The "Princess Di" of Japan, about Japan as a "vertical" society, and I can see the Sphinx from my house

There's a minor hullabaloo going on between Japan and Australia right now after the publication of a controversial book on Princess Masako, the Harvard- and Oxford-educated woman who became "Japan's Diana" when she married Prince Naruhito, the future Emperor. In the book, author Ben Hills argues that Masako has been made a "Prisoner of the Chrysanthemum Throne" and delves into the various problems she's had to deal with since joining the Japanese Royal Family in 1993 (I have a special commemorative 500 yen coin from back then in my house somewhere). While he overplays things a bit for their dramatic value, it's true that the past 14 years haven't exactly been a Cinderella story for poor Masako-sama, who had visions of reforming Japan's Imperial Household Agency with modern, Western-influenced ideas before the weight of 2000 years of tradition wore her down. The book has brought about quite a backlash from Japan, which highlights one of the odder aspects of this otherwise free-thinking democracy: one does not criticize the Imperial Family. Now that a male heir has been born to Naruhito's younger brother, a lot of the pressure is off poor Masako to get pregnant again. Japanese history is measured in eras that go with the reign of each emperor, with the Showa Era (1925-1989) being the reign of Emperor Hirohito, and the current Heisei Era (1990-present) being the current Emperor Akihito, who is getting on in years. I wonder what the next era will be called?

Last time I talked about how Japan's society is more ordered than the U.S. or Europe, organized in a way that literally creates a pecking order from the lowest to the highest, from the neighborhood dog that comes around sniffing for scraps all the way up to the Emperor himself. There are mechanisms found in Japanese society that reinforce this up-down nature, such as senpai and kohai, a person's senior or junior in a school or organization, a heavy focus on treating people who are older than you with more respect and receiving this respect from those younger than you, and a system of polite language that we could never conceive of in English. In practice, Japan becomes a "vertical" society, where the U.S. is theoretically more "horizontal," and almost nothing is allowed to mess up the tidy little system that exists here. When my sister entered the second grade, the teachers decided she was too advanced and moved her to the third grade, something that would never happen in Japan, as it would mess up the balance that people depend on throughout their lives. One by-product of this up-down structure is that there are barriers of politeness in place that keep me from being "friends" with someone who is much older or younger than me when speaking Japanese with them -- although there's no problem if we converse in English.

Near our house, we can see the Sphinx, the Statue of Liberty, and many other interesting wonders of world. These are pachinko parlors, a major source of entertainment for many Japanese men and women in Japan. An odd game which I don't pretend to understand, you basically buy a bucket of balls for $50, then sit for hours trying to hold a controller in just the right position to make most of the balls go into certain holes in the pachinko machine. Since "gambling" is illegal in Japan, except for certain events like horse, boat and bicycle racing, you don't win money if you get more balls than you started out with -- you get valuable prizes which you redeem for cash at a shady building next to the pachinko parlor. (Remind me to talk about the concepts of tatemae, the way we pretend things are, and honne, the way they are in reality.) Pachinko is quite a competitive business to be in, and operators (who always seem to be getting involved with some crime or another) work very hard to bring in the newest machines in -- with little video screens or cute anime-style characters printed on them, for example, or recently, pachinko machines based on famous anime series.

J-List loves PC dating-sim games, a great way to interact with beautiful girls (or guys) on your Windows computer, and we carry virtually every title available in English for fans, with many titles available in Internet Download Editions. We've recently gone through and added opening and demo movies for many popular games that you can watch, including Brave Soul, Heart de Roommate, the X-Change saga, Yin-Yang!, Pick Me Honey!, Bazooka Cafe and more. Check them out now!

J-List sells a unique line of original kanji T-shirts, with designs that range from hilarious to aesthetically beautiful to just plan cool to wear. We've added several T-shirts and Hoodies to our discount page, which we're closing out to make room for future designs. It's a great opportunity to pick up a great original shirt that won't be available again and get it at a great price too, but you should hurry as quantity is limited and sizes do sell out. If you're a big person you should also check out the site, as we've got several XXL and XXXL sized shirts there for you, all at great prices, too.

Remember that J-List carries over 3000 amazing products you can only find in Japan. One of our specialties is Domo-kun, the super cute plush toy that is the official spokesmonster of NHK, Japan's public broadcasting network. Unfortunately nearly all of the products we carry are out of production and can no longer be stocked by us, meaning that if you'd like to score a Domo-kun pen, plush keychain or the infamous "whenever you ... God kills a kitten" plush toy. So...check our Domo-kun lineup now!

Went to a new restaurant, and thought I'd record the meal I had. I am quite a baka for sukiyaki, and whenever I can eat it like this, I do.

