Open Discussion on Japanese Television, with Bakusho Mondai

I've often been impressed with the open nature of discussion I've seen on Japanese television, with several shows that really present opinions to viewers in innovative ways. One is a show called If I Were Prime Minister, which features the popular comedian Hikari Ota of the comedy duo Bakusho Mondai as he throws out topics to a panel of guests that include actors, writers and real sitting politicians. They never pull punches as they lambaste a panel of Finance Ministry employees over the lost pension payment scandal (while letting the employees tell their side of the issue), or call in doctors to discuss issues like the rise in hospital deaths due to doctor error. Considering what a peaceful country Japan is, you'd think that it'd be difficult to have a real public debate over the issue of whether Japan should Japan arm itself with nuclear weapons in response to threats from North Korea, yet that episode was lively, with all participants expressing their views despite the special nature of the topic in a country that's experienced two atomic bombings. Another show that's quite interesting is Live Debate Until Morning, a late-night show in which top-ranking politicians and members of the current cabinet will gather to discuss issues on live television until 4 am while millions watch. Since the show is so popular, every major politician makes sure to be included, and smaller parties are all invited to participate in the discussions, which keeps things from begin pulled unfairly in any one direction.

 

All About "Mascot Characters" in Japan, and Nara's Ugly Buddha

One thing about the Japanese: they love kawaii, or cute, and this often takes the form of "mascot characters" who promote everything from sporting events to public television and even Japan's military. They have mascots in the U.S., too, of course -- I remember doing my homework while sitting on the grass next to the statue of Monty Montezuma at SDSU -- but the Japanese really take it to a new level. One area where you often see these cute characters is government-affiliated organizations, which use them to soften their image with their constituents. Some publically-created mascots include Narita-chan, the official character of the Narita International Airport, the Noppon Brothers, who raise awareness of Tokyo Tower, and the cute uniform-wearing horse characters that are the public face of the Gunma Prefectural Police. Companies often create cute characters to help sell their products, like Kyoro-chan, the little round bird that's been promoting Morinaga's Choco Ball line of tasty snacks for forty years. Sometimes making cute characters to promote your cause can have the opposite effect, which the city of Nara found out recently. As part of an upcoming $95 million celebration commemorating the founding of Japan's first capital 1300 years ago, the city commissioned a new character that's basically a cross between a deer and an image of Buddha, since Nara is famous for these two things (the city is home to the largest bronze status of Buddha in Japan). But there've been widespread complaints that the character is ugly and an insult to Buddhists, as well as a big waste of taxpayer money. What do you think?

What Color "Randoseru" (School Backpack) Are You?

In the U.S., "back to school" season is in August, when parents prepare for the start of the new school year in September, buying new shoes and notebooks and clothes for their kids. In Japan, the school year has always started in April, seemingly timed to coincide with the cherry blossom season, and right now parents are bustling as they try to get everything ready in time. Education is taken very seriously in Japan, and in the case of new first graders, families will go all-out to make sure the child gets off on the right foot. First, every student must have a a desk to do his or her homework at, and there's a huge industry of companies selling stylish and functional study desks for kids, which include features such as a plastic sheet with images from the latest popular anime series printed on it, which can be removed later when the child is older. Another important choice is what kind of school backpack to buy. School backpacks are called randoseru, from the Dutch word ranzel, and they're extremely well made hard leather backpacks designed to hold everything the student needs over six years of elementary school. Right now stores are filled with an array of smart-looking school backpacks for parents to buy for their children, and every year manufacturers seem to offer them in a wider array of interesting colors. This move to offer more color choices is somewhat odd, since for 99% of children you see walking to school, the color of a randoseru is black for boys, red for girls, with almost no exceptions. A lot of this is cultural -- in a country where not standing out is extremely important, the idea of being the only kid with an orange or sky blue or yellow backpack would be quite unthinkable.

