definition cannot be fired except in extremely rare situations, it creates somewhat of a gap between society's protectors and Taro Q. Yamada (i.e., the average Japanese person on the street, Joe Sake Bottle if you will).

When you learn Japanese, or any foreign language for that matter, you need to get used to new and often strange pronunciations of familiar words. In the film "Madagascar," which my kids still try to watch at least twice a day if they can get away with it, Marty the Zebra is trying to find "the wild" which he believes is located in Connecticut. Once, my wife asked the kids, "Why does he want to go to Connecticut?" For phonetic reasons, Connecticut renders quite bizarrely in Japanese, a five-syllable word that sounds like "coh-neh-chi-KAH- tto" (in katakana, it's コネチカット). This pronounciation was so different from the English name that my kids were used to that they burst up laughing, then spent an hour trying to get my wife to pronounce "Connecticut" the proper way (which she couldn't do -- kids can be so cruel). In addition to place names, the Japanese use many English words in daily life, with altered pronunciations to fit their language, and it's always hard for English speakers to learn to "mispronounce" words, like "weekend" (ウィークエンド, which sounds like "oo-EE-koo-EN-doh"), "stew" (スチュー, which comes out like "su-CHOO" according to the rules of Japanese phonology), or good old "McDonald's" (マクドナルド, which is "ma-ku-do-NA-roo-doh").

Ogenki desu ka? This is one of the first phrases a student of Japanese encounters, and it corresponds to the greeting "how are you?" although "are you well?" is a slightly more accurate translation. In the context of this greeting, genki means "fine or "well" and you can reply by saying "Hai, genki desu (Yes, I am fine). But words don't always map cleanly to other languages, and genki can have other meanings, such as describing children running around (energetic), or someone beaming with happiness about something, or someone getting healthy after an illness. An elderly person is called genki if he's still hale for his age, you try to cheer up a depressed person by saying Genki wo dashite (lit. show me some genki), and the word can also describe the state that many men find themselves in when they first get up in the morning. The o on ogenki desu ka is an honorific prefix that shows respect, and it's often found on family titles (okaasan = mother, obaasan = grandmother), Buddhist words (otera = Buddhist temple), and "cute" words often used around kids or babies (oshiri = a cute-sounding word for a person's rear end).

You never know where the next "boom" is going to come from in Japan. It could be sneakers with ridiculously thick soles one year, fashionable clothes sporting the Union Jack the next year, and ridiculous librarian-esque horn-rimmed glasses the next. Right now Japan is in the middle of an "Ichigo Boom" or surge in strawberry-flavored food products, with dozens of delicious strawberry related products showing up in stores. Today we've posted some great new ichigo products for you to sample, from chocolate covered Koeda stick snacks to Strawberry Choco Flake to a bold new Strawberry Crunky, the chocolate with the oddest name in Japan. Check out our line up of strawberry products now!

Going to ge a haircut and learning about Japanese culture instead, when Japanese people must become bold, and using songs to master Japanese

People talk about convergence all the time, of things coming together in a more convenient form. Living in Japan, one of my favorite examples of convergence are hot spring baths (onsen) that offer other services too, like a restaurant where we can eat and enjoy a cold beer, a "massage corner" where we can say goodbye to the week's stress, and a barber shop where my kids and I can cut our hair before going to the baths to get clean. A few weeks ago my son and I were about to get our hair cut, and the barber asked how he wanted his hair to look. My son has a bit of a shy streak, and he looked over expecting me to answer for him, but I told him, "Speak up and tell the man how you want your hair cut. If you don't open your mouth and tell people what you want, you'll never get it." For some reason this statement was interesting to the staff in the barber shop, since Japanese kids are never told to be assertive or specify their own choices in a direct way, and soon we were all involved in a discussion on the differences between raising kids in Japan and the U.S.

Yes, seen from Japan, America is definitely a country where a person has to be very assertive if they want to get anywhere in life, and one of the things Japanese who study in the States must do is make a conscious effort to become more strong-willed. This "acquired boldness" can take many forms, such as learning to express opinions to others that would probably be kept to one's self in Japan and realizing that there's no shame in being more focused on yourself than on the overall group. My son got a lesson in comparative culture studies when, while attending a summer day camp in San Diego one year, the staff forgot to tell him where the lunches had been put so he could get his. If he'd spoken up and asked where his lunch was, the staff would have told him and all would have been well, but he sat there expecting someone to notice that he had no lunch -- which would have probably been the case in Japan -- so he went hungry all day. My project to get my son to assert himself more seems to be getting some results. At his special English elementary school, the teachers organized a weekly basketball club during recess for the kids. My son prefers dodgeball, though, and so he and some of his friends formed an official commission of kids to present their case to the teachers explaining why they wanted to have a choice between the two sports. It was a big success, and the new school dodgeball club starts next week.

