Some Pictures of Vegas, San Diego etc.

Here are some pictures I've had sitting in my iPhoto library, if you want them.

A little patch of grass for seeing-eye dogs to use for peeing at the San Diego airport.

Getting ready to fly. My wife did not expect them to say things like "If oxygen should be needed, a mask will drop down. Please insert 25 cents for the first three minutes" and was totally surprised. I should have warned her about Southwest first.

We had fun at Vegas. Just stayed at Ceaser's Palace since it's fun to be central to the Strip when in the city. Plus we'd never stayed there.

About the funnest thing to do is...nothing. We spent many hours lolling (not LOLing) by the poolsite.

The passing of George Carlin let me know that it was time to get out to see all the commedians that I respected before too much time passed, so I made sure to catch Penn & Teller this time around. It was a fabulous show, and I recommend everyone hit it. They've come a long way since season 5 of Babylon 5, haven't they? By the way, you get to shake their hands and get autographs after the show, which makes it totally

As a husband to a Japanese woman, I have to recommend Coach compared to Gucci, Louis Vuitton and all the other brands. This is because it's like $100 for something nice, rather than $600, which is really something I can get behind. In Shikoku there's a prefecture called Kochi, which sounds like Coach, and I had to make my dajare (bad Japanese pun) jokes about all these items being made there.

As I am wont to do once a year or so, I took my Miata out to the desert for some power driving.

I have one of the most recognizable cars in San Diego, I'm pretty sure. If you ever see me, say hi, although it will most likely be my mother driving since I'm not in country most of the time.

The open road and a Studio Ghibli watch.

One of the key destinations out here is Dudley's Bakery, a really good bakery. Also, the city of Julian, of course, which has great apple pies when it isn't under threat of burning down every other year.

Last night I even found time to go see the Batman movie. It was good!

Yuko Ogura is the First Gravure Idol Queen

I saw that super-cute Japanse idol/actress/singer Yuko Ogura (age 24) has been awarded the prestigious (?) First Gravure Idol Award from Sankei Newspaper's entertainment website "ZAKZAK." Yukorin, who was the girl dressed as a baby seal in the Youtube video with a polar bear you may have seen, got the award for being pretty much the single most popular bikini idol in Japan over the past eight years, and for breaking the iron-clad rule that a cute idol had to be, well, chesty in order to make it in Japan's cut-throat gravure idol world. (The term gravure comes from the word photogravure, a process for printing glossy magazines, but has come to mean sexy girls in bikinis in Japan -- no, I don't know what the heck is up with this word, either.) The Japanese are quite amorous of giving awards, and there seems to be no end to the prizes that can be given each year: popular idol/actress Yumiko Shaku recently won the "E-Line Award" from the Japan Association of Orthodontics for having the best facal profile, which includes a beautiful nose, jaw and chin. Literary awards are also rampant, and there are frankly so many -- the Yomiuri Prize, the Osaka Women's Literature Award, the Saitama Sports Literature Award -- that they all become kind of meaningles.

Park like a Rebel

Whenever I'm in the U.S., I find myself doing things in a slightly more Japanese way, just as I'm not afraid to openly embrace my gaijin side when I'm in Japan. For some reason, Japanese drivers always park their cars by backing in, so that Japanese parking lots are made up of rows of cars lined up the same way, like expertly groomed teeth. I refuse to follow this custom when in Japan, and pat myself on the back as I recklessly park my car front end first, with the back sticking out, and make sweeping statements to my kids about not being afraid to be original and choose your own path in life, which is incidentally called going my way by the Japanese. Today I noticed that most of the cars in the American parking garage I was in were parked front end first, so naturally I had to pretend I was Japanese, backing my car into the space, just to be me. Incidentally, living in Japan will make you a much better driver than you would otherwise be. The space I was backing my car into was far too small for the vehicle I was in, yet I expertly maneuvered the car into the space, something I probably could not have done before going to live in Japan.