Employment at Japanese Companies is Down

I caught a report on TV the other day about a unique problem Japanese companies are facing. It seems that the best young employees aren't that interested in working for companies like Honda, Mitsubishi and Sony, and instead are looking to join Google, Nike, Nokia or Microsoft if they can. These are gaishikei or "foreign capital" companies, a term which is loaded with images of open, flexible corporate culture where individuality and fresh ideas are encouraged rather than hammered down like the proverbial "standing nail." While working for a Japanese company offers more stability and less fear of sudden risutora (layoffs, from the word "restructure"), young people today prefer to work in an environment where they can make a more active contribution and distinguish themselves. The trend is supposedly happening in China, too, where U.S. firms like Motorola and Intel and are proving better at winning top applicants than Japanese companies. One job-seeker interviewed said, "I have the impression that in U.S. and European companies, I might be fortunate enough to have an idea of mine accepted and turned into a product, allowing me to see the fruits of my hard work. But this would be difficult in a Japanese organization." It's a long-term crisis for Japanese companies, I'd say: the kind of bold energy that led to game-changing ideas like YouTube or even Toys R Us just couldn't have emerged from inside Japan, since so many industries are dominated by large, hide-bound companies. There's another reason Japanese might prefer to work for foreign-based companies: being able to say that you work at BMW or Intel is extremely kakko ii (kah-ko EE, cool), and anyone with a career with a well-known foreign company will surely become popular with members of the opposite sex.

Robots in Japan and Lego MindStorms Soccer

The Japanese have a long history with robots, going all the way back to karakuri ningyo, mechanical dolls that mimic human movements and do things like serve tea and bow to guests, which date back to the 18th century. (If William Gibson is reading this, there's a steampunk book idea here, I just know it.) Today, robots play a relatively large part in daily life here, from assembling cars to acting as robotic pets to occasionally saving Tokyo from attacking aliens. Universities and companies in Japan invest heavily in the development of new kinds of robots, like the famous Asimo who can walk up and down stairs or a female robot that struts in a sexy manner to get your attention, with the the Holy Grail being to create a robot that can take care of Japan's aging citizens. On Sunday I spent the day at the Robocup Junior Championship, where ten teams did battle with soccer-playing robots based on the Lego MindStorms platform, zooming around a game field searching for a ball that they could "see" with a light sensor and figuring out the best way to propel it into the goal. It was very exciting -- the final match came down to one team of robots using the current NXT generation of MindStorms and a team using the older RCX series, which has stronger motors. In the end, the older generation prevailed, but my son's team did well enough to get invited to the regional championships in Tokyo -- he was thrilled.

Douglas MacArthur and the Japanese part II

Speaking of MacArthur, here's an ad for a Takarazuka production about him that I saw. Bet you've never imaged anything like this ^_^ Takarazuka is the all-female production company started in response to Kabuki being all male.

On the Endless Road Construction in Japan

I went to the dentist the other day to get my teeth checked. Normally, it's a ten minute drive, but I ran into no less than five teams of men digging up the road between the J-List office and my destination. It's all part of living in Japan, of course: the end-of-year road work, when government agencies hurry to use up their budgets before the Japanese fiscal year ends March 31. Japan is a country that's addicted to construction, and by law all car- and gasoline-related taxes must be used to build roads and only roads, even if there are other priorities. As a result, March always marks a huge increase in road work throughout the country, despite there being no actual benefit to anyone. Because roads are usually more narrow in Japan than in the U.S., it's common for construction areas to employ one or two "road guides" whose job it is to guide cars safely around the site, holding a flashlight to indicate whether it's okay to go or if you need to wait for a car coming from the opposite direction to go past. The only thing you can say about roads in Japan is that they are well maintained -- I do believe I've never hit a single pothole on a Japanese road.

Little Mis-Pronounciations of English in Japanese

The Japanese, of course, use a lot of English in their daily lives, even if serves mainly as a decoration, like a businessman showing his intelligence by peppering his speech with haughty-sounding katakana words like "compliance" "collaboration" or "initiative," the reverse version of American businessmen using trendy Japanese buzzwords. But because the Japanese have a limited phonetic range compared to English, and because words have been brought in over a space of many years, English words are sometimes imported "wrong," at least as far as my Californian-American English ear is concerned. The other day I asked my wife to get some yogurt from the refrigerator for me, specifying that I wanted the "Bio Yogurt" that was there. Since I was speaking Japanese, I said the word "bio" with its Japanese pronunciation of "be-oh," and this gave me a little shiver of weirdness since it's not said that way in my native tongue. Some other English words that are often changed compared to American English include "micro," which is pronounced "mii-cro" about half the time; energy, which sounds like "eh-neh-ru-GEE" with a hard "G"; and cocoa and aloe, both of which get their final silent syllables pronounced. There's nothing for it but to get used to these alternate pronunciations, and it's really not that hard -- before I know it I'm talking funny in English.

