Wither the Salaryman?

The word "salaryman" is a wasei-eigo (lit. "made-in-Japan English") term referring to a salaried male employee of a company. The word came into use in the Taisho Period (1912-1926) to describe the new professional class of company employees doing jobs we'd think of as "white collar," and during Japan's period of rapid economic growth in the postwar years these salarymen were responsible for Japan's economic miracle. The trademark of the salaryman is his conservative dark suit, called a sebiro in Japanese, which probably came from the English word "civil" since they are civilian clothes, i.e. not a military uniform. Although the salaryman is still the basis on which Japan's modern economic society is built, there are an increasing number of people turning on their backs on working full-time in a monolithic company, whether it's young people who choose to live as freeters, never tying themselves to one job for long, or men who escape their status as salarymen (known as datsu-sara), quitting their jobs to open a restaurant or a Japanese inn or go into business for themselves. The word salaryman describes male employees; female employees would likely be called "office ladies" (OLs) if they're doing standard clerical work, or "career woman" if they've made a choice to pursue their careers, which puts them in a different career track than normal OLs. Personally, I can't get past the fact that labels are used in such an overt way in Japan, the ultimate land of subtlety, where in the "always say exactly what you're thinking" U.S. it would be much more common for a more general term to be used for all employees.

Gaijin and Real Ramen

One thing foreigners visiting Japan should be sure and try is "real" ramen. Thanks to its cheapness, virtually everyone in the world is familiar with instant ramen noodles like Cup Noodle, and I sure ate my share during my days as a poor college student. The difference between instant noodles and the real stuff found in Japanese ramen restaurants, though, is like night and day. Although you might think of ramen is being a Japanese dish, it originated in China around the start of the 20th century, and within Japan ramen is considered Chinese food, on par with gyoza dumplings and spring rolls. (They even write the name for it in katakana, as it's a foreign loan word.) Ramen comes in one of several basic soup flavors, with the most common being shoyu (soy sauce), followed by miso (my own favorite), shio ("salt" flavor), and so on. I love ramen now, but it took me a few months to work up the courage to try many different kinds of the noodles when I first got here -- I was bowled over by the naked variety of ingredients, many of which I couldn't identify, that it took time for me to take it all in. Although you can probably find a ramen shop within twenty meters of you at all times in Japan, I recommend you try a yatai, or outdoor ramen stand, which is a wonderful icon of Tokyo; it's fun to talk with the Master while you eat. If you fancy yourself a ramen fan, plan on visiting the Yokohama Ramen Museum next time you're in town. Besides various displays on the history of the noodles, you can wander a perfect recreation of a 1958 Tokyo street and dig your chopsticks into the noodles of a bygone era.

Would you like pickled bamboo shoots with that?

Cuteness in the Bath, and Everywhere!

While most people in the U.S. probably opt for a shower to get clean, in Japan hopping in the furo (bath) is the norm, a nice custom that gives you time to relax after a hard day, although it does mean you need to wash your bathtub every other day or so. (Japanese baths come with heating units to allow water to be re-heated and used the next day, which is possible because you always wash yourself outside of the bath, keeping the water ostensibly clean.) This unpleasant task usually falls to me, since my kids are masters at disappearing the moment I go to ask them to do it. The other day I went shopping for various things for the home, including a new bath sponge, and I was surprised to see that the universal concept of kawaii (cute) was alive and well even in such mundane industries as cleaning supplies. Looking at the sponges the store offered for sale, I saw one that had a cute happy face that smiled back at me, so of course that was the one I reached for. Incidentally, J-List has many cute things in stock for you, including cute items for your bath, in our Wacky Things from Japan section.

My Wife's Uncle, the World War II Survivor

Yesterday we went to visit my wife's uncle in the hospital. Making a hospital visit to a sick friend or family member is quite an involved custom, called omimai (oh-me-my!), not to be confused with omiai (oh-me-eye!) which is formal meeting with a prospective marriage partner usually arranged by your parents. This is the guy who fought in World War II, and he just loves me since I'm the only one who listens attentively to his recollections of the war. I don't mind at all: it's great to be able to talk with someone who lived through such vibrant history during a time when our two countries were bitter enemies, and I gladly listened for an hour as he talked about his years manning the large guns on the Battleship Ise, a mammoth vessel that was retrofitted after Midway so that the back end could serve as a carrier. (Being an anime fan, I had to convert the scenes he described into proper Yamato vs Galimas space battles.) During the war, he escaped death no less than three times. The first was when an American bullet grazed his face, leaving a long scar. Then, his ship was to have been sent out with the Yamato on her final one-way mission, but there was no fuel so they got to stay at the shipyards at Kure. Finally, after the atomic bombing of nearby Hiroshima, the captain picked eight crew members out of a line to go to the city and see what had happened, and all eight men ended up dying of radiation poisoning. My wife's uncle had been the tenth man in that line.

Interesting Observations by Children and Linguistic Children

One thing that's fun about having kids is all the creative observations they make. Like the time my daughter saw a toy German airplane from World War II I had at home and proclaimed, "This airplane looks angry," because the Luftwaffe insignia looked like the "anger mark" seen so often in anime and manga. Or the time my family went to stay with a friend in Malaysia, and my daughter wondered why the (normal) maids that worked at our friend's house weren't wearing extremely kawaii uniforms like the ones she'd seen on Japanese TV. Then there was the time my son made a mistake in English, so he shrugged and said, "My name is stupid English," making a joke on that most elementary of ESL phrases. But you don't need to be a kid to be creative: just start learning a foreign language like Japanese. The natural period of exploration you'll go through as you engage in silly wordplay games in order to discover the boundaries of the language will have you coming up with the most expressive and inspired observations in no time, just like children do. This "linguistic childhood" effect also can also serve as a defense when your wife wants to know you're still geeking out over episodes of Mobile Suit Gundam at your age. Since I started learning Japanese in college in 1987, linguistically I'm only 21 years old!

The 1000th Anniversary of The Tale of Genji

2008 marks a special event: the 1000th anniversary of the completion of The Tale of Genji, the famous story penned by a woman known as Murasaki Shikubu, who was born in the year 973. Often called the world's first novel, the book was written in installments which were delivered to the ladies of the Imperial Court, with each chapter developing the 400+ characters in new ways, essentially making it the first Japanese soap opera. It's the tale of a fictional Japanese Emperor named Hikaru Genji ("Shining Genji") who was quite the playboy, and the first part of the story is largely concerned with the many noble women who loved him or who were loved by him. Just as students in English classes must schlep through Beowulf, Chaucer and Shakespere, which they usually hate at the time but hopefully come to appreciate later, all students here have to tackle Genji, although it's difficult because the Old Japanese the story was written in is so different from the modern language. The novel was written at the height of the Heian Period (794-1192), a kind of Golden Age when cultural influences from China and Korea enabled a level of peace and civilization hitherto unknown, before Japan came to be dominated by samurai warriors who warred for control of the country. To commemorate the millennium anniversary of the Tale of Genji, there are special museum displays going on throughout the country including one in Yokohama this month. The Japanese Post Office has gotten into the game, too, issuing a set of commemorative stamps for collectors.

Do Foreigners Freak Out Japanese People?

I was recently asked "Are Japanese afraid of gaijin?" It was an interesting question which I had to think on a bit before responding. Certainly the answer is no -- although Westerners are sometimes viewed as mysterious and confusing creatures by the locals, I wouldn't say anyone feels actual fear, except possibly for small children who might hide in their mother's skirts when a big foreigner comes lumbering up to say hello. Of course, foreigners here do perplex the Japanese around them on a regular basis with some of the strange things they do, whether it's leaving a box of laserdiscs out in the rain then taking them back to the store the next day as defective (as a friend of mine did once), using a mimikaki ear cleaner as a coffee stir, or squealing with delight at the most mundane sights and sounds of the country, like my unending fascination with Japanese railroad crossings. Of course, there are times when Japanese are freaked out by foreigners for good reason, like when a British tourist from Spain decided it would be a good idea to take his clothes off and go for a swim in the moat around the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, after he'd accidentally dropped a bag he was carrying in the water. It took the Japanese two hours to finally corner and arrest him.
Here are some pics. Hope you're not eating now ^_^ Who thinks this guy deserves to be made into an Internet meme?