One of the most popular categories of products at J-List are Japanese study-related items like kanji cards, hiragana practice notebooks and the best-selling Genki textbook series, and this gives me a warm feeling since I love to promote interest in the language whenever I can. Learning Japanese is a very challenging endeavor since it's so different from Western languages, but even a little bit of Japanese study opens new doors of understanding about the country. Although I generally recommend studying at a four-year university with a study-in-Japan option for serious students, there are lots of innovative ways to make Japanese study work, such as reading manga, developing an interest in "J-Dorama," playing import games in Japanese or getting into J-Pop/J-Rock. One of the best methods I found for learning Japanese was to memorize songs for karaoke, writing out the lyrics you want to learn several times. The act of writing the song aids memorization and when you've learned it, it's actually possible to retrieve words from memory by singing the song back to yourself, which helped me on more than one test in college. If this sounds like a good idea to you, I recommend the new book Songs for Learning Japanese, a textbook with two CDs that present some great popular and traditional Japanese songs for you to learn.

Learning about the brain through Madagascar, how names work in kanji in Japan, and a bizarre murder in Tokyo

We have a rule at our house: in order to help our kids become bilingual, we only watch DVDs from the U.S., and never bother with Japanese versions of American films released here. Right now my kids are in love with the movie Madagascar, laughing at the antics of Alex the Lion, Marty the Zebra, Melman the Giraffe and Gloria the Hippopotamus at least three times per day, as children are wont to do. My kids learned English in a very "natural" way, spending summers in the U.S., interacting with me and watching movies in English -- quite different from the memorizing of grammar and vocabulary that Japanese students must do. I've noticed that the two languages sometimes aren't as "cross-mapped" in my kids' brains as in my own, and it's quite common for them to know a word in English but have no idea what it is in Japanese, or vice-versa. I sometimes hold "who can translate this word the fastest" competitions when we're going somewhere in the car (trying to beat one's sibling at something is a great natural motivator), and it's interesting to see how difficult the act of moving a word or phrase from one language to the other is for them, even though they're perfectly functional in both languages. Recently I saw a news article that said that bilinguals who use two languages on a daily basis have a lower chance of getting dementia in old age due to increased blood flow through the brain. Hopefully we're doing some long-range good for our kids as we raise them to be a part of both countries.

Any loss of life is a tragedy, and the murder of a human being is especially bad. The number of homicides each year in Japan is low -- around 0.9 per 100,000 compared with 7.4 in the U.S. -- and out here in semi-rural Gunma murders are so rare they're talked about for weeks when one occurs. Despite the comparative rarity of homicides here, somehow it seems that the number of uniquely tragic or bizarre killings in Japan is much higher, at least subjectively. Currently Japan has been galvanized by the story of Kaori Mihashi, a 32-year-old Tokyo woman who murdered her allegedly abusive husband by hitting him with a wine bottle while he slept. The body was too heavy for her to lift, so she had the bright idea of taking a saw and carving him up into sections, depositing his torso, legs and head in different parts of the city (they're still looking for his arms, poor guy). She tried to throw suspicion off of herself by filing a missing person's report and replying to emails from her husband's mobile phone as if he were still alive, but the authorities found holes in her story and eventually uncovered the truth.

It's interesting to observe how kanji functions in society on a daily basis here. In written Japanese, kanji characters are used to write the major nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs in a sentence, with hiragana characters added for grammatical elements like the markers for subject and object, past tense, and so on. Names are also generally written using kanji characters, and just as there are alternate spellings for many names in English, there are many choices for writing a name like "Takeshi" (健志、武志、武史、丈志、丈史, たけし, well, you get the idea). When you learn someone's name, it's important to learn how to write it properly, and it's the height of rudeness to write someone's name with the wrong characters, especially in a business setting. (J-List's Yasu once changed suppliers because they wrote his name wrong on an invoice.) Part of becoming functionally literate with kanji characters involves learning to describe the kanji for a person or place name to someone over the phone, referring to other words that are written with that character, describing the radical (the part of a kanji used to organize it in a dictionary), and so on. The part of our city J-List is located it in is called Hashie-cho (波志江町, Hashie Town), a rather rare place name, and I've had to describe how to write this address so often I've got it down pat. "The 'ha' is 'nami' (波, wave), 'shi' is 'kokorozasu' (志す, meaning to aim for a goal or take on a challenge), and the 'e' (eh) is the first character from 'Edo' (江戸, the old name of Tokyo)."

Peter's Unified Theory of Japan meets Great Britain, going to the beach in January, and understanding Japan through its bicycles

Part of Peter's Unified Theory of Japan is that the Land of the Rising Sun has a lot in common with Great Britain. Both are island nations with similar land areas and unique cultures that were able to grow for centuries without outside interference. Both have made expert use of naval technologies to build empires in the past, and both exert a huge amount of cultural influence on the world comparative to their small sizes. Also, neither nation seems to consider itself to be a part of its respective continent, and sometimes it seems that Japan would be happier being part of Europe than of Asia. The strange connection between Japan and Great Britain was not lost on the members of the Iwakura Embassy of 1871, a group of ambassadors from the new Meiji Government who visited Europe and the U.S. to make observations about how Japan should proceed with modernization. Partly as a result of their recommendations, Japan consciously emulated Great Britain in many ways, including adopting a British-style Parliament and Prime Minister system.

