Greetings from Okinawa -- Beach Episode Time!

In just about every recent anime series, it seems there's a beach-centric episode in which the characters visit some "south seas island" where viewers are treated to plenty of fan service involving females in skimpy swimsuits. Well, it's time for such an episode in my life, and I'm writing this update from sunny Okinawa! Also known as the Ryukyu Islands, Okinawa is Japan's southernmost prefecture, which was an independent island nation until it was annexed in 1609. The history of the islands is long and varied, and a very sad chapter occurred during the bloody battle for the islands during World War II, which saw the deaths of 90,000 Japanese soldiers and 150,000 Okinawan civilians. Because of its special status as a U.S. possession from 1945 through 1972 and its current hosting of most of the the U.S. military stationed in Japan, Okinawa acts as a unique cultural bridge between the two countries. While we're here, we'll get in some quality relaxing-by-the-beach time, do some whale watching and take in beautiful Shuri Castle. And I'll probably annoy everyone by making Karate Kid references left and right.

Okinawa is unique among Japan's 47 prefectures in that it's got its own separate culture and language that's notably different from the mainland. While pretending that they're a completely homogenous, unified people despite the many differences from individual to individual is almost a national pastime in Japan proper, no one can pretend that Okinawans are cut from the same cloth as everyone else, which ends up being quite refreshing in a way. Every time I've met a Japanese who seemed "different" -- they spoke their mind more than most people, they've lived abroad or speak exotic languages -- it turns out they're from this part of the world. Okinawa serves Japan's more boring, white-bread culture the same way black music culture or (dare I say it?) Japanese animation provides an alternative choice for mainstream America, and dozens of Japan's most famous singers hail from the islands, including the red hot Amuro Namie (iTunes link), who has brought the world such tunes as "Body Feels EXIT" and "Chase the Chance." As a result of these big-name successes, Okinawa has many "talent schools" teaching voice training, dancing and other skills to the next generation of JPOP stars.

The Recession, as Seen from J-List

It's interesting to observe how Japan changes during a recession, from our somewhat unique viewpoint running J-List. Right off the bat, the various distributors and suppliers we deal with on a daily basis start treating us extremely well, eager to secure a closer relationship with a company that has customers all over the world. When we comment that the flow of information about what products will be released soon could be improved -- my ultimate goal is for all Japanese companies to discover RSS feeds as a way of easily publishing information efficiently -- they listen intently to our suggestions. Before the last recession in Japan in 1998 or so, foreigners trying to do business with distributors or import companies here weren't always treated as warmly as they might have liked, and we had to work extra hard to get them to do business with us. It wasn't discrimination, but a natural reaction by extremely hidebound companies who knew that overcoming the linguistic and cultural barriers involved with working with foreigners would be extra work for them. Nowadays, though, companies in Japan are a lot more flexible and open to international business opportunities. I wonder what changes and benefits will come out of the current downturn?

Dealing with older Japanese companies can be a challenge, which recessions actually help with.

April 1st is the Season of New Beginnings in Japan

Today is April 1st, famous in the West as April Fool's Day, a custom that's been imported to Japan in limited form. While some smaller companies or kawatteru (unique) individuals might go out of their way to create April Fool's jokes for the amusement of all, it's unthinkable that a larger organization would engage in such tomfoolery in straight-laced Japan. When I told the Japanese staff of J-List about the legendary 1957 news report the BBC did on the Swiss spaghetti crop that featured farmers "harvesting" the pasta they had "grown," they were shocked -- you'd never catch NHK doing something like that. April 1st is also the beginning of anything official in this part of the world, for cultural reasons that I can't quite fathom, although knowing Japan it's probably a cherry blossom thing. The Japanese fiscal year starts today, so if you live in Japan, I hope you got your taxes filed before last night. Also, new laws usually kick in on April 1st, like the near-total ban on smoking in many JR train stations in Tokyo which went into effect this morning. The school year also starts in April, and the blooming of the sakura create a powerful image of new beginnings for misty-eyed parents as they watch their children start the first day of school.

April 1st is the season of new beginnings in Japan.

Perception Mistakes, or, Would Barbie Date a Japanese Guy?

I've written before about how people's perceptions can easily get confused when dealing with other cultures, like how millions of Japanese think that "motel" is a euphemism for "love hotel" in English, or that ice cream cones are so called because they're made of corn, which has the same pronunciation as cone when rendered in katakana. Impressionable Brits growing up thinking that spaghetti is grown on trees might be another example. My own Japanese language education at SDSU erred on the side of polite language enough that when I actually came here, the actual speech entering my ear seemed quite rude to me, although it was just normal colloquial Japanese. I remember being surprised that stop signs used the informal command form of the word stop (tomare, toh-mah-reh) rather than some of the more polite-sounding verb forms I'd studied -- a very silly thing to think. The other day I was watching a Ken Burns documentary about Thomas Jefferson with my wife, and she remarked on how amazing it was that a Japanese person could make such an interesting film about American history. "He's not Japanese. He was born in Brooklyn." She was surprised: "You mean Ken is an American name, too?" Somehow she had gotten it in her head that the name of Ken was exclusive to Japan, and anyone with that name must be of Japanese descent. When she read Ken Brown saying "Is this a church? Yes, it is" in her junior high English textbook she pictured him as a half-Japanese or nisei man living in America, and had carried that impression with her all her life. It follows that that she thought Barbie's boyfriend was also Japanese, and she took some pride that a nihonjin had bagged himself such a famous American girl.

It can be easy to get the wrong idea about other countries.

The $50 Melon

The other day my wife gave me a treat for dessert: a delicious slice of honeydew melon. It wasn't just any melon, but one of those mouthwateringly good melons that costs $50, which always seem to amuse my mother when she's visiting. Of course, the point of a $50 melon isn't the price but its value as a gift and the warm feelings it generates when the recipient and his family eat it, which is what Japan's highly developed culture of gift giving is all about. This melon was a "return gift" from Asami, the talented J-List employee who keeps us supplied with bento boxes, fun traditional products and our trademark "Wacky Things from Japan." She recently got married (congratulations, Asami!), and as an employer we naturally gave her a small "congratulations gift" to help her get started in her new life. When you receive a gift in Japan, you always give one in return to say thanks for the first gift, and while this practice can sometimes lead to "gift wars" with endless volleys of gifts and counter-gifts going back and forth, in moderation is a nice aspect to life in Japan.

Japan's gift-giving culture is deep and complex, and occasionally delicious.

Learn about Japan Through its Resume Forms

One interesting way to compare Japan's more structured society with the U.S. and Europe is to look at the standardized Japanese resume form, called a rirekisho (ree-REK-sho), the "employment history form" that serves as both job application and a personal resume here. When you want to apply for a job in Japan, be it for a truck driver or sushi chef or computer programmer, you get one of these standardized forms from the stationery store and fill it out by hand. Virtually everything that's important about you is recorded on the form: name, address, school and career history, what special certificates or qualifications you've got, as well as your hobbies and interests. Some information isn't recorded, of course, such as anything related to religion or political affiliation, and there's no space to fill in your blood type, so that companies can't discriminate against sloppy type B people like me. The strict, straight-laced employment history form is very different from the open-ended way job resumes are prepared in the U.S., usually 1-2 sheets of paper that succinctly describes a person's school and work history and career goals. Unlike the Japanese resume form, there's no set format for a resume in the States, and there are thousands of variables that could affect how yours might look. Plain font or fancy? Colored paper? Traditional layout or something less orthodox? What level of information to include? It can boggle the mind, and I'm sure that Japanese who have to write English resumes for any reason have lots of trouble knowing where to start. Although the rirekisho forms are intended for Japanese people to use, I've been asked to fill one out for every job I've held in Japan, so learning how to write one is probably a good idea for students of the language. Conveniently, we've got them in stock.