Tacos, America and Handi-Vac Bags

There are many good things about being in the U.S., like being able to order a taco without getting octopus, since tako happens to be Japanese word for that marine creature. It's nice driving for free on the freeways instead of forking over $25 or so for a trip as I do back home, and having three dozen Mexican restaurants within a ten minute drive of my house isn't bad either. My wife is enjoying American television, from the endless reruns of CSI on cable channels to reality television like The Baby Borrowers, which seems oddly to be made in a way that a former ESL student like my wife can easily understand it. Even American TV commercials have her giggling with delight, from the ubiquitous ads for lawyers (unthinkable in Japan, where attorneys are so rare that I've never met one in 17 years of living in the country) to commercials for products she's sure would be popular with housewives back home, like the Reynolds Handi-Vac bags with a device that removes the air from the bag before you freeze it. Just as Americans might be amazed at watching television in Japan with all its chaos, it's fun for us to sit back and soak up the American TV that we don't generally get to see.

(Actually, you're going to shake your head at me, but octopus is one of my favorite foods.)

The Brain and Bilingualism

My wife and I are raising our kids to be bilingual in English and Japanese, and it's interesting to observe how thought processes work in both languages. For the past four years, my son has attended a special experimental school that teaches the normal Japanese curriculum but with 70% of the classes in English, and as a result, his brain has gotten quite used to thinking in that language. When working through difficult math problems, for example, I'll hear him utter, "Oh, they're talking about lowest common denominator" because he's more familiar with that term in English rather than in Japanese. Or sometimes it'll work the other way: once he didn't know what "gravity" was in English because he'd learned the concept in Japanese and hadn't built the synaptic bridge between the two words. When I came to Japan, I somehow managed to learn the word muri (無理), meaning "not able to be done," by having it explained to me in Japanese. As the word embedded itself in my brain I got quite comfortable with its use, and I never had the need to connect the word to an English equivalent. It was about a year later when I realized that the word had a very simple English counterpart, which was the word "impossible." It amazed me that the two parts of my brain could work so independently of each other that I could learn a concept in one language without it being hooked up on the other side. And yet, this is what happens in the minds of children who learn two languages growing up: both are separate and only come together synaptically when needed.

How to Pronounce Japanese Names

We certainly had fun in Las Vegas, enjoying some quality down time. On the way back to San Diego, our flight was delayed due to mechanical problems, causing us to wait at the gate to be put on another flight. When the airline counter called my my wife, they had the usual trouble with her Japanese name, stuttering over it several times, so I thought I'd write a simple pronunciation guide. Basically, keep in mind that:

a) Japanese words or names are made up of syllables, e.g. ka, ki, ku, ke or ko, never "k" by itself

b) the only syllables that don't come in consonant + vowel pairs are the five vowels by themselves and n, which can only come at the end of words; note that three sounds, shi, chi and tsu don't follow the neat consonant + vowel pairing, but just treat them as whole sounds

c) the five vowel sounds are always a ("ah"), i ("ee"), u ("oo"), e ("eh") and o ("oh"), with no exceptions

d) English rules of pronunciation don't apply to Japanese, and every syllable is pronounced, hence the name Kazue would be "KAH-zoo-eh" and not "kah-ZOO" (the English concept of silent e doesn't work in Japanese); note that Chi is always a hard sound, not soft as in "Chicago."

e) the best way to get comfortable with Japanese names or words is to listen to them, so watch anime in the original Japanese and repeat what you hear, or ask Japanese people to pronounce things for you.

Groups and Japan

Groups are, of course, extremely important to human beings, since you can't have much of a society without them. The various customs the Japanese have evolved regarding groups, such as having different categories of polite language for use when talking to someone from outside your company (soto) compared with someone from inside (uchi), or the inability to bring any group together without deciding who the leader will be (who then goes by titles like dancho, group leader, or kaicho, chairman), can really look odd to foreigners. While most people have different circles of friends they don't bring together -- I certainly wouldn't expect the local Miata Club members to mingle well with my anime friends -- the Japanese have raised this separation of different groups of friends to an art form. Because compulsory education ends with Junior High in Japan, most people have two groups of school-era friends: the ones that live in their part of town, who they went to the local Elementary and Junior High with, and a separate group of friends from High School, which is often located in another city. The idea of mixing these two groups together is almost taboo, since each group represents a separate set of experiences and memories that are walled off from each other, and going to dinner with friends from two different groups would be an extremely difficult situation for everyone.