Douglas MacArthur and the Japanese

You probably don't think about Douglass MacArthur very much, but to the Japanese, he's quite a figure. As Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in the Pacific, he battled the Japanese throughout the region, and his was the hand that officially received the surrender on the USS Missouri, ending the war. But to the Japanese, it was in the postwar period that MacArthur did great things, guiding the rebuilding of Japan as a "kind and loving father" to the nation, not entirely different from the Founding Fathers of the Meiji Restoration 78 years before. He brought in many democratic reforms, writing a new anti-war constitution. He broke up the zaibatsu conglomerates and redistributed five million acres of land to individual farmers, which no doubt helped contribute to Japan's healthy middle class today. More than anything, I think that MacArthur knew the importance of not "stepping on the face" of the Japanese, to borrow a phrase from their language. They were defeated, but the General took care to protect the Imperial Family from responsibility for the war, which was an important symbol to the people. I can find no evidence of "Abu Ghraib" like events during the Occupation, possibly thanks to the policy of choosing soldiers who had not fought in the Pacific theater, and thus had no special grudges. A lot of the plans he implemented were undone after the Occupation ended, such as the ban on all forms of martial arts and Kabuki plays, but the important changes stuck. The generation growing up after the war ended has the most reverence for the man. When I asked my wife's mother what her impression of him was, she practically gushed. "It's because of MacArthur that Japan is here today."

History Lesson on the Mitsubishi Zaibatsu

One concept you get used to when living in Japan is the ubiquitity of certain famous companies in many different industries. Take Mitsubishi, for example, a sprawling conglomorate of companies (keiretsu) that engages in everything from building cars to shipping to operating nuclear power plants and Japan's largest bank. (They also built the Zero during World War II.) The history of Mitsubishi began in 1870, when Iwasaki Yataro founded a trading company that would become Mitsubishi Shokai, a large shipping and trading interest, which soon diversified into coal mining, banking, insurance and military procurement. The name of the company comes from mitsu (three) and hishi (water chestnut), which is shaped like a diamond, and the famous logo is based on Yataro's family crest. The company grew quickly, eventually becoming one of the "big three" zaibatsu, along with Sumitomo and Mitsui, which wielded so much economic power that they could influence the political direction of the entire country. After World War II, all of the old zaibatsu were broken up for their role in the conflict, but all survive today as loose groups of associated companies.

On Traditional "Sento" (Public Baths) and Street Fighter II

If you ever come to Japan, you really should be sure to sample the bathing culture here. Although onsen (natural volcanic hot springs) are more famous, bathing was traditionally done in public baths known as sento, a word which literally means a place you can take a bath for a sen, an old coin equal to 1/100 of a yen, although they cost about 400 yen now. Sento have been around for centuries, with the first opened inside Edo Castle in 1591, and these traditional bathing places have been depicted in ukiyoe art for centuries. In more modern times, sento bring up images of the Showa Period, when most Japanese didn't have baths in their homes, and the picture of young apartment-dwellers walking to the sento with their bath kits under their arm is a classic one from the postwar era. Sento are famous for the extensively detailed Japanese art on the walls for customers to enjoy, as well for these yellow buckets that advertise a headache medicine called Kerorin; a glimpse of these buckets is enough to make most any Japanese person extremely natsukashii (NOTS-ka-shee), or nostalgic. Two of the most famous Japanese public baths in popular culture outside of Japan include the E. Honda level from Street Fighter II and the baths seen in Hayao Miyazaki's fim Spirited Away.

