All About Japanese Pen Spinning

Pen spinning is the art of spinning a pen around your fingers and doing amazing tricks with it, and J-List has recently added a line of specially weighted spinning pens to our site for you to check out. The unique activity of twirling a pen is thought to have originated in Japan with ronin, a word which once meant a masterless samurai but in modern days refers to a student who has failed his university entrance exams and must live in limbo as he studies to take the tests near year. Since these students had plenty of free time, they'd get really good at spinning their pens in their fingers while they studied. The First Pen Spinning Boom got underway in Japan around 1976, when students of several famous national and private universities became known for the ability to spin pens. It was later learned that all these students had attented a yobiko (cram school) called Sundai Preparation School, which soon became legend among "spinners" for birthing the sport. In 1997 a pen spinning fan named Hideaki brought spinning to the Internet age with the first website dedicated to the activity, which ushered in the Second Wave of Pen Spinning. The Third Wave arrived with the defining of the various pen spinning tricks (backaround, infinity, palm spin and so on -- they are frankly over my head, although they look cool) and the rise in pen spinning internationally in the form of world tournaments. How long will it be before Electronic Arts comes out with Extreme Pen Spinning for the Playstation 3? I'll let that be a question for the ages.

My Journey to San Diego, and Reverse Culture Shock

Well, I've made the big hop from Japan to San Diego, in preparation for the upcoming Anime Expo, which is sure to be a blast. The trip is 24 hours door-to-door, which includes 3 hours on a bus to Narita, sitting around the airport, and the total flight time. It's a stressful journey to be sure, although I'm always happy to make it because one of my two favorite places (San Diego or Japan) is waiting for me on the other end. As usual, I've spent a couple days experiencing various forms of reverse culture shock, being surprised at things like "small" drinks here (quite large compared to Japan), how dirty some people let their cars get (you just don't see cars that beg to have "wash me" written in dust as you sometimes do here), or how American school buses and mail delivery trucks manage to stay exactly the same as they were when I was a kid in the 1970s. I'm also fighting off the late-afternoon jet lag that starts to slowly creep up on me, so if I fall asleep during this update, I apologize in advance.

This city is why I love to drive convertable cars like the Miata / Mazda Roadster.

The General Japanese Traditional of Nostalgia

I wrote before about how, in the complex world of obsessive otaku culture in Japan, there are (for example) fans of Japan's various city towers, who love to travel to Yokohama's Marine Tower or Osaka's venerable Tsutenkaku Tower (the name means "Tower Reaching to Heaven") and fill scrapbooks with pictures and ticket stubs from their journeys. This odd tower fascination is part of a larger general tendency of Japanese to feel natsukashii (nats-kah-SHEE) or nostalgic, about the past, especially the early or middle Showa Period (1925-1989). There seems to be no end to things the Japanese can feel nostalgic about, and there's even a well developed otaku culture that worships the old city busses used in the postwar period, like the charming bus the father rides in on in My Neighbor Totoro, as well as a fondness for those old covered shopping streets that used to be so important to commercial life in Japan, but which are now largely dilapidated. When J-List's Yasu first came to work for us, we took him to Yukara, a delicious local restaurant that opens at 11:30 pm, and their food is so good that there are dozens of people lining up to eat even at that late hour. (It's kind of an official initiation for J-List employees to go there and eat.) While we were standing in line, Yasu walked up and down the street admiring the run-down houses in that part of the city, many of which didn't even have people living in them anymore. While some might just see ugly old buildings, he was fascinated with the kinds of construction used back when the houses were built, including the wooden sliding doors or the large recessed areas by the front doors (genkan), which were often bare earth rather than concrete or tile as you'd have today. I can understand the Japanese fascination with cool old things -- I personally have an odd compulsion about pictures and postcards of Disneyland and Las Vegas from the 1960s and 70s which I can't explain. 

So, what do you feel natsukashii about?

Seasons, Summer and Cold Ramen Noodles

One thing you learn about Japan pretty quickly is, what a seasonal place it is, with people doing different things at different times of year. It's summer now, time to enjoy traditional activities like listening to the soft sound of fuurin (Japanese wind chimes) as the wind blows in and watching fireworks at the Tanabata Festival while people mill around wearing yukata and eating shaved ice. If you are male and live with a female, you can expect to have your share of what I call "air-con wars" over what temperature the room should be, with females shivering at anything below 27 degrees C (80 degrees F) while males like me instead prefer that the temperature be cold enough to see your breath. Summer is also the season to eat one of my favorite dishes, hiyashi-chuka, essentially cold ramen-style noodles in a tangy sauce, with things like scrambled egg, ham, crab and cucumber on it, a dish I've never come across in the U.S., although it must be available at some Japanese establishments. Restaurants only offer this dish in the summer months, and when summer is over it's off the menu, letting you know that the season has finally ended and Autumn has arrived. While I'm never too sad to see the heat and humidity of Japan's summer go, seeing that hiyashi-chuka is no longer available at my favorite restaurant always brings a tiny pang of sadness to me.

The Benefits of Speaking English over Japanese

Between studying Japanese for four years at SDSU and living here for 17, I've pretty much got the Japanese language down. I've actually forgotten a large part of what I studied over the years, especially written kanji, since the great convenience of computers that let you select the right character by hitting the space bar means that almost no one writes kanji as well as they used to, including both Japanese and foreigners like me. Although I'm functionally fluent in the language, I've learned something odd, that it's often better to speak English in some situations. The other day I was at the public bath with my son (it's called Yura no Sato, which translates as Village of Hot Water Relaxation) when one of the other bathers struck up a conversation with me, asking me where I was from. He'd just finished an interesting trip around the world, visiting China, the Middle East and Europe, and was planning on going to the U.S. next. While my long years of studying tempted me to speak Japanese with him, instead I spoke only English, since I knew that getting to practice his language skills would really make the man's day. Speaking English instead of Japanese can open doors that might not otherwise open for you. Once I speaking with a Japanese female airline employee at a ticket counter about about the possibility of an upgrade to business class, and I received a somewhat cold reaction to my suggestion when I spoke in Japanese to her. I decided to ask at another counter run by the same airline, this time speaking polite English and batting my "gaijin Bambi eyes" as best I could, and darned if I didn't get that upgrade. My wife tells me that if I want to yell at someone for something, it's much more effective to do it in English -- it seems that angry words just carry more impact in English than in Japanese.

By the way, Aya Ueto is really cute.

Some Pictures fro the Party

Follow the Firefox logo...

I mean, they had a giant Firefox ice sculpture. How cool is that?

The Japan Mozilla organization gave a lot of speeches and there was general celebration.

I managed to run into the president of Good Smile Company, and I got to give him my own recommendation on the future of the Nendoroid line.

Firefox Party!

I took a day off yesterday to attend the official Firefox 3.0 launch party in Tokyo, which celebrated the historic third release of the great open source web browser. At the party, I wandered around a large room filled with various industry people -- developers, programmers, the occasional bigwig from Bandai or Yahoo Japan -- with everyone in attendance being Japanese, except for myself and two friends from Italy and Spain who were with me. I knew intuitively that the normal mingling you'd expect at a party like that would be a little more difficult due to the (perceived) language barrier that separated us from the Japanese around us, and we would have stood there not talking to anyone all night if it hadn't been for the natural exuberance that foreigners seem to have, enabling us to ignore whatever invisible social rules that may have been in effect and start up a discussion with strangers by, say, overhearing a conversation about Osaka and responding by doing an impression of the Glico Man, from the famous neon sign in that city. In no time, we had melted the ice and had a circle of interesting people around us, chatting about various topics. Back during my days as an ESL teacher, I quickly learned that my students responded more when I was energetic and outgoing, and in fact Japanese seem to take it for granted that foreigners will be a little more interesting in social situations than they are themselves. Incidentally, I really am happy to recommend Firefox as a great browser for everyone to use when viewing J-List or any other website, whether you're on a Mac, a PC or a Linux machine, and I'm not just saying that because they gave me free beer and sushi, although that was pretty cool. I mean, what has your web browser of choice done for you lately?

