History lesson: Japan's First English Teacher

It's interesting, looking at Japan through some of the "firsts" in its history. Like John Kendrick, the ship's captain who participated in the Boston Tea Party and fought in the Revolutionary War then went on to be an explorer, eventually becoming the first American to visit Japan. Or Horace Wilson, a teacher at the predecessor of Tokyo University, who thought it'd be fun to teach his students to play baseball back in 1873, which was the beginning of the long history of the sport here. The first English teacher in Japan, if you're curious, was a half-Chinook, half-Scottish man with the unlikely name of Ranald MacDonald. After hearing of the plight of three fishermen who washed ashore in Washington State but were unable to return to Japan because of their country's sakoku (closed country) policy, he started to feel a strange kinship with the Japanese people, which is interesting since we now know that American Indian and Japanese are indeed connected by blood. He decided to go to Japan, despite the fact that it was death for foreigners to enter the country, and booked passage on a whaling vessel that would take him close. Pretending to be a survivor from a shipwreck, he was rescued by the aboriginal Ainu and handed over to the local Samurai lord, who shipped him off to Nagasaki. The Japanese had a long relationship with Dutch traders, but none of them could speak English, despite the recent rise in power of England and the United States, so the officials got the idea of having MacDonald teach English to a class of fourteen students. The studies paid off, and when Admiral Perry showed up in 1853, students trained by MacDonald were able to communicate. Today there's a commemorative statue in Nagasaki thanking Mr. MacDonald for his contribution, and if I know Japan, I'm pretty sure they sell little cakes or rice crackers with his face on them, too.

Japan as a Functional Western Democracy

On the whole, Japan is pretty functional as a Western-style democracy. Politicians make laws which are executed by the nation's army of komuin, public employees who function as a British-style bureaucracy that provides the actual "body" of the government. There is corruption, of course, but it's limited to comparatively rare cases involving high-ranking politicians, never on an individual level, and it's taken for granted that every person you interact with during the course of the day will be honest. This is quite different from countries like India, where (I'm told) the speed that the phone company installs your phone line is proportional to the size of the bribe you paid the clerk. Still, not everything is perfect in Japan. Although the number of (largely wasteful) public works projects was reduced significantly during the era of Prime Minister Koizumi, Japan still spends $71 billion a year on roads, bridges, dams, etc. Another problem are the constant streams of hakomono, essentially "pork barrel project in a box," conceived by politicians so their friends who own construction companies can make money. A textbook example of this was the plan by our city's mayor (who lives next door to us, by a really strange coincidence) to build a second Ferris Wheel in our city, despite the fact that we already have a perfect good one. Happily, that wasteful project got national media attention and the project was withdrawn

How Japan has Changed for Foreigners

Japan has really changed for the better over the past decade and a half in terms of how easy it is for a gaijin to live here. When I arrived in Heisei 3, the third year of the reign of Emperor Akihito (i.e. 1991), it was quite difficult to find a bit of "home" -- when I'd get homesick, I'd go and eat Egg McMuffins at McDonald's, just about the only thing that was exactly the same as it was back in the States. Slowly, Japan opened up and let just about any product in, and now consumers have a lot more choice, from Doritos to Subway sandwich shops to AM/PM Mini Marts. The Internet has obviously helped improve the lives of foreigners living here, allowing expats like me to do things they could never do before, like buy books from Amazon or log into a SlingBox and catch the Superbowl live. There's been one setback for Americans living outside their home country, however: last year the United States Post Office stopped offering surface mail service for packages going out of the U.S., meaning that my mother can't throw some Thanksgiving goodies into a seamail box and send them to me. It's been quite an inconvenience -- now she has to send the items by airmail or else call shipping companies like Yamato for container shipping quotes. (Note that seamail shipping into the U.S. is still going strong, and you can choose it as an option when purchasing from J-List as long as you're not in a hurry for the items.)

Being Sign in Japan, and How to Make Tamago-Zake

It's funny how being sick makes you revert to what you know best. I've got the flu that's been going around the J-List office, so yesterday I headed home early, took some of the various U.S. cold medicines I stock, and laid down to rest. For dinner I wanted noting other than good old Campbell's Chicken Noodle Soup, which we'd brought back with us from our last trip. (The Japanese don't know what Chicken Noodle Soup is, the only soups they eat here being miso and corn potage.) When Japanese get sick, they naturally turn to their own cultural remedies. Supposedly, it's common to broil a leek (which they insist on calling a "long onion") until its soft, folding it inside a tenugui (a traditional hand towel), then they wrap that around their neck and go to bed. Then there's shoga-yu, which is hot water with grated fresh ginger in it and a little honey to improve the taste. The most famous folk remedy is probably tamago-zake, or egg and sake. To prepare it, put one cup of sake in a pan with a beaten egg, and heat it until just before boiling. Stir in some sugar if you like, the drink it back, and you'll be feeling better in no time. Or so they tell me anyway.

Valentine's Day in Japan 2008

Tomorrow is Valentine's Day, and all throughout Japan men are looking forward to receiving the gift of chocolate from females around them, in keeping with the local custom of women giving chocolate to men. There are two kinds of chocolate a man can receive, the most common being giri choco or "obligation chocolate," which females might give to males they work with or to teachers or male relatives because they feel it's expected of them. A lot of this is the result of good marketing, since virtually every convenience store in the country is decked out with decorations reminding shoppers that February 14th is around the corner. The best kind of chocolate is honmei choco, "true heart chocolate" that's given to a loved one, and all across Japan men will be looking forward to eating hand-made chocolates, cakes or other treats from our wives, daughters or girlfriends who want to show their love and appreciation.

Incidentally, since there's giri choco I thought I'd be cute and ask if they made ninjo choco as well. You've never seen such anime-like expressions of confusion on the J-List staff...

Tricks You Can Do with a Lemon and Chopsticks

The Japanese, of course, use chopsticks at almost every meal, whether they're eating rice, noodles, fish or meat. (Certain foods like curry rice or steak, of course, call for Western cutlery). Chopsticks are very easy to use: you just hold one stick between your middle finger and thumb, then hold the second with your forefinger and thumb so that you can create a "scissor" action that allows you to pick up food. With practice, it's very easy to pluck the last grain of rice from the bottom of your bowl when eating. The use of chopsticks is taught to children at around the age of three, and it's common for parents to want to make sure their kids learn to use them properly before they start preschool, making chopstick use one of the first forms of pressure children are subjected to in Japanese society. In Japan there's exactly "one" correct way to do things, a concept that extends to the holding of chopsticks as well, and it's common for conversations over beers at an izakaya restaurant to turn to how strangely one of the people at the table is holding their chopsticks. To me, the ultimate test of how good you are at using chopsticks is being able to wring the juice from a slice of lemon without getting any on your hands. Just slide the chopsticks into either end of the lemon slice and twist in opposite directions, extracting the lemon juice. Incidentally, J-List stocks many kinds of chopsticks from Japan, including ones with rough patches at the ends (to make them easier to eat with), and we even have a great line of "training chopsticks" for beginners.

All About Factories and Other Cool Things

You never know what will become the next interesting mini-boom in a place like Japan. Over the past few years, many Japanese have decided that the coolest thing is...factories? Amazingly, the strange industrial beauty of factories and other dark places like electric power plants does have a certain charm, and there have been a string of popular photobooks dedicated to capturing these eerie places. There's a variety show on TV that features objects being made in factories while famous TV personalities try to guess what's being manufactured, writing their answers on digital screens that are later revealed so the audience can laugh at all the wrong answers. It's quite fascinating to watch nylon fibers being spun and coated in plastic that turns out to be a fire house, or watch as long rods of steel are fed into a machine which clips pieces off and stamps them into pachinko balls. I was also fascinated to see how Mitsubishi makes pencils -- I couldn't take my eyes off the bizarre stream of wood as it was shaped and wrapped around the graphite leads.