Tama the Feline Stationmaster

You never know what's going to become popular in Japan next. It could be a new variation on the Maid Cafe concept like the Code Geass Cafe in Akihabara, where all the employees dress as characters from the anime series, or the "Morning Banana Diet" craze that supposedly has people buying up all the bananas in Japanese supermarkets right now. In Okayama Prefecture, a cat named Tama has been made honorary stationmaster of Kishi Station, which has created a huge spike in popularity for the region as tourists flock to see the cat of the hour and buy his official cat photobook. Kishi Station is located in an area so rural that it's been reconfigured as an unmanned station, with no permanent staff working there. Tama is owned by a man who runs a kiosk outside the station, and the cat became such a local icon that the train line decided to name him official stationmaster and buy him a little hat to wear. The popularity of the cat has been credited with bringing millions of yen to the entire prefecture in the form of increased tourist revenue, and the rail company has offered Tama all the cat food he can eat to show their thanks. I can has lifetime employment?

Japan Universities vs. U.S.: Which are Better?

Japan is a great place with a lot to offer many people, whether you're interested in learning the language, making good friends or just surfing the weirdness (of which there is plenty). One area where I feel America beats Japan handily its university system, which provides an incredibly rich array of options for anyone wanting to broaden their horizons. I've got a friend who worked for a major computer company doing a job that was not terribly fulfilling for him (I believe "soul crushing" were his exact words). When he was laid off a couple of years ago, he decided to make a big change by going back to school and getting an art degree. Although Japan's competitive university system does do some good by helping students set goals for themselves early on, one downside is that almost no one has a hope of getting into a major university unless they're near the age of 18 and are very focused on their studies -- going back to school in your thirties or forties is almost unthinkable. Japanese universities are inflexible in other ways, for example each major is generally walled off from the others, with little ability for students to experience a broad range of subjects. If you're a poly sci major and decided you want to switch to education, you're going to have to start your entire college career over from scratch, rather than being able to change majors and keep most of your units. Back during my time at SDSU (affectionately called "Suds University" by students because of all the beer we drank), students deciding they wanted to change majors was a regular occurrence, and even encouraged by the school, since the whole point of a university is to help students find their way.

Narrow Roads and Japan

You've been in Japan to long when, while driving on a two-lane road, you know the lane nearest the curb is going to be used as a parking lot. Since Japan has a lot less land area than the U.S., cramming four times the population of California into a space that's slightly smaller, allowances for the lack of space have to be made, and on most streets you can expect to see cars pulling over along the side of the road so people can run into the conbini (convenience store) and buy milk. There are always two or three cars in front of my parents' liquor shop on Sundays, too, since that the day Shonen Jump comes out. In all my years of driving in the U.S. I've never been on a road that was so narrow that two cars couldn't pass side-by-side, but it's not difficult to find roads like that in the more rural parts of Japan, and one of the skills you need when driving on such roads is the ability to back up until you can find a wider spot for the oncoming car to pass. Since there are many blind corners on narrower Japanese streets, there are curved mirrors posted to help you see oncoming cars or pedestrians, although learning to drive while being aware of these mirrors is quite a challenge -- they just don't enter my vision at all.

Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea

Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea is the latest film by Hayao Miyazaki, and it's been quite an event here in Japan. It's the story of a curious fish named Brunhilde who decides to sneak away from her father and sisters and see what's on the surface. There she's befriended by a human boy named Sosuke who names her Ponyo, and the two become fast friends. Because Ponyo licked a cut Sosuke had, she acquired the magical ability to assume human form, and she makes up her mind to leave the sea and live with her friend forever. It's a simpler film than Miyazaki-sensei has made in the past, closer to My Neighbor Totoro or Kiki's Delivery Service than to more plot-driven action films like Laputa. Just as his famous character Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind was based on a character from Homer's Odyssey and a Japanese folk story of a princess who loved insects, Ponyo is a fusion of multiple sources, namely The Little Mermaid with its core elements rearranged; the local version of mermaids, as drawn in a famous woodblock printing from the Edo Period; a reverse version of Urashima Taro, the tale of a Japanese fisherman who visits a magical undersea palace; Little One-Inch, the story of a tiny child who goes to live with a Japanese couple, eventually attaining full size after many adventures; and The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, about a child who emerges from a bamboo stump who turns out to be the Moon Princess. (This last tale is, I am certain, the basis for E.T. as well,) As is usually the case with Miyazaki's films, there's always one song that you can't get out of your head, and the Ponyo theme (iTunes link) has been the most popular song in Japan for months. Ponyo, Ponyo, Ponyo...sakana no ko...

My Family the Anime Family

Sometimes I think my family would make the basis for an interesting anime series, along the lines of Darling wa Gaikokujin, a comic about a Japanese woman who thinks she's found the "perfect" American husband but is surprised when things don't always go as she expects. In the tradition of Sailor Moon and Magical DoReMi, my daughter would be the main character since she's quite occhokochoi (oh-cho-ko-choi), translatable as "clumsy in a cute way," always needing help from everyone else. Her brother would be a glasses-wearing egghead, constantly pointing out her faults, which is what he does already; you could make a lot of good tsukkomi and boke jokes based on his over-analytical nature when it comes to English, compared with her tendency to use English words freely without actually knowing what they mean. I think I'd make a pretty cool "Pops" type father character, a good-hearted but sometimes bumbling American who is an otaku for Japanese hot springs and who sometimes knows things that Japanese have no idea about. Having my wife as the president of their company (since my wife is president of J-List) would create some humorous situations, too -- the wife could try to pull rank on her husband at home -- while providing an updated vision of women for Japanese children to see. So if you have any contacts at a major animation studio in Japan, please send them my way!

Fires and Firemen in Old Edo

When you think of traditional images from the Edo Period, firemen probably don't immediately spring to mind. And yet for centuries, the brigades of hikeshi, lit. "those who put out fires," have been extremely important in keeping Japan's cities from going up in flames on a regular basis. Although we might think of Japan as being a backward nation during its 250-year period of sakoku ("chained country"), when it was death for any Japanese to leave Japan or for any foreigner to visit, the sprawling metropolis of Edo (now Tokyo) was actually the largest city in the world, with as many as 1.25 million residents at the time of the national census of 1720, compared with 860,000 in London. With so many people living in buildings made of wood, bamboo and paper, fires were a constant danger, and so teams of firemen wearing thick, multi-layered kimonos of cotton and special sandals were organized to keep them under control. Since there were no water pumps back then, the main way they accomplished this was by tearing down houses that weren't burning yet in order to isolate fires to a single part of the city. These heroic men were celebrated with a special genre of the ukiyoe art, which you can see by viewing the 2009 calendar we've posted to the site today.

There's a famous story related to fires in the Edo period, the tale of a girl named Oshichi, who became the most famous arsonist in Japanese history. She was born in the year 1666 in present-day Chiba Prefecture, and was adopted by a family who sold vegetables in Edo. When she was 16, a fire burned through much of the city, and she was forced to evacuate with her adopted family. While fleeing the flames, she met a page from a Buddhist temple named Shonosuke and they fell madly in love with each other. After she returned home, she found herself thinking of the young man endlessly, and her obsession became so great that she decided to start another fire in they city, so that she might be able to see her lover again. She was caught and executed, but her story became a legend in a Guy Fawkes sort of way, and has been used as the basis for traditional Kabuki plays for centuries. Oshichi was the first Hinoeuma (hi-no-EU-ma) or "Fire Horse," the beginning of the superstition that girls born in the Year of the Horse every 60 years will grow up to be headstrong and will cause sadness for their family. The last Hinoeuma year was 1966, and so many women avoided having children that year that it caused a noticeable drop in Japanese population numbers.

A manga version of Oshichi, and her grave, quite a tourist spot today

Japanese Food Gifts

The Japanese, they take their gift-giving seriously, a fact that I was reminded of while in Tokyo yesterday. I was passing through Ueno Station, one of my favorite parts of the city, and I saw an interesting shop selling omiyage (oh-mee-YAH-gay, souvenirs) of Tokyo, with the interesting name of Gift Island. They offered all manner of exotic sweets for sale, from the famous Tokyo Banana (banana-shaped cakes) to Goma Tamago (a traditional manju cake shaped like an egg and made with black sesame seeds, supposedly very healthy) to the fabulous castella, a cake rich in eggs that was introduced by the Dutch in the 16th century. One of my favorite traditional treats is called dora-yaki, which looks to the Western eye to be two pancakes with sweet Japanese beans inside; this is the favorite food of Doraemon the time-traveling robot cat, by the way. Of course, J-List has recently started carrying some interesting gift boxes of souvenir snacks you normally can only buy in places like Akihabara or Asakusa, with packages that are specially designed to be suitable for giving to others as gifts, or you can munch them yourself. Check them out on the site!

