Keigo, or Polite Japanese

In Japanese, there's a whole subset of polite language called keigo which can be quite a challenge for foreigners to learn, since we don't have anything like "exalting" and "humble" verb forms for raising up the person you're speaking to while lowering yourself in comparison to them. I recently had instance to write an email to a certain company in Japanese, and to make sure I hadn't made any serious mistakes -- I'm sure there's nothing more amusing to Japanese people than foreigners screwing up their language -- I asked Yasu to check the email. He made quite a few changes, making the overall tone of the letter more formal and catching some of the little things I'd missed, but before I sent it out, I found myself replacing some of the extremely polite and accurate language he'd added with what I'd originally written. I think that gaijin have a certain reputation as being passionate and emotional, and I wanted to preserve some of that spirit in my email, even if it meant the Japanese I was writing wasn't as "proper" as it should have been. One important part of learning this strange and wonderful language is developing a personal balance between the various aspects of it.

The use of polite language between human beings is an interesting side of Japan.

My Favorite Food: Yaki-Manju

My wife bought me a great present the other day: a book featuring all the places to buy yaki-manju in our prefecture. A traditional food that's essentially balls of bread on wooden skewers cooked over charcoal while being painted with a sauce of miso and brown sugar, yaki-manju is one of my favorite foods, but since young Japanese are generally not interested in taking over these family businesses, more and more shops close every year -- something the our prefectural government is trying to stop by publishing the guidebook. I intend to spend the next few weekends zooming around discovering some of these great shops, since the owners are always so happy to talk with a foreigner. Other things Gunma is famous for include mountains, a really firm gelatinous food called konjac or Devil's Tongue, strong winds in the winter, and strong-willed women all year round.

Note that Yaki-Manju dosn't have the sweet beans inside that foreigners usually dislike (but which I have also come to appreciate).

You can buy yaki-manju at really cool-looking old shops like this.

The Newest Keyword in Japan is Konkatsu, or "Marriage Activities"

Japan is a fast-moving place, and you never know what new boom is just around the corner. One year, women might be flocking to fortune-tellers who promise to divine the future based their blood type, then it might be educational quiz shows in which famous TV personalities sit in "class" and answer questions about various subjects, then get graded as if they were students. One word that's on people's lips a lot these days is konkatsu, meaning "marriage-related activities," i.e. the various things that women and men do to to find the right person to marry. The idea comes from a book called The Age of Konkatsu which argues that people should put as much effort into finding the right marriage partner as they do in finding employment. As a result of this "marriage boom," a lot of single Japanese are thinking about the best way to find Mr. or Ms. Right, and are using the various services that exist for this purpose, such as omiai (formal arranged meeting) introduction companies and even various online services. Considering Japan's low birthrate -- currently the lowest in the world at 1.34 children born per female, compared with 2.1 in the U.S. -- I certainly am happy about this new trend, and wish everyone many happy babies.

Be sure and check the title of the book this girl is reading:

Japan is currently having a boom in konkatsu or "marriage activities."

Twitter in Japan

I've started using Twitter, the famous "micro-blogging" tool that lets you make short observations and send them out in real-time. I like it because the conversations you can have with people on the other side of the world are fascinating, and it's a useful way of trading information back and forth on the fly. For example, if I'm writing about English words the Japanese use that are based on British terms and want to check some facts before I push out an update, I've got several hundred really cool people who are happy to shoot me a quick reply when I post a question. Twitter is also starting to catch on with Japanese users, too, who probably appreciate its simpler learning curve compared with sites like Facebook or Mixi.jp (there isn't one). Although Japanese users have the same 140 character limit as the rest of us, they've actually got a big advantage: because of the way kanji compresses a lot of meaning into a single (two-byte) character, you can fit a lot more information into the same space, allowing them to express themselves more freely. As a test, I googled a Japanese translation of the famous "To be or not to be" scene from Shakespeare's Hamlet to see how much of it would fit into one tweet. Nearly half of it made it in, all the way up to "...and by a sleep to say we'd end..." If you'd like to follow me on Twitter and read my random thoughts, by all means please do!

