A Little Safer For Vice Ministers of Health and Welfare

The biggest news in Japan these days has been the murder of a former Vice Minister of Health and Welfare and his wife, an event which shocked the usually peaceful country with its violence. Last Monday, a man disguised as a delivery company employee entered the home of Takehiko Yamaguchi (66) and his wife Michiko (61) and stabbed both to death with a "survival" type knife, and the next day, the individual attacked the wife of another former head of the ministry, although she fortunately survived. Since the attacks were both directed at former heads of the Welfare Ministry's Pension Bureau, there was widespread speculation that the crime might have been perpetrated by someone angered over the loss of millions of pension records in the 1980s, which effectively robbed a huge swath of workers of some of the pension benefits they'd receive later in life. The real motive for the slayings may have been a bit more mundane, however. According to an email sent to the Tokyo Broadcast System, which had been reporting on the incidents, the killer committed the murders because his dog was put to sleep at the "health care center" (aka the dog pound), also operated by the Welfare Ministry. "This was revenge for having 'my family' [dog] killed at the health care center 34 years ago," the man said in his email, which also complained that Japanese municipal authorities are putting 500,000 stray dogs and cats to sleep each year. When I saw that police had arrested one Takeshi Koizumi (46) and recovered the murder weapons from his car, I knew instinctively that his occupation would be listed as mushoku, or unemployed, since the Japanese news always announces what job a certain suspect does (even if it's no job), so that viewers can categorize him in their minds properly. With this dangerous killer behind bars, hopefully the world will be a little bit safer for Vice Ministers of Health and Welfare for a while.

My Trip to America, er, Costco

Over the weekend we had a bit of an adventure: we made a trip to a Japanese Costco, the membership club that offers the American warehouse shopping experience to consumers in Japan. Costco has been operating stores here since 1999, but until recently all the locations were on the other side of Tokyo from where we're located, and I would rather fly all the way to California to buy something rather than drive through the chaos that is Japan's capital, if I have any choice in the matter. When we walked through the doors we were instantly transported to a world of shopping convenience where we could find all sorts of things not usually available in Japan, from American hot dogs to breakfast cereals to fabric softeners and more. We were quite pleased with how much effort the company had put into bringing the standard Costco experience to Japan, and we knew where everything was right away because the layout was exactly the same as the stores we shopped at in San Diego. (My existing Costco card even worked.) While Japanese consumers have gotten more comfortable with buying bulk over the past two decades or so, Costco still has some work to do to adapt its business model to the country, and many of the products they were offering in the store seemed confusing to me, from the bake-at-home pizza that was too big for tiny Japanese ovens to a full selection of children's books in English, which no one was even picking at, or American pickles, which I am happy to buy but which most Japanese dislike. Paradigm shifts in buying habits always present opportunities to certain companies, and I could see that a lot of American brands were getting a toe-hold with Japanese shoppers who had never seen Downy or Tide or Duracell batteries in the past. It'd be interesting to see if these companies can increase their market share in Japan, using Costco as a springboard. There was a downside to my little shopping trip, however: the feeling of being back in the States was so complete that I had real trouble staying on the correct side of the road while driving home. You should have heard my wife scream.

I really can't explain why Japanese people would be taking picture of this

Japan [hearts] Britain

One of the themes of being an American living in Japan is discovering how much the country has taken various cues from Britain. It starts out with cars, getting used to "strange" car-related words, like the hood of the car being called a bonnet, or seeing your first Toyota Super Saloon, a car with a name that makes Americans think of the Old West until they learn that saloon is just the British word for sedan. Americans might make a visit to the bathroom or the restroom, but in England (I'm told) they are more likely to use the word "toilet," which is the same in Japan -- and I've gotten some funny looks in stores in the States asking the cashier where the "toilet" was. Then there are clothing-related words that the Japanese imported from Britain, like a jacket or sweater being called a "jumper," and of course the infamous word "pants," which refers to trousers, jeans or slacks in the U.S. but underwear in Britain and Japan. It seems that the Japanese have looked to Britain in other ways, too. For example, I can't think of a single situation where I'd call a friend or acquaintance by his last name, but it's common for classmates in Japanese schools to do this, for example saying, "Nagashima, let's go" instead of using the person's first name of Takeshi. When reading the Narnia books with my son, I saw characters referring to each other by last names, and it made me think that Japan and Britain were somehow closer than it seemed on the surface.

More Thoughts on Kanji

There's no doubt about it: the most complex part of learning Japanese is kanji, unless you're fortunate enough to already be fluent in Chinese, and if you are, I envy you. An educated Japanese person generally uses around 2000 kanji, compared with 3500-5000 for the same person in China. Because the Chinese writing system was basically grafted onto the existing Japanese language in the 5th century, there are fundamentally two ways to read any character, the on (rhymes with bone) or Chinese reading, and the kun (rhymes with spoon) or Japanese reading, the latter being an existing Japanese word that's been assigned to a kanji based on the character's meaning. As a general rule, you use the Chinese reading for compound words made up of two kanji (for example, the word for "hibernation," toumin, written with the characters for winter + sleep), and there are quite a few Chinese and Korean words that are the same in Japanese for this reason. The Japanese reading is usually used for characters that appear by themselves (e.g. the character for winter written all by itself, fuyu), or in special cases like names of people or places. It's hard to believe, but it's easier to memorize Japanese vocabulary words through kanji than, say, learning from a book which prints Japanese in the Roman alphabet. For example, the character for "most" can be combined with a variety of other kanji to describe ideas like tallest, shortest, etc., like saikou (most + high = highest, also meaning the best), saitei (most + bottom = the lowest, meaning a real jerk when applied to a person), saisho (most + begin = the first), saigo (most + after = the last), and saishin (most + new = the newest). Memorizing these words in kanji only takes two "bytes" of your brain's memory once you've gotten used to the characters themselves, but memorizing the words in the Roman alphabet would be harder since they're just a jumble of letters.

My Knock Knock Joke Reconsideration

What if you met a Japanese person who went around telling "knock knock" jokes in English all the time? It would be pretty strange, I'd wager, and you might not know what to make of them. But that's essentially what I do in Japanese: making wry Japanese jokes called dajare (da-jah-reh), although in my family we call them dadajare, since I'm the Dad. As a strange side-effect of learning Japanese, my brain has developed the subconscious ability to come up with strange jokes whenever I hear a word or phrase that acts as a trigger, quite unrelated to what I'm thinking about at the time, and when the family does something together they know I'll probably be making little puns until they're groaning for me to stop. For example, one way to say "I don't have it" or "there aren't any" in Japanese is nashi, which also happens to be what those delicious Japanese pears are called, so naturally I might reply "Japanese pear" if my wife asks me if I have her car keys. In Japanese, the Leaning Tower of Pisa is called Pisa no Shato, and since the final word sounds like the French word for castle, I might make a bad joke about how I've always wanted to go see the famous Chateau di Pisa. The other day I was watching TV and needed to switch the sound from Japanese to English, and as I looked around for the remote control, my wife asked me what I was searching for. The Japanese word for "sound" is onsei (OWN-sei), which my brain told me is similar to the word for "eleven" in Spanish (once). So I said, "I'll give you a hint," and proceeded to count from one to ten in Spanish. The next number was eleven, and suddenly everyone knew that I was looking for the remote control so I could change the sound on the TV. For some reason, telling dajare jokes is the domain of middle-aged men in Japan.

Sleep Like a River

The Chinese writing system, kanji, is an inseperable part of the Japanese language, the same way Latin or Greek is a part of Western languages, and this relationship with the written word pops up in the language in interesting ways. In Sazae-san, the long-running anime that captures in calming, peaceful tones the happiness of a traditional Japanese family, Sazae and her husband Masuo sleep on futons with their son, Tara-chan, sandwiched in between. This is called sleeping in kawa no ji style, literally "sleeping like the character for river" since it imitates the three flowing lines that make up the character for river. Similarly, my daughter, rambunctious tomboy that she is, usually sleeps in a dai no ji, or the shape of the character for "big", with her arms extended and legs spread as far as possible, the better to take up as much room as possible when sleeping with her mom and dad.

