My Favorite Thing About Japan: Trains

One of my favorite things about Japan are the trains. Perhaps it's because I'm from a country where "rail life" isn't that big a part of the culture, especially on the West Coast, but I've always been quite taken with the convenience and aesthetic beauty of Japan's trains. It's quite common for various train lines in Japan to become famous around the country, like the Yamanote Line that runs in a loop around Tokyo, or the Arashiyama Line that goes through some of the most beautiful parts of Kyoto. Currently I'm watching an anime called Aoi Hana (English title "Sweet Blue Flowers"), an amazing story about yuri -- beautifully expressed love between females -- and the 19th century novel Wuthering Heights, of all things. The show is set in the Kamakura area south of Yokohama, and prominently features the Enoshima Electric Railway, a quaint single-track train line that seems to transport you back in time to a simpler era. The already beautiful characters in the anime are made even more interesting thanks to the imagery of this iconic train.

If you want a really special Japanese train experience, ride the Enoden.

The Japanese Peace Sign

Over the weekend I went to my daughter's annual school bazaar, which means that my life became a "school festival" episode again. At these festivals, each class or school club puts on different events for visitors, like a haunted house or a maid cafe or a food stand selling yakisoba noodles. One group of girls had done an especially good job setting up a hot dog stand with a parody of the Subway logo that I thought looked cool, so I got out my camera out to take a picture. Almost immediately, the girls struck that most Japanese of poses, flashing the "peace" sign at me as they prepared to have their picture taken. While I'd always assumed the "V" for victory gesture had entered the Japanese popular culture as a result of the occupation of Japan by the Allied soldiers, perhaps as some sort of cultural exchange negotiated between the Sanrio company and Winston Churchill, it seems to be a more recent phenomenon. According to one theory, U.S. figure skater Janet Lynn came to skate in the 1972 Sapporo Olympics and fell on her butt, and when she got up, she made a cute "peace" sign to the Japanese cameras. This was supposedly the moment when the gesture entered the Japanese DNA, and why you can't take a picture of a Japanese person today without them making the "V" sign.

The "peace" sign is a very Japanese gesture to make.

Country Names in Kanji?

Another interesting aspect of Japanese is that there's not just one writing system, but four -- hiragana for fundamental grammar, katakana for expressing foreign loan words and place names, kanji for organizing information into efficient chunks, plus romaji or the Roman alphabet, which is used in various unofficial ways. While the "correct" way to write, say, Russia or Spain or Germany would be to use the katakana syllabery, it wasn't so long ago that each country had an excruciatingly complex name in kanji, written with characters that phonetically represented that country's name. Nowadays each of these archaic names still exist but have been reduced to a single character, which has the benefit of being able to express a concept like "three-way talks between the United States, England and Russia" with just five short characters, a common form of abbreviation used in newspaper headlines. Incidentally, we've gotten in some cool T-shirts featuring the USA and France written in their kanji names, if you like the way the characters look.

Uniqueness Features of the Japanese Language

Each language has various unique features. One of the interesting aspects of Japanese is that there are multiple first- and second-person pronouns that people can use, depending on their personality. For example, a man might use watakushi for a job interview, boku for casual speaking and the more "manly" ore (oh-reh) if he's talking with his male friends, while the average girl would use watashi in neutral settings, atashi if speaking to female friends or her boyfriend, or boku if she were a bit of a tomboy. In the dating-sim Love Plus (which I am still playing...just have one more girl to get...) one of the first choices you make in the game is whether to use the more polite but potentially weak-sounding boku or the rougher but potentially rude ore when referring to yourself, which subtly changes how the girls in the game respond to you. One of the three girls you can interact with is Rinka, a classic tsundere, a word which comes from tsun-tsun (angry, proud) and dere-dere (lovestruck). You can tell you're getting somewhere with the girl when she starts fumblingly referring to herself with the feminine word atashi. Isn't it fun to learn about Japan through its popular culture?

