The Queen of Subtitles

The other day I saw my wife watching an American movie that was being shown with Japanese subtitles, although I had no idea what it was because she had the volume turned too low to hear anything. When I commented on this, she said, "Oh, I didn't notice the volume was turned down. I was reading the subtitles." The Japanese consume a lot of TV and movies from the outside world and are quite at home with reading subtitles, a big difference from in the U.S. where subtitled films historically are not popular. When a Hollywood movie studio wants to make sure their film will do well in the Japanese market, they go out of their way to hire Natsuko Toda, known as the Queen of Movie Subtitles, who is so in demand that her personal schedule often determines what movies Japanese people see and when. Just about every famous film from Star Wars to Apocalypse Now to Harry Potter movies have begun with the "Subtitled by Natsuko Toda" title, letting moviegoers know they won't be confused with the flow of the story as they watch. One interesting side-effect of being so comfortable with subtitles is that the latest Will Smith film might be grouped together with, say, a French art film, since Japanese viewers are getting information through the subtitles and are not understanding the spoken lines in the film. Thus, films that might not get attention in the U.S. because they are "foreign" might have greater success in Japan.

Ms. Toda loves her Hollywood stars, and is always on hand whenever they visit Japan.

Japan Crime Bizarre, or the Lens of the Internet?

In 2007 a sad event occurred in the town of Aizu-Wakamatsu, which is incidentally famous for being the site of a mass suicide of samurai who chose to commit Seppuku rather than become part of a modern, Western-style Japan during the Meiji Restoration. A 17-year-old boy walked into a police station with a shoulder bag containing the severed head of his mother, who the disturbed boy had just killed. Perhaps it's due to the relative rareness of violent crime in Japanese society, but some of the tragedies that do occur seem especially horrific and at times even creative. Like the man who kidnapped his neighbor at knifepoint then, afraid the police would catch him, killed her and flushed her body down the toilet to dispose of it. (He was sentenced to life in prison without chance of parole this week.) It would be easy, judging from news reports of these sad and bizarre cases, to get a distorted view of Japan, especially when seen through the lens of the Internet. It's not unlike the perception that the Japanese are always eating bizarre desserts just because some parts of the country sell wasabi or squid ink-flavored ice cream as a novelty. Although it's not very exotic, the boring reality is that the most popular flavor of ice cream here is vanilla. While any loss of life is tragic, Japan happily remains a reasonably safe country, with a national murder rate lower than that of New York City.

Crime is always sad, and sometimes some really bizarre stuff seems to happen in Japan.

Haikyo: Modern Ruins

One of the more interesting things about Japan is haikyo, or exploring the ruins of our modern civilization, and whether it's spelunking through run-down factories or exploring abandoned love hotels, it can be quite interesting to see a side of the country that doesn't make it into the travel books very often. I've done my share of this, going with some of my students to check out ruins of an old prison that had been abandoned for decades, and near our city we can see the remains of an amusement park I used to take my kids to, which seem to be watched over by a giant statue of a Buddhist Kannon deity nearby. The grand-daddy of modern ruins in Japan is Hashima Island near Nagasaki, nicknamed Gunkan-jima or Battleship Island because of the way it looks like a ship floating in the water. When rich coal deposits were discovered at the end of the 1800's a colony was set up to house the miners, and during the heyday of the island in the 1950s there were nearly 5000 people living in close quarters there, complete with high-rise apartments, a pachinko parlor and even a movie theatre. It all came to a screeching halt when the mine was closed in 1974 and everyone left, in some cases with cups of undrunk tea still sitting on the table. Now the most famous ghost town in Japan has been proposed as a UNESCO World Heritage site. Let's hope they get it open to the public soon!

All About J-List's Home Prefecture of Gunma

J-List is based in Gunma Prefecture, a crane-shaped piece of land that's located right in the center of Japan -- the heso (belly button) of the country, as the locals like to say. Situated on the edge of the Kanto Plain, where Tokyo and Yokohama are, Gunma appears regularly in crime dramas after someone commits a murder needs a conveniently rural, mountainous place to dispose of the body. Because the name of Gunma is written with characters that mean "a herd of horses," people in other parts of the country think there are lots of horses here, but it's completely untrue -- we don't even have a horse racing track anymore. The primary cities in Gunma are Maebashi, the Prefectural capital, famous for wooden kokeshi dolls; Takasaki, a vibrant commercial city, although because it was never bombed during World War II the roads are noticeably narrower and more difficult to drive in; Ota, home of the Subaru corporation, and the old Nakajima Air Works, where Japanese Zeros were built; and our own Isesaki, famous (?) for J-List and for the photographer of Russian model Yulia Nova, who happens to live about 2 km from us. Virtually all the cities in Gunma are former castle towns, and almost without exception the City Offices are built on the grounds of the former castle ruins, which fulfills some kind of continuity with the past that I as an American can't quite fathom, although it's rather cool. In keeping with Japanese regional tradition, Gunma is famous for many things, including konnyaku, a gelatinous food made from yams that's so firm that several elderly people a year choke on it and die, kara-kaze, the biting wind that blows over the mountains in the winter, and kakaa-denka, extremely strong-willed women (like my wife). Now you know a little bit more about Japan!

Our home prefecture of Gunma at a glance. Hot springs, vibrant nature, Daruma dolls: we've got it all.

Hillary in Japan

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is making her international debut right now, having chosen Japan for her first official visit. She's been incredibly busy meeting with a wide range of different groups since arriving here, but while everyone is smiling for the cameras, her visit is shaping up to be a rather strange one. First, she was received by the Empress Michiko rather than Crown Princess Masako, who is still suffering from depression and avoids nearly all public appearances. She asked to meet with Ichiro Ozawa, the leader of Japan's main opposition party, apparently hedging bets that the current ruling coalition might not be in power for much longer. She also met the parents of Megumi Yokota, the poor girl who was kidnapped and spirited away to North Korea, as a gesture of support. Ms. Clinton's visit came at an especially embarrassing time for current Prime Minister Taro Aso. First, an opinion poll was released showing public support for his administration to be around 9%, the timing of which was no doubt helped along by reporters with whom Aso-san is famous for quarreling. Then in Italy, Japanese Finance Minister Nakagawa announced he would step down after apparently giving a press conference while drunk as the proverbial skunk. I'm sure it was a real Nyoro~n moment for Akihabara's famous politician.

Hillary Clinton and Foreign Minister Nakasone; Former Japanese Finance Minister "Shochu" Nakagawa.