Wow, this place is good -- chopstick instructions in English. I guess writing them in English would be kid of silly.

I don't know if Americans eat much in the way of raw egg (been living in Japan way too long), but it really makes good sukiyaki great for me. Take the boiled meat, put in the egg, and then...

...put it on the rice, so that the egg and soup from the sukiyaki falls down on the rice. Repeat.

They finished off with really good coffee in a really cool Japanese cup. The cost for this meal? Something like $7. And as long time readers may remember, I judge every restaurant by its ice coffee, which was quite good, a solid 8 or 8.5. So I had no complaints at all.

Understanding Japanese society through business cards, some fun Japanese words that are pregnant with meaning, and all about Shinjuku

I was making up some Japanese business cards for one of my employees yesterday, trying different layouts and fonts to see what looked best. As I worked on the design for the "name card" (as business cards are called here), something seemed wrong to me, but I couldn't put my finger on it. Then it hit me: I'd left off one of the most important parts, the job title. Organization is very important in a place like Japan, and just as the entire country is ordered into prefectures, cities, towns and villages, with no unincorporated areas anywhere, people are generally expected to fit into pre-defined slots, e.g. programmer, graphic designer, accountant, city employee, and so on. Everyone must have an occupation associated with their name for people to know how to categorize them, and when proper categories aren't available, allowances are made, such as the recent additions of sub-groups like "freeter," a person who only works part-time jobs without ever officially joining a company as a full-time employee or starting a career; or NEET, a term for a young person living with their parents and "Not in Educational, Employment or Training," i.e. loafing and surfing the net all day. When I started J-List, I encountered some opposition from my wife's family, who didn't think it was a good idea to trade a secure career teaching English for the uncertainty of starting a business on the Internet. I realized later that this was because the concept of an "entrepreneur" was not defined as a valid category in their minds, and they didn't know how to feel about a son-in-law who didn't fit neatly into one of the pre-defined slots...which suited my American sense of individualism just fine.

Any way you look at it, English is a convoluted language, with grammar and vocabulary taken haphazardly from many sources, including Olde English, French, Greek, Latin and listening to young people these days, Japanese. The Japanese language is much the same, originally based on the indigenous (pre-6th century) language of the Yamato people dwelling in the Nara Valley, influenced by 1500 years of kanji and 250 years of national isolation, and then exposed to a huge amount of foreign loan words in modern times. There's a category of four-syllable (or four kana) words used here that are so pregnant with meaning they boggle the mind, and as is often the case with nihongo, you can't ask yourself why they mean what they mean but must instead just accept them as gestalt units. First is sekkaku (seh-KAH-koo), which carries the implication of having gone to great trouble to do something for someone only to have them not appreciate your efforts. Another fun word is yappari (yah-PAH-ree), which means "just as I thought" or "as I expected" or "Aha! I knew you'd be trying to peek into the girl's bath!" When you learn something that surprises you, you might use the phrase naruhodo (nah-roo-hoh-doh), which can be translated as "wow, I didn't know that" or "I see your point," and on a TV drama, a character picking up some information from subtle, unspoken clues might mutter this word to themselves as a signal to viewers that he'd found another piece of a puzzle. Finally there's tonikaku (TOH-ni-kah-koo), which just means "at any rate" "regardless of that fact" or just "anyway." When my bilingual son was growing up, he got confused and accidentally combined English and Japanese stems to create the hybrid word "toni-way" (tonikaku + anyway), which has been a running joke in our family ever since.

One of the first things I did after arriving in Japan back in 1991 was hop on a train to Tokyo to explore Shinjuku, one of the most famous parts of Japan's sprawling capital, which I'd only glimpsed through the window of manga and anime until that time. One of Tokyo's 23 wards, Shinjuku is a bustling mini-city unto itself, with sprawling department and electronics stores, restaurants and drinking establishments. Because it happens to contain some of the only stable land in the earthquake-prone area, virtually all of Tokyo's high-rise buildings are located in Shinjuku, including the monstrous 48-story Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building (Tokyo's "city hall") and virtually everything seen in the film Lost in Translation. Shinjuku Station is the busiest in the world, with a mind-boggling 2 million passengers passing through each day as they rush to get to work or home. The station is so massive that the only thing to do is divide Shinjuku into quadrants based on what train exit you're using, e.g. take the east exit to score some good Indian food, or the south exit to get to that one good bookstore, and so on. Shinjuku's Kabuki-cho section is one of Japan's leading drinking districts, too, and a complex economy has formed around the thousands of tired salarymen who get rid of their daily stress there, throwing some back with co-workers before heading home.