Twitter is slowly building popularity with Japanese fans, who type confusing things like "wwww" to mean laughter.

Sale Reminder!

Remember that right now J-List is having a great "Fiscal Year is Ending" sale, in which we'll give you a $5 gift certificate code for every $100 you spend on the site, since we'd much rather sell the many amazing bento, toy, traditional, snack and other items we've got in stock to you rather than count it on inventory day. This means you've got an excuse to add another few items to your cart if you're just under the next $100 level, and save money. The gift coupons will be issued as your order is processed, and never expire -- you can use them any time.

The Future in Capsule Hotels?

When humans one day live in space, I'm sure we'll make use of the experience Japan has gained with fitting people into smaller spaces. Since Japan has a little less than half the population of the U.S. crammed into an area the size of California, they've come up with some interesting ways of making do with less elbow room, such as constructing restaurants up off the ground so that cars can park underneath or building businesses with homes attached, like my own house with its small liquor shop built into the ground floor. Another example is the classic 4 1/2 tatami sized apartment that serves as standard living quarters for poor college students in Tokyo, which can be surprisingly livable thanks to well designed storage compartments and a fold-down loft area for sleeping. Another famous example of fitting a lot of people into a small space can be seen in Japan's capsule hotels, honeycomb-like capsules that contain everything you need including TV, clock, and a plug to power your laptop, quite a bargain at around $30 a night even in the heart of Tokyo. Now a new company is experimenting with the capsule hotel concept, creating luxurious "First Class Capsules" that are more like very small hotel rooms, offering a place to stretch out in privacy while still keeping the cost low, around $48 per night.

A new company is experimenting with "first class" capsule hotels.

That 100% Authentic Real Gaijin Feeling

Over the weekend I went up to Karuizawa, the charming town in the mountains of Nagano Prefecture that serves as a popular getaway for Tokyoites (and appears in quite a few anime series). While walking by an Italian gelato shop I was surprised to see a real live Italian young man, who greeted me with a very authentic-sounding buongiorno as he handed out a sample of green tea flavored gelato, something I'm pretty sure they don't have in Italy. It was an innovative idea by the shop owner to beat the recession: get an Italian to greet customers and get them into the store, and it certainly seemed to be working. There are certain times that Japanese just expect a "real" foreigner and aren't happy with anything less. A visit by "Santa-san" will certainly be appreciated by children if it's a real gaijin in the Santa suit rather than a Japanese person, and if you didn't see a real Indian chef preparing your naan in the tandoori oven you wouldn't feel like you were eating authentic Indian curry. Western-style weddings are quite popular in Japan, and no wedding would be complete without a real gaijin minister to perform the ceremony, accented-Japanese and all, and this is actually a lucrative side-job for several English teachers I know. The ultimate spot to see real live foreigners in Japan, though, would have to be Tokyo Disneyland, where a small army of performers from various countries fill roles like Alice in Wonderland while the Japanese visitors fawn and snap photos.

Sometimes there's no substitute for a real-live gaijin.

The 2009 J-List Mail Server Is Broken Sale, or the J-List End of Fiscal Year Sale If You Like

J-List has been having some issues with our mail server, making it difficult for some customers to receive our little cultural postcards from Japan. We're getting a new mail server built, but in the meantime we thought we'd have a sale! J-List's end-of-fiscal-year is approaching, so we're doing like Japanese companies do and having a special sales event, since we'd much rather sell our cool anime and other products to you rather than count it at inventory time. During this event, we'll send you a gift code (store credit) worth $5 for every $100 you spend for your next purchase, with both actual purchase price and shipping used for the calculation. It gives you a good excuse to throw an extra few Kit Kats or a case of your favorite Japanese gum to your cart if you're only a few dollars under the next $100 amount. The gift codes never expire and can be used any time.