It looks like a Twinkie, but it's Tokyo Banana, so it's much cooler ^_^

October 1st -- Time To Change Your Uniform

Do you that rustling noise? It's the sound of millions of Japanese students, mostly in junior high and high school, changing from their summer to their winter uniforms. Today is the day for koromo-gae (koh-roh-moh GA-eh), meaning "seasonal changing of clothes," when Japanese students will switch from their light uniforms for summer to their heavier uniforms for winter, which they all do on the same day, from Kyushu to Hokkaido. (Okinawa, being extra warm, gets to wear their summer uniforms for two months longer than the rest of the country.) Of course, the weather doesn't always get the memo, and at the end of September it got really cold in Japan, forcing my son to go to school shivering in his summer uniform...and of course, now that the uniform change has come, it's gotten really warm again, so he'll be sweating. Like many aspects of Japan there's more to the clothes-changing custom than meets the eye, and it turns out that it dates back to the Heian Period (794-1185), when the Emperor would commemorate the seasons by officially changing his ceremonial kimonos from winter to summer or vice-versa. Of course, J-List sells authentic high school uniforms for guys and girls, including both summer and winter versions of girls' uniforms, which are custom made to your exact size by the famous Matsukameya of Nagoya. If you'd like to own a cool high school uniform of your very own, browse our site now. Yes, there's plenty of time to get your uniform made and shipped to you by Halloween, although it's a good idea to order quickly.

Japanese Convenience Stores And You

You can pick almost any area to compare Japan with the U.S.: history, culture, sports -- or if you like, convenience stores. The modern combini came to Japan in 1974 with the opening of the first Seven-Eleven here, a project which got its start when Japanese businessman Hideo Shimizu took a bus trip across the U.S. looking for the "next big thing" and fell in love with the idea of stores that offered items customers might need to buy on short notice, sold in a uniform way. Now there are dozens of convenience store chains here, including Lawson ("your town's hot station"), Sunkus (the name is a bizarre merging of "sun" and "thanks"), FamilyMart, MiniStop, Heart-In, and Yamazaki Daily Store. While most of the foods sold at U.S. convenience stores are pre-packaged and highly processed, many of the offerings in their Japanese counterparts are downright wholesome, with traditional Japanese-style food (bento and onigiri), Western favorites like cucumber and strawberry sandwiches, bread products including sliced bread as well as specialty items like Curry Pan, a good selection of salads, dozens of types of bottled Asian and Western teas, aloe-flavored yogurt, and so on. Convenience stores are the salvation of the single male since there are enough healthy choices that you can usually eat pretty well there without resorting to that most famous of bachelor foods, instant ramen, although they sell that, too. You won't find the iconic Slurpee or Big Gulp at Seven-Elevens in Japan, but I'd give them up any day in exchange for niku-man, a steamed Chinese bun filled with meat that's great in the Winter. Combini offer other forms of convenience, too, like a full color copier and digital photograph printer, the ability to pay your electric and phone bills at the cash register, shipping services for sending packages, and increasingly, real banking services, including making cash withdrawals and deposits using the smart ATM. That first pilot store back in 1974 has really paid off: Seven-Eleven's parent company Seven&i Holdings purchased its parent company in 2005 and now owns the brand worldwide.

How to Learn Japanese: Intuition

If you want to learn a language as different from English as Japanese is, you'll need a few things. First, you'll need to get past the brain's natural resistance to trying to "read" a language comprised of little snakes wriggling on a page, as Japanese looks to be at first, and the best way to accomplish this is to practice hiragana, katakana and kanji until your brain starts recognizing the characterswithout conscious throught. (It takes less time than you'd think.) You'll need a lot of perseverance, and as wide a range of areas related to the language you can feel passionate about as possible -- this is usually not a problem when it comes to Japan, since there are so many fascinating aspects of the country. Another thing that really helps with foreign languages is what the Japanese call kan, meaning "sense" or "intuition," and if you are kan ga ii (kahn ga EE, having a good sense about things) you'll be able to intuit the meaning someone is trying to communicate even though you might not know the word per se. My son and daughter are both preparing for the Eiken English test in a few weeks, but they're going about studying in different ways. My son, who is very methodical and likes to understand everything about what he's studying, gets hung up on difficult vocabulary, made all the worse by the fact that he's taking a test intended for college-level students yet is only 13. But we're constantly amazed at how often my daughter, a year younger, is able to pull the correct answer out of her head without actually understanding the material she's studying on a conscious level. She's got kan, which helps her sense the meaning most of the time.

I've no idea what this picture is but it rules. Hence I will include it here.

Japanese Office Spaces

In the movie Tron, there's a great scene where you see this sea of cubicles going on forever, an extremely prescient visual for 1982. I'm pretty sure most people wouldn't look at that part of the film and say, "Wow, that'd be a great place to work!" but in Japan, that might not be the case. Japanese offices are nearly always open, with desks lined up in rows or facing each other so that the only privacy workers have at their desks is whatever reference books they can manage to stack around themselves. Before starting J-List I worked in the local City Office as a "Coordinator of Internationalization," helping to provide various services to foreigners in our city, and it was a rather unnerving experience, working in a room where 30+ people had a direct line of sight to me at any moment. Larger organizations use the open floor office model, too. Once I visited one of our distributors (Tohan) and was surprised to see the entire company working in one cavernous space with rows of desks and hundreds of people buzzing about, without so much as a cubicle wall to hang a Dilbert strip on. One interesting aspect of this open approach to workspace-building is that the bosses are in the same space as their employees, although usually with their desks set in a special location so they can oversee the employees attached to them. At least, working in this way adds a layer of transparency and democratization to the company as a whole, even if it wouldn't be much fun to work in.

The Power of Voice in Japan

The Japanese are masters of influencing emotions using voice, and I'm often amazed at the eerie beauty of the voices that enter my ear here. If you watch anime in Japanese, of course, you know how talented the Japanese voice actresses are, and their ability to bring to life a character that would otherwise be (literally) two-dimensional and inert is one of the major attractions of the genre. One of the most popular voice actresses in Japan today is Aya Hirano, who provides the voices for Haruhi Suzumiya, Konata from Lucky Star and Misa from Death Note, and she can do the most amazing things with a character. But the strangely compelling beauty of Japanese voices isn't limited to anime: you can find females who are specially trained to speak in a uniquely soft way in various professions, too, such as female bus guides, who entertain passengers on long sightseeing trips; ground hostesses, those airport employees who call out your flight number in the most delightful sing-song tones; and Japan's legendary elevator girls, the uniformed women who stand in the elevator and announce each floor for you (although they've almost completely disappeared). It's hard to describe the quality of these sweet voices, which are made possible by weeks or months of vocal training -- there's something about the way they dip down and back up again at the end of a sentence that casts a spell over me. But speaking in a cute voice isn't just for a few professions with high customer visibility. I'll never forget the time I called NTT, Japan's sprawling telephone and Internet provider, to get help with some computer hardware I was having problems with. The voice on the other end belonged to an extremely kawaii-sounding female NTT employee, and bastard that I am, I actually expected her to take down my information and then transfer me to some male technician who would tell me how to fix my problem. I was quite surprised when the cute voice quickly proceeded to help me debug my router and fix the TCP/IP problem I'd been having, solving it in no time. I had to hang my head in shame for a while after that.

Understanding Katakana English

I wrote last time that one of the challenges of living in Japan is getting accustomed to Japanese-accented English, sometimes called katakana English because of the way it's filtered through the syllable-based phonetic structure of Japanese. Back in high school, I listened to the old-school Macross song "0-G Love" for more than a year before it it dawned on me that the phrase was English -- the unfamilar pronunciation confused me enough that I wasn't even able to identify it as my own language. Of course, everyone has an accent when speaking another language, including me, and I might have similar challenges understanding the local English whether I was in Japan or China or Jamaica. Part of the probem is, the special nature of Japanese phonology makes words that are a single syllable to us (like "truck") into three when spoken by a Japanese person (torakku, pronounced to-RAH-kkoo). Some other vocal concepts we take for granted need to be remapped into sounds that exist in Japanese, which is why "where" sounds like "oo-eh-AH" and "twins" comes out like "tsoo-EE-nzoo," which can take a while to get used to. Then there are words that are used differently here, even though they're ostensibly English, like VIP and UFO, which are pronounced as "veep" and "you-fo."

Ah, Mari Iijima, you still got it...