Signs that Japan is Getting Older

Japan is getting older, and it's interesting to see the way society evolves and changes. Even during the 16 years I've been in Japan, I've noticed quite a change in way products are marketed, with a lot of companies embracing the coming market for services for the elderly. It seems every third TV commercial on daytime television is for companies selling products to older Japanese, including ways to remodel your house and make it "barrier free," a term the Japanese have coined meaning a living space that's free of stairs and other obstacles that make it hard for mobility-challenged people to live. Diapers for adults are also advertised openly on TV, as are hair-loss products aimed not just at men, but women. Insurance companies like Zurich and AFLAC have found a profitable business in Japan selling supplemental insurance to elderly Japanese who worry about being hospitalized and not having enough insurance to cover the costs. Then there's the I-Pot service that home electronics maker Zojirushi operates, which is essentially an electric pot for boiling water that's linked wirelessly to the Internet, which can be configured to send you an email every time your elderly mother makes a pot of green tea, to reassure you that she's okay. Aww, that's nice.

One Way of Understanding Japan's Culture: Kata (Form)

One way of approaching an understanding of Japan is through the word kata, which means "form" and describes the many aspects of life in Japan that follow a specific, pre-determined structure which society at large has agreed on ahead of time. Without a doubt, the Japanese are a people who like to follow fixed forms in many aspects of their lives, and it can be amazing how naturally people fall in step in these situations. I was reminded of this a week ago when the brass band that my son performs in at his school participated in a recital along with ten other elementary schools, an event that required everyone to be completely in sync with each other. First, there is a "greeting" speech by the chairman of the organization that put on the event, followed by comments from other high-ranking members. Then the performances came, perfectly executed by each school's band, as the audience clapped. Finally, the nice lady who was most responsible for making the whole recital come together received the largest bouquet of flowers I've seen in my life from her students, which seemed spontaneous but was also part of the overall form of the event. You see this tendency to closely adhere to pre-approved forms in many different settings, from weddings and funerals to the way the average Japanese person interacts with teachers, doctors and anyone else they want to show respect to. Incidentally, Nintendo sells a trivia game for the DS platform here in Japan to help players learn the "common sense" associated with these events and avoid embarrassment -- that's pretty smart.

(You can see my son way in the back with his Bass Clarinet that's as big as he us)

Reflections on Beef Bowl and Japanese Culture

Over the weekend I took my son out for a bowl of gyudon, steamed beef over rice, the most popular form of fast food in Japan. The restaurant was crowded, so I added my name to the list, writing "Peter" in the katakana writing system that's generally used for foreign names and loan words, and sat down to wait. "Everyone else wrote their last name," my son observed. "Why did you write your first name?" This was an interesting question, and I didn't have an answer for him right away. Ostensibly, names in Japan are written in family name, given name order, so someone named Taro Yamada in English would be Yamada Taro in Japanese. But by unwritten rule, Westerners nearly always continue to use their name in the same order as they do back home. When I was a teacher, I was universally known as "Peter-sensei" by my students, never "Payne-sensei" as you'd expect. I'm pretty sure this is done unconsciously -- the Japanese staff at J-List, who are used to me asking them difficult questions when I'm posting an update, all said they'd never noticed this phenomenon -- and probably because English teachers are supposed to be as "fun" as possible. Having my students use my first name certainly did seem to bring them a little closer to me, so it was never a problem. While Japanese never use English name order for themselves while in Japan, it's not uncommon for TV "talents" (comedians, actors etc.) to choose stage names that sound more like English. When the Los Angeles-born son of legendary martial arts film star Sho Kosugi started his own career on TV here, he debuted using the name of "Kane Kosugi" (in English word order) which underscored his American-ness and the fact that he could speak English fluently, and added a bit of spice to his appeal with fans.

Site Improvement Announcement

We're happy to announce some new features on the site. In the upper left hand corner of the J-List and JBOX.com websites you can see the new Account button which takes you do a series of screens that lets update any aspect of your account information, including changing your password or email address. You can review your order history over the past six months, too, a feature that we've wanted to bring you for a long time. In addition, we're launching a new service that let you know what the current status of your order right in the order history screen. For example, when our staff process your order and starts the packing process, the status will be reflected on the order history for that order, and when, say, a shipping label is printed, that will be posted too. The system is still "beta" but we think it will provide a lot of useful feedback for you, making it easy to see what the current state of your order is. Enjoy the new features, and as always, your feedback is very welcome!

Fun with Japanese Numbers

"You've been in Japan too long when you're speaking English with your gaijin friends, but all references to money are in Japanese." This is a funny phenomenon, but true: even when speaking English, foreigners living in Japan will tend to use Japanese for numbers and yen money amounts. The reason is that the Sino-Japanese numeric system, which came from China, is clunky when converting to the Arabic numeric system. The number system revolves around the unit 10,000 (man, pronounced mahn), rather than 1,000; thus, the number 10,000 is 1 man (ichi mahn、一万), 20,000 yen is 2 man (ni mahn、二万), 100,000 is 10 man (juu mahn、十万) and so on. The conversion from one numeric system to the other is just frustrating enough that most foreigners will be happy to leave their numbers in Japanese, if the person they're talking with understands the words. If you think it's difficult learning to think in units of 10,000, you should try doing math with the kanji-based numbers that come after man, which are oku (億、equal to 100 million), cho (兆、1 trillion) and kei (10 quadrillion, which is so high that I never bothered to learn the kanji for it).

One Small Problem with Japan: Concrete and Asphalt

Japan is a great place, and I love living here. The country is beautiful, the culture always new and fascinating, and the people are very kind. One of the drawbacks to life in Japan, however, is the abundance of concrete and asphalt around me. Roads seem to criss-cross every inch of Japan, even high in the mountains in the center of the country, and it's common for the Japanese government to cover the sides of mountains in concrete to guard against falling rocks, so you can't even see the mountain you're currently driving on. Virtually every river in the country has been extensively "engineered" to guard against dangerous floods, which can make them look quite unnatural, with reinforced concrete slopes on both sides. We have a "vacation mansion" up in the mountains around Karuizawa, which sounds really cool until you learn that the word "mansion" in Japan means an apartment that is owned as opposed to being rented. As we were driving home one weekend, I caught a really nice view of Mt. Asama, a large volcano that's erupted several times over the last century. It was spectacular, with steam coming out of the top and everything, but I was having a terrible time snapping a picture of the mountain without getting a power line in the picture. Kind of lame.

Thoughts on the Japanese fascination with Europe and the U.S.

Just as many in the U.S. and Europe have a fascination with all things Japanesque, the Japanese have their own fixation with the West. A lot of this comes from Japan's unique history: for 250 years it was a "closed country," and it was punishable by death for anyone to leave Japan or for foreign barbarians to enter. The only exception was Dejima, a tiny artificial island in Nagasaki Bay, where the Dutch were permitted a trading colony. When Commodore Perry sailed into Yokosuka Bay and forced the Shogun to open his doors to trade, it was a culture shock for Japan that was not entirely unlike what we'd feel if UFOs suddenly landed at the United Nations. As the Japanese fervently studied the West they gained great respect for its accomplishments, which can take some pretty interesting forms today. For some reason Manekin Pis, that statue of a boy peeing in Belgium, is extremely famous in Japan, and there was even a punk band that named themselves the Piss Kids in homage to this, translating from the Japanese name of the statue. The story of Anne Frank is also extremely well known here in Japan (you can read it in manga form), as are stories like Anne of Green Gables. The Japanese have expressed their fascination with the city of Paris by building a scale replica of the Eiffel Tower (Tokyo Tower) and a miniature version of the Palace of Versailles, erected as a residence for the Crown Prince. And don't get me started on the copy of the Statue of Liberty in Odaiba, across the bay from Tokyo. It's all quite silly.

Sony Life Insurance? Panasonic Home? Kanebo Gum?

One thing you get used to when you live in Japan is companies selling products that are, well, unexpected from the point of view of a Westerner. Dell makes computers and Ford makes cars, but if Ford started making computers we'd all wonder what was in their drinking water. But it's quite common for Japanese companies to enter a wide range of businesses under the same brand, a concept I was introduced to at the age of five when I saw a commercial for Yamaha lawnmowers, and wondered how the company could also make the electric organ we owned at the time. You know Sony for their home electronics, but in Japan, Sony is also famous for life insurance, online banking, high-end make-up products, as well as being the licensor for Thomas the Tank Engine products. Building homes is big business in Japan, and companies like Panasonic and Toyota own companies that build homes under those brands -- there's even a builder called TBS Housing, operated by the Tokyo Broadcasting System, of all people. Mitsubishi is famous for their cars, but they're also busy making trains and home electronics and selling securities, and they are the leading manufacturer of pencils in Japan. Oh, and make up company Kanebo also markets chewing gum and medicine under the same brand. Weird, eh?