Japan's version of a resume/CV says a lot about the country.

Japan and the Atomic Bombings

Japan's history is unique in many ways, for example its decision to close itself off to outside nations for 235 years, allowing it to develop in near-complete isolation. Japan is also the only country to experience an atomic bombing of its citizens, an event which has affected the nation in ways that are difficult for outsiders like me to accurately perceive. The subject is an extremely delicate one of course, and even after 18 years I can't remember having a conversation on the topic here without things becoming very uncomfortable. Survivors of the two atomic bombings are known as hibakusha, and such individuals are eligible for financial support from the government to help with related medical care...although they often aren't interested in accepting it due to the stigma that's grown up about them in the postwar years. Recently the interwebs have been chatting about the incredible experience of Tsutomu Yamaguchi, an engineer who was in Hiroshima on business on August 6 and whose body was badly burned when the bomb exploded at 8:15 am. With the city in total chaos, he did the only thing he could think of and got on a train bound for his home in...Nagasaki, where the second atomic bombing took place three days later. "I thought the mushroom cloud was chasing me," he said. Mr. Yamaguchi is currently 93 years old, and his status as the only known double atomic bombing survivor was recently recognized by the Japanese government. I don't know whether to think of the guy as unlucky or lucky, but I'll raise a glass to him nevertheless.

False Cognates

I remember when I first learned the Japanese word for "name" -- which is namae, nah-mah-eh -- I noticed the similarity between the two words and wondered if the Japanese could have borrowed theirs from some Western language. It turns out that this isn't the case, and the parallel between the two is purely accidental, a surprisingly common occurrence that's known as a "false cognate" in linguistics. In Japanese you thank someone by saying arigato, which is very similar to the Portuguese for the same phrase, obrigado, but this is another example of unrelated words accidentally having similar pronunciations. Or the word so, which by an amazing coincidence corresponds perfectly with the word "so" in English as in so desu ka? "is that so?" Often words have pronunciations that are slightly shifted but still close, like boya which means "boy," hone (ho-ne) which means "bone," and the Japanese word for road, which is doro, phonetically the exact opposite of the English word.

The word for "bone" in Japanese is hone, which as in sebone (se-bo-ne) or backbone.

Of Cherry Blossoms and Taepodong Missiles

My mother is visiting from the U.S. right now, having come to spend some quality time with the kids in their native habitat. We'll also take her to some beautiful Japanese parks so she can enjoy the sakura, as the timing of her visit worked out great this year. (It can be quite hard to plan a trip to Japan to see the cherry blossoms as you're never sure ahead of time exactly when they'll bloom.) It seems that every time my mother visits Japan she experiences some of the more frightening aspects of the country, like the typhoon, earthquake and minor eruption of Mt. Asama that happened the last time she was here. This trip she might be in for an even more exciting time, as North Korea prepares to test fire one of its Taepodong-2 missiles, er, I mean launch a peaceful satellite, which has everyone here very jittery. North Korea has fired test missiles before, including one in 2006 that went over Japan's air space, and Japan has threatened to shoot down any missile that approaches. Living in Japan is great fun, but being next to North Korea? Not so much.

Japan is nervous about a possible North Korean missile launch.

What Is Normal?

During my time here I've learned a lot about the Japanese. For example, they can be very "boom"-oriented, happy to jump on the bandwagon when something becomes popular only to change their minds soon after, which happened a few years ago when everyone suddenly decided Korean dramas were the neatest thing since microwavable rice. They have a tendency to be meticulous and obsessive, too, like the student of mine who was desperately in love with a boy she knew but was too shy to confess her feelings...over the course of fifteen years. I've also observed that many Japanese want to be thought of as futsu (foo-tsoo), that is, normal, ordinary, or just like everyone else. I had a friend in college who was quite a unique individual in many ways, for example being so passionate about learning English she'd try to memorize an entire dictionary page each day. I once told her my opinion, using the word kawatteru (ka-wat-teh-ru) which carries the nuance of being unusual or slightly eccentric, rather than the word hen ("strange"), which would have been rude. Although I'd meant it as a compliment -- after all, I don't have a "normal" bone in my body-- she was taken aback by my statement, saying, "No, I'm a normal girl, the same as everyone else." In the anime Clannad After Story there's an episode in which Nagisa tells Tomoya she can't go on a date with him because she has to take a "mock exam," a practice test for the coming college entrance examinations. "But you're not going to university. Why take the test?" "I want to take it with my classmates, so I can be the same as them."

More Fun with Japanese Abbreviations We Don't Understand

I wrote recently about how the Japanese often find new and inventive abbreviations for words using the English alphabet, such as OL ("office lady"), what female office employees are called, or 2LDK, shorthand for an apartment with two rooms and a main living/dining/kitchen area. The Japanese have some other innovative uses for the English alphabet, too. The English letter E happens to have the same pronunciation as the word for "good" (as in quality, not as in taste), which is ii, and as a result it's common for advertisers to use that letter to promote a positive image of their products. In a similarly odd fashion, the letter W has come to mean "double" to the Japanese, and Meiji might advertise their delicious Fran brand of double-coated stick snacks as "W chocolate," which would be understood by everyone here to mean there were two kinds of chocolate used. The letter "w" is also used on the net as shorthand for the Japanese word warau (to laugh), and adding "ww" to a Twitter post is roughly the same as typing "LOL" in English to indicate laughing out loud. If you play Japanese RPGs like Brave Soul, you may notice how the highest rank you can attain is usually "S" rank, which seems to come from the English word "special." Of course, one of the most famous (or infamous) creative uses of English letters in Japanese is the "H," which has come to serve as a universal euphemism for anything related to sex.

Graduation in Japan

Yesterday was my daughter's graduation ceremony from elementary school, and my wife and I watched proudly as our little girl finished this first phase in her journey of life. There are many customs regarding formal ceremonies in Japan, and this ceremony required that students perform a complex dance of bowing to the principal and teachers before getting up on the stage to receive their diploma, all in accordance with the idea of kata, the shape or form that things should conform to. Afterwards, there was a series of long speeches by the school principal and various community leaders which were peppered with English words like "leadership," "challenge" and "goal." I wore my reifuku, a convenient black suit that goes well with any kind of formal event such as a funeral or wedding -- just change the color of your tie and you're ready to go. Japan is a country that doesn't change very quickly, at least in the small rural city we live in, and amazingly both my wife and her mother attended the same elementary school as our daughter, including graduation ceremonies that had changed little over the past few decades. When I think of how different America is from region to region, and how much things have changed since when I was young, this strong connection with the past really blows my mind.

Visiting the school for the last time as a parent of one of the students, I reflected on the small and large cultural lessons I'd learned there, which provided me with plenty of neta -- what the top part of sushi is called, or in this case material for these little missives that I write -- over the years. I remember my surprise when I first visited the school, which seemed to my eye to be like something out of Soviet Russia, built with the dreary concrete that all public buildings seem to be made of here. Or my fascination that students had a weekly class called "morals," and I remember wondering what topics might be covered in this country that wasn't founded with any kind of Judeo-Christian base. (They included lessons on common sense and family, awareness of the problems of bullying, and free-thinking exercises about, say, whether someone who left their wallet on a table and got it stolen was partially to blame for not being more careful with his money.) As we were walking out of the school, I encountered one last bit of culture shock from the Japanese public school system: a poster intended for first graders showing "the" correct way students should sit during class, which struck me as something you'd never try to specify in an American classroom.