Fast Food, Japan Style

Another good option if you're trying to eat in a hurry is to hit a konbini, or convenience store, where you can find anything from healthy onigiri to ready-to-eat bento lunches and even salads. My own favorite fast food would have to be gyudon, or beef bowl, basically a bowl of rice with steamed beef and onions on top, with raw egg poured over it, if you like. Recently there's been a trend of beef bowl restaurants emulating McDonald's and their giant-sized Mega Mac by offering extremely large portions with 3x the normal amount of beef piled on. They seem to be quite popular with customers.

The most popular fast food in Japan is gyudon (beef bowl).

Maria-sama is Watching My Daughter?

My daughter continues her adventures in junior high school, a place of learning and Japanese-style character building. Because her school is Christian, I know that the next few years will be interesting not only for my little girl but for my Buddhist wife, who knows as little of the history and background of Christianity as I know of the Nichiren or Shingon schools. It's funny how we take cultural knowledge for granted, for example being able to identify that this motif or that style of architecture is Catholic or Protestant, but my wife has no such background to draw from. Another big change in our home is that my wife now makes bento for our daughter every morning, and she's having great fun thinking of interesting ways to make the lunch more delicious and fun to eat, writing messages like ganbatte! ("Study hard and make us proud!") in nori, and so on.

Actually, the school isn't Catholic school or even all-girls.

What Year Is It in Japan?

Do you know what year it is? I often don't, thanks to the Japanese custom of counting years according to the reign of the Emperor in power. The current era of Heisei ("Achieving Peace") started in 1989, when Emperor Akihito ascended to the throne, making this year Heisei 21. Heisei is the fourth era since Japan became a "modern" nation; the others were Meiji ("Enlightened Rule," 1868-1912), when Japan began to emulate the West for the first time; Taisho ("Great Righteousness," 1912-1926), which saw a terrible earthquake that killed 140,000; and the long and eventful Showa ("Brilliant Harmony," 1926-1989), a time of war, rebuilding and eventually, toilets that wash your butt for you. When you live in Japan for a while, you naturally come to memorize certain events in the Japanese era system: for example I was born in Showa 43, I came to Japan in Heisei 3, and started J-List in Heisei 9. Japanese Emperors are always referred to by their era name in Japan, e.g. Emperor Showa for Hirohito, Emperor Heisei for the current Akihito, and it's quite common for Japanese to have no idea what their Emperor's name is. Akihito is 125th in the longest unbroken monarchy in the world, and he recently celebrated his 50th wedding anniversary to his wife Michiko (who comes from our prefecture of Gunma).

Congratulations to Emperor Akihito and his wife on 50 years of marriage!

Beautiful Koinobori Flying in the Sky

May 5 is Children's Day, a special time for celebrating boy children that's part of the Golden Week holidays. On this day families will proudly display a samurai battle helmet called a kabuto as they eat a special meal of rolled sushi, then the boys in the family will take a bath with sword-shaped iris flowers to make them strong in the future. Over the next few weeks, families with boy children will fly huge kites made to look like fish swimming upstream when the wind blows, called Koinobori or Upstream Swimming Carp, essentially a traditionally painted windsock which signifies a boy's journey through life. Our prefecture is quite famous for displays of these flying fish banners, and if you go for a drive you'll see dozens of them filling the sky with brilliant colors. As usual, things in Japan have a tendency to be quite old: the custom of flying carp-shaped banners started with samurai families in the Edo Period (1603-1868), while celebrating boy children on May 5 goes all the way back to the 6th century A.D.

Beautiful carp streamers, flying in the sky in our prefecture.

Anzen Daiichi Japan

Japan is a country that's very focused on safety, and there are many mechanisms in place to keep people from getting injured. For example, when a building is constructed, it's wrapped in a cloth covering that protects people walking below from being hurt by a falling hammer, which looks to my eye like they've grown the building by incubating it in a giant cocoon. Whenever there's roadwork to be done, there'll be several men with flashlights whose job it is to guide the cars around the construction, which probably isn't a profession I've thought about much back home. Since Japan is such a safe place, I imagine it was quite a surprise when a giant crane suddenly toppled over in the middle of Tokyo yesterday afternoon, bringing a 104-ton metal boom crashing down across a busy Tokyo street. Six people were injured, including two men who were trapped in a truck that was hit squarely by the falling crane, but happily no one was killed.