The First Japanese-English Dictionary

I write a lot about Japanese history because it's an interesting way to get a feel for how unique the country is. I'm particularly interested in the "firsts," like my recent post about the first beer brewed in Japan, which formed the foundation for the Kirin Brewery Company. The other day I wrote about how Japan had enjoyed a special relationship with The Netherlands throughout the Edo Period, and in fact referred to the study of all Western language, medicine and technology as Rangaku, literally meaning Dutch Studies. But fifty years before Admiral Perry would force Japan to open its doors to trade with the rest of the world, a Dutch translator in Nagasaki named Shosaemon borrowed a Dutch-English dictionary from a trader and created the first Japanese-English dictionary, which was completed in 1810. It was called the Angelia Gorin Taisei, or Great English Vocabulary Book, and it was used by Yukichi Fukuzawa, one of the fore-fathers of modern day Japan and the guy on the 10,000 yen note, when he made his historic fact-finding missions to America and Europe to explore how Japan should approach modernization.

A really, really old dictionary. It blows the mind.

Functional Japan, Dysfunctional Japan

In a lot of ways Japan is quite a well-run country. For example, when Vice Defense Minister Takamasa Moriya was found to have accepted bribes from defense contractors in violation of the law, prosecutors did what they'd do in any similar situation, invading the Ministry of Defense with an army of men in suits to probe for evidence to support the indictments. That this was the equivalent of the U.S. Justice Department serving warrants on the Pentagon to search for evidence of wrongdoing impressed me, since I can't see something like that happening under America's less transparent system. Also, the Japanese Finance Ministry rightly foresaw the problems with U.S. mortgage-backed securities and ordered all Japanese banks to steer clear of them, resulting in far less damage to the banking industry on this side of the pond. Still, Japan does have their share of problems, and one of the most famous is the practice of amakudari, which means "descent from heaven." It's essentially the practice of high-ranking government officials taking cushy jobs in industries they used to oversee when they retire, which creates a lot of you-scratch-my-back cooperation that really shouldn't exist between the private and public sectors. It's analogous to the practice of former members of Congress becoming lobbyists after they retire, and it can create a lot of potential for improper exchanging of a lucrative career for influence that I think we'd be better off without. Amakudari has been a fixture of the postware era for so long it'd be difficult to imagine a Japan without it, and even American companies like Aflac and Coca-Cola owe their current position in the Japanese marketplace today to smart decisions to hire former high-ranking beauracrats to steer their companies through the complex regulatory system here. Still, embattled Prime Minister Taro Aso has declared his intention to end the practice of Amakudari by the end of the year, and I certainly wish him good luck on that. Of course, it's likely that Mr. Aso won't be Prime Minister for too much longer at the rate things are going for him. Maybe he can get himself a primo job at a government contractor before the ban kicks in.

The original meaning of the term, relating to Shinto gods journeying from heaven to visit the Earth.

Hand Written Kanji Messages

The other day we went out for one of my favorite Japanese foods, katsu, or fried cutlet of pork or chicken, which is of course made so much better by that heavenly Bull-Dog sauce they have here. As we were paying at the cash register, I noticed a framed piece of cardboard displayed on the wall with a handwritten message by the president of the company, declaring in flowing characters his company's dedication to quality ingredients and to greeting customers in a genki (cheerful, energetic) manner when they come in the door. The practice of putting a hand-penned message where customers can see it is quite common in Japan, and I think it helps communicate the passion of the business owners while providing a source of motivation for the employees. In the classic baseball anime Touch, there's a similar handwritten sign hung on the wall in which Minami declares her support for Kazuya's dream of taking his team to Koshien, the national high school baseball championship near Osaka. When Kazuya is killed in an accident, his twin brother Tatsuya must take Kat-chan's place, and the sign on the wall becomes a focal point for this goal. Japanese brush calligraphy, called shodo or "the way of writing," is quite a popular art form in Japan, and the ability to write beautifully formed characters is considered an important trait for a person to have. Incidentally, we stock plenty of cool Japanese calligraphy items on the site, and we're also happy to announce the return of our Custom Kanji Board service, where we'll write any character, phrase or other message, including your name in kanji, and send it to you.

"Kazuya, aim for Koshien! by Minami Asakura" from Touch.

Have some Fruits by Minutes Made while wearing your Suits and a new Shirts!

I went with my son to a public bath the other day, always a fun way to relax and wash away the day's cares. My son asked me to get him a "buckets," using the plural form of the English word, and so I brought him two of the little buckets used for splashing water on yourself, knowing of course that he only wanted one. For phonetic reasons, some English words are imported into Japanese in their plural forms, including words like shirt, suit, swimsuit, peanut, fruit and sport, which always appear with the 's' sound on the end (shirts, suits, etc.), even if you're talking about just one of the item. In Japanese, one refers to a suitcase as a "suitscase," and it takes the brain a few months to get over the weirdness of this -- ditto for learning to ask for "peanuts butter" or "Minutes Maid Orange Juice," and of course the English word "bucket," which always appears as "buckets" in Japanese. There seem to be three reasons for some English words being mapped to their plural forms like this. First is the rather convenient lack of singular/plural in Japanese grammar: saying hana ga kirei could mean either "the flower is pretty" or "the flowers are pretty" depending on how many flowers you happen to discussing, and as a result, the Japanese don't sweat the plural/singular state of a word any more Americans consider the gender of nouns in Spanish when they speak English. Another reason is that the softer tsu ending on the plural forms is easier for Japanese to pronounce than a hard 't' consonant sound. Finally, converting some words to their plural forms also avoids the dreaded L/R confusion that can be a problem in the language. Because "fruit" and "flute" would have the exact same pronunciation when rendered in katakana, the musical instrument became furu-to and the stuff you eat became furu-tsu.

Have some fruits by Minutes Made while wearing your suits and a new shirts!

Happy Friday the 13th

I've talked before about how the Japanese can be quite superstitious at times, and since today is Friday the 13th, I thought I'd revisit some of the more interesting folk beliefs here. Such as, don't urinate on a worm, or he'll get revenge by making your private parts swell up. Don't whistle at night or a snake will come, and don't play with fire or you'll wet the bed. When you sneeze twice, it means someone is gossiping about you, a joke that pops up in anime quite a lot. If you see a spider in the morning, it's good luck, so don't kill it. If you want to check the weather tomorrow, throw your shoe as far as you can; if it lands sole down, it will be sunny, but if upside down, it will rain. Being such a death-oriented place, there are a lot of related superstitions. When you attend a funeral you'll be given a packet of salt by the funeral home, and you must throw the salt over your body to cleanse it before crossing the threshold into your house or the spirits of the dead will move in. Don't cut your fingernails at night, or you won't be able to be with your parents on their deathbed. Don't write someone's name in red ink, or you'll shorten their life. Finally, if you see a hearse, you should hide your thumbs inside your fists, or one of your parents will die (this is due to the fact that the word for thumb in Japanese means "parent finger").

Oh, they know about Friday the 13th, but mainly associate it with the classic horror film only.

Japan has many interesting superstitions.