Rising Divorce Culture in Japan?

It's often said that Japan's society follows a decade or so behind the U.S., and looking at such areas as the adoption of laws about smoking in public places or child safety seats in cars, that statement seems to be pretty accurate. Sadly, Japan's divorce rate has also followed this trend, and the number of couples calling it quits is higher than ever. Currently there are 2.3 divorces per thousand people in Japan, compared with around 3.6 for the U.S, 2.2 for Canada, and 2.8 for the U.K. These numbers sound pretty much in line with the rest of the world, except when you consider that just a generation ago Japan's divorce-per-thousand was under 1. The social pressures that have been driving the increase are many, including less economic reliance on the husband by women and a decrease of stigmas about being batsu-ichi, or "one strike out," a common slang for someone who has been divorced once. A big trend is the rise in jukunen rikon, or "middle-aged divorce," when couples find their marriage can't survive the husband retiring and hanging around the wife and her friends all day (the term for such husbands is nure-ochiba, noo-reh-OH-chi-bah, a wet leaf that sticks to your shoe and won't come off, no matter how hard you shake it). This trend has been aided by recent laws making it easier for women to claim half their husband's pension if they were together for a certain number of years, which has lead to many books and articles advising women on the best "divorce strategy."

Gyoza Troubles in Japan

Japan is in an uproar right now over a food poisoning scare involving frozen dumplings called gyoza -- you may know them by their North American name of "potstickers" -- imported from China. The dumplings were tainted with toxic pesticides which made dozens of consumers sick, including a five year old girl who nearly died. The Japanese are a very group-oriented people, and when there's a general movement in one direction others are willing to follow, and right now everyone is falling over themselves to avoid all frozen foods, even products that weren't made in China. The ruckus is making itself felt in Japan's business world, too: a proposed three-way merger between mammoth Japan Tobacco and two smaller makers of frozen foods is in danger of being called off because JT was the company that distributed the problem dumplings. The whole thing kind of reminds me of the period after 9/11, when Japanese tourists stayed away from Hawaii in droves out of fear of terrorists, quite a silly thing to think, all things considered. Poison aside, gyoza is one of my all-time favorite foods in the world, and I love to obsess over the ratio of soy sauce, vinegar and spicy sesame oil that I dip them into before eating them. While the food poisoning scare has hurt makers of frozen foods, supermarkets and Yokohama's Chinatown distract, business was booming at our local ramen-and-gyoza shop when we went there last night. The "Master" (what you call the owner of any kind of small shop in Japan) seems to be doing a very brisk business right now, with many families coming to eat food they can trust.

My Favorite Japanese Food, "Nabe"

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

Thoughts on Japanese Politics

The U.S. Presidential race is on, with the various candidates debating the issues publicly as they jockey for votes on Super Tuesday. With American politics being followed internationally -- I've gotten into some fascinating discussions with friends from Australia, Canada and the U.K., who all understood U.S. politics a lot better than I understood theirs -- the issues being discussed in the U.S. right now are probably familiar to many around the world. Japanese politics, on the other hand, are a little more subtle, so I thought I'd talk about that subject today. There are three major political parties in Japan: the Liberal Democratic Party, which has ruled the country almost continuously since the end of the war; the Democratic Party of Japan, which currently controls one of the country's two legislative houses; and the New Komeito Party, which still has unofficial ties to the Sokka Gakkai religion, the closest thing to "Evangelical Buddhism" there is here. It's hard to define what being conservative and liberal might mean in the context of Japan, but for the most part conservatives are pro-business, favor close ties with the U.S. even if it means having to take part in overseas conflicts that most Japanese citizens are against, support rural farmers in exchange for their political support, resist pressure over Yasukuni Shrine, oh, and they naturally revere the Emperor. On the other side of the fence are mavericks like Tokyo Mayor Shintaro Ishihara, who literally wrote the book on Japan saying "no" to outside pressure from the U.S. and who has run Tokyo well even if he steps on the toes of some commercial interests. (There are some flavors of socialism, including a Japan Communist Party, but they have so little traction with voters it's almost funny.) Currently there's a spat going on inside the ruling coalition over how funds collected from taxes on gasoline should be used. Under the current law, automobile-related taxes may be used only for building of roads, despite the fact that there are plenty of perfectly fine roads already made. Conservative members of the legislation are fighting tooth-and-nail to ensure that every yen of road taxes be used for more roads, even if it means projects people won't benefit from, while their opponents push for either a lowering of gasoline taxes or loosening of restrictions on what the money can be spent on.

Different Kinds of "Green Tea" from Japan: Ryoku-cha, Matcha, and Beyond

Although coffee and Western tea are popular in Japan, many prefer the wide variety of Asian teas that would likely be perceived as "green tea" to most Westerners. The word for tea in Japanese is cha, and like many concepts that are especially important to every day life here, the word usually gets the "honorific" prefix o, making ocha. Popular varieties of tea enjoyed regularly include ryoku-cha, a slightly weak green tea; mugi-cha, a pleasant-tasting tea made from barley that's enjoyed in the hot summer; or genmai-cha, tea with roasted grains of unhulled rice in it. Oolong-cha, a dark refreshing tea from China, is perhaps the best-selling bottled beverage in Japan; it's nice because it cuts through oil, washing down anything greasy you've eaten, and the Chinese use it to clean the fingers while eating. Coca-Cola became the leading drink maker in the Japanese beverage market by being very smart about local tastes, and their popular Sokenbi-cha, which blends many different types of tea, is one of the top-selling bottled teas on the market. The other type of green tea is matcha, a bitter tea made from powder, used in the Japanese tea ceremony and is also a popular flavoring for ice cream and traditional sweets. The best matcha tea comes from Uji, a town a few kilometers outside of Kyoto, and this year's Matcha Kit Kat goes out of its way to advertise Uji Matcha on its box.

Japanese People think Americans Know Every English Word Ever Made

Before I started J-List, I taught English as a Second Language (ESL) to a wide range of Japanese students, including kids, OLs (female company employees) and even some elderly learners. Because I spoke Japanese, my services were quite in demand, since of course the first thing you look for in an English teacher is that he be fluent in Japanese -- kind of makes you understand why they aren't better at English than they are. For a while I had a weekly class teaching some retired women, and we had a lot of fun, with them telling me all the things that Americans seem to be interested in when they come to Japan, like what part of the city was bombed during World War II. During one lesson one of the ladies was telling me about the various charities she was involved in, including the local Rotary Club and UNESCO. "I'm also a Soroptimist," she proudly told me. This word was unfamiliar to me, so I asked her what it meant, and I'll never forget the look of shock on her face. How could I, a native speaker of English, not know this word? Didn't every speaker of English know every word? Getting over her surprise, she explained about the Soroptimist Society, an international organization that works to improve the lives of women around the world, which is also active in Japan. This tendency of Japanese to assume that every English speaker knows every word in the language happens with doctors, too, who spend years amassing knowledge of medical conditions in English then want to try them out on foreigners they encounter.

Funny Japanese place names: Eromanga??

There are some pretty hilarious place names in the world, like Hell, Michigan, Hookersville, West Virginia or Lord Berkeley's Knob, Scotland. There are some that sound funny to the Japanese, too. The second largest city in Idaho is Nampa, which happens to be a common slang term that roughly means "girl hunting," what bored young people in Japanese cities usually do on weekends. The Boyne Valley near Dublin, Ireland causes snickering when rendered into katakana, since boin is the sound of soft, round things going, well, "boing." In Holland there's a town called Scheveningen, which comes out sounding like sukebe ningen in Japanese, meaning "depraved human being" (I'm sure they could use some of our T-shirts there). In Texas, Michigan and Alaska there are towns with the name of Onalaska, which happens to sound like onara-suka, which is "Did you have flatulence?" in polite Japanese. The prefecture of Siliana in Tunisia gets more attention than it otherwise would, since it sounds like shiri and ana, a person's rear end and hole, respectively. The most common "catch-all" Japanese insult is baka, meaning "stupid," but in Osaka they prefer the term aho, and I'm sure the town of Ajo, Arizona gets at least a few additional tourists each year because of this name. But the strangest accidental place name would have to be Eromanga, a mining town that's the farthest point from the sea in Australia, with a name that sounds like manga comics that are naughty. Similarly, there's an island near Australia named Erromango, which got miss-transliterated as Eromanga in the Nintendo Wii weather program, making it an instant legend in the eyes of Japanese gamers.

