The Japanese fear of making mistakes, the end of the Japanese blood type myth, and panty shots in anime you didn't expect to see

Although the Japanese generally study six years of English (or up to ten if they take it in college), they're not as a rule famous for their linguistic skills. There's a long list of reasons why this is so -- English is considered a "test" subject like math, science and Japanese history, grammar and vocabulary are invariably taught in Japanese by Japanese teachers, there are relatively few native speakers around to practice with, and so on. Another big reason many Japanese can have trouble attaining competence in a foreign language is fear of making errors. I saw a concrete example of this many years ago while working at a Japanese supermarket in San Diego, where I noticed a tiny sticker that read "curry" stuck on a box of Vermont Curry. (By the way, you've been in Japan too long when you no longer find anything unusual in the concept of "Vermont Curry.") Being the curious type, I removed the sticker to see that the company had accidentally printed "carry" on the package, a natural enough mistake for a foreign company to make, and had been compelled to fix the error in a way that actually brought more attention to the problem. Many Japanese seem to be quite fearful of making mistakes when speaking English, and it's hard for them to overcome this barrier when they go to a foreign country and must get over "pre-thinking" what they want to say before saying it. In reality, errors are part of the feedback essential for communication, and I've never forgotten a vocabulary word that I screwed up royally with when using the first time. If I had a secret weapon when it came to studying Japanese it was that I never concerned myself with the zillions of errors I made as I try to get my point across to someone.

Historically, the Japanese have placed a great store in what blood type a person is, and some (admittedly silly) people adhere to the belief that the shape and antigen type of your red blood cells can determine your personality. Supposedly, type A folks are straight-laced, serious about everything, very organized, like Felix from The Odd Couple if you're old enough to know what I'm talking about; type B are "my pace," e.g. they go at their own pace, live in their own world, quickly get bored with things that don't interest them, and speak their minds to a fault; type O are very bold, hate to lose and have good leadership skills; and AB people are often so smart they look strange to everyone else. A few years ago there was a series of TV shows that purported to do experiments on groups of people, seeing how kids of different blood types would solve problems for example. For years, my wife would make pronouncements about me or my kids, that we did such-and-such because of our blood type, but she recently received a shock that caused her world view to come crashing down, when a doctor friend of ours asked my kids if they'd like to see their own blood in a microscope. It turned out that both my meticulous son who keeps a detailed log of all his weekly allowance expenditures and my not-a-care-in-the-world daughter who passed a difficult English test by guessing at the answers are both type O, and not A and B as she'd expected.

Have you gained some weight? If you're a big person and come to Japan, be prepared to hear light-hearted comments about your weight. Although it's usually not polite to make direct mention of a person's girth in the U.S., in Japan it's quite common to start a conversation with an acquaintance by asking him if he's gained weight recently before getting down to the discussion at hand. It's not fun, but you get used to it quickly enough, and the Japanese mean no harm in it -- it's just a kind of small talk, like discussing the weather or the economy, since there are so few people who are on the big side here. (Actually, it's okay when they comment on your weight. If they stop mentioning it altogether, you might have a problem.)

We've just finished doing more upgrades to the J-List website today. Unfortunately the changes to the site might have caused browser cookies to be reset, clearing the shopping cart contents for some customers using the site right as we did the changeover. Very sorry for the inconvenience if you were using the site at the time. Pesky IE7 and its mis-directed anti-phishing warnings...

Remember that J-List sells a magazine that's personally done a lot of good for me, Nihongo Journal, a monthly periodical featuring Japanese lessons for many levels, from beginner-intermediate on up, covering a variety of language areas, from business Japanese to conversational speaking to preparing for the JLPT. We carry the magazine via our popular "Reserve Subscription" service which lets you get Japan's most interesting magazine sent to you each month. As with our other subscriptions for Japan's anime, manga, fashion, JPOP, men's and other magazines, you can pay month-to-month as each issue comes in via credit card, check or money order or Paypal, or you can pre-pay for a year's subscription all at once.

I've been on quite a tear recently, watching classic anime like Touch (the most excellent baseball manga ever), Arion (hilarious combination of Zeta Gundam characters with the Greek Pantheon), and lately, the original Yamato. I thought it'd be fun to compare with the original U.S. release.

There are, ah, a few scenes that I don't remember seeing before. And don't even get me started on Dr. Sado (Dr. Sane) and his "spring water" with the "sake" kanji clearly written on the label.

The fan translation I'm watching is done by Central Anime in Kansas (major shout out to you guys!), which is funny since Gunma (where I am) is probably the "Kansas" of Japan. These guys put lots of great commentary in the translation like what was going on historically when the episode was first aired. They also did the Touch translation.

Most interesting, of course, where the World War II sections that were not in the U.S. version, at least to my recollection.

As I recall, they said "The Yamato" in one line, then renamed it the Argo (bleah) right away. This version had a long scene devoted to the last battle of the Yamato.

Through one of those bizarre coincidences Japan likes to throw at you (like the one about how, through random chance, I just happened to come live in the city where the creator of my favorite anime/manga Touch was born and marry a woman who happened to share his birthdate of 2-9), they showed Otokotachi no Yamato, the film about the end of the ship, the next day, and it was "timely-sugiru" so I watched it.

It's hilarious to realize how totally Star Trek (TNG and beyond) gets its cues from the Yamato series. Like the Holodeck.

A reeeeally cool bunch of parody anime dubbers (no, not that bunch of parody anime dubbers) called Cornpone, who have made many things that I haven't seen, did a great (long) short film called Animation vs. Live Action, in which they basically pit the TNG Enterprise against the Yamato/Argo, and other fun stuff.

Japan's latest shining baseball star, fun space-saving innovations, and Japan is wasted on the Japanese

Japan takes its baseball seriously, and right now the whole country is closely watching Daisuke Matsuzaka as he starts his new career with the Red Sox. A longtime favorite among Japanese baseball fans for his boyish face and strong pitching repertoire, Daisuke is the latest player to make the hop into the Big Leagues. This guy was literally born to play baseball -- his mother named him after Daisuke Araki, the star of the Koshien high school baseball championship the year he was born, and he went on to win the Koshien championship with his high school in 1998. When he joined the Seibu Lions as their #1 draft pick, he distinguished himself further by striking out the .380-batting Ichiro three times in a row the first time they went head to head, which no had ever done. Like every Japanese baseball player, he married an attractive "announcer" (newscaster), but his relationship with the lovely Tomoyo Shibata caused quite a scandal at the time, since she's five years older then him (they called her a cradle robber). As usual, the Japanese go wild over their citizens who achieve recognition outside Japan, be it baseball players like Daisuke or Ichiro, directors like Otomo or Miyazaki, or mangaka like Shirow Masamune, and this is no exception. (When Kenzaburo Oe won the Nobel Prize for literature it was funny to watch most Japanese people wearing questioning manga faces, saying "Who's that?")

