Cultural Lessons and Initial D

The other day I bought an Initial D driving game for my Playstation 3, which is fun since the mountains of Haruna, Myogi and Akagi are all real places located near J-List. I had a problem with the game, however: every time I tried to select an option I found I was hitting the cancel button instead of execute, which would bring me back to the previous menu. The reason was related to an interesting cultural wrinkle between Japan and the West: here, a circle (maru) always means "yes" or "correct" while an X (batsu) is always "no" or "wrong." So while gamers from America and Europe expect the X button to execute the current menu option, in Japanese Playstation (and PSP) games this is reversed. I first encountered this issue when studying Japanese at SDSU: when my teacher handed me my test back marked with dozens of red circles, I thought I'd gotten all the answers wrong, but I soon figured out that circles meant good. We've had similar cultural issues with the coffee maker we use at J-List, a large 12-cup model purchased in the U.S., since the girly-man coffee makers here are laughably small. The Mr. Coffee switch displays a 1 for "on" and a 0 for "off," and invariably one of our Japanese staff members will put the switch in the "circle" position, expecting the coffee to flow then wondering when nothing happens.

Living in Gunma is fun for an Initial D fan, since I can go on these real roads if I want.

Japan and the New Type Influenza

Japan is doing its best to deal with the outbreak of the "new-type influenza virus" that has taken hold here, with 302 cases officially reported, although no deaths thanks to Japan's excellent medical system. Everywhere you go, Japanese consumers are snapping up those health masks and wearing them to keep the germs away. The influenza fear is having an effect on the economy, too, as travel plans to areas where flu cases have been reported are cancelled, including my son's scheduled school trip to Kyoto next month (it's been put off for a year). Prime Minister Aso has appeared on TV and urged people to remain calm, but I know this has to run its course: once Japanese people have decided they're going to freak out about something, everyone gets on board. This is thanks to the concept of migi e narae (migi eh nah-rah-eh), an old army command that literally means "Copy the person on your right!" although it's more useful to think of it as "me, too-ism." Basically, this word describes the Japanese tendency to do whatever people them are doing. If you're concerned about the new influenza, the best advice might be to stay home and avoid unnecessary contact with others. To that end, I recommend everyone buy cool stuff from J-List. That's a great idea!

Japan is currently undergoing fear of the new influenza. Good thing we stocked up on Hello Kitty masks.

The Paradigm of Living in Japan

Living in Japan means getting used to a new paradigm, and it often feels like the country exists on another dimension from the rest of the world. Maps that aren't oriented towards the North, with swastikas written on them, since the symbol (properly called manji) denotes the location of a Buddhist temple here. People shooting off fireworks while it's still light outside. Buying a six-pack of beer and paying the same price as six individual cans. Then there's the tendency for important public messages to be delivered by cute "mascot characters" like Chidejika, whose name comes from chideji (terrestrial digital) the shika (Japanese for deer). The character, who reminds people that they need to prepare for the switchover from analog to digital TV due to take place in July 2011, replaced SMAP member Tsuyoshi Kusanagi when he was arrested for public nudity at a park at 3 am.

Chidejika is the official mascot of the end of analog TV broadcasts in Japan, which has become a massive target of online parodies with the 2ch crowd:

This is a Miku Hatsune video about Analoguma (Analog Bear).

The Most Famous Monkeys in Japan

All my life, I've heard the words "See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil," but I never connected the phrase with Japan particularly. Imagine my surprise when I went to Nikko Toshogu, a beautiful collection of temples about 100 km north of Tokyo, and saw the famous 17th century wood carving of the three monkeys respectively covering their eyes, ears and mouth. The phrase in Japanese is mizaru, kikazaru, iwazaru (do not see, do not listen, do not speak), and it's partially a pun, since the -zaru verb ending sounds similar to the Japanese word for monkey, saru. Like most really old things, three wise monkeys originated from outside Japan, and there are variations of the monkeys and the message in many cultures. Incidentally, Nikko is just about the most beautiful place you can find in Japan outside the Kyoto region, and it should be at the top of your list of places to visit if you're looking for something to do in the Kanto area. I love walking through the beautiful temples and going to the 5-story pagoda, which houses the bones of the single most famous Japanese person, Ieyasu Tokugawa, who unified Japan and ushered in the Edo Period.

The three wise monkeys, a famous image of Japan.

Evangelion Phone: You Can (Not) Buy One

I love my iPhone, really I do. It lets me read Wikipedia in bed, check the status of the J-List servers from anywhere, practice my Japanese calligraphy, send my random thoughts via Twitter and engage in impromptu lightsaber battles with other iPhone users. Still, there are times when the more traditional keitai (cell phones) sold in Japan tempt me. Today Japan's #2 cell phone maker "au by KDDI" announced 19 (!) new models for the coming summer season, including a solar-powered phone that can be recharged by leaving it in the sun, a phone with a Kindle-like "e-paper" display that shows information such as weather reports, and a model designed by Giorgio Armani. But the most geek-tastic new phone is from Docomo: the limited-edition tie-in with the upcoming Evangelion 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance movie, designed by Gainax and director Hideaki Anno.

Docomo's new Evangelion phone is nerdgasm-inducing.