The pronouns a person uses can tell you lot about their character.

October in Japan

October is here, and that means a few things in Japan. First of all, it's the designated time for koromo-gae or "clothes-changing," when everyone in the country suddenly switches from summer to winter mode, including every student changing from summer to winter school uniform on the same day, from Okinawa to Hokkaido. As a gaijin -- which literally means "outsider" after all -- I could never get into this seasonal rhythm and would wear shorts and short-sleeved well into November (crazy rebel that I am) causing everyone around me to constantly ask me if I was cold no matter what the temperature actually was. October is the mirror of April, the season of beautiful cherry blossoms, and in this month you can enjoy koyo ("crimson leaves") as the trees gradually change color. It's also the month for tsukimi, or moon-viewing, which has been a good excuse to eat Chinese dumplings and drink sake while you take in the beauty of the full moon ever since the Heian Period (794-1185). October 3rd is the most popular time for moon-viewing, called juugo-ya, which is incidentally the night Princess Kaguya returned to her home in the Kingdom of the Moon in the classic Japanese fairy tale The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, which served as the basis for the film E.T.

October 1st is the day to change from summer to winter clothes.

Japanese Pronunciation Guide 2009

It's time for another installment of Peter's Japanese Pronunciation Guide. First, understand that Japanese is a syllabic language, meaning that sounds always come in consonant + vowel syllable pairs (e.g. ka, ki, ku, ke, or ko, never just a "k" sound by itself), or as a single vowel syllable. The exception is the letter "n," the only consonant that can appear by itself, without which we wouldn't have the word "ramen" (and that would be a travesty). Vowels are easy as pie in Japanese -- there are only five, identical to the ones in Spanish. They are:

A - "ah" rhyming with "fall"
I - "ee" rhyming with "feel"
U - "oo" rhyming with "fool"
E - "eh" rhyming with "let"
O - "oh" rhyming with "go"

When you see a word like origami, just break it into syllable-sized chunks, pronouncing all the letters and squeezing it into the "Japanese phonetic grid": oh-ree-gah-mee. One reason why I always recommend people learn Japanese using hiragana as a base (as in the White Rabbit and Genki products) rather than learning with Romanized Japanese (written in the Roman alphabet) is that the rules of English pronunciation can get in your way, making you think that the third syllable of a name like Tomoe is a "silent e" when it should be in fact pronounced normally. Other things to keep in mind: a "g" sound is always hard (as in go), never soft (as in giraffe). Also, the "R" line of sounds (ra-ri-ru-re-ro) can be challenging at first, since they're closer to "L" or "D" than "R," so that the word ramen is about 80% of the way to "lamen," pronunciation-wise. Remember that J-List has many cool Japanese study products, if you want to give it a try.

The hiragana system is the basis of every sound made in Japanese.

Cultural Lessons from Anime, or, Would You Like Some French Fries?

It's always fun to observe the little bits of Japanese culture that are communicated through anime. I was re-watching the moe anime K-On! the other day, and I caught an interesting gesture that seemed to speak volumes about Japan's group-oriented society. Tsumugi had just joined the keion-bu (light music club) and was eating in a fast food restaurant with her new club members. As the other girls talked about how to find the fourth member they needed to keep their club from being closed, Mugi (who has some awesome eyebrows, let me tell you) picks up her "potato" (french fries) and adds them to the pile Mio and Ritsu are eating from. It's the ultimate gesture of group membership, mingling one's food with your new friends so you can all eat on equal terms, and it communicates a lot of information about what kind of girl Tsumugi is to viewers. I'd probably have hoarded all my fries, and when they were gone I'd steal from the others...

Mugi-chan shares her french fries with her friends as a gesture of group membership.