Tinkle Tinkle, Little Star

There are some words that the Japanese seem doomed to have problems with, due to the fact that their language is rather phonetically impoverished, with just 5 vowels and a limited repertoire of sounds produced normally. For example, the sounds of L and R are not separate in Japanese, which makes it nearly impossible for them to tell the difference between words like "right" and "light" without years of practice, and opening up some pretty humorous situations in election season. The Japanese are less likely to use the Internet term "FAQ" because it has the same pronunciation as another famous word that starts with F, which can cause confusion. The sound "si" is pronounced "shi" in Japanese, which of course can lead to problems when Japanese ask you, "Please, sit!" The J-List staff reports thinking that the the word "peanut," which is always pronounced as "peanuts" in Japanese (even if you're eating just one), sounds quite close to a potentially embarrassing word in English. Finally, the joker who introduced the song "Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star" to Japan might have thought it was funny at the time, but I've observed that virtually everyone here has managed to memorize the "twinkle, twinkle" part without the "w" sound. Tsk, tsk...

This is a Playstation game called Tinkle Star Sprites. 

340 mpg Savior: The Honda Cub

The most successful motor vehicle in history isn't the Toyota Corolla, and it's isn't the Ford F-Series pickup, or even the Volkswagen Beetle. It's the Honda Super Cub, the two-wheeled miracle created by the Honda Motor Company in 1958. Conceived as an easy way for people to get around cities in postwar Japan, the Cub (which stands for Cheap Urban Bike, in case you were wondering) was designed as a follow-up to a popular engine kit that could be attached to a bicycle to aid the rider when pedaling. The 50 cc motorcycle became an instant hit, making Honda a leader in economical transportation and becoming one of Japan's most successful export products. The Cub, which has sold more than 60 million units to date, is used in Japan in a wide range of industries, including delivery of mail and home-delivered ramen noodles. When I first got here I really wanted to buy one, although my high school-age students were shocked by this, since (in Japan) the stereotype of these small motorcycles is that only ojisan (middle-aged men) ride them, although there are enthusiasts who manage to tour the country on their little Cubs. Although sold in the U.S. and Europe, the Super Cub really caught on in Asia, especially in countries like Indonesia and Vietnam and where they're used by millions -- I'll never forget going to Bangkok and seeing a family of five, including father, mother, two toddlers and a baby, perched on one of these tiny 50 cc bikes. Considering that the Honda Super Cub gets an amazing 340 mpg (146 kpl), it seems to me that this is the perfect solution to the current gasoline crisis. All we have to do is encourage everyone to start commuting on these cheap, economical motorcycles, perhaps after reworking our cities a little to be friendlier to slower-moving traffic. Who's with me?

Things Foreigners Do that Surprise Japanese

As an American living in Japan, I know how surprised Japanese can get when foreigners internalize the society around them too much. Here at J-List, the Japanese staff have gotten used to me doing things like bowing while speaking Japanese on the phone to someone or pulling out a kotowaza (Japanese proverb) to make a point. According to an interesting online poll, some other things gaijin do that surprise Japanese include speaking using dialects like Osaka-ben, singing enka songs at karaoke, giving dates in the Japanese calendar system (e.g. Showa 43 instead of 1968), drinking fruit-flavored milk with a hand on one hip after a bath (sounds odd, but I do it most every week), and sitting seiza, or in proper Japanese kneeling position. Another thing that surprises Japanese people is when foreigners are polite, or when they line up properly in crowds -- it seems sad to me that this kind of behavior be the exception and not the rule. When Japanese go drinking with a foreigner, they always seem to expect him to order a Budweiser, since that's what all foreigners drink, right? But I'm much more likely to ask for atsukan, or hot sake, which always seems to surprise Japanese around me. The holy grail of a foreigner living in Japan is when a Japanese person temporarily forgets how to write a difficult kanji and you casually jot it down for them. That's only happened a few times to me, but it was glorious, let me tell you.

Japan, Suicide and...Fortune Tellers?

The terrible rise in suicides in Japan (more than 33,000 last year) has everyone talking about what can be done about the problem. While U.S.-style medical services that provide counseling for people in mental distress are not completely absent from Japan -- I remember being fascinated after learning that my old Japanese teacher had been training for a license to work a suicide hotline -- the fact is that these kinds of services seem to have much less reach in Japanese society compared with the U.S. Even if psychological counseling were widely available here, my feeling is that it wouldn't be used that much. Perhaps as a result of living in a country with half the population of the U.S. crammed into the area of Nebraska, the Japanese are extremely protective of their privacy, and many people in need of counseling might be unwilling to open up and talk about their problems with strangers, instead choosing to gaman, or stoically endure their problems in silence. The Japanese also have an extreme mistrust of drugs, and many of the most common medicines in use in the U.S. aren't even available here. In an odd way, the role of psychological counselors is filled in Japan by -- no laughing, now -- fortune tellers, people who provide advice and guidance after reading palms, tarot cards, and so on. Whether it's a website accessed from a cell phone that gives advice on what emotional challenges a person may face tomorrow or the weekly TV appearances of famed author (and former Iron Chef judge) Kazuko Hosoki, when Japanese need some advice, more likely than not they'll get it in the form of fortune telling.

Metabo

Japan has started a new initiative to fight fat using the buzzword metabo, short for metabolic syndrome, a polite way of describing the tendency to gain weight as people get older. Under newly passed rules, everyone between the ages of 40 and 74 must get a check-up that measures their waist, and if the circumference is over 85 cm (33.5 inches) for men or 90 cm (35.5 inches) for women, the person will be assigned to a nutritionist who will give recommendations on diet and exercise. They're also making some vague noises about financial penalties for companies that don't reduce employee paunch, although I've lived in Japan long enough to know tatemae (an untruth made for appearance's sake) from honne (the way things really are) when I see it. Compared to most of the rest of the world, the Japanese are far from overweight, and I've known 24-year-old Japanese women who had to do their clothes shopping at Gap Kids when in the U.S. to find clothes that would fit them. But as Western-style foods like the Mega Mac become more popular here, there's widespread fear that Japanese waistlines might follow the U.S. in coming years. I talk a lot about how the Japanese like to think of themselves as a homogenous people coming from the same genetic stock (there's another good example of tatemae by the way), but I didn't think they believed it so fervently that the government would try to apply one set of health metrics to the entire population. Still, battling the dreaded metabo monster is certainly not a bad thing, and I believe the new focus on health in middle-age will bring families closer together as wives and children show more concern for Dad.

Japan and Auto Mechanics

For some reason, living in Japan robs a person of the ability to open the hood of their car. When I lived in the U.S., I was quite comfortable giving my car a tune-up, changing oil and spark plugs, and even replacing the odd head gasket, but since coming to Japan I find I haven't touched a car's engine in fifteen years. My wife is indicative of most Japanese on the subject of auto maintenance -- she once said to me, "I opened my hood once, but I didn't know which one was the engine." This is partially due to excellent service here, with uniformed gas station employees who will cheerfully check your oil and air when you buy a tank of gas, but another reason is sha-ken, a government-mandated automobile maintenance check-up you have to get every two years. The sha-ken check-up is expensive, costing $800 or more, although this amount includes various taxes and a required form of auto insurance, but the upside is that cars are safer and almost never break down. The sha-ken check-ups have a somewhat cynical purpose too: when the next one rolls around, it's common for people to buy a new car instead rather than pay the check-up fee for the old car, which no doubt contributes millions to car manufacturers' bottom lines as people replace their cars at a faster pace than they otherwise would.

Bad Japanese "Dajare" Puns and Arnold Schwarzenegger

It's still drizzling in Japan, as rainy season continues dumping an extra helping of precipitation on the Japanese islands. This morning while leaving the house I grabbed for an umbrella so I could make the 2-minute trek to J-List World Headquarters without getting wet. The umbrella turned out to be my wife's favorite Louis Vuitton, and when she took me to task for using it, the inner reaches of my brain came up with a retort: "But honey, mi casa es su casa!" This was a play on the word kasa (casa) meaning both "house" in Spanish and "umbrella" in Japanese. For some reason, I've gotten very good at thinking of ingeniously bad puns in Japanese, called dajare (dah-jah-REH), and when we go for a drive on the weekends I'm known to torment my kids with joke after bad joke. Some of these linguistic puns come naturally in the course of learning Japanese, of course, like the word ikura which means both salmon roe as well as "how much is it?" making for the obvious gag ikura ikura? ("How much is this salmon roe?"), or how the word for "like" (suki) is pronounced similar to "ski," which causes every student of the language to suddenly ask each other sukii ga suki? ("Do you like to ski?"). At least I'm not the only one with an odd sense of humor in Japanese. Currently California Governator Shuwa-chan is appearing in TV commercials promoting tourism in his state. The goofy slogan he recites combines the word nandemo ari meaning "it's all here" with California, with the result being Nandemo Arifornia. It's quite silly.

