Education Shock

Of all the aspects of Japan I had to get used to when I came here, the educational system was one I remember being especially confused by. My very first morning in Japan was a Saturday, and to my surprise the children of the family I was staying with got up and rushed off to school. Compulsory attendance on Saturdays had been part of public education here for decades until it was abolished in 2002 under the yutori kyoiku or "Slow and Easy Education" reforms, but that first sight of students cheerfully walking to school instead of playing was hard for me to wrap my brain around. More confusion was waiting for me when I started teaching junior high students at a juku, an after-hours school to help students keep up with their schoolwork and prepare for future entrance exams. I was perplexed by the idea of children willingly studying in a classroom until 10 pm instead of watching TV and having fun like I did at that age. Another point of confusion for me was that mandatory education stops at the ninth grade here, and by definition all high schools are optional for students, although nearly everyone attends. Since students choose schools based on their academic level and future goals, high schools function like a miniature version of the university system, with top-ranked schools competing to attract the smartest students and other schools specializing in subjects like engineering, commercials skills like bookkeeping, or (since our prefecture is quite rural) agriculture. Speaking of schools, I've got some good news: my daughter passed her examination for the private junior high school she wanted to enter, and was accepted! I think I'll get some victory sushi on the way home tonight.

Super Convenience!

The Japanese have a reputation for being innovative and coming up with new ways to make everyone's life a little more convenient. I had my first taste of this phenomenon when I bought a crappy Datson B-210 back in college, which sported a single key that worked in both the ignition and the hatchback and didn't mind whether it was upside-down or not, which was a lot more convenient than the dual keys that came with the Mustang I'd owned before. When I came to live in Japan I was greeted with many more of these small but much-appreciated innovations. First there's the faucet that juts out of nearly every toilet here, giving you a place to wash your hands with the clean water as it runs into the tank after a flush, or the spring-loaded toilet paper holders that let you insert a new role with a flick of your wrist. The toilet seat heater/butt washers also fall into the "extremely convenient" category. I'm a big fan of margarine tubs in Japan, which have little holes in the lid that allows you to keep a butter knife half-in and half-out of the tub, so you don't have to get a clean one from the drawer each time you butter toast. They also have blocks of cheese that's already pre-sliced, so you can pull off a piece without cutting it. If I were in charge of coming up with new products at a company in the U.S., I'd mine Japan for ideas til the cows came home.

Atsuhime

When I was six years old, I lived in New Zealand for a year. Besides falling in love with something called Big Ben's Meat Pies, I learned that the BBC makes historical dramas that really delve into the past, which was interesting to me since it's not something Americans are used to seeing. Japan's NHK follows the BBC model very closely, making many jidai-geki or "period dramas" -- this is incidentally where we get the word "Jedi" from -- that bring various episodes of Japan's long past to life for modern TV viewers. There are many productions shown over the course of the year, but the best is always the Taiga ("Big River") Drama, which runs from early January to the end of December and has the biggest budget and the most beautiful costumes. This year was the 47th Taiga Drama since the series started in 1963, and it told the story of Atsuhime, a girl who married the 13th Tokugawa Shogun. The period was an especially tumultuous one, which saw the arrival of Admiral Perry and his "Black Ships" then culminated in the Meiji Restoration, when the 250-year rule of the Tokugawa clan ended and a modern government was founded around the Japanese Emperor. It stared the popular actress Aoi Miyazaki, who gave a brilliant performance and won many fans for the show, which pulled in ratings of 28% last night.

I Bought 12 Boxes of Cereal

If you went to the supermarket recently, you might have picked up some cereal and put it in your cart. I bought some cereal recently too -- 12 boxes, in fact. Although breakfast cereal can be found easily in Japanese supermarkets, with familiar names like Corn Flake, Corn Frosty, Choko-wa (chocolate loops), Genmai Flake, and recently, Fruits Loops (the "fruits" is a fluke of Japanese phonetics, I love it for some reason), the boxes are so tiny that an American shopper would probably laugh out loud in the middle of the store, with just 1.5-2 "normal" servings of cereal in each box. So I occasionally decide to make an order from the Foreign Buyers' Club in Kobe, a service that lets foreigners living in Japan purchase anything from the U.S. (or Britain, or Australia), as long as they don't mind ordering by the supermarket case, which usually means 12 boxes. Having that much of any single brand of cereal is a little tiring, but it's nice to have the option of buying natsukashii (nostalgic) food from home when I want it.

It's quite interesting to see how Geoffrey Giraffe, Tony the Tiger and so on have been adapted to Japan. Creepy sometimes, but interesting.