Japan's History of "Dutch Studies"

I like digging around in Japanese history to find interesting little tidbits. In 1853, Admiral Matthew Perry sailed his "black ships" into the harbor at Edo (modern day Tokyo) on a mission to force Japan to ends its "closed country" policy and trade with the U.S. (Interesting aside: his main goal was to get Japan to open its ports to American whaling vessels, which were killing whales by the hundreds throughout the Pacific, quite a turnaround from today.) Prior to Perry's visit, all foreign contact with Japan had been limited to the fan-shaped artificial island of Dejima in Nagasaki, and it was death for any foreigner to land in Japan or for any Japanese to leave. The idea was to lock out all external influence, probably a good idea considering the penchant the world powers of the day had shown for colonizing countries and adding them to their empires, and the policy certainly was successful in preserving Japan's unique culture. Only the Dutch were allowed any contact with the Japanese, and they enjoyed such a close relationship with Japan for two centuries that the general word for studying Western technology and medicine during the Edo Period was Rangaku (lit. "Dutch studies"). When Napoleon annexed the Netherlands from 1810 to 1813, making the country a province of France, Dejima was the only place in the world where the Dutch flag flew.

The old word for the study of Western medicine and technology was Rangaku, lit. "Dutch studies"

The Sounds of Japan

I've always enjoyed the sounds of Japan, from the calming bong-bong-bong made by train crossings to sounds that mark the seasons, like the buzzing of the cicadas in the humid Japanese summer or the old man driving around selling ishiyaki imo, stone-baked sweet potatoes, and playing that eerie-sounding sweet potato song through speakers. Every day while working at J-List, I immediately know when noon has rolled around because a siren located in the center of town goes off. It's not just any siren -- it's essentially the same air-raid siren that sounded half a century ago when Japan was being bombed flat by Allied B-29s. The siren sounds every day at noon to announce that lunch time has arrived, but it serves some other purposes as well, including letting people know when there's a local disaster such as a fire, and hearing the siren at night means everyone should check their neighbors to make sure everything is okay. In this way, it provides a little "community glue" for the people living in our city, unconsciously making everyone feel a part of the same happy group unit since practically everyone in our city is within hearing distance of the loud siren. When I first heard it, it was somewhat un-nerving, since it's not a sound you normally encounter outside of movies about World War II. But now it's just a part of my life in Japan.

I love the many sounds of Japan, with the exception of the election cars asking me to support politicians I can't vote for anyway.

Here's a Japanese train crossing sound for you.

And here are some Japanese cicadas. Yes, I know they have them in other countries ^_^

Hillary is Coming to Japan-land

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will be coming to Japan next week on her first visit in her new official capacity. While no one can say for sure if she'll think to bring Prime Minister Aso some Valentine's Day chocolate, she will likely meet with him to discuss the global economic situation, and may ask for help from Japan in making reforms in the U.S. auto industry. She has also expressed interest in meeting with the families of the 17 Japanese kidnapped by North Korea, a terrible situation, but one that seems very far from Washington. As one of the most powerful women in the world, Hillary is quite famous over here, reported in the news often and known to everyone here. Although the number of women in Japan's national legislature is only slightly lower than that of the U.S., female politicians of Ms. Clinton's stature are quite rare in Japan. The closest would probably be Yuriko Koike, a former newscaster and one of Japan's highest-profile female Diet members, who was responsible for the government policy of banning suits and ties among Diet members in the summer, to allow the air conditioning to be turned down to save money. Which is another example of avoiding being mottainai.

Will Hillary bring some chocolate for Prime Minister Aso?

Loan Words Over the Centuries, and Mottainai

Japan started its history more or less as a blank slate, with most of its architecture, religion and even written language borrowed wholesale from China and Korea starting in the 5th century A.D. As the country modernized after 250 years of being closed off from the West during the Edo Period, it started up the idea-importing machine again, bringing in thousands of foreign-loan words to express the new concepts that were flooding into the country. (For example, ramune started out as the English word lemonade.) Then something interesting happened: around the time Space Invaders became the coolest thing in the world, the trend seemed to reverse itself, with Nihongo suddenly flowing outwards to the rest of the world. Just think of the number of Japanese words the average person under 40 knows after three decades of exposure to Japanese animation, comics, films and video games: names for weapons used by ninja, abstract concepts such as The Force Bushido, and many other examples. Dyed-in-the-wool otaku know many more concepts in Japanese, and can probably debate the differences between the various genres of moé anime using all the correct terms. It's been interesting to see the Japanese word mottainai (moh-tai-nai) cropping up on some websites here and there. The word, which is actually a Buddhist religious term expressing regret, essentially means "What a waste!" and it's constantly used by Japanese mothers when their kids refuse to finish the food that's on their plate, leave the lights on or are otherwise wasteful. As people try to be greener, the phrase is serving as a kind of slogan to get people to think about using resources more wisely.

It's become quite fashionable to avoid being wasteful, using Kenyan Nobel winner Wangari Maathai as an example.

Japan's Efficient Toilets

Japan's toilet culture is quite unique, especially when you're coming from the outside. First, there are two types of toilets here, standard Western units you're familiar with -- they come in normal, butt warming and butt washing types -- and washiki or Japanese-style, which you squat over to use. For Westerners, going about your business without sitting down takes some getting used to, but after a while you come to appreciate the traditional toilets since nothing delicate touches anything dirty. While standard toilets have become more common in homes, the toilets found in shops and restaurants are usually Japanese-style. Japan is often criticized by foreigners living here for not valuing its natural environment enough, and its habit of covering mountains in concrete on the off-chance there might be a landslide someday does seem to affirm this. But the Japanese have come up with a great way to save water, with toilet handles that can be turned one way way when you only need to release a little water (called sho for shoben lit. "little convenience," i.e. pee) and the other way when you've gone no. 2 (dai for daiben, with apologies to London's famous clock tower). Even more water is saved by the faucet at the top of most toilet tanks, which lets you wash your hands with the clean water as it flows into the tank after a flush. Which keeps things from being, you know, mottainai.

Using a Japanese-style toilet isn't hard at all once you get the hang of it.

When Translating, Take It Easy!

When you become bilingual in a language, you learn a lot about how your own brain works, such as what actually goes on inside your head when, say, you learn a new vocabulary word. Every act of learning involves a physical change in your brain, the creation of a new synapse from one cell to another, and sometimes it seems you can feel this at work in your head. The "mystery of translation" is another thing that's fascinating to me, considering the work we've done bringing Japan's PC dating-sim games out in English over the past decade. Translating from one language to another takes place deep inside your brain, on a level below your conscious thought, like a process in a computer running in the background. When we translate our games, we're often faced with difficult questions that involve cultural or linguistic constructions that don't exist in English. For example, what's the best way to translate lines by a character speaking extremely polite Japanese, or a female tomboy-type character who's using male speech even though she's a girl? What linguistic elements can't be brought over into English and are best left out of the final translation, if the goal is to most accurately reflect the spirit of the original? What other ways might there be to translate that strange Japanese Internet meme yukkuri shite ite ne besides "Take it easy"? It's always fun to explore the differences between the two languages and come up with the best translation.