Service and Tipping in Japan

One of the most pleasant aspects of living in Japan is getting excellent service wherever you go, whether it's at a restaurant or having your tank filled by cheerful employees who will wipe your windshield and get rid of any trash in your car for you. At the hot springs hotel I stayed at last weekend, I was impressed with the amount of effort the staff put in for us, bringing the multi-course meals and laying out the futons and making sure we knew where all the baths in the hotel were located. One might be tempted to think that the staff was going out of their way because we were foreign visitors, but that wasn't my impression: if you are the okyaku-sama (the word that covers the English concepts of guest, visitor and customer) you will be treated well. Ironically, no matter how good the service is, you can't show your appreciation by tipping. Although the Japanese have imported many customs from the West, from Western furniture and clothing to medicine, the custom of tipping doesn't exist in Japan at all.

The year 1955 is alive and well at Japanese gas stations.

Dharma, 108 and the Buddhism of Lost

Like many others, I'm a big fan of Lost. Unfortunately my wife has gotten into it, too, which means I have to translate the difficult international accents for her, since the show seems to be tailor-made to torture Japanese ESL learners. In a recent episode, the character Jack had to give something of his father's to another character in order to accomplish a goal, and this made my wife observe, "Wow, this is just like Buddhism." (In this case the idea is katami, possessions of a person who has died which are distributed to his friends later.) Yes, the producers of Lost do seem to enjoy adding "pop Buddhist" themes to the story, such as the Dharma Initiative, the mysterious organization doing experiments on the island, which J-List readers will recognize as Daruma, the famous famous red statues that represent the Buddhist monk who meditated for so long that his arms and legs atrophied and disappeared. Then there's the computer with a button that must be pushed every 108 minutes to keep the world from ending. The number 108 is quite important in Buddhism, representing the 108 sins that a person must overcome in order to reach Nirvana, and on New Year's Eve the temple bells are rung 108 times. Interesting tidbit: in India, the number you call when you have an emergency is...108!

The producers of Lost are fond of adding Buddhist themes to the show.

How to Search Google in Japanese

Google is an amazing tool that allows us to find information in seconds, and I swear by it. When searching in Japanese, however, Googling can be a bit more complicated. First of all, to find information on an individual in Japanese you obviously need to know the correct kanji for their name, and searching with the wrong characters will bring up unexpected results just as misspelling a name will mess up Google results in English. There are many different name kanji for writing Japanese names, and the most common names can be the hardest to work with since there are so many possible variations. If you wanted to find information on singer Ayumi Hamasaki, for example, you'd type the name in to the kanji front-end processor (IME on Windows, Kotoeri on the Mac) then hit the space bar, scrolling through the many possible kanji. Which one is it? Surprise -- all of them are wrong. The singer writes her first name in hiragana.

Five common ways of writing the female Japanese name Ayumi in kanji.

And there she is!

My Favorite Place: Onsen Hotels

A friend from Italy came to our prefecture for a visit, so I took him to one of my favorite places in Japan, an onsen hotel in the small mountain town of Ikaho. While most any volcanic hot spring is a joy to bathe in, I'm a big fan of the larger onsen hotel experience, where you can roam the hallways in your yukata sampling several different baths, then do fun stuff like karaoke or table tennis. Japan can be a strangely uniform place, and features you can find at one hot spring hotel will usually be available almost everywhere. For example, I guarantee you'll find a vending machine selling Haagan-Dazs ice cream and a little shop inside the hotel that sells ramen to guests who get hungry late at night. Also, there's always a "game corner" where you can play video games, but for some reason they're always games from 10-15 years ago. The inn we chose is quite a famous one, having been operated by the founding family for the last 420 years -- wow. One thing I like about the dating-sim games we sell is the cultural tidbits you can get from them, and our game Tokimeki Check in! is filled with fun references to these hot springs inns, if you're curious to learn more about them.

The hot springs inn I went to was founded in 1576. Yes, I was amazed by that, too.

Star Wars vs. Japan

Since the two great obsessions of my life have been Japan and Star Wars, I enjoy it when they come together in interesting ways. Star Wars is of course heavily based on concepts borrowed from Japan, from bushido-infused Jedi Knights wearing kimono to the Obi-Wan-as-ronin themes to the word "Jedi" itself, which comes from jidai-geki, or historical period dramas. One of the most famous Japan-related inspirations in Star Wars was Darth Vader's helmet, which is based on the kabuto helmet of Masamune Date, 1567-1636 (family name pronounced dah-tay). He was an enigmatic daimyo who founded the city of Sendai in northern Japan, and who did some amazing things, like sending Japanese envoys to Mexico, Spain and Rome in 1619 to negotiate trade, just as the Tokugawa clan was beginning its policy of isolation from outside cultural influences. The pro-Christian daimyo was always open to new ideas, and he loved international gourmet food, which has given the city of Sendai a reputation for excellent restaurants today. His helmet is one of the most iconic in history, with perfect Darth Vader-style dimensions and a large metal crescent on the top, symbolizing animal horns. I personally believe the famous samurai lord contributed his name to cause of the Sith, too, since "Date" seems too close to "Darth"
to have been an accident.

Darth Vader's helmet is based on a famous samurai's kabuto.

Tokyo as the Center of Japan

Japan is often said to be a "vertical" society, in which a given person has a higher or lower social level based on their status, age or number of years in an organization, a concept that takes some getting used to when coming from the U.S. Interestingly, there's a similar relationship between Tokyo and the rest of the country that seems to be a relic from Japan's past. Basically, Tokyo is by definition the "heart" of Japan by virtue of its being the designated capital, which is reflected in interesting linguistic ways. For example, all trains come in two types, nobori or "climbing" and kudari or "descending," and after a while I figured that this had to do with whether the train was going towards or away from Tokyo. Similarly, there are words like jokyo suru which means "to come to the capital," a concept I can't picture us making a special word for in English. "Standard Japanese" is defined as whatever people in Tokyo happen to speak, which is again quite different from the U.S., which has no official geographic linguistic center.