Home is Where Your Liquor Shop Is

I received a request to talk about my house in Japan by a Twitter reader, so I thought I'd oblige. It's common in space-challenged Japan for businesses to be incorporated into residences, and the front of my house is occupied by the small liquor shop that my wife's parents operate, which has its benefits, as you can imagine. While the idea of living with one's parents all your life isn't one everyone would be cool with, it's very common in Japan, where the oldest son or daughter (or in my wife's case, the only child) is expected to take over the family home, and by extension, the family grave. While many Japanese seem to enjoy tearing down their homes and re-building them from scratch every 20 years or so, we never did this, and as a result our house is an interesting hodge-podge of eras, originally built in the 1970s, with a second story added when my wife and I got married (plus flushing toilets, please don't forger those), with various changes made over the years as our family grew. In most countries, the value of the house generally goes up -- the current economic situation notwithstanding -- so when you make a change like redoing a bathroom, you take in account how it will affect the price of your home. In Japan, though, almost no one would deign to live in a "used" house, so the value of homes is essentially zero, which means you never need to stress out about your home's value when "reforming" your home.

(Note, this isn't my liquor shop. I couldn't take any pictures since it's dark here already when I wrote this, but I'll post some if there's interest)

Many shops in Japan have houses built into them.

Love Plus Pocky

I spent my weekend in a Japanese high school, dating three different girls in Love Plus, the awesome interactive dating-sim for the Nintendo DS that we sell. The game system is pretty innovative: each day, you decide what area of your character to improve, practicing sports, studying, working at a part-time job and so on, doing things that will make the girl you're pursuing like you more. Eventually you'll accumulate enough "boyfriend points" to make her confess her love for you. Once one of the girls becomes your girlfriend, you can interact with her throughout the year as if she were real, sending her emails and going through each season with her. Best of all, there are "touch events": while on a date, you can check to make sure no one is looking then touch her hair to make her smile, and maybe even earn a kiss. If you want to give the game a try, we've got it in stock, or if you prefer our traditional line of English-translated line of excellent dating-sims/H-games, we've got those too.

J-List is happy to announce the return of Pocky and Japan Kit Kat to our website! The summer in Japan so so hot that every year, we're forced to remove all chocolate snacks from the site to keep it from turning into so much Meltykiss, but now that it's started to cool off, we've brought all your favorite chocolate treats back. Why not browse them all now?

English as Torture for Japanese ESL Learners

The next time you utter the phrase "walk to work," you've just done something that's very difficult for Japanese ESL learners. English is an especially rich language with a bazillion sounds borrowed from many sources, and it can be really difficult for phonetically-challenged Japanese speakers to master these strange sounds. Words like "walk" and "work" may seem simple to you or me, but rendered into katakana they sound nearly the same, making it hard for the poor nihonjin to keep them straight. Japanese is famous for lacking separate concepts of "L" and "R," which creates a world of problems with words like right and light. If you were to purchase the awesome Japanese baggy Loose Socks that J-List sells, you'd see the mysterious phrase "Flesh Agers" written on the tag, which we're pretty sure describe girls who are enjoying their "fresh age" (which is only slightly more comprehensible). From the Japanese point of view, English just seems needlessly complex. For example, the first syllable of mashed potatoes, mushroom and marshmallow are all identical when reduced to the Japanese syllabery system, and if you tried to teach these differences to ESL students they'd probably run screaming from the room faster than you could say "crash, clash, crush." There are other phonetic land-mines built in Japanese: for example the syllable si (as in the word sit) is pronounced shi, creating a huge potential for problems when inviting someone to sit in your living room.

Are you a "Flesh Ager"? Good, if so.

Famous in Japan?

The other day I was watching a show about strange and unique world records people had achieved, and there was a segment featuring Takeru Kobayashi, the renowned competitive eater who won the World Hamburger Eating title over the weekend (congratulations!). It was cool to see him getting some love from Japanese television, since he's almost completely unknown here in Japan for some reason, although he has lots of fans outside of Japan. To many who grew up in the Nintendo era, Mario and Donkey Kong creator Shigeru Miyamoto is a familiar icon, yet he's almost completely unknown over here, and even J-List's Yasu, a hardcore old-school gamer with a large collection of classic NES game cartridges, did not know his name or face since he's not part of the popular culture here. Some other examples of Japanese whose stature is larger outside of Japan than in include Takashi Murakami, the unique artist who has brought his colorful anime-influenced themes to the international design world; Heroes star and super-geek Masi Oka; artist Yoshitomo Nara; and the Japanese band Shonen Knife.