How many words for "rice" do the Japanese have?

There are many large and small challenges you encounter when learning Japanese. For example, it's difficult being at peace with the idea that your brain actually can learn to read hiragana and kanji just like it perceives written English, and breaking through this barrier is an important early milestone. Another small challenge is translating single-word concepts in English into Japanese, which is usually more complex. For example, just as the Eskimo supposedly have many names for snow (which turns out not to be all that true), there are multiple words for rice that are used on a daily basis, like uncooked rice (kome), unpolished rice (genmai), steamed rice that's ready to eat (gohan, which also refers to all food), newly cultivated rice (shinmai, also used to refer to a new employee at an organization), and so on. Being an island nation, the Japanese eat various types of plants grown in the sea, which we call by the unappetizing name of "seaweed." Major categories include nori, the dried, green seaweed eaten with sushi; wakame, green leaves eaten in soup; and konbu, a kind of seaweed that's almost black, used as flavoring in soup or eaten on rice. The Japanese similarly have about five different kinds of tea which would probably be called "green tea" by the average Westerner but which are all very different.

More thoughts on Senpai and Kohai, and the origin of the word Honcho

I wrote last time about how living in Japan puts you in tune with the system of senpai and kohai, or seniors and juniors in a school or organization, and how even foreigners living here unconsciously organize themselves according to how long they've lived in the country. This vertical social system may seem odd to Westerners, but it generally works well in this country that has to cram half the population of the U.S. into a land mass the size of Montana. My daughter walks to school with a group of kids from our neighborhood organized into a unit called a han. When she was small, the oldest child became the leader, or hancho (which is where we get the word Head Honcho in case you wondered), who was responsible for making sure the younger kids kept up with group and that no one was being bullied. Next year, my daughter will be in the sixth grade, and it'll be her turn to help protect the younger kids in the group each morning. Although this top-down system works well through university, it gets stressed when it encounters the real world. While the senpai/kohai system used to work in parallel with the ages of individuals, so that a person at a certain age was always of higher rank than employees younger than him, today it's quite likely for a 35 year old to change jobs and find himself working with a 25 year old, who is the senpai and must be shown respect, even though he's younger.

Japanese ASCII Art Can Make you Cry

I've always been amazed at how expressive the Japanese can be, whether they're inventing new English words to describe products in amazing ways or creating onomatopoeia that capture not only, say, the pakku pakku sound of rapidly eating (which is where Pac-Man gets his name), but the sound of silence or of softly falling snow. Japanese net users are also very creative when it comes to making art with ASCII that expresses emotions and adds character to computer-based communication. A few months ago someone made a BBS post called "Sorry About Baseball" that was a tribute to his mother, decorated with extensive ASCII art. The post was picked up by other users who added music and made animated versions using Flash that have many crying in front of their computer monitors. It's the story of an uneducated mother raising her son alone, despite being very poor. One day, she received tickets to a baseball game, and the boy was overjoyed at the prospect of seeing his first live game; but when they got to the stadium, they found that they weren't actual tickets, only coupons for a discount on regular tickets, which they couldn't afford. On the train back home, the mother showed a tear and said, "I'm sorry for being so stupid."The boy dedicated himself to his studies, eventually winning a scholarship to college so he could make his mother proud. Years later, as she lay dying, his mother woke up and said, as if suddenly remembering something, "I'm sorry about the baseball game." He tried to tell her "I had fun," but he couldn't make his voice work.

My Japan Reconsideration: the Concept of "Senpai"

Before I started J-List, I worked as an ESL teacher, sharing my native language with Japanese students. One Friday, an American co-worker and I took a new teacher who had just arrived in Japan out drinking, so we could get to know him and start showing him around our city. As we imbibed beer at the izakaya bar that was the popular haunt with the English teacher crowd back in the day, something was nagging at me, reminding me of something I was forgetting to do. Finally, I realized what it was, and I turned to my co-worker. "Dave," I said to him, fighting back the weirdness that comes from speaking Japanese with another foreigner, "you realize that you and I are senpai now? And you know what that means." He groaned, but nodded. To the new teacher, Dave and I were senpai, or senior, because we'd been in Japan longer than him, and he was our kohai, or junior. The Japanese social order absolutely required that we go out of our way to guide and help him get used to Japan, and that meant that we had to dig into our wallets and pick up the tab for the night. The social rules were quite clear on the subject, and we had to obey or be in opposition to those rules, which is not a good thing to be in Japan. It's interesting to note that the new teacher was older than both of us, yet still the time-in-a-place-or-organization took precedence over age.

Anime and Japanese Pop Culture Are Everywhere

One thing I really like about being so involved with Japanese popular culture is the global nature of it, how it appeals to so many people around the world. Whether it's singing the theme song to Heidi, Girl of the Alps with a roomful of German fans at a convention near the banks or the Rhine, hanging out with bloody Battle Royale cosplayers in Rome, or finding manga series that I struggled with in college for sale in English at my local bookstore in San Diego, I'm always amazed at how anime and related culture have been accepted by all of us. Back in 2006 a crowd protesting in the Gaza Strip helped their message reach a wider audience by printing a picture of Haruhi Suzumiya -- star of a mind-bending anime series about a girl who yearns to meet ESPers, time travelers and aliens, and gets her wish -- on their sign. The image was picked up by the Japanese press, who were amazed to see the popular anime character in so remote a place. I think part of the reason we can all embrace Japan's pop culture so freely is actually because of its distance from most of us, its lack of connection to our own historical or cultural backgrounds (or hang-ups), which removes barriers that might otherwise make it harder to accept something so different. In short, while we may argue over issues like religion, politics and economics, we can all agree that Godzilla knocking over Tokyo Tower looks pretty awesome, or that "Haruhi-ism" is pretty cool. So, world peace through shared popular culture, everyone!

Understanding Cultural Differences Through CSI: Miami

When you live in a place like Japan, you never know what cultural wrinkles you'll discover next. Maybe you'll stick your chopsticks upright in your rice (which is only done during funerals), pour your own beer (bad manners to do it yourself), or accidentally order some gyumotsu because you didn't know it was pan-fried beef intestines (yuck). My wife and I are both hooked on CSI: Miami, but because of the language difference, she usually watches the Japanese-dubbed broadcast on satellite channel Wowow while I stick the good old English version. During an episode we watched in English last night, the character Delko called his sunglass-wearing boss Horatio Cane by the nickname "H." "What did he just call Horatio?" my wife asked, not sure she'd heard correctly. "Oh, you know, Horatio's nickname is his first initial," I said, and her eyes went wide with surprise. For reasons unknown, the letter "H" has become the universal euphemism for anything related to sex in Japan. For example, if a person is "H" (always pronounced with a Japanese accent, ecchi) he or she thinks about it too much, and the most common way to refer to the act in general is H suru or "to do H." Thus, the idea of leaving Horatio's nickname intact in the Japanese version of the show was just not going to work, and the lines were rewritten.

All about the Japanese word "Gambaru" (do your best)

One word that comes up in anime a lot is gambaru (gahn-BAH-roo, alternately written ganbaru, in Japanese 頑張る), a happy, cheerful term which means to do one's best, to work hard, to give one's all and so on. It's usually heard in its formal form gambarimasu (gahn-bah-ri-mass, "[I will] do my best!"), or else as a request, e.g. gambatte or gambatte kudasai (gahn-BAH-tay koo-da-sai, "please try hard!"), or alternatively in its "command" form, gambare! (gahn-BAH-ray, "Do your best!"). If you want to learn some phrases to surprise Japanese people with, these are good places to start, since everyone will react positively to them. In a country that embraces hard work and diligence as much as Japan, it's not surprising that this term is used on an almost daily basis in many different situations. Japanese salarymen are expected to gambaru at work, while their kids gambaru in their studies at school, and the sick must do the same while they work to get over their illness. As long as a person is giving his all, he's got the seal of approval from Japanese society in general.