Tokyo is the center of Japan in more ways than are immediately apparent to the casual observer.

Interesting Japanese Foods: Takoyaki

Japan is home to many interesting foods, only a small number of which are generally known to the outside world. Like taiyaki, sweet bean paste cooked inside a shell shaped like a fish, great to eat in the winter (see a chocolate version here), or chawan-mushi, chicken and other good things steamed inside a heavenly egg custard, often served as a separate course in traditional Japanese meals. Another enigmatic food is takoyaki, especially popular in the Osaka region ever since it was invented in 1935. In stark contrast to the English word taco, tako is Japanese for octopus; to differentiate the crustacean from the Mexican food, the Japanese always use the plural word "tacos" (takosu) for referring to the latter, even if they're talking about just one taco. Takoyaki are basically fried balls of batter that contain a piece of cooked octopus meat inside, painted with a delicious sauce, which is great to eat piping hot while walking around a summer festival. While many wouldn't be too thrilled at the idea of eating octopus meat, it actually has no taste and is strangely satisfying to chew, and it's become one of my favorite foods. Once in rural Japan my wife and I happened across a takoyaki vendor who'd decided to call his little shop Tako Bell, which was such an unexpected thing to see we howled with laughter. If you're curious about this unique Japanese food, FritoLay has created a crunchy Takoyaki-flavored snack that we've posted today.

Takoyaki is a famous food in the Kansai region that I like.

Japanese People I Have Met

Before I came to Japan, I thought I knew pretty much what kinds of people I'd find here: lots of Japanese salaryman types riding the train to work, overstressed students struggling to get into university, and so on. This was 1991, when there were no blogs to provide "slice of life" information about Japan, and it seemed that every book on the subject was written by old-timers who came here after World War II and never left. I was naturally surprised to encounter Japanese people of every imaginable type here, which makes sense of course since I only had stereotypes to work from before. For example, I met a normal Japanese businessman who was an "airport otaku," able to discuss the features and history of just about every major airport in the world in great detail. Then there was the time some very average high school students I'd been teaching asked me to come and watch them dance. They were in a "rockabilly circle" (club) that dressed in extravagant 1950's era outfits and put on impromptu street performances -- it was really cool. Even the seemingly mild-mannered Jun, the J-List staff member who keeps our site stocked with interesting snacks and toys, surprised me: in his younger days, he traveled along the Silk Road through China, India, and Iran, and had perfected the art of eating with his fingers without making a big mess.

All things considered, I did not expect to meet Rockabilly fans when I came to Japan.

English Words with Kanji

I wrote last time about an amusing marketing campaign by Georgia Coffee to sell canned coffee using the slogan "Yes, we can!" with the final word written in kanji. Say what -- a kanji character for an English word? While the general rule is that the katakana writing system is reserved for foreign names for people and places along with imported words like "bottle keep" (when you leave a bottle of bourbon you've purchased at your favorite bar with your name on it, trusting that no one else will drink it) or "skinship" (the Japanese word describing the important connection between a parent and child), some English words have been in use in Japan for so long they've been assigned honorary kanji, such as tobacco, coffee, or beer. This is an example of something called ateji, essentially assigning a pronunciation to characters that have a similar meaning. Sometimes the results are amusing -- for example, the characters for tobacco happen to be written with characters for "smoke" and "grass."

My Son and the Coming Exam Test Hell

On Sunday my wife and son drove to his juku, or evening preparatory school (a.k.a. "cram school"), for a formal meeting with the teacher who oversees his studies there. Next year my son starts the third year of junior high, which is the beginning of juken hell as he prepares for the entrance exam to get into high school, and the meeting was to make a concrete study plan for the next 18 months. Japan's educational system is complex and difficult for Westerners to understand, but basically, compulsory education ends at junior high, making high school effectively optional, which creates competition for the best schools. Under Japan's meritocracy system, students who want to attend one of the top schools must study hard, and there's an entire ecosystem of large and small juku schools to help students reach their educational goals. My son is interested in engineering and has decided to shoot for the top boy's high school in our prefecture, a difficult goal which will mean many hours of studying on top of his normal schoolwork. It'll be hard for him, and also for me, since it means many months of doing almost no father-and-son stuff like playing catch or evening lightsaber battles. But it's all part of raising a kid in Japan.

Yoyogi Seminar is one of the largest "cram" schools in Japan.

Yahoo vs. Google: Which Female Users are More Sexy?

Women who use Yahoo vs. those who prefer Google -- which are sexier? That's a question posed by one ladies' magazine, which polled 600 female users of both websites about how they perceived themselves. While Yahoo's star may have been eclipsed by Google in the U.S. and Europe, the brand is still going strong here in Japan, where less-sophisticated users often associate the Yahoo website with "the Internet" in general, often not knowing there's anything beyond it. Yahoo just seems to "get" the Japanese market in a way that other companies have trouble emulating, and their market share for search in Japan stands at 51% compared with 39% for Google. The magazine's poll found that among female Googlers, 23.5 ranked themselves as "sexy" or "somewhat sexy" while just 9.6% of female users of Yahoo described themselves this way. The article went on to postulate that users of Google thought the service was kakko ii or "cool" because of its more technical approach to the web, while Yahoo Japan users thought less deeply about what tools they were using to get information.

Yahoo is still king of search in Japan, especially among females.