J-List is humming along nicely both here in Japan and in our San Diego office, processing hundreds of orders daily and getting them out the door in a speedy manner. Whether you're looking for great Japanese snacks, anime figures and toys, Japanese study supplies, 2009 calendars or our Wacky Things from Japan, we've ready to get your order processed in record time. Browse our amazing stock of products now!

Kanji We Can Believe In

Each year the organization that publishes the Standardized Kanji Test announces the "kanji of the year," the single character that best sums up the events of the past twelve months. The kanji character is announced at a ceremony at the beautiful Kiyomizu Dera temple in Kyoto, one of Japan's most famous places, and it's fun to try to guess what it will be ahead of time. The character for 2008 has been announced, and it's truly a kanji we can believe in: hen 変, meaning "change," reflecting the many changes that Japan went through this year, including a new Prime Minister, plenty of economic turmoil and the election of a new American President with a similar message. The mechanics of individual kanji characters can be quite complex, and the hen character is used in many words, including normal verbs like kaeru 変える (to change [something]) or kawaru 変わる (to change [yourself]), and it's also the word for "strange," as in hen na gaijin 変な外人 (strange foreigner), something I've been called more than a few times. Anime fans may be familiar with some words that incorporate the hen kanji, too, like henshin 変身 (transform!), a staple of so many Japanese TV shows, taihen 大変(meaning "terrible" or "what a shame"), and that infamous "H" word hentai 変態, which has come to represent the more naughtier elements of anime, manga and computer games from Japan but which just means "not normal" or "perverted" in Japanese. Other characters that were considered this year included kin or "gold" to celebrate Japan's Olympic medals, raku meaning "fall" due to the stock market drop, and shoku or "food" in reference to the food scandals from China.

Coincidences in Japan

Today's interesting word of Japanese is guuzen (GOO-zen), which means "coincidence." I don't know why, but there seems to be something about Japan that brings out the most unlikely coincidences, at least for me. On several occasions I've bumped into people I studied Japanese with at SDSU in Tokyo and Yokohama -- quite a feat, considering the fact that I live far from these places myself. The guy who lives next door to us decided to run for mayor of our city of 200,000 and won, so my next-door neighbor just happens to be the mayor. When racing manga/anime Initial D got popular in the U.S., I was surprised to learn that the mountain roads I'd been zooming up and down for years were the setting of the story. But the biggest guuzen of my life would have to be the fact that the city I just happened to come to live in was the home town of Mitsuru Adachi, the creator of Touch, the classic baseball manga that I used to learn Japanese from, and which formed much of my early perception of Japan and its language. What's more, the artist just happens to share a birthday with my wife, another incredible coincidence.

J-List is primed great Japan-related products to you, and we've got an incredible stock of great toys, bento boxes, traditional and wacky items from Japan, snacks and more. If you're looking for ideas, why not browse the "Top 50" pages of the site, seeing what items other J-List customers are picking up? You can browse the top-selling toys (general), toys (Ghibli-related), anime figures, Hello Kitty items, traditional products, Wacky Things from Japan, bento boxes, snacks, magazine subscriptions, anime artbooks, Japanese study items, PC dating-sim games on CD-ROM or download, DVDs, T-shirts, and more. It's fun to browse J-List!

On Wedding Kimonos and Gaijin

In my city there's a bridal shop that sells the most beautiful wedding kimonos for happy Japanese brides to wear, and on the outside of their shop they've got a large sign showing models wearing the kimonos that they sell. The funny thing is that the models are all foreigners, something that always surprises me when I drive past -- if the company is selling products to Japanese women, why use gaijin models? The answer is that the Japanese have a rather deep complex about Westerners and seem to perceive them as being superior to Japanese on some unconscious level, just as Europe and America are considered more advanced politically and socially than Japan, despite our many faults. As a result it's effective to sell certain products by associating them with foreigners in some way. While beauty may be difficult for you or me to define, the Japanese seem to have no problem in this area: for a woman to be considered really beautiful she needs to be very tall (at least 175 cm), have an 8:1 ratio of head to body, and have a "high nose" (meaning a nose that juts out at a bold angle rather than being flat against the face).