Since Japan has just 1/25 the land area of the U.S. but half its population, people here have to come up with innovative ways of using land efficiently. Some friends of ours recently built a restaurant near the center of town, and did what many business owners do: they built their house above their restaurant, with a separate entrance and everything. My house is the same, with half of the downstairs taken up by our rural liquor shop, especially handy when I run out of beer late at night. Imagine if the Denny's near you was built on stilts to allow cars to park underneath, so that the parking lot and the restaurant itself could share the same plot of land? In Japan that's how it's usually done. Sometimes when I go to the Prefectural Office in Maebashi I put my car in the vertical parking garage, essentially a giant elevator that stores your car until you're ready for it, then spits it out when you need it again. And whenever my mother comes to Japan, she has to get a picture of the Japanese gas stations with the pumps located above the cars with hoses that drop down, enabling a gas station to be constructed in a much smaller space than could otherwise be used.

Youth is wasted on the young, they say, and in a similar way, Japan is wasted on the Japanese. Foreign visitors are always taken with the beautiful temples of Kyoto and Nara or the graceful Himeji Castle near Kobe, yet all too often it seems that Japanese are quite ho-hum about the amazing country they live in. I've travelled all around Japan, hitchhiking or taking the Youth 18 ticket that lets you go anywhere you want within a 24 hour period for around $20 as long as you don't consider spending 16 hours inside a slow local train to be a drawback, but I've yet to meet a Japanese who feels quite the same way about this place as I do. Japanese high school students usually take a school trip to Kyoto but most of the time they're bored when they get there, and when my wife saw the beautiful rock garden at Ryoan-ji in Kyoto she admitted a strong desire to run out and mess up all the little rocks that were combed so neatly. Taking your own country for granted certainly isn't limited to Japan, of course -- I have a friend in Rome who's never been to Venice, just a few hours away by car, and there are many places the staff of J-List has visited in the U.S. that I've never been to. So I guess it's all part of being human.

We've got a treat for fans of PC dating-sim games: we're permanently dropping the price of Casual Romance Club by $10. A fantastic game from Japanese publisher Libido, it's in a class by itself since it was released in Japan already translated, and it's the only game where you can choose to hear the girls' voices in the original Japanese or cutely accented English. In addition to a unique gaming dating system in which you actually go on dates with the girls in the club, the game comes in a large Japanese box with the most beautiful printed game manual you'll ever see, hardcover and glossy and fully translated into English. Enjoy the game at its new price!

Thoughts on television in Japan, April and "newly harvested rice," and that cultural question, what color is the sun?

Television (which turns 80 today) in Japan can be quite entertaining, and sometimes its fun to sit back on the sofa and see what Japan's TV networks have for me. While there are some variety shows in which they do odd things like seeing how many seconds a sexy bikini idol can stay on a mechanical bull or submerge her body in protru- sion-inducing freezing water, these types of programs are in the minority. One show I caught the other day took a simpler approach: a camera crew started at one end of the Inokashira train line that runs from Shibuya to Kichijoji, famous for its large (for Tokyo) park and drinking area, and went to each station, introducing a unique business located in the area. These included a man selling refurbished American motorcycles from the 1930's, a Japanese couple who fell in love with the unique taste of Korean food found in Los Angeles' Korea Town and now operate a restaurant that aims to recreate that taste, and a store that sells nothing but mimikaki, those traditional Japanese "ear picks." Another staple of Japanese television takes several "talents" -- a catch-all word meaning any television personality -- and sends them off through the Japanese countryside, bathing in exotic hot springs and enjoying delicious meals at Japanese ryokan inns while the camera follows them from place to place. It's hard to understand, but watching this kind of "feel good" show can have a real calming effect on a person, and I'm sure a lot of other viewers here would agree with me.

It's April in Japan, and that means two things: beautiful sakura blooming everywhere and ichinen-sei (一年生、 first graders). April is the start of the Japanese school year, and throughout the country millions of parents will be watching with teary eyes through the video finder as little Taro or Hanako start Elementary School, with cherry blossoms falling all around them. Japan's "back to school" season is a busy one for mothers, who must rush to get all the school supplies for the new school year -- if you've noticed a lot of notebooks, pencil cases and erasers on J-List lately, you know it's because that's the season here. Mothers are going to get even busier, though: they're given a list of things they must hand-make for their kids to use, including a quilted bag to put art supplies in, a "shoes bag" (sic) for carrying shoes around inside the school, and a clean towel with the child's name sewn into it for daily desk-cleaning. In addition to being the start of school, April is when new employees officially enter the work force, and somewhere in Japan right now there are a few hundred new hires at a Company Entrance Ceremony enduring a long speech from the chairman. These new employees are often referred to as first-graders or shin-mai (新米, newly harvested rice).

What color is the sun? You might answer that it's yellow, or orange, or white. However, when asked this question, though, many Japanese are likely to answer "red." This seems to be a differences in cultural perception -- the red circle in the Japanese flag is called hi-no-maru or circle-of-the-sun -- and the color red does seem to have a special place in the hearts of the Japanese. Red is the color of celebration, something the Japanese imported from China, and when you attend a Japanese wedding you always leave with a bag of gifts which include sekihan, red rice that's cooked with beans in it. There are many words that incorporate the color in them, such as aka no tanin (a "red" or complete stranger), or one that took me a while to get used to, akachan (a baby), which comes from the supposed red coloring of a newborn infant, although I can't really see it. Japan's perception of color often causes confusion among foreigners, such as their use of the word "blue" to refer to the deep green of a forest and -- most confusingly -- for the color of a green traffic signal.

Karoshi means death from overwork, and it's a reality in Japan, where companies demand long hours of their employees. You don't have to live in Japan to be overworked, and we've got a great new Japanese T-shirt that shows a famous symbol of tired "salarymen" returning home on the train after working through an exhausting day, with two men visible inside the train so that they form a face. The words at the top of the train say "Karoshi" and below the train is written Otsukare-sama deshita (oh-TSA-rey-sah-mah DESH-ta), which is the phrase you say to someone who's finishing his day's work, corresponding to "Thanks for working hard today." Great new T-shirt printed in Army Green. Don't work too hard!