Japan as the land of safety, small conveniences of living in Japan, and the reason for that wacky "Engrish"

I've written before about how Japan is a very safe place -- so safe it might just kill you with boredom. Swimming pools in Japan generally have two or more lifeguards on duty at all times, although it'd be pretty hard to drown since the water is never deeper than your waist, and dangerous things like diving boards are not allowed. My son and I didn't realize what we were missing until we went to visit family in Maryland, and got to jump off the high dive at the local pool, something a non-Olympic swimmer could only dream of doing in Japan. People are constantly bombarded with silly safety messages here, which remind you to "stand behind the yellow line" on train platforms because apparently trains are dangerous or something, and there's even a voice to tell you how to get on or off an escalator safely in department stores. Now the latest trend in obsessive safety thinking is condemning swings, sliding boards, jungle gyms and other equipment at playgrounds due to an infinitesimally small number of tragic accidents involving children at play. Japan is nothing if not the land of duality, though, and just as it tries to "think of the children" on the playground, the country still lacks some of the basic safety attitudes we take for granted in the U.S., like always using approved child carseats when driving, using baby gates to keep little ones from dangerous parts of the home, and so on.

There are some key areas where the U.S. is well ahead of Japan, including availability of Mexican food and the proliferation of sports bar-themed restaurants with excellent beer. One area where Japan has a comfortable lead, though, is the delivering of packages via its takuhai (private delivery company) system, as seen in the Ghibli animated classic Kiki's Delivery Service except with packages being delivered by polite, efficient men in trucks rather than by a witch and black cat on a broomstick. One of the great conveniences of flying out of Japan is being able to send your suitcases to the airport via companies like Yamato or Sagawa for around $9 per suitcase, allowing you to hop on the train or bus to the airport without a lot of heavy stuff to lug along with you. I recently bought a used Mac G4 tower from a friend to use as a backup server at J-List. My friend dropped the heavy box off at the 7-11 at 9 pm on a Sunday night, and the package reached me, two prefectures away, less than 12 hours later. Total cost? Just $15.

As everyone knows, the Japanese are capable of coming up with some amazingly creative (?) English phrases, like "Body Feels EXIT," "Get Chance and Luck," "Fappy, Fax Makes It Happy" or "All Your Base Are Belong To Us." There are several reasons why this happens, including the fact that the Japanese nearly always learn English in a bubble, sitting passively as grammar and vocabulary are explained to them in Japanese by Japanese teachers, with the amount of linguistic input from living, breathing native English speakers being quite limited. Also, when a Japanese person studies English for six years (high school) or ten years (college), it's understandable that they'll want to strut a bit and use what they've learned, even if it results in something like "For restrooms, go back towards your behind." But the biggest reason there's so much colorful English here has to be that, to many Japanese, English is really just a decoration, something to sprinkle around to add color to one's environment without thinking about it too deeply. I was reminded of this fact over the weekend, when I took my family to the Pizza La in Karuizawa and sat down in the to enjoy some pizza. Perhaps because Karuizawa is a town discovered and colonized by Europeans soon after the Meiji Period, the restaurant had a bookshelf filled with English books for customers to browse through while they ate...although no one in the place was showing any interest in them. My family dug in though, each finding some interesting book to page through -- I scored a biography of Hemingway from the 1960s that looked interesting. We even did something we'd never have done in the U.S., liberating some of the books to read at home, since it was clear no one was going to be wanting them anytime soon, and an unread book is such a lonely thing. I'll make it up to the Pizza La people by bringing some of the English childrens' books my kids are too old for by next time I'm in the neighborhood.

One of the fun things about visiting Tokyo is walking down the street and getting pocket tissue handed out to you by people advertising businesses like banks, hairdressers, or newly opened restaurants. J-List lets you experience this thrill with the free authentic Japanese pocket tissue packet that we include with most every order you made from us. We say "most," because we won't include tissue with orders in cases where the tissue would bend or damage your order (like a thin magazine or doujinshi). You can also buy ten of our wacky pocket tissues for the low price of just $3.00, if you have an especially runny nose.

Our weekly (almost) trip to the mountains was pretty cool this time around.

One of the books from the Pizza La (and yes, it does take time to learn to stop saying Pizza LA, as in Pizza Los Angeles) was a great book on the Titanic.

Shots from an electronics store where I'd dashed in for something. This is the NTT Docomo Mushroom.

Softbank, aka Vodafone, is kicking butt with their phone types. This is a great series of phones based on the PANTONE color chart.

And more!

Speaking of kicking butt, they've been scoring big with some famous names.