Fortunately the crane didn't claim any lives when it toppled.

Junior High School in Japan

My daughter has started junior high school, which is a big step in Japan, a kind of medium point between childhood and adult society. Junior high is when Japanese when first come into contact with the harshness of the real world, learning the importance of respectfully greeting your senpai (upperclassmen), getting used to wearing a school uniform everyday, and following many more rules than ever before. Bukatsu, or club activities, are very important in junior high, and all the clubs at my daughter's school are actively trying to recruit her, just like they do in anime. She has to choose one carefully, however, since many of the clubs like gymnastics and brass band take pride in practicing every day during summer vacation, which would make it difficult for her to go to the U.S. One reason we chose a private junior high for our daughter was our conviction that she'd have trouble getting used to school life at a standard Japanese public school, with straight-laced teachers who'd likely not understand her special situation as a haafu, possibly even yelling at her for dying her hair brown when it's her natural color. English is another reason we went with a private school, since junior high is the realm of "this is a pen" and "I am a boy" and we knew that our daughter would be bored at best, and might potentially have friction with teachers who were self-conscious about their own poor pronunciation of the language.

Junior high introduces students to some of the drearier aspects of Japanese society.

Chopsticks

Although Japanese kitchens are well stocked with spoons, forks and knives, most meals in Japan are eaten with chopsticks. Children usually learn to use chopsticks around the age of 4, when they start attending preschool, and this is quite possibly the first of many adjustments to the larger group culture that children have in their school lives. Every foreigner living in Japan knows the anguish of being told by a Japanese person hashi ga jozu ("you use chopsticks very well"). While one popular response is to compliment the speaker on their use of a knife and fork, I've found you can have more fun telling them okagesama de (oh-KA-gay sah-mah deh). This is a complex phrase which literally means "Yes, thanks to you," almost as if you had leaned how to use chopsticks from the person even though you've never met them before. The phrase is a useful way of showing Japanese-style humility whenever someone compliments you on something, and since few would expect a gaijin to know it, it's fun to see their surprised expressions. Incidentally, we have many chopsticks in stock on the site, including several types of training chopsticks that can help you if you're still learning how to use them.

Incidentally, it took my son a couple years to realize that chopsticks had nothing to do with Chapstick that you put on your lips.

Chopsticks are the most common way to eat in Japan.

Japan's Cultural Ties to China

One interesting aspect of Japan is its closer cultural relationship to its nearby neighbor, China, the ultimate origin of practically all major art, science and architecture in Asia and in many ways the "mother culture" of Japan itself (fertilizer in frozen gyoza aside). Many of the foods the Japanese eat every day originally came from China, like those steamed meat buns called nikuman which have been around for more than 2,000 years. The characters that the Japanese use to write with come from China, too, which gives the two countries a special relationship, since Japanese and Chinese can read about 30% of each other's language right out of the box. One of the most famous stories in China is the Romance of the Three Kingdoms (aka Sangokushi), a historical novel written in the 14th century that's very popular among Japanese boys, who read it in manga form and play video games based on the historical battles. The high-budget film Red Cliff part II is showing in Japan right now, and my son is a huge fan, hooked as he is on all things Sangokushi. Because the movie is shown in Chinese with Japanese subtitles, it's not the most accessible film for an American like me, but I look forward to finding a version with English that I can watch.

The Chinese tale of Sangokushi is very popular in Japan in general, and in my household in particular.

What's in a word? A maid by any other name...