Beautiful image of graduation, Clannad style.

Sit with your feet on the floor, pencil in the hand correctly, sitting up straight, other hand balled into a fist while you study.

Another, presumably older picture telling how "good children study." Could be as old as ten years but probably not much older.

Fires and Japan

Japan seems to have an especially tragic relationship with fire. The combination of older homes built close together, the common use of kerosene heaters to heat rooms and the lack of smoke detectors (which only became required by law in the past few years) means that whenever I watch the news, I wonder if there'll be a new report of some horrible fire killing an entire family. Last week there was a terrible fire at nursing home in our prefecture resulting in ten deaths, an event that has Japan asking itself many hard questions about the quality of care it gives to its elderly. Then over the weekend came a report that the historic home of former Prime Minister Yoshida, who oversaw the signing of the peace treaty with the U.S., had burned to the ground. Whenever we hear the air-raid siren in our city sound at night, we know there's a fire somewhere, and on two occasions we've looked out the window to see houses near J-List burning. Fires have played a big role in Japanese history, too, and whenever you visit the beautiful old buildings in Kyoto you have to get out your guidebook and check how long the current building has been standing since the last big fire destroyed it.

Tragic fires are all too common in Japan.

Speak Japanese using English Words you Already Know

You may know that if you want to to express "you're welcome" in Japanese you can say "don't touch my moustache" and the meaning will be communicated, since this phrase is similar to dou itashimashite. There are plenty of other English words that happen to match up closely with Japanese ones, from "cheek show" which sounds like chikusho! ("Damn!") to "bimbo," which happens to mean "poor" in Japanese (binbo). Some people will say "yada yada yada" to indicate unimportant details, but in Japanese the similar-sounding iya da means "no" or "I dislike that." When you announce something with a lot of fanfare you might say "Tada!" but this word (tada) happens to mean "free" (as in beer) in Japanese. Often everyday names seem to sync up with Japanese words in odd ways. I have a friend name Debbie who everyone calls Deb, but this isn't very flattering in Japanese as debu means "fat"; similarly, people named Jimmy might not want to use that name in Japan, as it happens to mean plain and boring (jimmi). You can sometimes combine names to make other words, like Ben, Joe (benjo) which means "toilet," or Joe, Ken (joken) meaning "condition." Finally, the name of Chewbacca from Star Wars sounds like someone who is crazy about kissing (chu baka), while his nickname of Chewie sounds like Japanese for "beware of..." (chuui), as seen in our popular Beware Perverts wacky kanji T-shirts. Now you know some (probably useless) Japanese!

You can speak Japanese using English words you already know!

Time to Buy a New Cell Phone

Over the weekend I went with my son to get him a new keitai, or cell phone. Portable phones are so ubiquitous in Japan that NTT has actually started removing some payphones from public areas due to lack of use. With the penetration rate for cell phones near 100%, things can get pretty competitive between the three cell phone companies, who offer bonuses of up to $250 for defecting from other companies. As usual, it was fun to browse the lineup of phones offered and see how they differed from what's available back home. While most phones sold in the U.S. are made by Nokia, Motorola or South Korean manufacturers, nearly all handsets sold here are from well-known Japanese companies, and you can buy co-branded units like a Sharp Aquos phone to go with your Aquos flat-screen TV or a "Wooo" phone sold by Panasonic under that brand. As usual the current lineup of phones are long on style, many being so beautiful you might have trouble identifying them as phones. Most support common features such as "1-seg" TV viewing, screens that slide sideways to allow you to view PC-style websites during your morning train commute and support for electronic payment systems that let you touch your phone to a magnetic plate to pay for train tickets, food and so on. I'm amazed at the breakneck pace the industry runs at, and the life of a given model of phone is only four months or so, after which time the manufacturers have to upgrade it or risk falling behind. Japan's cell phone culture is cool, but it may end up harming the country's long-term standing as a technically advanced nation: the phones are so good that many forgo owning computers, and thus often don't have basic skills that most of us take for granted, like how to use a spreadsheet.

Cell phones in Japan are fun, but are they harming Japan's future?

The Duality of Words in Japan

One of the skills you need to acquire when you come to live in Japan is the ability to deal with the "duality" of words, the strange tendency of linguistic concepts to split into two. For example, many European cities have two names, like Venice or Florence in English and Venetia or Firenze in Italian, and the Japanese seem especially adept at picking the city name you're least familiar with to use, causing confusion for English speakers. This eventually leads to a better understanding of the world, including that "win" (Wien) coffee with whipped cream on top has nothing to do with winning anything, and the wieners that kawaify your bento apparently come from Vienna. Any reference to a name from the Bible in Japanese will usually use the original Hebrew/Greek/Aramaic version, i.e. Yohane instead of John, so learning Japanese can lead to picking up other tidbits of interesting knowledge along the way. This idea of linguistic duality pops up in other places in Japan, too. First of all, there are fundamentally two ways to read any kanji, using the on or Chinese reading or the kun or Japanese reading. For example, you use the Japanese reading mizu for the kanji for water written by itself, but the Chinese reading sui when it's joined with other characters, like suido, "water pipe." Finally, virtually every place name in Japan comes in two versions, the modern one that everyone uses and the old Edo Period name. For example, Nagano Prefecture is famous for its soba noodles, and it's common for restaurants to advertise themselves using the old name of Shinshu, to associate themselves with the natsukashii (nostalgic) old days.

Bizarre Japan Mystery #442: "frankfurt" and "hamburg" are what frankfurters and hamburgers without bread are called.

Hey Baby, What's Your Blood Type?

I remember reading through old Saint Seiya manga back in college, wondering why they always write the blood type of each character along with their name, age and astrological sign, and now I know: in Japan, it's believed that you can tell a lot about a person's personality and character traits from his blood type. Type A people are neat, tidy, and plan things meticulously, almost to a fault. Type B are "going my way" (as the Japanese say), meaning that they do their own thing without worrying about the opinions of others, and don't plan things out in advance. They can be messy, and tend to act on impulse, too -- I am type B, and my wife is always commenting on why do some things I do based on my blood type. Type O people have a private world inside their minds, supposedly, and they're quick to become passionate about something, but then change to something else just as easily; type O people make good leaders. Finally, AB people have "two faces," one that they make in front of some people and another one they keep to themselves. Could there be something to it all? If you're feeling the urge to get into Japan's fun blood type culture, we've gotten in some cool phone straps today that let you announce your blood type to everyone.

Blood types mean a lot in Japan.

Newspapers in Japan Still Genki

Around the world newspapers are having a rough time as circulation continues to drop, thanks in part to the changes brought on by the Internet. This isn't really the case in Japan, where circulation at newspapers still remains high, around 10 million for the Daily Yomiuri and 8 million for Asahi Shimbun. Part of the reason for the relative health of the industry is related to how connected the large media companies are to everyone's lives here: Yomiuri, for example, also owns the Nippon TV broadcasting company and the Tokyo Giants. Also, newspapers sell for a higher price in Japan, $2 for the daily editions, making Japanese newspapers less dependent on advertising for profits. Finally, they benefit from people like my father-in-law who gets five newspapers each day, including three dedicated sports newspapers. While I like to sit back with a paper occasionally, I get most of my news from the net thanks to RSS feeds, which make it easy to follow just the information you want from news sites, blogs and other sources of information using dedicated RSS readers or services like Google Reader. (J-List also has an extensive RSS feed system too, allowing you to automatically view all updated products on the entire site, view new bento items only, and so on.)