Thoughts on Newsweek Japan and Job Interviews

My wife reads the Japanese version of Newsweek, and sometimes I thumb through it to see how it compares to the U.S. version, or the laughable "International" edition that just happens to have exactly one news story from each region it's sold in, e.g. India, Singapore, Japan, etc., whether or not there was any important news going on. Although Newsweek is published here in Japanese, the editors know their readers tend to be interested in English and international business, and I once came across an article on how to tackle an American-style job interview. The Japanese are used to treating English as if it were an exact science, with "one" right answer to a given question, e.g. the correct reply to "How are you?" is "Fine, thanks, and you?" These questions, however, would have been linguistic torture for Japanese ESL learners, with open-ended questions ("tell me about yourself"), requests that they accurately evaluate themselves ("what are your strengths or weaknesses?") and so on. This is the complete opposite of how job interviews are handled in Japan, where people looking for employment are expected to act in an extremely humble way, accurately representing your past work or educational history while dressing down what they're achieved in the past, and avoiding standing out from other applicants. If you don't wear this mantle of modesty during a job interview you certainly won't be hired in Japan.

The Japanese edition of Newsweek knows their readers are interested in English.

Interesting Social Observations Over a Bag of Chips

The Japanese, as I've often written, are a group-oriented people, and it's interesting to observe the subtle body language that goes back and forth when people get together. If you have a bag of interesting chips that you want to offer to friends, the correct way to do it is to open it "party-biraki" style, placing the bag with the seal facing upwards, then ripping the entire bag open so that the contents sit on the opened wrapping. This makes it convenient for everyone to take some of the chips, but it also helps your guests get past their enryo block. The Japanese have a tendency to avoid taking something that's offered, called enryo (translatable as restraint, reserve, or as a verb, to refrain from doing something), and it can be difficult to get people at a party to lighten up and have fun if they're so busy being polite to each other. By opening the bag so that the contents will go to waste if your guests don't eat, you give them an excuse to dig in.

The correct way to encourage Japanese guests to eat.

Famous English Phrases in Japan -- Yes, We [kan]!

For some reason, I'm able to recite the "government of the people, by the people, and for the people" part of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address address in Japanese. It's one of the most famous phrases in English, up there with the "I Have a Dream" speech, and since my students had to study it in their English classes, I picked it up while teaching them. Snippets of the Bible and of Shakespeare make their way into the Japanese language, too, and anyone who reads newspapers or magazines will be familiar with the local versions of "pearls before swine" or "frailty, thy name is woman," although they might be fuzzy on the source. The most famous English phrase in Japan is probably one you're not familiar with. It's "Boys, be ambitious," which was spoken by Professor Clarke, who taught English and agriculture at what would become Sapporo University in 1876. I have no idea why these words would become so well known here, but the Japanese of the day certainly took them to heart. The latest English phrase to become known by everyone in Japan is "Yes, we can!" and Georgia Coffee even made an advertisement for their canned coffee, substituting the kanji for "can" (kan) in the slogan.

(Although foreign loan words are written in katakana, there's a small subset that have been in use so long they have been given honorary kanji.)

Georgia Coffee came up with an amusing way to advertise their products using English.

Japanese Females and Constipation

I've been fascinated with the women of Japan ever since I arrived here, and over the years I've managed to pick up a few bits of wisdom regarding this most interesting of animals, which I'll pass along to you if you like. First, Japanese females are extremely proper, always trying to do what is expected of them socially and always aware of hito no me, the "the eyes of others" watching them, one of the most important mechanisms for making Japanese society the way it is. They are frighteningly well-organized, and will make a promise to meet a friend two months in the future and somehow manage to actually be there without forgetting. Japanese females seem to be unable to resist popular trends, and once a new fashion catches on it will be everywhere overnight. Perhaps it's just my own experience, but I've known Japanese girls to be quite focused on marriage, and from a guy's perspective it can be unnerving when that particular subject comes up for discussion on a first date. While many Japanese females possess a Vulcan-like ability to hide their own emotions, others openly embrace Japan's unofficial religion of kawaii, and love to speak of themselves in the third person just like some characters do in anime. Because they eat rice three times a day, Japanese females are always constipated, but good luck trying to convince them to give up rice, the staple food of the country. Finally, if you ever need to buy shoes for a Japanese female but don't know their shoe size, go for 23.5 centimeters. For some reason, every Japanese girl I've ever known has had feet of that exact size.

I've yet to meet a Japanese female who isn't locked in a life-and-death struggle against constipation.

My Drive to Brazil

My daughter recently asked me if I could drive her to the nearby town of Oizumi so she could visit a friend who lived there, and I was happy to do it. In my 18 years here I'd never been to the "Brazil in Japan," famous for having the highest percentage of nikkei Brazilians and Peruvians in the country, and I thought it'd be a cool trip to make. Officially, the number of foreigners living in the town is just about 10% of the overall population of 40,000, but this doesn't account for the thousands of unregistered (illegal) residents, and the real foreign population more like 25%. It was certainly interesting to drive down the street and see all the businesses sporting Brazilian flags, and walking into the all-Brazilian convenience store was a good excuse to buy some interesting chocolates and something called Inca Kola. The people of the town are largely dependent on factory jobs at companies like Sanyo, and times are very hard for them right now, prompting the Japanese government to take the unprecedented step of offering financial assistance to any guest worker who wants to go home but who is unable to for economic reasons. I think towns like Koizumi are good for Japan, providing them with a vision of their own country that isn't so homogenized. On the other hand, the nikkei living here could do a lot more to meld with the overall Japanese society, embracing the language and customs, as I have strived to do. Whenever I attend local events like hatsu-mode (hatsu-moh-day) on January 1st, standing in the freezing cold at the Shinto Shrine to pray for happiness in the new year, I look to see if there are any other foreigners in line with me, perhaps a Peruvian who I can practice my pathetic Spanish with, but I'm always the only gaijin around.