Take it easy? Please make yourself at home? Please take your time and go slowly? It all depends on the context.

Post Office Hotel Row

There's a big to-do going on right now over the proposed sale of a chain of luxury hotels operated by the Japanese national post office, called Kampo no Yado. The post office here has always worked like a giant bank, offering services like savings accounts to Japanese consumers, just another example of Japan taking its cues from the U.K., where a similar system has been in place since 1861. Since Japanese people love to save money, there's rather a lot of it in the postal savings system, a mind-boggling 106,000,000,000,000 yen or USD $1.15 trillion. (It took me several minutes to convert this number from the kanji-based numerical system used here to something I could wrap my head around.) Naturally, no politician could let that much money sit around and do nothing, so over the last two decades the government built a chain of luxury hotels for customers of the post office to use at a discount. Now that the post office has been privatized, they're required to sell off the money-losing hotels, and a company called Orix has put in a bid to buy all 70 for the low, low price of just $109 million, despite the fact that it cost $2.6 billion to build the hotels in the first place. (And you thought your 401(k) had done poorly.) Japanese Internal Affairs Minister Hatoyama, known for being a can-do organizer, has blocked the sale so there can be an investigation of how the bid process was managed, and he plans to try to sell the hotels in smaller chunks so that the government can get a better price for them.

Does your post office let you stay for cheap in a traditional Japanese inn?

Buddhism in Japan: Like the Air

Soon after arriving in Japan, I walked to a Seven Eleven to buy some onigiri, those triangle-shaped rice balls that are similar to sandwiches in the U.S. While I enjoyed my lunch, I wandered behind the convenience store and was surprised to see a beautiful Buddhist temple nestled in between a beauty shop and CD rental store. People were walking by, not paying the slightest attention to the small temple despite it looking to my outsider's eyes as out-of-place in a modern glass-and-asphalt city as a UFO. That's largely what Buddhism is for many in Japan, it seems to me: all around you like the air, but generally unseen until your life takes you to some point where it shifts to the foreground, such as the death of a family member. Buddhism has been a part of Japan since the beginnings of its culture, and you can see its footprint in many interesting places. Amano-jaku is a word that describes a person who is a contrarian and who does the opposite of what's expected of him because he wants to be "going my way" (that is, live life at his own pace), like a friend of mine who loves to quote ironic movies yet who has never seen Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I was surprised to learn was this word originally referred to a mischievous Buddhist deity known for tricking people into doing evil things. There are other signs of the religion in everyday language, such as the Japanese word for "to get ahead in life," which is shusse suru (shu-seh suru), which I realized one day was written with characters that really meant "to go into the next world," and which is related to Buddhist teaching.

One of the thousands of Buddhist temples in Japan;

Benefits of Being Male in Japan

In a lot of ways, Japan is a "men's paradise" where males are able to enjoy certain benefits that would probably be hard to find in the States, even beyond receiving Valentine's Day chocolate from females on February 14. For example, sometimes when we're having a family argument about something, my wife will tell the kids, "Everyone stop arguing. Your father has spoken, and we'll all do what he says because his word is law in this house." I have to say, it's kind of nice: like living in the Father-knows-best 1950s, but with high speed Internet. But although I may be the daikoku-bashira or the "big black pillar" that holds up the family, I'm more than happy to follow the standard Japanese custom of allowing my wife to control the family finances, including managing our savings, planning for long-term goals, and so on. This is accepted as joshiki (common sense) in Japan, that women are better at managing money.

I've done this for so long, though, that I don't know if it sounds odd to people not living here. Is it really rare for the wife to handle the family's financial situation?

My wife is smarter than me, so I don't mind letting her handle our daily finances.

Warm Winter

When you're coming from sunny San Diego, where it's often above 70° Fahrenheit/20° Celsius in the winter, just about any other part of the world is going to feel chilly. Japan's winters are usually very hard on me, thanks to the combination of cold temperatures, the biting kara-kaze winds that blow down from the Japanese Alps, and homes that aren't well constructed because you're expected to tear it down and build a new one in 15 years anyway. But this winter has been an incredibly warm one, with temperatures more like March or April than February, and I haven't needed to put on multiple pairs of long underwear to keep from freezing to death even once. Every year in our prefecture there's an ice fishing event held on Mt. Haruna, when the lake at the top freezes, but yesterday it was announced that the event would be cancelled this year due to the warm temperatures keeping the lake from freezing completely. The warm summer is even affecting the Sapporo Snow Festival going on in Hokkaido right now, where hundreds of beautiful snow sculptures are displayed. The warmest winter temperatures in 18 years have made the snow watery and difficult to work with, which forced the city to truck in extra snow for the event.

Beautiful snow sculptures in Sapporo

One Glass or Two?

Japanese is a complex language, with a lot of information that's not openly stated since Japanese people are usually good at communicating things indirectly. The other day my family went out for miso ramen and I ordered a beer, since that restaurant had Yebisu, my favorite brand. The serving girl who was taking our order asked, "How many glasses should I bring with the beer?" and since I was going to drink and let my wife drive home, I told her to just bring one. A minute later I realized she hadn't asked about how many glasses we wanted at all: instead she was gently reminding us to avoid drinking and driving, just in case I'd planned on having my beer then driving home myself. The new policy of restaurants taking a more proactive approach to customers ordering alcohol without a designated driver started a few years ago, with new policies put in place by the National Police Force, including a new rule that a passenger who lets another person drive drunk or the person that served the alcohol can be charged with a crime. The new policy has born fruit, with the announcement that deaths from traffic accidents numbered just 5155 in 2008, the eighth year of decline and a huge improvement over 1970, when the number of traffic deaths was more than 16,000.

New social pressures against drinking and driving are having a positive effect on the accident rate.

Gaijin Envy

"You've been in Japan too long when the foreigner sitting across from you breaks the wa inside the train car, but somehow your own presence does not." The psychology of foreign expats in Japan can be quite complex, and I'm sure you could write a Ph.D. thesis or two exploring what's going on inside our minds. One odd phenomenon I've observed is the tendency for foreigners here to get a negative impression of other gaijin for one reason or another, a silly reaction that I've worked hard to outgrow. One of the most famous Americans in Japan is Dave Spector, who can be seen on the morning "wide show" (a news and gossip program covering a wide range of topics) reporting on what's happening in the entertainment world in fluent Japanese. He's frequently hated by foreigners living in Japan, who complain about him speaking "American-accented" Japanese on purpose and dying his black hair blonde to better conform to the image of foreigners that Japanese have, and of course we dislike him for speaking better Japanese than us in the first place (that bastard). More than a few foreigners have improved their language skills by learning to sing enka songs at the karaoke machine, myself included, but when Jero became the first "black" professional enka singer in Japan, I noticed more than a few negative comments on message boards by non-Japanese who couldn't contain their jealousy. These days the only foreigners I get a negative impression of are those who don't make the slightest effort to fit in with the society around them, or who are purposely loud and/or rude with their Japanese hosts. Happily, these kinds of people are quite rare.