Difficult English and the Japanese

"Where is your domicile?" This was what a Japanese man I ran into at a party asked me, by way of making small talk. It gave me pause because it's not the clearest and most direct way to ask someone where they live, although it's not grammatically wrong. There are quite a few instances where English-speakers living in Japan find themselves dealing with more complex words than they might be used to in their daily lives. When you go for a ride on the Shinkansen, there's a sign in English asking passengers to avoid smoking in the vestibule, which I gather is what the area between the cars is called. Another English word I didn't know before coming to Japan was "alight" meaning to exit a vehicle, which I encounter whenever I ride the bus to the airport. I guess the idea is that if you've gone out of your way to learn a language, there's a tendency to want to use the longest and most complex words you can. And I've been guilty of this, too: I remember stubbornly writing every word I could in kanji even though my Japanese friends told me that they used simpler hiragana for those words instead.

Why learn difficult words if you're not going to use them?

Japan and the Entrepreneural Spirit

The economy here in Japan has certainly been better, and it seems that every day brings more news of production being scaled back in this industry or that. A big part of the problem for Japan is that their economy is closely tied to exports, which exposes companies to extra weakness when there's a slowdown in the rest of the world. But there are other problems with Japan, or at least they look that way to me when viewed from my point of view as an American living here. First of all, the country is positively addicted to building things like dams and roads and quasi-educational facilities like the Chiaki Mukai Memorial Science Center, built to celebrate Japan's first female astronaut. These projects are important, except when they're a big waste of money, like the time our city became nationally famous when the mayor (who lived next door to me) decided that we needed a brand new Ferris Wheel despite the perfectly good one we already had. Related to this is amakudari ("descending from heaven"), in which government beauracrats guide large public projects through the approval process then retire to receive lucrative jobs with the companies that directly benefited from those projects. Another challenge is the low amount of "entrepreneurial spirit" among many Japanese. When I see news of employees getting risutora (what layoffs are known as in Japanese, from the English word "restructure"), I always wonder if one of them won't take the opportunity to make the proverbial lemonade and go into business for themselves. There are actually some benefits to starting a business in a recession, including lower costs, the ability to hire good people cheaply and a great chance to learn how to be a bootstrapper, but I've not met many Japanese who would agree with me. More often than not, they'd fall back on that famous Japanese mantra of sho ga nai ("it can't be helped").

Sometimes the Japanese seem to lack the entrepreneural spirit.

Rice and Japan

Rice is the staple food of Japan, eaten two or three times a day by most people, and it's so ubiquitous that the word for rice (gohan) doubles as the word for "food" or "meal." Japanese usually eat white rice steamed in electric rice cookers that are owned by virtually every household (although there other convenient ways to enjoy hot steaming rice at home). Rice is usually eaten as a side dish to other foods (hamburger steak, sashimi, etc.), and many Japanese imagine that Westerners each every meal with a big basket of bread on the side. Supposedly, the idea of eating a small amount of a main dish with a lot of rice comes from Japan's wartime past, when everyone was poor and had very little to eat except rice -- it was common for kids to eat Hinomaru Bento, or bento of white rice with only a single red pickled ume plum in the middle, so that it looks like a Japanese flag. The best rice in Japan comes from Niigata Prefecture, on the Sea of Japan side of the country (the Snow Country in Kawabata's famous novel, if you've read it). It's called Koshi-Hikari, and restaurants proudly boast of serving only this type of rice to their customers. The latest trend in rice is to print cute moe anime girls on the side, which seems to have helped sales quite a bit.

The latest trend in rice is printing cute anime girls on the packaging.

Critical Thinking and Japanese Education

Because my son goes to a special immersion school in which the curriculum follows the guidelines set down by the Ministry of Education but with 60-70% of the classes taught in English, there are some differences between the education he's receiving and a standard Japanese one. The other day we went down to the school to attend Parents Participation Day, and one of the events they had prepared for us was a debate in which the students would discuss issues like, should drink vending machines be put in the school, or should chemical fertilizer be used for growing crops. I thought the debates went well, with the students researching many interesting points on both sides, but my wife had a negative reaction to them, saying, "If they want to learn to debate, they should wait until university." It seems that critical thinking isn't something that's associated with compulsory education in Japan, and the idea of students taking stands on various issues was a strange one to my wife, although it didn't seem that odd to me. I wonder if a decade or so into the future debates like the one the students demonstrated for us might not be more common. One of the themes of Japan as a nation is that it cares a great deal about the image it projects to Westerners. When the collective body of gaijin living here points out things like, there is very little free-style essay writing in Japanese schools, the government reacts by adding essay writing, as they did some years ago; and when we foreigners voice opinions along the lines that Japanese students spend too much time studying, they introduce programs like yutori kyoiku, the national policy of "easy-does-it education" in which school hours were cut back to allow students more free time (a policy that's since been reversed due to Japan's poor standing in national tests against the other nations of Asia).

Japan often changes its educational practices in reaction to the opinions held by foreigners.

Japan's Most Loyal Dog

I was in Tokyo over the weekend, waiting for a friend at the most famous meeting place in Japan, the statue of Loyal Dog Hachiko in Shibuya. Hachiko was an Akita-ken owned by a university professor in the 1920s, who would wait patiently for his master to return on the train every evening. One day the man failed to return, having died of a heart attack while at work, yet the loyal dog continued to wait for his master for years until he eventually died, too. Local residents erected a statue to the dog which has become such a famous landmark that you can tell anyone in Tokyo "meet me at Hachiko" and they'll know the exact spot. I noticed that the Japanese Ministry of Finance was putting Hachiko to work this tax season, using his famous image to encourage civic-minded Japanese to accurately declare their income via a sign around his neck that read, "Have you filed your income tax declaration with the Tax Ministry yet? Please be sure and do it as soon as possible!"

Japan's most famous dog is put to work by the Japanese tax office.

My New Dentist

Ask any gaijin living in Japan about dentists here and you'll probably hear a lot of complaints. I recently changed dentists because my old one loved to break routine dental work into multiple visits, like the time he took 18 months to put in an implant I needed. My new dentist is much more efficient, taking only one visit to fix my mushiba, or "bug tooth," the oh-so-cute word for dental cavities in Japanese. Apparently he hadn't worked on many Americans, and he went out of his way to tell me that the material he was filling my tooth with was made by 3M in the U.S., and to carefully explain exactly what work had was doing, since foreigners have a reputation for wanting more information from dentists and doctors than they normally provide patients. Like many businesses in Japan, the dental clinic doubled as the dentist's family home, with an attractive glass-and-concrete front door for patients to enter through and a residence built above. This is a common practice in Japan, and most of the convenience stores in our prefecture feature rooms built above for the manager to live in. My own house follows this business + residence pattern, too: the rear part of our house is a two-story domicile for our family, and the front is the liquor shop my wife's parents run. That's right, I live in a liquor shop -- why do you think I like living in Japan so much?

Many business are designed with residences built into them.

Misconceptions between Japan and the West, or, Do they have McDonald's in America?