Hot Japanese Female Politicians, Lack of Children

Taro Aso is getting down to business as the 92nd Prime Minister of Japan, forming his cabinet quickly after his landslide election. One of his first moves has been to appoint Yuko Obuchi, the 34-year-old daughter of the former Prime Minister who sadly died in office, as a new Special Minister in Charge of Measures Dealing with the Falling Birth Rate. Obuchi, who happens to hail from J-List's home prefecture of Gunma, might be the perfect person to serve as poster child for the issue, since she's got a lot of visibility as a young female lawmaker (following recent political trends, she's quite the hottie), and she has a one-year old baby, too. The problem of shoshika, literally "fewer children-ization" or the increasing dearth of children in Japan, has got a lot of people worried as its effects start to be felt in earnest, and Japan's population is projected to drop from 130 to 100 million by the middle of the century if things don't improve. Already Japanese cities are being forced to close some elementary schools, tearing them down or re-purposing them for use as general municipal buildings. There are many reasons why Japanese women are waiting longer to start having children and are having fewer when they do, with everything from the high cost of raising a child to changing social roles to a general lack of patriotic spirit among Japanese suggested. Prime Minister Aso will likely face more debate on the issue if an election is called in the next few months, as is expected, and the opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) has been floating a plan to pay each household $250 per month for every child they have. Personally, I'd feel better about bringing children into a world where the government is solvent and not wasting its money in silly ideas, but that's just me.
(This is a chart of the Japanese birth rate, going form 4.5 children per female in 1947 to 1.4 today. The dip you see in the middle is the year of Hinouema, the Year of the Fire Horse, 1966. According to superstition, girls born in this year are supposedly very headstrong, and parents avoid having children in this year to avoid having daughters that can't find husbands.)

Announcing the Beginning of Pocky Season

Chocolate Season has Begun! J-List is happy to announce the return of chocolate snacks to our website, now that it's cooled down here. We're busting out all the new flavors of Pocky for the 2008-2009 chocolate season, with an excellent new Crush Pocky in an extra large package and two new flavors of Dessert Pocky, the richest and most delicious stick snack ever. In addition, we've classics like Original Pocky and Men's Pocky back on the site. As usual, you can buy individual boxes or opt for shrinkwrapped cases at a special discount price.

Japan's New Otaku Prime Minister

Japan's next Prime Minister has been decided, and as expected, it's to be Taro Aso, who received more than 95% of the votes by his ruling Liberal Democrat Party. One of the few really interesting Japanese politicians, he worked his way through college at Stanford before his parents called him home to keep him from becoming too "Americanized," so he went to England to complete his studies instead. He mined diamonds in Sierra Leone, represented Japan in the Olympics in 1976 at Clay Pigeon Shooting, and he's quite technically minded, having assembled his own PCs from the motherboard up for the past ten years. When discussing Japanese politicians, the word "thoughorbred" often comes up, and this term applies to Aso-san as well: his father was a former cabinet member, his grandfather a former Prime Minister, and he's the great great grandson of Toshimichi Okubo, one of the most important reformers of the Meiji Restoration of 1868. It's well know that Aso-san is a fan of Japan's manga and anime culture, which has helped him attain popularity among younger Japanese, especially among 2channelers and the English anime-related blogosphere. He supposedly reads three volumes of manga a day, sometimes on the Diet floor, and much of the recent recognition of the importance of Japanese popular culture have come from Aso-san, who has said he would like to create an international "Nobel Prize" for manga. His interest in comics -- for example, he promoted education about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima using the famous manga story Hadashi no Gen (Barefoot Gen) -- has caused the term "Manga Diplomacy" to be coined, and it will be interesting to see how his ability to name all the Lucky Star characters will color his leadership. One of the most refreshing things about Japan is their ability to have elections without contemplating the religion of the candidates in question in the slightest. When I mentioned to my wife that Aso-san happened to be a devout Roman Catholic, a rarity in a Buddhist country like Japan, my wife was surprised to hear it. At no time had the issue even been brought up by the Japanese news media.

This is the picture that "outed" Aso-san as an otaku and won him millions of fans on the Internets. They call him Rozen Aso now.

Wisdom on Living in Japan

When foreigners come to live in Japan, there are certain skills they will need to acquire. When I first arrived in Japan back in 1991, I was surprised to see that almost none of the roads in Japanese cities had names, which made it extremely difficult to learn my way around. I had to get good at visualizing routes inside my brain and learn how to refer to roads in vague terms ("the road with the beauty shop and the convenience store") when asking for directions. Another skill is getting accustomed to the accents of Japanese people you'll be interacting with, which can be quite a challenge, as your brain doesn't immediately understand that someone asking for uu-OH-tah wants a glass of water. When speaking Japanese with people, you'll need to get good at identifying the subjects of sentences since they're often left off when the meaning is otherwise clear from the context, or at least faking understanding in certain situations, such as the time I was picked to stand up and conduct the Maebashi Philharmonic playing Beethoven's Symphony No. 5. Afterwards, the MC asked me something that I didn't catch, and rather than embarrass myself on the stage with hundreds of people watching me, I replied with the non sequitur so desu ne, which should mean "yes, that's so" but in effect doesn't mean anything.

Speed Racer Service Centers

Would you get your car serviced at a Speed Racer Service Center? I sure would. It's an interesting gimmick by entrepreneur and former Super GT race driver Tetsuji Tamanaka, who licensed the characters from Tatsunoko Production's venerable "Mach GoGoGo" to create a chain of Speed Racer-branded service centers, gas stations and used-car dealerships designed to bring a well-known face to the "total carlife support" they offer their customers. The familiarity of the character Go Mifune (as Speed is called in Japanese) combined with the current income level of the generation that grew up watching the original show has proven to be a big win for the company, which is opening franchise shops throughout Japan that do everything from buying used cars for sale through its national network to auto painting and that annoying sha-ken car inspection that drivers of older cars must pay $1500 for every two years. This isn't the only company that ties anime to car culture: there's also a chain of car repair shops that uses the famous Space Battleship Yamato logo and characters to promote themselves. These businesses are somewhat unique though: while anime is enjoyed by literally everyone at some point in their lives here, it's not usually something you see while driving down Main Street very often. Like Cowboy Bebop and Akira, Mach GoGoGo is one of those shows that became far more popular internationally than it ever was inside of Japan, and I for one am glad to see that Speed Racer hasn't been forgotten in the country of his birth.

Of course, they also have their own sexy Race Queens:

Trying to Get Into the BBC

I got a good laugh the other day while watching an episode of Comedy Central's The Daily Show. During the "Moments of Zen" compilation of coverage of the two political conventions, British comedian John Oliver tried to walk into the BBC's preparation room, despite not having an official pass. "I'm British," he said, with his proper accent, "and you don't need a credential to be British. My voice is my credential." It was extra amusing to me because I'd done a very similar thing in Japan. A decade or so ago, they held an international speed-skating competition in my prefecture, so I decided to go check it out. As I went to find my seats in the bleachers, I happened to notice a door for coaches and other VIPs, most of whom were from the U.S. or Europe, and on a hunch I wondered if I could get into that room just by being American. The Japanese person watching the door didn't want to let me in at first, but the right mixture of appearing to be in a hurry and speaking English at him rapidly got the job done, and I got to enjoy the skating competition while helping myself to beers and munchies. It wasn't very nice of me, of course, but it was an experiment I felt had to be made at the time.

(The BBC bit starts around 3:10 or so)

Wacky English T-Shirts!

During the Sports Festival, I engaged in a little hobby of mine: hunting for bizarre English T-shirts. For some reason, the parents who attend these sporting events often choose to wear T-shirts with the most interesting English phrases on them, so every year I walk around with my camera and see what I can see. My search got off on the right foot when I came across a young woman whose shirt said, "Gluttons: Smile Positive and Good Heart," followed by a man whose shirt proclaimed "Make Up Foundation For This World." Some of the slogans I saw seemed quite deep ("Music: Make a Recording, Life 83% Full"), while others were more perplexing ("Sense of Pitch 1962, Rosegirl"). Sometimes the messages were silly ("You're my Hearo [sic], Fashion Icon!!") while others tried to offer insight into that elusive concept of "freedom" which Japanese often associate with the USA ("Liberty Bell is Prime Wish -- I Love Me"). Of course, no one gives a second thought about what their T-shirts have printed on them in Japan, since for most people, English is primarily a decoration that's considered kakko ii (cool) and not something actually used for communication, which is why there's no problem with displaying a message like, "Definite Difference: That Oneself Cannot Be Ruled Is Not Free." Of course, we've been known to sell a wacky T-shirt or two here at J-List, but in Japanese rather than English. If you like the idea of having a wacky shirt with aesthetically beautiful kanji that no one around you can read, why not browse our lineup now?