See the TV ads here (the lower one is better since it's Schwa-chan speaking Japanese instead of a stupid voice over. Or do your part for California tourism by printing out this PDF poster!

The New Tokyo Tower: Tokyo Sky Tree

There's a new tree set to start growing in Tokyo, all the way up to the sky. It's called Tokyo Sky Tree, a giant new 610 meter (2003 ft) tall broadcasting tower that, if completed as planned, would be the tallest structure in Japan. The tower will replace Tokyo Tower, a scale replica of the Eiffel Tower built in 1958, as the primary means of beaming television to the 35 million residents of the Greater Tokyo Area. The name was chosen by voters who picked it over such choices as Tokyo Edo Tower, Mirai (Future) Tree, and Rising East Tower. Like many people, I personally liked the originally proposed name of New Tokyo Tower -- very sensible and Hobbit-like -- but it was unavailable due to trademark issues. In the end, Tokyo Sky Tree does have a kind of pleasingly weird appeal not unlike Tokyo Big Sight, the sprawling convention center where the Comic Market doujinshi convention is held twice a year. One thing you learn early on when traveling around Japan is, the Japanese are fascinated with towers, and there seems to be a large tower in every major city, from the historical Marine Tower in Yokohama to the unique beauty of Kobe Port Tower and many more. There are even "tower otaku" in Japan, people who obsess about visiting every tower they can and collecting the ticket stubs from past years. I'm sure they'll enjoy making the pilgrimage to Tokyo Sky Tree when construction is completed in 2011.

Is Competition Good for Students?

One interesting aspect of education in Japan is how students face competition in many forms which helps make them better students. Starting with junior high school, many students are ranked according to their test scores, with a board hung outside the class that lists each student's rank is in relation to everyone else. If you're the #1 student in your class, you can bet your classmates will be gunning for your slot, so you'd better study hard. The system of having to take an entrance exam to get into high school also provides a reason for students to be more serious about their own education, since you have to hit the books if you want to get into one of the best high schools. (My 13-year-old son is already preparing for a high school that's known for its engineering and robotics courses.) Although I often wonder if it's really a good idea to put pressure on kids to study at such a young age, I can see benefits from creating a more vigorous study environment for teenagers. Growing up in the public school system in Maryland and California, I can honestly say I don't have a single memory of studying hard or being challenged until I got to college, and getting kids to apply themselves at a younger age can't be a bad thing.

So what do you think? There is the obvious question of sad outcomes that can happen when young people have more pressure than they can handle, but on the other hand, there is no gang violence or drug problems or other terrors that prey on kids in the U.S. I wonder which approach is better. 

The iPhone and Japan

The iPhone is finally coming to Japan, and I'll certainly be in line to get one when they become available next month. But how will the device really do here? I'd say that while there is a lot of interest by Japanese fans in the phone, it's still unsure whether it will be a runaway success or not. First of all, Japanese consumers are extremely fickle -- there's a reason J-List does no business within Japan, and never will -- and anyone doing business here needs to really be on the ball if they want to do well, especially if you're selling a device that does things in a totally new way. Another problem comes from the syllabery nature of Japanese, which can express sounds like KA-KI-KU-KE-KO but not "k" by itself. It turns out that it's quite easy to type Japanese using a standard numeric keypad by entering, say, 1992*44444 for arigato, and -- I am not kidding, here -- there are novelists who write their works exclusively with a numeric keypad on a phone because they can type faster that way. The new iPhone will have support for an on-screen kana-based method of text entering, but my guess is that it won't feel the same to Japanese phone users, who are used to walking or riding bicycles while pecking away on their phones. Finally, there's a slew of handy local features iPhone won't support, like a payment system that lets you buy train tickets by touching a panel with your phone and a low-bandwidth TV system called Wanseg (from "one segment"). I've heard from many Japanese computer users that American companies like Apple and Microsoft regularly get little details wrong when producing products for the Japanese market, so I wonder what other small aspects of the iPhone will feel funny to users here. Still, considering the number of things you can do incredibly well on the thing -- I use my American phone a few hours a day in Japan, where it's not even usable as a phone -- I've got a feeling Apple will do quite well.

The Japanese and English Webs

I like to read sci-fi novels with mind-bogglingly big ideas in them. One series I enjoyed was the Uplift Saga books by David Brin, which described a galactic society of races that gained status in each others' eyes by discovering pre-sentient life and "uplifting" them to intelligence. There were two fundamental forms of life in the books, oxygen-breathing types like humans and hydrogen-based life that lived inside gas giants and stars, and the great differences between these two groups meant that they could never interact but must exist side by side instead. Sometimes I feel this way about the Japanese and the English web: both are vibrant, constantly inventing new mini-trends and memes and fads, yet they're largely separated by the Great Wall of Language. Most Japanese people will instinctively click away from an English page they happen to land on, perhaps as a result of being forced to study it for all those years in school; likewise, most native English-speakers I know won't spent a lot of time trawling Japanese-language websites unless they're there for a reason. They come together at certain points, of course -- YouTube is a good example of a bridge that has joined the two halves nicely -- but by and large, English-speaking web surfers will tend to be more familiar with the latest "I Can Has Cheeseburger" cat jokes while Japanese fans watch videos of computer-generated vocal idol Miku Hatsune singing while waiving her leek back and forth.

Skinship & Ticklishness?

Are you ticklish? My kids certainly are, and I only have to move my hands towards them in a threatening manner to have both of them giggling on the floor in laughter. My Japanese wife, however, isn't the slightest bit ticklish, and you could spend hours rubbing feathers over her body and not get the slightest response. I know nothing about the physiology of ticklishness or were it comes from, but my own pet theory is that stimulation of the the body during a young age causes the nerve endings to become more sensitive, which results in ticklish bodies when the kids get older. When my kids were babies, we did caress them and touch them a lot, something the Japanese wisely call skinship, yet my wife says that it's very un-Japanese to touch your children so much, and insists that she was never held or played with that closely when she was small. I've always believed that my wife's being raised in a traditional Japanese environment which had a lot less warm parent-to-child touching (imagine the planet Vulcan basically) led to her never becoming ticklish. Do you think people raised in happy, loving households are more ticklish as a result?

"Nice on!" and Other Strange English Phrases

In the Japanese version of Wii Sports Golf, a player who gets his ball onto the green is rewarded with a voice that says, "Nice on!" which of course means "That was a very good drive that resulted in getting your ball on the green!" It's an example of the "reduced English" that's used so often in Japan to communicate the most meaning in the simplest language possible. It's really quite logical -- when a woman is pregnant you might say she's "baby in," while it's natural to think of a male salaried employee is a "salaryman." Instead of taking a recreational vehicle camping, just rent a "camp car" instead, and when you take a shower reach for the "rinse in shampoo" (that is, shampoo with cream rinse in it, or conditioning shampoo). Within the context of the Japanese using English within their own society, the shorter and more direct the phrases can become, the better, since all those extra English words can really make a person's head hurt. I get so used to seeing shortened or simplified English around me that properly formed language stands out. At Japanese hot springs, the usual notice about customers with tattoos not being allowed to enter the bath (because of yakuza) is usually limited to "NO TATTOO." However, at one bath near us the notice says, "Please understand that we cannot accept customers with tattoos." I was really impressed with how politely they had worded that.