 

Understanding Kanji: The Basics

The Japanese writing system is based on kanji, the pictographs evolved by the Chinese starting around 2500 B.C., and China serves a similar role to Asia as Rome does in the West as the primary basis of writing and culture. Although learning to read kanji is a challenge for Westerners, it's actually quite a logical when you get used to it. First, the simplest characters are stylized representations of everyday objects, like mountain (yama) or rice field (tanbo), both of which look so much like what they mean you might be able to guess them just by looking. One of the most famous kanji characters in the West is naka (also read chu), which means "inside" or "middle" and can be seen on the costume of the Greatest American Hero and in the film Red Dragon, as well as in the name for China itself ("the country at the center of the world"). Kanji is composed of "radicals," essentially characters within characters which help to organize things. For example, the kanji for "to say" (iu) looks like a stack of books, and many kanji with similar cognative meanings, such as to read (yomu) or language (go) feature this character on the left half. In the Chinese speaking world there are two standards for characters, Traditional (used in Taiwan and Hong Kong) and Simplified (used in mainland China, Singapore and Malaysia). Since kanji have been used in Japan since the 6th century B.C., Japan uses the former, with the result being that I can probably read a menu with little problem in Hong Kong (although I couldn't prounce anything correctly), but I'd be quite lost in China proper.

Aizuchi, the Japanese Tradition of Saying "yes" All the Time

Leave it to Japan to turn concepts as simple as "yes" and "no" into something more complex than it needs to be. But because of the differences in language and culture, sometimes even these simple ideas can cause confusion. "Yes" in Japanese is hai, and in addition to affirming a statement or question, it's also used to let the person whose talking to you know you're listening attentively. This is called aizuchi, words of agreement that a Japanese will say while listening to another person. It's not uncommon for gaijin to assume that a person saying hai...hai or so desu ne (yes, that's so) to us is actually agreeing with what we're saying, when in fact the opposite may well be true. A classic example of this this tradition to insert words of agreement in the middle of what someone else is saying are folk songs in which one singer sings the lines of the song, interrupted by a chorus of shamisen-playing background singers who shout out their agreement to what the first singer has just said. I learned soon after arriving in Japan that to not give this verbal feedback to someone who's talking to you can be rude, and they're likely to stop what they're talking about and ask, "Are you listening to me?"

The Pachinko + Speed Racer Connection

Japan's Pachinko industry continues to innovate in interesting ways as it tries to appeal to new kinds of customers, and the current trend of tying new machines to famous anime series seems to be going strong. The latest offering is a Speed Racer Pachinko game no doubt designed to capitalize on the upcoming film by the Wachowski Brothers. The game goes beyond traditional Pachinko by adding video game elements on an LCD screen, urging the customer to keep playing so he can finish the current race and displaying new screens of art as the player shoots the metal balls into the machine. There are several game types, including a special "Battle Reach" mode that lets the Mach 5 do some of its signature tricks when you play well. Personally, I love the marriage of anime with pachinko, even though I'm not exactly a fan of the game itself, as it gives popular manga-ka a chance to update their characters, like the gorgeous redesign of the Galaxy Express 999 universe by Leiji Matsumoto. Other pachinko machines with interesting themes you can find in Japan include the 70s anime classic A Dog of Flanders (watch poor Nello and Patrasche ascend to heaven with angels all around them as you play), the Korean drama Winter Sonata, and that campy classic Knight Rider, which was such a hit in Japan back in the 80s.

Car Names: Naked, Every, Sunny Bluebird, and "That's"

Although Japan is famous for its extensive rail network, allowing people living in large cities like Tokyo to get by without owning a car at all, most families in less urbanized areas do own automobiles. Some of the cars sold here have names that sound extremely strange to gaijin, like the Daihatsu Move Latte I saw driving on the road the other day. Would you be caught dead in a car called Naked? What about an Every, or Sunny Bluebird, or maybe a Thanks Chariot? Or the Honda That's -- I'm not kidding, "That's" is the name of the thing. Or maybe a Life Dunk, which I guess is supposed to make you think of the most excellent game of basketball you ever played. Although drivers perceive English to be very kakko ii (cool), it's increasingly common for car companies to mine languages like Spanish or Italian for car names, which gives us such interesting cars as Demio (Spanish for "of mine"), the Familia S-Wagon ("family sporty wagon") or the Spacio ("space"). One of the few names derived from a Japanese word is the Toyota Camry, which comes from kanmuri meaning "crown," part of the company's strange fixation with this word. Other cars in this series include the Corona (Spanish for "crown"), the Corolla (Latin for "small crown") and their current flagship luxury model in Japan, the Crown Royal Saloon.