You can get Inca Kola, the famous soft drink from Peru, in Japan.

The Age Perception Gap Between East and West

When the cute-as-a-button Aki Hoshino tried to enter a casino in Macau the other day, she suddenly found herself forbidden from doing so by the staff. The reason was supposedly that they thought the famous gravure idol -- that's a made-in-Japan French word which means a model in a sexy bikini -- was under the age of 18 and thus forbidden from entering the casino premises by law, so they blocked the door to keep her out. It seems hard to believe that a 32-year-old woman could be mistaken for a minor, but I'm inclined to believe it. I remember shopping in America with a former student who was 24 at the time, and when she pulled out her credit card to make a purchase, the clerk said, "Sorry little girl, you can't use a credit card here." It seemed that to his eyes, this average Japanese girl in her 20s seemed no older than a teenager. The phenomenon of being unable to accurately assess age between East and West goes both ways, and my wife will often snort with laughter at actors portraying high school-age students on TV, yet who look to her eyes like they're in their mid 30's or higher.

Google Touches a Cultural Nerve

Google has revolutionized the world, adding ten points to the collective IQ of humanity by allowing us to summon up the information we need quickly and efficiently. When the company added a cool feature to view classic maps with its Google Earth software, it faced a backlash from some users, as the maps in question show areas of Japanese cities where Japan's lowest caste used to live. Since the days of Hideyoshi Toyotomi, the infamous almost-Shogun who started out as a peasant farmer yet became the most powerful man in the country, Japanese society had been divided into four sections: samurai warriors, farmers, artisans and merchants. (The merchants were supposedly on the bottom, but since they leant money to everyone else they were actually quite powerful.) There was one more class of people so low they didn't even merit inclusion in this social system, called the burakumin, who did "unclean" jobs like tanning leather and cremating the dead. (Similar classes of outcasts existed in other Buddhist countries, such as Korea to Thailand.) Today the subject is a huge taboo, almost never discussed openly, and using the old burakumin system to discriminate against people is forbidden under article 11 of the Japanese constitution. I was interested to see that, although the Google issue has been widely reported on by the International press and the blogosphere, it's been ignored by the domestic masu-komi, as the news media here is called (from "mass communications"). None of the Japanese staff of J-List had even heard about it until I told them.

Google goofed by using maps that reveal the secrets of the past.

Suki: All About the Word "Like"

If you watch anime in Japanese at all, one word you will probably become aware of quickly is suki which means "like," usually pronounced quickly so that it sounds like "ski." This compels all students of the language to say sukii ga suki! (I like skiing!) as soon as they learn the word since it sounds funny to the ear. The proper usage would be something like watashi wa sushi ga suki desu, literally "as for sushi, I like it," but since the Japanese love to omit words, a more common phrase would be just sushi ga suki, "[I] like sushi," since the subject is generally understood. When one person confesses their feelings for another, suki desu is what they'll probably say, although this is actually using the word for "like" rather than "love"; in at least one manga I can think of, a character had to revert to English -- "Like or love?" -- to get around the vagueness that seems built into the Japanese language. A variation of suki ("like") is dai-suki ("big-like"), usually said by a cute female anime character before they glomp a male character violently in a big bear-hug.

In the manga ending to Kimagure Orange Road, Madoka has to ask for clarification: "Like, or Love?"

Japan, where Gender Surprises Are Commonplace

Getting into anime means having your horizons broadened, learning about strange and new concepts like senpai and kohai (senior/junior in a school or organization), something that doesn't exist in English. It also means getting used to some gender-related surprises, thanks to the extensive Japanese tradition of stories involving males assuming female roles or vice-versa. Appreciating the comedy and/or drama of mixed-up gender roles goes back very far, to the kabuki plays of the Edo Period in which extremely talented male actors would fill female roles, or the Takarazuka Revue, the all-female troupe that's put on on a variety of shows with women expertly playing male roles since 1913. Anime is rife with stories that break gender rules, from the classic Rose of Versailles, which follows Lady Oscar, raised as a boy, throughout the events of the French Revolution, or the Rumiko Takahashi classic Ranma 1/2, about a boy cursed to change into a girl whenever he gets wet, usually with hilarious results. Even the dating-sim games we've been involved with have been known to bend a gender or two, such as the X-Change series. Perhaps the highest expression of the mixing-up of gender roles is Maria Holic, centered around a boy who dresses up as a girl to attend a prestigious Catholic school at the behest of an eccentric grandmother.

Maria Holic, the pinnacle of the Japanese tradition of gender-mashing.

J-List Special Sale Continues!

J-List is continuing our special End of Fiscal Year for another month, since we'd much rather sell the excellent bento, snack, anime figure, plush toy and other products to you rather than count it during inventory day. For every $100 you spend on cool products from Japan, we'll give you a gift coupon for $5, which gives you quite a nice excuse to add another few packs of Black Black Caffeine Gum (or whatever) to your shopping cart if you're near the next $100 point. Coupons can be combined and they never expire. What great products can J-List send you today?