He created some of Japan's most famous cultural icons, but Miyamoto-san is unknown here.

Happy "Chicken Day" from Japan

Today is the 28th, which I happen to remember has been designated Chicken Day by the Japan Poultry Council since 1978, due to the fact that the Japanese word for chicken (niwatori) can be expressed phonetically using the number 28. KFC Japan has latched on to this idea and offers a discounted "Chicken Day Set" every month. There's a whole universe of these odd-but-fun unofficial days, like Railroad Day (Oct. 14), commemorating the opening of the first rail line in Japan, Bread Day (April 12) which marks the introduction of Western bread here, or Pocky Day, which the Glico Corporation has designated as November 11, since 11/11 looks like four Pocky sticks waiting to be munched on. My daughter, who amuses herself for hours on end looking at pictures of cats on the Internet, recently told me that February 22nd is "Cat Day" since the number 2 in Japanese is ni which stands for the nyan-nyan-nyan sound that cats make.

Happy Chicken Day from KFC Japan. "Donald McDonald" is not happy.

Public Urination and Other Surprises in Japan

Having lived in Japan since the first Bush presidency, I generally feel like I've gotten used to the place..and yet, the country has brought me many moments of confusion over the years. Like the first time I saw a Japanese salaryman wearing an expertly tailored suit riding a bicycle whole holding an umbrella with one hand, which is something you just don't see back home. Or that first time eating ikizukuri, which is sashimi that's so fresh, it was cut off while the fish was still alive and moving. Outside of Japanese cities it's quite common for men to relieve themselves wherever it suits them, and it's such a problem you can see signs that say "It is forbidden to urinate here" in front of people's houses, which was certainly a surprise to see. Another thing that made me do a double-take was the common practice of shops stacking their merchandise out in front of the shop, where anyone could presumably make off with it...although apparently no one does. The other day I went to the local supermarket to pick up some food items my wife needed, and I noticed a cute girl handing out samples in one aisle, so I went over. The samples were little cups of beer, which seemed an odd thing to be giving away freely to customers who were going to be driving home in their cars soon. I'm pretty sure they don't do that in the U.S.

Living in Japan means not being surprised at seeing this all the time.

Awesome Anime Figures @ J-List

Remember, J-List sells really cute pre-painted anime figures direct from Japan, including popular lines like Nendoroid and Figma and Revoltech, as well as incredibly detailed scale versions of your favorite anime characters recreated in PVC. Since the Japanese are nothing if not creative, there's a category of anime figure called "cast off" featuring clothes that can be, well, cast off, allowing you to display the figure any way you like. Click here to browse all the gorgeous anime figures we have in stock, or here to see the top 50 figures over the past week.

J-List will be attending the first-annual Long Beach Comic Con, a new convention hend Oct 2-4 that looks like it's going to be loads of fun, from the first-ever appearance of Berkeley Breathed to the Robot Chicken staff, plus (heh). Our staff be in booth 117, so if you're going to be at the show, come say hi!

Dams, Damn Dams and the Politicians Who Cancel Them

It seems that whenever there's a dust-up about pork-barrel construction projects in Japan, my home prefecture of Gunma is at the center of the controversy. It happened a couple years ago when the then-mayor of our city (who happened to live next door to us) decided that what we needed was a shiny new Ferris Wheel -- despite the fact that we already have a perfectly good one -- and naturally he and his friends who also happened to own construction companies would profit from this new building project. This example of wasteful public works projects became national news, and we had camera crews at our house trying to ambush the mayor and interview him about the project, which was eventually cancelled. One of the issues in the recent election in which the former opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) ousted the long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) was unnecessary public spending, and the fight centered around the Yamba Dam Project. For the past 57 years the dam has been planned, and an entire generation of Japanese living in the villages that were to be submerged had been making preparations to relocate...although the new government has declared that the project would be ended, which is causing confusion and anger in the affected areas. Although the DPJ is acting like the decision to cancel the $9.9 billion project was made purely for fiscal reasons, there's little doubt politics are playing a role as well, since the dam just happens to be located in the district overseen by former Prime Ministers Obuchi and Yasuda, politicians who were arch rivals of the new administration.