But as much as Japan secretly wishes it were part of Europe, it's very much an Asian nation, and that means...bicycles. Yes, bicycles are a popular way to get around in Japan, with people from all walks of life using them to get where they want to go, including businessmen in expensive tailored suits, which is always amusing to see. I happened to look at the bicycle section of our local home center the other day, and was interested to see the latest trends in two-wheeled transportation. The basic Japanese bicycle is a rather kakko warui (kah-KOH WAH-ROO-ee; ugly, uncool) design popular with middle-aged women that's affectionately called the "Mama-Chari" (from "mother's chariot," don't ask me why), which sports a large basket for bringing home the day's groceries. There are other types of bicycles too, from mountain bikes to fold-up bikes you can take on a train to electric-assist jobs, but if you want to get something really kakko ii (kah-KOH EE; cool, stylish) you should go for a bicycle with a spiffy corporate logo printed on the side. There are plenty available in stores, including bikes sold under brands like Jeep Wrangler, Jaguar, PT Cruiser and something called "Chevrolet Chevy." Don't want a bicycle with a car logo on it? How about a United Colors of Benetton bicycle, a bike for ladies with the famous "ELLE" logo on it, or...Wimbledon? Yes, there's an official Wimbledon bike, complete with their slogan: "The All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club." I was especially partial to the Zippo-branded bicycles I saw, which apparently combine the fine engineering of the world's most popular lighter with fast-switching gears by Shimano. Since I don't smoke but like Zippo lighters, maybe this is a good compromise for me.

Just because we don't live in San Diego doesn't mean we can't catch some waves in January. Over the weekend we took the kids to Caribbean Beach, a massive-scale wave pool that simulates a sandy beach, located about as far from the sea as you can get on Japan's main island of Honshu. Besides the wave pool, there were water slides, several Jacuzzis and a fun "flowing pool" that continuously pushes you in one direction, kind of like an "It's a Small World" attraction that you get to swim in. The facility was built by the city of Kiryu, right next to the municipal garbage incinerator, allowing the energy generated from the burning of garbage to be put to good use heating the various pools and keeping the cost down. Like Japan's Postal Savings Accounts (which effectively form the world's largest bank, in terms of deposits) and its government-run Kampo life insurance system, public projects like this heated pool are one more example of how Japan's government loves to meddle in areas that are generally considered the domain of private industry in most other countries. I'm not complaining about a fun pool to use, of course, but for every well-conceived project like Caribbean Beach there are all too many failures. For example, high in the mountains of Nagano Prefecture there's a beautiful resort hotel that was built with money from Postal Savings Accounts, which people can stay at cheaply. Not only did the coming of the hotel depress the commercial hotels in the area with unfair competition, though, it's also nearly always empty, a sprawling resort with no guests despite the staggering cost to build it.

Valentine's Day is not far off, so we're posting a reminder in case you wanted to do February 14 Japanese-style this year. Valentine's Day in Japan is a day when women give chocolate to boyfriends, husbands or fathers to show their love or say "thank you" for their hard work and support. Often women will go to great lengths to make hand-made chocolates, and stores stock many types of chocolate molds, decorations and other tools to help them in their goal. In addition to a selection of chocolate molds that we've posted today, J-List is loaded to the gills with great chocolate snacks from Japan, the perfect way to show your feelings this year. Why not browse our great snack section now?

This is a silly thing to have on your bike.

This is pretty silly, too.

Do other countries have these? It's a light that runs from the friction of the front wheel. It slows you down so people usually turn them off, making riding at night more dangerous.

Here's the bike I liked, the Zippo bicycle. What will they think of next?

Outside of Cainz Home I encountered a perfect replica of K.I.T.T. I've lived in Japan so long that I'm used to stuff like this, but this is weird, right? I mean, you wouldn't drive Knight Rider's car in the U.S., right?

The front even does the "Cylon" thing.

All about our bath in Japan, the concept of Japanese-style "trust," and what's up with Vermont Curry?

Bathing is very important in Japan, and almost all Japanese take time to enjoy a slow bath at the end of the day, which provides time to reflect on recent events or enjoy some "skinship" with the kids, two things that can be lacking in modern society. When we built our Japanese house, we chose a "unit bath" with a nifty computer that fills up the tub with the push of a button. You can set the bath to fill up at a certain time or change the temperature of the bath, or push the "extra full" button when you're especially tired and want a really good soak. Unfortunately our bath computer broke recently (it kept turning on spontaneously and running all night in parody of The Sorcerers Apprentice), so we had to get a new one installed. After the work was done, I asked my wife how much it cost. "I don't know, I didn't ask about money. I left it up to the man K-san sent, and knew it would be okay."