Here are some of the pictures I took:

Autumn in Japan: School Sports Festivals!

Autumn is upon us, and in Japan that means one thing: School Sports Festival, a special event held at all elementary schools where kids run relays, do tug-of war, have egg toss competitions, perform dances that they've been practicing for months, and so on. Known as undo-kai in Japanese, pronounced "OON-doh-kai" and having nothing to do with the undo feature on your computer, the Japanese tradition of a special day when kids can show off their athletic abilities to their parents began in 1874 when an English teacher named Frederick William Strange organized the first "outdoor games" as a way for Japanese to learn about Western sports. Today, Sports Festivals are held across Japan, which turns out to be quite profitable for companies like Panasonic and Sony, who are all too happy to sell this year's hot new video cameras to all the oya-baka ("parent-fool"), the word for parents who go ga-ga filming their own kids. Saturday was my daughter's last Sports Festival of elementary school, and we dutifully gathered to cheer her on during the various events she was in. It's an annual tradition at the school that the sixth graders treat everyone to a brass band performance of the theme to Space Battleship Yamato, aka Star Blazers, and everyone did a great job.

Cash Society Japan

I remember my first payday after coming to work as a teacher in Japan, being handed an envelope containing my entire month's salary in cash, which was quite a surprise to me. Japan has always been a very cash-oriented society, with no equivalent to personal checks or money orders, and when making purchases most people will pay in 10,000 yen bills. Credit cards exist here of course, but they're much less common than in the U.S., and to get one you need to pass a strict credit check and have been employed at the same company for at least a year -- a far cry from the pre-approved credit cards I'd get in my mailbox back in college. A few years ago, we bought the plot of land behind our home, I remember going to pay for it in cash, counting out the bills for the previous owner as we finalized the contract. Of course, the only thing constant in the world is change, and Japanese are slowly adopting alternate ways of paying for products, such as Suica, a rechargeable contractless smart card that can be used to pay for train tickets, food purchases and so on. One of the most innovative ideas I've seen in a long time are the cell phone with Suica cards built into them, so all you need is your phone and you can pay for just about anything.

Of course, if you want cash we've got both yen and dollars on J-List.

Food Fraud

Each year the organization that publishes the Standardized Kanji Test announces the "kanji of the year," the character that best sums up the events of the past twelve months. Previous characters have included inochi (life) in 2005 to mark the terrible young lives lost in suicides that year, tora (tiger) due to the historic Hanshin Tigers' victory in the Japan pennant, and ikusa (war) in 2001, when the U.S. invaded Iraq. The kanji of the year for 2007 was nise (nii-SAY), meaning "fake" or "fraud," due to the large number of food-related scandals that became news, including a famous restaurant caught labeling normal meat as high-grade Kobe beef and serving leftovers to customers, a confectionery company that sprayed water on stale slices of cake so they'd look fresh enough to sell, and Hokkaido-based "Meat Hope," which despite its awesome name got in trouble for intentionally mis-labeling its products. So far, 2008 has been more of the same as food scandals continue. The most egregious one so far has been a company called Mikasa Foods, which bought inedible rice that had been contaminated with pesticides and seawater (it said) for use in glue production. In reality, it relabeled the rice and sold it to more than 370 companies, which used it to manufacture everything from food to sake to beer and more -- bleah.

Fall Traffic Safety Week

It's time for Traffic Safety Week in Japan, when awareness of various automotive safety issues is raised throughout the country. Originally begun in 1948 in response to the increase in motor traffic in regional Japanese cities, the government officially adopted a twice-annual Traffic Safety Week system in 1962, designating April 6-15 in the spring and September 21-30 in the fall as special periods to promote "safety driving" (as the Japanese invariably call it). Everywhere you go for the next ten days, signs and flags will remind drivers to slow down, and there'll be plenty of police checkpoints looking for drunk drivers, people not using their seatbelts, and so on. Since Japan is crisscrossed by so many railroads there's a big problem with drivers trying to run train crossings as they close, and during this week groups like the Lion's Club will stand at train crossings wearing Haruhi Suzumiya-like "traffic safety officer" armbands to make sure drivers stop at the train crossings properly. The Japanese care a great deal about traffic safety, and often carry Shinto good luck charms specifically made for that purpose.
Yes, nothing gets the chicks like traffic safety awareness.

Ne-ver Ending Japanese Grammar Lesson

If you've paid attention while watching Japanese anime or, ahem, other videos in Japanese, you've might have noticed the word ne. This is an interesting Japanese grammatical particle that usually goes on the ends of sentences and serves several purposes, mostly related to asking for confirmation of information or agreement with an opinion. Here are two examples:

アイスコーヒー二つですね？ Aisu kohii futatsu desu ne?
You'd like two glasses of iced coffee, is that right?

今日は、暑いですね。Kyou wa atsui desu ne.
It's hot today, isn't it?

Other functions of the all-purpose Japanese particle ne include softening a sentence so its meaning it less harsh (Chotto furorimashita ne. You've gained a little weight, haven't you?); emphasizing what you want to say (Kondo chanto kiite kudasai, ne. Please listen closely next time, alright?); working as a pause in sentences, like "um" in English; and to get the attention of the listener before speaking. Girls use ne more often than men and with a higher intonation, so males should use the word with caution lest they appear effeminate, although guys speaking Japanese will mess this up all the time (it's part of our charm). Even if you don't speak any Japanese at all, just memorize the phrase ne! and pull it out whenever a Japanese person says something you want to agree with, and watch the look of surprise on their face.

Kawaii, ne?

All About Older Japanese

Most Western nations are facing the problem of ageing populations, but Japan is really leading the pack, with its combination of a very low birth rate, healthier diet and a good medical system. Japanese older people are just like elderly from any other part of the world, sometimes friendly and interesting to talk to, and other times unwilling to take crap from anyone as they dive for the last pair of shoes at a department store bargain sale. As an American living in Japan, it's can be interesting to strike up conversations with older Japanese, who will often talk about what the war years were like for them, or the time they saw General MacArthur, and there's an unspoken acknowledgement of all that's changed in the past 60 years. Since it's generally expected that the oldest son or daughter will take over the family house and care for the parents in their silver years, elderly folks generally have the benefit of lots of family around them, at least in the semi-rural prefecture where I live. Partially because of this system, and also (I've been told) because Japanese rarely leave the area where their family grave is located, you don't see people migrating to a different part of the country when they retire as is the case with Florida. The main social activity of Japanese retired people seems to be going to the doctor's office every day to sit and chat with friends while they wait to be seen by the doctor for some (usually imagined) pain, and if you ever get sick in Japan you'd better have a strategy for getting to the doctor's office early. While most of the older people living in my neighborhood are very genki (healthy, full of energy), there's one poor woman whose back is stuck at a 90 degree angle, making her unable to stand up at all. I'd always assumed this problem came a lifetime of planting rice by hand, but supposedly it's caused by a chronic vitamin B1 deficiency that was a chronic problem in the first few decades of the 20th century.

Social Security Hotel

I went to Tokyo to meet a friend yesterday. He's working for the prestigious Tokyo University, the top ranked school in Japan, and it was interesting to take in a part of the city I'd not seen much of before. The hotel we stayed at was called Eminasu, and I was surprised to see a large sign stating proudly that the hotel had been built with money from the National Pension System, the equivalent to Social Security in Japan. Yes, there's so much money sloshing around in funds like the pension system and Japan Post deposit accounts that legislators are quite unable to keep their paws off it, and regularly launch grand hakomono (lit. "box-thing") construction projects to foster economic development, provide services for citizens and (of course) secure lucrative employment for the former government employees who were directly involved with said projects when they retire. (This is known as amakudari or "descent from heaven.") Sometimes the system works okay, as in the case of the hotel we stayed at, providing a good room at a slightly subsidized rate since the government-operated hotel didn't need to generate a profit. But there are plenty of horror stories of massively wasteful construction projects made with taxpayer funds, like a sprawling resort hotel at the top of a mountain that no one ever stayed at and a now-bankrupt theme park designed as a replica of a Turkish village, complete with a full-sized Trojan horse. How fitting.

They have these hotels all over. You can stay at this one in Kyoto if you like.My hotel room was $80 per night, so I presume the ones in Kyoto will likely be the same.

The rooms certainly look nice!