It can be easy to get the wrong idea about other countries, and it's not uncommon for people to carry misconceptions around with them for years. Like the student of mine who asked me if they had McDonald's in America -- she'd eaten Makudonarudo all her life and had assumed it was a Japanese chain. Or an exchange student friend of mine who was sure that HBO was some kind of euphemism for "H-video." Japan is famous for its love hotels, places where couples can spend some quality time together, important in this privacy-challenged country where people in their 20s often live with with their parents, and sometimes their grandparents. Before the current word had been coined, these establishments were referred to as "motels" (mo-teru), with the result being that many Japanese think that America is littered with love hotels along every freeway. We can get the wrong idea about Japan and the Japanese, too. When I arrived here, I was sure all vehicles would be unbelievably small, yet there are plenty of large cars on the road, and I even see imported Cadillacs quite often. I expected Japan to be so expensive I'd have to sell my retinas if I wanted to eat a steak, yet I can gorge myself on Indian food for far less than what it would cost me to eat at the Star of India restaurant in San Diego. Whenever there's an earthquake that makes the international news I know I'll get emails from family members asking if I'm okay, as if Japan were such a tiny country that every quake could be felt. In reality, Japan's about the size of California but spread out so that it would reach from New York to Dallas, so most quakes are too far away to be felt. Oh, and and teriyaki sauce? The Japanese almost never eat it.

Do they have Makudonarudo in America?

The Joy of Enlightenment in Anime

I've written before about the "joy of enlightenment," the mysterious thrill your brain gets when it solves a puzzle or gains some new insight. Being a student of Japan means having many opportunities to overcome large and small linguistic and cultural hurdles, and it's one reason I encourage people to take an interest in studying the Japanese language. After writing about how Japanese often show affection for famous stars, TV shows etc. by reducing their names into abbreviated versions like the anime series Kare-Kano (His and Her Circumstances) and Puri-Kyua (Pretty Cure), I realized that the currently popular show Toradora followed this naming system, and wondered what it could possibly stand for. I searched my memory for several minutes until the answer suddenly popped into my head: the female lead character is Taiga (tiger), which is tora in Japanese, while the guy she's maybe kinda sorta attracted to is Ryuji, written with the kanji ryu for dragon (dora). The satisfaction of having perceived the answer was great, not unlike the (incredibly rare) times when my wife has trouble remembering how to write a certain kanji character, and I'm able to produce it for her.

Taiga and Ryuji make a great couple.

Beef Bowl and other Domburi Foods

Although Japanese foods like sushi, sashimi and sukiyaki are famous all over the world, the Japanese have an incredibly varied diet. A week's menu might feature curry rice, the Japanese adaption of a British version of the famous Indian food; all manner of broiled, stewed or raw fish; a joining of Chinese and Korean cuisine with kimchee fried rice; a tasty plate of seafood pasta; and delicious omrice, an omelette over flavored rice with a ketchup heart drawn on top. One category of Japanese food I like is domburi, basically big bowls of rice with various things on top. The most famous of these foods is gyu-don, Japan's ubiquitous beef bowl, enjoyed a million times a day at fast food restaurants like Yoshinoya and Sukiya of Yokohama. There are other types of foods served on rice in a big bowl, like katsu-don, fried pork cutlet on rice (yum), or Oyako-don, which means "parent and child rice bowl" and contains chicken mixed in with eggs served on rice (hence the wacky name).

More Fun With Japanese Abbreviations: PA / IC / TPO / NG Edition

I talked last time about the Japanese penchant for abbreviating Japanese or kana-based English words, either to make unwieldy phrases easier to use or to show affection for their favorite drama, anime or tarento (TV talent). It's also quite common for Japanese to create English-based abbreviations for everyday words, which they invariably expect native English speakers to somehow magically understand just because they're written using the Roman alphabet. During GW (Golden Week) we might want to drive up to the mountains, so we'd get on the IC (interchange, or freeway on-ramp) then stop at a PA (parking area, or freeway rest stop) along the way to eat. While filming a CM (TV commercial), an actor made an NG ("no good," meaning an on-camera blooper), then forgot his TPO ("time, place, objective," i.e. his overall social situation) and cursed loudly. In some cases these abbreviated English words seem strange to Americans, but it turns out they've been imported from Britain, as with WC, meaning Water Closet (no, not that one). Anime fans tend to learn a lot of these specialized abbreviations, such as OP and ED (the opening and closing theme songs in an anime), or OST and BGM (original soundtrack and background music), which can lead to confusion when talking with non-fans who don't know what the heck you're talking about. Some of the "English" abbreviations that become popular in Japan are actually based on Japanese words, such as the slang KY, short for kuki yomenai or "can't read the air," referring to a person who isn't good at picking up on the feelings of those around him. Another slang word is TPI, supposedly used by high school girls to describe unfashionable males -- it stands for t-shatsu pantsu ire or a man who has tucked his T-shirt into his underwear.

A P.A. is a Parking Area, where you can buy food, gas etc. within the closed freeway system.

Japanese Snow Monkeys

Onsen (pronounced OWN-sen) are the volcanically heated baths that are so popular in Japan, and some hot springs like Arima Onsen near Osaka or Dogo Onsen on the island of Shikoku are mentioned in Japan's oldest written documents, indicating that the Japanese have been taking volcanically heated baths for longer than they've been writing kanji. But humans aren't the only creatures that like to take a hot bath here in Japan. If you visit Jigokudani ("Hell's Valley") in Nagano Prefecture, you might catch a glimpse of Japanese monkeys beating the cold of winter by going for dip in the hot water. Japan's "snow monkeys" are quite a famous image of winter, and the sight of a monkey family enjoying a hot bath together just like a human one is very touching.

Japanese monkeys take a dip in the hot springs.

Hey, let's go to Kyoto!

Spring is here, and that means something special to the Japanese: sakura, the cherry blossoms that make the country blaze with beauty for a week or so, then blow away in the wind til next year. Although the first blossoms are still a few weeks away, Japan is starting to buzz about the coming Season of the Sakura (no, not that one), which can be enjoyed in practically every park, temple and shrine when the time is right, so common are cherry trees here. For the next few weeks, we'll all be tormented by TV commercials beckoning us to Japan's beautiful city of Kyoto, showing the most breathtaking scenes of cherry blossoms you can imagine followed by the city's official slogan So da! Kyoto e iko! ("Hey, let's go to Kyoto!"). You can tell how passionate Japan is about its cherry blossom culture by studying the many related words they use, like kaika ("first opening of the flowers"), zenkai ("fully opened" i.e. full bloom), sakura zensen (the "cherry blossom front" that moves up the country), and so on. I'm certainly ready for some flower viewing with friends and family!

The cherry blossoms in Kyoto are as beautiful as the city's marketing machine is brilliant.

The Joy of "Haafu," Revisited

I've written before about the Japanese affinity for attractive faces that are haafu, or half-Japanese and half-Western, and it seems that every time I turn on the TV I see a beautiful star like Becky, one of the top "talents" in Japan these days. The popularity of hybrid features extends to newscasters like Crystal Takizawa or Helene Hayama, who have accumulated many fans with their unique un-Japanese look. This love of blended Caucasian features seems to fill a special need in Japan, a country that believes itself to be almost entirely of the same genetic stock, although this is largely a social myth. Foreigners can be scary and unpredictable, like the crazy man who stripped naked and took a swim in the Imperial Palace moat a few months ago, or they might speak rapidly at you in English, or do something else that's unexpected. But a person who combines both Japan and America or Europe will likely be more approachable, speak Japanese and do the things you expect them to do. To many Japanese, the blending of East and West represents the ideal, as visualized by the fashion doll Licca-chan, more popular than Barbie here. Licca's mother is a Japanese fashion designer and her father is a musician from France, and she can speak both languages. That's so cute! Of course, haafu stars are popular with J-List customers, too, as seen with enigmatic stars like who bring fans the best of both worlds like Maria Ozawa or Cecil Fujisaki.