Dave Spector and Jero are two of the most famous gaijin in Japan

On Economics and CEO Hair

As of last November, Japan is officially in a recession. It's an especially bad situation for the country since they're so dependent on exports, from automobiles to semiconductors to many other manufactured items. As they've done in past recessions, the Japanese news media is going out of their way to shed light on the new economic challenges being faced, looking at the business situation from many angles to help their viewers understand what's going on and adapt accordingly. One of my favorite TV shows is called The Dawn of Gaia, a hardcore news program that delves into difficult issues of the day, from the falling birth rate to the coming lack of sufficiently trained medical staff in Japanese hospitals. The other day they did a fascinating story about the difficulties faced by the American automobile makers and what they were doing to change their businesses, with comparisons to what the companies in Japan were doing, and it was very interesting to see the Japanese take on the situation. It may be the lack of 24-hour cable news lowering the signal-to-noise ratio, but my perception of the news media in Japan that they hold themselves to a higher standard of professionalism than what I usually see in the U.S., with less endless interviewing of "talking heads" who frequently say nothing and more meaningful reporting. Between programs like Gaia and Live TV Til Morning, a show in which top politicians are put in a studio to debate various public issues from midnight til 6 am while viewers watch, I generally think that Japanese TV viewers have access to higher quality news with less political bias than in the U.S.

During the show about the American automakers they interviewed G. Richard Wagoner, Jr., president of General Motors, and I remarked to my wife that he certainly had the proper head of "CEO hair" that you'd expect from the president of a large company. "What's that?" she asked. "Company presidents have special hair in America?" Apparently this particular perception didn't apply in Japan, although there are some things the Japanese believe about a person's body that are quite interesting. First, it's thought that a person with large ears will become wealthy, since the ears are so big money can't help but "fall in." If your middle toe is longer than your big toe (called ashi no oya-yubi or "the parent toe of your foot"), it's said you'll go farther in life than your parents did. And men, if you've got a large nose, you're in luck: it's commonly thought that the size of a man's nose corresponds to another part of his body. Hope you enjoyed today's edition of useless information from Japan!

The president of GM and his "CEO hair" (source)

Meticulous Japanese Women

One of the first things I noticed about Japanese females was how meticulous they can be. For example, when three Japanese women eat lunch together at a restaurant, one will usually produce a calculator so they can accurately split the bill, figuring the amount that each should pay down to the last yen, including splitting the tip, if in the U.S. One of the driving social concepts in Japan is the expectation that everyone should be chanto shita, that is, "proper" and completely honest, and making sure money is always accurately accounted for is part of this. If one person in the group paid too much or too little, a delicate social balance would be upset, causing confusion and bad feelings. My current favorite anime series is Sayonara Zetsubo-Sensei ("Goodbye, Mr. Despair"), about a sometimes-suicidal teacher and his classroom of odd students. In one episode there's a funny scene in which Chiri, the girl with the need for everything in her universe to be proper at all times, is asked to cut a cake for seven people. Her brain goes into high gear, trying to calculate how to slice the four strawberries on top so that everyone gets an exactly equal share. "In order to divide the cake equally, each slice must have an arc of 51.428571428..." In the end, the only way to ensure that everyone received an exactly equal amount was to dump the entire cake into a blender and liquefy it.

Chiri tries to divide a cake among seven people with complete accuracy; Mt. Asama belches out a plume of ash

The Sociology of Tokyo Disneyland

I caught an interesting commercial for Tokyo Disneyland yesterday which said, "It's time to say goodbye. Why not make one last visit here, and make some memories together?" February is definitely the "season of goodbye" in Japan, when students who are graduating from junior high or high school part with friends they've had for years. The Japanese are very relationship-oriented, and work hard to keep friendships strong, often for decades -- all of my mother-in-law's friends are people she went to school with, for example, which boggles my mind -- how do you keep the same circle of friends for 60+ years? In general, a person will have two sets of school friends: those from the same neighborhood who attended elementary and junior high together; and friends from high school, which is not compulsory, with students choosing a school that fits their academic goals and level. Disneyland was reminding students who are about to graduate that they'd be parting from their friends (and boyfriends/girlfriends) soon, and that it was a great time to plan a group trip to Disneyland to have some fun together. It was an incredibly smart marketing message for the company to think of, and I'm sure they'll be making money hand over fist as a result.

Tokyo Disneyland is the most profitable theme park on the planet thanks to understanding psychology

The Price of Volcanic Hot Springs

As you probably know, I love Japan's culture of onsen, bathing in volcanic hot springs. But nothing good in life is free, and the wonderful hot water pouring out of the Earth does come with a cost, in the form of live volcanoes and earthquakes. Japan is an extremely active place seismically, with a whopping 1/10 of the world's 840 active volcanoes located here, which are the source of the quakes that often send my Star Wars figures tumbling. Today Mt. Asama, one of the most active volcanoes in the country, spat out a plume of ash that reached Tokyo some 140 km away. This was a minor eruption as these things go, but in 1783, Asama rained fire and ash down on the village of Komochi, killing 1500 and earning the village the nickname "The Pompeii of Japan." Since I go to the foot of Mt. Asama every other week or so, it's only dumb luck that I wasn't right there to see the fireworks.

Mt. Asama, which is about 2 km from our apartment up in Karuizawa, goes boom

Asashoryu, the Happy Sumo Wrestler

Sumo wrestling is the national sport of Japan, enjoying a special legal status and support from the government. Every two months, a 15-day tournament is held, three in Tokyo and one each in Nagoya, Osaka and Kyushu. Wrestlers fight one bout each day, and the one with the best record of wins-to-losses at the end of the tournament is declared the winner. There are six ranks for the wrestlers to climb up through, with the top being yokozuna, or Grand Champion, and for a wrestler to attain this rank, he's supposed to not only be the strongest but have the proper kokoro (heart, soul) that embodies the spirit of sumo wrestling. (I can hear Yoda's voice: "...The deepest commitment, the most serious mind.") When top-ranked Mongolian wrestler Asashoryu sealed his victory at the sumo championship last week, he pumped his arms in the air in exultation, but this breech of proper sumo etiquette has landed the wrestler and his stablemaster in hot water, earning them both a stern warning from the Japan Sumo Association.

What do you think? Is it fair to ask a non-Japanese wrestler to hide his happiness and emotions that much in the name of being a good sportsman?