A Certain Magical Kanji Trick

I've started watching an anime series with the rather unique name of A Certain Magical Index, which is about magic-using espers living in a futuristic place called Academy City, and a girl named Index who has 103,000 magical books stored in her memory. The name of the series is interesting because it illustrates a flexible aspect of written Japanese. Normally, kanji characters have "readings" (official pronunciations), and the general rule is that a character by itself will be read using the kun or Japanese reading, like the word for water (mizu), while two characters forming a compound word will use the on or Chinese reading, as in the words for seawater (kaisui) or cold water (reisui). It's permissible to "force" readings of kanji characters by assigning them an original reading of your own, which is called ateji. When foreigners want to write their names in kanji, perhaps for one of those cool custom Japanese name stamps, they usually turn to this system: for example someone with the last name of Lockwood might choose characters for "lock" and "tree" for their kanji. Another use might be in novels, to show multiple ideas in a single gestalt. For example, the translator of the Harry Potter novels could choose to write "flying broom sport" in kanji with "Quidditch" in katakana above as the reading, which would communicate both the meaning and the pronunciation at once. The character Light Yagami from Death Note also uses ateji for his name, assigning the English word "Light" to his kanji of "moon." The "Index" in the title of the anime I'm watching now is written with characters that mean "catalog of forbidden books" (kinsho mokuroku), which adds additional meaning for the reader to pick up.

iPhone Diet Update

My "iPhone diet" is going surprisingly well, and I've managed to lose 12 kg (25 lbs) so far. On this diet I'm basically eating anything I want, but making sure I record what I eat in an iPhone app called Daily Count, which gives me visual feedback about how many more calories I'm allowed for the day. The other day I went to the onsen (hot springs) with my son, and he suddenly started dancing while singing "Everybody Dance Now," which is what we do in our family when something good happens for some reason. I asked him why he was doing the victory dance, and he nodded towards one of the other bathers, who happened to be quite a big larger than me. At 93kg (205 lbs), my weight is slightly above average for the U.S., but in Japan where people are so thin, I'm really huge by comparison, making seeing someone larger than me in the bath a noteworthy event. I've actually been asked in the past if I was a professional wrestler -- sigh.

Thinking Way Too Hard

For whatever reason, there are certain subjects I never managed to study during high school or college, including chemistry, philosophy, world religion or the history of classical music. I also never took Latin, which I've heard is a cool subject to study because you get a sense for how the words we use today have evolved from the languages of the past. While I may have no particular experience with the etymology of English words, I recall going overboard with my Japanese studies, trying to learn more about the grammatical structure of the language than was necessary to use it. For example, you probably know that arigatou gozaimasu is a polite way to express "thank you" in Japanese, but I'd catch myself going beyond the simple phrase, parsing the grammar and kanji to better understand why it meant what it did. Similarly, the phrase yoroshiku onegai shimasu (yo-roh-shkoo oh-neh-gai shee-MAHS) is used when meeting someone for the first time (making it similar to "nice to meet you"), or when asking something important of someone ("thanks for doing this for me"). I'd try to come up with the most accurate English representation for the phrase I could, which worked out to be something close to "I humbly beg your favor" -- potentially interesting on a linguistic level, but quite useless when trying to communicate with people. I also caught myself going overboard learning every kanji I encountered, despite the face that many weren't in active use in the Japanese language at all.

Poor Prime Minister Aso

Poor Prime Minister Aso is really getting beaten up in the press these days. His approval rating is in the doldrums having fallen to around 31 percent, a number that's being reported almost gleefully by the mass-komi (as the news media is called here, from "mass communications"). There's something about Japanese politics that compels people to attack anyone perceived as being a "standing nail" and try to hammer them back into place, and the minute any politician dares try to assume a leadership role the negative energy start flowing. The complaints being leveled against Aso and his cabinet include the PM's love of fine hotel dining (which he pays for himself), for occasionally misreading kanji characters in his speeches, and for his many slips of the tongue, like when he said that many doctors "lack common sense." Amazingly, plenty of the anti-Aso comments are coming from his own Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), a phenomenon that's related to the complex system of internal factions (habatsu) within the larger party: Aso-san lacks support from a strong faction, so few will defend him. The new vogue of "Aso-bashing" might spell good news for the main opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) and its leader Ichiro Ozawa.

Yaeba, the Cute Crooked Teeth

Have you ever noticed that Japanese girls sometimes have very crooked teeth? Because the Japanese really never got into the Western custom of fixing teeth with braces, Japanese girls often have teeth that are quite oddly shaped, almost like they had too many teeth for their mouths. Fortunately, these teeth (which are called yaeba in Japanese, YA-eh-ba) look cute to the Japanese, and many Japanese singers and idols including the famous Seiko Matsuda have made their oddly shaped teeth part of their appeal. Although Westerners probably look at the crooked teeth as a negative, I kind of like the appeal they add to a pretty face. Maybe I've been in Japan too long.