Half-French Helene Hayama is a bridge between East and West.

Electronics Shop Language Lesson

Every once in a while I encounter a Japanese person who, for whatever reason, can't accept the fact that I speak their language. The other day I went to the denkiya (electronics store) to pick up some items and browse all the bright and shiny things they had on display. The store I was in had an excellent selection of Japanese massage chairs, and I decided to sit a spell and read email on my iPhone, since getting a shiatsu massage while doing email is a pretty cool combination. The minute I sat down, a female employee of the store appeared and, in rather broken English, started explaining the various benefits of owning a $3000 massage chair. Despite the fact that my replies and counter-questions were all in Japanese, she kept explaining in English, pushing buttons on the remote control to demonstrate the various functions of the chair. In the end I gave up and spoke English to the lady, who never seemed to register that I had lived in Japan for years and spoke the language fluently.

An electronics shop is a great place for a language lesson.

Japanese Kana Abbreviations

The other day my daughter asked me if I wanted to play Mari-Suma with her, and I replied that I'd rather watch an episode of Ame-Fani instead. She was speaking of playing Mario Smash Brothers on the Wii while I was talking about America's Funniest Videos, and we were both engaging in a rather strange Japanese custom of shortening words into smaller chunks. Like everyone, the Japanese don't want to use words that are long and clumsy so they developed a system of reducing words into (usually) four kana characters to make them easier to use. Foreign-derived words can be especially awkward, and so it's common to hear shortened words like Ame-komi (American comics), Yafu-oku (Yahoo auction) or pasokon (personal computer). The abbreviations are often created as terms of endearment by fans, and you could almost measure popularity based on which stars have these shortened Japanese nicknames and which do not, i.e. Brad Pitt is more popular than Harrison Ford because everyone says Burapi but no one uses Harifo. Anime series and games often receive the abbreviated name treatment, too, like Mari-Mite for Maria Watches Over Us or Sukisho for the game "I Like What I Like, So It Can't Be Helped" (also a slogan on a popular shirt we make). Some of the words you already know are actually the result of these Japanese word reductions, like the Nikkei stock average (short for Nihon Keizai Shimbun, or Japan Economic Newspaper) or Pokemon.

A book explaining the rules of Ame-Futo, or American Football.

Japan Suicide Update

The number of suicides in Japan has topped the 30,000 mark for the eleventh year in a row, with the official tally of of people who opted to go to that karaoke bar in the sky hitting 32,000 in 2008. This number is slightly higher than the actual number of suicides in the U.S., despite the fact that America has more than double the population here. As usual, the prefecture with the highest suicide rate was Yamanashi, near Mt. Fuji, home to a morbid forest called Aokigahara Jukai ("the Aokigahara Sea of Trees"), famous as a suicide spot ever since it appeared as the setting in a novel in the 1960s. Last month our rural city was shocked at the news that a mother who'd become disillusioned with life jumped under a train with her seven-year-old son, a terrible and needless waste. While Japan has made some strides in recent years, including logging 700,000 calls from troubled persons at suicide hotlines last year, clearly more needs to be done. While fixing problems with medicine isn't always the best solution, I can't help but think that part of Japan's suicide problem might be related to the cultural aversion to taking medicines -- many of the drugs used to treat serious depression in the rest of the world just aren't available here.

(By the way, do not google Akigaoka with safe search off. Just trust me on this, you will not like what you see.)

The eerie calm of Aokigaoka Jukai, second only to the Golden Gate in annual suicides.

Dialects in Japanese: Osaka-ben and Beyond

Every language has dialects, and Japanese is no different. I've heard that since Japanese people are more likely to stay in the same place all their lives, or move to Tokyo for work or education then do a "U-turn" back to their home prefecture a few years later, the country's dialects are more pronounced than in North American English. The most famous alternate dialect is Osaka-ben, where they say maido (mai-DOH) instead of konnichiwa for a greeting, reflecting the region's mercantile background (it's short for maido ari or "Thanks for giving me your business every day"). Often dialects are used to add a new dimension to a character in anime, and if you have a group of females in a given show, you can bet there'll be one whose "charm point" is speaking some cute but odd-sounding variant of Japanese. Beyond the major dialects -- rough and comical Osaka-ben, eerily polite Kyoto-ben, Gaelic-sounding Tohoku-ben from Northern Japan -- it's funny to observe the "artificial" dialect of gaijin-ben, the over-inflected Japanese that foreigners are known to speak, which is often used by radio DJs and announcers on TV shows to add a "chic" flavor to their speech.

Ogiue from Genshiken speaks a cute-sounding northern dialect.

Living in Japan: Plusses and Minuses

All in all, Japan is a fairly easy country for an expat to live in: people are friendly and interested in English, the country has low crime and it seems like there's always an interesting experience to be had somewhere. You have access to entertainment -- theatres show Western movies in English with Japanese subtitles, not dubbed over as in most foreign countries -- and having the best Internet in the world means you never feel that far from friends and family members back home. Another nice thing about Japan is public transportation, and if you live near a reasonably large city you can probably get by without the expense of a car. But there are some challenges to living here, as well. Japanese homes are not up to the quality standards of the U.S. (I'm cold all the time in mine), and moving into any rented home or apartment requires 5-6 months rent up front, what with the "thank you money" paid to the landlord and other charges that are customary. Another challenge for newcomers to Japan who haven't already studied the language is not being able to read. Although you can find signs written in English near train stations or on major roads, it's quite easy to find yourself in a place where everything around you is in Japanese. The good news is, nothing helps you learn like necessity!

All-in-all, Japan is an easy country for gaijin to live in.

How Japan Changes You

When you live in a place like Japan for long enough, it inevitably starts to change you. First it's the little things, like the inability to eat a meal without first saying "Itadakimasu!" (literally meaning "I am about to receive the gift of this food"), or politely turning your headlights down to "park" at intersections to keep from blinding the driver across from you. Before you know it you're bowing to people while talking on the phone, you can't remember your weight or shoe size as measured back home and you find yourself taking a long time to get to the point while talking to anyone. The other day my son asked me how they measure the area of rooms in America, and I vaguely recalled there being a something called "square feet" or "square meters" that I'd known about once. Japan, of course, uses that oh-so-traditional unit of measurement known as the tatami mat, and the size of a room is always expressed in how many tatami would fit inside, even if it's a traditional Western room with wooden flooring. A 6-jo (6-mat) room is a good sized space for one or two people to sleep in, while a 4 1/2 mat room (called yojo-han) is what the cramped rooms poor college students live in are called. After being here for so long I can perceive spaces in Japanese mats pretty accurately, but I have no idea how much 1200 square feet would be.

Tatami mats are used to specify room sizes in Japan.

Leadership Fail in Japan

Japan's political world was shocked at the arrest of the top aide to Democratic Party of Japan head Ichiro Ozawa over improper political contributions. At a press conference this morning Ozawa defended his aide, calling the contributions in line with the limits set by campaign law and vowing to beat the allegations. While he talked a good fight, it's likely the news will affect the DPJ's chances of winning a majority in both houses in the upcoming election, which will no doubt lead to more deadlock and other problems for the nation. Politically Japan is quite a basket case, currently on its 11th Prime Minister since I came here in 1991, compared with just three in the U.K. in the same span. While I often hear people complain about two-party political systems which lock out smaller groups, I can't say that Japan's system of one large disfunctional party and a collection of universally ineffectual smaller parties is any better.