Japan's Internet is #1 in the World

Japan has the best Internet connectivity in the world, according to a newly released study which compared actual data-transfer rates and overall customer satisfaction by Internet users around the world. Sweden came in second, followed by the Netherlands (#3), South Korea (#5), Germany (#9), France (#12), the U.S. (#16) and the U.K. (#24). The results were interesting to me because Japan lagged behind the rest of the world in adopting the Internet throughout the 1990s, with significantly higher prices and lower connection speeds. A lot of the slow Internet development was due to NTT, the 800 lb gorilla of the telecommunications world here, a former government-run monopoly that owned all the lines ISPs needed to lease in order to do business, and which generally kept a lot of competition out of the marketplace by functioning as the country's largest ISP directly. It turns out that having a less competition might have been a good thing in the case of Japan, since NTT and its subsidiary companies were able to execute technology roll-outs more efficiently than if it'd been up to a hodge-podge of companies, as is the case with the U.S. J-List connects to the net through hikari fiber or an optical fiber line, although it was a long wait to get our office wired for the fast connection. We actually had to make a formal request to the mayor's office (my wife happens to have the same last name as him, so we let the staff think we were related), and they passed along our request to NTT, who made sure J-List was the first customer connected in our city. Having fast, efficient Internet despite the lack of competitive pressures might seem puzzling, but it's quite common for Japan to seemingly violate the rules of Capitalism yet have things turn out okay in the end.

Wither Morality in Japan?

"Children who are able to greet others properly won't be steered wrong in life." This is one of the many tidbits of wisdom hung on metal signs put up by our local PTA, and every time I drive down a street I haven't been on before I'm strangely compelled to keep my eyes open for new signs. "People who don't show respect to their parents won't receive it from their own children." Japan is a unique industrialized nation in that its ideas on morality were never based on the Bible, unlike Western countries, and I've always been interested in how the Japanese define the concept. All elementary school kids have a class called dotoku (morality) in which they learn about various (of course secular) issues, such as how recognize and stop ijime, how to be thankful to others, and so on. "Weak-minded children are caused by over-protective parents." Yes, pinning down the basis of Japan's thinking on morality is a challenge. Is it based on Buddhism? I haven't been able to identify any active lessons that Japanese Buddhism imparts to its followers other than to be respectful of your family members, especially those who have gone on to the next world. It's a question I hope to find the answer to some day.

This one says, "Parents show their loving concern for their children when they offer advice to them." Sounds lame in English but better in Japanese.

A Taco Revolution in Japan?

"How many Taco Bell sauce packets do you have in your glove compartment?" I've got a lot, and whenever I go to the U.S. I make sure to bring back more, since they're awfully convenient and taste good, too. We had soft tacos for dinner the other day, and it was a reverent experience, with everyone making each taco with care and eating it slowly, savoring each bite. Unlike Hong Kong with its mish-mash of food cultures, with all manner of cuisine from Asia, Europe and everywhere else mixed together, Japan can be rather closed-minded about what it eats, which makes it hard to find some of my favorite items. The amazing thing about the tortillas we ate this time, though, was that they were bought here -- I kept re-reading the Japanese text on the package, unable to believe my eyes. Could this be the beginning of a renaissance of culinary internationalization in Japan? My fingers are so crossed.

Site Back UP

J-List, this site, and JAST USA / Peach Princess were all offline for a couple of hours due to a blown router with our ISP. Back up now. Whew ^_^;;

Is Japan Behind the U.S. and Europe?

I write often about how Japanese consider themselves to be a decade or so "behind" the U.S. and Europe, and almost take it for granted that their country is less advanced than the West. For example, I've heard people here remark that no one from Japan could have created a company like YouTube, capable of serving videos to every point on the globe, because no one here could think on such a nakedly large scale. Although it's all too easy to judge Japan from my American point of view, there are some core areas that could be improved, starting with thinking about the web. Yahoo Japan's video site would like to be #1 here, but it not only requires Windows 2000/XP/Vista to work, but you have to be using Internet Explorer, which is a real bummer for Linux, Mac and all Firefox users. Japanese web companies don't seem terribly interested in the outside world, either: Mixi.jp, the leading Facebook-like site in Japan, requires an email address with a Japanese ending (yahoo.co.jp as opposed to yahoo.com) to sign up. Banks can be frustrating, too. Back in my single days, I went hitchhiking up to Hokkaido, being sure to bring my bank card so I could get money from the "cash corner" (ATM) when I needed it. Unfortunately, banks and their ATMs were closed for the Golden Week holidays back then, so I wasn't able to get any cash out all week. (Banks have gotten better, but are still frustrating -- it still costs $6 to send $50 to someone's bank account, as there are no personal checks in Japan.) In the past, many of the most innovative ideas have flowed from Japan, like the Sony Walkman or the idea of putting a camera in a cell phone, but I don't think something like Skype could ever have been invented here.

Confucius Say: Take a Test, Young Man

The Japanese like tests, and there are a mind-boggling number of them offered to people of all ages, from the most popular English test (the Step Test, called Eiken here) to tests for penmanship and kanji writing ability, knowledge of world historical sites, the ability to memorize train schedules and even use of a kendama. Japan's culture of bettering yourself through study and competitive testing was imported from China, where the idea of awarding government jobs based on academic ability rather than, say, giving them to the sons of current officials, emanated from the teachings of Confucius. When I first arrived in Japan, I wanted a way to make myself study Japanese harder, and I found the perfect goal: the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT), held every December. The test is set up in four levels, with level 4 being the easiest (hiragana, katakana and a limited number of kanji) and level 1 being required for entrance into a Japanese university, which worked out great because it's not hard to raise yourself up one level with each year of study. The deadline for applying for the test this year is coming up on Sept. 20, so if you'd like to give the test a try, see this site for more information. Remember that J-List genuinely loves Japan and wants to promote the study of the language, and we've got tons of Japanese study books in stock, including JLPT-specific study aids.

In other words, the idea is to use these:

and get one of these:

You Are Already Married!

Happy Wedding! To commemorate the 25th anniversary of Fist of the North Star, the popular manga and anime set in a post-Apocalyptic future in which everyone looks strangely like extras from Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, the publishers are holding an actual wedding ceremony for the two main characters, Kenshiro and the woman he spent years battling for, Yuria. On Saturday, 777 lucky fans who won invitations to the event will dress up in their best formal suits to attend the special wedding, which is being put on by the famous "charisma wedding planner" Akemi Ariga. The event will be similar to the fake "funeral" for Kenshiro's brother, the warlord Raoh, and should be widely attended by the media. You can always tell someone who's on his way back from a wedding in Japan, because he's carrying a large bag of gifts he received from the new couple containing things like katsuobushi (dried bonito fish), sekihan (red-colored rice with beans) and manju cakes. Tomorrow there will be 777 Fist of the North Star fans carrying some serious otaku cred home with them on the train. Although they're fictional characters, we certainly wish Ken and Yuria lots of happiness. You are already married!

Hey! Let's go to Kyoto!

Every visitor to Japan develops, I think, a special relationship with Kyoto, the beautiful city that was capital of Japan for most of the country's history. Founded in 794 as Heian-Kyo, it was made in imitation of the great Chinese cities of the era, sporting a Manhattan-style grid pattern with wide, straight roads that are actually named, quite convenient as streets are generally not named in Japan. Of course, everyone loves the beautiful old temples, and whenever I'm in the city I've got a mental list of must-see sites that are among my favorites, from the bamboo forest at Arashiyama to Nijo Castle with its anti-ninja squeaking floors to Kiyomizu-dera, nearly destroyed in Godzilla vs. Mothra. History can be found at every corner, for example on the Gojo Bridge, the scene of a famous sword battle between the 7-foot tall warrior monk Benkei and the charismatic Yoshitsune more than 1000 years ago. When you go to Kyoto, you suddenly become linked with every other foreigner who's ever visited the cty. Even Albert Einstein, who spent several months lecturing in Japan, loved the city. As fall approaches, we'll be under attack from TV commercials reminding us of how beautiful the city is this time of year, with the slogan, "I've got an idea! Let's go to Kyoto!"

Here's the Kiyomizu-Dera commercial for Kyoto. Warning: it will give you Kyoto-lust!

And the commercial advertising my favoritest place of all, Sanjusangendo (the Hall of 33 Bays).

 

All About the Word "Anime"

Although anime has become a part of our world culture, watched by fans from all over the globe, the word anime has some interesting history to it. From the early years of the industry, the most common term for animation in Japan was doga, meaning "moving pictures," but when the groundbreaking Tetsuwan Atom (Atom Boy) aired in 1957, it was marketed as "TV manga," starting the early trend of referring to animation with the same word that's used for comic books, manga. The first known example of the word anime being used as an abbreviation for "animation" was in 1965, in an industry magazine for independent film directors, and the word started to spread out to fans from this point. By the time the popular World Masterpiece Anime Theatre series began in 1975, bringing classic works of children's literature like Heidi, Girl of the Alps and A Dog of Flanders to viewers, the word anime was universally used to refer to the genre. One of the biggest events for anime fandom as a whole was Tokuma Shoten's launching of popular anime magazine Animage in 1978, which went on to define many of the concepts of the genre that we take for granted now, bringing all fans together under the same big tent. Although the word anime is often used in the west to mean the opposite of traditional Western animation, Japanese will readily refer to Disney films using the term.