Announcing the 2009 PC Dating-Sim Game Sale.

Announcing the 2009 PC Dating-Sim Game Sale. We thought it'd be a great time to do something nice for our customers who play Japan's amazing PC dating-sim games, and so we're having special sale just for you. First, take $5 off the price of shrinkwrapped package versions of dozens of great games from G-Collections and Peach Princess, our way of saying thanks for your past and future support. Then, we're going to give you free games from Hirameki with every two titles you pick up, which are fun to play. Of course, the discount you get for buying multiple games together still applies. This is a great time to pick up an interactive PC dating-sim game or six! Browse all items now!

Taro Okamoto Art Display in Shibuya

If you go to Tokyo's Shibuya Station right now you can see an incredible piece of art created by late Japanese artist Taro Okamoto. The sprawling 30-meter wide mural is called Myth of Tomorrow, and it depicts the terrible event that was the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, right down to images of fire engulfing a giant skeleton in the sky while small people flee with their bodies on fire. The painting, which had been missing for a quarter-century, was found in a warehouse in 2003 and restored, and is now on display for everyone to see. It was interesting to see it shown in such a public place, since the subject of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki isn't exactly something that's openly discussed even after more than six decades. I can't think of a single conversation I've had with a Japanese on the subject that didn't immediately turn into a long silence with a change of subject at the end. I'm not sure what it is about the bombings that makes it almost impossible for Japanese to voice an opinion or show an emotion one way or the other, even if it were to berate me or express anger or even thanks, since they did bring the war to an end. Maybe the display of the mural is a sign of more openness in this area in the future.

The Wrath of Kan

(Note: we had a problem with the site right after the last update, with many products not appearing in product categories for several hours. We fixed the issue, and are sorry if you were inconvenienced. You can see Monday's update, and browse the items in that update, here.)

I've written before about how effectively studying a language requires certain things. A real desire to learn is important, as is being inventive enough to figure out how your own brain learns best. It's also useful to have what the Japanese called kan (kahn, 勘), a word which means perception or intuition, and which refers to the ability to figure out meaning in abstract situations. If you're kan ga ii then you're good at make sense of something from very little information, but someone who is kan ga warui is terrible at picking up meaning from a few threads. Because I'm married to a Japanese woman whose English is less than perfect (which is my fault, since frankly my Japanese is "too" good for her English level to grow -- sorry, honey), my American family has had to develop these sixth-sense abilities if they want to communicate with her. For example, when my wife added "gross lipstick" to her Christmas list, my sister was able to guess that she probably wanted gloss lipstick instead, and get some for her, and when my wife sends my mother information on what time my "fright" arrives at the airport, it's not hard to figure out that she's talking about my flight. Someone who is kan ga ii will probably be able to intune out that a Japanese person asking for "potato" at a fast food restaurants would like French Fries, or that someone who's about to "take a bath" to your house is really going to catch a bus, but if they're kan ga warui, well, who knows what could happen. I love languages because they really give you a chance to get to know your own brain in new and interesting ways.

Tokyo Gift Update

I was in Tokyo the other day, passing a sprawling stand selling various omiyage (OH-me-YAH-gei), or gifts given as souvenirs after a trip. The Japanese are master gift givers, and have many customs related to giving and receiving them, which provides a valuable "social lubrication" that makes all manner or personal and business relationships work more smoothly. Whenever a Japanese person goes somewhere, they will be compelled to spend plenty of money on gifts to give to whoever was left at home, and taking a trip in Japan always includes setting aside some time to see what the gift shops have for sale. In July and December there are two special gift-giving seasons, when people will give gifts to thank teachers or others in the community to thank them for their past assistance. Predictably, these specially made gift boxes containing anything from coffee to cooking oil to laundry detergent are often passed on to others, with some gifts changing hands many times before they're actually used. Incidentally, if you ever come to Japan, it's probably a good idea to bring some items to give out as gifts to people you might encounter here, as it will really make things so more smoothly -- something representative of wherever you're from, or even a carton of cigarettes from your home country, always a popular item. (The smoking staff of J-List says that Newport Menthols are a good brand, since they're not sold here.) Incidentally, remember that J-List now carries a lot of these fun gift-able boxes of snacks, the perfect thing to get the Japanophile on your list this year.

Japanese Fire Department Report

Clang clang! Clang clang! Right outside my window right there's a fire truck driving by slowly, ringing a bell and playing a recorded voice: "This is the community volunteer fire-fighting brigade. Please remember to extinguish all flames before going to sleep tonight." Japan lacks American-style central heating in its homes, with the majority of people using kerosene heaters to warm individual rooms, although there are other options such as "fan-heaters" which use kerosene to heat the room but electricity to run a fan and regulate the temperature, and shut off the flame every three hours for safety and ventilation purposes. With so many heaters like this in use, it's not uncommon for fires to occur, and the Japanese are extremely cautious about making sure they don't, which is why when it gets cold out, our small local fire department will make the rounds and remind people of how important it is to make sure heaters are turned off before bed. Fire has long been the bane of Japan, a country with a high population living in homes of wood and paper, and the tradition of fighting fires goes back to the Edo Period. Over the past few years, Japan has -- finally, from my American-centric point of view -- gotten more serious some of the public safety concepts that we take for granted, and now requires that smoke detectors be installed in all new homes.

To Pull One's Leg

Recently my kids took the Eiken Test, the primary standardized test of English used in Japan. They really dislike it when Japanese people assume they get their English for "free" just by being born with an American father, and both put a lot of effort into preparing so they'd do well. During the weeks before the test, I'd offer to help them study, but I was usually chased away by my wife. "We don't need any native English speakers around here confusing them," she'd say. From the other side of the room I'd bend my ear and listen to them studying using the many textbooks published specifically for the Eiken test. The way they broke English down into mathematical formulas, like "infinitive or gerund + be + ing" or "used to + verb" was fascinating for me. Also, they'd discuss familiar English idioms in the driest grammatical ways, like "to pull one's leg" or "to crash one's party" which seemed bizarre to me, but it helped them organize the many kinds of phrases and vocabulary words in English in ways they could handle, since learning it organically like native speakers do is impossible when living in Japan. Although it was strange to see my kids learning English in this artificial way, I knew that passing a test in Japan meant having a strategy, and a lot of the time spent "studying" for the test was really used discussing the best way to tackle the different sections, for example focusing on the listening portions of the test which they're good at, and spending less time on the long reading comprehension parts. I'm happy to announce that both of them passed their tests with flying colors! To celebrate, we took them out for their favorite Korean BBQ.

Prime Minister Aso's Favorite Word

In Japanese politics, as elsewhere, certain words or phrases get permanently attached to politicians. When Shinzo Abe came into office in 2006, he declared his intention to create a "beautiful nation, Japan" which would respect culture, possess dignity, have the vitality to grow towards the future and be trusted by its neighbors, and while his success in this area can be debated, his era will forever be tied to this phrase. The current Japanese leader is Taro Aso, beloved of anime fans and 2-channelers (as users of the famous Japanese BBS "2ch" are called) for his affinity for reading manga, and he's coming to be known by the phrase nantonaku (nahn-toh-NAH-koo), which means "somehow" or "for some reason" or "don't ask me how, I just know." Overuse of the phrase is the mark of an "about" person, that is, an imprecise speaker who doesn't focus on specific questions or plans, and his tendency to use the phrase in official settings is getting him some criticism by the press. (Kind of reminds me of my father, counting how many times I said "y'know?" in a sentence back when I was a teenager.) Poor Aso-san is also being teased in the media for making mistakes when reading common kanji characters, although this sounds to me like a mild case of dyslexia, something I also suffer from. Here's hoping this isn't the start of the decline in his popularity, since he's the most interesting Japanese PM in a long time.