Hop We Can Believe In

Every time I turn on the TV, it seems, one of Japan's big four beer companies is releasing some groundbreaking "new" brew which they hope will appeal to customers and win them a few points of market share over their competitors. Recently Sapporo brought out a new variety of its high-end Yebisu brand called "Yebisu The Hop," a name which highlights the fresh ingredients of the beer, based entirely on Czech Republic-grown hops as opposed to other beers that use rice and corn for part of the fermentation process. I like the name because it shows Japan's long fascination with the English word "the," which is truly difficult for them to master no matter how many years they study as the concepts of definite and indefinite articles don't exist in Japanese. The word "the" (rendered as za due to the limitations of Japanese phonetics) is used in marketing quite often, from department store Ito Yokado's semi-annual "The Sale" event to a tea bag I happen to have on my desk right now, which has "The Drink Bar" written on it as it was liberated from a family restaurant beverage bar at lunch. As is usually the case, the new Yebisu beer also has an extensive English explanation on it which is part decoration (since English is kakko ii or "cool") and part statement of quality. The text on the can, which is only slightly mangled, reads, "The exquisitely refined aroma of this beer is from select fine aroma hops and aroma hops, Yebisu yeast and slow maturation." I think I'll sneak down to my father-in-law's liquor shop tonight and try one.

Benefits from Living in Japan

Although Japan is certainly not a perfect place, in general there are benefits for gaijin who come here to live. First, it's not uncommon for foreigners to receive certain kinds of attention or enjoy some small opportunities that wouldn't be available to the locals, like the time I attended a concert given by my favorite band (Psy-s, if you know your 90s J-Pop) and was able to become friends with the singer because she'd happened to notice me dancing in the audience. As a foreigner you're considered part of a group that's outside the larger society of Japanese people -- gaijin literally means "outsider" after all -- and as such, it can be said that no one expects a lot from you at first. This allows you to either a) live up to their expectations and be a slacker, if that's your thing, or b) surprise them by speaking their language, and if you're able, quote rare kotowaza (traditional Japanese proverbs) that they don't expect foreigners to know, for shock value. Since coming to live in Japan means being far from home, you can usually spread your wings a bit and let go of any social inhibitions you might have had in the past. Then of course there's the small benefit you generally get with the opposite sex, since being a foreigner in Japan is something close to speaking with an exotic accent. I've had many instances where females found me more interesting than I really was mainly because of my gaijin status, and this allowed me to be more outgoing and have more fun overall. And have woken up after a night out drinking with an odd phone number scrolled on a chopstick wrapper. Remind me to tell you about the time I went flower viewing and met a girl who was boasting about what a good kisser she was...

Kanji is, like, radical dude

Part of learning to read and write kanji involves learning about the building blocks (called radicals) that make up the characters. Although they can look like so much goobldygook when you're not used to them, most characters are built with parts of other characters which help guide their meaning. For example, characters for things like language, to read, to translate, and to speak all contain the same left half (called gomben), which is the character for "to say." Kanji characters are often tied to the elements, and there are radicals for characters related to water (found in characters for sea, fish, tide), fire (found in ash, smoke and to burn), or rain (which shows up in characters for cloud, snow, and lightning) -- all quite logical, really. When you study kanji for far too long, as I have, you start to imagine you can see the threads of thought that went into their creation. For example, the kanji for "second" (as a unit of time) has the same right portion as the character for "sand" and I imagine some scholars in ancient China millennia ago working out why it was logical for the two concepts to be linked in this way, because of the way time can be measured with an hourglass.

Announcing The J-List Anime Figure Sale!

J-List is having a very special sale on our most gorgeous prepainted anime figures, and you're invited! Because we're a bit overstocked on some of these gorgeous prepainted figures and flexible action figures we carry, we've lowered the prices on all items, a super chance for you to add to your collection. We've got some of the most popular figure lines on sale, including Figma and Nendoroid, too. Best of all, buy 2 or more figures from the sale and get another 10% off. Since we've gone out of our way to add figures in logical groups (e.g. Haruhi and Lucky Star), it's the perfect reason to buy them together and build a great shrine to your favorite anime.

The Most Popular Japanese Words of 2008

Every year dictionary publisher U-CAN announces the most popular buzzwords for the past year, slang which appears suddenly and is likely to fade away almost as quickly. One word that was on people's lips in 2008 was arofo, an abbreviation of "around forty" made popular by a television drama by the same name, and the word has come to symbolize the current generation of Japanese women in their forties. This has also been a good year for Japanese comedian Harumi Edo, who makes use of the fact that words in Japanese end in full syllables, e.g. ra-nin-gu instead of "running," and her popular comic routine that turns the final gu! sound into the English good! has won her a place on the list. Some words that were nominated for the award but not chosen include homuresu chugakusei (homeless Junior High School student) based on a book released by a media "talent" who spent some months living in a park as a boy, dokuiri gyoza (poison Chinese dumplings) due to the Chinese food scare, and asa banana (morning banana), reflecting the sudden popularity of a diet that promoted eating a banana for breakfast, which resulted in bananas being completely sold out and impossible to buy in supermarkets throughout the country.