Gaijin Leading Companies in Japan

There have been a lot of changes in Japanese society since we started J-List in 1996. First, the old concept of lifetime employment, that Japanese workers will generally stay at a firm their entire lives without ever changing jobs, fell by the wayside when iconic companies like Sony started eliminating jobs and laying off employees, something that had never been done in the past (although companies would often force layoffs in their subsidiaries when times got tough). Another big change was the idea that Japanese companies could be headed by (gasp!) foreigners, a trend which probably started when Brazil-born Lebonese-French Carlos Ghosn assumed leadership of Nissan in June of 2000, turning the company around by eliminating jobs that the company's core business couldn't support. Now it seems that many of the most visionary Japanese companies are headed by foreigners, for example Shinsei Bank, a popular Internet-based bank that's breaking rules and taking names in the extremely conservative Japanese banking world, introducing concepts like not charging a $6 fee to transfer $20 to someone's account, letting Japanese use ATMs without fees when traveling in other countries, and having bank branches that stay open past 3 pm. (My theory is that banks in Japan close so early in Japan to encourage young men to get married, so they'll have wives who can do their banking for them.) Foreigners have taken the lead in sports, too, for example Coach Bobby Valentine, who made a name for himself as the talented coach of the Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters.

There's another company in Japan run by a foreigner which you may have heard of: it's J-List. When we founded the company, Japan was really at the dawn of the Internet -- I mean they were tapping stones together to send TCP/IP packets. When we incorporated, we asked our bank we could go about setting up an account for credit card processing, and our request was so bold and unexpected that one of the vice presidents of the bank came out to personally apologize, saying they didn't believe the Internet would be appropriate for processing financial transactions, forcing us to do our banking through the U.S. instead. I sometimes reflect on what it's been like for the Japanese staff who have worked at normal companies to come to J-List and suddenly have an American for a boss. My staff tells me that it's interesting working for a gaijin because I don't play games with the concepts of tatemae (something we pretend is true even though we all know it's not) and honne (the truth; the way things really are); we're more likely to call a duck a duck. (Although, me suddenly asking my staff what it's like to work for an American all but guarantees whatever they're going to tell me is also a tatemae, and I'm fully aware that it was a pretty difficult thing to ask them.) Also, foreigners have a way of doing things that would be impossible for Japanese, and that strange latent power that gaijin seem to have in Japan has helped us make J-List what it is today -- almost by definition, we don't know what can't be done because we don't know what the hell is going on around us. Personally, I'm sure it's challenging for them working for a person who's more emotional and less organized than a straight-laced Japanese shacho (company president) might be, but hopefully the fun we have bringing wacky and fun products to customers around the world make up for it.

Do you work for a foreigner, or otherwise challenging person because he comes from a significantly different background from you?

Hello from Las Vegas

Hello from Las Vegas, where my wife and I have come for some R&R without the kids, which is always a fun thing for married couples to do. While sampling the various casinos and other attractions the city has to offer (including Penn & Teller, which I recommend to everyone), we've been having some interesting conversations with the other tourists we've met here, including many Europeans, getting into debates about things like how there can be so many distinct accents in the U.K. My wife was taken aback at my talking with strangers at first -- after all, it's rare to have a deep conversation with someone you don't already know in more reserved Japan unless you're already comfortable with each other, and to an extent, aware of each others' role in the group, if there is a group. But she came around, realizing that it's quite interesting to strike up a conversation with someone nearby and learn about Oklahoma or Florida or France. I feel sorry for the many Japanese tourists who come to America but miss out on the chance to make new friends, either because of language barriers or needless clinging to invisible social rules.

Dentists in Japan

Ask any gaijin living in Japan about dentists, and you'll be sure to get an earful. While Japanese dentists are good at fixing teeth, they're famous for making you come back dozens of times to finish your dental work, instead of getting it out of the way in a few visits. Once I had some work done on three teeth that took an incredible 18 months. I believe Japan's dentists take so long to work on teeth because of the way insurance is structured -- they're only allowed to charge a certain amount to the system each day, so they spread it out as much as they can. Like men whose job it is to stand by the road and wave a flashlight to let you know there's road construction going on and NHK employees who knock on millions of doors to collect the $20 monthly fee from households in person, Japanese dentists are an unfortunate symbol of Japan's lack of efficiency in some areas.