Gaijin Workers in Japan

As with other countries, there are many foreigners living and working in Japan, each contributing to society in different ways. The total number of foreign workers (counting me) has been up quite a bit in recent years, to more than 300,000, and while this might sound like a lot, it's still tiny compared to other countries. While most of us might think of gaijin as English teachers or foreign employees of a company based overseas, the real picture of who is working where in Japan is more complex. There are foreigners from America or Europe doing web design at Japanese companies, "working holiday" travelers from Canada or Australia,

and even people from India employed by studios like Soft on Demand. One large group of workers in Japan are the nikkeijin from countries like Peru and Brazil, who have an inside track to getting a work visa for Japan if they can prove Japanese ancestry. These people work largely in manufacturing, like the large Sanyo plant in our prefecture or the Toyota plants near Nagoya, and if you drive a Japanese car there's a good change someone from South America helped make it. Incidentally, I'm asked about my visa status a lot by readers. I came to Japan on an "cultural" work visa which I'd set up ahead of time with an English school that hired me. After a certain number of years renewing a normal work visa, the authorities will consider granting you "permanent resident" status, which I got after being here for about six years. My nationality is still good old USA.

Manga and Learning Japanese

Naturally, the Japanese that's taught in textbooks isn't always the most natural-sounding, and I remember being frustrated by some of the language I was learning at college, which seemed to be too formal to me. I augmented my own studies by reading lots of manga in Japanese, a great way to expose one's self to the language as it's spoken since nearly all of what's written on the page is character dialogue, which gave me a model to use when speaking myself. (Plus reading manga is fun.) I'll never forget how taken aback my teacher was when I first asked her for help in understanding what I was reading in the comics, though: "That is not Japanese! You should not read it!" she said, refusing to even answer the question I had. Now looking back, I can understand her position somewhat, since when learning a foreign language it's important to avoid being rude when using words you might not understand completely, and erring on the side of politeness is never a bad idea. I certainly have offended more than one Japanese person by using all those cool words I learned from Fist of the North Star on them. The question I'd tried to ask my teacher back then was certainly one that would never have appeared in any textbook: it was the colloquialism tte, that is, a small pause and the syllable te, which is put on the ends of words or sentences. It's meaning can be quite complex, but it usually corresponds to "he said" or "or so I've heard." For example, if you are telling someone that you've heard this parfait shop is good, you can add tte to the end of a sentence, i.e. kono mise wa oishii tte, meaning, "They tell me that this shop is really delicious."

Car Related Culture Shock

When I first got to Japan, I had plenty of culture shock related to automobiles. Cars are very important to the Japanese, and in all cities except for the largest ones, a car is really required to get anything done. Auto theft is quite uncommon in Japan, so it's not at all rare to see someone leave his beautiful Nissan Fairlady Z parked in front of the conbini (convenience store) with the engine running -- the idea that his car might be stolen just doesn't enter into the thinking here, so it's perfectly safe. Japanese cars have the steering wheel on the right side, as in England and Australia, and the Japanese have perfected the art of starting the car without getting in it, since the ignition is easily accessible on that side of the vehicle. When stopped at a light at night, it's considered good manners to turn your headlights down to "park" so you don't blind the person in front of you, and when someone lets you go ahead of them in traffic, flashing your emergency lights at them once or twice conveys your thanks -- although this is done by polite Tokyo drivers, not Gunma locals, who have bad driving manners. Japanese love their cars, and there are many interesting products that allow drivers to deck their vehicles out, including bizarre and interesting accessories, gaudy air fresheners, and flashing lights that are great for picking up girls. And if you love anime as much as you love your car, you can of course deck it out as an ita-sha, a word that sounds like "Italian car" but which is written using the kanji for "pain." Although ita-sha have really taken off lately, cars decorated as shrines to anime have always been around, and I remember seeing a gorgeous air-brushed custom van with images of Lupin III on it when I first arrived in the country.

It's "Its"

One of the more enjoyable aspects of living in Japan is discovering strange English, which is literally everywhere since the Japanese are apparently dedicated to learning just enough of the language for them to create funny phrases like "For Beautiful Human Life" and "I Feel Coke" and "Crunky Kids Crunch Chocolate." The Japanese find English to be quite kakko ii (meaning "good style" or "cool") and like to dress up just about anything by adding some English to it, even when it doesn't seem to make much sense to you or I. When when I first got here I had great fun roaming through my city with a camera, documenting everything I came across. Then one day I went into a electronics store and the ultimate expression of funny Japanese English: a toaster oven with "It's" written in large letters, followed by "It's Contemporary Basic Gear, by Sanyo." Nearby I found a rice cooker, also with the "It's" brand on it, and then a small refrigerator, and a vacuum cleaner, and more. Sanyo had developed the "It's" brand as the perfect way for young people outfitting a new apartment to include a little style, and since I was still accumulating the things I'd need for my new life in Japan, I made sure to buy as many "It's" products as I could.

Mmm, Vermont Curry

When the Japanese think of Georgia, they naturally think of Georgia coffee, the brand of canned coffee made with the finest beans from the slopes of Mt. Oglethorpe. Similarly, what would Vermont be without the delicious taste of Vermont Curry, made with all those rare spices the state is so famous for? (In reality, Georgia Coffee gets its name from from being the home state of the Coca Cola Company, while Vermont Curry supposedly contains the taste of apples from the state, although no one knows this.) Like in other countries, Japanese marketers often pair place names with food products to sell them more effectively, and as a result people can develop the strangest associations. Like Oregon Strawberries, the most famous "brand" in Japan thanks to the efforts of the Oregon Strawberry Commission, or Bulgaria Yogurt, sold in supermarkets across the country, or the inability of Japanese to comprehend that there's anything in the state of Kentucky but chickens and KFC. We do this all the time, too, with words like Canadian Bacon, which you can't find in Canada, except maybe at McDonald's, or Swiss Cheese, which I'm told is known as Emmenthaler cheese in Switzerland, since it comes from the Emmenthal region.

Nice Vote.

Haha, this was just too cool not to post. If you don't get the joke, see our T-shirt.

Hot Springs and the Onsen Mark

Like many people in Japan, I am a furo-bito, or a person who likes taking baths in natural hot springs. Like Finland and their famous saunas (two million units in a country of just five million residents), volcanic hot springs are almost a national treasure in Japan, and I love hitting the onsen as often as I can. Most hot spring baths have a official-looking sign posted somewhere describing the chemical make-up of the water and affirming that it is a true volcanic hot spring, since some establishments have gotten in trouble buy promoting water heated in a boiler as natural. Each bath usually features a metal plate boasting of all the ailments that will be cured if you sit in the water, such as rheumatism, chills, muscle or joint pain, skin problems, cramped shoulders, sleeping disorders, and even anemia. The long list of cures can get quite silly, in fact since merely taking a bath could never fix so many problems, but reading through the list you can sense the pride the Japanese feel at their culture of relaxing for hours in the bath. One famous image associated with Japan's culture of bathing is the onsen mark, the official icon used to denote the presence of a public bath on maps. This character came into official use in the Meiji Period, when German engineers arrived in Japan to take the first modern surveys of the country and adapted the local image to their maps, although the first use of an onsen mark goes all the way back to 1661, on a map of our own prefecture of Gunma. Being an officially recognized character in the Japanese language, the onsen mark is present in any Japanese-language computer font, almost as if it were an alternate kanji character.