(This is the Honda Vamos. I just love that name.)

Money in Japan

You've been in Japan too long when, on a visit home, it takes you three tries to write a check. It's funny but true. Japan is a very cash-based society, and there are no such things as using personal checks to pay for goods. On payday, employees at many Japanese companies in Japan get a fat envelope of 10,000 yen notes as their monthly salary, which would be unthinkable in the U.S. A couple of years ago we bought some land in order to expand the J-List facilities, and I remember going to the owner's house to pay them for the land in cash, which was certainly an interesting experience. As a result of this lack of personal checks, foreigners who live in Japan for a long time completely forget how to write them and have to re-learn it every time they go home. When you need to pay for something in Japan, you usually do a direct transfer to their bank account, called furikomi in Japanese. It's inconvenient and the bank fees are high (around $6 to send $200 for some hard drives I bought recently), but that's the system that's used most commonly in Japan.

Do the Japanese Say "I Love You"?

Do the Japanese say "I love you"? It's an interesting question that touches on cultural issues as well as linguistic. There are several ways to express the concept of love in Japanese, with the most casual being suki desu ("I like you") or dai-suki desu ("I 'big-like' you"), both of which imply romantic love when used with a person as the object; or the phrase ai shiteru, which specifically means "I love you." As a general rule, Japanese couples verbally express love for each other a lot less than is done in the West. Part of this is just the culture here -- strong feelings like love are not displayed openly since (I've been told) saying a thing over and over again can rob it of its real meaning. Instead, Japanese couples in love rely on a concept baffling to foreigners called mugon ryokai, or "wordless communication," a kind of telepathic text-messaging that enables an idea to be perfectly understood by both parties even though it's never stated overtly. The concept of love can seem quite abstract in Japanese, and there are multiple Japanese words for the term. The word koi usually describes romantic love, while ai is a higher kind of love that is used for family or anyone who's very dear to you, or the steady, slow-burning love of marriage. These two words are combined into a compound word to make a general word for love that marries both sides, which is ren'ai.

On Being Unique: Japan's First Black Enka Singer

If you're thinking of breaking into Japan's tarento (talent) world, here's a bit of advice: you gotta be original. Japan's entertainment world is filled with singers, comedians and other famous people who often occupy mind-share with fans based on their originality, like the interesting twist that small-bodied cute girl Gal Sone brings to the TV screen as she shoves twelve plates of sushi down her throat. The foreigners who have found fame in Japan also depend on being unique, such as Bobby from Nigeria, who can really spice up a variety show about cooking, or the most famous Japanese-bilingual Italian in Japan, Girolamo Panzetta, who happens to be the only Japanese-bilingual Italian in Japan. The general rule is, if there's already a foreigner who can make jokes in the dialect of rural Yamagata prefecture, there's no need for a second one, so it's important to have a Unique Selling Proposition if you want to make it big. Now the world of enka, the eerily beautiful traditional music of Japan, is getting an injection of soul with the debut of the first black enka singer this week. His name is JERO, short for Jerome, and the quarter-Japanese, three-quarter African American singer has been nicknamed Kurobune by the Japanese press, after Admiral Perry's Black Ships. He grew up listening to his Japanese grandmother's enka records, and he came to Japan after graduating from the University of Pittsburgh with the specific goal of becoming a singer in mind. His first single is Umiyuki, a song that captures the loneliness of the Sea of Japan in the winter, and it's available on the Japan iTunes Store along with lots of other great Japanese songs from every genre.

Who Are the Role Models of Japanese Women?