Trust me, this is funnier than it looks at first:

Japanese Food Can Kill You

One of the things I like best about living in Japan is the food. From traditional types of Japanese cuisine like sushi and sashimi to rice bowl-based foods like Oyakodon ("parent-and-child rice bowl," made with chicken and eggs) to local versions of Chinese dishes and all types of bento, eating in Japan is a joy. Japanese food has a reputation for being healthy, and in a lot of cases it is, containing less fat and fewer highly processed ingredients, but the reverse is also true: there are plenty of popular foods here that can kill you. The most famous deadly Japanese food is fugu (pufferfish), which contains a poison that paralyzes your body while you suffocate, but since fugu chefs must undergo years of training and be licensed by the government, deaths from it are quite rare today. A more dangerous food is mochi, or rice cake, essentially a square of extremely dense rice that's been pressed into a solid shape. Cook it over a flame and it will turn soft and chewy -- so chewy in fact that 30% of accidental deaths among the elderly supposedly come from choking on it. A similar food is konjac or Devil's Tongue, a kind of yam eaten throughout Asia that's grated, pressed and boiled until extremely firm, like gelatin made with very little water. Although the low-calorie/high-fiber food is popular with dieters, konjac is so firm that it must carry warning labels on the packaging, and no matter how careful people are, occasionally children or elderly manage to choke on it. All told, a staggering 4000 Japanese choke from overly chewy foods each year in Japan, a very sad statistic.

I love, LOVE this stuff, mochi. Sadly, it's about the most calories you can have in one meal.

Peter the Japanese Writing Teacher

I've been in "teacher mode" a lot these days, spending time helping my daughter write essays in Japanese. She'll be taking the entrance test for a private Junior High soon, and one of the requirements of the test is that she be able to write a good essay on a topic like, "What kind of Junior High School student do you want to be?" or "Name an event in your life that moved you emotionally." Historically, tests in Japan have been all about rote memorization, for example knowing that the city of Heian-kyo (modern Kyoto) was established in 794, or that the angles of a triangle always add up to 180, but as educators see that students lack written communication skills, essays and other kinds of writing have started to become more common. Like Japan's society itself, the essays have a strict framework to them, written on special "essay writing paper" with columns of squares to write characters in. In addition to writing kanji and kana correctly, the essay tests knowledge of how to properly write using the form, including some seemingly arbitrary things like knowing that the title must be indented three squares, and so on.

This is what the special paper, called genko yoshi 原稿用紙, looks like:

Recently spotted on Twitter: "Got my bento toys from J-List last night in the mail. Even cooler than advertised. My husband will never guess what's for Christmas!" That makes us so happy. J-List is a great place to search for really rare and fun items from Japan, whether it's anime toys and figures or bento boxes or unique 2009 Japanese calendars or our trademark Wacky Things from Japan.

Christmas Lights in Japan

Christmas is approaching, and in Japan that means one thing: lots of pretty twinkling lights. Throughout the country there are hundreds of romantic light displays that offer beautiful illumination and imagery for the Christmas season. In Tokyo, you can visit places like Roppongi Hills, Tokyo Tower or Shinjuku's Terrace City to take in these beautiful light displays, which are especially popular with couples, who plan a special evening at one of these "date spots" on Christmas Eve, considered the most romantic night of the year. In Yokohama's famous Yamashita Park you can visit Perry Joriku Hikari no Michi, translatable as the Shining Street of Admiral Perry's Landing, which commemorates the coming of Admiral Perry and his Black Ships with beautiful Christmas lights. This seems like an odd thing to celebrate, but I guss it's no stranger than the robot sister of Tetsuwan Atom (Astro Boy) being named Uran, meaning "uranium," an unexpected move for the only people who have experienced an atomic bombing first-hand. Just one of the many ways Japan confuses us foreigners.