Sake and the Japanese

As a rule, the Japanese are rather fond of their spirits, and enjoy a wide range of recreational alcoholic beverages, from sake to beer to one of my favorite drinks, a Grapefruit Sour, a glass of a gin-like alcohol called shochu which comes with half a grapefruit and a juicer, requiring you to extract the juice and pulp and add it to your drink. The last decade has seen a long-term boom in the popularity of wine in Japan, with many people developing a taste for red wines from all over the world, in part to promote good health. Even the humble liquor shop that my wife's parents run has seen quite a transformation in recent years, with the share of traditional sake in the store shrinking (partially due to our sake-buying customers dying of old age, sad to say) and being replaced by imported wines. My wife and I are signed up with a company that sends us six bottles of wine from a different part of Europe every month, complete with information on the region -- I like to read through the newsletters they send and get a feel for how "winespeak" in Japanese compares with English. Right now the Japanese are preparing to go ga-ga over the beaujolais nouveau, a traditional wine from France that goes on sale at midnight on the third Thursday of November, which is transported in huge quantities to Japan by air cargo.

Time to Choose a Junior High School

In many ways it's been Japan's blessing to have very little in the way of natural resources compared to, say, Saudi Arabia: this has forced the country to invest heavily in its own citizens through education. There are quite a few mechanisms for encouraging students to be serious about their studies from an early age, for example the many standardized tests for everything from English to kanji-writing to calculating numbers with an abacus, which provide goals for students that help them buckle down and apply themselves in ways I didn't learn until I got to college. My daughter will be entering Junior High next year, but we're not too keen on the idea of putting her in the normal public Junior High schools here, so famous for taking students that stand out (as my daughter is sure to) and hammering them into shape until they're just like everyone else, in accordance with that famous Japanese axiom deru kui wa utareru (DEH-roo koo-EE wa oo-TAH-reh-roo), or "the nail that sticks up will be hammered down." Instead, we're applying to a private Junior High in our area that's got quite a long history, having been established back in the Meiji Period. (On the school grounds they've preserved the original building the American missionaries who taught at the school in the 1880s lived in, and I love going in there to soak up all the history.) Since my daughter has to pass a test to get into the school, she's worried about how to prepare for it, but thankfully there's another useful mechanism for helping students out: the mogi shiken or "mock exam," where students can take last year's test and learn exactly what kinds of subjects will be on the new test, get used to pacing themselves, and so on. She took her mock exam over the weekend and is feeling much better about the upcoming entrance exam.

Star Wars Pachinko

Pachinko is the national pastime of Japanese men, and most anytime you drive by one of the many pachinko parlors around my house, you'll see a parking lot nearly filled with cars. The point of the game is to take a bucket of silver balls that you buy from the proprietors and shoot them into a pinball-like machine, hopefully holding the controller at just the right angle that the balls will fall into certain holes in the machine, causing more balls to come out. If you are a "pachi-pro" or a person who's really good at playing the game, you'll end up with more balls than you started out with. Since gambling is illegal, you can't redeem the balls for money, but you can exchange them for valuable prizes like cigarettes, which you take to a smaller business located next door to "sell" to get your money -- very silly. Our home prefecture of Gunma is the Detroit of the pachinko world, with several large pachinko makers located here. Right now, pachinko manufacturer Sankyo is advertising a new Star Wars: Attack of Darth Vader pachinko game that looks pretty cool. In the commercial, the Sankyo factory located 1 km from J-List can be seen.

Announcing the J-List Support Center

At J-List, we all work hard to be the very best company we can be, bringing you fun and wacky products like Hello Kitty toilet paper . As the Internet has matured, the wonderful tool that is email has become somewhat less reliable, and sometimes when you send an email to someone it seems to go nowhere. Over the past few months, we've become aware that J-List's email is not as reliable as it should be, and that more than a few customers have asked us questions about their orders and have gotten no reply from us due to these email problems. J-List takes communication very seriously (as customers who have gotten emails from me at 2 am can attest), and it really makes us sad that some customers have been unable to reach us easily. Today we're happy to announce a sweeping replacement for our contact form, the J-List Support Center located at http://help.jlist.com, a secure new contact database that you can use to ask J-List anything about our products, your order, or what the weather is like in Japan this week. You might not even need to ask, though, because the system has a complete Knowledge Base with articles that help you find the information you need yourself, including many articles on potential issues with our PC dating-sim games. All emails will be tracked with tickets, and you can read our replies by logging into the contact system if emails don't reach you for some reason. We sincerely apologize to any customer who ever had a question that didn't get replied to due to email issues, and we think the new support center is going to make it much easier for you to get fast answers from us. Expect more good things from J-List! As always, feedback is welcome.

Coming of Age in Japan?

Japan is currently engaged in some soul-searching about whether or not to lower the legal age of adulthood. Historically the official year for coming-of-age has been 20, and quite a big deal is made of this event every year around January 15 on Seijin-no-hi, or Coming-of-Age Day. On this day, Japanese young people who have turned 20 that year (with "year" being defined as the previous April to the upcoming March) gather in their city wearing fine new suits or beautiful kimonos to hear long, drawling speeches from politicians about life, responsibility, and the importance of contributing to society by working hard. Now a possible amendment to the Japanese Constitution is being considered which would officially lower this age to 18 from the current 20, which is the legal age for voting in Japan, as well as for buying tobacco and alcohol. (The age for driving is 18.) Most young people are opposed to the change, which doesn't surprise me somehow. For some reason, Japan is a place where the younger generation isn't in a hurry to grow up, and it's common for children to live with their parents well into their 20s, or if they're the oldest son or daughter of the family, forever, since they'll be taking care of the parents as they get older. There's something about the Japanese psyche that makes many young people more than happy to "grow up" at a slower pace, whether it's the famous "parasite singles," who live at home forever and never marry or make households of their own, or the more common "freeters," who work part-time jobs without ever deciding on a full-time career. Perhaps its a side-effect of having fewer children born over the past generation, meaning more doting on each child by parents compared to the old days.

Big Dreams, Little Tokyo

One of the many products J-List carries is a fun film called Big Dreams, Little Tokyo, a movie I like a lot, and not just because some J-List kanji T-shirts appear in it. It's the story of Boyd Wilson, an American who's obsessed with learning Japanese and being Japanese, and he goes everywhere dressed as a Japanese businessman, handing out business cards for his language school and translation service. His roommate is Jerome, a Japanese young man born in the U.S. who wants more than anything to become a sumo wrestler, and the two of them have many adventures as they stand on the border between East and West. During the film, there's a scene where the main character is told, "Boyd, you're not Japanese. No matter how many times you bow, you will never be Japanese." This devastates him, and he goes home and rips all the posters of scenic Japan off his wall. I had to laugh at that scene since I've been in that situation before. There's something about working really hard to master a language and trying to memorize every kanji character "just because it's there" -- even archaic ones that Japanese themselves cannot write -- that makes a person liable to overidentify with the object of his fascination. Gaijin in Japan eventually come to see that balance is needed between the two halves, and I'm much more at peace now choosing to be an American in Japan, rather than trying to be Japanese myself.

(I got my wife to go out with me by writing bara, the kanji for "rose," which almost no Japanese can write. Good dating tip!)