Japan's top-ranked sumo wrestler takes a victory lap

Language, Bilingualism and Translation

It seems that the skill of translation can be quite separate from the ability to communicate freely in a language. My son took a standardized test given to all students in our prefecture the other day, with an unexpected result: he got a relatively low score on the English portion of the test. This surprised us, considering he's fluent enough to watch American TV and movies without even paying close attention to the screen, and only occasionally has to ask me what certain specialized words mean. The test called on the students to translate sentences from English to Japanese and vice-versa, which seemed to present a special challenge for him because of the "raw" way he learned English, talking with me, interacting with his family in San Diego, and learning from native teachers at the experimental English school he attends. Because I learned Japanese as an adult, "connecting" the vocabulary and grammar to concepts already in my brain, I can think of a Japanese word like mezurashii (meh-zoo-rah-shee) and the English meaning (unusual, rare) will spring into my mind. But in my son, the synaptic bridge joining these two concepts might not have been created yet, potentially causing interesting difficulties in moving meaning from one language to the other. If you want to learn about how your own brain works, study a foreign language!

The act of learning is actually creating synapses in your brain. Isn't that freaky?

Japan, the Cash Based Society

Japan is an extremely cash-based society. Although credit cards have gotten more popular with consumers over the past couple of decades, people here are generally more comfortable dealing with cash, and often carry a lot of it. When my wife goes shopping in the U.S she brings a lot of money, and once she managed to lose her purse with more than $1000 in it, something that most folks could not imagine doing. (Happily, she got it back safely, cash included, thanks to an honest man who turned it into the police.) The Japanese sentiment that cash is kamisama (God) is expressed in the tendency for households to keep all their savings in normal accounts paying around 0.05% interest rather than stocks, and I just realized that I don't know a single Japanese person who owns any stocks in a public company. In 2006, singer Keiko Fuji (who is the mother of JPOP star Hikaru Udata) tried to board a plane from New York to Las Vegas with $420,000 in her carry-on luggage. The authorities promptly confiscated it, sure that anyone with that kind of cash must have been involved in some illicit drug deal. It appears, however, that the former star just liked carrying around lots of money when she went to Vegas since, you know, banks are such a trouble to deal with and everything. After several years, no evidence has been found to show that the singer had been involved in any wrongdoing, and happily, the money is scheduled to be returned to her soon.

Most Japanese households keep their savings in low-interest cash accounts

Test Post - Is the new server working?

Doing a sample post, to see if the server move worked. If so, this site will be faster and more enjoyable to use! Enjoy the upgrade.


Here's my new favorite image of Obama at his Mac for you.

Beer in Japan

Although Japan might be famous for sake, wine distilled from rice, the beverage most people order when it's time to throw a few back after work is beer. Beer has been brewed in Japan since 1870, when Norwegian-born William Copeland came to Yokohama to seek his fortune and founded what would become the first beer brewery in the country. (It's popular to visit his grave in Yokohama and leave cans of Kirin beer as an offering, to thank him for his hard work.) Today the market is dominated by the "big four" breweries of Kirin, Asahi, Sapporo and Suntory, and in accordance with standard Japanese business practices, these companies also have strong businesses selling everything from processed foods to bottled tea. (Can you imagine buying iced tea bottled by Coors?) Now Kirin has announced it will be making big changes to its flagship Ichiban Shibori by altering the ingredients and moving to a 100% hop brewing process, rather than the current formula that contains rice. Will consumers respond to the "premium" Kirin beer, or will this be a "New Coke" moment for the company? As soon as we get some in at my father-in-law's liquor shop I'll let you know.

Kirin will be changing the recipe for their flagship beer

Wasteful Japan

I love Japan, really I do, but there are times when I have to shake my head at the lack of competence of the Japanese government. Currently they're preparing to distribute money to consumers to help them deal with the rough economy here, but the stimulus package is turning into an embarrassment for Prime Minister Aso's government as the news reports on the $600 million or so that it will cost in bank transfer fees to send around $130 to each household. Japan is faced with the prospect of an unprecedented decline in the population in the coming decades, yet there's precious little in the way of a plan to deal with the situation and help maintain Japan's economic standing in the world. Japan is a nation addicted to construction, and this time of year you can't go anywhere without running into delays as work crews tear up streets then lay the asphalt surface down again. Instead of building roads that are already pretty much okay, it seems plain to me that money could be better spent to bolster Japan's hospitals, which already suffer from a lack of important staff. (And don't get me started on the road near J-List they started to build, then stopped in the middle of construction, leaving a gravel road that's no one can use and a lot of wasted money.) The lack of support for Mr. Aso's government and his ruling Liberal Democratic Party means a real possibility that the opposition Democratic Party of Japan might win a majority of seats in the next election, which would be disruptive and potentially dangerous for Japan, as the party has only been around in its current form for a decade.

Kirin will be changing the recipe for their flagship beer; Enjoy some "reverse chocolate" from Morinaga

This year it's Gyaco Choco from Japan!

Japan is getting ready for Valentine's Day, that very special time when women show their devotion to the men in their lives by presenting chocolate to their boyfriends, husbands, fathers and, if they don't mind giving "obligation chocolate" (expected in certain social situations), male co-workers. But confectionary maker Morinaga is doing things differently this year, promoting the idea of gyaku choco or "reverse chocolate," by which they mean guys giving chocolate to girls, just like they do in the rest of the world. "Instead of waiting for a girl to give you chocolate," a tag line on their website reads, "be bold and give chocolate to them instead!" They've even released some packages of their delicious chocolates printed with reversed images, specially made for trend-setting males who want to be original and give a chocolate gift to that special girl instead of waiting for her to come to him. Whether you're giving chocolate the standard Japanese way or doing things in reverse, J-List has an excellent selection of delicious chocolate snacks from Japan in stock for you right now.

Enjoy some "reverse chocolate" from Morinaga this year!

I Love the Smell of Kimchee in the Morning

Words sure are complex things, and it's interesting to consider why we use one word over another. This morning I was running late for work, so I grabbed a quick Japanese breakfast of white rice and kimchee, that delicious spicy pickled cabbage from Korea. I remarked to my mother-in-law that I was opting for a simple breakfast today, using the English word "simple" but with a Japanese accent, resulting in something like sin-puru. This got me thinking about why I'd chosen that word rather than the perfectly good term (kantan) that exists in Japanese. The answer is that words serve different purposes to people, and sometimes using a word from another language can provide a little je-ne-sais-quoi to your speech. In Death Note, you can see Light Yagami pull off one of his unique murders of the corrupt and unjust using his supernatural notebook then utter the phrase "Checkmate" when he was done. But the term used to declare victory after a game of Shogi, "Oh-te," would sound ridiculous if used in the saem situation.

Kira from Death Note, is so bad-ass

I love the smell of kimchee in the morning.