Shinyo (Trust) and the Japanese

One of the most important concepts in daily life in Japan is shinyo (SHIN-yo), which means "trust," and when Japanese have dealings with individuals or businesses, choosing someone they can trust is extremely important. Of course, everyone wants to deal with people and companies they believe will do right by them, but in Japanese society the idea of only working with trustworthy entities is elevated to a much higher cultural level. One way to make sure you're working with people you can trust is the concept of shokai (SHO-kai), a kind of introduction whereby someone who is already trusted by a third party will formally introduce you to them, in effect sharing the goodwill they've already established with both you and the third party. Because both parties have a trust relationship involved, they have an obligation to make sure everything goes smoothly to avoid "stepping on the face" (to use the Japanese phrase) of the person that brought you together. There isn't a single aspect of Japan that isn't improved by this trust-based relationship system, and time and time again I've found myself depending on people who had been formally introduced to me by someone else I trusted. My wife recently sold her car through a used car dealer, and I happened to remark that it was odd that cars are seldom sold between individuals in Japan -- there's no local version of the Auto Trader or eBay Motors. The reason, I was told, was that no one would ever be able to trust a stranger enough to buy a car, since they might be lied to about important details or otherwise taken advantage of, so they instead rely on professional companies whose reputations they can verify, of course paying more for the privilege.

My Japan Father-in-Law Buys an HD Television

Like many other Japanese men, my father-in-law likes baseball. I mean, he really likes Baseball, so much that he'll watch a game on TV while listening to another one on the radio, with three sports-related newspapers beside him. (Japan has no less than ten national sports-dedicated newspapers published daily, if you can believe that.) One day our cat climbed on top of our TV and, as we all watched in horror, managed to vomit inside the case, causing the circuitry to fry and the picture to go dark. It was an inconvenience, but the timing was actually quite good -- like the U.S., Japan is in the middle of phasing out the old analog TV broadcasting system for digital terrestrial, and by 2009 everyone will have had to make the switch one way or another, so we couldn't get too mad at our cat. On the way to the denkiya (home electronics store) to shop for a new television, my father-in-law asked me to make sure we picked out an "HD" model, but the way he pronounced these letters -- ecchi deh -- was very amusing to me. Due to a quirk of Japanese phonology, the sounds ti and di could not be written in the katakana writing system until a few decades ago, so teh and deh were substituted instead. (Basically, they hadn't officially started using ティ and ディ as sounds in katakaka yet.) The result of this is that everyone above the age of 50 or so has memorized English words like party, DVD or Disneyland as par-teh, deh-vee-deh, and Dehs-neyland, and the mere act of using these older pronunciations marks you as an old fogie. To hear a super high tech word like "HD" pronounced using this outdated pronunciation system was quite unexpected, and I had to laugh.

Make Japan an Immigrants Country!

Many industrialized countries are battling falling birthrates, as human societies change and shift. The numbers of babies born per female in Russia, Italy, and Germany, for example, are 1.25, 1.29, and 1.35 respectively. There are all too few babies being born in Japan, too, just 1.29 per female, a situation made worse by the lack of imigration to offset the drop in real population here, unlike the U.S. and Europe. To avoid a future in which there are too few people in Japan to do the jobs that need doing, a group of Japanese Diet members has for the first time put forth a proposal calling for Japan to create a forward-looking immigration policy and accept 10 million foreigners over the next fifty years as a way of keeping its society and economy healthy. In making the proposal, Japanese legislator Hidenao Nakagawa said, "There is no way to save Japan's future without turning to other nations. Japan must open its doors as an international state and shift toward establishing an 'immigrant nation.'" I've long thought that Japan should form relationships with countries and eliminate barriers to long-term work-stays and full-fledged immigration, and maybe this will be a first step. Incidentally, while many nations are seeing their birth rates fall, they're actually on the upswing in the U.S., up to 2.2 per female on average. Japanese leaders must be asking themselves how America can keep its birth rate high without the social programs that give parents a monthly bonus for having three or more kids, which are common here. It's hard to know what the reasons for the difference in birth rates are, but personally I think the American tendency to be positive about the future plays a big part. The Japanese are rather quick to see huge, unsolvable problems when they look to the horizon, which can cool couples to the idea of having another child, but Americans are (at least as seen from the outside looking in) much more likely to be optimistic about the future, and I think this is one factor at play here.

Nakagawa-san is on the left, and the otaku who almost became Prime Minister is below

Chibi Maruko-chan and the Blue-Eyed Friend

Sunday nights at our house is time for Chibi Maruko-chan (Little Maruko), one of the most popular anime shows in Japan despite it not being terribly well known internationally. It's the story of Maruko, a cute but lazy third grader who lives in the magical time of the 1970s, a simpler age when there was no Internet and even the idea of a wireless remote control for your TV was a dream. It's a great show because of the many cultural references it makes to the late Showa Period, allowing kids to see the (sometimes silly) stuff that was popular when their parents were young. In last night's episode, Maruko's wealthy classmate Hanawa-san invited Maruko and her friends over to meet a mysterious "blue-eyed person" who was staying at his house, which turned out to be a girl named Pearle, visiting from overseas. Immediately there was mass chaos as all the characters tried to come up with some English to say to the girl, but no one knew any, so they sat there shyly. Maruko went home and asked her family to teach her some English, but all she got was useless phrases like "this is a pen" and "hello! thank you! goodbye!" When Maruko finally was able to figure out how to say "nice to meet you" to the foreign visitor, she was met with puzzlement. It turned out that Pearle was from France and didn't speak any English, which caused even more confusion. It was an extremely funny episode -- I've observed the Japanese tendency to assume that any Western-looking foreigner walking down the street must be a native English speaker very often.

Here is the opening credits from the show by the way. It's been the most memorable anime song, and among the top five karaoke hits, over the past decade and a half. The title is Odoru Pompokorin.

 

The History of Doujinshi

Doujinshi are the fan-created comic-books which have become a huge sub-culture here in Japan. The word literally means "same-person-magazine" and grew out of the tradition of like-minded writers forming literary circles and publishing their short stories and poetry in the form of small-run magazines that they each contributed to financially. The history of comic doujinshi circles began in 1953 when manga artist Shotaro Ishinomori formed a group called the East Japan Manga Research Club, with another landmark coming in 1967 with the publication of Tezuka Osamu's COM, a magazine that invited readers to send in their own manga to be published. By the 1970s, university artist circles were commonplace, and early doujinshi paying tribute to the anime series of the era flourished; attendance at the nascent Comic Market doujinshi convention would grow 600 in 1975 to more than 500,000 today. Over the years, the underground comic world has served as an incubator for talented manga artists who want to go pro, and a huge number of big names started out drawing doujinshi, including CLAMP, Rumiko Takahashi and Lupin III creator Monkey Punch. This creative "DIY" esthetic extends beyond comic books, and there are many kinds of self-created works sold as doujin, including novels, BGM compositions and fan-produced computer games.

It's Me, It's Me Fraud Update

So picture this. Suddenly you get a phone call, and a young voice says, "It's me, it's me," as if you knew the person -- well, it must be your grandson, Taro. He then tells you that he's done something terrible, gotten into a traffic accident perhaps, and he needs $40,000 to pay off the other driver before the police become involved, so would you please go down to the bank and transfer the money to this account? Or maybe it's a man posing as your son's boss, who sternly tells you that your son has made an error that cost the company $50,000, which you must pay on his behalf. The most common name for these scams is Ore-ore Sagi, literally "It's Me, It's Me Fraud," and the damage from these crimes this year may top the previous record of 28 billion yen ($259 million) set in 2004, which is a lot of soybeans. Now matter how much the police try to educate citizens against the dangers of believing what strangers tell them over the phone, the situations continues. Between the high number of elderly people with hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash savings and the Japanese sense of on (pronounced "own"), translatable as moral obligation to family members, it's apparently easy for these thieves to score big. One of the regular customers at our liquor shop was nearly taken in by one of these scammers, who had researched his family extensively in order to craft more believable lies.