The Nice Guy of Japan's Entertainment World Has a Bad Month

Singer, comedian and all-around nice guy Tsuyoshi Kusanagi has been a fixture on Japanese TV for the past two decades as a member of the popular group SMAP, appearing in many drama and variety shows and even learning Korean so he could be a bridge of comedy between Japan and South Korea. Given his squeaky-clean image, fans were shocked when was arrested for public nudity at 3 am in a park in Tokyo a few weeks ago. He'd been drinking heavily and had apparently thought he was at home, as his clothes were removed and folded neatly beside a bush. His arrest caused shockwaves in the Japanese entertainment world, and got the poor guy yanked from some high-profile advertising contracts as the media engaged in an unprecidented feeding frenzy. Happily, Tokyo prosecutors have stated that they won't be "sending the documents" (a Japanese idiom that means to officially file charges) against the singer, mainly because he'd shown remorse and reflection for what he'd done. While his future career is still up in the air, some years ago another SMAP member got in trouble for running away from a police officer who was trying to give him a parking ticket, injuring the officer, which got him banned from the group for six months. Hopefully Tsuyoshi will be able to get back to work soon.

The ii hito (nice guy) of Japan's "talent" world got in trouble after drinking too much.

John Manjiro, the First Japanese Man in America

The first Japanese person to set foot on American soil was Manjiro Nakahama, a 14-year-old fisherman who was rescued in 1841 by an American whaling vessel and brought to the U.S., where he received a full education in English. This was during the era of sakoku ("chained country"), when Japan was officially shut off from contact from the outside world except for a single Dutch trading outpost in Nagasaki, and it was death for a Japanese person to travel abroad or have contact with foreigners. After 12 years of living outside Japan, "John" Manjiro went home, determined to try to convince his country to end its isolationist policy. When Admiral Perry's Black Ships arrived in 1853, John Manjiro became an important figure, acting as translator and interpreter between the two parties and communicating what he'd seen in the U.S. to the Shogunate, including American ideals like on democracy. He went on to teach English, mathematics and ocean navigation, and was a major inspiration to future reformers like Ryoma Sakamoto, the "Che Guevara" of the Meiji Restoration. His contribution to the positive relationship between the U.S. and Japan in those early days can't be overrated. I read recently that the home he lived in in Fairhaven, Mass., will be opening as a museum in honor of the first Japanese to live in America, on May 7. If you're in the area, go check it out!

John Manjiro is the first Japanese to live in the U.S., and was an important bridge between the two countries.

Happy Ramune Day

Today is Ramune Day, marking the 137th anniversary of the famous Japanese soft drink's manufacture in Japan. A carbonated beverage with a lemon-lime taste, Ramune is fun to drink because of the glass ball at the top, which closes if you try to swig it too fast. While a fun novelty now, using a glass ball to seal in carbonation was quite high tech back when it was invented by British engineer Hiram Codd in 1872, quickly spreading to Japan through traders. Originally a corruption of the English word "lemonade," Ramune was a favorite of sailors in the Imperial Navy during World War II, and is closely associated with summer festivals today. The sign of a Ramune bottle is sure to cause Japanese to exclaim natsukashii! (nots-ka-SHEE), meaning "nostalgic," and I've known many Japanese to fondly tell me of the days when they were so poor all they had to play with were the glass marbles from Ramune bottles, which makes me wonder if this isn't some kind of shared group memory or something. The Ramune brand isn't owned by any one company but (like the Kewpie Doll) is generic, manufactured by several different bottlers throughout Japan. While we don't sell Ramune itself (too difficult to ship glass bottles internationally), J-List has dozens of great Ramune-themed items, from our logo T-shirt to delicious snacks and gum, and even the fun Ramune-scented parody pen.

Ramune is a popular icon of the past in Japan, and for us gaijin, of how fun and wacky Japan can be.

The Ancient Art of Speaking a Foreign Language While Inebriated

Back in my college days at SDSU we had a "Japan-America Friendship Club" that would organize events like beach side bonfires attended by the ESL students from Japan and gaijin who were trying to learn Japanese. It was at events like these that I learned the ancient art of speaking a foreign language while mildly inebriated, which allows you to communicate significantly better than you otherwise would, at least until you pass out. It's as if there's a barrier in the mind that's always trying to keep you from making a fool of yourself, which gets deactivated when you have a beer or two. Of course, the benefits of alcohol on foreign language ability are as fleeting as cherry blossoms in the spring, and you can quickly find things going in the opposite direction if you're not careful. Happily, the Japanese have another tradition I've been known to make use of from time to time: whatever a person says or does while under the influence is generally forgotten about and ignored forever. Isn't this country great?

Alcohol can help your Japanese-speaking ability...and then harm it.

The Socio-Fashion Phenomenon Known as Gal-Mama

Whenever I go to Tokyo, I start to pay more attention to my surroundings when the train hits Omiya, a large city on the outskirts of the sprawling capital. This is the point that all the Japanese females around me start to become extremely fashionable, with expensive name-brand clothes, tall leather boots, expertly styled hair and a general air of elegance I've found nowhere else in the world. While New York or Paris might be ahead of Japan when it comes to setting worldwide fashion trends, I don't believe there's anyplace where females spend more energy on looking oshare (oh-SHA-reh), the catch-all term for being stylishly dressed. One of the most enigmatic groups in Tokyo's fashion world are the gyaru, or "gals," the young women in Shibuya or Harajuku who feel compelled to place fashion before all else. This general social trend has changed and morphed many times, starting out with the Amullers who imitated popular singer Amuro Namie, moving through ganguro or "black face" girls who spent hours at tanning salons, the older and more sophisticated one-gyaru, and finally the current age-jo (ah-gay-joh), named after a butterfly called ageha that's become the symbol of their generation. I'm extremely interested in the socio-fashion phenomenon known as gyaru mama, essentially extremely stylish girls who have gotten pregnant and become mothers, but since they're not willing to relinquish their love of beautiful clothes and make-up, they share this world with their children. It's quite interesting to see these girls, wearing the most flamboyant outfits while they push their baby carriages, and I can tell it really takes an inner strength to resist the never ending pressure from society at large to conform. If you're interested in the Japanese fashion world, be sure and browse the magazines like Egg and FRUiTs and S Cawaii, available either as revolving subscriptions or as single issues.