Words carry different meanings to different people. For example, the most common word for steamed white rice in Japanese is gohan, yet I've noticed that whenever you're eating at a Western-style restaurant like Denny's, it will always be called by its English name, rice (raisu). Another word that the Japanese have imported from English with a slightly altered nuance is "propose," which refers only to a proposal of marriage, and I'm sure that somewhere, a Japanese woman has gotten the wrong idea when listening to a business proposal from a male colleague. One of my favorite characters from Lucky Star is Patty, a female otaku from America who learned Japanese from anime and manga, resulting in her speaking the language very strangely, to say the least. In her official "image song" there's a section where she berates her classmates for mixing up the Japanese word kaseifu (what a normal maid who cleans your house is known as) and the English word maid, which carries connotations of a super-kawaii servant who will cheerfully fulfill your every request. "A kaseifu is someone that's convenient to have around. A maid is someone who can make you feel happy inside forever!" On the surface the two words mean the same thing, and yet they're totally different.

A maid is a person who can make you feel happy inside, as long as you use the English term.

Is it possible for a person to forget their native language?

Is it possible for a person to lose the use of their native language? Studies in linguistics (which I did a bit of in my college days) say yes, under some conditions. Language is more than a means to engage in communication and commerce: it defines us more than anything else, and acts as our "operating system," to put it in computing terms. After the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979, many Iranian students studying in the U.S. at the time were forced to stay permanently. With little hope of returning to their home country, some accepted their new life so completely that they stopped using their native language, until they essentially became unable to speak Farsi properly. During my time in Japan, I've never felt I was losing my ability to speak English, although I did go for more than a year without talking to a native speaker, which meant the English I was speaking was being subtly affected by my ESL students, which was quite a weird experience. It's amazing how hard it can be to recall certain seldom-used words when you live in a non-English speaking country like Japan, such as "potentiometer" or "gynecological," and at times I've been obsessed with trying to recall a word I knew existed but which I couldn't remember for some reason.

Naturally, it's not uncommon for Japan to affect the people who choose to live here in strange ways.

The Traditional Cuisine of Kytoo

The Japanese, of course, love to make meals into something that's beautiful to look at, a concept known as shoku no bi, or "the beauty of food." The ultimate embodiment of this concept is kaiseki ryori, the traditional food of Kyoto in which a great deal of care is taken with the presentation of the food, from the shape and color and texture to the elegant dishes it's served on. Since the Japanese love their seasons so much, what you're served will depend on what time of year it is -- in the fall your meal with have a momiji (Japanese maple) motif, while sakura petals will adorn your food in the spring. Kaiseki meals are served in courses, similar to fine French dining (which the Japanese also love, probably more than the French do), and courses include sashimi, tempura, grilled fish, rice, and various other foods. To be honest, it's not uncommon to have no idea what you're putting in your mouth when you eat kaiseki (at least one dish will contain a flower that you ar free to eat, if you like), but don't worry, everything is good. If you're curious about Japanese cooking, check the J-List site for some cool cooking books.

Tthe traditional food of Kyoto embodies "the beauty of food."

My Trip to the American Shopping Mall in Japan

I finally got a chance to visit the new American-style shopping mall that opened recently, called SMARK. Inside was a mix of Japanese and U.S. stores that offered a huge variety of products for consumers to buy, including Eddie Bauer, Gap clone innovative Japanese clothing retailer UNIQLO, and other shops with names like HeartMarket, Dog Garden, and I's Palace. I smiled at a store called GENKI KIDS, but my daughter thought it was a great name. "Don't you know anything, Dad? It's really cool to write Japanese in romaji [the Roman alphabet]." We made sure to eat at Wendy's, the American fast-food restaurant famous for its square hamburgers, which is making a push into rural Japan in an effort to recreate the legendary success of "Kentucky" (as KFC is called in Japan). The menu was pretty much the same as back home, with the addition of a Teriyaki Burger, and the "regular" size Frosty was so small you practically had to eat it with chopsticks.

I finally got to eat at the Wendy's that recently opened near my house.