Kamakura Confidence

My daughter's been quite happy in school recently, after a trip she took with her class a few weeks ago to Kamakura, the historic town known for its many beautiful temples. As part of her Ministry of Education-mandated English class (they recently decided that Japanese were never going to get good at English unless they started studying the language earlier), the sixth graders had a special assignment: they were to approach the foreign tourists and ask them some questions that had been prepared, like where they were from and what they liked about Japan. It was quite a challenging task, since the students had taken their English lessons from their normal Japanese homeroom teacher who doesn't actually speak the language at all, and most of the kids weren't able to make themselves understood by the foreign tourists. It was the perfect moment for my daughter, who came to everyone's rescue and engaged the gaijin visitors, getting them to come and answer everyone's questions while she translated. After that, the other kids in my daughter's class had a bit more respect for her.

2009 Japanese Calendars!

It's time for J-List to role out our big volley of 2009 preorder calendars, as we make hundreds of gorgeous anime, character, JPOP, Japanese sexy idol, traditional and other calendars to our customers around the world. If you've never had one of these giant poster-sized Japanese calendars on your wall, we hope you'll consider getting one or more this year, since they really are something special, with the highest quality printing imaginable, gorgeous glossy coated sheets, and all original art, which will be treasured by you all year long. Every year it's fun to see which Japanese star will claim the coveted "CL1" spot, indicating that they are the most famous person in Japan, and this year the top spot goes to super-cute idol, singer and voice actress Yui Aragaki from Okinawa. We've posted dozens of these great 2009 calendars for preorder -- browse them all now!

Gotta Get Me Some Creamed Corn Soup

If you love "corn potage," then get to Japan as fast as you can, since people here just can't get enough of creamed corn soup. Most every famires (family restaurant) sports a Drink Bar where you can help yourself to as many glasses of iced coffee or melon soda as you'd like for 200 yen or so, and nearby, there's usually a Soup Bar with a big pot of delicious creamed corn soup -- mmm. As an American, when I think of soup I think of the Campbell's classics like chicken noodle, tomato, and vegetable beef, but these are as alien here in Japan as Green Tea Butterscotch and Rose Flavored Gum are in most parts of the world. Other types of soup the Japanese like include creamed pumpkin or carrot soups, healthy wakame (seaweed) or miso soup, or if at an Italian restaurant, perhaps some minestrone. When you get sick in the U.S., most people think of eating chicken soup, but in Japan the most common remedies are drinking a tea with ginger in it or swallowing down a raw egg in sake -- yum.

(They even have it canned.)

The Goal of Education in Japan

I remember back in the 1980s, when Japan's educational system was held up as a success story for other nations to follow. While there certainly are some good elements the country's approach to education -- like the idea of using competition to get students to become goal-oriented and apply themselves in ways I could never have dreamed of when I was that age -- not every aspect of schools here would be appreciated in other countries. The primary goal of education in Japan seems to be to help create happy members of society through inclusion in groups, and there are several mechanisms for promoting this appreciation of your own place as a member of the larger group, for example the complex system of sports and other character-building clubs that students are compelled to join in Junior High School. Whereas American Junior High and High School kids will each have random schedules, Japanese classes are fixed, with all 40 students of class 3-A staying in the same classroom for every hour of every day, as different teachers come and go depending on what the next subject is. One side effect of this is that all classes in Elementary and Junior High learn the exact same material, no matter what their individual level might be. My daughter was taking some lessons with a private tutor in the U.S. over the summer, and I was discussing the possibility that she might be borderline dyslexic with her teacher, since I am myself. The tutor asked me, "Well, if that's the case, they must have some kind of special class for her in Japan, right?" The answer is no -- unless a child is so different they're not able to go to their normal school, everyone will be treated exactly the same no matter what, the better for the harmony of the group.

Divorce and Japan

There's a sad statistic that's on the rise in Japan these days: divorce. The combination of the country's rapidly aging society, high stress levels and a new law that enables a woman to claim up to half of her husband's company pension is causing the number of older couples getting a "vintage year divorce" to rise. When I was an English teacher, I taught a wide range of students, including a fair number of housewives, and I remember being surprised by the venom some of the women were capable of spitting when discussing their husbands. I didn't understand at the time that at least some of this husband-bashing was part of a Japanese social custom you might call "out-humbling each other," as women try to show that they have the most worthless, lazy husband in the room. (Japanese mothers and grandmothers will do the same thing when discussing their own children with others, having competitions to see whose kids were the most baka, and I've had to expressly forbid this kind of talk in my own home.) The divorce rate in Japan is still comparatively low -- currently around 2.2 per 1000 people per year, compared with 4 in the U.S. and 2.6 in the U.K. -- but finding someone who is batsu-ichi (lit. "one strike out") is a lot more common than it has been in the past. Coupled with the trend of women either marrying much later or not at all, it Japan has some tough issues to face as the 21st century progresses.

They look so happy as they stamp that divorce document.

The Best Time to Come to Japan

One of the cardinal rules for gaijin coming to Japan is, try your best to make it over here as a university student. College life in Japan is a kind of magical time between childhood and adulthood, mercifully free of the stress that normally comes with studying at university, where you can make lifelong friends and see Japan from a viewpoint you won't ever get to enjoy again. I was too poor to come to Japan when I was in college, so I had to come here as a shakai-jin, a "society person" or full-time worker, which colored my experiences in a different way, but I'd have given anything to be able to visit Japan during school. Many universities offer study abroad programs that allow students to spend a semester or a year living in Japan, so if you or a Japan-focused young person you know would like to come to Japan for a year, start looking into what's available. Remember my theory that every young American should be made to live for a year outside their home country, which would do wonders for the way we view our own country and the rest of the world.

If you are lucky enough to come here during your college years, this is what you get to look forward to:

Fun with Japanese Company Names

For some reason, studying the etymologies of Japanese company names is fascinating to me. Like how the founder of Canon got the name for his company from the Bodhisattva Kannon, a kind of Goddess of Mercy revered by Japanese Buddhists, or how the name Epson was formed from "Son of Electric Printer." When you study Japanese, you start to see these famous brands in a new light, for example watchmaker Seiko is written with characters meaning "delicate and minute engineering," while Nikon is an abbreviation of Nihon Kogaku ("Japan Optical"). Yakult got their name from the Esperanto word for yogurt, which was suggested by a Polish researcher working with the company at the time, and Subaru is the local name for the Pleiades star cluster, deemed fitting as the company was formed by merging six smaller companies together. Bandai's name is rather complex: it comes from Bandai Fueki, one of the books in Sun Tzu's The Art of War, and the phrase means "forever unchanging," since children's toys should be something that are constant throughout the ages. A lot of Japanese company names have the word ya at the end, such as toy maker Kotobukiya or the bookstore chain Kinokuniya. This is a character meaning "roof" which is used to denote a shop, like hana-ya (a flower shop) or ramen-ya (a ramen shop) in addition to being part of various proper names. There's a new sporting goods store that just opened in our city called Himaraya, which is great since it fits the standard Japanese naming practice yet makes you think of the mighty Himalayas. Their official company slogan is pretty cool, by the way: "We have a fine dream."

And in case you don't know what a Bodhisattva Kannon is, our neighboring city of Takasaki just happens to have a giant (as in 5-story) statue of the goddess, which I'll show you.

4000 Years of Chinese Traditional Medicine

Don't tell anyone, but I'm on a diet. You could call it the "iPhone diet" because I'm using one of the many applications (iTunes link) for my iPhone to track daily calorie intake. My plan is to eat whatever I want while accurately recording everything, which will help me identify the stuff I've been eating that's the most harmful. To help me out, my wife bought some bad-tasting medicine, saying, "Now, this is kampo, so it will definitely work." A word that literally means "Chinese way," kampo refers to the traditional herbal medicine of China, and it occupies an almost mythical place in the minds of the Japanese, in effect being a complete class of medical science that's separate from Western medicine. Many products, from energy drinks to various "enhancers" to Yomeshu (a kind of medicinal sake loaded with Chinese herbs) advertise themselves as making use of the magical power of kampo to relieve symptoms. Many kampo medicines have the full backing of the medical community here, and health insurance even covers them. In the U.S., however, traditional Chinese medicines are completely ignored by almost every major company. It'd be interesting if there were some really effective drugs sitting right under our noses that have been in use in China for thousands of years.