A new appreciation for American medicine, all about the word 'baka' and a really annoying girl in a yellow dress who I can't stop listening to...

It was Thomas Paine -- a possible ancestor of mine, although I somehow doubt it -- who uttered the words, "These are the time that try men's souls." Strike the word "men" and insert "gaijin" and you know what it's like to be sick in a country like Japan. Although I resisted as best I could, it seems I've managed to pick up the bug that my wife and daughter had, and now I'm pecking away at the computer while wearing one of those Japanese health masks, and feeling quite miserable. No matter how much I may like Japan, one of the fundamental rules of human beings is that when you're feeling under the weather, you want familiar remedies that you know will work. Japan has plenty of cold and flu medicines on the market, with names like Benzablock, Paburon, Ruru and even a local version of Contac, but they just don't seem be strong enough for my oversized American body. There are differences in how medicines are sold, too -- I'll never forget the first time I got sick in Japan, trekking feverishly to the supermarket to buy medicine because that's where you go in the U.S., then being told that I had to find a drug store instead. Happily, I always keep a small stockpile of American medicines in the house, from Nyquil to Dimetapp and Vicks Vapor Rub and so on, so hopefully I'll be okay in no time.

Without a doubt, one of the most famous words of Japanese is baka, the all-purpose insult that takes the place of many more anatomically colorful words in English. Meaning "stupid" or "idiot," the word is used by Japanese of all ages, from three-year-olds to the elderly. Someone nearly hits your car in an intersection? Let fly with a baka yaro! ("stupid jerk!"). Your gaijin husband who shall remain nameless mistakes a mimikaki ear scoop for one of those spoons used in Japanese tea ceremony? The proper response to this would be, baka ja nai? ("what are you, stupid?"). The word is also used to describe someone who goes overboard with love of something, like "oya-baka," parent-fool, the word for mothers and fathers who are absolutely ga-ga over their own kids; and "tsuri-baka," meaning fishing-fool, someone who likes to fish so much that he does it whenever he can. The word is also found in Japanese proverbs, like Baka ni tsukeru kusuri wa nai," or there is no cure for stupidity." The word baka (馬鹿） is written with the characters for "horse" and "deer" and there's an interesting legend about how this word came to be. It seems that in ancient China there was an Emperor who was not very well liked by his retainers. One day, one of his underlings presented the Emperor with a deer, instead of a horse as was customary back in those days. When the Emperor pointed out that it was a deer, the man insisted that no, it's a horse. He kept this up until he convinced his lord that the deer was, in fact, a horse, and thus Emperor became famous throughout the land for being so stupid that he couldn't tell the difference between the two animals.

Another trait I respect about the Japanese is their tendency towards kinben (KEEN-ben、勤勉), or diligence and hard work. The famous image of an industrious Japanese salarymen is one that everyone is familiar with, but children in Japan are encouraged to work hard, too, with a general culture that expects kids to put in 1-2 hours of studying per evening, on top of any juku night classes they may attend. Several times a week there are quiz shows that aim to interest the minds of young people, like Test the Nation, which presents questions to viewers and lets them keep track of their own scores. We're big fans of TV Champion, a show that usually pits teams against each other doing things like baking bread in the shapes of famous buildings or making works of art out of origami. Last night's episode involved four very smart kids who underwent an amazing battery of quiz questions before a winner was finally determined, and our whole family was hanging on every question. One of my favorite food items sold by J-List are Shigekix (shi-geh-kicks), super tart "hard gummy" candies in flavors like lemon, cola and ramune. In their newest series of TV commercials, which I've posted in the product descriptions on the site, a strange but irresistible girl in a yellow dress sings a song inside the brains of students, tying the BCAA Amino Acids and Gaba in their products and the stimulation of the tart taste to students hoping to do better in their studies.

More random pics that I'm not sure if I've posted yet. This is just about the most attractive building in our city, a little community center and bus stop. This is where our bus goes to/from when we go to Narita .

I ducked into the Toys "R" Us to see if they had new Star Wars figures (they had nothin'). They did have a cool item for Yamato/Star Blazers fans, including a real Wave Motion Gun for you to shoot.

My camera. Whee.

SIgn in our local soba restaurant.
"Please smoke as little as possible."

Update on the Ferris Wheel project -- thanks to reporting from these fine people at TBS, it looks like the project has been scrapped. Banzai!