Obama vs Obama

Well, the election is finally over. As usual, the task of explaining how the Electoral College works to the Japanese staff of J-List is similar to teaching someone the rules of American football -- in other words, very difficult -- although the local Japanese news helps out by going over the basics of the system. As has been widely reported, there's a city in Fukui Prefecture on the Sea of Japan with the name of Obama (written with kanji meaning "small beach"), but the coincidence is even more amazing due to the fact that the word for "city" and the suffix used to refer to individuals in formal situations like news reporting is both shi -- hence, the official name of Obama City is Obama-shi, and the most common way for a newspaper article or news reporter on TV to refer to Mr. Obama would be Barakku Obama-shi. The connection between the place and the man began when the Senator made a visit to Japan in 2006 and happened to encounter a customs inspector from the city who told him of the name match-up, and when Mr. Obama announced his candidacy the city designated themselves his unofficial supporters in Japan. Tomo recently got married to a girl from Fukui, and he reports that she's happy at having an American President with the name of "her" city. In a further coincidence, the city of Obama happens to be where two of the 16 Japanese who were abducted to North Korea and forced to teach Japanese to spies were from. The Japanese aren't too pleased with the recent decision by the U.S. State Department to remove North Korea from its list of official terrorist states, and some here hope that Mr. Obama's having the same name as one of the abduction sites will raise some awareness of this issue in the American government.

Tetsuya Komuro Haters: Can You Celebrate?

One of the most famous stars of the J-POP world is in hot water. Music producer Tetsuya Komuro, creator of most of the top musical acts of the 1990s, was arrested today over contract fraud after he sold the rights to many songs he'd written but didn't actually own. After a successful musical career with his band TM Network in the 80s, he became a music producer, using his eye for talent to discover and promote many of the biggest names of the day, like Amuro Namie, TRF, Ami Suzuki, Ryoko Shinohara, and Hitomi. These artists were collectively known as the Komuro Family, and they set the pace for music in Japan for years, earning TK (as he's called) a spot near the official listing of top earners in the music world. Komuro may have been a brilliant music producer, but his English skills aren't that hot, and he's reponsible for coining some of the goofiest song lyrics of the past 20 years, including GET WILD AND TOUGH, BODY FEELS EXIT, EZ DO DANCE, CRAZY GONNA CRAZY and so on. We sure hope he "get chance and luck" and is able to get out of his present situation soon.

Wendy's in Japan -- woah

It's not every day a gaijin living in rural Japan opens the newspaper to see an ad for Wendy's staring back at him. The American fast food chain will be bringing its square hamburgers and Hobbit-sized versions of those wonderful Frosties to residents of our prefecture this month, opening in a large-scale shopping mall with the somewhat disturbing name of SMARK. It's amazing how many ways companies from overseas are able to bring their products to market in Japan these days, a far cry from the late 80s when politicians insisted that imported skis were not "suitable" for Japanese snow. While some large companies have brought big changes to their industries directly, for example Toys R Us taking advantage of the lack of centralized competitor in the toy business to take the top spot for themselves, others brands bring their products into Japan by partnering with local companies, which is why you see a little Suntory logo on cans of Pepsi here. Another breakthrough has been the rise of American-style "Premium Outlet Centers," where companies like Nike and L.L. Bean and Timberland can reach out directly to Japanese consumers without bothering with the infamous multi-tiered Japanese distribution system. I visited one of these shopping outlets the other day, and literally had to think for a few seconds to recall whether I was in the U.S. or Japan, since the layout of the stores was almost exactly the same as in outlet centers I've shopped at in San Diego. (The McDonald's sign written in katakana finally gave it away.) Following recent food trends, Wendy's Japan is going "mega," bringing double and triple hamburgers to hungry Japanese eaters.

More Japanese Idioms for You

Here are some more Japanese idioms, which can be fun for foreigners to pick up and use since no one expects us to know them. If something is too small, like your end-of-year bonus, it's suzume no namida (soo-zoo-meh no NAH-mee-da, 雀の涙), which literally means the tear of a sparrow and is similar to the idea of "a drop in the ocean." To express the concept of flattering or brown-nosing someone, there's the phrase goma-suri （ごますり）which means to grind up sesame seeds -- so if you laugh at a dumb joke your boss makes, you're grinding his sesame seeds for him. If you're hiding something but your secret is discovered, the Japanese would say shippo ga deta which means that your tail has popped out from inside your clothes, bringing up images of a wolf wearing human clothes. And if someone is kao ga hiroi （顔が広い）they literally have a "wide face," which means that everyone knows them and that they have a lot of influence. Of course, many of the things we say in English -- like "two birds with one stone" (isseki nicho　一石二鳥, lit. "one stone, two birds") or "pearls before swine" (buta ni shinju、豚に真珠) -- have been imported into Japanese and are commonly used, too.

The Japanese [heart] France

The English language in general and the U.S. in particular are a great source of inspiration to Japan, and America often represents many high ideals to socially-restricted Japanese young people, including that always-elusive concept of "freedom" they associate with us, despite not really having an idea what the word might actually mean. Still, it's not that rare for Japanese to live and find success in places like New York or Los Angeles or London, and as a result there's a somewhat reduced amount of kakko ii (lit. "good style") associated with the English language. To be really cool, it seems, you have to go to France, which is idolized by many Japanese because it's so different, both culturally and linguistically, from this corner of the world. When popular actress Kumiko Gotoh married F1 driver Jean Alesi and moved to Europe, there was a collective sigh of envy from every female in Japan who wished they, too, could be swept off their feet like that, and the actress has been able to maintain her popularity despite not living in Japan full time. Other stars like actress Miho Nakayama and former newscaster Eriko Nakamura also live in Paris, making them minor legends in the entertainment world here. France is used to add mystique to characters, too, such as the fashion doll Licca-chan (far more popular than Barbie here), who is half Japanese and half French, or the magically challenged Louise Françoise de la Bamue le Blanc de la Vallière from Zero no Tsukaima, whose French-sounding name adds a certain je-ne-sais-quoi to her character. The No. 1 manufacturer of beds in Japan is France Bed, which has built quite a brand making people think their products are made in the land of of cheese and wine, although its bed have a large tag "Made in Japan" on their products if you look closely.

War, Names and Awesome Magical Girls.

I've written before about my wife's uncle, the World War II veteran who loves me since I'm the only one in the family who listens intently to his old war stories -- everyone else has heard them so many times they just tune out when he starts talking. I went to visit him again the other day and I took my son since I want to expose him to that bygone era of history while there's still time to talk with those who took part in it. We didn't know what room he was in, so I called my wife to ask what his name was. (An odd phenomenon of speaking Japanese: since you have so many ways of referring to a person with labels such as ojisan "uncle" or sensei "teacher," it's not uncommon to not be sure of the name of a person you've known for years.) Since he was born in the 1920s, his name sounded odd to my ear -- it was Kumakichi Kurihara -- but I didn't have any problem remembering it, since I knew the kanji the name was written with: "Oh, a lucky bear in a field of chestnuts, got it." (The kanji are kuma "bear" + kichi "good luck" for his given name and kuri "chestnut" + hara "field" for his family name.) We had a nice chat, with my son asking many questions about what it was like during the war, and me trying to keep mental images of Strike Witches (the anime about magical girls fighting in an alternate universe that's similar to World War II) from invading his narrative.

Sweet Japanese Foods

Like many families in Japan, we live with my wife's parents in a niseitai jutaku, or "two household-home," meaning that my wife's parents and my own family are considered two separate households that happen to live in the same house. My parents live downstairs in rooms that are traditionally Japanese, while our house upstairs is more Western, although we've got a nice tatami room with Okinawa-style square mats that I like to sit in while I work on my laptop. The other day I was hungry so I got a bowl and prepared to grab some of whatever my mother-in-law had on the stove for dinner, which turned out to be nikujaga, a simple stew of meat and potatoes that's slightly more interesting than it might otherwise be due to the fact that its name sounds like Mick Jagger. My wife saw me and said, "Watch out. It's probably really sweet since my mother made it." Failing to see how a meat-and-potatoes stew could be "sweet," I took a big spoonful, and darned if it wasn't really sweet. Many Japanese dishes do call for sugar to be added, and many sauces such as teriyaki and the flavoring for sukiyaki are essentially soy sauce mixed with sugar. For this reason, the Japanese don't really have a custom of eating dessert after a meal, since their main dish was sweet enough to satisfy them.