This brings us to one of the concepts I really like about Japan, shinyo (SHEEN'yoh, meaning "trust"), a wonderful idea that's used on a daily basis here. For ten years we've always used the same contractor, K-san, whenever we wanted to get some work done on our house, like when we "reformed" (renovated) my wife's parents' liquor shop or redid the kids' rooms. We like him because he does good work, and he makes sure his work is always good because he's got our trust. The electricians and carpenters and others who work with him are part of his "trust network" and they make sure they don't ever do wrong by us because it would amount to "smearing mud on the face" of K-san. The trust extends to money, too -- we can be sure that what we're charged probably won't be outside what is reasonable, even when my wife forgets to ask what it will cost beforehand.

"You've been in Japan too long when you no longer find anything amusing about the concept of 'Vermont Curry.'" Although you may think of certain foods like sushi, sashimi, tempura and sukiyaki as popular Japanese dishes, the honorary national food of Japan has got to be curry, or as the Japanese call it, curry rice. Curry spread from India during the 1700s and from there went all around the world, a gift from the British Empire, enjoyed in Japan now more than any other kind of food save rice itself. Japanese curry is thick and delicious, and many companies compete to make the best curry for the marketplace, with products like House The Curry (the Japanese love to add the word "the" to product names), Java Curry, and Vermont Curry, flavored with the mild kiss of Vermont apples, or something like that. One of the rules of curry-eating is, curry takes even better after it's been left to sit out all night, and "second day curry" is heavenly (although my son discovered that "second day Chef Boyardee ravioli" is pretty good, too). Curry is available in many forms in Japan, poured over a fried pork cutlet; as udon noodles in a curry soup, a popular dish from Nagoya; or as curry bread, a doughnut-like ball of bread with curry inside. Unlike countries like India, Thailand and Korea, the Japanese are wimps when it comes to spicy food, and when we order curry in a restaurant I have to ask them to make it spicier.

The art of faux pas in Japan, Internet-influenced advertising trends, and 100 "geniuses" the Japanese respect

I'll never forget the moment. In my first year of SDSU, my family got a Japanese homestay student who stayed at our house for a month. It was a great way to share a little bit of the USA with someone from Japan and vice-versa, and I heartily recommend taking homestay students to everyone who has the opportunity. We were eating some rice that our student had prepared, and I needed someplace to put the chopsticks I was fumbling with, so I did what seemed natural to me and jammed them into my bowl of rice, straight up. Our homestay student looked shocked and told me, "Only dead people do that." This was my initiation into the many-faceted world of Japanese faux pas, the complex list of things you're not supposed to do. Many of these customs, such as not sticking chopsticks in rice, not handing food to another person chopstick-to-chopstick, and not sleeping with your head pointing towards north, are related to Buddhist funerals. Some other famous social goofs that foreigners are known for include include walking into homes without taking shoes off, confusing words like ippai and oppai (meaning "a lot" and "boobs," respectively) when speaking to prospective in-laws, and throwing up on the Prime Minister of Japan.

The Japanese are a very orderly people, and they like to organize their world into tidy little lists they call "rankings" (rankingu). The other day I caught an interesting show on TV entitled "100 People the Japanese Like - Genius Version," which introduced the top 100 visionaries, innovators and thinkers in history, as chosen by an online poll. In addition to international figures who are very dear to the Japanese, the forefathers of the Meiji Restoration and a few Emperors from ancient China, many on the list of the most respected geniuses were soldiers who fought during Japan's "Country at War" period. Here are some of the more interesting entries:

33. Walt Disney (founder of Tokyo Disneyland -- just kidding)
31. Soseki Natsume (the most famous Japanese writer of the 19th century)
24. Akira Kurosawa (renowned filmmaker)
18. William Shakespere (famous for tormenting Japanese students of English)
14. Charlie Chaplain (he made several visits to Japan and is very popular here)
13. Ryoma Sakamoto (freedom fighter against the Shogunate, also famous for popularizing Western boots in Japan)
11. Tezuka Osamu (creator of Astro Boy and of anime and manga as we know it)
10. The Wright Brothers (first aviators)
9. Amadeus Mozart (decomposing composer)
8. Nobunaga Oda (the first of three successful unifiers of modern Japan)
5. Hideo Noguchi (researcher who helped isolate yellow fever, later died of yellow fever)
4. Shokatsu Komei (legendary figure from China's history, famous for making Chinese manju bread with meat inside, now sold at 7-11)
3. Thomas Edison (inventor and shrewd businessman, created the electric chair to make his competition look bad)
2. Leonardo da Vinci (Michelangelo wasn't too happy about this)
1. Albert Einstein (who also loved Japan during his several month visit -- he even had a favorite bento restaurant in Nihonbashi, Tokyo)

Here's a short from the show, the piece on Edison.