Japan's Police Boxes

The subject of Japan's police is an interesting one. Japan's boys in blue are organized under the umbrella of the National Police Force, one of the first areas of society to be modernized in the European model when the country began its transformation from a feudal backwater into an industrialized nation in the 1870s. As with the Ministry of Education, Japan's police are a very top-down organization, and there's little variation between police in different parts of the country, from Hokkaido to Okinawa. One reason often given for the lower rate of crime in Japan is the efficient system of Koban, the so-called "Police Boxes" or small police stations situated around Japanese cities. If you have a problem or need to ask for directions, there's usually a Koban nearby where you can get help at, and I think the system works better than large, centralized police stations. Up til now, these small police boxes have been staffed mainly by men, due to fears that female officers might be in danger if they were asked to work night duty. This policy is about to officially end, however, as police boxes in Tokyo start employing female officers at all hours of the day and night.

This koban in Shibuya is rather famous, since there's a "soapland" right behind it -- so much for prostition being illegal.

A Certain Somewhat Ugly Magical Kickboxer

The most interesting kickboxer in Japan would have to be Yuichiro "Jienotsu" Nagashima, an avid anime fan and cosplayer who happens to be extremely adept at judo and full contact karate. Famous for dressing in flamboyant anime costumes as he fights, the New Japan Kickboxing Federation-affiliated fighter manages to turn every bout into a huge performance, generating plenty of attention for himself from bloggers and the media in the process. So far his cosplay events have included Miku Hatsune, Haruhi Suzumiya, Shana of the Blazing Eyes and Index from A Certain Magical Index. It's enough to make me feel sorry for his opponents -- it's got to be one thing to take a beating in the ring, but totally different to get your butt kicked by some dressed up as the cute Ranka Lee from Macross Frontier. His goal in life is to climb to the top of the Japanese K-1 world and eventually get a studio to let him work as a voice actor. "I want to work hard to be the best anime otaku I can be." Oh, and his favorite cookies are Country Ma'am -- we agree!

Japan's anime cosplaying kickboxer is always entertaining to watch, although a little scary.

My favorite place in the world: The Ghibli Museum in Mitaka, Tokyo

The other day I took my mother and the kids down to Tokyo to see the Studio Ghibli Museum, pretty much the most excellent place in the world if you love the works of master animator Hayao Miyazaki. Inside, you can see a replica of the desk Miyazaki-sensei worked at while creating his most famous films (right down to his cigarette-filled ashtray), climb inside a giant plush Catbus, and take your picture beside a full-sized version of a robot from Castle in the Sky Laputa. Visitors are able to watch a short original Ghibli film while there, too, and we were fortunate to get to see the best one, Mei and the Kitten Bus, essentially the "sequel" to My Neighbor Totoro. It tells the story of an adventure Mei has with a baby neko bus in which she's taken to a conclave of Totoros and meets the Grandmother Catbus, who she befriends by giving her a delicious Morinaga caramel -- it's quite awesome. Mr. Miyazaki's hand could be seen in almost every aspect of the museum, from the winding staircase that only kids could climb to the toilets, decorated with acorns and wood; when you pay for something, the little tray you put your money in isn't made of plastic, but natural leather cut in the shape of a leaf. Inside the museum there's a cafe famous for selling coffee with Miyazaki's characters drawn over the top in chocolate. Sadly, Mr. Miyazaki decided that he didn't want visitors to the museum "eating" his characters, even in chocolate form, and asked the cafe to refrain from the practice -- bummer.

Tthe Ghibli Museum is my favorite part of Tokyo.

Happy Gundam 30th Anniversary

Today is an auspicious day for anime fans everywhere: the 30th anniversary of the start of Mobile Suit Gundam, which burst onto TV screens on April 7, 1979. Essentially the first anime series in which the humans were more important than the robots they piloted, it told the story of humanity after it had emigrated into space and of the One Year War for independence between the space-based Principality of Zeon and the United Earth Federation, with plenty of drama and political intrigue to go with giant robots destroying each other. Interestingly enough, the show was slow to catch on and was ended 9 episodes early. With the introduction of the Bandai's line of Gundam models and the three compilation movies, popularity began to pick up, and the show went on to become an icon of Japanese animation. Today, characters like the everyman-hero Amuro Rei and the charismatic Char Aznable are as much a part of Japanese popular culture as R2-D2 and C-3P0 are in the West.