Japan's Most Influential Web User

Big changes may be coming to Japan's online world with the announcement that Hiroyuki Nishimura, founder of the infamous BBS 2ch (pronounced ni-channeru and abbreviated ni-chan), has sold the rights to the popular website to a company in Singapore. "I thought it might be interesting if I sold 2channel off, to see if there would be any difference if it was owned by a company, rather than myself," Nishimura said in an interview. 2ch is a massively popular BBS and all-around source of vibrant Japanese Internet culture, birthing such legends as Densha Otoko (Train Man), the true story of an anime otaku who won the love of a beautiful woman by getting advice from readers of the site, and Kikkoman, the super hero who also dispenses soy sauce. The site is so influential that companies and politicians tread lightly to avoid catching the ire of 2-channellers, as its users are called. No one is sure what the infamous founder is up to in transferring ownership in the site to a third party, but there's widespread conjecture that it's a legal move designed to protect him from the many lawsuits he's faced over content from the website's anonymous users. The BBS has a less-than-sparkling reputation for reasons other the libel issue: crimes are often announced on the site by deranged users looking for attention. Police have learned to take posts on the site very seriously, as they did when a 2ch users made a death threat against Mongolian sumo wrestler Asashoryu, arresting the man immediately.

The influential Hiroyuki of 2ch is Japan's version of Kevin Rose

Things That Look Strange To Foreigners

It's been said that Japan is the only country in the world that cares what its foreigners think, and I'm inclined to agree. The other day I caught a variety show that featured a panel of "talents" (well-known entertainers and idols) talking about things in Japan that stand out as odd or interesting to foreigners. For example, there's a scene in the film Battle Royale in which Beat Takeshi is holding a cheap umbrella in the rain, which looks odd to non-Japanese eyes because it's clear plastic, something you don't see in America or Europe but which is very common here. Bookstores in Japan are supposedly interesting to gaijin, too, with books that have obi or paper "belts" around the outside with advertising or other information printed on them, or cards handwritten by the staff of the bookstore recommending this book or that. Japan has many home electronics stores which foreigners love to visit, and they're often surprised to find "washlets," those butt-washing toilet seats that are so popular in Japan, which you'd never expect to see in a Best Buy. Also, most every electronics store has a theme song that they play constantly while you're in the store, designed to get stuck in your head so you'll come back and buy more. Hot towels handed out to you in most every restaurant, taxis with doors that open automatically via a hydraulic mechanism and those cool health masks were also discussed. Of course, the most interesting thing to me is that the idea of people sitting around taking in great detail about how their country and customs appear to foreign visitors. I could be wrong, but I just can't see a similar show in the U.S. being very successful, although I'd love to be proven wrong.

Books in Japan (and sold by J-List) often have a removeable paper "belt"

Japanese Train Sleepers

I took a day off and went down to Tokyo yesterday to catch up with a friend over some beer and hot sake. On the train, I wasn't surprised to see several people around me doing what Japanese always do on trains: fall deeply asleep the moment we leave the station. Look around any train car and you'll be sure to see at least a couple of these amazing train sleepers, snoozing away while somehow managing to remain (mostly) upright. When they arrive at their station, they magically wake up through a mechanism I haven't figured out yet, and exit the train. To me the ability to sleep soundly in a public place like that is the ultimate expression of trust in one's society, and since Japan is a very safe place, people usually have no problem with dozing off while they wait to get wherever they're going. I believe it's analogous to children sleeping in the back seat of a car while your parents drive somewhere driving you somewhere.

Sometimes it can be nice to sit next to a Japanese train sleeper, if she's cute.

Gaijin: Foreigners in Japan

The word for "foreigner" in Japanese is gaijin, written with kanji meaning outside + person, making it essentially equal to the word "outsider." All countries have foreigners, of course, but Japan's status as one of the most homogeneous countries in the world has a special meaning for Westerners living here, forcing most of us to "be at peace with sticking out in a crowd." A person from Sweden or France could walk down the street in New York without anyone noticing that they came from another part of the world, but in Japan, the "other-ness" of a non-Japanese face can't be hidden. In my home prefecture of Gunma, it's quite common for me to go somewhere -- a school function, or my daughter's Girl Scout meeting -- and suddenly realize that I'm the only non-Japanese present, often out of hundreds of people. While I'm okay with this, I've known some who couldn't handle the stress of "living in a fish-bowl," as one friend put it. While few in super-polite Japan are rude enough to openly stare at a foreigner, children sometimes can't resist gazing at the great big American pecking away on his MacBook. Whenever this happens, I smile at the child and say, "Konnichi-wa," which hopefully gives him a positive impression of having met a foreigner. (For some reason I am positively obsessed with making sure I don't act in a way that makes young children think of foreigners as "scary.") My own response to the issue of being different from everyone around me is to embrace it, driving my Miata with the top down and my blond hair blowing in the wind.

Early images of foreigners mingling with Japanese in the Edo Period. That must have been fun.

More on Gaijin: Statistics in Japan

Here are some numbers on the 2.2 million foreigners who live in Japan and make up 1.63% of the overall population here. While the classic image of a bumbling American or Brit on a mountain bike asking for directions to the train station might be prevalent in the minds of most Japanese -- this is because the foreigners they've had the most contact with have been their English teachers -- in reality Americans and Europeans make up only a small number of the total. The largest "foreign" group here are Chinese followed by Koreans, and as I mentioned last time, many of these were actually born and raised in Japan but maintain a unique identity for cultural reasons that are beyond my ability to grasp. (Interesting aside for anime fans: Lynn Minmei from Macross would have fallen into this category.) The next largest group are the nikkei (Japan-related) from Brazil and Peru, descended from Japanese who went on a diaspora to South America a century ago. In general, foreigners in Japan each find their own specific niche to occupy, and truth be told, I couldn't tell you much about the daily lives of people in most other groups. When I was an English teacher, I did English-teacher-type things like go see American movies, explore my city for hidden temples and study Japanese. I did my best to break out of that shell, though, hitting all the Peruvian restaurants the Japanese are too timid to enter, working out with a big guy from Iran for a few months (we communicated in Japanese, always an amusing sight to see), and challenging a Chinese friend to see who could get a higher score on the Japanese Language Proficiency Test. (I beat her score barely.)

Breakdown of foreigners living in Japan by country. I assume the U.S. figures count military stationed here.

Akiko Wada: Resident Korean in Japan

One of the most famous singers in Japan over the past two decades has been Akiko Wada, who appears on most every music show belting out songs in her signature strong voice. I found out the other day that this pillar of the Japanese music world isn't actually Japanese, but zainichi kankoku-jin, or a South Korean residing in Japan. While discovering that an entertainer actually comes from a neighboring country shouldn't be any more surprising than learning that William Shatner or Michael J. Fox are originally from Canada, in Japan there's a bit more to it. Ms. Wada didn't immigrate to Japan from South Korea, but was born in good old Osaka to zainichi parents. To my American sensibilities, this means that she should be Japanese, not Korean, perhaps with a heightened sense of her unique ethnic roots, but in Japan there's a strong tradition of Koreans maintaining their cultural identities by preserving Korean citizenship, attending schools taught in the Korean language, and so on. (I once went to the North Korean high school in our city to recruit students for the school I worked at, one of my more bizarre experiences as an ESL teacher.) There are no insurmountable barriers to taking Japanese citizenship, and Koreans and Chinese living in Japan, who enjoy a special lifetime residence status, are welcome to become Japanese at any time. Those who choose to keep their citizenship do so for various reasons, including the desire to maintain their ethnic identity and their unwillingness to take a Japanese kanji name, which is still legally required so the person can be added to the family register. I could become a Japanese myself as long as I passed some minimal requirements, but I choose not to: it's more fun being an American in Japan rather than a Japanese who is bad at kanji.