Japan's 99% Conviction Rate

Last time I talked about the new Japanese "lay jury" system, which aims to have citizen jurors take part in the process of judging and sentencing serious crimes. This is quite an alien concept for Japanese, who have only 120 years of history as a Constitutionally-founded nation and no existing tradition of a trial by a "jury of one's peers." I mentioned that the conviction rate for criminal trials is over 99%, which compares to around 85% of in the U.S., and I received some questions about how this could be so high. First of all, it's considered an extremely serious offense to charge someone with a crime without being sure of his guilt, and it often takes Japanese prosecutors weeks or even months to bring formal charges in crimes while they sift through evidence and make sure they're not making a mistake. For example, it took several months for Aum Shinrikyo cult leader Shoko Asahara to be officially charged and arrested, despite his clear involvement in the 1995 subway nerve gas attacks and murder of a lawyer named Sakamoto and his family. The Japanese legal system is focused on getting suspects to confess their crimes, which is seen as the first step in rehabilitation, and police sometimes try so hard to their man to come clean that they end up with confessions by innocent people -- ack. Another big reason for the high rate of guilty verdicts is that there are a lot fewer resources in Japan for prosecuting crimes, which means that prosecutors must choose their strongest cases and decline to take action in situations where evidence is lacking, which inflates the numbers. Hopefully the various reforms the government is putting into place now, which include increasing the number of lawyers in Japan, will improve things in the future.

J-List Special Black Monday Sale!

J-List is just bursting with great products that would be appreciated by the special people on your shopping list this year, from anime calendars to plush toys to prepainted figures to bento and wonderful Japanese snacks. To celebrate Black Monday, we're doing something special: giving a $25 discount for any purchase of $200 or more. Considering the huge number of outstanding products we've got in stock, it'll be easy to pick $200 worth of great calendars, toys, figures and other items for the people on your list (or yourself). Offer good Monday and Tuesday!

8 9 3 = Yakuza

Like most countries, Japan has its unsavory elements, including organized crime. Japan's version of the Italian mafia are the yakuza (YAH-koo-za), a name which literally means "8 9 3" and refers to a losing hand in a traditional Japanese card game. The yakuza have almost four hundred years of history dating from the Edo Period, when the nation was closed off to outside influence and able to grow free of the wars that had plagued previous eras. While yakuza gangsters have been seen as defenders of the weak in popular lore, in reality they're very smart criminals with excellent organizational skills who operate various businesses, from illegal high-interest loans to shady drinking establishments in Tokyo's Kabuki-cho district where simply sitting down can expose you to an exorbitant fees. Yakuza are famous for their incredible full-body tattoos, a popular art form in Japan, and I've certainly seen more than my share of these, despite the "no tattoos allowed" sign. Although yakuza are gangsters, they're usually very polite, and it's considered good form for a well-connected person to have a few yakuza friends, just in case you ever need them. Yakuza are often associated with Japan's famously loud right-wingers who drive around in huge trucks blasting World War II era songs and, occasionally, the theme from the classic anime Space Cruiser Yamato. There's a whole subset of the Japanese language used by these gangsters, and part of the fun of living in Japan as a foreigner is seeing how good I can get at speaking the dialect.

Jury System Coming to Japan -- Alert Ally McBeal!

"Overseas dramas" are as popular as ever here in Japan, and thousands of fans follow American series like Damages or Boston Legal by renting DVDs from shops or watching the episodes that are broadcast on TV, usually late at night on NHK. There are many concepts in these courtroom dramas that must be hard for Japanese viewers to follow, however, due to the differences in the legal systems of Japan and the U.S. One of these differences -- the lack of cases being heard by a jury of average citizens -- will be changing soon, as the Japanese government prepares to roll out its "lay judge" system in 2009. Envelopes have been mailed out to 295,000 citizens informing them that they've been chosen as potential jurors in the new system, meaning that they can be called upon to appear in court to start hearing cases. The new system, in which groups of six jurors and three professional judges will decide the guilt or innocence in serious crimes like murder or arson, has been put in place in part due to Japan's embarrassment at its sky-high rate of convictions of 99%. The idea of whether average Japanese citizens can perform the duties of American-style jurors is a complex one. On the one hand, there is the school of thought that the group-minded Japanese might find themselves going with the opinion of the larger group for social reasons, rather than because they genuinely think the person in question is guilty or innocent. On the other hand, I've known many contrarian Japanese who would likely take an opinion different from everyone else just to show how headstrong they can be, which would cause all kinds of problems. Will the lay judge system work? I'm frankly not sure, but I think it'll be a useful exercise for every Japanese who takes part in it.