The history of Valentine's Day in Japan, thoughts on why the Japanese are so harmonious, and a really cute picture of the Yamato

You probably know that they do Valentine's Day a little differently in Japan than in the West. Here, Feb. 14th is a day for women and girls to give chocolate to men and boys, and all throughout Japan, millions of fathers, husbands, boyfriends and would-be-boyfriends look forward to scoring some chocolatey goodness. In Japan, you never receive a gift without giving one in return, called o-kaeshi, and March 14 has been designated as "White Day" when males give something back to females who gave them chocolate the month before. (In South Korea they've taken this a step further with "Black Day" on April 14th, a day when single males who didn't receive chocolate bitterly eat black noodles, wallowing in their single-ness.) My son and I were looking forward to some delicious handmade chocolate today but we're out of luck, as both my wife and daughter are bedridden with this year's bout of influenza that's going around. Zan-nen! (ZAHN-nehn, meaning "what a bummer!")

In case you'd like to know the history of Valentine's Day in Japan, I'll tell you. The first Valentine's Day advertisement in Japan appeared in Showa 11 (1936), when a chocolate shop in Kobe called Morozoff promoted its wares as being perfect for lovers to enjoy together. World War II got in the way, and it wasn't until after the war that people could think about anything as frivolous as chocolate. In 1958, the manager of the Isetan department store in Shinjuku got the idea of having a Western-style Valentine's Day chocolate sale, but it was a total flop -- they sold just five boxes of chocolates! Attempts to raise awareness of the day continued with poor results, but in the 1970s, chocolate maker Morinaga hit on the idea to promote Valentine's Day as a day for women to give chocolate to boys and confess their love, and the rest is history. Currently, 60% of females in Japan report giving chocolate to someone, which makes for a lot of happy fathers, husbands, boyfriends and would-be-boyfriends.

I've talked before about what the Japanese call kokumin-sei (koh-ku-meen- SAY), a kind of "national personality" that's basically the essence of what makes Koreans so Korean and the French so very French. One of my favorite aspects of the Japanese is their dislike of confrontation and general willingness to get along with each other on a daily basis. By and large, you won't find yourself being hassled much in Japan, and even some of the scarier people you might encounter, like yakuza in the public bath with their full-body tattoos, are quite polite as long as you're polite to them. This harmonious attitude extends to the legal system, too, making lawsuits extremely rare. When there's an automobile accident, for example, the two insurance companies work it out between themselves, weighing the various factors before coming to an agreement on how to divide fault between the two parties, and it's virtually unheard of to have issues decided in a courtroom. There are quite a few identifiable mechanisms that help the Japanese get through the day harmoniously, like the mantra sho ga nai" which means it can't be helped," and the basic golden rule of society that you should never cause meiwaku (inconvenience) to others. There are some possible theories about why the Japanese are so good at getting along. Perhaps it comes from having to learn to live in a small country with many people around, or maybe it has to do with Japan's decision to become a peaceful country after their defeat in World War II, or just maybe it's a by-product of the long period of absolute rule by the Shogunate during the feudal Edo Period. My own theory comes from the ethnic name of the Japanese people, the Yamato, which is also Japan's first name for its own country, dating back to the 4th Century. The characters literally mean either "Great Peace" or "Great Harmony," and it seems natural to me that a country with such a name would value getting along with one another in a peaceful way.

Remember that you can get all the great anime, manga, toy/hobby, fashion, and other magazines in Japan sent to you each month, thanks to J-List's popular Reserve Subscription service. Here's how it works: for most items, you have the option of either paying month-to-month or paying for a full year in advance. If you choose the former option, we'll reserve the current issue of the magazine(s) you want each month, charging them to a credit card on file if like, or else by check/money order or Paypal. The amount charged is the same every month, e.g. $8.50 each issue of Newtype Japan, plus the shipping. If you want to choose the annual payment option, you can pay for all the issues and SAL shipping together and get a discount. The annual option is great for anyone who wants to pre-pay for the issues (including libraries and universities who use our services), and our convenient month-to-month option is recommended for anyone who wants the flexibility to stop or change subscriptions at any time.

Some friends of ours just built a new house (on top of a restaurant), and invited us over. It was built by our friend Mr. K.

Is this not cool? It's like a showroom for Pier 1 Imports, but in a good way.

Like many in Japan, they had only a little room to work with, so their tatami room is only a 4-jo. You measure rooms in Japan using tatami mats, e.g. this room is quite big, it must be a 20-tatami (jo) room, and so on.

Picture from in front of our favorite soba noodle restaurant. This is the same racoon-dog thing as in the Ghibli film Raccoon Wars.

My, he is happy to see us! This is just one of the many ways Japan can confusing poor gaijin. Supposedly the testicles on these raccoon statues are good luck, although I couldn't comment on the penis.