J-List stocks region free DVD players that are great for enjoying DVDs from any part of the world. Our low-cost DVD players play discs from any country out of the box, are fully compatible with NTSC and PAL TVs, come with international power supplies, and are fully warranted by the manufacturer. Best of all, they feature the ability to play DIVX and AVI format movies, in incredibly convenient feature since 4-5 movies can be put onto a single disc. We've gotten fresh stock of our high-end DVD-7050 player in stock today -- check it out now!

Remember that now is a great time to pick up that delicious Sakura or Ichigo Kit Kat, some yummy Green Tea Pocky or Meltykiss, or other chocolate products that we sell. In the summer months, which are not far off now, we're unfortunately forced to remove all chocolate products from J-List since they melt like crazy. When we take our chocolate snacks off the site we always get emails from customers wondering why they can't get their favorite Crunky. So check our snack pages now!

Elections in Japan, a run-down of what politics are like here, and using Japanese "honorific" markers for fun and profit

It's my least favorite time of year in Japan right now: election season, when dozens of politicians drive around in loudspeaker cars shouting "Please support me in the election!" or that eternal Japanese phrase Gambarimasu! (I will work hard for you!). The current elections are for prefectural representatives, and down in Tokyo (which is organized as a prefecture with cities, towns and villages operating inside it), Japan-That-Can-Say-No author Shintaro Ishihara is battling to hold onto his job as governor, using the city's bid for the 2016 Olympics as part of his platform. While he may be the Japanese politician foreign residents of Japan love to hate due to a few negative statements he's made in the past, I admire his success at making Japan's capital function more efficiently, for example cutting through the old red tape to allow films like Lost in Translation to be made.

Being used to the American way of doing things, Japan's political system has always been quite confusing to me, with the Diet being subject to dissolution by the Prime Minister at any time, which incredibly doesn't plunge the country into civil war. I often hear Americans say they wish there were an alternative to the two-party system at work in the U.S., and if so, maybe they should take a look at Japan. There are five major political parties here, the largest being the mammoth Liberal Democrat Party, pro-agriculture and pro-business, which has stayed in power almost without exception since the end of World War II. It's so powerful that there have traditionally been factions inside the group, essentially sub-parties within the overall party that decided the real issues, although former Prime Minister Koizumi dismantled a lot of this. The three opposition parties are the Democratic Party of Japan, who love to produce "Manifestos" about investing in our children's future; the Communist Party of Japan, currently agitating for elimination of the 5% consumption tax; and the declining Social Democratic Party, which took a body blow in recent years over its policy of promoting friendly ties with North Korea. Finally there's the New Komeito, part of the current government coalition, which acts as the unofficial political arm of the Sokka Gakkai Buddhist Movement, roughly analogous to the Mormon Church having their own national political party.

Last time I mentioned that the word for rice is "gohan." The first syllable of this word -- go, more commonly pronounced o-- is an interesting aspect of the Japanese language, an "honorific marker" that you put on some words to show respect for them. As a general rule, important concepts like money (okane), relationships like mother or grandmother (okaasan, obaasan) and some everyday blessings like tea (ocha) or a hot bath ("ofuro") take the honorific "o" when speaking or writing. If you were going for total accuracy you could translate a word like oyu as "honorable boiling water," but this is tedious, to say the least. It's interesting to notice the patterns of words that take this honorific syllable: words having to do with death or Buddhism tend to take it (otera = temple, okoh = Buddhist incense), yet words related to Japan's Shinto religion usually don't. English don't usually get the o prefix, but sometimes a waitress will use the word obiiru when bringing you the beer you ordered. Adding the honorific o to a word tends to soften it, so words related to children or babies tend to take it (omaru = child's potty, omutsu = diapers, oshiri = butt). It's always acceptable to use these words without their honorific syllables on the front, although it can make the speech sound rough or uncultured. For example, a person who refers to his mother as kaasan sound like a hillbilly shouting "Ma!"

Interested in Japan's music scene? Got an iPod, or iTunes on your computer? Then we recommend the prepaid Japan iTunes Music Cards J-List sells, the only way to buy music from Apple's iTunes Store here unless you happen to have a credit card with a billing address in Japan (and even I don't have one of those). The iTunes cards are incredibly easy to use -- just lot out of your current iTunes account if you have one, select the Japan store in iTunes, click Redeem, make a new account tied to the iTunes Music card's number, and you're good to go. The music works fine with the iTunes and iPod you're currently using. I personally have been enjoying the original music of Joe Hisaishi, the composer to nearly all of the music from Hayao Miyazaki's animated films, which are all available in the Japan iTunes Store.

I'm totally amazed, but my son turned twelve today. Twelve! That's 4380 days! Because they got an overdose of good Asian food culture in Malaysia they wanted good old pizza, which is what we got.

Here's my son hiding under his "rira-rira." It's a long story...

My daughter baked a cake. It was good, with chocolate covered bananas inside.

My son got a really nice chess board and was happy with it. Of course, when your son get a chess board for his birthday that can mean only one thing...

Yes, it was time for me to get my ass handed to me royally. Every time he ended the game I kept saying no! let me do that move over. The result was that I got beaten about 5 different ways in this one game. Sheesh...

Differences in "maid culture" between Japan and Malaysia, thoughts on technology, and what makes a jar a jar?

First of all, we experienced some server trouble Sunday night for about an hour or so. I'd think of some witty April Fools Day joke to attribute the downtime to but it's already April 2nd in Japan. Sorry for anyone trying to view the site during the trouble -- everything's back to normal now.

My family got back from Malaysia last week, bursting with news about everything that they'd seen there. They were in Kuala Lumpur, the country's largest city, and got to take in many beautiful sights, from mosques to bazaars to the famous Twin Towers. One cosmic truth about Japanese boys is that they all seem to suffer from "beetle mania" and love to collect beetles as pets, and since Malaysia is a regular Beetle Mecca, my son had great fun hunting for his favorite specimens in the backyard. As is natural, there were cultural differences between my Japanese family and the Malaysian friends they were staying with. For example, our friends had never seen snow and were interested in hearing what winter was like in Japan. They were quite wealthy and employed several maids to clean their house, which caused some minor culture shock in my daughter, who wondered what the maids were doing cleaning. In the context of modern Japan, a maid is an incredibly kawaii girl who wears a frilly uniform as she serves coffee and cake and generally provides eye candy for men to enjoy, and they have nothing to do with cleaning. I had to laugh at the differences in the two cultures.