Okinawa

Last time I talked about the Ainu, the original inhabitants of the Japanese islands going back to the stone age. There's one "other" ethnic group in Japan, the residents of the Ryukyu Islands, also known as Okinawa, where a big chunk of the U.S. military in Japan is stationed. A separate island kingdom until 1609 when it was annexed by the Satsuma Clan (present-day Kagoshima), Okinawa has a fascinating culture that's completely different from that of the mainland, with a unique language, social identity and architecture. (The Ghibli film Spirited Away makes use of architectural motifs from Okinawa to create a mysterious supernatural world inhabited by spirits.) Like all regions of Japan, Okinawa is famous for various foods, including goya, a bitter gourd which is fried with other vegetables, and awamori, a very strong rice wine. Residents of Okinawa seem to have gotten very good at "slow living" and are very much outside the pressures of normal Japanese urban life, which is no doubt part of the reason they have the longest lifespans in the world. I've only known a small number of Okinawans, but the few I've met have been extremely open to other cultures, speaking languages like Spanish and French that almost no one in the homogenized mainland ever masters. In much the same way that black popular culture influences overall American culture, Okinawa's "otherness" provides much-needed flavor to the rest of Japan, and many of the country's singers hail from there, like superstar Amuro Namie and Gackt. There's a whole class of eerily beautiful Okinawa-influenced Japanese songs (iTunes link) like the recent hit song Nada Sousou, one of the most popular songs on iTunes Japan, which you can purchase using our popular iTunes Japan Prepaid Cards.

The Ainu

Japan is a country that likes to think of itself as coming from more or less the same genetic stock, called Yamato Japanese, which is kind of silly since you only need to meet a few dozen people here to see that there are many obvious differences in skin shade, the shape of the face and eyes, body type and so on among the "uniform" Japanese people. The original inhabitants of the Japanese islands were a group called the Ainu, which were once spread throughout the islands but were pushed northward as Japan's mainstream culture expanded out from the Nara-Kyoto area. The Ainu were quite different from the Japanese, growing long, thick beards and tattooing their bodies extensively, with women traditionally tattooing moustaches onto their faces to ward off demons. Their belief system is very close to the Japanese Shinto religion which sees kami (gods or spirits) in natural objects, and this probably formed the basis of Shintoism, although I'm not sure if Japanese like to admit that openly. The Ainu possess their own language and culture, although it's been very difficult maintaining their individuality given all the changes that have visited Japanese society over the past century, including the Soviet seizure of Sakhalin Island at the end of World War II, which forced many of the the remaining Ainu to flee to Hokkaido. Recently the Japanese Diet passed a resolution calling for the government to officially recognize the Ainu as a separate ethnic group, an important historical milestone.

I'm Gonna Eat Some Mornin' Crackers

The other day I reached for some saltine crackers and found myself smirking at the name on the package: Mornin' Cracker. This interesting name the manufacturers had chosen for their product sheds light on the unique fascination many Japanese have with speaking "natural" English. The Japanese study English for an average of six years yet know what's being taught to them isn't a living, breathing language, and many students who do want to learn focus on what they perceive as "natural" English, which often means going out of their way to copy the slang they see native speakers using, like the alternate spelling of the -ing suffix. I've had students who refused to use phrases like "want to" or "going to," instead substituting "wanna" or "gonna" as often as they could, despite the fact that their overall language ability wasn't at the level for that to sound natural. As a learner of Japanese, there was a lot of temptation for me to use slang I picked up reading manga or heard others using, but often I found that I lowered people's impression of me when I did so, just as you might not know what to think if a slang-obsessed Japanese man introduced himself to you for the first time by saying, "Nice to meet you, Brutha." When learning a foreign language, it's best to go slowly when trying out the fun but potentially offensive slang terms you come across, and always watch the Japanese people around you to see what kind of reaction you get. If you screw something up, as I've done many times, you'll know it.

Religion, Guns and Preconceptions About Japan

When I came to live in Japan back during the first Bush Presidency, I brought many things with me, including a suit, long underwear, and extra shoes, since I was sure I couldn't find my size here (turns out I had nothing to worry about there). I also brought a suitcase full of preconceptions about what life in Japan would be like, many of which turned out to be wrong. First of all, I expected Japan to be a fairly un-religeous place, but when I got here, I was immediately invited to attend the Japanese Baptist church in our city, where I learned that studying by reading the Old Testament in Japanese is very, very hard. I was also surprised at the existence of Jehovah's Witnesses handing out local versions of The Watchtower and polite Mormon missionaries riding mountain bikes while wearing ties, which they're famous for here. I was also pretty sure I wouldn't encounter any guns, since everyone knows that there are no guns in Japan, right? Imagine my surprise when a Japanese friend of mine who built high-performance racing bicycles turned out to be a hunting aficionado who owned several new and antique Remington rifles. Getting a license for a gun in Japan is very difficult, and prospective owners must undergo several months of training in their use and safety and be able to pass background and vision checks, but gun owners do exist here. I guess that's the way of it: for every impression you have of something, there are always counter-examples, waiting to prove you wrong.

Haha, love this picture. Click to enlarge.

Tragedy in Akihabara

Usually there's nothing like a Sunday afternoon in Akihabara. It's fun to roam through the many electronics stores to see the latest devices, or head into one of the anime shops to browse figures or doujinshi comics. The blocked-off street (known as "pedestrian's heaven") is so full of shoppers and tourists and fans in cosplay giving "guerilla live" street performances that it feels like a great big carnival. This happy image was destroyed on Sunday when a crazed man drove a rented truck into a crowd then jumped out and started attacking people with a large survival-type knife, eventually killing six men and one woman and injuring ten others before police could take him into custody. Although rare in usually-peaceful Japan, these bizarre knife attacks do sometimes occur, and they're called torima, roughly translated as "a devil who just happened to be passing by." Sunday's tragedy called to mind an attack on children in an elementary school by a deranged man in which eight children were killed, which in an eerie twist happened exactly seven years before this attack. All Japan is buzzing about the possible motives of the attacker, a 25-year-old temporary factory worker from Shizuoka Prefecture, who may have been set off by a mistaken belief that he had been let go from his company when this was not the case. All throughout the world and the web, people are expressing sadness over the terrible tragedy. 

"Ich bin ein Akihabarer..."

My Grammatical Problem

I've got a grammatical problem: my son, who began Junior High School in April, has started learning formal English grammar in ernest, and suddenly I'm being called upon to explain the ins and outs of past perfect, present progressive, subjunctive mood, and tense agreement to him. Back in my ESL (English as a Second Language) days, I was quite adept at teaching the rules of grammar either in English or Japanese, but it's been ten years since I was called sensei, and a lot of that knowledge escapes me now. The Japanese take English grammar seriously, and during Junior High and High School spend six years learning it in great detail, of course always discussing it in Japanese rather than, you know, English, since it's mostly considered a test subject for university entrance examinations anyway. The biggest question students usually ask is why, why do sentences like "He will have been to Kyoto five times" or "If he had gotten the job, he would have been happy" need to exist. Due to the simpler construction of Japanese sentences, most of these linguistic twists aren't needed and can't even be easily expressed, which was a real boon to me, coming from the other direction.

Summer, Mugi Tea and Cool Biz

The Japanese are a very seasonal people, doing different things at different times of year, and as the warmer weather approaches, everyone is getting into "summer mode." First of all, summer is the season for drinking mugi cha, the delicious barley tea which is consumed all around the country, since it's cold and refreshing and can be easily made with cold-water tea bags. In July and August, the summer festivals like Tanabata will arrive, without a doubt my favorite part of Japan (well, after hot springs). Summer is also time for Japan's politicians to show they're doing something about global warming by embracing what's called cool biz, a program promoted by the Japanese Ministry of the Environment every year that promotes using less electrical power by embracing clothing that allows people to be comfortable even with the air conditioning turned down. Prime Minister Fukuda (who comes from our prefecture of Gunma) held a press conference over the weekend wearing a casual shirt from Hawaii, which looked ridiculous on the man. He looked relieved when the press event was over and he could change back into a suit.

Mm, Seafood Pasta

Have you had Tuna Spaghetti recently? I did for lunch, and it was really good, a fresh marinara sauce with chunks of white tuna and several stalks of asparagus on top. I don't remember seeing much in the way of seafood pasta dishes in the States, but they're among my favorites here in Japan, and many restaurants offer good spaghetti alla pescatora, even your basic famires (family restaurants) like Denny's and Coco's. Living in Japan certainly makes you appreciate seafood, and I eat all kinds of things I would never have otherwise, from sushi and sashimi to miso-stewed mackerel, although I do draw the line at shio-kara, which is pickled squid intestines -- that's just going too far. There's one problem: I tend to know the names of fish in Japanese, and can even write them in kanji in some cases, but I often have no idea what the name of the fish I'm eating is in English.