Little Things About Japan

When a foreigner first comes to live in Japan, there are many small things they'll notice. Ceramic roof tiles on every house, which makes them appear to the eye to be beautiful temples until you get used to looking at them. Menus listing "kcal" for food items, since what we call a calorie really is a kilocalorie. People pointing at objects with their middle fingers, which would be rather insulting back home but which means nothing here. More vending machines than you can possibly imagine. Another aspect of Japan that struck me were the men who stood in the road to guide traffic around patches of road construction, which seemed like the most ridiculously easy job in the world, although they take it very seriously. They'd hold up their little orange baton at you then bow their thanks to you when you stopped, and like a fool I'd bow back, hoping no one could see the stupid foreigner.

Wacky Japanese Television

While many Westerners have a bizarre view of Japanese television because of a few variety shows that torment people by making them sit in a bathtub of scalding water or put their hand in a box of snakes, most Japanese TV isn't nearly that strange. There are dramas, like the currently running GiraGira that's based on a popular manga about "host clubs" staffed with good-looking males; talk shows like Waratte ii tomo ("It's Okay to Laugh"), which is in the Guinness Book for 36 years of uninterrupted daily broadcasts; and some imports, like the local version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? The internationally famous Takeshi Kitano hosts several shows including Anyone Can Be Picasso, which has a segment where artists compete in an "art battle" for the right to open an exhibition of their work in New York, and Unbelievable! which shows touching and miraculous stories from around the world. Japan's declining academic performance compared with neighboring countries has caused a lot of consternation here, and the TV networks have responded by creating popular educational shows in which "talents" (a catch-all word for comedians, actors and anyone who's interesting to watch on TV) sit in "class" and take tests on various subjects, with lots of witty banter to break up the studying. Another apparently popular category of television are travel shows in which a camera crew will follow some famous people as they journey through rural Japan, stopping at traditional inns and hot springs and sampling local food delicacies along the way. I even saw a version of this concept shot in California, in which a former idol singer drove from San Diego to Solvang, a quaint Danish town complete with a windmill, stopping at various points of interest along the way. Although I don't find driving on Los Angeles freeways to be particularly fun, it was quite interesting to see places I knew being described in detail to Japanese viewers.

This is older than God (from before Takeshi had his accident while riding home on a scooter from Fumie Hosokawa's house where he was having an illicit affair), but it's really hilarious:

Omedetou Gozaimasu!

Miu, Riko and their new sister, Kokoko. It's a regular Three Sisters' Story.

That's a nice "shutter chance."

Understanding Japan "Properly"

There are interesting ways to gain an understanding of a society through its language. Two words that speak to Japan's rule-oriented approach to behavior are the words chanto ("properly") and chanto shita ("proper"), which are used to grant a higher status to "the way things should be done." Once, when I went to pick up my daughter from school, I watched the teacher showing the kids a kami-shibai (a story told to kids using sheets of cardboard with pictures on them) about the proper way to brush your teeth, the proper way to greet others, and so on. Of course teaching kids is one thing, but it's interesting to note that the concept of there being "one" correct way to do things comes up in many situations. Almost without fail, those who don't do what's expected of them -- young people who drop out of school and play guitar in front of the train station, couples who live together without getting married, even crazy gaijin like me who quite their English teaching jobs to start companies selling wacky things from Japan to people around the world -- are seen in a negative light by society at large. Some examples of the word chanto in Japanese sentences are, chanto benkyo shite kudasai (Please study properly, as you should) or, kare wa chanto shita sarariiman desu (He is a respectable company employee).

New Image Hiding Feature on JBOX.com

We've been making more improvements around here, always finding ways to make your experience at J-List a better one. One question we've struggled with for some time was what to do about some of the items we sell on the JBOX.com site which feature, say, famous Japanese idols in bikinis. It's a hard question, since we don't want to group idols with wide appeal like Yuko Ogura on the "R" site only just because they're wearing a bikini, and yet some of those bikini shots can get pretty sexy. We think we've come up with a good solution that keeps some steamier PG items on the JBOX site without being a problem for people who surf the site at work. Now, all images of sexy bikini photobooks or calendars will be hidden but the first one, and if you want to see them, just click the "view images" button that's right there. Feedback on the new changes is always welcome!

Pregnant Woman Dies in Tokyo: Update

Japan is in a state of shock over the death of a pregnant mother after she was turned away from seven different hospitals. The woman was near her due date when she suddenly started complaining of a terrible headache and nausea. On the advice of the obstetrician the husband called an ambulance, but it took an hour and a half before a hospital finally agreed to take the patient. The baby was born via Caesarean section and is fine, but the mother unfortunately died several hours later of what was discovered to be a brain hemorrhage. The problem is lack of doctors, especially ones capable of handling an emergency patient about to give birth. As Japan's birthrate falls, more and more hospitals are readjusting their staff to better serve their existing patients, and all too often this means less attention paid to maternity medicine, which of course is a source of worry for any potential mothers. While this sad event happened in Tokyo, the problem is even worse in rural towns -- I once saw a documentary about a woman who had to drive herself two hours to the only maternity hospital in her area for her regular check-ups, and how nervous she was about what would happen if anything went wrong with her pregnancy with her so far from her doctor. It's an especially ironic tragedy coming just as Japan tries to take on its sagging rate of population growth, even creating a new cabinet post for Minister in Charge of the Declining Birth Rate headed by young politician and new mother Yuko Obuchi. Now all the talk shows are buzzing with experts giving their opinions on the problem, with slogans of "Don't let this woman's birth have been in vain."

(We do have some happy birth-related news for you, by the way. An hour ago, J-List's manga and photobook-meister Yasu's wife safely gave birth to their third daughter, as Yasu continues his plan to re-populate Japan single-handedly. The baby's name is Kokoro, and mother and daughter are doing fine.)

All babies look Japanese when they're born, don't they? Note: this isn't Yasu's baby.

All About Shinto

I recently talked about Buddhism and how many of Japan's customs are tied to the religion, sometimes without people being aware of it. For example, the traditional Bon-Odori dance done at Tanabata festivals in August was originally performed to welcome the spirits of the dead who were returning home for a visit, but no one seems aware of that these days. But Buddhism isn't the only religious tradition here -- there's also the original belief system, Shinto. The word means "Way of the Kami" or "Way of the Gods" and it finds spirits (kami) in things like mountains, trees, rivers, and for people who watch too much anime, magical fox gods who transform into pretty girls. You could probably make a strong argument that Totoro, a magical spirit who lives in the forest and which only children can see, comes from this tradition of worshipping nature and is thus a kami, but Japanese people might look at you funny if you did. Another aspect of Shinto is purification, and there are many rites related to making something (land you're about to build a house on, the sumo ring you're about to wrestle in) clean and pure. Some people even pay a Shinto priest to ogamu, or purify, a new car they've just purchased, so they'll have good luck and avoid accidents. Whenever I go in our out of the J-List office my eyes pass over the glass of water and plate of salt that my wife keeps by the door. This, too, is for purification purposes, to keep bad luck out of J-List and protect all of us inside.

Idioms in Japanese

We never think about idioms in our own language, but to non-native speakers, learning the meanings of phrases like "to leave no stone unturned" or "to stick your neck out for someone" is a real challenge. There are idioms in Japanese, too, including a whole sub-category that have to do with parts of the body. The phrase koshi ga hikui (lit. "one's lower back is low, near to the ground") means a person who is very humble and always apologizing, a good thing in the context of Japan, but shiri ga aoi ("one's rear end is blue") means they're too young or lack experience since babies born in Asia have a blue spot on their rear ends until the age of two or so. If someone can't keep a secret they are kuchi ga karui ("their mouth is too light"), but if they are kuchi ga umai ("their mouth is skilled") then they're good at making jokes or getting others to agree with them. The eyes in Japanese are called me (pronounced "meh"), and some idioms that make use of eyes include me ga takai (lit. "your eyes are high"), meaning someone with very high standards, and me ga ten ni natta ("my eyes became little black dots"), meaning, I was so surprised, my face looked like a character out of a manga.