Living with a foreign language every day as I do gives me large and small insights into how our brains are wired, including, for example, how we come to assign words to objects. What makes a jar a jar? In my own dialect of English, at least, it's any glass container that has a wide mouth opening. A bottle is similar, but must have a narrow opening. The Japanese define vocabulary words in the same way, although there can sometimes be confusion when they import English words and assign slightly different meanings to them. To you or me, "juice" comes from various types of fruit, but in Japanese the word is often used to refer to any canned beverage, even if it's tea. Milk comes from cows, but here the word miruku refers to powdered creamer for coffee. Rice in Japanese is usually called gohan, unless you're eating at a Western-style restaurant, in which case it's called by its English name, raisu. Often some of the earliest words to be imported from English are shifted in meaning the most, since the Japanese of the early Meiji Period had very little experience with foreign languages. Some of these older imported words include "rouge" (lipstick) and "manicure" (what they call nail polish), and even the venerable Ramune soda got its name because some Japanese person of the era couldn't pronounce the word "lemonade." Sometimes two words become one, as in "curb" and "curve" which are phonetically impossible to distinguish in Japanese anyway, while in other cases related concepts are split into two, as with clip-on earrings ("earring") and pierced earrings ("pierce"), treated as two separate concepts rather than sub-sets of the same group. And the word jar? In Japanese it usually means "rice cooker" -- go figure.

Technology is always on the move, and no sooner do we get used to one type than it's been replaced by something else. When I first came to Japan in 1991, it was very hip for young people to carry beepers, called "pocket bells" (ポケベル） and my students would constantly send messages to each other, usually during my class. At first the units could only receive numbers, so my students would send messages using cryptic phonetic codes -- for example, good morning ("ohayo") was rendered as 084, and "where are you now" ("ima doko?") came out as 10105. Yeah, I can't figure it out either. Then pocket bells that could display kana characters arrived, allowing more detailed messages to be sent, which really allowed communication to flourish. The ubiquitization of the cellular phone put paid to beepers a few years later, although paging services continued to be operated for customers in specific industries where they were still being used. Last week NTT announced that they were ending their paging service, which brings the pocket bell era to a close. Considering how quickly other technologies seem to be fading -- I'm sure modems and CRT monitors will look really cool and retro in another decade or two -- I wonder what the future holds for all of us?

(Ha, I just realized that the word Pocket Monster is a reference to the term Pocket Bell.)

And now for some random pics that I hopefully haven't posted yet. Do you hate caterpillars? For some reason they are the most detested insect in all Japan -- they're known as Kemushi or "hair bugs" in Japanese. This is one I happened to save from being squashed in front of a store.

Ah, things I love about Japan. This is the current Momi Momi chair line.

Keep your "naisu badii" (nice body) with one of these, a Joba horse riding simulator.

It can also help your golf swing, according to this.

At our place in Karuizawa we were bestoyed a great honor -- a pigeon used our balcony for its nest. Here it is with its new babies.

The most-quoted phrase by pop Japanologists, the reason for Japanese innovation, and stupid Japanese money tricks

No consideration of Japan is complete without the often-quoted-by-gaijin- who-are-experts-on-Japan phrase deru kui wa utareru (DE-ru KOO-ee wa oo-TAH-reh-ru), which translates as "the nail that sticks up will be hammered down." It describes the tendency of Japan, especially the educational system here, to "hammer down" individuals that don't fit in so that they're brought in line with everyone else. While a classroom full of similar students would probably be easy for a teacher to manage, the idea that students with special talents -- a child gifted in music or math -- might be forced to "conform" to the larger group offends my American idealism. My first employer in Japan had a daughter who was born in the U.S. and grew up speaking mostly English before returning to Japan, but by the time she'd finished three years of Japanese high school, various social pressures (as well as some issues unique to the girl, no doubt) made her actively pretend to not understand English, even though I knew better. The Japanese are quite aware that their country isn't very good at handling special cases, and in some instances a family with an exceptional child will emigrate to a country where the differences can be appreciated and encouraged. The great irony is that many of the most successful people in Japan have violated this rule and stood up as proud as any nail ever did, such as Softbank president Masatoshi Son, cybermall Rakuten founder Hiroshi Mikitani, and flamboyant former professional centerfielder Shinjo. The man who founded Honda stood out, too: as a boy, he wanted to learn how to swim, so he got the idea of swallowing small fish whole and jumping in the water while it was still flapping around inside his stomach.

The Japanese are very good at taking an idea and improving on it, and the entire history of modern Japan involves observing the nations of Europe and the U.S. and seeing what they could adopt and make better. This is known as wakon yosai or "Japanese Spirit, Western Know-How," a phrase that was coined after the Meiji Restoration, meaning that Japan should combine the technology of the West with that "extra something" (which the Japanese insist on calling "plus alpha") that only Japan can provide. My first introduction with Japanese innovation upon arriving here was in one of the most uninteresting places imaginable, the toilet. Most Japanese toilets in homes have a little sink on the top that lets you wash your hands with clean water as it flows into the tank after you flush -- very logical in a country that's both starved for elbow room and very conscious about cleanliness. One of the fun things of living in Japan is keeping mental count of the little innovations there are around me, from vertical parking "elevators" for your car to single-serving drip coffee that sits over your cup to cola vending machines that are only a few centimeters thicker than the length of a can so that they can be placed along the narrow roads in Tokyo. Oh, and those dreamy massage chairs.

There's a wacky thing that Japanese do to money: fold a 1000 yen bill so that 19th century novelist Souseki Natsume (or whoever -- it works with just about any bill) makes sad or happy faces, depending on which way you look at it. I'll teach you how it's done so you can amaze your friends with this great Japanese trick. First, take a bill and make an outward fold where each of his eyes are. Make an inward fold through the middle of his face, so that his eyes are higher than his nose (like little mountains). If you look at the bill from above, the face will look sad; from below, and he'll look happy. Virtually all Japanese known this silly trick, and would probably be surprised if any non-Japanese knew it. Here is the result:

Remember that our newest PC dating-sim game, YUME MIRU KUSURI :: A Drug That Makes You Dream, has gone "Golden Master" and will be on its way to the duplicators soon. We've got some other happy announcements for H-game fans, too. First, we've lowered the price of Yin-Yang! X-Change Alternate by $10, so if you haven't picked up this extremely popular title yet, you have a great excuse to do so now. Then, two of our popular game releases are now available in a new Internet Download Edition: the gorgeous Legend of Fairies and Fairy Nights, fully translated into English and compatible with Window as well as Mac (OS 9/X).