The First and Last Shinkansen

An era has come to an end in Japan: the "0-Series" Bullet Train, first launched back in 1964, has made its last run as the venerable series is officially brought out of service. It was during Japan's heady postwar growth period that the government made a proposal to build a high-speed train line to handle the increasing passenger load on the Tokaido Line between Tokyo and Osaka, and slowly things got under way. With the impending Tokyo Olympics only a few years off, the project was kicked into high gear so that the line would be opened in time for foreign visitors to oo and ah over. It was a big success, and the speedy trains helped improve Japan's international image like no other symbol of the postwar period. The 0-Series is considered the Mother of the Bullet Train by rail fans, and all told they've traveled enough miles to circumnavigate the globe 30,000 times -- wow! Tickets on the last 0-series were snapped up in record time by train otaku who wanted to be present on that last journey, and as the train pulled out, hundreds of fans were there with cameras to record the moment. During my years as an ESL teacher I had many students who loved train more than anything, and after school vacations they'd have all kinds of interesting stories for me about taking a long trip to some rural corner of the country to ride their favorite train.

iPhone [hearts] Emoji

One of the things I like about the iPhone 3G I use in Japan is now it updates itself with new software that usually adds new features for free, something my old cell phone certainly didn't do. Version 2.2 of the iPhone software was recently released, and one Japan-centric feature it offers is emoji, or "picture-characters," apparently so important to Japanese consumers that Softbank had Apple add the feature specially for them. With the update, Softbank users can call up an optional keyboard that features several dozen cute pictures which can be inserted into emails, with everything from an ikari mark (the mark anime characters get on their heads when they're mad) to images of food, buildings and apologetic boyfriends. Some of the symbols are downright puzzling (an eggplant? a rocket? smiling poop?), but I guess the idea is to give enough choice so that users can be as whimsical as they like in their emails. It's certainly a lot more expressive than using boring old ASCII to express one's self, like the word Orz which looks like a man on his hands and knees apologizine. I wonder if the new emoji feature will bring in a lot of new users in Japan.

Oh, and unfortunately this is only for users in Japan, and only when they send mail using their Softbank account, which no one uses. Happily there is a hack out there for Jailbroken phones.

Soybeans

Everyone knows that rice is the staple food of the Japanese, and it really is -- we eat it 2-3 times a day, and we're not nearly as traditional as some families. The "other" staple food in Japan would have to be soybeans, which are the source of a great variety of Japanese foods. Miso soup, a hot soup made from fermented miso paste, is an extremely healthy dish that's enjoyed with every traditional Japanese breakfast, and served with other meals. Tofu is another popular food, used in many Japanese and Chinese recipes, or good served chilled on a hot afternoon with soy sauce poured over it. Natto is the famous fermented soybeans that are popular in much of the country, although less so in the Kansai/Osaka area, to say nothing of my mouth. My kids eat it all the time, and when they want to tease me they come up to me and breathe Natto breath on me -- ugh. Japan couldn't get through a day without soy sauce, of course, the single most common condiment in Japanese kitchens, even more than salt and pepper. Finally, soybeans play an important cultural role each February on Setsubun, the traditional end of the year according to the old lunar calendar, when you throw them at imaginary devils to chase away evil and bring happiness into the home. (If you're looking for some good miso soup, we've got several varieties in stock, and miso soup bowls to go with then.)

The History of the Japanese Word Processor

I saw that Toshiba recently won a special award for its JW-10 Word Processor, a breakthrough product that allowed the Japanese language to join the modern age of computing when it debuted in 1978. The idea for a Japanese word processor came six years earlier, when Toshiba engineer Kenichi Mori talked with newspaper editors who complained that their writers took much longer to write articles than their counterparts in the U.S., and he realized that a computer-based workflow was needed in Japan. Since Japanese has thousands of kanji characters, creating a way for users to easily select the kanji they wanted to enter was needed, and they came up with the modern system in which the user enters hiragana characters then hits a button to cycle through possible characters for that word, with software that helps guess the correct character so there aren't a lot of embarrassing errors in the document. The JW-10 cost $63,000 and weighed 220 kg, but it proved that there was no fundamental reason why Japanese users couldn't embrace this new technology along with the rest of the world. This fundamental kanji input system is everywhere now, and any time a person enters Japanese on a Mac or PC or using a keitai (cell phone), they're using the fundamental algorithms developed by the Toshiba engineers. Unfortunately, creating the first word processor in Japanese had the unintended consequence of making just about every adult-aged Japanese person terrible at writing kanji, thanks to the computer interface that looks up the characters for you. In this age of convenient electronic devices, the average Junior High School student can probably write a lot more kanji than most adults.