Wither Gaijin?

The most common word for "foreigner" in Japanese is gaijin, written using the characters for "outside" and "person." While ostensibly referring to any non-Japanese person, the term is most often used to mean American and European foreigners, and never to, say, Chinese or Koreans, who are referred to by their own specific nationality (e.g. chugoku-jin, kankoku-jin). Depending on who uses it and in what way, the word gaijin can sound derogatory to some, which is why TV newscasters will always use the more polite gaikokujin or "outside-country-person" instead. Recently there's been some discussion on various blogs about how bad the term gaijin really is, and weather we should be trying to stop its use. My own take is that it's just a word, and no worse than the term "alien," which sounds a little strange when you've grown up watching sci-fi films then realize it can refer to people from other countries, too. The reality is that the majority of the "discrimination" many foreigners get in Japan is positive -- people offering to pay you $40 an hour to speak your native language with their kids, pressing gifts into your hands, and girls writing their phone numbers on the back of chopstick wrappers. Personally, I think that if someone you don't know starts buying you beers in a bar and inadvertantly calls you gaijin, as has happened to me, it's best to not be too quick to take offense -- you are enjoying their beer, after all. Of course, Japan is by no means perfect, and improvements should be made. Still, when I compare my own experiences here with what the reverse situation might be, I really can't find reason to complain.

The Cup Ramen Museum in Osaka

Next time you're in Osaka, consider visiting the Monofuku Ando Memorial Ramen Museum, a sprawling facility commemorating the achievements of the Taiwan-born Japanese inventor of instant ramen. In the postwar years, Japanese were eating bread made with wheat flower brought in by the occupying U.S. military, and Momofuku (then operating a small business extracting salt from seawater) wondered why they didn't eat noodles instead, which were more familiar to the Japanese people. In 1957, a bank he was director of went under, taking his personal finances down along with it. In order to get out of debt, he returned to his idea about noodles, trying to find a more convenient way to prepare them. The result was Chikin [sic] Ramen, a delicious chicken flavored raman that's still being sold after fifty years. (I had some for lunch today.) At the museum, you can see different varieties of Cup Ramen from around the world, like broccoli ramen from Germany or curry flavored noodles from India, which are made without the soup base so that the noodles can be eaten with the hands, as is the custom in that country. Cup Ramen in all Western countries have noodles that are shorter than in Japan, to make them easier to eat with a fork. The museum sports a virtual reality room showing what happens as ramen is made, from the viewpoint of the raman itself, and afterwards you can mosey up to the Instant Ramen Bar and order some ramen with custom toppings that you can specify. (One of the most popular flavors is Seafood Milk, ugh...)

Prime Minister "Baton Touch"

Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda surprised everyone by suddenly announcing his resignation on Monday. He's stepping down, he says, to take responsibility over the political stalemate that's grown between his ruling Liberty Democratic Party and the opposition Democratic Party of Japan, which has control of half the Japanese legislature and which is stubbornly resisting working with the LDP to resolve various issues. Incredibly, this is the 10th leadership change since I came to Japan in 1991, compared with only three in the U.S. and Britain during the same period, which illustrates a real problem with Japan: the near total lack of long-term quality leadership. Of all the recent head honchos in Japan, only the popular Junichi Koizumi was able to overcome the strange phenomenon of Japanese politicians withholding their support for their own leaders the minute they try to lead long enough to enact any reforms -- I really have to feel sorry for Fukuda-san, who was never given a break by anyone. The anime-watching world is all aflutter with the hopes that Fukuda's second-in-command Taro Aso will become the next PM. Aso-san is famous for being an otaku, known for carrying volumes of manga with him onto the Diet floor and calling for the government to support artists and companies exporting manga and anime to the world. In addition to his appreciation for Japan's popular culture, Aso-san is a maverick in other ways, being Roman Catholic in a very Buddhist nation, and fluent in English after studying at Stanford and the London School of Economics as well as spending two years mining for diamonds in Africa.

Japan's Prince of Tennis

Japan has a new Prince of Tennis, by the name of Kei Nishikori, who is kicking butt in the U.S. open right now after his big win against David Ferrer over the weekend, making him the first Japanese tennis player to advance to the 4th round since 1937. Born in in rural Shimane Prefecture in 1989, he took up a racket at the age of five and would hit balls against the side of his house for many hours, showing a remarkable aptitude for the sport. He took the incredible step of leaving Japan behind, crossing over to the U.S. at the age of 13 to be trained at the IMG Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy, which caused quite a lot of buzz at the time. As usual, Japanese who compete in the world stage and raise the image of Japan in the eyes of foreigners become overnight sensations in here, and suddenly his name is on everyone's lips. I certainly hope that Nishikori-kun can follow stars like Ichiro, Hideki Matsui and soccer player Hidetoshi Nakata in redefining the international image of Japan through sports. Ganbatte, Nishikori!

Understanding Star Wars through Anime

I finally got to see the new Clone Wars computer animated film, which just opened here. One of the minor agonies of being a Star Wars fan in Japan is having to wait an extra long time for films to open, because George Lucas likes Japan and always wants to personally be here for any of his film releases. Whenever a new Star Wars film comes out, my son and I pick through it to see what character names were obviously inspired by Japanese words, like Count Dooku's name from doku meaning poison, or the obi in Obi-Wan meaning a kimono belt. The new character in this film was Anakin's padawan Asohka, which seems like it can only have come from the phrase ah, so ka? meaning, "Oh, is that so?" The new film was obviously inspired by Japanese animation to a certain degree, and I noticed the animators even followed the recent convention of including an okama or gay character, in the form of the makeup-wearing Ziro the Hutt, nephew to Jabba. It's quite common for recent anime series to feature one effeminate male character, called okama kyara in Japanese, to provide comic relief and act as a foil for the main characters. Some examples of these fabulous characters include Leeron, the capable and flamboyant engineer from Gurren Lagann, and Bobby Margot, the helmsmen of the Macross Quarter from Macross Frontier, so manly and yet so girlish. Heck, Gonzo's gorgeous Romeo x Juliet anime remix even featured an okama character: it was William Shakespeare himself, repurposed as a mentor to the starcross'd lovers.

As for the Clone Wars film, hrrm, it was a nice extension of the Clone Wars animated shorts, that's for sure. As long as you hypnotize yourself into pretending you're a 12 year old boy again, it was great.

Things a Japanese City Will Definitely Have: Hanabi Taikai

There are certain things that every self-respecting Japanese city will be sure to have. For example, a large central Culture Hall, or bunka kaikan, to hold important events like concerts, piano recitals and taiko drum performances put on for parents by the local kindergarten kids. In April, Japan's cherry blossoms explode with color, and virtually every Japanese city has an established park or two lined with cherry trees for their citizens to sit under, as they try pretend that their city alone is famous for sakura. If a city has more than a million residents, it starts to pine for a large tower in the center of town, and almost every major city from Tokyo to Kyoto to Fukuoka sports a tall Space Needle-like tower. Then there are big fireworks festivals, large displays of color put on for everyone's enjoyment on a specified day during the summer. Our city's fireworks festival was on Sunday, and the entire city oo'd and ah'd as the sky was lit up with beautiful "fire flowers," as they're called in Japanese. Fireworks, of course, go back a long way in Japanese history, and you have to wonder what it was like seeing a fireworks display back in the Edo Period.

Thoughts on Reading Kanji

When you can't read or write kanji, the idea of being able to recognize hundreds or thousands of the symbols probably seems daunting, but as with most things in life, it's not as difficult as it first looks. Kanji characters are built quite logically, with different quadrants of many characters organized around the meanings for that character. For example, the kanji for words like to speak, to read and to translate all feature the same left section, a radical which happens to look like a stack of books on a shelf, which is the character for "to say" (iu), indicating that all these characters are related to communication in some way. While Chinese might need around 3500 characters to read and write their language properly, Japanese is a bit more manageable, with 1006 characters taught in Elementary School and another 939 in Junior High, which are collectively known as the joyo kanji or "general use" characters. One of the most interesting thing that happens when you learn a language that's as different from English as Japanese is the moment you find yourself "reading" normally, without subvocalizing or translating into English -- nothing but your eyes, passing over the page and reading in the chunks of kanji, hiragana and katakana directly. The brain is amazing, really -- it can do anything.