This is the best reason to go to dentists: hot, hot oral assistants who clean your teeth for you. I just know there's a major Japanese fetish for having your teeth cleaned by a beautiful woman. I'd go every week if they'd let me. 

International Day of the iPhone: Japan

Well, the International Day of the iPhone is here, when Apple's new 3G iPhone launches around the world. In Japan, the line outside Softbank's flagship store in Omotesando, Tokyo reached 1500 people and over a kilometer in length, as Japanese fans lined up to get their hands on the device for the first time. Masayoshi Son, the enigmatic president of Softbank and the mind behind the success of Google-trouncing Yahoo Japan, was beaming as he watched the lines of iPhone buyers, most of whom were switching from competing cellphone companies au/KDDI and NTT Docomo. Being a maverick has helped make the UC Berkeley-educated Son, a third-generation Japanese of Korean descent, the richest man in Japan, and his ability to "think different" probably helped him win the contract for the iPhone from Steve Jobs. While I'm still not sure if the iPhone will bowl over Japanese keitai users, who are extremely hidebound and love their flip-fones with the fancy styling and easy-to-type (for them) numeric keypads, I do love the coming havoc the iPhone will wreak in the Japanese cellphone marketplace as users realize they don't have to give cellular providers power to dictate everything about their phone, from what music formats they can listen to to what applications they can run -- they can just stick anything in iTunes and sync it over. Today I updated my (first-gen) iPhone to the updated 2.0 firmware and downloaded the app I've always wanted, a light saber sound simulator (iTunes link). Any phone platform that can bring that kind of awesomeness to its users will certainly find a niche in Japan.

Humor in America, The U.K., Japan

Humor is a very cultural thing, and it's fun to analyze the things people from different countries consider amusing -- jokes about the lack of education or hygiene among people in a certain region, visual or slapstick forms of humor, orifice-related jokes and so on. Often, we can't comprehend the things that people in one culture find funny -- Canadian stand-up comedians telling jokes about Nova Scotians go way over my head, for example. Then again, there are times when the cultural difference can make something all that much more hilarious, which I believe is why Monty Python and the Holy Grail is such a cult favorite in the U.S. -- the gap between the two countries magnifies all the jokes, and our unfamiliarity with British understatement ("There are some who call me...Tim?") make it a ridiculously funny film. Humor in Japan often seems to be situationally-based, putting a character in an impossibly bizarre position and drawing laughter from his embarrassment, for example. One important category of humor in Japan comes from manzai, two-person stand-up comedy that involves a dumb comedian (boke) who makes erroneous observations and his sharp-tongued partner (tsukkomi), who berates him at every turn. The interplay of R2-D2 and C-3P0 in the Star Wars films is largely a reflection of this comic tradition, of course filtered through the films of Akira Kurosawa. The old adage that if you have to explain it, it isn't funny holds up pretty well in my experience, and back when I was a teacher I tried using American humor as teaching tool, bringing in Far Side comics or funny song lyrics for my students to discuss. I remember once trying to explain the concepts of irony, sarcasm and cynicism, all three of which are represented by the exact same word in Japanese (hiniku). It was, ahem, not my most inspired of lessons, and I think my students were more confused when I was finished.

Thoughts on Learning While Drunk

Studying a foreign language is interesting because you learn a lot about how your own brain works in the process. I remember back in Psychology 101 at SDSU, being told that when you learn something while in a certain state, it's easier to recall the information later while you're in the same state. The example the teacher gave us was, if you're dumb enough to study for a test while drunk (it was college after all), you'd do better on the test if you took it while in the same state of inebriation. While I've not tested this, I have noticed that memory seems to be tied to language in interesting ways. During my Japanese literature phase, when I was going to read all the classic works of writers like Soseki Natsume in the original Japanese, I read several interesting Japanese literary novels, including Kokoro, a story of a love triangle between in Meiji-era Kamakura. After reading it in Japanese, I found that I had difficulty remembering the plot when I talked about it in English, but discussing it in Japanese was actually easier.