It's interesting to watch the evolution of the various female role models in Japan over the years. Everyone has actors, singers, writers or others that they look up to for one reason or another, and in Japan these famous faces provide inspiration to millions of females throughout the country. Often the current female role models can be tracked by watching how many TV commercials they're in, and you can tell right away that a lot of young Japanese girls really love model and actress Yuri Ebihara (Ebi-chan), who always looks genki in her commercials. Angelina Aki is another popular role model who is half-Japanese and half-American and who grew up in rural Japan. She's made a great career for herself by letting her American side show while she sings, which of course makes her seem quite exotic to fans. Then there's the enigmatic Ataru Nakamura, a popular singer who was born male but suffered from Gender Identity Disorder, which drove her to finally receive reassignment surgery and become female. The unique story of Ataru's decision coupled with her one-of-a-kind singing voice has won her many fans throughout Japan.

 

On the Alien Registration Card for Gaijin

All registered foreigners living in Japan carry one of these, a Gaikokijin Toroku Shomeisho, aka the Alien Registration Card, which you get from the City Office in your local town when you first come to Japan to live. It lists the name, current address, employment status and photograph of the person in question, and generally provides whatever information authorities might need access to. It's quite an analog system, actually -- when information needs to be updated, the changes are hand-written on the back of the card by a City Office employee, along with a special stamp that proves that an authorized official has made the change. Theoretically, any policeman can ask to see the registration card of any foreigner, but I've never been asked to show mine and have always found Japanese policemen to be very courteous and nice.

Japan as a Communist Country?

I've often wondered at how Japan was able to become such a successful Communist country despite being free-market at the same time. Although it's a surprising statement, there are quite a few areas in which Japan seems to have the trappings of a Soviet-style state, right down to those drab public university buildings which always seem to make me think of Chernobyl. Japan's economy has always been famous for government intervention, such as the old MITI, a government ministry that set industrial policy for the nation during the postwar decades and guided the decisions of Japan's corporations. Many markets still seem to operate in this "command economy" model, for example all rice and wheat is bought and sold exclusively by the government to keep prices stable. Japan has a health care system that's pretty good, covering 70% of health costs to everyone who doesn't have existing insurance and forcing health care costs to grow slowly by nature of the caps its puts on various services. Yet despite this, taxes here are generally in line with the U.S. rather than the higher rates paid in Europe. Instead of the Soviet Union or China, it's Japan that ended up with the "classless" society, at least judging from the 80+% of people who consider themselves to be "middle class" (despite the BMW 5-series sedan sitting in the driveway). It's as if Japan was somehow able to take the best parts from both Capitalism and Communism for itself.

Japanese Word Abbreviations

The other day I was taking my 11 year old daughter out to lunch when she said to me, "Oh, can we go by Toys R Us? I'm looking for a new 'Dizu-puri' toy." Being a parent, I fully expect to not understand what my kids are talking about, but I figured I had a few years to go yet. Seeing my confusion, she told me that "Dizu-puri" was an abbreviation for "Disney Princess," and suddenly things were much clearer to me. Just as we come up with lots of acronyms in English, the Japanese make words easier to work with by abbreviating them, often by taking the first two katakana sounds of each word ("Famicom" and "Pokemon" are examples of this). This tendency to abbreviate words seems to be especially common among fans of video games and anime, and there are many titles that have been shortened by fans, for example the popular game and anime The Eternity that you Wish For is nearly always shortened to Kimi-Nozo, and Gainax's clunky This Ugly But Beautiful World is much easier to say as Kono-Mini.

On the Lack of Home-Grown National Organizations in Japan

Last time I talked about how Japan functioned pretty well as a modern democracy, despite some irksome problems. One area that's always struck me as odd is the lack of large-scale domestic organizations in Japan. Groups like Greenpeace, AARP, the NRA or the ACLU work to further the various political or social goals they've set for themselves, but when I try to find a similar large-scale national organization that tries to increase the visibility of a particular cause in Japan, I frankly come up short. I can only think of a few national-level groups, such as Japan Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, the Japan Lions Club, or the Japan Rotary Association, and all of them are imported from other countries. It seems counter-intuitive to say that the group-oriented Japanese aren't good at making groups, but it does seem that "organic" groups conceived in Japan tend to not grow beyond a certain size. I'm not sure why this is, although the general "top-down" nature of ideas in Japan, with change always emanating out of Tokyo rather than from the outside in, probably plays a big role.

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.