And if you want to read the whole list in Japanese, go to this page.

As with the rest of the world, the Internet has profoundly changed Japan, allowing people to communicate in many new ways. Adoption of fast broadband has helped -- even J-List has a speedy hikari fiber (fiber-optic) connection despite being surrounded on all sides by rice fields in our rural city. As the existence of the Net causes changes in society, advertisers change too, and the latest trend in TV commercials is to end a segment with a visual of a keyword being typed into a search engine. At the end of a commercial for a home builder the keyword "reliable homes" is shown being searched for, and Mitsui Mitsubishi Bank claimed the keyword "a roof over your head" using this method. McDonald's scored big with an ad campaign asking "Does Donald ever speak?" (his name is Donald here) and suggesting that viewers search for Donald no uwasa ("the latest gossip about Donald") in web browsers, which led to an interactive TV commercial online. Suggesting that viewers do a Yahoo or Google search on a certain keyword isn't only done in TV commercials, but is showing up in radio and print ads, too. Apparently getting the customer to take an action helps put them in a certain frame of mind for making a purchase, and I'll bet advertisers measure spikes in keyword searches to gauge which advertisements are proving effecting for them. I think we should test this theory, though. Everyone, search for Domo-kun on J-List right now!

Coming of Age Day in Japan, on Japanese puns used in TV commercials, and right wing politics at work in Japan

Today is a holiday in Japan, Seijin-no-hi, or Coming of Age Day. Venture into any Japanese city right now and you'll see hundreds of 20-year-olds decked out in the finest kimonos and sparkling new suits, greeting each other and taking group photos together. In Japan, the official age of adulthood is 20 (as commemorated in our wacky "you must be 20 years old to purchase tobacco and alcohol" T-shirts), and today is a special day to mark their official debut as shakai-jin (lit. "society-people"), or full-fledged members of society. Today, 20-year-olds throughout the country will endure long speeches by elderly community leaders, have lunch with friends, and go drinking in the evenings to enjoy their new freedom. For parents it's a proud day too, and doting fathers are all too happy to plunk down $5000 for a gorgeous kimono that their daughters will in all likelihood wear only once. Like many aspects of Japan, Coming of Age Day has been around for centuries -- in the old days women celebrated turning of age by dying their teeth black for the first time.

Each language has its own unique phonetic features and its own potential for dajare (dah-jah-REH), or bad puns, which are called dada-jare in my family because I'm the Dad and I usually make the bad puns (which is a pun in itself, really). In Japanese there are some silly conventions used in advertising that are unique to the language, which are interesting for a gaijin to observe and catalog. First of all, the word zo (zoh、増) means "more" (as in "50% more free"), but it's also the word for elephant （像）-- hence, it's not uncommon for a TV commercial to make use of elephants to reinforce the image of getting more free buy buying such-and-such brand. Similarly, rakuda （駱駝）is the word for camel, but it also means "[this] is very comfortable and convenient"　（楽だ）, so every few years some company or another makes a TV commercial featuring camels basking in comfort because of some product. Dogs say "woof!" in English, but to the Japanese the sound is "wan!" and some companies create cute dog characters showing that they're "number wan" in their respective industries. Finally, the word mou (moh) means "already" but it's also the local version of "moo" -- and so, it's common for commercial messages to be communicated using cows saying things like, "Stop wasting your money on brand X, already!" Those Japanese can be so goofy.

We interrupt this J-List update to bring you the latest news in right-wing politics, Japan style. One of the downsides to living next door to the mayor of a Japanese city is, every once in a while ultra-conservatives will park their loudspeaker cars in front of our house and blast the neighborhood with anti-mayor threats and slogans, which is what they're doing right now. Japan's right-wingers are not unlike the KKK in the U.S., making use of freedom of speech laws to get their political point across despite being universally ignored by all reasonable people. This time they're howling about the project to tear down our city's perfectly good Ferris Wheel and erect a new one two kilometers to the north, so it'll be visible from the freeway as people drive by, essentially the municipal equivalent of unnecessary surgery. "Come out and face us, Mayor Yanai!" they're shouting through the loudspeakers. "We were stupid to make a person like you our mayor!" If you've ever seen any of the films of Juzo Itami such as "Minbo, or the Gentle Art of Japanese Extortion," you know how comical Japanese right-wing yakuza types can be, with their giant trucks and their military uniforms and their incessant banzais to the Emperor while playing the theme song to the old Space Cruiser Yamato anime. Silly as they are, today is the first time I find myself in perfect agreement with them, since I also oppose the needless construction project. How do you say "pork barrel" in Japanese?

J-List loves to bring you a slice of Japan's amazing pop culture with every update. We're especially fond of Japan's tradition of manga comics, and stock hundreds of titles, including the outstanding English-translated manga magazine, Comic AG, one of the best values you'll ever see. In additional to being available in single issues, you can get a revolving subscription so each issue is sent to you automatically. Or order AGSET, sets of 5 comics for a discount, also very popular. Why not browse our manga pages now?