Barber Shops and Baths

I love getting a haircut in Japan. The barber shop I use rents space inside a lobby of a large onsen/public bath, making it possible for me to get my hair cut and then jump right into the bath immediately, washing away all the unwanted hair from my head. The guy who cuts my hair is very interested in English, having been to the U.K. several times, and he always asks me for advice on how he can learn more effectively. My main advice to him is to be "8x" like a CD-ROM drive in a computer -- that is, to attack the problem of learning from as many different sides as possible. In my own case, I augmented my Japanese classes at college by watching anime, reading manga I was interested in, translating songs for friends and writing fan letters to my favorite manga artists. (Some even wrote back, so bowled over were they at receiving a letter from an American fan.) Finding aspects of Japan that you are interested in -- be it J-doramas, offbeat music, martial arts or what have you -- is a great way to make it easier to learn the language. My barber is always full of questions about America, asking me things like what barber shops are like there, or what my first impressions of Japan were, and we have many interesting discussions. Truth be told, I wish more of the Japanese people I met were more curious about the world outside Japan, asking questions like him -- all too often, it seems, I encounter people who don't really want to be inquisitive and learn new things.

Politics Compared: Japan and America

America's election is almost here, and the whole world is watching, including the Japanese, who get regular reports from the campaign trail on the news. It's interesting how politics differs in each country, with people taking sides on different issues in accordance with their own unique national history. Japan's system allows for several political parties, with the major ones being the ruling Liberal Democratic Party; the opposition Democratic Party of Japan; New Komeito, a party with ties to the Sokka Gakkai Buddhist religion, part of the current coalition; and the smaller Japan Communist and Socialist Parties. Perhaps due to this more complex political landscape, the idea of being "conservative" or "liberal" here is a little different from what you might be used to in your country. Conservatives like the ruling LDP are associated with being pro-business, pro-agriculture, since farmers make up so much of the party's base of voters, and pro-construction, as Japan loves to build things. Conservative politics often go hand-in-hand with respect for the Japanese Emperor, and at the extreme end ultra right-wingers embarrass everyone by driving around in loudspeaker trucks blaring war songs from World War II. (On the upside, they sometimes play the Space Battleship Yamato theme song, which is cool.) Things on the other side of the aisle are harder to pin down. "Liberals" in Japan would on the surface be tied to traditional socialist movements, although there's very little discussion of this in modern Japan; instead, the only "socialist" proposals you hear about are attempts to eliminate the 5% consumption tax to help households economically. Teachers in public schools are considered left-leaning and against the Emperor System, and when my wife was in Junior High she had a teacher who took time out from the normal curriculum to teach the students about the war, despite this not being in the approved textbooks. Different issues divide people at different times, for example there was a rousing debate on how to reform Japan's sprawling National Postal System (which also functions as the world's largest single bank in terms of deposits) a few years ago. North Korea's kidnapping of 13 Japanese citizens to serve as language teachers for North Korean spies has also left its mark on politics, and the Japan Socialist Party was never able to recover from being associated with North Korea in the past. Despite the push and pull of party politics in Japan, very little actually changes after an election, due to the layer of professional civil service employees (komuin) who actually do the work of government. The Minister of Education might change when an election is held and a new cabinet formed, but very few of the staff at the Ministry overall would be affected, which brings a kind of eternal stability to the country. Incidentally I've voted in the election via the absentee ballot system already. If you're in the U.S., hope you'll be voting, too!

This is what Japanese elections are like, but louder

Stereotypes and Japanese Salarymen

Stereotypes are not good since they cause us to make assumptions about people from other countries before we've gotten to know them. When I taught English as a Second Language, I used to do a lot of part-time work, going to people's homes to teach their kids once a week, and I was able to come into contact with a lot of people from average families trying to help their kids learn English to extremely wealthy students who seemed to think it was fashionable to have foreigners hanging around. One family I taught seemed to be a pretty average Japanese family on the surface: bustling mother overly concerned about her kids' education; bright daughter; younger son who loved Pokemon and "UFO Catcher" (crane game) machines; and a salaryman father who often worked late. The father surprised me one day by showing me pictures of his journey from Vladivostok to Moscow on the Siberian Railroad, which had been a lifelong dream of his, and I was immediately sorry I'd assumed he was such an average Joe. The leader of my daughter's Girl Scout troop is another such person. At first glance, she's an average middle-aged Japanese woman, worrying over how to make her daughter study more and tending a small dairy farm. Turns out, she's also a published author of children's books, and quite well-known in her field, which I never suspected, looking at her. I wonder if the Japanese I meet here have stereotyped ideas about what I'm like before they get to know me?

South Korea [Hearts] Japan

Today marks an interesting 10-year anniversary: the first legal performance of a Japanese song in South Korea, when singer Tomoe Sawa performed several classic Japanese melodies including Furusato (Home Town) in a concert in Kwangju. Ever since the end of World War II, South Korea maintained an official ban on "cultural imports" from Japan, allowing no Japanese music, no Japanese-language manga or animation, and no films to be distributed inside their country as a way of protecting themselves from the strong influence of their island neighbor and former enemy. (I'm told that a healthy black market for JPOP and anime products always existed, if you knew where to look.). The government-approved performance was the beginning of a major shift in relations between the two countries, allowing many new kinds of trade to flow across the Sea of Japan (a name the Koreans hate, by the way). The result has been a renaissance of cultural exchange resulting in a flood of everything from popular South Korean Dramas to films to Winter Sonata-themed pachinko machines here, while Japanese singers like Gackt and many dramas and films have become popular in South Korea. Tourism between the two nations has blossomed, too, as Japanese feel more welcome in South Korea and vice-versa. Being an outsider to both countries, I'm aware of how inadequate my overall understanding of the Japan-Korea relationship is. I do know, however, that the old slogan of "world peace through shared popular culture" is totally true, and just as Japan's international standing has been raised by people around the world embracing its culture as their own, South Korea has a lot to gain by opening up and sharing with Japan.

All About Buddhism and Greco-Japanese Art

Like most questions related to Japan, religion is complex and interesting. The major religion of Japan is Buddhism, distributed among dozens of sects like Nichiren and Shingon and Tendaishu, although it's frankly all Greek to me (see below). Although around 70% of Japanese describe themselves as Buddhist, it's hard to separate the religion from the overall culture of Japan, since so many aspects of life here (like not sticking your chopsticks up in your rice, or not sleeping with your head pointing north) flow unconsciously from the religion. I arrived in Japan in 1991 knowing nothing about Buddhism, and I still know nothing in 2008, although I've enjoyed observing everything around me, even if I didn't always understand what I was seeing. One surprise I had in store for me was that Buddhism in Japan doesn't seem to have much to do with trying to achieve Enlightenment through fasting or denying yourself worldly pleasures -- truth be told, most Buddhist priests I've known owned really expensive Mercedes Benz cars. No, Buddhism here is all about remembering and loving your ancestors, and over the course of a year there are many events related to making those who have died before you know they're not forgotten. Another surprise I got happened during my first visit to Nara, the capital 1200 years ago. Outside Todaiji Temple there are two giant statues of Buddhist guardian deities -- manifestations of the Bodhisattva Vajrapani, or something like that -- which looked to my eyes like something out of Ancient Greece. And indeed, the Nio figures are good examples of the Greco-Buddhist artistic tradition, which made it all the way to Japan. Amazing!