Green Tea Can Save America

In addition to lots of anime-related panels, video rooms and other interesting events, anime conventions are great because you can wander the dealer's room and find some cool things to buy, like, well, J-List stuff. While there are always plenty of companies selling anime, manga and similar products, I like to check out what non-anime booths there are at a given show, hawking things like swords or vampire contact lenses or steampunk art. At Anime Expo I happened across an interesting booth by Japanese bottled tea company Ito En, giving out samples of that most Japanese of beverages, green tea, and carrying their marketing message of Oi, ocha! ("Hey! Tea!") to Americans. Bottled tea beverages are extremely popular in Japan, with twice the volume sold compared to carbonated soft drinks (6 million vs. 3 million kiloliters, if you're curious). Since all Asian-style teas are consumed without sugar of any kind, they're extremely healthy, and it seems clear to me that the #1 beverage of choice among Japanese being naturally free of sugar (unlike, say, Coca-Cola, or virtually everything sold in any store in America, as I learned today when the store I went in didn't stock even non-sweetened iced tea) is probably the single most important reason why Japanese are among the thinnest nations on Earth, which is certainly something to think about. (As an aside, today I was eating some tuna salad from a supermarket here in the States and was surprised to find there was sugar in it -- ack.) Incidentally, J-List offers various kinds of good Japanese tea for you to sample and enjoy, including a beverage I can't recommend enough, mugi-cha, the refreshing Japanese barley tea that's so cold and good in the summer. It comes in handy cold-water tea bags so you can always keep some in the fridge.

"Arubaito" Culture in Japan

There are three kinds of employees in Japan: full time, part time, and arubaito (ah-roo-BAI-toh). The last type, the name for which comes from the german word for "work" (arbeit), refers to contract-less employees who are paid by the hour and work irregular or semi-temporary schedules, as differentiated from full company employees, who have benefits like twice-annual bonuses and vacation time, and semi-official part-timers, who also have some formal benefits. One of the biggest trends in post-bubble Japanese society is the tendency of younger workers to shun traditional full-time employment, instead being content to work informal jobs staffing video rental stores and gas stations, tutoring at evening cram schools, and so on. According to a new government report, an amazing 35% of the workforce now occupies these "non-regular" employment positions, exchanging freedom to change jobs at will and less on-the-job stress for lower job security. Why so many would choose to work as "freeters" (as these part-time and temporary workers are called) puzzles older Japanese, who of course benefited greatly from the stable economic growth of the postwar period. The reasons 'baito is so popular are many, but one big one is that many Japanese have come to value their own leisure time over work. This is a good thing of course, although I personally consider the industriousness of the Japanese people as a whole to be no less than a National Treasure for the country, and something that I hope will continue into the future.

My Anime Expo 2008

Pay no attention to the rivet that happens to be where our mascot's nipple would be, that was not intentional.

Driving to LA

Convention Center

Setting up the booth

As usual, we have some interesting products. Did you know these Trading Torsos are squeezable?

I love this figure. It's 1/4 scale!!

This is Char Aznable, but I believe he's really cosplaying Tanaka from Otaku no Video, cosplaying as Char, making it quite a deep joke.

Miku Hatsune didn't have a leek so we gave her one.

A satisfied customer of our high school uniform line.

There were about a Brazillion of Asuka's there. This one was hawt.

She put the shirt on and then grabbed her boyfriend's butt, just like on the shirt. It was pretty cool to see.

These anime fans were so tired.

Um, yeah. Buy the used panties of anime characters. It was a really deep joke, but a little off-color.

Living outside of the U.S. makes stuff like this seem *so* stupid. I had to laugh at actually seeing one of these signs.

Our bishoujo game panel was full. I was happy.

LA being LA, there is a lot of Korean stuff. I found some great "fast food" Korean BBQ.

The hotel was quite good. It was, among other things, the Buck Rogers hotel showing futuristic New Chicago.

This is Shokotan, the star of the convention this year. She came by our booth and bought a bunch of kanji T-shirts, since she just loves Americans' take on anime. It was cool talking with her, since she didn't expect to find anyone who could speak Japanese selling stuff.

Closing out the con. I like to show this stuff since most people never get to see it.

There are always little piles of trash after these things. It's kind of lonely to see.

That's all for this year, Anime Expo. As the Japanese might say, see you next!