Picture of a 右派 car (right wingers loudspeaker car) I'd shot next to my favorite hair dresser.

The text on the side says "Leave a rich environment to our children and grandchildren." It's backwards by the way -- a stupid rule in Japan is, you right from left to right, except when writing on the right side of a car, in which case you go from the front of the car, back. Whatever.

And here are some pictures from our trip to Karuizawa, Land of Snow right now. Some of you probably think that snow is nothing, but to a San Diegan like me, it's magical even when it makes driving more difficult.

Out the window of our apartment.

Cold baka.

And since today's topic was dajare or bad puns in Japanese, on our way home we went to a restaurant called Auntie Pasta, which was pure gold as far as dajare go.

Learning about how your brain works through Japanese, looking back on Japan since 1991, and services gaijin render to Japan

One thing I like about learning another language is the understanding you get of how your own brain works, not unlike reverse-engineering the firmware in a cool techno gadget. One area that interested me was analyzing how new words or grammatical concepts were internalized in my mind. Back in my SDSU days, I distinctly remember struggling to memorize the word "soto" (soh-toh), meaning "outside." I'd stare at the word for several seconds, saturating my short-term memory as I waited for my long-term memory to grab the word, but it just wasn't working. Next I wrote the word 20 times, always a good way to memorize information, and even created a mnemonic picture for myself, imagining a Chrysler DeSoto outside a window (stupid, but it worked). The final step in mastering the new concept was using it and getting feedback from Japanese speakers -- often negative feedback when I'd use the word in a spectacularly wrong way, but that's still okay. It's like your mind is a network of cobwebs, and in order to secure a piece of knowledge inside so it won't fall out you have to attach it to the network with threads from several different directions, which oddly is pretty much what happens on a synaptic level inside your brain.

Sometimes it's fun to look back on how things have changed since I came to Japan in 1991. The Tokyo land bubble had just burst but the shock hadn't trickled down very far yet, and businesses still seemed to be in "bubble mode" -- on my first trip to Tokyo Disneyland, for example, I went into an ice cream shop and was surprised to see no less than eleven employees waiting to serve me ice cream even though I was the only customer in the place. In retrospect, the off-and-on recession years of the 1990s were really good for Japan, forcing it to adopt a "reality based" approach to its economy which is bringing benefits now. When I first came here, Japan was a very closed place, truly an island nation, where common brands like Coca-Cola and Budweiser seemed downright exotic because there were so few other foreign products around, but there's a lot more choice now. By far the biggest change in life in Japan has been the arrival of that newfangled Internet thing you've been hearing so much about. Back in the day, it cost $4 a minute to call home, so I learned to talk fast, but in the age of broadband and Skype, Japan doesn't seem like such a far-away place anymore.

Like plover birds that clean crocodiles' teeth, gaijin in Japan serve many useful functions to our Japanese hosts. First and foremost, we notice things, and provide an important point of reference for Japan's all-too homogeneous society. When I first arrived in Japan, I was shocked to see cars on the roads with children playing inside and nary a child safety seat in sight -- carseats just weren't part of the national consciousness yet. No doubt the combined "frown power" of foreigners living here helped push lawmakers to enact Japan's first carseat law, which they finally did in 2000. Sometimes I find myself noticing little linguistic oddities in the Japanese language and sharing them with people around me, whether they want to hear about them or not. For example, the word sashimi (sliced raw fish) is written with characters that mean "stabbed meat" （刺し身）, but if you've ever tried stabbing sashimi with chopsticks you'd get some funny looks. The word chawan means "rice bowl" yet is written with characters that actually mean "tea bowl" (茶碗), and no one thinks anything of this. A Japanese child who has lived abroad for a time and returned is a kikoku shijo (帰国子女）, which means literally means "return-country girl-child" even though the term applies to boys, too. And the Japanese word for novel is written with characters that mean "short story" (小説）. There's plenty of weirdness in English, of course, but because we aren't as aware of the individual meanings of parts of words, we don't notice them as much.

More pictures from "What we did on our Oshogatsu" (New Year's Day). Here we sit at my wife's uncle's house, drinking beer, eating good food and playing old Japanese card games. This is a rather easy game about a princess, a feudal lord and a Buddhist priest.

Then it was time to play some Hana Fuda, which my kids love.

The deck of Hana Fuda cards our uncle brought out was quite rare. Can you guess why? Hint, look at those three characters on the bottom of the package of cards. These cards were made by Nintendo, back when this was what they did.

No New Year's would be complete without mikan oranges. Since we had no mikan oranges, we ate deko-pon oranges, which are larger and sweeter. But they're not strictly speaking, mikans.