A Golden Week to Remember

It's shaping up to be a Golden Week to remember here in Japan, as hundreds of thousands of Japanese make use of the extended holiday period to travel to exotic destinations like Guam, Hawaii, Australia or California. Fears of the "new-type influenza virus" (as it's being officially referred in the news) will certainly make things more interesting when they all come home, and Narita Airport is on its highest state of alert, scanning returning passengers with special cameras that show body temperature in case anyone gets infected abroad. There were two reported cases of the new virus here in Japan, but happily both turned out to be the more conventional Hong Kong strain -- whew. The Japanese are already quite at home wearing surgical-style health masks whenever they feel under the weather or during hayfever season, and these masks are even more common nowadays. Anyway, we hope you all have a safe and enjoyable Golden Week, wherever you are in the world!

Mask-sporting Japanese tourists head overseas. Glad I'm not among them.

Hey gaijin! You are "good head"

I've written about how speaking a foreign language requires a special "other" sense, which the Japanese call kan (kahn). If you are kan ga ii (having a good sense about abstract things) you might be able to figure out that someone who compliments you by saying you are "good head" is probably telling you you're smart, since atama ga ii (good head) is how you express intelligence in Japanese. But while a big part of interacting with people from other language groups means understanding what they're saying to you even if it's not communicated clearly -- like when my wife asked for "gross lipstick" for Christmas, meaning gloss -- there are times when you need to get meaning across to others. When my mother was visiting from the U.S., I left her alone with my kids as much as possible so they could have lots of time practicing their English with her. (Apparently I register as a Japanese person to them, since they know I speak Japanese, and they speak almost no English when I'm in the room.) My daughter was saying something about how much fun she'd had at Sea World in San Diego the previous summer, but she couldn't remember the English word for the animals she'd seen. So she used her imagination, flapping her hands together like flippers and barking like a seal until my mother knew what she was talking about.

In other news, did you know that the word for brains in Japanese is noh-miso, lit. the "miso paste of the brain"?

What's better than making an order for some great bento, J-snack, anime or traditional items from J-List? Getting a free give back in return, which is what you get during our "End of Fiscal Year" special sale. For every $100 you spend, we'll give you a cool gift code for $5 to use with your next purchase. Why not see what excellent products from Japan J-List has for you today?

Japan: Land of Exotic Desserts

Before I came to Japan, I fancied myself a bit of a dessert aficionado. Pumpkin pie with vanilla ice cream was one of my favorites, and I've always had a soft spot for dipped chocolate soft-serve ice cream from Dairy Queen. I learned how much I'd been missing when I got here, though, as I was introduced to a world of amazing sweets from all over the world. The Japanese have a long history of taking ideas from the outside and improving on them, and many of the exotic desserts found here were brought over during the Meiji Period, like the dreamy Japanese-style custard-filled cream puffs called shu cream, pronounced just like the stuff you clean your shoes with (from the French chou a la creme), which naturally come in Hello Kitty and Totoro-shaped variations, too. Another French dessert the Japanese have embraced are crepes, and my kids have an amazing ability for knowing where the nearest crepe vendor is so they can beg me to buy them the strawberry and whipped cream-filled pastries. While some sweets were imported so long ago they seem uniquely Japanese now, such as the 400-year old konpeito candies and famous Castella sponge cakes from Nagasaki, some are more recent imports, like Nata de Coco, a dessert from the Philippines that's eaten in yogurt. You can often see the exotic side to Japanese desserts in the snacks we sell through the site, like the smash hit of the season, Tiramisu Kit Kat (which will be disappearing from the site soon, fair warning). One side benefit to living in Japan is learning to appreciate that a very small yet very delicious food is superior to something mass-produced and served in large servings.

The Japanese love crafting delicious desserts as much as I love eating them.

Foreigners and the Japanese

The most common word for "foreigner" in Japanese is gaijin, written with the characters for outside + person, although since this word has a slightly negative connotation you'll generally hear the softer-sounding gaikokujin -- outside-country-person -- spoken on the news. Foreigners serve many purposes here, teaching English or translating or working as fashion models or manufacturing goods in factories. Since native English speakers usually work as ESL teachers, the first impression most nihonjin have of non-Japanese is the English teacher who taught him to say "apple" and "banana." To the Japanese, we foreigners often come across as overly outgoing, and very emotional, always expressing our joy or dislike on the surface rather than holding it inside, as is more common here. That's part of the general character of gaijin, though, and if we weren't getting excited and going on about something, they'd probably ask us what was wrong. The Japanese have become quite comfortable with the fact that many gaijin are advanced anime otaku, and are no longer very surprised when they encounter a foreign visitor with extensive knowledge about obscure anime and manga.