On Denny's and Seven-Eleven

If you ever want to appreciate your local Denny's, I advise you to go live in Japan for a few years. It's not that Denny's Japan is all that bad -- it's actually one of my top picks for late-night famires (family restaurant) coffee and dining -- but something about it just doesn't satisfy the American in me like the ones in the U.S. Denny's Japan is owned by the company that also owns Seven-Eleven, the top chain of convenience stores in Japan, and for some reason the company thought it would be a great idea to remind everyone of this fact by sticking big Seven-Eleven signs on all Denny's, showing the parent company's new name, 7&i Holdings. After all, nothing makes you hunger for good restaurant dining like a convenience store logo, and nothing builds customer loyalty like branding yourself as a holding company. During Anime Expo, I was quite happy to be able to enjoy breakfast in the nearby Denny's, since I associate a Grand Slam Breakfast with the restaurant chain far more than the menu items they offer in Japan, which include lots of traditional Japanese foods like fried pork cutlet and miso soup.

Japan Can Be an Expensive Place

You've been in Japan too long when you pay over $70 for a Captain Santa T-shirt and realize a few days later how much you really spent. It's true: Japan can be an incredibly expensive place when it wants to be. Virtually everything, from construction materials to gasoline (currently up to the equivalent of $6 a gallon now, although the average Japanese doesn't drive 75 miles round trip to run some errands, which you can find yourself doing in California), is pricier than in other parts of the world, and food costs consume a quarter of the average household budget. One problem is that the ways goods are sold in Japan is still too structured, with products coming into the hands of consumers through established routes and multiple levels of distribution, for example the multi-tiered book distribution system that J-List has to deal with when ordering artbooks or manga. But there's something about living in Japan that compels a person to want to own things he wouldn't otherwise bother with, like the above-mentioned T-shirt I bought in 1992 featuring Captain Santa, a line of high-end clothing featuring images of Santa at the beach. It was the best T-shirt I've ever owned in my life, but at $70, I probably should have had my head examined. From toilet seats that wash your butt to the 20+ varieties of massage chairs they sell here, there sure are a lot of ways to spend your money in Japan.

The Internet and Changes

Sometimes I think that no one is happier with the changes that have been brought on by the arrival of the Internet than me. When I went to Japan back in 1991, I had no inkling of the transformation that was about to sweep over the world, making it a lot less of a hardship to be a gaijin living in a far-off place like rural Japan. Back then it was still the era when people paid something called "long distance" to "call" people who lived far away, which incurred extra fees, and I remember spending $4 or so per minute to call my family when I'd get homesick. It didn't take long before something called the Internet soon put that odd custom in its place, and before I knew it I was able to order the things I needed from companies like Amazon, and of course, offer similar services to people not lucky enough to live in Japan through J-List. One of the best things about the way the Internet has grown is the ability for me to work just about anywhere, doing things like writing this update as easily from the U.S. or Europe as from Japan. A long as there's a nice, fast Internet connection, that is. I have a friend from Italy who likes being in Japan because he can access his server that's 20 km from his Italian office more quickly than home in Italy, where his local connection is much slower. What will the future hold for the Internet? I'm optimistic that we'll all have wireless T1 Internet nodes embedded in our skulls within a few years, and then things should start to get really interesting.

Useful Hooks in Japanese for Foreign Loan Words

There's nothing more interesting than studying a foreign language, of learning the way its unique grammatical rules work so you can form sentences and ideas and communicate with others. Language is always rule-based, and even dialects like Ebonics and Cockney which may sound "wrong" to speakers of standard American or British English are actually formed around their own suites of unique grammatical rules. The Japanese make heavy use of foreign loan words, usually borrowed from English, but since the grammar of the two languages is different, something is needed to "bridge" the two, and conveniently there are two such grammatical aides built right into the language. The first is the adjective particle na which allows an adjective to be plugged into a Japanese sentence without breaking any rules, and you can hear phrases like surimu na onna (a slim, slender woman), gohjasu na hoteru (a gorgeous hotel) or torendii na dorama (the latest trendy drama on television) spoken every day in Japan. I've even heard the word "epoch-making" used in this fashion -- as in, epokkumeekingu na ibento, meaning an event that is truly Earth-shattering in nature. The other tool to help foreign words be used in Japanese is the catch-all verb suru which means "to do." Words you might hear in Japanese include getto suru (GET-toh suru, to get or find something), doraibu suru (doh-RAH-ee-bu suru, to go for a drive), kamingu auto suru (kah-min-GU AH-oo-toh suru, lit. to do "coming out" or to come out of the closet about something), and of course, sekkusu suru (to have, well, you know). The staff at J-List uses lots of English in their Japanese, too, and you can hear terms like sukyan suru (to scan something), pikku suru (to pick products in preparation for shipping) being used everyday.