Japan seems to suffer from a chronic leadership problem.

Re-Learning English Pronunciation

I've heard it said that when French people learn English, they need to work hard at re-learning how to pronounce their own language since so many words used in English originally came from French. Similarly, Japanese use many English words in their daily lives, but the pronunciation is far from what most of us might expect, making it necessary for foreigners to get comfortable with katakana English. The simple English word "weekend" becomes a bizarre-sounding oo-EE-ku-EHN-doh in Japanese, and if you want people to understand you you have to get used to saying it this way. Another word that's quite hard to get down is "wind orchestra" (oo-EEN-doh OH-keh-su-to-ra). Often when English words are imported into Japanese they're changed slightly, which can sound weird in English speakers for a while. The word "Google" comes through in Japanese as "goggle" (as in what you swim with), and Japanese web users universally perceive the double "o" in Google as a pair of eyes looking through goggles.

It can be odd to get used to English pronunciation that feels "wrong" at first.

Moe-teki Employment for Japan's Otaku

The word moe (mo-eh) is written with a kanji that means "sprout," but it's meaning is a bit difficult to pin down, essentially being translatable as "the warm feeling you get looking at your favorite super-cute anime character." As the moe anime genre takes over Japan completely it's appearing in some surprising places, like the Moe Diet Book, the Moe Guide to Investing in Stocks, and my personal favorite, Moe Particle Physics, in which a cute cat-girl explains electrons, neutrons and quarks in easy-to-understand language. Now a "Hello Work" (municipal employment office) located near Nagoya has gotten into the act, creating an "image character" called Miruku (Milk) Chita aimed at inspiring Japan's otaku and NEETs (Not involved in Education, Employment or Training) to get out and find jobs. While you could say that the government is being smart by shaping its message so that it will reach the young people of today, it's possible to look at things in a more cynical light: that they desperately want to get the country's anime-obsessed youths into jobs that generate taxable income to help support the ever-graying population.

Milk-chan is going to help Japan's NEETs get a job.

Japan's Vertical "Senpai" Culture

I write a lot about how Japan's society is considered "vertical," with concepts like senpai, a senior in a school, company or other organization, a role that comes with a degree of respect but also responsibility, such as the unwritten rule that you'll pick up the tab at restaurants when eating with your kohai (junior) from time to time. While it's common for a person's "social level" to be tied to their age -- an 18-year-old student in high school will be senpai to students who are younger than him -- there are times when this neat social system is upset. For example, what happens if a student is held back a year, and he suddenly becomes kohai to his former classmates? (Incidentlaly, the idea of a gifted student skipping grades is totally alien in Japan.) As early as a decade ago many workers could expect to stay at the same company all their lives, but now almost no one does, which means that at some point a 35-year-old is going to change jobs and find himself working under a new senpai who's ten years younger than he is. It's common in anime for age-based relationships to be turned on their ears as a vehicle for more interesting characterization. For example, when Haruhi forces Mikuru to join the SOS Brigade, part of Kyon's surprise is that Mikuru is a year older than the rest of them: so powerful is Haruhi's personality that she bends even an older student to her will. Other examples of this tendency for age-based relationships to be skewed in anime include Tomoyo from Clannad, who speaks in a brisk, rude manner to everyone including students older than her, and Taiga from Toradora, who clashes violently with her school's class president.

For the record, this kind of thing of thing happens in anime but not the real world very often. ^_^

It's common in anime for characters to disregard proper age relationships.

Teenage Girl Clothing Shock

There's no place quite like Japan for that paradigm-shifting-without-a-clutch experience. My daughter starts Junior High School next month, and she's been happily getting her school supplies together. The other day I saw her picking a new wardrobe at an online retailer that carried all the brands girls are wearing these days, like Beverly Hills Polo Club, School Scene, and of course, Playboy. Say what? It turns out that in Japan, the famous bunny logo is extremely popular with fashionable girls, who think it looks oshare (oh-SHA-reh), or stylish and chic. Hiding my surprise, I asked her what "Playboy" was, and she replied, "It's a famous maker of girls' clothes. Don't you know anything, Dad?" I shrugged -- if the symbol was removed from its special meaning in the U.S., I guess it didn't matter if some 13-year-olds had little bunnies sewn into their socks. It's similar to the way the perception of cursing changes in Japan, a country that has no "foul" language or anatomically-based swear words to speak of, with the most common insult being baka (stupid). If my son were to use the "F" word around me I'd likely not bat an eye, since it has no power in a country where no one would be shocked by it.

A surprising clothing brand for girls in Japan.

Gunma Red String Project: a "Marriage Encouragement Initiative."

The Japanese government continues to wrestle with the country's falling birthrate, among the lowest in the industrialized world, and one area they're trying to focus on is the trend of people waiting longer to get married and start having children. Recently 52 single men and women gathered for a singles' party that was put on by our prefectural government as part of its "mariage encouragement initiative" that brings people together so they can meet and socialize. The program is called the Gunma Red String Project, evoking the image of the "red string of destiny," a Japanese belief that two people who are destined to fall in love are tied together with an invisible red string that connects their pinkies. The goal is simple: to help salarymen and women who are too busy to engage in normal dating to get out and meet people they might be compatible with, and hopefully help them fall in love. Since the Japanese already have a tradition of omiai, often thought of as "arranged marriage" but really more like a formal meeting between two single people to see if they think they'd be compatible, the idea of a party organized for singles to meet each other was probably less strange in practice than it seems at first. Let's hope Cupid Gunma-chan finds some targets!

Our prefectural mascot Gunma-chan is engaging in some match-making.

Filial Piety and the Japanese

The other day I was listening to the audio book of Children of Men and I heard a word I'd known of for a long time but had never encountered in my native language. The word was "filial piety," meaning the love and restpect you should show to your mother and father, and the only reason I know the word at all is because its Japanese version, oya koko (oh-ya koh-koh), comes up quite often in daily life here. While most of the James Clavell-derived images of Japanese people are completely false -- I have yet to meet anyone who was ready to commit ritual disembowelment to defend the honor of their ancestors -- one area where the classic image of nihonjin is dead on is their custom of showing special respect for their parents, both while they're alive and after they've gone on. This phenomenon is complex and takes many forms, from a son who studies extra hard so he can get into one of the cheaper national universities to save his parents money to children who alter their own lives because of the needs of their parents. For example, my mother-in-law spent some years in Tokyo in her younger days, and there was a special someone she wanted to marry, but when her parents called her back to Gunma to take over the family liquor store, she had to leave Tokyo forever. My wife, too, would have been more than happy to live in the U.S., but since she's an only child and needed to take over the family home she returned, which was good for me since I was waiting for her. So go give your mom and dad a call and show them some filial piety!

The ultimate expression of filial piety, carrying your aged mother up the stairs to bed.

All About Japanese Health Masks

I've managed to catch the cold that's been going around the J-List office, so I've got one of those Japanese health masks on right now. I remember my first few days after arriving in Japan, wowing at everything from the vending machines that were less than a few inches in depth to allow them to be placed along narrow streets to highly urbanized areas which nevertheless had rice paddies in the middle of them. Every time I'd head out to explore my city, I'd encounter a person wearing what appeared to me to be a surgical mask, as if they'd just ducked out of the operating room to get some air. These masks are worn by anyone experiencing cold or hayfever symptoms, done to avoid infecting others with your germs and to also to give them a visible warning that you're sick and they might want to keep their distance. In a country where one of the most important virtues is gambaru -- that is, do your best, give your all, work hard, always show your effort -- the image of an employee working hard at his or her desk with a gauze mask on, perhaps enduring a slight fever, is in some ways a classic cultural image.