What Happens to Foreigners who Live in Japan Too Long

Strange things can happen to foreigners who live in Japan for too long. They might watch TV while drinking beer and eating shredded, dried squid as a snack without thinking about how odd it would look to their friends back home, or start bowing to people while talking on the phone. They'll probably think nothing of a grown man riding a bicycle with a basket on the front and a little bell on the handlebars that makes a lovely ding! sound. If from the U.S., they'll probably only know their shoe size and weight in the Japanese (Metric) system. (When I was in California last month I actually kept my iPhone's weather widget set to degrees Celsius, which is unheard of for an American.) Carried to the extreme, being in Japan for too long can even change your personality. There's a legendary gaijin living in our prefecture who came here from the States during the Vietnam War and forgot to leave. When some English teachers formed a basketball team, he volunteered to coach, but it didn't work out very well. It turns out that the guy had been mellowed out by Japan's extremely non-confrontational, cooperative society so much that he was unable to motivate the players as a coach should, threatening to kick their sorry asses off the team if they didn't shape up and play better, and so on.

More thoughts on the LOLification of English and strange Japanese Internet slang

As the Internet Age marches on, the ongoing LOLification of my native language often has me saying WTF? even though the picture of that kitten that made the cookie but eated it did have me ROTFL. Japanese Internet users love to invent slang words, too, and venturing onto the legendary BBS 2ch (pronounced ni-channel) to check out all the l33t-speak can really get confusing fast. 2-channelers love to use strange words like nin-shin (妊娠）, which usually means "pregnant" but has come to refer to Nintendo fanboys for some reason; gugure (ググれ), a morphing of Google as a Japanese verb meaning "look it up on Google, fool!"; or wwwww, which is laughing, just as zzzzz represents sleeping. Just as Japanese uses many words imported from English, some foreign-derived slang terms include kopi-pe (koh-pi-peh, meaning "copy & paste") or su-re (soo-REH, スレ、from the Japanese pronunciation of the word "thread"). Many words embraced by internet users here are abbreviations of Japanese phrases with the vowels removed, which allows them to be input quickly even when using Japanese input software. Two examples are KTKR (short for kita-kore キタコレ, meaning "Yes, this is it, baby!") or WKTK (wakuwaku-tekateka ワクワクテカテカ, meaning "I really can't wait for that to happen, I'm on pins and needles"). Just as popular U.S.-based BBS 4chan has its /b/tards, 2ch has a sub-group known as the VIPPERS, who evolve even more bizarre net lingo to wrap themselves in.

Learning Japanese can be easy. No, really!

With a sentence structure and grammar unlike anything used in the West along with three different writing systems, learning the Japanese language can certainly be challenging. Then again, there are times when Japanese learners get off easy. First, there are whole swaths of words that are simple to learn, thanks to the way kanji words can be appended to the ends of other words. If you need to specify a language, just add the kanji for language (go) the end of a country name, resulting in France-go, Russia-go and so on. Similarly, nationality can be specified by sticking the character for "person" (jin, pronounced "jean") on the end of a country name, for example America-jin, Nihon-jin. When the Japanese adopted the Western calendar during the Meiji Era, they wisely named January ichi-gatsu (1-month), February ni-gatsu (2-month) and so on -- much easier than using the old esoteric names from the Edo Period. One of the most difficult areas of English for Japanese to learn are verb tenses like past perfect and present progressive, but I'm happy to report that none of these structures exist in Japanese, something bilingual foreigners are thankful for every day. Similarly, Japanese is not a tonal language like Chinese or Vietnamese, making it much easier for English speakers to pronounce. There are some difficult patches in the language, of course, including concepts like "sister" which get split into two, oneesan (older sister) and imouto (younger sister). When I'm talking about something my friend's sister did, my brain isn't used to filing away the age of the girl relative to her male sibling, and it can be difficult to pull that information out on the fly while speaking quickly.

The truth behind "Omiai" (Arranged Marriages)

When I was growing up, I remember thinking that they had arranged marriages in Japan, probably something I got from watching the episode of Happy Days where Arnold gets married in a traditional Shinto ceremony. In reality, the Japanese custom of omiai (easily remembered as "oh, me eye!") is more like an "arranged meeting," a kind of formal get-together between prospective partners, usually organized by busybody aunts who can't stand the thought of their being any single people around them. Omiai can take place with all family members in attendance, or just the prospective couple. Interestingly, you're supposed to bring a Japanese resume form on which you can record your school and work background as well as interests (horseback riding and tea ceremony are recommended hobbies for prospective brides), just like applying for a job, which strikes me as a little odd. If the young people hit it off, they'll go out on more conventional dates to see where things lead. Before my wife met me, she had had omiai with a few men, including the son of a sake distributor that her parents have a business relationship with, hence she couldn't refuse. Fortunately for me, all of the men were quite bowled over by her extensive travels and ability to speak English, and she was still available when I came along.

Learning about the subtleties of Japan through children's programming

Living in Japan can bring you into contact with concepts that may be difficult to wrap your mind around. While Sesame Street has been shown here for years, it really never got that much traction; a much more popular childrens show is the NHK program Okaasan to Issho ("With Mother"), which has been broadcast non-stop since 1959. The show is divided into sections that feature different songs for kids to sing, presumably with their mother, although I would join in despite the title of the show. One song teaches kids "AIUEO" and the beginnings of the hiragana sound system, while another is the Pajama Song, which celebrates toddlers being able to put their pajamas on all by themselves, quite an achievement when you're that small. I've found it interesting to observe the little cultural differences between the show, which is watched by practically every child age 0-5 in Japan, and what I remember watching from my own youth. The show is always hosted by a Singing Older Sister and Singing Older Brother, who lead the kids through the various songs in each section. One day I noticed that the Older Brother host always spoke informal Japanese (早くなるぞ！） while the Older Sister spoke politely　（早くなりますよ！）, a bit of subtle role model-building for the kids to watch and imitate. When I asked my wife about it, I got a blank stare -- apparently no Japanese person could have noticed such a tiny cultural difference.

This video is the Dango Sankyodai, or the Three Dango Brothers, the story of three little dumplings who live on a stick that was shown on the With Mother show and became a national obsession a few years ago. At the top is the Oldest Son, on the bottom is the Third Son, in the middle is the Second Son, Dango Sankyodai. Dango, dango, dango, dango, danso sankyodai. Warning: this song WILL invade your brain and never leave!

The latest cool thing in Japan -- Hot Beer?

Japan is a country that likes to embrace new things, and whatever new and bizarre trend comes along, J-List will be there to report it to you. The latest cool thing in Japan might just be hot, as Kirin introduces its new "Hot Beer" that's consumed in a steaming cup like coffee. Based on the company's Ichiban Shibori Stout dark beer, the drink is served with a stick of cinnamon and sugar cubes on the side. The heat of the beer is supposed to bring out flavors not present when served cold, including a deep aroma not unlike that of coffee. The beer is being test-marketed at the Kirin factory in Yokohama, but the company suggests that curious beer aficionados can try it by microwaving beer to about 120 degrees Farenheit (50 degrees Celsius) and stirring it rapidly to give the beer a Cuppochino-like foamy head on top. It's supposedly good poured over vanilla ice cream, too.

Gaijin to get Language Requirement to Live in Japan?

There was a minor dust-up on the Internets in Japan this week after the government suggested that it might add a Japanese language requirement for long-term foreigners living here. Foreign Minister Masahiko Komura suggested that requiring foreigners renewing multi-year visas or applying for permanent residency status (which generally means foreigners who have been in Japan for 5+ years at least) to meet minimal linguistic requirements would help encourage the foreign population better fit in and be good for Japan's society overall. Some bloggers and others are crying foul at the suggestion, though, saying that it shows a xenophobic side to Japan's government, but I support the idea 100%. It goes without saying that someone trying to live in Japan will get a lot more out of their time here if they can communicate with people, and if the government can find a way to encourage foreigners to study the language, it can only lead to more understanding between gaijin and nihonjin. (Note that normal visas for jobs such as English teachers, which are issued on a year-to-year basis normally, would not be affected by this plan.) A lot of the comments I saw online had to do with whether or not getting foreigners to learn Japanese would lead to them actually being "assimilated" into Japan's society. That's a difficult question, since I know that even after seventeen years of living here, I could commit seppuku in front of the Imperial Palace and still not be considered Japanese, and I'm okay with that -- I'm just an American who happens to like living in Japan. For myself, I know that you can't learn a language without internalizing the values held by that linguistic group, and and the more foreigners take an interest in learning Japanese, the happier everyone will be together.