Akiko Wada is a pillar of the Japanese music world, and can probably mix you up some great Kim Chee soup

Pronouncing English with Katakana

One of the small benefits of the Japanese language is its syllabic nature, which eliminates some of the nuance of how words are pronounced. I was listening to some music on my iPhone the other day when a song by Dido came up, and I realized that I had no idea how to pronounce her name properly -- was it DIE-doh, or DEE-doh? In Japanese, you'd generally have katakana written above a name which would provide a way for everyone to know with 100% accuracy how it should be pronounced. When I was a boy I loved dinosaurs, and I remember trying to figure out how on Earth you were supposed to pronounce names like diplodocus and acrocanthosaurus properly. This wouldn't be an issue in Japanese, though, since katakana syllables are always pronounced the same way. There are downsides to using a system like katakana for pronunciation, though. When I order Indian food in the U.S. I probably speak with a Japanese accent since I got into Indian curry after arriving in Japan, and to this day I have no idea how to pronounce camembert cheese properly, since I first ate it here.

The talented singer's full name is Dido Florian Cloud de Bounevialle O'Malley Armstrong, by the way

Study English with Obama-sensei!

Today saw the inauguration of Barack Obama, an event which was watched closely from Japan along with the rest of the world. I caught the ceremony on NHK, listening to the Japanese commentators giving their interpretation of the speeches, explaining unfamiliar terms to viewers, and so on. The Japanese have a good opinion of Mr. Obama, and everyone is hopeful that he will bring some much-needed change for the better to the world. One book publisher here had the good idea of selling a book of Mr. Obama's speeches to help Japanese students of English study in a fresh new way, and this series has turned into a runaway hit in bookstores throughout the country. One of the biggest differences between Japan and America is patriotism, and while the average Japanese person is certainly happy to be living in Japan, love of country just isn't expressed in the same way as in the U.S. Concepts Americans take for granted, such as the Pledge of Allegiance, getting misty-eyed when visiting Arlington National Cemetery or being addressed with the phrase "my fellow Americans" in a moving speech by one's president are completely missing from life here. Patriotism is an incredible source of power to a nation, and it's interesting to see that some Japanese, at least, are borrowing it from the United States by studying Mr. Obama's uplifting words.

You can study English with Obama-sensei

Japan's Untouchables: the Burakumin

I caught an article on the New York Times website the other day about Japan's little secret, the class of "untouchables" that lived at the bottom of Japanese society for centuries. Known as burakumin, which oddly enough can be translated as "village people," they historically did jobs such as tanning, undertaking and the slaughtering of animals, considered "unclean" in both Buddhism and Shinto. While there had been a lower class of people serving this role from antiquity, burakumin didn't become defined as a specific class until Toyotomi Hideyoshi came along. He was a peasant who managed to work his way up in the ranks until he was the most powerful man in Japan, shogun in all but name, and one of the first things he did was change the rules so that no one else could follow in his footsteps. He created the four-caste system (called shino-kosho), which re-aligned society into four groups, with samurai warriors at the top, followed by the peasants who grew the rice everyone ate, the artisans who made swords and other products, and finally the merchants. The fact that the burakumin aren't officially included in any of these castes highlights their status as "non-humans" -- they weren't even worthy of mention. The official status of the burakumin continued until 1871 when they were freed, but discrimination continues to this day. The extent of this discrimination and what form it takes is difficult for me to actually report on -- the issue of burakumin is so taboo that it's almost impossible to get anyone to talk about it. I can say that the Japanese are extremely conscious of how terrible it is to treat a person differently just because of what job his great-great-grandfather happened to do, and it's illegal to consider burakumin status in employment or other areas of society. I've never heard the subject of someone's burakumin history brought up in any form, and the fact that I've lived here for 18 years without, say, hearing a slang word referring to the group says to me that Japan has done a pretty good job of expunging this aspect of discrimination from its society.

Social organization of the Edo Period

Japanese Film, Onigiri and Finland

Japanese films (houga) are a unique genre of cinema that I'm fascinated with, and whenever I watch one I'm captivated by how there's usually no structure, unlike Hollywood films which are generally formed in three acts for maximum emotional involvement by the audience. Instead, the story in a Japanese film meanders here and there until it reaches whatever conclusion is coming, which is not unlike life, when you think about it. I recently watched an interesting film called Kamemo Shokudo (Kamemo Dining Hall), about a Japanese woman and two friends who run a Japanese restaurant in Helsinki, Finland, specializing in onigiri, the "soul food of Japan." At first their only customer is a Finnish manga otaku who shows up wearing a different kanji T-shirt every day, and the restaurant has trouble attracting other customers, who don't know what to make of the new restaurant. They experiment with local foods, making rice balls with reindeer meat inside, and have many adventures as they're slowly accepted by the residents of the city.

Making onigiri in Finland at Ruokala Lokki (aka Kamome Shokudo)

Joe Hisaishi

My favorite Japanese musician is Joe Hisaishi, the talented composer who created the music for Hayao Miyazaki's most memorable films, including My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki's Delivery Service, and the latest Studio Ghibli work, Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea. Born in Nagano Prefecture as Mamoru Fujisawa, he discovered his love of music at the age of 5 when he started taking violin lessons. After graduating from music college in 1969, he began his career as a composer, taking advantage of the international attention being paid to Japanese musicians like Ryuichi Sakamoto's Yellow Magic Orchestra. As his career started to take off, Mamoru decided to take a new name based on an American musician he respected a lot, Quincy Jones, using an alternative reading for kanji characters he assigned to represent the singer's name to come up with Joe Hisaishi. (I swear, I am not making this up.) In addition to his worldwide fame as the composer of the Studio Ghibli music, Joe Hisaishi is constantly in demand by movie directors like Beat Takeshi who want him to make soundtracks for them. His piano music is used in TV commercials (iTunes link) quite often, too, and he's the composer of the official Toyota Corolla theme. He's released dozens of albums featuring his healing piano music compositions, which you can browse and buy with the iTunes Japan prepaid cards J-List offers. Browse all his music via this link.

Joe Hisaishi plays the piano while simultaneously conducting an orchestra (the guy is a stud)