Learning to Mis-pronounce English

You've been in Japan too long when you can pronounce the constellation of Orion like the Japanese do, which sounds something like OH-ree-ohn. The Japanese use a lot of English in their daily lives, which is ostensibly good for native English speakers living here since it means fewer new words to learn, although you often have to spend time getting used to the alternate pronunciations, which is partially a function of the language being phonetically based on syllables rather than consonants and vowels. To you or me, the word "weekend" probably has two syllables, but in Japanese it sounds like "oo-EE-koo-EN-doh." Some other hard-to-get-used-to words include allergy ("ah-REH-roo-gii," with a hard "g" in the last syllable), energy ("eh-NEH-ru-gii," also with a hard "g"), and the word loose, which always seems to be pronounced "lose" (as in the word loose socks). Despite how odd these (mis-)pronunciations of familiar English words may feel at first, accepting them is all part of learning to speak Japanese properly. If you're interested in learning some Japanese and want to help improve your pronunciation, I recommend using textbooks or other study materials that force you to read everything in hiragana right from the start, and not romaji (Romanized Japanese), since your brain would try to apply the pronunciation rules of English where they don't belong. The Genki textbook series or the kanji cards from White Rabbit are both excellent places to bein.

This is how the Japanese memorize the sounds made in American English. Looks hard!

Negative Experiences in Japan

Japan is a great country, with a lot to offer both short-term visitors and tourists as well as people like me, who like the place so much we put down permanent roots. But still, Japan is far from perfect, and there are various sources of stress for gaijin living here, for example (if your language skills are still improving) not being able to talk freely to people or even to read what's written on some signs, not being able to understand local customs that might be taken for granted by everyone but you, or (if you live in a rural city like I do) having kids occasionally stare at you because you're different. (I just say hello to them in English.) I've lived in Japan for 17 years and have traveled quite extensively throughout most of the country, meeting a lot of people along the way. It has happened, so infrequently it's almost statistically insignificant, that not every experience I had here was a good one, and not every person I met was 100% happy to be dealing with an overly-exuberant American like myself. Like an old farmer who, when in his cups, asked me why "big America" had to beat up on "little Japan" during the war, or the scary yakuza gangsters I found myself surrounded by when I stupidly stayed at a 24-hour sauna in Kyoto, or the one time I tried to enter a bar in Roppongi and was told politely that they didn't accept foreign customers. (I should have worn our "No Gaijin" T-shirt.) Whenever I encounter some minor inconvenience I shrug and move on, reciting that useful Japanese mantra shikata ga nai (or more colloquially, sho ga nai), which means "it can't be helped," the main way the Japanese maintain their happy, largely confrontation-free society. I know that everyone is human, and for every minor negative experience I may encounter here in Japan, there are a few hundred positive ones. (Thoughts of girls' phone numbers scrawled onto chopsticks wrappers come to mind, but we don't go there.) ^_^

The Joy of Linguistic Enlightenment

One of the things I've liked about my years of learning Japanese is what I've come to call the "joy of satori," a sort of thrill that jumps through your brain when you make a difficult linguistic connection, solve a challenging kanji problem, or intuit a correct answer without really knowing why. Satori means understanding or comprehension, or written with another kanji, enlightenment in the Buddhist sense, and I believe our brains are hard-wired to feel joy when a difficult solution is finally comprehended. I remember back when I read reading my favorite manga, the Rumiko Takahashi classic Maison Ikkoku, the story of a university ronin who falls in love with the widowed manager of his apartment building and takes several years to woo her. There's a secret code embedded in the series, a number system based on the names of the characters and the apartments in the building: for example, the main character is Godai and he lives in room number 5 since go is 5 in Japanese; his neighbor Yotsuya lives in room 4 as yotsu represents that number; and so on, with Kyoko being zero, since her last name contains the character nashi (meaning "nil"). I'll never forget the thrill I felt when I puzzled this system out for the first time -- it was a small piece of enlightenment, but it was my own.

This is the ending to the Maison Ikkoku movie, which tells you the events of a couple days before Kyoko and Godai get married, not terribly canon but if you're an MI fan it's loads of fun. It's kind of the total climax of the Maison Ikkoku universe because of the ending credits, which count down the ten characters in numerical order from 9 to 0. The character of Nikkaido, who lives in room #2, was put in the film after being left out of the whole series just to make these ending credits possible. Anyway, this is a great snapshot from the end of the 80s, when everything was drawn by hand -- even the ending credits are embedded in the frigging cels, as they should be, without the video effect crap they do these days. Enjoy.

 

Let's Have Fun with Japanese Verbs

The Japanese can be quite creative when it comes to playing with words, whether it's coming up with an advertising slogan like "Shall We Sapporo Beer?" or making textbooks called "Let's English!" or Japan's leading cellular phone company changing its name from DoCoMo to DOCOMO (all caps). They also keep their language fresh by constantly adding new words, some of which come from English, although they're often adapted for easier use by shoehorning them into Japanese grammar. Since most Japanese verbs end in -ru, there's a tendency to make slang words by tacking on this ending, which creates interesting hybrids like memoru (to take a memo), daburu (to be duplicated, from "double"), misuru (miss + ru, to miss, to get an answer wrong on a test) or baguru (bug + ru, to get a bug in your software). Just as "to google" has become a verb in English, the unofficial word for "to search using Google" in Japanese is guguru, used by almost all Internet users. Another example of this trend is the English word "trouble," which is converted into the slang verb toraburu meaning "to get into trouble," which inspired the title for To LOVE-ru, a popular anime series about a princess from space who wants to marry a Japanese high school student, which combines this troublesome word with "to love," making an even deeper linguistic joke. These words conjugate just like a normal Japanese verb, yielding sentences like boku no geemu ga bagutta! "my game froze up!" or kore, gugutte mite "try googling this and see what comes up." Can you guess what these English-derived words mean? nabiru, takuru, hamoru, homoru, rezuru. (Answer at the bottom of this post, scroll down.)

(The answers to the quiz above are nabiru, to navigate, i.e. to serve as navigator for the driver when taking a trip; takuru, to go somewhere by taxi; hamoru, to harmonize when singing; and homoru and rezuru, which both mean to make love with someone of your own gender, depending on whether it's guy/guy or girl/girl.)

Rainy Season in Japan

Japan has entered its rainy season, a month-long period when it will rain most every day as the country does its best impersonation of Seattle. The word for rainy season is tsuyu, written with characters that mean "plum rain," and there are several theories about how this odd name came about, including that it comes from the fact that Japanese plums ripen around this time of year, or that the kanji for plum resembles the character for "every day" (as in, I can't believe it's going to rain every day). Although I complain about the dreary weather, the rain is important to Japan's rice growing, and odd years when very little rain fell have been followed by bad rice harvests. Incidentally, if you ever want to know what the weather will be like tomorrow, do what Japanese kids do and throw your shoe as hard as you can. If the shoe lands upright, it will be a nice day tomorrow; if it lands on its side, look for clouds; and if it lands upside down, it will rain.

Bowing in Japan

You probably know that the Japanese have an extensive custom of bowing as a greeting or to show thanks or respect, called ojigi. There are three different kinds of bowing: the casual eshaku (EH-shaku) bow made with a 15 degree inclination, often made when passing coworkers in the hallway; the keirei, a deeper 30 degree bow that's most used in business; and the sai-keirei, in which you incline your head and body 45 degrees to show special respect to someone. To do a proper bow, stand up straight with your feet together, look the person you're bowing to in the eyes, and bow from your waist for 1-2 seconds before standing up again. Remember, in business settings, the goal is raise the other party up by lowering yourself, which in itself is quite a metaphor for much of Japanese society, hence learning to bow properly will help you understand Japan a little better. Bowing is also important in Japanese martial arts, and it can come in handy if you should encounter any Jedi Knights in your travels.