Karaoke Update: The Age of the Singing Otaku

The J-List staff had fun at our New Year's Party on Friday, and afterwards we engaged in that famous Japanese past time, karaoke. While most people outside of Japan might imagine getting up and singing in front of a lot of strangers on "Karaoke Night" at a bar, in Japan people usually go to a karaoke box with individual rooms so groups can sing together privately, which mitigates a lot of the embarrassment of belting out songs in front of others. Karaoke uses extremely advanced technology in Japan, with a networked system that streams the songs and video to the machine you're singing with from a central location, which allows the most popular songs to be accessible to everyone immediately after a song's release. Looking at the selection of songs available, I was amazed at how much Japan had changed since my arrival back during the first Bush Presidency. Back then, there was a tiny section of "Anime & Hero" theme songs towards the back of the song book, but with the mainstreaming of anime and video game culture over the past decade, the number of anime-related songs available to sing has exploded. In addition to the main book of Japanese songs and a second book that listed offerings in English, Korean, Chinese and Tagalog (pretty international for Japan), the karaoke box we were at had a third book filled with songs from anime and video games. No matter what minor or esoteric song we searched for, from all the Final Fantasy themes to Dance Dance Revolution tracks and even some songs from the dating-sim games we publish in English, we found them all in the song book. Clearly, the age of the singing otaku is here.

Pictures from the J-List New Year's Party, If You Want Them

Okay, since I managed to get back earlier than I thought, here are some pictures. The izakaya was a place called Hokkatei, combining the first two characters of Hokkaido with Tei, meaning stop or in this case restaurant. Good seafood, considering we're as far from the sea as you can get.

Since Forget-the-year and New Year's Parties are quite common in Japan, restaurants like this have pre-set menus ready for us. We got the sashimi and nabe set, which was lots of fish (which you really appreciate when you come to live in Japan), and three big pots of kim-chee soup. Yum.

A rare glimpse of the J-List crew. Hilariously, the girls all sit on one side, and the guys on another side, no matter what we do. It's like we're all in Elementary School. This is us about to do the clap I wrote about in today's update. 

This is atsukan, hot sake. It warmed us nicely.

The nabe was delicious, too. This is kind of like sukiyaki, but deeper, and with different ingredients, including kim-chee, tofu, vegetables and meat. When we'd eaten it all, they put rice and crab meat in and stewed it some more and it was heavenly.

Later it was off to the karaoke box. They actually have disco balls in them, isn't that cool? Do they have disco balls in the U.S. at all? I've been gone way too long to know the answer to that.

There sure was a lot of anime and even video game music to choose from, testimony to the rise of otaku culture in Japan. Here you can see the full selection of songs from Air, one of the PC dating-sim games that was so popular they made a mainstream anime out of it.

I've posted before about how good karaoke is for learning Japanese. The only problem I had with it was, it's so effective at teaching you how to read and pronounce kanji properly, you outgrow it quickly.

Just what we all need, a medley of songs from Macross 7. Well, that was our fun little party. Hope you are going to have some fun this weekend, too. And of course, kotoshi mo yoroshiku onegai shimas, which essentially means thanks for your past support, and we hope you'll continue to help us out in the future.

Off to the J-List New Year's Party now

I'm rushing to finish this update a little early since tonight we're having the J-List Shin-nen Kai, or New Year's Party. Similar to the Bo-nen Kai or "Forget the Year Party" held at the end of the year, a Japanese-style New Year's Party is an opportunity for companies or other groups to officially mark the start of a new year, and be brought closer in the process. We've reserved a room at a local izakaya, a traditional bar-restaurant that serves delicious food in addition to frosty mugs of beer and bottles of hot sake (got to have the hot sake!). J-List isn't a very formal company, and we're all pretty relaxed while we go about our business of bringing Japanese pop culture to the world, but I'm always surprised how ceremonial these company get-togethers automatically become. Once everyone is present, the organizer of the party (Yasu does it every year) will stand up and formally announce that the party has begun. After short speeches from Tomo or myself, we'll have the kanpai (cheers) and start eating and drinking. When the beer is gone we'll gather again and Yasu will announce that the party has come to an end, upon which everyone will clap their hands together loudly once, which symbolically ends the event until next year.

Observations on Japanese education, and "No Media Day"

The other day I came home from work to spend some time with the kids, and I suggested popping a DVD in and watching it. "I can't," my daughter told me. "Today is 'No Media Day.'" This is an interesting idea that Japanese public schools have started to combat the glut of TV and video games in our modern society, and we had a fine time playing a few rounds of Uno instead. I've noticed some other interesting mechanisms that Japanese educators use to help bring students and their parents together. Recently my 12-year-old son made dinner for us, which was part of his Home Economics homework (he made a meat-and-potatoes dish called niku-jaga, an odd name because it sounds like Mick Jagger), designed to help the kids understand how hard it is for Mom to cook for everyone all the time. Then there was the time my daughter was assigned homework to help her mother around the house, which for some reason included making sure the shoes in the genkan (the foyer where people leave their shoes before entering the house) were all lined up neatly, not scattered like they usually are at our house. Compared with my own experiences in the U.S., I've noticed a lot more involvement by parents in the education of their children here, from frequent Parent Days in which mothers and fathers can sit in on classes to a system that places pressure on parents to spend at least one year in the leadership of their school's local PTA.

Juken season in Japan -- time to eat your Kit Kat!

Right now it's juken (test) season in Japan, when hundreds of thousands of high school students take the university entrance exams they've prepared for over the past three years. The tests that each student must take differ depending on what school they're shooting for. Students trying to get into a national university like Tokyo or Kyoto University -- which are the most affordable, which makes them the most popular, which creates academic competition to get in, which increases the academic stature of the schools -- must take two, a standardized test called the Center Test, then the individual test for their school of choice. Because the Center Test is so important to the futures of so many young people, the subjects that appear on it help determine the educational direction of the country. One reason the Japanese aren't generally proficient at using English despite six years of study is that the Center Test requires only knowledge of grammar, vocabulary and the ability to puzzle out listening comprehension questions; since using English to communicate in any way isn't on the test, it's completely ignored by students. Due to a happy linguistic accident, the name Kit Kat sounds similar to kitto katsu ("you will surely win"), which has made it the official snack mothers give to their kids to munch on while taking their tests. To commemorate the season, Nestle has just released the new Sakura Kit Kat for 2008, which we've got on the site now.

The rivalry of Universities: Keio vs. Waseda

Have you ever noticed that when two groups occupy a similar space, rivalries emerge? Whether you're talking about Mac vs PC, Coke vs Pepsi, or the national rugby teams of Australia and New Zealand, each party will try as hard as they can to win against their hated rivals. The top two private universities in Japan are Waseda and Keio, and like Harvard and Yale, the schools have a rivalry that goes back to their founding a century ago. Keio University was founded in 1858 by Yukichi Fukuzawa, a visionary who travelled to the U.S. to study education at Brown University; he also promoted public education of all children and launched an influential early newspaper. Waseda was launched in 1882 by a former samurai named Shigenobu Okuma who had been taught English by a missionary in Nagasaki using the Bible and the Declaration of Independence as his study guides. Today the rivalry between the two schools is fierce, with Keio students mocking the name of Waseda for containing the characters for "rice field" and laughing at the many used book stores that can be found around the campus, implying that the students are too poor to buy new books, while Waseda-ites dislike the snobbery of Keio's wealthier students. Everything comes to a head twice a year with the So-Kei (Waseda and Keio) baseball match, which is watched by so many students that classes at both schools have to be cancelled. The rivalry between Waseda and Keio extends far beyond the current generation of students, since many members of the government are alums of the two schools. When Japan moved to update the faces appearing on its currency a few years ago, Prime Minister Koizumi (a Keio alum) made darn sure that no one removed Mr. Fukuzawa from the 10,000 note, which was the only bill that didn't get refreshed.