I was holding my MacBook Pro and my cell phone, and our uncle was so interested I showed him some of the stuff you could do with the Internet, namely Google Earth and Google itself. He wanted to look up some pictures of his old ship, the Ise, and we found some good ones. This was a hell of a ship, a battleship with three main batteries of guns, along with runways in the back that could accommodate 22 planes. See more pictures here.

Learning your own language by teaching ESL, funny English used in Japan, and all about chopsticks

One of the cool things about teaching ESL in Japan was learning my own language and its grammar. Language is based on rules which are internalized by speakers of that language, and part of the reason why New Jersey English or Osaka Japanese sounds odd to people who aren't from those places is, speakers from those areas are using a slightly different set of internal rules. Although we all learn some grammar in school (does everyone remember creating sentence diagrams?), the only way to really learn something is to teach it, to stand in the middle of a classroom with students who are each struggling with a different problem area and find a way to help them. After letting my students down by saying "uh, sure, I guess that sounds right" a few times (Japanese students hate teachers who do that), I buckled down and learned how to teach grammar. Did you know the difference between "the" (rhyming with "three") and "the" (rhyming with "uh")? The first is used before words starting with vowels ("thee end") and the latter before all other words ("thuh dog"), although it was news to me at the time. What do you do when a student asks why you have to say "a piece of chalk" when it's clearly something you could count like a pen or pencil. Or why pants and glasses are "pairs" when you can't separate them? Or why can we count fish individually, but the meat of a fish is non-count? Or why words like "sky" and "sea" appear plural sometimes (e.g. "the Friendly Skies" or "the seven seas")? One rule of English that threw me at the time was the long list of words with different intonations depending on whether they're being used as nouns or verbs (e.g. research the research, permit the fishing permit, present a present to someone, or rebel against the rebel base). Surprisingly, living in a foreign country has put me more in touch with my native language.

The Japanese learn a lot of English, six years if they graduate from high school and up to ten years if they attend a four-year university. Despite this, most Japanese don't really get that good at communicating in English for several reasons, including Japan's isolated position in the world (when 99% of the people around you are Japanese, there's not a lot of opportunity to practice) and the fact that English lessons are generally taught in Japanese for the exclusive purpose of passing tests. But just because the Japanese aren't generally fluent in the language doesn't mean there isn't a wealth of English phrases used on a daily basis here. When it's time for me to spell my wife at helping our son with his homework, for example, I'll say "baton touch" as I sit down, a common phrase used when taking over a duty. If my kids misbehave in public I remind them to think about the "TPO" ("time, place, occasion," although my son says it means "toilet paper office"). Anime fans know that when something good happens to a character, they're liable to shout "Lucky!" (LEH-kee!). When we go for a drive up in the mountains, we take the "I.C." (interchange, or freeway on-ramp), and when we get hungry we stop at a "P.A." (parking area) to eat. Some "English" words used here are downright unintelligible to native speakers, like "don-mai" (DOHN-my) which means "don't worry about it" and comes from "don't mind," or "back-ourai" (back-OH-rai), meaning "it's okay to back up a little further," from "back-alright."

There comes a time in the life of every gaijin when he or she inevitably encounters chopsticks, those devilish tools used for eating in most of Asia. Japanese people use chopsticks for nearly every meal, except for Western dishes like pasta and curry. Along with hiragana and the ABC's, learning to use chopsticks is something kids are taught by their parents at around the age of two or three, although some children still have yet to master chopstick use by the time they start preschool. This being Japan, it is exactly one "right" way to hold chopsticks, and it's not uncommon for a group of people to start critiquing the chopstick use of someone in the group. Foreigners living in Japan know that using chopsticks in public is cause for praise from older Japanese, although please note that countering by complimenting their use of a knife and fork is not generally appreciated. Although they're hard for Westerners to get used to at first, chopsticks are very easy to use, and when you master them it's not hard to pick that last grain of rice out of your bowl quite deftly. Incidentally, J-List carries a wide variety of chopsticks, from ones with rough patches at the tips for easy gripping of food to higher-end chopsticks that are a joy to hold and use, and even disposable chopsticks that are handy to have in the kitchen.

Do you have a website or blog? Would you like to help J-List brings its brand of Japanese pop culture to the world and get something back from us? If so, then we hope you'll join the Friends of J-List Affiliate Program, a cool system that lets you link to J-List products and receive commissions as cash or store credit (your option). Our system regularly receives praise from new members for being very easy to use, and since we host all graphics ourselves, there's not even any bandwidth cost to you. You can link to any product, category or search string on either the J-List or JBOX.com websites, with total control over what you show your readers. Effectively immediately, we're raising the commissions we pay, making this an even better opportunity for you to help others find J-List. See this page for more info and a link to join up!