Are you coming to Anime Expo? If so be sure and stop by booths 624-626-628 to say hello, and check out the many anime figures, plush toys, T-shirts, Hoodies, manga and dating-sim games we've got for you. We'll also be holding a panel on bishoujo games on Saturday July 5th from 8 to 9 pm in room LP4 (LACC 411), with free stuff for everyone who shows up, including a raffle and more. See you there!

Pleasantville, Japan

One of my favorite movies is Pleasantville, a fun film about two modern-day teenagers who get transported inside a 1950s-era black-and-white TV show similar to Father Knows Best or Leave it to Beaver. In the strange universe of Pleasantville, every wife stays in the kitchen cooking her family's dinner, and there's a funny scene where the husband comes home to an empty house to find no wife and no dinner waiting for him, which utterly confuses him since it's supposed to be impossible in the world he lives in. Watching that scene the other day amused me because just that day my Japanese father-in-law had been upset because his wife had gone off to a UNESCO meeting without leaving his dinner, forcing him to fend for himself in the kitchen, never an easy task for an older Japanese man. The idea that a funny joke about life in the 1950s could still describe people in contemporary Japan is a surprise, but then Japan is a very different place from the U.S. In my family I'm considered the daikoku-bashira or the "big black pillar" that holds up the family, and it's always interesting to observe from a cultural standpoint the way my Japanese wife or her mother jumps up when I get home from work, fetching me a bowl of rice and my chopsticks in a way that reinforces my role in the family. Part of me feels like resisting that kind of treatment, since I don't think it's particularly necessary, but in the end I usually just shut up and eat my dinner.

Anime Expo 2008

We're here at Anime Expo, the most excellent anime-themed annual event there is, with something like 40,000 other fans who have gathered to celebrate the important alternate popular world culture of Japanese animation. I've been involved with American anime fandom from the beginning -- I was at this event back in '91 when it was called Anime Con, when no one was sure if there were enough anime fans to fill a whole convention. As I wander the halls of the Westin Bonaventure hotel looking at the inspired kids (I'm at that age where most everyone I see can be described with this word) I see, it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

Speaking English vs. Japanese, Part II

Last time I talked about how there are times when gaijin in Japan might find that some doors open for them if they speak English rather than fluent Japanese. I'm not sure why this, but the tendency for Japanese to react positively to someone speaking English seems to be related to the strange "English complex" they possess, the various difficult emotions each Japanese person has about the language, which most study for years but don't really master. Tomo tells me it's related to what's known as seiyo suhai shugi, translatable as Worship-of-the-West-ism, the tendency for Japanese to assume that Europe and America are more socially advanced and inherently superior to Japan. Basically, when a person speaks English, he seems to be elevated to a higher rung of the social ladder than if he spoke fluent Japanese -- even if he could recite the Tale of Genji from memory while performing tea ceremony and folding origami (sigh). One area that tends to be important to males living in Japan is, well, meeting females, and the great agony of gaijin who have studied a lot Japanese is the inverse relationship of language study to how popular you (might) be with certain kinds of Japanese girls. It seems that a fun English-speaking foreigner might just be more interesting (mysterious?) than a Japanese-fluent gaijin who can discuss the various historical causes for the Saigo Takamori's Rebellion which took place after the Meiji Restoration. Of course, this is a pretty big generalization, and I know that my wife was intereted in me because of my deeper passion for Japan rather than in spite of it. But seeing newly-arrived teachers in the JET program go drinking with girls hanging off them at the local pub made cramming for Level 1 of the Japan Language Proficiency Test just a little bit harder. Oh well.

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.