Japan's Wonderful TV "Talents"

Spend a little time in front of a TV in Japan and you'll see more than a few interesting "talents" (tarento), which is a generic word for any comedian, actor or other famous person who appears on TV regularly. These TV stars come in all shapes and sizes, from super cute models like Aki Hoshino and Yuko Ogura, to Speedo-wearing comedian Yoshi Kojima whose signature joke (shouting sonna no kankei ne! or "But that doesn't matter right now!" as often as possible) became a national past-time, to exotic gaijin talents like Bobby Ologon from Nigeria. One star who's been seen on J-TV quite a bit lately is Natsuko "Gal" Sone (SOH-neh), a 5'4" Japanese girl who could probably eat more than you or I could in a dozen meals. A professional "gluttonous eater" who has competed in several competitive eating contests in Japan as well as Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest in Coney Island, she has a seemingly endless ability to wolf down sushi, ramen, or mayonnaise pizza (her favorite food). You can usually find her appearing on one of Japan's many variety shows, chatting with the hosts while casually shoveling more food down her gullet. Usually when I watch Japanese TV, I'm on the lookout for yarase, or faked content designed to make for interesting viewing at the expense of honesty, but Gal Sone seems to be the real deal since she eats everything in full view of the cameras. Despite her huge appetite, she weighs only 95 lbs (43 kg).

The uncanny ability of the Japanese to deal with crowded spaces

It's natural for the Japanese to be more skilled at some things than folks in the U.S. or Europe. For example, the Japanese are certainly better at performing detailed, meticulous tasks such as designing small machines or perfectly painting Gundam models, and are also very creative when it comes to making new English words (Meltykiss, yum). Similarly, the Japanese seem to have an aesthetic sense that I think most Westerners lack, an ability to arrange something as mundane as food in a way that brings out its bi (beauty, pronoucned like "bee"), as you can see with bento and other types of Japanese cuisine. Another area the Japanese definitely excel at is dealing with the cramped and crowded spaces that are all too common here. At the Comic Market, the doujin convention held twice a year at Tokyo Big Sight, around a half million people need to make their way into the halls and find the artist circles whose books they want to pick up. Buying comics from popular circles means standing in line, which is extremely difficult to do when there are thousands of people milling all around you. Somehow, though, a line manages to form despite all the chaos, with the last person in line politely holding a sign that indicates that this is the place for new people to line up. One of the most important virtues for a Japanese person to have is gaman, the ability to endure an unpleasant situation, and you can really appreciate a society in which everyone understands the importance of being polite to others when there are that many people around you.

How to make a fool of yourself in front of a famous Japanese artist

One of the defining features of the Japanese as a people is that they are generally kenson (KEN-son), that is, humble and not boastful. If you've ever tried to compliment a Japanese person on something such as their English ability or how smart their kids are, you may have experienced a strong denial that can be confusing to Westerners. I was reminded of this during the San Diego Comicon a couple of years ago. While setting up our booth I happened to see a Japanese-looking girl with a badge that read Junko Mizuno. Being a complete idiot, I didn't realize it was the artist herself, and I actually said, "Oh, you have the same name as that famous artist, how interesting." The girl, who is so small-bodied she could have passed for a sixth grader, blushed red that anyone would think her famous, despite her many published works all around the world. One word the Japanese use when receiving some kind of compliment is okage-sama de (oh-KAG-geh sah-mah deh), a phrase which literally means "thanks to you," which is a little weird since the person doing the complimenting probably had nothing to do with the acquisition of the skill in question. Often when you say something nice to a Japanese person, they'll turn the kindness back onto you with this phrase.

Barrier to white people learning Japanese: Kanji

Without a doubt, one of the big barriers to learning Japanese are the kanji, the Chinese characters that communicate meaning in written Japanese. Elementary school students start learning kanji in the first grade, starting with the simplest character there is (ichi, the number one, written 一) and going all the way up to the last character of the sixth grade (hai, meaning ash, written 灰). Although many might blanch at the idea of mastering the entire list of 1945 joyo or "general use" kanji, what you need to be considered literate in the language, it's really not that bad if you take it a step at a time. In recent years, the rise of waapro (word processing) and computers has brought a real change in how people work with their writing system. Since characters are written by hand less often, instead increasingly typed using a computer keyboard or cell phone's keypad with the correct character picked from a list, many Japanese (and gaijin, like yours truly) lose much of their ability to write the characters, although the ability to read them is usually not affected. The problem is pretty widespread, with Japanese people from all walks of life generally less able to write kanji than the previous generation. The other day I caught a TV show called Neptune League in which teams of famous people -- say, female TV announcers, who are all supposed to be very well educated -- ride in a train traveling through a computer-generated mine shaft. Words fly out at them, and they must correctly write the kanji characters on the screen or the CG car will be sent crashing to the bottom of the shaft. It's quite an interesting show -- everyone in our family gets quite excited as they try to write the correct answers before the timer runs out.

Eating "ekiben" (train station bento) on the Shinkansen

On Sunday I took my son into Tokyo to check out an exhibition on robots at the National Science Museum, where we got to see the famous robot Asimo that can climb stairs and play soccer. We took the opportunity to ride the shinkansen, Japan's famous bullet trains that zip along special elevated rails, which is my all-time favorite way to travel. My son told me he wanted to eat ekiben, the traditional bento boxed lunches that are only sold at train stations. Each Japanese city makes its own unique train station bento lunches, like Masu no Sushi (a round disc of rice with salmon on top that you eat like a pizza) from Toyama on the Sea of Japan, or the famous Kanimeshi (crab meat bento) from Hakodate, Hokkaido. The symbol of the city of Takasaki (where we catch the train) is the Daruma, those round red figures that are displayed in homes and businesses to bring good luck, which are representations of Bodhidharma, a historical figure from India in the 6th century who founded the predecessors to Zen Buddhism and Kung Fu, and who attained his unique round shape by fasting and meditating for so long that his arms and legs disappeared. When it came time to choose which lunch we wanted to eat, we naturally picked Daruma Bento, and ate it in the train as the countryside sped by.

Making some changes to the blog

Just a heads up, I'm going to be making some changes to the way I do the blog posts. Instead of one "super" post with several subjects and today's newly posted items, I'm going to start doing smaller, more conventional posts in a more conventional format. I'm doing this for several reasons, but one of them is so that someone who wants to link to a point I make from another website doesn't necessarily have to be pointing to a post with Zenra Ice Skating, or whatever the latest wacky product is. Feedback on this is greatly appreciated. 

Thinking about elections in Japan vs. the USA, a mechanism for sexual equality, and information you can get from the Japanese news

There are two things that are really strange to watch in Japanese: sportscasters giving the play-by-play of an American football game and news reporting on American politics. With the U.S. presidential race officially underway, everyone is watching the caucuses to see which candidates will look the most "presidential" by the time they're done. The Japanese masukomi -- what the news media is called here, from "mass communications" -- is no exception, following candidates around with cameras and explaining to viewers in extra detail just what is going on, since the American political process is about as confusing to the Japanese as, well, the rules of American football. Japan's political structure is quite different, a British-style parliamentary democracy in which two major and three minor parties compete for seats in the country's two legislative houses, with the party or coalition of parties in power electing the Prime Minister. Because the people don't choose their leader directly as with Presidential elections, there's a lot less dialogue between the Prime Minister and the people when it comes to the issues. The Japanese are often fascinated with the gap between flamboyant American presidents with their positive speeches that start with "My fellow Americans" and the more subdued politicians found in Japan, a country in which building consensus with other lawmakers is valued more highly than individual leadership skills. 

  

I talked last time about how many Japanese women don't seem to set the same goals for themselves as women from the West, in many cases actively wanting to get married and become full-time housewives. Not everyone is this way of course: the more urban the area you're in, the more likely you are to find educated women with good careers they wouldn't give up for anything. But by and large, the majority of females live by the motto that "marriage equals quitting your job." Since Japanese law requires that companies provide equal opportunity to both men and women, companies have evolved a two-track system that lets employees choose whether they want to be on a "career" path or the less-demanding "office work" path. At the bank we use in Japan, there are two kinds of employees: tellers who wear bank uniforms while they help customers, and the managers wearing normal business suits, who are responsible for making decisions and bringing new business into the bank. "Career" employees of either gender have to take qualification tests, move around the company more frequently to expose themselves to all its operations and have their performance measured, but they receive higher pay and promotions; "office" path employees, on the other hand, earn less but have fewer responsibilities. While it's probably not perfect, this system seems to work pretty well. Employees who want to pursue a career in banking can opt for the more challenging path, while those who don't want the added work (or who want the option of being able to quit at any time, say to get married) aren't asked to be more career-minded than they want to be.