The summer conventions are not too far off. Have you ordered your Matsukameya high school uniform yet? We're starting our convention lineup earlier than normal this year by attending the Star Wars Celebration IV convention in Los Angeles May 24-28. This is only the fourth official Star Wars convention ever held, and my first. It'll be great to rub elbows with Star Wars fans from all over, and we'll have lots of fun and interesting products from Japan for you. So if you can make it to the show, be sure and look for us! See this page for info on the show.

A magic Japanese phrase for you, home ownership Japan-style, and Japan as "producer heaven"

Last time I mentioned the magic words that may be responsible for much of the wa or harmony that Japan is famous for. The phrase is shikata ga nai (sh-kah-tah ga NAH-ee), or in its more common form sho ga nai, which both translate as "it can't be helped" or "I can't do anything about that," and its used in a wide variety of situations. Whether it's the government quietly hinting that a European-style VAT may be in Japan's future or Section Chief Tanaka's flat rejection of your latest suggestion at work, the phrase allows Japanese to accept what they cannot change and shrug off stress that would otherwise build up inside them. The phrase can also be seen on our wacky T-shirt and hat for girls, "I like what I like, so get off my back!" which sums up a lot of my own life. From my idealistic American point of view, it seems that the phrase is trotted out a little too quickly when there's some social injustice or other wrong that needs righting, be it racism or sexism or many other ism's out there, but of course there are things that we can't change in the world and it's very practical of the Japanese to be open about this fact. The phrase is also used to cheer someone up after sickness, heartbreak or other sadness. We had a sho ga nai event this morning when our family cat, Mi-chan (short for "mix" since her fur is black and white), was hit by a car and killed. My daughter's going to be devastated when she gets back from Malaysia, and I'm sure my (very Buddhist) wife will bring up the idea of migawari, or an animal dying to take bad luck away from the family.

A friend of mine is taking a big step in his life, buying a plot of land and hiring a builder to build a house on it for him. Unlike in the U.S., where you usually buy an existing house through a realtor, it's much more common in Japan to buy land and plan your own home from scratch. The Japanese are not fans of "used" homes that someone else has already lived in, though, so if the land you're buying happens to have an older home already on it, it's a given that it will be torn down and replaced. Home construction is a huge business here, and when my friend was looking for a company to build his home he had many options, from large firms like Sekisui that uses baseball star Ichiro for their TV commercials to Habel House, famous for steel-framed homes that are so strong you could keep a pet elephant on the second floor. Japanese companies tend to engage in businesses that might seem a little off-target to some, and my friend could have chosen homes built by Panasonic (PanaHome), Toyota Home (they build your house in parts on the same manufacturing lines as their cars then truck the pieces in), or TBS Home, the house-building arm of the Tokyo Broadcasting Station, I kid you not. He could also have done what many Japanese families are doing and get an "import home," basically a pre-designed kit that's assembled in Canada or Sweden and shipped over, then put together by a local contracting company. In the end he went with a company with the charming name of Wish Home that specializes in building homes of brick. Of course, buildings made of brick are not allowed in earthquake-prone Japan, so the house itself is built so that the structure is actually supported by the internal 2x4 frame, for safety.

Although Japan is a capitalist country with a strong market economy cast in the mold of the U.S. and England, there are plenty of differences. One of the major themes of economics in Japan is that it tends to be a "supplier heaven" for companies that manufacture products and provide services, with so much power accumulated into the hands of large companies that it seems a wonder that things can function at all. In general, sellers of products benefit from stricter pricing structures and are able to capture a greater percent of the final purchase price than in any other country. At the rural liquor store my wife's parents run, our markup for beer and tobacco is a piddling 5%, barely enough to pay the electricity in the shop, but this doesn't matter since a shop without beer and cigarettes wouldn't get many customers, so my parents treat them as loss leaders. Price fixing is illegal here, but there's a whole slew of product categories such as books and CDs that are allowed to be sold at manufacturer-specified prices, which is a boon for producers wanting to create stable markets with none of that pesky competition. If you own an apartment building in Japan you've got it made thanks to the "key money" system that usually requires a tenant to pre-pay six months of rent when they move in, which includes "thank you money" and a deposit to the owner as well as to the agent that found the apartment for you, which by the way must be paid every two years. The funny thing about top-heavy supplier-centric economies is that they're always changing, and just as the open field of ideas called the Internet has brought a lot of good in the U.S. and Europe, the fact that change will come to Japan too is, well, sho ga nai.

It gives us great pleasure to announce that our upcoming game, YUME MIRU KUSURI :: A Drug That Makes You Dream, has gone "golden master" and will soon be on its way to the duplicators. This is a really outstanding game set in a totally modern version of Japan in which you play a Japanese student struggling with many of the same problems that real students deal with every day. Your life is about to be turned upside down by three beautiful girls: the grown-up Mizuki who's terrified of her own weakness, the poor transfer student Aeka, and the bizarre cat girl Nekoko. As you interact with these characters and affect each others' lives you can find love, purpose and much more. A super game with dramatic themes, dreamy art and fascinating characters. We hope you're preorder your copy now!

Remember that J-List carries a great for fans of JPOP, the iTunes Japan Music Cards, which are the only way to buy music from the iTMS unless you happen to have a credit card registered inside Japan. Looking for the Doraemon theme song? Want to browse the latest singles by Every Little Thing? Or browse the Japan Hip Hop scene for songs you like the sound of? It's all very easy to do from any Mac or PC running iTunes. The cards come in 1500 and 5000 yen denominations, and are super-easy to use: just log out of your current iTunes account, select the Japan store, click the link to enter an iTMS card number, and you can set up a new account for your Japanese music. You don't even have to muck with Japanese characters in the iTunes application, since it will work

I'm feeling sad about Mi-chan so I'll show you some pictures. This is our cat, taken a few days before she ran got hit by a car.

Animals totally have personalities, and even though it looks like she hated being put in this doll house by my daughter, she was always happy to "gaman" (put up with) anything my daughter wanted to do. A real kid's cat.

This is Mi-chan's brother, Ku-chan (from kuro, black). This dumb cat loved to climb inside people's cars and hid inside a moving can that brought some furniture to us, then got carted off. We *hope* he's alive somewhere but aren't sure.

Mi-chan as a baby, back when we could play Kitten Stick-Ons©.