This month's "H-Game of the Month" is one of my own favorites, Snow Drop, a dramatic story-centric PC dating-sim game by Will and female Japanese illustrator Shikage Nagi (who also created Little My Maid). A great game set in a winter wonderland, you play the sensitive Minoru, caught in a love triangle between your childhood friend Kyoka and a mysterious girl named Shizuka, who you're sure you've met before even though you can't remember her. What about the experienced Keika who keeps trying to get you to comfort her, or your troublesome younger sister? And what is the mysterious destiny that waits for you in the snowy Japanese mountains? Available at a great price this month only!

Happy New Year! On Jan. 1st we went to our local shrine to pray for happiness in 2007. These two girls were wearing kimonos, very beautiful.

We ended up coming back to the place with the Japanese torii arches again this year. While waiting in line (about an hour, and boy was it cold), I was compelled to make a joke about torii influenza (a play on bird flu in Japanese). No, it wasn't very funny.

Waiting, and drinking in Japan all around me.

Afterward it was time to hit the stalls, which sell everything from choco banana to cotton candy and tako-yaki (octopus balls). We got some yaki-soba (Japan's version of chow mein).

Here a girl makes our crepes for us. It amused me to see that she was a koal with tons of make-up on, yet was deftly preparing our crepes.

Not every aspect of Japan is attractive to foreigners. Here's the fried ika (squid) booth.

Happy New Year from J-List, and some information about the Year of the Pig and something with the cool name of "Sexegenary Cycle"

Happy New Year from J-List! In Japanese, the phrase is akemashite omedeto gozaimasu (ah-kay-mah-shtay oh-meh-deh-TOH go-ZA-EE-mahs), literally "congratulations on opening the new year." We hope 2007 will be a year of peace, prosperity and happiness for everyone!

In the same way that much of Western culture comes from ancient Rome and Greece, Japan was greatly influenced by China, and many elements of their society can be traced back to the Middle Kingdom. For two millennia Japan used the old Chinese Lunar calendar to record time, and they inherited the Chinese Zodiac system as part of that tradition. There are twelve animals in the so-called Chinese Sexegenary Cycle, which rotate through year after year. 2006 was the Year of the Dog, for example, and 2007 is the Year of the Pig, and various characteristics are attributed to people born in each animal year. For example, those born in a Pig Year are supposedly honest, straightforward and sometimes aloof around others. Each time the Chinese Zodiac cycles around to your year (at the ages of 11, 23, 35 and so on) its another landmark in your life.

There's an interesting story of how the Chinese Zodiac came to be. On the day of the New Year the Gods (or Buddha, depending on which version you read) declared a race among thirteen animals to come and offer New Year's Greetings. The Ox knew he was the slowest animal, so he started out before the others. The Rat noticed this and hopped on his back, jumping off at the last minute to claim first place. The Ox came in second, followed by the fleet Tiger. The Rabbit was next, with the kind-hearted Dragon behind, who was delayed by helping the Rabbit across the river. The Horse ran along then, but the Snake slithered between his legs and startled him, beating him in the race. The Sheep, Monkey and Rooster were working as a team to get across the river, and arrived next. Then came the Dog, delayed because he stopped to take a bath along the way, with the Pig coming in last -- he'd gotten confused and climbed the wrong mountain, forcing him to backtrack. The thirteenth animal was the Cat, who had forgotten what day the race was held and asked his friend the cunning Rat, who told him the wrong date, which is why there's no Year of the Cat, and why cats hate mice today.

What's that clicking sound? It's the sound of another J-List customer buying the second-to-last copy of the cool 2007 Japanese calendar you've had your eye on. Japan is a very seasonal place, with different activities held at different times of year, and right now is Calendar Season. Why not spend a few minutes browsing our amazing selection of 2007 anime, JPOP, sexy idol and other calendars from Japan, or our many other products?

J-List is taking the day off today, of course, but we'll be back tomorrow to
process everyone's orders quickly and efficiently. Feel free to browse our
extensive selection of wacky and wonderful things from Japan. Thanks!

More random pics from Guam. We thought this burglar warning was worth snapping a shot of.

Guamian bookmobile.

Yes, this is a yak.

The kids, playing by an old Spanish fort.

The dolphins were fun to play with, but I wanted them to stop the boat, dump a bunch of food in the water and let us frolic with them. The captain explained that the dolphins were actually kind of shy and didn't like people.

There was some bad renditions of Japanese and Chinese food in Guam.

Sitting in the drive thru in McDonald's, we looked up to see about 100 of these weird little lizards (Geckos, someone told us) crawling on the outside of the building and threatening to fall into our convertible car.

In keeping with section 7 of the American Expat Code, we made sure to bring back plenty of Taco Bell sauce, which is pretty darned good on the Twisters you get at "Kentucky."

Daughter Rina hides the McDonald's food she's smuggled in to Taco Bell.

The other reason Guam is good for us, we can buy American cereal!

I know the evil food producers of the West have put corn syrup in everything (replacing sugar, which may be partially responsible for everyone getting so fat), but I'd never seen it for sale as-is.

We made our Japanese-style Christmas Cake on Dec 25th. It was good, although it didn't feel much like Christmas.