Congratulations on 30 years of Newtypes, spacenoids and colony drops.

On Okinawa Lily Princesses, And More

We're back from our long weekend in Okinawa. It was a fun trip, and we got a lot of relaxing in as we explored the cultural differences between the island of Karate Kid's Miyagi-san and the rest of Japan, including sampling the local cuisine. The island's closer cultural proximity to the U.S. has somehow caused Okinawans to love tacos, which would be unheard of on the mainland where ordering tako would get you some delicious fresh octopus. Another local favorite is root beer, which surprised me since almost every Japanese I know thinks it tastes like the muscle cream Salonpas, yet business at the A&W restaurants we saw was brisk. Like many other Pacific islanders, Okinawans love Spam, and I made sure to try a "Spam musubi" type onigiri, a favorite of President Obama's from his days in Hawaii. One bit of culture shock we had was our inability to read any of the kanji names on signs, since they're so different from anything you see in Japan proper -- a good analogy would be a person from Boston visiting California and trying to pronounce the Spanish-derived names there. Okinawa is the poorest prefecture in Japan, and there are definitely fewer expensive cars on the road. They get sweet revenge by living longer and aging more gracefully than anyone else in the world, even the already long-lived Japanese, thanks to diets low in fat and salt, lower levels of stress and a positive, supportive community.

Since I strive to bring my half-Japanese, half-American children up to see things from the viewpoint of both cultures, we visited some of the former battlegrounds from the terrible Battle of Okinawa, a three-month conflict that killed more than 100,000 Japanese troops as well as a quarter of the civilian population of the island, an event that hasn't earned Japan proper any love in the minds of the locals. I was especially touched by the story of the Himeyuri Lily Girls Squadron, 222 high school girls who were mobilized as nurses during a major Allied offensive. The girls were from wealthy families and had led very sheltered lives up to that point, yet suddenly they found themselves tending to hundreds of dying soldiers in makeshift hospital caves. A large number of the girls were killed during the fighting, but many who survived soon committed suicide, so great was their fear of the approaching kichiku-beihei ("beastly American soldiers") thanks to the propaganda that they'd been subjected to. Of course, one big difference between Japan and Okinawa is that there are monuments and memorials at all -- as I've written before, it's very rare to see any kind of reminder of the war years in Japan, for cultural reasons that are difficult for me to fathom. About the only place you can go in Japan to pay respects to the soldiers who fought and died for their country is Yasukuni Shrine, where the bones of Japan's worst war criminals are unfortunately also interred.

A memorial to the tragic Himeyuri Lily Girls in Okinawa; for the record, a castle in Okinawan is pronounced gusku, not shiro.

Japanese Children of Men

There's a strange trend in our prefecture these days: building new elementary schools so that they're "barrier free," a word which I'm pretty sure originated in Japan that means free from physical challenges to disabled people such as stairs. The schools are made so that they're much more accessible to those with difficulty getting around, and they're built on one level rather than on two floors, as has been the norm in the past. The reason for this new approach to school construction is uniquely Japanese and related to its low birth rate: in twenty or thirty years when the schools are no longer needed for children, they can be easily converted into homes to provide care for the elderly. This gave me a bit of a chill when I heard it for the first time -- as a big fan of the book and film Children of Men, which tells the story of humanity that has become unable to create new children, it hit rather close to home. Still, rather than build another dam or cover a mountainside in concrete on the off chance that there might be a rockslide someday, building schools so that they can serve multiple purposes in the future seems like a good idea. Remember, according to current projections the population of Japan in the year 3000 is going to be....just 27 people.

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.