I joke when I post about things like my wife saying "I'm glad we have pets around, they die in place of family members" but living in the context of a very Buddhist place like Japan, I start to believe it. And if believing it makes it actually work, I'd certainly give up a beloved pet over a family member. So if you died to save one of us from some bad fate, Mi-chan, you have our eternal thanks.

An Incredible Otaku Journey, Earthquakes can be Fun, and Weird Accounting Tricks in Japanese

I got a reminder that Japan is very much a part of the Pacific Ring of Fire yesterday when a 6.9 quake woke me up and gave me a good shake. At the time I was staying at our "mansion" (apartment) at the foot of Mt. Asama, one of the most potentially active volcanoes in Japan, and I quickly looked out the window to make sure the mountain hadn't decided to go all Mordor on us. Aside from jittery nerves, there was no damage where I was, although plenty of older homes collapsed close to the epicenter, and one poor woman was killed by a falling stone lantern, a very "zen" way to go, I guess. Learning to not jump at every little earthquake is all part of living in a place like Japan, and it goes hand-in-hand with developing a taste for seafood and tofu, learning to never pour your own beer, getting used to wearing slippers that are three sizes too small, and being at peace with confined spaces that would make a Space Shuttle astronaut claustrophobic.

Over the weekend a friend and I went on the ultimate geeked-out road trip, traveling to Lake Kizaki in Nagano Prefecture, the setting for the two moe (mo-EH) anime series Please, Teacher! and Please, Twins! The first series is about a beautiful Pocky-eating alien who secretly marries one of the students at the local school, and the sequel is a dramatic love triangle between a boy and two girls that's complicated by the fact that one of the girls is the boy's long-lost twin sister, but none of them is sure which it is. (Twins is the better series if you have to pick just one -- besides being a really good story, it's got the best fan service ever seen. Wow, looks like it's all up on YouTube if you're curious and can stand the English dubbing.) Just about everything seen in the two shows is based on real places in the Lake Kizaki area, and otaku from all around Japan and the world make pilgrimages there, visiting their favorite landmarks and eating Pocky and Pretz, the two signature snacks from the shows. My wife snorted when she heard what we had planned, but no self-respecting Japanese female planning a trip to Europe would miss the chance to visit the Palace of Versailles to see the grandeur first introduced to them in the famous Rose of Versailles anime, or re-enact their favorite scenes from Roman Holiday in beautiful Rome, and my wife's been to both several times.

One aspect of running a business in Japan is developing language skills that I might otherwise never pick up. In addition to needing to be able to read "legalese" for signing licensing contracts and what not, I've had to learn the basic mechanics of accounting in Japanese, which is difficult since I don't understand it in English. As a general rule, legal institutions that work in the U.S. are also present in Japan, and if you have a concept in one country it will probably translate into something similar on the other end. Part of this comes from countries following the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles so that their laws can interoperate, but a lot of Japan's lock-step movement with the U.S. comes from a deeper tradition of generally following behind us in all things -- for example, Japan's version of our 401(k) is ingeniously named the "Japan 401(k)." I recently found one concept that exists in Japan which is quite different from the States. It's called gensen choshu and it means withholding income at the source, which is what happens when you get your paycheck with tax already taken out, but in Japan, taxes are pre- deducted in a wider range of situations. If we were to hire a programmer to do some work for us, we're required by law to pre-deduct his taxes when we pay him, hence for a $1000 job we'd pay him $850 and send the rest to the Tax Ministry in his name, presumably to keep the payment from going unreported. This is a minor inconvenience, but I was surprised to learn that investment income is also pre-deducted in the same way. So when my wife puts money in a CD at 1% interest (still considered a fairly good return in the bizarro world that is Japan), she actually only gets .85% from it, which means she's potentially losing up to a year of earnable interest on other investments she might make that year. I'm sure taxpayers would rise up and revolt over something like this in most countries, but sadly the Japanese mantra of sho ga nai ("it can't be helped") keeps people from demanding change.

J-List is proud to carry the Canon Wordtank, the electronic dictionary for serious students which I used myself for many years. Japan is a country that takes studying seriously, and the Wordtank is loaded with useful features to make learning a foreign language easy. Unlike virtually every other manufacturer, Canon's Wordtank line goes out of its way to be friendly to gaijin, with features like an English menu mode, the ability to look up single or groups of kanji on the screen (useful because it's common for a word you look up to be written with kanji students can't yet read), an English manual, and of course the ability to save words and kanji for later study. I also like the feature that shows you how to write kanji by animating the stroke order -- very handy. Just because the Wordtank is small doesn't mean it lacks brains -- inside its memory you can find 11 complete dictionaries. We've restocked the popular Wordtank G55 on the site now, ready for your immediate order!

The weather wasn't that good for a road trip, especially in a convertible, but we didn't care.

We drove quite far -- the trip was 500 km round trip, taking us through many beautiful rural mountains and highways.

After only getting lost a little, we eventually arrived at the lake.

It was easy to find all the landmarks thanks to the various otaku sites that document where everything is.

This is the Lawson from episode 1 where Miina talks with Maiku for the first time. The premise of the show is that Maiku (Mike), Miina and Karen are half Japanese since they've got blue eyes. Yet only two are related...

The fumikiri (train crossing) from the opening credits was the next stop in our wacky little journey.

Umino Kuchi Station is the veeeery rural train station that services the place, and the final scene of the series.

Here's the inside. It was eerie being here, since everything in the show was done with perfect accuracy. Kind of like how cool it would be to be allowed to walk around in the Bag End set that they built for Lord of the Rings, but a lot less so.

There was a mini-shrine put there by fans and a notebook where people wrote messages to each other at having come to this spot. Pictures, poems, people's emotions were all recorded.

Then we went to the Daily Yamazaki Store, which was the model for Herikawa Shoten, where the twins worked.

This is the nice lady who owned the place. Basically, after Please Teacher was such a success, a representative from Bandai came by one day and asked her if they could have permission to "shoot pictures of" her shop. She thought it was for a documentary and said okay. A year later, suddenly her shop has been transformed into Otaku Central, but she didn't seem to mind. She was happy to have an American she could talk with, since I guess most of the ones who venture by don't speak the language.

She had a map where people can write where they're from, write messages and everything.

There was only one thing left -- to located the house where the three lived. It turned out to be pathetically easy since there are only about 30 houses in this village.

I wanted to go talk with them and ask how they felt about being the most famous inaka house in all otakudom, but I didn't have the nerve.

Finally, we swung back to the playground, where I shot a picture of the sliding board. Then it was time to go home, back to reality, at least for a little while.