Tragedy struck the other day when a man got caught in the doors of a gondola at a ski resort in our prefecture, falling to his death, and I happened to note that the news report stated that he was a "part time employee" of the ski resort. A person's status as defined by how they're employed seems to be somehow more important in Japan than it is in the U.S., and news reports regularly inform viewers of whether the person being talked about is a kaisha-in (full-time company employee), arubaito (part-time employee, from the German word for "work"), komu-in (public employee) and so on. It can be odd to hear this information provided so meticulously, especially when the employment status of the person being reported on has nothing to do with the event in question. One of the most common "people categorizing words" you hear is mushoku, or unemployed, so often tied to reports of crimes in the news. It's not stated overtly, but it seems like the inclusion of a persons employment status in news reports helps viewers know how they're supposed to feel, with the assumption that something that happenes to a homeless man or a "member of a violent gang organization" (the polite way to say a Yakuza gangster) is fundamentally different from a white-collar salaryman.

Thoughts on men and women and marriage, things that surprise foreigners in Japan, and how we sound to the Japanese

Yesterday my wife and I went to our favorite restaurant and noticed that the girl who had been working there was gone, replaced by a young man who was waiting the tables instead. I guessed why the girl wasn't around -- "I'll bet she quit to get married" -- and when we asked the owner, that was indeed the reason. When it comes to men and women there's definitely a different mind set at work over here, with a high number of women actively yearning for kekkon taishoku (leaving employment due to marriage) so they can become housewives, at least until the kids are old enough for them to return to work. While I personally believe women can do anything they set their minds to, the goals that many women in Japan set for themselves can be quite different from what's considered the norm back home. During my career as a teacher I had one student who had really dedicated herself to learning English, studying in the UK and working hard to achieve her goal of becoming a "ground hostess" for JAL, one of the most sought-after careers here. Naturally she threw all this away when a coworker proposed marriage to her, quitting her job and becoming the only perfectly bilingual homemaker in the neighborhood. The challenge for me as an outsider is to keep from judging things like this from my own local world-view, since Japan isn't the U.S. and the U.S. isn't Japan, but sometimes it can be a challenge. 

I talk a lot about how difficult it is for Japanese people to learn English, with its complex grammar and pronunciation rules. But what about the reverse -- how badly to foreigners mangle Japanese when we speak it? First of all, Japanese is just a language, and it's not harder or easier than any other -- actually, the lack of equivelents for some of the complex grammar in English ("she would have been able to go...") is downright wonderful. Of course, foreigners speak Japanese with accents, and these depend on the speaker's native language -- an American speaking Japanese will sound very different from a person from China or Korea. Languages like English use intonation to stress meaning, and it's common for foreigners to accidentally apply these rules to their new language, resulting in speech that goes up and down like a roller coaster compared to Japanese, which is rather flat in intonation. (Remember my theory that Japanese people come from the planet Vulcan.) There are a lot of English words in daily use in Japan, like "weekend" or "elevator," and English speakers tend to say these words with their native pronunciations, not the (correct, in this case) more challenging oo-ee-koo-EN-doh or eh-reh-BEH-tah. Some foreigners supposedly speak Japanese too quickly: when the news program World Business Satellite comes on, I know my wife will make fun of the gaijin commentator from Morgan Stanley as he gives his rambling assessment of the latest economic numbers, somehow moving his head up and down like a chicken. 

When foreigners first come to Japan, there are many things that stand out as odd to them. Using coins for the equivalent of $1 and $5 bills, which Americans aren't used to. Having 50 or more vending machines all without immediate walking distance of wherever you are, and sliding a $100 bill into one to buy a drink. Manhole covers decorated with culturally significant images from each region of the country. Getting a hot meal at a convenience store. Horizontally oriented stoplights, except in Northern Japan, where they hang them vertically due to the heavy snowfall. Stores which let you know they're about to close by playing Auld Lang Syne through store speakers. Drinks with names like Pocari Sweat, Calpis or Volume Up Water. It's all very odd, but that's the fun of going to another country, seeing what it has to offer and comparing it with what you know back home.

As promised, here are a few pictures. Been so busy... :(

This is the pen he got from Prime Minister Hashimoto, if anyone remembers him.

Game with a letter, and is stamped with "Prime Minister of Japan" on it, which made our uncle very proud.

This was the watch he got last year. A gold plated pocketwatch, really nice.

This was the thing though, a beautiful silver cup (like the cups the fliers drank sake out of right before they went off on their kamikaze missions). Stamped with the symbol of the Prime Minister.

And here's the letter from the PM, in extra large letters. Essentially thanking him for fighting for his country so long ago. 

A useful word of Japanese, Japan's seasonal nature, and how to teach an 80 year old Japanese war veteran about the Internet

I've got a bit of a problem. On January 1st we did what we always do, visiting my wife's family, including making our annual trip to her 80-year-old uncle's house. He fought during World War II on the Ise, essentially a battleship on the front and a flight deck on the back which could launch a squadron of fighters. We like to listen to his war stories -- he talks about how he got the scar on his face from shrapnel from an American bomb, and how the only reason he survived the war is because they took the fuel from his ship and gave it to the Yamato for its final sortie. I like my kids to talk with him as much as possible, since it's hard to get the kind of insight he can offer us about the past. Anyway, he's decided he wants to learn how to use the Internet, and is hoping we can help him get online. Now, it can be a challenge for any older person to learn something that complex, but it's doubly hard for him. When he was growing up, it was considered "unpatriotic" to use foreign loan words from English, which resulted in words like "curry" being translated into kanji meaning "yellow sauce with meat on rice" (黄色肉入り汁かけご飯）for the duration of the war, and as a result, people from his generation understandably know almost zero English. Yet here I am trying to explain alien terms like "mouse" "browser" and "window," words that can't be translated into Japanese since they're exclusively used in English. It sure is a challenge. 

One of the more useful words of Japanese you might want to learn is nani, which essentially means "what," and is one of the first words that old-school anime fans from the 1980s like me learned -- we didn't have any of these newfangled "subtitles" or "English dubbed tracks" you kids have nowadays. While you can occasionally hear nani?! (what?!) when watching anime or dramas in Japanese, the word usually takes a more polite form in everyday use. The most common usage would be nan desu ka? (nahn dess kah), which is just "What [is it]?" with an implied subject that's usually clear from the context. If you want to ask what a specific object is, point to it and say kore wa nan desu ka? (ko-REH wa nan dess ka), which is "What is this?" In Japanese, there are "counters," words you use to count different types of items, like mai (for counting flat objects, like sheets of paper or coins) or hon (for counting cylindrical objects like umbrellas). You can combine these counters with nani to ask thing like "how many playing cards?" or "how many pencils?" which would be nanmai? or nanbon? respectively. Put this kanji together with the character for "hour" and you get nanji, what hour, e.g what time is it now. Since this word has the same pronunciation as that dreamy bread served in Indian restaurants (naan), all foreigners are required to make the same corny joke, holding up the bread and asking kore wa nan desu ka? (which would mean either "what is this?" or "is this naan bread?"). 

One thing I've noticed about Japan: it's a very seasonal place. Spring is beautiful with its short-lived cherry blossoms, summer is hot and humid with many festivals, fall is filled with crisp brown leaves, and winter is cold and frosty. I've met Japanese who tell me with great pride that, unlike America, Japan has four distinct seasons, and they enjoy every one of them -- apparently these people haven't ventured outside of Southern California. Japanese people try to avoid being kisetsu-hazure (ki-SET-tsu HA-zoo-ray), which means doing the wrong things for the wrong season, and foreigners regular receive comments like "What's wrong? Aren't you cold?" for wearing short sleeved shirts on warm days in October -- we're too dumb to know that long sleeves should be worn after October 1 regardless of the actual temperature. Once, I was teaching a lesson using an ESL textbook with my students which featured a picture of a boy flying a kite in summer. My students were amazed that anyone would do this -- it turns out in Japan, flying kites (called tako) is something you do on New Year's Day, and almost no one would think of flying kites during any other season. Our lesson turned into quite an interesting cultural discussion.