Amuro, the Nature Documentary Narrator

The other day my son and I were watching an NHK documentary on penguins and elephant seals living on King George's Island, near the South Pole. We were interested in the show because of the beautiful and mysterious creatures they were showing us, but also because the narrator was Tohru Furuya, perhaps the most famous anime voice actor in Japan today, who provided the voices of Amuro Ray from the Mobile Suit Gundam universe, Tuxedo Mask from Sailor Moon, Kyosuke from Orange Road, and about a bazillion other roles over the years. My son and I (who like Gundam way too much) made a great game of spitting out Gundam-esque lines and laughing as "Amuro" replied with fascinating information on the mating rituals of the wildlife on the island. In many ways, anime is everywhere in Japan, and there's no a person under the age of 45 here that can't wax a little nostalgic about some anime they watched as a youngling, even if they're not an active otaku today. That's part of the fun of being an anime fan -- it means there's the potential for an unexpected connection with any Japanese person you meet, even when you least expect it.

By the way, if you're a Gundam fan, hunt down the Zeta Gundam compilation movies. They're quite cool, since you can watch the entire Zeta Gundam series (truly the Empire Strikes Bath of the Gundamverse) in a short time. The altered character designs are hard to get used to, though. Cool, but switching back and forth is a little funky.

The Three Stages of Gaijin Eye Aversion

My wife came into my office the other day holding the latest copy of Newsweek (the Japanese version) that contained some interesting article she'd just read. "Did you know the secret rule of gaijin in Japan? When they see another foreigner on the train, they avert their eyes!" Of course after living here for so long, I was well aware of the strange tendency for foreigners to avoid making eye contact with another foreigners they see on the street, be they from Europe, the U.S. or Brazil, and I've even done it myself. It's a strange phenomenon indeed, which I've come to think of as the Three States of Eye Aversion. First, a foreigner who has moved to Japan is enjoying himself and getting used to living in a country in which 98% of the people identify with the same ethnic group, which feels a bit strange for a while. Then along comes some Sri Lankan guy on his way to Tokyo, making you re-think your neat little world view of Japan, so you do your best to ignore him. You realize it's silly to ignore someone for a silly reason like that, though, so you decide to go talk to him, but you then find out that not everyone from Sri Lanka speaks English, so you embarrass yourself terribly. Finally, you decide to keep your eyes to yourself the next time you see a foreigner on the train, which makes for a simpler Japan Experience anyway. Incidentally, I don't think the odd eye aversion thing applies to tourists or anyone visiting Japan for a short time, so you never need to worry about running into unfriendly people here; this odd custom only affects foreigners living in Japan on an extended basis.

Then there are the times when you avert your eyes for other reasons...

Japanese Sound Words, and Underwear Fanservice Anime?

Would you like to learn to speak Japanese fluently? If so then you want to become pera pera, an odd but fun Japanese onomatopoeic word that means "able to speak a foreign language very well." After a trip to the beach, don't you hate the feeling of sand in your shoes? That's zara zara, which every Japanese immediately recognizes as the gritty sound of sand. Then there's one you hear in anime quite a lot, doki doki, the "sound" of a nervous person's heart racing, perhaps as they prepare to confess their love to someone special. While there's a whole class of "normal" onomatopoeia that mimic actual sounds like cats and dogs (nyan nyan and wan wan, in case you were curious), the Japanese take these concepts a step further by creating highly descriptive sounds for abstract ideas as well, and because they're so unlike anything we have in English, it's fun for students to learn about them. Something that's brand sparkling new is described as pika pika, while old and run-down is boro boro. If you work fast and efficiently (bishi bishi), your boss might give you a bonus, but if you're slow and lazy (dara dara) he or she might fire you. Eating quickly is known as paku paku, which is where the famous video game character got his name from, while the useful phrase giri giri means "barely," as in barely arriving on time, barely having enough money to buy something, or (in some situations) barely having clothes on. Then there's suu suu, which describes feeling especially drafty: in the classic episode of Strike Witches, the anime about World War II-era magical girls who wear mecha to fight powerful alien enemy, there's an episode where the playful Italian Francesca Lucchini makes off with Yoshika Miyafuji's underwear, forcing her to prepare for battle without her skivvies on. Poor Yoshika complained loudly using this colorful phrase ("suu suu suru!").

A Few of my Favorirte Japanese Foods

sushi, sashimi, and udon or soba when you think of food in Japan, people here have an incredibly rich and varied diet, with popular Chinese and Italian and Indian dishes, American favorites like "Hamburg Steak" (a large steak made of hamburger meat, which Japanese assume we eat every day in the U.S.), and so on. A lot of the foods I really like now are ones I hadn't even known existed before I came to live here. One of my all-time favorite meals is katsu, a cutlet of pork or chicken that's fried and eaten with rice and that heavenly sauce, and it's one of the dishes the J-List prefecture of Gunma is famous for. Then there's Chicken and Egg Soboro, perhaps my favoritest food ever. It's basically teriyaki chicken, flavored ground beef and scrambled egg eaten over steaming rice, and I always have to fight with my kids for seconds when we have it at my house.

Sitting on the Floor in Japan

One of the minor challenges for a foreigner living in Japan is getting used to sitting on the floor a lot. While Western-style furniture like comfortable sofas and chairs can be found everywhere here, it's common for most houses to also have one or more washitsu (Japanese rooms) complete with tatami mats and little cushions to sit on called called zabuton (literally, sitting futon). In my house, we often eat with my wife's parents, with everyone sitting around the kotatsu, a low table with a heater inside for keeping warm in the winter, while everyone grabs from a large pot of food boiling away in the center. Even after living for so long in Japan, an hour or so of sitting on the floor like this starts to get uncomfortable, and I'll usually switch to a nearby chair when no one is looking. I remember when I met my future mother-in-law for the first time: she took me out to experience a really traditional Japanese tea ceremony, which requires that you sit in seiza ("correct sitting") position with your entire body's weight resting on your knees and feet for about 10,000 hours. Japanese always expect that foreigners won't be able to sit for long in that position, so of course I had to summon up every ounce of will I had in me and endure my legs falling asleep without complaint. I guess I made a good impression since she let me marry her daughter.

Do you know the Sino-Japanese numeric system, man?

The Arabic number system used in the West is based on 1,000, but the kanji-derived number system used in Japan uses 10,000 as its central numerical unit, a concept that takes a while to get used to. Basically, if you want to buy something that costs 10,000 yen, you need to think of it as ichi mahn en, or one "ten thousand." Want to pick up a laptop that goes for 100,000 yen? It'll be juu mahn en, or ten "ten thousands" of yen, while a car that costs a million yen is hyaku mahn en or one hundred "ten thousands." The conversation is not only a chore to do on the fly, it's a huge source of potential translation errors, since your brain latches onto the first number it hears like "ten" and immediately assumes a value of 10,000, when it's really 100,000. The mahn character comes up in many other words, too, making it an interesting oddity for students of the language. For example, the character can be found in the word for fountain pen, man'nen hitsu, literally a pen you can write with for 10,000 years; a number of ancient proverbs in both Japanese and Chinese, like "cranes live for 1000 years, turtles live for 10,000 years"; and in the famous battle cry banzai! which is written with characters that mean "to live for 10,000 years." The name for the Great Wall of China in Japanese uses the character, too: Banri no Chojo, or the Long Castle of 10,000 Leagues. Because the character for 10,000 is accurately transliterated as man, it's common for foreigners to sometimes pronounce it like the word "man" in English, when it should be said like mahn, with a long vowel. Little problems like this are one reason I recommend that anyone interested in studying the language avoid texts that use Romanized Japanese but instead force you to read in hiragana and katakana right from the beginning, like many of the items we offer. Besides giving you a quick start at being literate, your pronunciation and accent will be much improved by not having to un-learn the brain's natural tendency to apply the pronunciation rules of English to other languages.