What we can learn about culture and Star Wars from Japanese comedians, some reverse sexual discrimination, and all about "What is your Hobby?"

"What is your hobby?" This is one of the first phrases of English conversation that Japanese students learn, along with "What is your name?" "Where are you from?" and "What is your blood type?" My students at the time were aged 18-20, that period when you're sure you've had all of life's major experiences and don't need to form any new opinions, and some regular responses included Mayumi's stated love of doraibu (going driving with friends), Misako's constant talk about baito (working a part-time job, from the German word arbeit), or good old Kiyoko, who always replied "going shopping with my mother." Because I'm an emotional, idealistic American, I always did my best to get the students to give more information to the class about what really excited them, to get them to do more with their precious youth than they were doing. But except for a few students who had a particular passion for something they could share with the class -- the Beatles, American pro wrestlers, traveling around Japan taking pictures of trains -- getting my Japanese students to be excited about anything was always a challenge.

Speaking of hobbies, one of mine is comparing the cultures of Japan and the U.S., in case you haven't guessed, and sometimes you don't need to look any farther than the people who make us laugh, comedians. While most famous comedians in the U.S. come from the stand-up circuit or through the hallowed gates of Saturday Night Live, comedy in Japan is a little different. One form of traditional Japanese comedy that's been around for centuries is rakugo, literally "fallen words," which involves a lone comedian sitting Japanese- style on a zabuton cushion located very near the audience. The interesting thing about this style of performance is that, rather than using new comedy material, the monologue that the comedian tells is one of an already established library of a hundred or so such humorous stories, although a good rakugo-ka will add his own unique touches. There's a TV show where rakugo comedians do battle to see who is the funniest, and when they get a laugh they get another cushion, so that by the end the winner is sitting on a tower of them. (And in fact, a way of saying "that was funny" is Zabuton, ichi mai, or "I'll give you one zabuton cushion for that.") Another pillar of Japan's comedy world is manzai, humor involving a two-man team that includes a dim-witted boke (boh-KAY, meaning fool) and his sharp-tongued tsukkomi (tsu-KOH-mi, meaning straight foil) sidekick, who act out complex comic sketches together. Manzai has been popular throughout the 20th century and has had a great influence on many areas -- for example, the characters of C-3P0 and R2-D2 indirectly owe their existence to this humorous tradition, via the films of Kurosawa. The most popular manzai team in Japan today is Bakusho Mondai, who are regular guests on news programs where they bring their witty commentary to bear on the events of the past week. If you've happened to see the Japanese version of Apple's "Get a Mac" ads, the duo playing the Mac and PC are two halves of a manzai comedy pair. (We have an English book of rakugo monologues on the site today if you're interested.)

Normally when you think of a subject like sexual discrimination you think of women not being offered the chance to do what they want on an equal footing with males, but I had a little lesson in reverse discrimination last night. My wife, mother-in-law and our two kids were heading to Malaysia for a week to visit a family friend, leaving me home alone -- the Holy Grail for any married man, since I can walk around the house in my underwear, put my feet on the table, and drink out of the milk carton with impunity. Before she could leave, though, my wife was compelled to prepare a week's worth of meals for me, as if my male-ness made me totally unable to fend for myself in for seven days, like some comedy version of a husband from the 1950s. And that, I realized, is one aspect of the relationships between men and women in Japan, a kind of yin-yang (to bring a sufficiently Asian image to my theory) in which the man is responsible being the "great black pillar" (daikoku-bashira) that holds up the household, while the woman does her part to ensure the happiness of the family from the inside. Sounds overly simplified to put it like that, I know, but from within the context of living in Japan, it really works well.

Today we've not one, not two but three wacky new Japanese T-shirts for you on the site. The Japanese are an incredibly expressive people, and they can take something as bland as ASCII letters or generic hiragana and katakana characters and turn them into incredibly expressive images. We've got three new limited-run T-shirts featuring popular emoji ("emotional characters") that capture the heart and soul of the Japanese BBS 2ch and look really cool at the same time. See them on the site now!

J-List carries region-free DVD players that make it child's play to enjoy region-encoded DVDs from Japan, Europe and other countries. Our players are specially manufactured to ignore the pesky region codes that try to keep you from watching the discs you want to enjoy, and are fully compatible with DVDs from all regions, including PAL and RCE discs. Even better, they're loaded with features, like the ability to play DIVX/AVI files burned onto DVD-R media. We've lowered the price on our popular RJ-200 progressive scan/surround sound DVD player, making it even easier to snap up one of these half-height demons and watch any DVD you like.

I see I forgot to post pictures of the hidden micro brewery in the mountains of Gunma. Well, here you go. Here are the taps.

Good roaring Dwarven fires, too.

In general, any time I get the chance to eat wood-fired pizza, I take it.

Like all Japanese breweries, there were three types, very blonde, medium and very fruity, and very dark/stout. I found the middle path to be the most delicious.

This is what the Japanese call a "Margherita" Pizza.

I just love the construction of this place, all wood, with huge pillars of wood visible inside. It was so unexpected to find such a good place in a town with a winter population of a few hundred.

I brought some of these back for my father in law, although I know he won't like them. I'll just have to help him drink them ^_^

The man who created the Yamato theme song, all about the traditional game Karuta, and thoughts on corn soup

I've written before about how the meinichi (命日), the anniversary of a person's death, is very important in a Buddhist country like Japan, and once a person has passed on those left behind will remember him or her on this day. Today happens to be the meinichi of Hiroshi Miyagawa, a person who's had no small impact on Japan's animation industry, as well as myself. He was the composer who wrote the music for Space Cruiser Yamato, shown in the U.S. as Star Blazers, essentially the first anime series associated with the now-familiar concepts of dramatic, sequential stories with problems that are resolved and multi-faceted characters who die, fall in love and generally act like real people. Several years before John Williams gave us the music for Star Wars, Maestro Miyagawa showed the world what could be achieved with extremely melodramatic and high-quality music even in something as mundane as an animated series. His single most famous creation was the Yamato theme song, which he composed after being asked by Producer Nishizaki to envision "an iron ballad," and the song is regularly performed by marching bands from the Maritime Self-Defense Forces to my daughter's 4th grade class. The Yamato franchise, with its Gamilon-planet-bombs-as-allegory-to-World-War-II themes, was incredibly campy, but for many it was a first wonderful bridge to Japan.