The warmest winter ever in Japan, all about the Japanese kanji character 'ki' and excitement at my son's school

We've been watching the extra-cold winter dumping lots of snow on the U.S. this year and feeling more than a little guilty, what with Japan experiencing the warmest winter its had in decades and all. The previous 1960 record for the latest snowfall in the Tokyo area has already been smashed, and with the bizarre T-shirt weather continuing, there's talk that this might be the first snowless winter since they started keeping records back in 1876. One of the most enjoyable times to be in Japan is sakura season, when the cherry blossoms bloom with exploding fireworks of beauty, but it's been so warm this year that everyone is sure the sakura will bloom at least a full month earlier. There's also a lot of concern that with such mild weather this year, there'll be less snow in snowpacks in the mountains, leading to water shortages in the summer.

Sometimes part of the fun of studying a language like Japanese is "surfing" the linguistic elements that are totally different from anything found in one's native language. One of the most common kanji characters is ki (気）, a rather all-purpose concept for expressing abstract ideas (read chi in Chinese). Although it can be translated as spirit, soul, nature, heart, mood, feeling, or atmosphere, it mainly deals with (spiritual) energy and a person's awareness. The character is found in some elementary words that students of the language encounter right away, such as genki (happy, energetic), tenki (weather) or kuki (air). The word can express intention (seppuku suru ki = the intention to commit ritual suicide, wish I could think of a better example ^_^), and feelings or emotion (kimochi ii = that feels good). In anime series like Dragonball Z, when a character gets so filled with energy that he literally glows with fire, the word for that fire would be ki. The concept is also used in martial arts and yoga, which seek to focus the mind's ki in beneficial ways -- it also pops up in words like kiai, the verbal yell you release when focusing your strength on a task. The word can be found in several Japanese idioms that are used quite often, such as ki wo tsukete (be careful; literally "fix your body's energy and attention on the task at hand"), or ki wo tsukau (to be considerate of; literally "to use your ki on behalf of another person").

One of the most popular "talents" (an all-purpose word meaning singer/actor/ comedian/whatever) in Japan is Takuya Kimura, a member of the popular group SMAP, the male idol band that dominates much of Japan's music scene. Takuya, who plays the voice of Howl in Howl's Moving Castle, has been called both the "sexiest man in Japan" as well as the domestic version of Brad Pitt, mainly because Levi's hired "Kim-Taku" for their jeans commercials to counter Edwin's successful line of commercials featuring "Bra-Pii." Although they started out as a Backstreet Boys-like group, SMAP has utterly woven itself into the fabric of Japan's pop culture, and you really can't turn the TV on without seeing one or more members of the group hosting a variety show or doing their gourmet cooking competition thing or pulling some gag on the air, like when George Lucas came to Japan and they presented him with a beautiful Japanese sword, which turned out to be a cheap plastic light saber. Recently there's a rumor going around that Takuya and his wife, former singer Shizuka Kudo, are going to put their daughter in my son's special English elementary school this April, which has set the hearts of the school mothers all aflutter with thoughts of Japan's sexiest man attending parents' day with them.

J-List sells a unique line of original T-shirts, hoodies and embroidered hats featuring funny and wacky kanji messages, and today we've gotten in a cool new design for you. Every once in a while you hear of a Japanese man who wasn't able to resist his own particular urges, and who got in trouble peeking at pretty girls. Our new wacky T-shirt warns people who see it to beware of nozoki -- peeping toms, who like to watch women secretly -- with a hilarious new design. Check it out on the site, now!

Heh, I'll tell you my own favorite game. All those newfangled video games are okay, but I'm still loyal to the original Unreal Tourmanent, released in, I think, 1999. I'm using it on my Intel MacBook Pro, and the fact that it plays so nicely (even with 300 bots, see below) in Rosetta is really an amazing thing.

The reason it's so fun is that there's a nuke you can use to kill your enemies.

Of course, that's not fun enough, so here's what I do. Load the game, type SUMMON WARHEADLAUNCHER unless I'm on a level that has the nuke, get the warhead, then type ALLAMMO. Then instead of having one pansy nuke you have 999 of them. Muhahaha! LOADED is another fun command that gives you all weapons in the game.

You can then addbots if you like so that you have 100, 200 or more enemies to kill rather than the default of 16. Note that adding too many bots at once can overload the machine since most of the bots appear at the same few spawning spots which causes them to explode, and the computer has to draw 100 x 300 bits of expanding flesh on your screen.

This lets you discover a new kind of game, where basically everyone is trying to kill you but you've got a nuke. You can do fun game of trying to kill everyone else (up to 300 bots) without using any weapons other than the nuke. This means you need to shoot and duck behind obstacles, or shoot at the ceiling to take out someone before they get too close. It's quite a challenge. Another fun thing is to slow the game down so you can set up extra beautiful kills.