You see many people wearing gauze masks in Japan.

Desserts in Japan -- Coffee Jelly, anyone?

Desserts in Japan can be a little different from what you might find back home. One popular dish in Japan is coffee jelly, coffee flavored gelatin that's really good with whipped cream on top -- Starbucks even sells a Coffee Jelly Frappe in the summer which I love. Another popular dessert in Japan is purin, egg custard flan pudding with caramel sauce on top which was unknown to me before I got here. Nata de Coco is a well-known dessert in the Philippines with firm, chewy squares made from coconuts, and it's popular in Japan -- it's really good in yogurt. Cake is big here too, and most cake shops are small, highly professional outfits who bake fabulous delicacies and sell them for $5 per piece (you almost never buy a whole cake in Japan, it'd be too expensive). Finally, there are many kinds of ice cream in Japan, from matcha (green tea) and azuki (sweet Japanese beans) to variations on Italian gelatin and "soft cream" (what soft-serve ice cream is called here), although my favorite is vanilla with a little matcha powder sprinkled on top.

Beautiful Japanese Dolls

As a person from a relatively young nation, at least compared to Japan's long history, I'm often floored by how old some of the traditions here are. March 3 is a special day for families with girl children, called Hina Matsuri or Doll's Festival, which seems tailor-made to be fascinating to Japan-obsessed gaijin. A few weeks before, families will set up an extensive arrangement of beautiful dolls called hina ningyo, which are meant to represent the Japanese Emperor, his wife and the imperial court. On March 3rd, the family will have a special dinner, eating colorful rice crackers called hina-arare (yes, Dr. Slump fans, that's where Arale-chan's name comes from) and one of my all-time favorite foods, chirashi-zushi, essentially a "tossed salad" of fish mixed with sushi rice. It's important to take the dolls down right away, it's said, or your daughters will get married late in life. Amazingly, the custom of families celebrating their daughters with beautiful dolls dates back to the Heian Period (795-1185), which is six times longer than my hometown of San Diego has existed as a city. Note that J-List has some interesting Hina Matsuri items on the site -- click to view!

Beautiful Hina Ningyo dolls on display.

Interesting Japanese Culture in Anime

Being an anime fan means more than just enjoying pretty moe [mo-EH] girls and watching robots battle each other: it's a journey of discovery in which you often find yourself grappling with cultural concepts that go well beyond what your Japanese dictionary tells you. Like the idea of senpai and kohai, senior and junior members in a school or organization, labels which carry nuances of responsibility and respect that aren't easily translated into English. Another potentially difficult concept is osana-najimi (oh-sah-nah nah-jii-mee), or childhood friend, which describes a special kind of close friendship between people who grew up together, very common in anime, manga and games. Yet another word that has a larger cultural footprint to it than it appears at first is tenkosei, meaning a student who has transferred from another school in the middle of the school year. Life in Japan is a lot more stable than it was for me in the States, and while I thought nothing of changing schools 5-6 times between the first and eighth grades, this would be quite rare here. Imagine moving to a new city and attending a school filled with people who have known each other all their lives, and you're the only one who's different -- it might make fitting in quite difficult. The drama of this kind of human interaction is apparently interesting to anime creators, and there are plenty of tenkosei characters around, such as Koizumi, the "mysterious transfer student" that Haruhi is so happy to have found in The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya.

Our game YUME MIRU KUSURI has an arc where you must save transfer student Aeka from being teased by her classmates.

A Proud Time for a Parent in Japan

It's a proud time for J-List's Yasu, the guy in charge of stocking cool artbooks and Japanese study items on the site: the oldest of his three daughters is starting first grade this April. He recently took her to a furniture store and had her choose a study desk so she can get into the proper habit of studying for several hours a day, since education is taken so seriously here. The desks themselves are well designed, made of higher quality wood than the desk I have at J-List, with many features like built-in lights for reading and many small drawers for kids to organize their study materials in. Another important choice for a new first-grader is what kind of school backpack to buy. School backpacks are called randoseru, from the Dutch word ranzel, and they're extremely well made hard leather backpacks designed to hold everything the student needs over six years of elementary school. What's amazing to me is how little this ceremony of putting one's child on the road to being an industrious student changes from year to year, and when we bought the desks and backpacks for our own kids it was exactly the same as when my wife had entered the first grade so many decades before that.

It's a rite of passage to buy a study desk and school backpack for your child in Japan.

Laughing at my Students

All things considered, laughter only belongs in a foreign language classroom if it helps build confidence in language skills, and it's really not a good idea to throw your head back and laugh at the mistakes your students make. Although I've tried to hold to this goal, there have been times during my career as an ESL teacher when it was very difficult to keep the giggles away. One older student was describing a scene about skyscrapers in New York, but she kept saying "skycrapper" instead, which had me twisting this way and that picturing some kind of divine lavatory in the sky. Another time a student told me how he fixed his car radio over the weekend, only he didn't say "fixed," but another word entirely which starts with the same letter, and I struggled to keep from laughing out loud at this. We were talking about careers once, and one student who planned to take the test to enter the National Postal Service told me his dream was to become a "post officer," which struck me as amusing, even though it's a logical mistake when you stop and think about it. Then there are those bits of insight that only a learner of a foreign language can have, like my student who observed, "We cannot go to Antarctica because it is under penguin rule." I feel bad about laughing at my students from time to time, although I know that I've given as good as I got, providing the Japanese with many hours of amusement thanks to my own language slip-ups over the years. Like the time I tried to order some mango juice in a restaurant, and substituted a "k" for the "g," resulting in pretty much the rudest word that exists in Japanese (which is "manko" and is a word referring to the female genitals).

"We cannot go to Antarctica because it is under penguin rule."

Handicapped in Japan

I've often gotten the impression that Japan has a reputation for not matching the standards set by the U.S. and Europe when it comes to helping its handicapped enjoy more normal lives, perhaps due to the many places that can only be accessed by climbing stairs in Japanese cities. While more could certainly be done to make the country "barrier free" (a made-in-Japan English word that describes environments that can be used without limitation by elderly or handicapped), overall it's been my experience that Japan works quite hard for its citizens with physical challenges. There are many concrete examples, such as daily broadcasts of news programs for the deaf on NHK and Japanese schools extending that "one big happy in-group" mind-set to the special-needs classes in public schools, allowing kids with, say, Down Syndrome to participate in the annual Sports Day events along with everyone else. There are 350,000 legally blind individuals living in Japan, and they can get around town with the use of crosswalks which play different songs depending on the direction so people know which way to cross -- one of the songs is "When a Body Meet a Body Coming Through the Rye" by the way. Guide dogs that help the blind get around are also quite common. As an interesting aside, Japanese guide dogs are trained to follow commands in English rather than in Japanese, for example "right side!" or "wait!" rather than Japanese versions of these commands. This is because there's quite a lot of difference between the way men and women speak in Japanese, with men tending to use the rougher command form of a word like "sit!" (suware! soo-wah-reh) while women would use the softer-sounding request form of the same verb (suwatte! su-wa-tte), potentially confusing the animal. It's an interesting example of Japan's language being too multi-layered and nuance-filled for its own good.

A box soliciting donations for training of seeing-eye dogs.

Here's the train crosswalk music, both songs.