The Suicide Boom

You never know what's going to get popular in Japan next: maybe horn-rimmed glasses will suddenly come back into vogue, or a new restaurant will open in Akihabara selling gourmet instant cup ramen prepared by pretty girls in maid costumes (this actually exists). Sadly, there's been a tragic "boom" in Japan involving suicides using a concoction of easily available household chemicals which, when mixed, make for the perfect way to die. (Well, that's if you consider being paralyzed and slowly suffocating over two hours to be perfect.) So far there've been more than 40 cases involving the chemicals, not counting related deaths like the father who tried to save his son and also succumbed to the fumes, and it's feared the number will keep growing. There are many reasons why more Japanese are likely to willingly visit that sashimi bar in the sky, including the high degree of stress in Japan's overly urbanized society and differing attitudes about death in a country that has glorified suicide in the past, in the form of classic novels of shinju, or lovers' suicide; seppuku, the ritual self-disembowling of samurai; and of course kamikaze. Still, there are real reasons why there are so many suicides in modern Japan, including the near total lack of counseling services, the tendency for Japanese to widely ignore such services when they do exist, and mistrust of virtually all medications, making it rare for depressed people to be given drugs that might be able to help them. The government could be doing more, too: recent changes in traffic laws have managed to bring the annual number of people killed in traffic accidents to a record low of under 6000 per year (compared to 40,000 in the U.S.), but there are few visible signs that the government is trying to do anything to stop suicides. Although Japan has quite a reputation as a suicide country, it's only 10th in the world, with countries like South Korea, Russia and Lithuania ranking considerably higher.

Let's all keep on being supportive of each other and not be suicidal or anything, m'kay? We love you!

 

Magical Toilet Sound Obfuscating Water Princess!

I know I write about toilets in Japan quite often. For some reason, there's a lot of interesting culture to be found at the porcelain altar, between the seatless Japanese-style toilets that present foreign visitors with their first major culture shock in Japan to those wonderful "Washlet" toilet seats that clean and dry your rear end while you do your business. Once I went to a restaurant with my daughter, who was about five years old at the time, and had an interesting experience. She excused herself to go to the ladies' room, but came out a minute later saying she was too scared to go because there was a "strange sound" in the bathroom. She insisted I come in with her, so I ducked inside to see what this scary sound could be. It turns out it was a device called Oto-hime (a play on the name of a goddess from Japanese mythology, 乙姫、with the characters switched around to mean "Sound Princess," 音姫) which makes a chirping sound when ladies use the toilet, because Japanese women hate the idea of anyone being able to hear any sounds they make while they go. Before the device was introduced in the 1980s, it seems that female patrons in restraunts would flush the toilet multiple times to mask the sounds, which wasted an incredible amount of water. Since males don't usually go into public ladies' rooms, the existence of these strange sound-emitting devices is quite mysterious to men in Japan.

Here's a video of how they work. Just wave your hand over the button and the sound of water will come out of the device, allowing you to do whatever you need to do with without nervousness of people listening to the sounds you make.

 

An Order of Pizza and Japanese Culture

Today is Inventory Day here at J-List, when we have to count the many thousands of excellent products we stock. It's quite a job, with our entire 15-person staff counting all the items throughout the day, so we make it fun by ordering lunch from Pizza Hut, which 99% of Japanese think is Pizza Hat. Anyway, we mis-calculated the number of people who'd be eating and didn't order enough quite pizzas, making me worried that there might not be enough food for everyone. However, I'd forgotten about the Japanese tradition of enryo (en-RYO), a word which means constraint, modesty or to refrain from doing something, and when we opened the pizza boxes and told everyone to dig in, it took five minutes or more for the Japanese staff to start eating. The girls would take one piece and say they were full, and we had to literally put the pizza slices on plates and press them into people's hands to get them to eat. In the end, there was just enough pizza to go around. It's difficult as an American to completely understand a concept like enryo, but part of the reason it was so hard to get everyone to start eating was, no one wanted to be perceived as being first to grab for food, so they stood around saying, "No, after you" to each other. This was probably due to having so many people in the same place at once. If there had been only 2-3 people and a single pizza, they'd have been less self-conscious.

We did not get the Macross Frontier pizza special they're running, because you have to order medium pizzas for that, and we needed larges this time. Are they implying that otaku don't have friends, or what?

Jump Magazine 40th Anniversary Canned Coffee?

Manga is the name given to Japanese comic books, although most people over the age of 35 or so will use the word to describe animation on TV as well. The word literally means "whimsical pictures" and was coined by Edo Period ukiyo-e artist Hokusai (the dude who painted the famous Red Fuji and Great Wave Off Kanagawa pictures you may have seen) to describe a book of woodblock art he'd done. Although manga can be associated with obsessive otaku culture, there really isn't a single Japanese person who didn't grow up with a favorite manga that they still feel nostalgia for, whether they're an active fan now or not. On Sundays our rural liquor shop gets the new issues of the popular weekly manga magazines, a day earlier than the large chains and convenience stores, one of the few bones thrown to small retailers in Japan. I always marvel at the customers who stop by to pick up the new issue: elementary school and junior high kids, of course, but plenty of adults, including a businessman in a really nice BMW who makes small talk with me and, since we live next door to our city's mayor by some strange coincidence, the deputy mayor of our city. This year marks the 40th anniversary of Shonen Jump, the popular manga weekly, and Japanese canned coffee maker Roots is putting on a major advertising campaign for its new coffee called "Innocent Blend" (I am not kidding), showing panels from the great Jump comics of the past, from YuYu Hakusho to Dragonball Z to Saint Seiya all the way up to Death Note. So everyone celebrate manga by, er, drinking some canned coffee, or something!

Gokuh: "After he shook hands with me, he wiped his hand off when he thought I wasn't looking!"

L: "I hit the snooze button on my alarm clock twice this morning, and ended up being late."

Here are some more. This is from Kimagure Orange Road, the novels for which I translated back in the day. This is from the last volume when the love trianble between Hikaru, Madoka and Kyosuke (who is a secret esper) is resolved. The ad says, "I went to make a purchasae with my 'point card' but it had expired..."

Another favorite of mine, Video Girl Ai, which is 1000% times better than the short anime they made, although the anime had Noriko Sakai to make up for it. This is Ai saying, "This guy only makes jokes that make himself look bad." Which is very funny when read in Japanese, very funny.

For the Bleach fans. This says, "S- So she was really trying to break up with me!?"

The Matrix vs. Megazone 23

No work is ever created in a vacuum, and everything is constantly being influenced by everything else. Every time I watch Silence of the Lambs, I marvel at how blatantly the X-Files draws its core inspiration from the film, right down to the geeky Lone Gunman characters who help out on the case, and I'm sure the creator of CSI: Las Vegas got his idea for that series while watching Manhunter, the 1986 film that introduced Hannibal Lecter (the 2002 film Red Dragon is a remake of Manhunter). The world of Japanese animation is not immune from taking inspiration from other sources either, for example the many cues Fist of the North Star takes from The Road Warrior, or my pet theory that the "magical girl" genre of anime rose in response to the popularity of My Wife is a Witch, aka Bewitched, which was popular in Japan during that era. If you've seen the film The Matrix, you know how Hollywood has been influenced more than a little by the world of anime. While a lot of the inspiration for the movie obviously comes from Shirow Masamune's hard-hitting Ghost in the Shell sci-fi series, a larger part of the story is a tribute to Megazone 23 (pronounced "two-three"), one of the breakthrough anime concepts of the 80s. In the series, the population of Tokyo thinks its the end of the 20th Century, but in reality it's 500 years in the future and everyone is living inside a space ship. Many elements of the Megazone series are borrowed for the Matrix, including the hacker-as-semi-messianic main character idea.

MZ23 the first was one of the great Haruhiko Mikimoto creations. He could snare fans with any illustration on a record album, a model box, you name it...

Part II has radically altered designs, although I didn't dislike it as much as I used to. This was the best anime sex scene of its era, though, You know you're an old-school anime nerd when you can say honestly that a girl has broken up with you over differing opinions on Megazone 23 character designs.

Part III is a new generation, several hundred years into the future. A lot of the Hacker Neo stuff comes from this one.