There's something about running down the hallway in the contrail of a tactical nuke you've just shot that's so much fun. Incidentally I've played this game so much in the past my eyes actually got infected. That's not good, is it?

Ah, beautiful stress relief... I realize my love of cheating at games goes back to my Captain Kirk complex, since I look up to him as the father I didn't have (Captain Kirk, Carl Sagan and Ernest Hemingway). I guess using NOCLIP or god mode in a game is just my own answer to the Kobayashi Maru test.

A Yakuza gang war in Tokyo, my trip to the concrete jungle of Tokyo, and how the wisdom of China is at work in Japan today

Japan has a reputation for being a peaceful place with very little in the way of violence, giant monsters emerging from the sea and smashing Tokyo notwithstanding. This happy image was somewhat shaken this week when a minor gang war broke out in Tokyo, with several shots fired back and forth and one gang boss killed. Japan's Yakuza have been around for centuries, and usually go about their business in a very orderly fashion, with the major groups -- Yamaguchi-gumi in Osaka and the smaller Sumiyoshi-kai and Inagawa-kai in Tokyo -- respecting each others territory. This harmony was broken when some members of the 3rd-ranked Inagawa Group of Tokyo allowed the traditional protection money collected from restaurants and bars in Roppongi to go to the Yamaguchi group, which amounted to the Osaka mafia muscling in on territory that wasn't traditionally theirs. Some arrests have been made so hopefully we've seen the last bit of fighting. The Yakuza like to pretend they're modern day Robin Hood anti-heroes, but their various criminal enterprises, including ultra-high interest loans and protection scams, cause great harm to people. The term Yakuza is a phonetic play on the numbers 8, 9 and 3, which add up to 20, representing the worst possible hand you can get in a traditional card game played since the Edo Period.

Yesterday I went to Tokyo on business, just a 45-minute Shinkansen ride away. Whenever I visit Japan's capital I experience a brief period of localized culture shock as I adjust to having that much concrete and steel around me, and having my own personal space cut down to a fraction of what it is in our home prefecture of Gunma. My eyes always go a little wide when I see the, er, extremely beautiful and fashionable women riding trains or crossing the famous "scramble intersection" in Shibuya, so different from the more down-to-earth females back home that it seems to my eyes like the difference between regular television and HD-TV. Even the men are image-conscious in Tokyo, reading magazines like Smart or Myojo and no doubt being subtly influenced by the endless stream of boytoy "talents" from Johnny's Entertainment, Japan's most successful talent management company. Passing through Shinjuku, I spied one extremely fashionable youth who was busy playing with a pink Nintendo DS, and it occurred to me that in Japan today men and women are in open competition to see which set can be more fashionable and stylish -- an odd phenomenon that probably wouldn't happen in the U.S., unless I've really been away too long.

In a very real sense, the culture of Japan flows from China, just as everything in the West from laws and courts to roads originally came from ancient Rome and Greece. China is so much a part of Japan's history that you couldn't express ideas without thinking in kanji, the pictographs that Japan imported along with Buddhism in the 6th century A.D. (this is in contrast to the two Koreas, who have largely decoupled their language from kanji in favor of the "purity" of the home-grown hangul writing system). Just as elements of classical languages survive in our speech ad infinitum, the Chinese language pops up in Japanese from time to time, for example in the poetic phrase shimen-soka (she-men-SOH-kah), which means "being surrounded by enemies on all sides and totally betrayed." The wisdom of China also survives in the form of proverbs that the Japanese have imported, such as the old standby ningen banji saiou-ga-uma, which means "All human affairs are like Saiou's horse." This refers to an old Chinese story about a man named Saiou whose horse ran away, making everyone say how unfortunate he was. "How do you know this is a bad thing?" he asked. His horse came back, bringing another horse this time, and when people congratulated him on his good luck, he asked, "How do you know this is a good thing?" He then or bad happens, no one can say for sure if it is truly a good or bad thing in the end. It's kind of like marrying an 80-year-old billionaire -- in the end, who can say if it will be a good thing or not?

Today is February 9th, which according to the usually-incomprehensible- to-gaijin Japanese numbering system is "Meat Day" (Niku no Hi, 肉の日), since 2/9 can be read ni ku meaning meat in Japanese (refer to Yakuza, above). Today is also my wife's birthday, so we're off to enjoy Korean Barbecue, a popular delicacy in Japan. Have a nice weekend!

Some random images. I have in my home a brand new Magic Window from 1973, which set me back a bit on eBay. Just thought I'd show it to you.