If you love "corn potage," then get to Japan as fast as you can, since people here just can't get enough of creamed corn soup. Right now I'm sitting in Steak House Miya, a Japanese restaurant that serves both regular and "hamburg" steak, famous for a tangy daikon sauce that the server pours over your sizzling plate, then a napkin is draped over the whole thing to keep it from burning you as the sauce cooks into the meat. Beside my steak and plate of rice is a bowl of corn soup with corn flakes sprinkled on top, which tastes good enough, I guess. As an American, when I think of soup I think of the Campbell's classics like chicken noodle, tomato, and vegetable beef, but these are as alien here in Japan as Green Tea Butterscotch and Rose Flavored Gum are in most parts of the world. Types of soup that the Japanese prefer instead include creamed pumpkin or carrot soups, healthy wakame (seaweed) or miso soup, or if at an Italian restaurant, perhaps some minestrone. When you get sick in the U.S., most people think of eating chicken soup, but in Japan the most common remedies are drinking a tea with ginger in it or swallowing down a raw egg in sake -- yum.

I wrote last time about the traditional Japanese card game karuta, which gets its name from the Portuguese but is based on games played in the Imperial Court in ancient Kyoto. Karuta consists of two decks of cards, one featuring hiragana characters and another with poems or phrases that correspond to cards in the first deck. Two players scatter the hiragana cards on the floor randomly and assume a position that allows them to grab cards easily, then a third person starts reading the poems one by one. The most famous karuta game is the Hyakunin Isshu, which features poetry about one hundred historical figures in short tanka form. As kids hear one of the 1300-year-old poems -- perhaps the one about the poet Ki no Tomonori, which goes "In the peaceful light/Of the ever-shining sun/In the days of spring/Why do the cherry's new-blown blooms/Scatter like restless thoughts?" -- they grab the card that corresponds with that phrase before their opponent can find it, and whoever gets the most cards wins. Another popular variation played in our prefecture is Jomo Karuta, which substitutes poems about the beauty of Gunma, from the fiery Mt. Asama to the bustling hot springs resort at Ikaho. Playing karuta is good on many levels, since it teaches children to read, is competitive and fun to play, and it also instills them with a link to the past that I think Americans can't easily comprehend. It can be used to teach many things, too. For example, my daughter is learning the flute, and her teacher cleverly makes the kids play a version of karuta that teaches them musical terms, like da capo and staccato.

J-List has been involved with licensing and translating Japan's amazing PC dating-sim games for years, and we've built a great lineup of really amazing story- and character-centric games for bishoujo gaming fans that allow you to take your relationship with Japan to a whole new place. Our games are available in shrink-wrapped CD-ROM packages as well as Internet Download Editions, and there are titles for every taste, from cat girls to maids and highly evolved dramatic stories and more. We're happy to announce that we've completed our initial testing with Microsoft's new Windows Vista operating system (32-bit), and are happy to announce that all our games are compatible with the new platform. So whether you're using Vista now or plan to in the future, our great dating-sim games will be compatible.

Remember that J-List carries the extremely high-end school uniforms for guys and girls made by Matsukameya of Nagoya, a company with an outstanding reputation in Japan. Our sailor uniforms are all custom made to your exact size specifications and available in many styles, making it easy for you to have the coolest costume for the summer anime conventions. We also carry a really cool item: authentic Japanese school bags, the kind high school girls carry to school, made of high quality materials and loaded with pockets to hold all your stuff.

An expected bit of Irish in Japan, thoughts on Japan's slow-changing educational system, and all about the concept of "kakko ii"

Yesterday was St. Patrick's Day, a celebration of all things Irish in the U.S. and, presumeably, Ireland. As you might imagine, there isn't a lot of awareness of this day in a place like Japan, which knows nothing of shamrocks or leprechauns or pots of gold buried at the end of the rainbow. However, we managed to have our own little Irish Experience nevertheless. While taking our customary weekend drive up the mountains around the resort town of Karuizawa, we came across an interesting-looking restaurant that served wood-fired pizza and home-brewed beer, a rarity in a country that favors large, easily-taxable industries. Among the beers they offered was an authentic Irish Stout, and I was so shocked at the concept of drinking a rare and delicious brew on a mountain in an extremely rural corner of Japan that I had to have three of them. One thing you can say about Japan is, you never know what it's got in store for you next.

The subject of Japan's compulsory educational system is a complex and interesting one. Officially begun as part of the modernization program of the 1870s, Japan's schools are responsible for teaching young people everything they need to function in life, from reading and writing of kanji to math and science to social skills suitable for Japan's group-oriented culture and being able to say "Fine thanks, and you?" when you ask them how they are in English (a very important skill, to be sure). Public schools are extremely conservative and resistant to change, and it's amazing how much is the same at my daughter's elementary school compared with when her mother went there 25 years ago...or her grandmother, who attended the same school 50 years ago. This is good on the one hand because it creates a continuum of experiences that crosses generations, such as playing the Japanese educational game "Karuta" that teaches respect for local culture -- even something like Japanese school lunches have cultural threads that we foreigners can never comprehend. On the other hand, Japanese public schools seem trapped in a time-warp without any significant plan for the changes students will face this century, including fierce competition from every country in Asia. I sometimes wonder if Japan's educational system can go on changing so little.

Japan can be a very style-oriented place at times, and it seems that everyone is concerned about looking good. The universal word for "cool" in Japanese is kakko ii (KAH-koe ee, lit. "good style"), while the opposite is kakko warui (KAH-koe wa-roo-EE, "bad style," e.g. dorky). Another word that describes an absence of coolness is dasai (dah-SAI, out of fashion, uncool, n00b), which supposedly started out as a derogatory word for people from half-rural, half-urban Saitama Prefecture, just north of Tokyo, essentially to Japan's capital what Orange County is to Los Angeles. Many Japanese also have a great appreciation for what's known as dasa-kakko ii, or something that's both lame and cool at the same time, or perhaps cool specifically because it's out of sync with current mores. Some examples of dasa-kakko ii might include the hair styles or fashions from the 1970s, that scene from Mobile Suit Gundam when Amuro sits in the cockpit desperately reading through the manual as he trying to find the mecha's weapons, the movie Willow, anything featuring Vin Diesel, and the artist formerly and currently known as Prince.

Remember that J-List carries cool computer peripheral and iPod products by Japan's leading company, Elecom. From stylin' USB computer mice to their trademark katakana mouse pads and keyboards to stylish speakers for your iPod, Mac or PC, Elecom has great stuff for you. We also carry the bizarre-but-cute Mogmo Kun, a push little monster that "eats" your USB flash drive or similar shaped device in order to protect it. So cute! All products are fully compatible with computers and iPod products around the world.