Election and Election News Coverage in Japan

There are some big differences between how elections work in Japan compared to the U.S. Because Japan uses a British-style Parliamentary system, the elections aren't held as regularly as they are in the States, and you never know when the Prime Minister will disband the government and throw us all into Election Hell, with candidates riding around in loudspeaker cars thanking everyone loudly for their support. Election advertising is usually limited to posters showing the candidate wearing a smart suit with his name in large kanji characters, and negative advertising and campaigning is strictly forbidden. There are two types of election news coverage in Japan: reporting done by NHK, Japan's version of the BBC, which by law must be neutral on all issues; and traditional masukomi (from "mass communications") outlets like Fuji or TBS. While the press in Japan seems well balanced when covering politics -- for example, even minor parties are given ample time to present their views on popular political talk shows, no matter how small their representation -- you can always count on Asahi Shimbun-affiliated TV Asahi to give the ruling Liberal Democratic Party a hard time because of their long history of opposition. Also, the news media is always careful to tip-toe around any issue involving the New Komeito, Japan's third-largest political party and part of the current ruling coalition, since many famous singers and actors are members of the Soka Gakkai Buddhist religion, which is completely unaffiliated (wink wink) with the New Komeito party (wink wink).

Here are the official Election Poster Places you see around town. You also see plenty of these posters in people's homes, where they're no doubt pressed into displaying them as a form of Japanese giri. But you don't see Hitler moustaches, one politician choosing unflattering images of his opponent for negative advertising, or anything. It's all about positive issues, slogans (sometimes in English), and gambarimasu (Japanese for "I will do my best for you").

Interesting Japanese Phrases: Yappari, Naruhodo, Masaka, Sasuga

When learning Japanese, I found myself fascinated by words or phrases that were completely unlike what existed in English. For example, there's a class of single-word phrases which, for some reason, have many possible translation paths in English, making them challenging (but fun) to use. First there's yahari (alternately, yappari), which you use to express your own expectations about something, roughly equivalent to "I knew it" or "just as I expected." When someone tells you something that you didn't know, you can use naruhodo (nah-roo-ho-doh), which means "I see" or "that's news to me." If you watch an hour of anime in Japanese, you'll likely hear the phrase masaka (mah-sah-kah) at least once, usually said by a shocked character -- it just means "it can't be!" or "you've got to be joking!" Finally there's a great word to pull out when you want to praise someone: sasuga (SAH-soo-gah), which roughly means "I always knew you were incredible!" So if you have a friend or coworker named Yamada-san who does something good, hit him with "Sasuga, Yamada-san!" and know that you've made his day.

Do You Know Miss Hanako of the Toilet?

Do you know the story of Toire no Hanako-san, or Miss Hanako of the Toilet? It's a Japanese urban legend that can be found at most every elementary school here, and it goes like this: if you go to the fourth stall of a specified girl's bathroom, usually on the third floor of the school, knock three times and call out "Hanako-san, are you there?" then you'll hear her reply, "Hai" (yes). Open the stall and you'll see a shimmering figure of a girl with bobbed hair with a red skirt on standing there. It's the ghost of Hanako, a girl who committed suicide after being bullied by her classmates (ijime), who is said to haunt the girl's bathroom looking for revenge. Or in an older version, Hanako is a girl who was playing hide-and-seek in the school bathroom during the war and was killed in an American air raid because she couldn't hear the air raid siren. Hanako-san is part of a pantheon of "school ghost" stories that are well known in Japan, like Kuchisake Onna or Split-Faced Woman, a female ghost who asks you if she's beautiful before trying to devour you, and Teke-Teke, the upper torso of a female who claws her way around Japan searching for her lower half, which was severed in a train accident in Hokkaido. Anyone hearing this story will supposedly see Teke-Teke's lower half walking aimlessly around the countryside within three days. Let us know if you see anything!

Exceptions to Rules in Japanese

When you study a language like Japanese, you learn many rules that make up the grammar, like the unique particles wa and ga which verbally mark the subjects of sentences; o, which conveniently marks the object of a sentence; how to change the verb forms to add whatever meaning you want to express, and so on. But as you study, you'll learn that to every rule there's an exception. For starters, the grammatical structures used in Japanese are important, yet in real spoken Japanese, most parts of sentences are usually understood by speakers and are thus eliminated, which can create confusion in the minds of students. When addressing someone, the Japanese add -san to the ends of their names for formal speech, and for relationships that are closer, -chan for girls and -kun for boys. But there are plenty of exceptions to this neat little system, for example, calling all children with -chan regardless of sex, mothers adding -san to the names of foods in bento lunches for their kids, -kun being used with females in formal classroom or military settings, or the Japanese obsession with nicknames, with the whole country thinking of Arnold Schwarzenegger as "Schwa-chan" because that's so darned cute. Bottom line, any language is complex, and the best way to cover each different facet of it is to expose yourself to plenty of input in that language. Thankfully, it's quite easy to find interesting and compelling ways to get input in Japanese, whether from manga or anime or Japanese dramas or even the PC dating-sim games we sell.

Wacky Japanese You Already Know

It's time for another installment of Wacky Japanese You Already Know, featuring Japanese words that happen to be homophones with English, like hen, a word for a female chicken which happens to mean "strange" in Japanese, or the letter "E," which is an all-purpose word for "good" or "okay" here (Romanized ii, pronounced like the letter). In American English, "honky" is an impolite word for a white person, but in Japanese, honki means "serious," e.g. honki desu ka? "Are you serious?" The word "kinky" might make you think of something creative in the bedroom, but in Japan the region of the country containing Kyoto, Osaka and Nara is designated as the Kinki Region -- there's a popular "multi-talent" duo from the region called the Kinki Kids. If you've ever seen one of the Rambo movies, you know how to say "violent" or "violence" in Japanese, since that's what it means -- rambou. When a relationship has bumps, the word for this is giku-shaku, which sounds so much like "geek shack" that you can probably just use that word. "Emo" describes a kind of music and related counter-culture style of living, but in Japanese it's...a potato (imo). And if you've ever wondered how you say "voice actor" in Japanese, it's really easy: "say you" (seiyu). Now you know some more Japanese words. Wasn't that easy?

First European Wins a Sumo Championship. Honky desu ka?

History has been made in the Sumo Wrestling world with the victory of Bulgarian wrestler Kotooshu (koh-toh-OH-shu), the first time a wrestler from Europe has won a Sumo Championship. Born Kaloyan Stefanov Mahlyanov in Bulgaria, he was a successful wrestler in his home country, but when his weight increased past 120 kg, the maximum for participating in the Olympics, he decided to try his hand at sumo wrestling instead after participating in a few bouts as a joke. He climbed the ranks in the sumo world quickly, attaining the 2nd highest level of ozeki after only 19 tournaments, the most rapid rise of a wrestler starting from the lowest rank. (There are six tournaments held each year, three in Tokyo and one each in Osaka, Nagoya and Kyushu.) His handsome good looks and relatively low weight of just 152 kg / 334 lbs -- compare that to Hawaiian wrestler Konishiki, who was a massive 264 kg / 580 lbs -- have earned him many fans, and the nickname "the David Beckham of sumo." His wrestling name of Kotooshu combines the traditional Japanese musical instrument koto with the kanji name for Europe, Oshu. The top sumo wrestlers are always quite famous in Japan, appearing on TV commercials and talk shows, and I'm sure we'll be seeing plenty of this wrestler from now on. He's even won his first first sponsor: Meiji's Bulgaria brand of yogurt, which makes a lot of sense.

The Melancholy of Hayao Miyazaki

Question. Should we make this as a T-shirt? ^_^

Eye Creases and Beauty in Japan

In Japan, there are often concepts that are difficult for Westerners to grasp. One measurement of beauty here is related to the number of creases in a persons eyelid when their eyes are open -- one crease is called hitoe (hee-TOE-eh), two creases is futae (fu-TAH-eh). Single-creasers have slender, traditionally Asian eyes, while those with more creases have larger eyes that look European to the Japanese. Getting plastic surgery to change the appearance of your eyes is quite popular among TV stars and young Japanese people, and my wife likes to regularly report on which TV stars who have suddenly changed their faces. (There are even products that promise to make your eyes look larger and more "Western.") I have to admit, I'd never considered that people had different numbers of creases in their eyelids until coming here -- it was a totally alien concept to me. Another measure of beauty is having a "high nose" (hana ga takai), an important feature for anyone who wants to be considered one of the Beautiful People here; the opposite is a "low nose" (hana ga hikui). The rule is, if you can touch your chin and the tip of your nose with one extended finger without contacting your lips, you've got a "high nose." I never really thought of schnozzes as anything other than "big" or "small" before coming to Japan, but apparently there is more to a person's nose than meets the eye.