Today is Good Bath Day

I have the most interesting car: when I start it in the morning, it greets me with ohayo gozaimasu (good morning) and tells me the date, followed by an interesting bit of "what day is today?" trivia. For example, August 15 is Instant Ramen Day, May 9 is Ice Cream Day, and November 22nd is Happy Married Couples Day, designed to help promote happy married couples (and hopefully get that non-dog birth rate up a little). Today is ii furo no hi or "good bath day," a day when people like me who love Japanese hot springs and open-air baths can feel good about getting very clean while bathing. While I do love going up to the mountains to experience a real volcanic hot springs whenever I can, I don't really have to go far to take a nice hot onsen bath, as there are three large public bath/hot springs establishments within 5 km of J-List, and one under construction that should be opening soon. Every weekend when we're trying to decide what we want to do, my kids know what my suggestion will be: heading to some hot springs to get really, really clean.

Dog Birthrate Update

Japan is experiencing a big increase in its birthrate...of dogs, that is. While Japan's rate of human births continues to sag, with just 7.87 babies born per 1000 persons, compared with 14.4, 12.4, 12.0 in the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom, respectively, there are plenty of dogs to go round -- about 12 million of them according to an annual study of a pet food industry group that was recently released. Dogs are changing Japan in subtle ways, something I noticed when I saw that a nearby home center had installed a dog run in its parking lot, essentially a fenced off grassy space where dogs who have come shopping with their owners can run, jump and play with other dogs. If you're a cat person (we'd qualify, as we have six in our house), you'll have plenty of company in Japan, too, as there are another 12.5 million cats living in Japanese homes. All told, there are dogs and cats in Japan than humans under the age of 15 here -- Japan is truly a paradise for pets.

A New Start for J-List

First of all, we've done a nice redesign of the J-List and JBOX.com websites, improving the look of the graphics of the site and making some changes to make things easier to find. We've also given our official mascot character Megumi-chan a refresh, just in time for the holidays, and we think she looks really cute in her "Santa-wear" (as a Santa suit is called in Japan). We've worked hard on the site refresh and we hope you like it! As always, feedback on the new site design is more than welcome! (Note that we are still tweaking the site.)

Pitty the Poor Gaijin

There are many important milestones that a foreigner trying to master Japanese will face. Ordering in a restaurant for the first time, for example, or communicating to the pizza delivery guy how to get to your apartment, not easy since streets are generally not named in Japan. Trying to get the hang of keigo (polite Japanese) is challenging since English speakers aren't used to the concept of using one form of language to raise up (exhault) the person you're talking with while using another type to lower (humble) yourself, and I remember crashing and burning many times due to getting the two confused. For many students of nihongo, the Japanese Language Proficiency Test is the primary goal they set for themselves, and whether you're trying the easiest level (level 4) to test your grasp of elementary written and spoken Japanese or are going all-out for the hardest level (level 1), required for foreign students to enter a Japanese university, having a goal and meeting it is a glorious thing. Some might consider passing level 1 of the JLPT to be the "ultimate" test of a person's Japanese, but I found an even higher goal gaijin can shoot for if they're so inclined: talking with the Emperor. I was watching a press conference with Japanese Emperor Akihito, and a foreign journalist stood up to ask him a question in Japanese. Unfortunately, the reporter garbled the question just enough that the meaning wasn't clear to the Emperor, who had to ask the poor man to repeat his question several times, while the cameras and everyone in the room stared on. Having been in many embarrassing situations myself, I felt terrible for the poor reporter. (Incidentally, J-List stocks dozens of excellent study aids for students learning Japanese -- browse our huge selection of items, now!)

Early Thanksgiving

On Sunday we had ourselves an early (and partially Costco-enabled) Thanksgiving, since Thursday is rather a difficult day to take off in the bustle of Japan, and since it was actually a local holiday called Labor Thanksgiving Day here, a day for giving thanks to people who work hard all year. It's not always easy to translate special cultural events to other countries, but we did our best to have a traditional holiday meal anyway, enjoying chicken and mashed potatoes and gravy, although there was sushi, too. It was up to me to explain the background of Thanksgiving to the Japanese friends we'd invited over, and I did my best to impart the history of the holiday to everyone, also explaining little details like, no, no one actually likes cranberry sauce, but we have to have it out because it's traditional. I've been careful to indoctrinate my kids in all the little things American kids must know, so we sat around watching A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving on DVD, which is always fun.

The Christmas season is fast approaching, and J-List is loaded with many outstanding products that the people on your list would love to receive. From our lineup of Japanese toys to our bento boxes and accessories to our kanji T-shirts and study supplies and more, J-List is the place to come when you want to find something that will really be appreciated by the person on your list. Remember, too, that there is no sales tax of any kind when you buy from J-List, and that we've got some great specials going on to save you money. Help J-List make this Christmas a little more special for the Japan-focused people on your list this year!

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.