Native English teachers provide the first impression of gaijin to most Japanese, and yes, this guy looks creepy

Fun with Japanese Sound Words

One aspect of the Japanese language that's fun to study is onomatopoeia, the words we use to describe the sounds all around us. Naturally, the Japanese have assigned unique words to the physical sounds in their world, for example a dog says wan wan! to the Japanese but woof woof! to us. Some other examples of these sound words are "twinkle twinkle" (kira kira), "drip drop" (potsun potsun) and the sound of rain pouring down (zaa zaa). Some of the sounds they think up can seem quite strange. For example, the "sound" of eyes looking left and right is kyoro kyoro, as in the popular line of bento boxes we sell, which is not something any English speaker would think a sound was needed for. The sound of snow falling has a word, too, shin shin (pronounced "sheen sheen"), which summons up pleasant images of whiteness outside a frosty window. There is a "sound of silence" in Japanese, which is shiiin ("sheen," with a lengthened vowel). When I make a joke that my kids don't think is funny, they'll usually make this sound to highlight how bad my joke was.

The many sound words used in Japanese are fun to learn.

Buddhism vs Shinto

There are many things that American houses have which their Japanese counterparts lack, and vice-versa. A Japanese home will generally have a recessed area by the front door for people to leave their shoes, hardwood floors with unusually steep stairs, and at least one washitsu or "Japanese room" with traditional tatami mats and paper doors and other cool things like that. Homes in America are different, with big ovens for baking (very rare in Japan), a garbage disposal for getting rid of uneaten food (not allowed here because rice would gum up the pipes), and central heating (unthinkable in this country where rooms are heated one at a time). Another thing you'll find in Japanese homes but not in most American ones is a butsudan (boo-tsoo-dahn), or Buddhist Altar, the centerpiece of Japanese family life, and afterlife, if you will. Every morning, my mother-in-law takes the first bowl of rice out of the rice cooker and offers it at the altar along with three sticks of incense, so so her mother and father know they're not forgotten. Strictly speaking, only the head of a household will have one of these altars; other family members such as children who have moved out will return to their "base home" to participate in family events at various times during the year, which binds the family together in ways that are difficult for Westerners to comprehend. To my unfamiliar eyes, the Buddhist altar in my house is very similar to the Ark of the Covenant from Raiders of the Lost Ark, a radio for talking with one's dead ancestors.

While Buddhist icons like temples or home altars focus attention on those who have gone on ahead, the other side of Japanese religious imagery is Shinto, which celebrates kami or spirits in natural objects like a mountain or a stream. While the austere imagery of Buddhism provides comfort during times of sadness such as funerals, Shinto ceremonies are happy and life-affirming: weddings, naming a new baby, breaking ground on a house to be built, praying for good luck on the New Year or carrying a mikoshi, a kind of portable shrine, around at the summer festivals. For cultural reasons that I can't quite understand, it's much more common for those of us who became interested in Japan through its popular culture to be more familiar with Shinto imagery than Buddhist. Whether you're talking about the manga stories of Rumiko Takahashi or watching the many anime characters who wear the now-famous garb of a Miko-san (Shrine Maiden), it's far more common for the themes found in Shinto to find their way to the minds of outsiders like us than Buddhist imagery. I wonder why that is?

A Buddhist Altar is a radio for talking with one's ancestors; some otaku have fun carrying a mikoshi in Akiba.

Government Stimulus, or, How To Take Six Months To Distribute $120 To People

Japan's export-driven economy is in the doldrums because of the recession, but don't worry -- the Japanese government is ready to help again, this time with its new "fixed-amount stimulus package" for all taxpayers, including legally registered gaijin like me (yay). Although the paltry $120 per adult doesn't go very far, families also get $200 per child, so the overall amount wasn't too bad. Since elderly Japanese are notoriously susceptible to "it's me, it's me"-type frauds in which a stranger calls up pretending to be a son or grandson in dire need of a quick $30,000 to get out of some trouble, the government is running advertisements warning people about the potential for stimulus-related shenanigans. "No one from the government will ever ask to borrow your ATM card or bank passbook, or require that you surrender any private personal information," say the ads. I hope they're effective, but considering that there were more than 17,000 reported cases of bank fraud last year, I'm sure some people will get duped.

The Japanese government is taking steps to guard against stimulus-related fraud.

Golden Week 2009

It's nearly time for Japan's Golden Week, a semi-accidental clustering of holidays that usually fall near each other, which the Japanese government has latched onto as a great way to stimulate the economy, since people are theoretically spending more money when doing leisure activities with family than while at work. The holidays are Showa Day on April 29, the birthday of the old Emperor; Constitution Day on May 3, commemorating Japan's postwar constitution; Green Day on May 4, a day to celebrate nature; and Children's Day on May 5. While Golden Week is a nice break from the daily grind, it's all but useless as a holiday, since the other 126,999,999 Japanese in the country also have the week off, and trying to drive anywhere is a fool's errand. This year will be especially insane thanks to a new economic stimulus plan enacted by the Japanese government which lets people drive anywhere on Japan's highways for a flat rate of $10, a big reduction from the $25 it used to take me to drive 100 km into Tokyo, or the cool $130 I'd have to part with to take a trip to, say, Osaka. The only thing worse than leaving the Tokyo area during Golden Week is coming back, and the "return rush" traffic jam that happens the day before the holidays are over is not something I want to contemplate.

The rush to return to Tokyo after Golden Week is terrible to even think about.

The J-List Website is Back Up

First, we had server issue that made it impossible to access the site for several hours -- very sorry for the inconvenience. The problem has been taken care of, and J-List is up and ready to serve you now! Since it was a DDOS attack, we had to block certain IP ranges, mostly in Korea and Russia, where these bad computers seem to be located. If you find that you can't access the site for any reason, contact us and we'll fix it for you.

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.