Made and printed in the U.S.A. Pretty spiffy.

Not a great picture of my setup at home (which will be upgraded to a Mac Pro if Apple would *deign* to get a new machine out for us). I've never seen these Japanese notebook computer racks that hold your laptop upright for cooling purposes. They're quite nice to use.

That's?

Kicking back at the family restaurant we go to a lot for lunch, called Joyful, a name which somehow makes me happy. This is the steak part of the menu.

Of course, at a cheap place like this a "steak" is always a "hamburg steak."

Of course, the highlight of the manu is, Yuko Ogura appearing in it. Don't ask me, I don't know what she has to do with Hamburg Steak.

The reality of "learning Japanese," Japan's special relationship with garbage, and the history of the Japanese Postal Mark

One thing I've heard from foreigners who have recently come to Japan -- and which I've probably uttered myself a long time ago -- is the phrase "And then, when I've learned Japanese..." This is amusing to me since you never actually "learn" any language in the sense of suddenly becoming completely competent in all aspects of its use. A foreigner living in Japan naturally stakes out the important areas of his life or work and attains working fluency in those areas, usually not bothering with aspects of the language that will probably never touch him. After four years of study in college and a decade and a half of living in Japan I'm able to function in a wide variety of situations here, including business settings, dealing with family and friends, ordering a pizza and giving directions to my house, attending funerals and weddings and so on...but if I were suddenly thrust into the world of a banker, a politician or a daiku carpenter who builds houses using traditional Japanese techniques, I'd be completely lost. Similarly, my wife is perfectly functional in English in most cases, yet when its time for the CSI broadcast on NHK, I know she'll flip the TV into Japanese mode since the show lies outside of her established linguistic boundaries. As your life meanders on and the way you use language changes, naturally your language skills will change too. When I became a father, I realized that I didn't have a clue how to speak Japanese "baby talk," so I started that aspect of my language education. In the process of running a Japanese company I've had to learn how to read contracts in Japanese to make sure I didn't accidentally sign away my house or something, and now I'm quite comfortable with most Japanese legalese.

Every morning my car greets me and gives me my daily "What day is today?" trivia point, informing me that today is Ice Cream Day (May 9), Natto Day (July 10), Haiku Day (August 19) and UFO Day (June 24), and so on, and every time I get in my car I never know what wacky and esoteric new information I'll be presented with. Tomorrow is "Japanese Postal Mark Day," celebrating the establishment of the unique symbol used to indicate a place where you can find postal services here, which looks like the marriage of a capital T with an equals sign, or like the katakana symbol for te (テ）. The Japanese post office was established in 1871, just four years into the reign of the new Emperor Meiji that proved to be a watershed moment in the modernization of the country. In 1887, as part of a national revitalization effort, the Postal Service announced that the English letter "T" would be the new symbol of the Post Office of Japan. Ten days later, the ministry sheepishly admitted that they had mis-read their own symbol, and the actual symbol of Japan's postal organization was the one that's in use today. The "postal mark" symbol is officially registered with the International Standards Organization and is included in all Japanese fonts on personal computers.

One of the first words a foreigner who comes to live in Japan learns is gomi, the most common term for garbage in Japanese. The reason is that Japan -- a nation that ranks 63rd in the world in terms of land area yet 10th in terms of population -- must understandably take some special measures to make sure its trash situation doesn't get out of hand. As newly arrived gaijin must learn, trash can be disposed of on designated days, and must be separated into various categories (burnables on Tuesday and Friday, non-burnables on Wednesday, organic trash every other week) and disposed of in approved bags you can buy in stores in that city. Although the words "environmentally conscious" don't spring to mind when you think of Japan, with its custom of covering the sides of mountains in concrete on the off chance there might be a rock slide someday, the country has been recycling for decades as one way of reducing the amount of trash generated by society. When you buy shampoo or bathroom cleaner, you're presented with a choice: a regular plastic container, or a cheaper refill-only package that lets you refill the bottle you've already got at home and cut down on what you throw away. There are many laws on the books requiring that you take special steps to safely dispose of old cars, computers and televisions, and it's common for home electronics stores to take away your old stuff for free when you buy something new, to save customers from the hassle of paying a recycling company money to take care of their old junk.

Since I'm talking about shampoo, here you go, some pictures of shampoo. Yes, I did get some rather odd looks taking these, thanks.

I've often thought this would be a good name for shampoo... This is one of the refill only packages, of course.

Another one. This one is Nuance Airy, whatever that is.

Wash your hair with black, sooty charcoal, yes!

From across the room, Tommy Lee Jones was silently watching me with eyes that were somehow sad.

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!