Tthe Yamba Dam is a big point of debate in Japan today. This village is one of the proposed relocation sites.

Tokaido, the "Route 66" of Japan

When you take the train from Tokyo to Kyoto, the train line you use is the Tokaido Line. I've always liked this name because it recalls the original Tokaido ("eastern sea road"), the historic highway between Japan's official capitol of Kyoto and Edo, the seat of the Shogun's government. The official beginning of the Tokaido road (or end, depending on which way you're traveling) is in Nihonbashi, Tokyo, which is an interesting place to visit, filled with shops to explore and busy merchants selling wares. Happily, the Tokaido was an important subject for popular culture during the Edo Period, and there's an extensive amount of information detailing what travel was like on the "Route 66" of old Japan, including many ukiyoe woodblock paintings for us to enjoy now.

When you visit Kyoto on the Tokaido Line, you're traveling over history.

Re-Learning English Pronunciation

One odd thing about learning Japanese is getting used to revised versions of words from your native language. The Japanese import a lot of words from English, but they aren't always rendered with 100% phonetic accuracy due to limitations of the katakana sound system. Also, the longer a word has been in use, the more it will likely have changed into some unrecognizable form, like ramune, the famous lemon-lime drink which got its name from lemonade. The Japanese often use English words for happy, positive concepts, and one word they like is "healthy"...however since it's pronounced herushii, it took quite a while for my brain to get used to it. Another phrase that sounded weird at first is "thank you," pronounced san kyu, or the word "sexy," rendered as sekushii. A fairly common way to say "don't worry about it" is don-mai (DOHN-mai), which started out as "don't mind" back in the Showa Period, and if you want to surprise a Japanese person, try using this word with them. The most elementary English word of them all, the definite article "the," is yet another example of pronunciation that must be re-learned, and making one's brain accept za as correct was not easy. Of course, sometimes these "English" words sound strange because they're not English at all, like the word "theme" which comes out like teh-mah in Japanese, since it was imported from German (thema).

"Za Sale" is an advertising word thrown around a lot in Japan.

Japan and Foreigners

One interesting aspect of the Japanese is how concerned they are with how they appear to foreigners, especially from the U.S. and Europe. The other day I caught a show called "Cool Japan" which essentially consisted of a circle of gaijin from countries like America, Canada, Germany and China discussing how they perceived certain aspects of Japanese culture, in this case the extreme fashions that can be seen in Shibuya and Harajuku. During the show, a camera crew followed a man from Sweden and a woman from Russia as they walked around the more fashionable parts of Tokyo, giving their impressions of what they saw. "Why are you dressed up like this?" the woman asked a particularly interesting gyaru with overly tanned skin and blonde-dyed hair. "It's because I wanted to stand out and not be like everyone else," the girl replied, apparently oblivious to the fact that everyone around her was dressed in a similarly unique way. Later the foreigners learned about Tokyo's "Deco Boom" in which just about everything you can think of, from fingernails to cell phones to H1N1 health masks, are covered with lavish decorations. The show is interesting because it brings a lot of cross-understanding between foreigners and Japanese, and it also says a lot about how Japan wants to be viewed by the rest of the world (i.e. kakko ii, meaning cool or good style).

How does Shibuya fashion culture look to you? Japan wants to know.

Japanese Superstitions and Mt. Fear

Although the Japanese are a very level-headed people who generally have their feet firmly planted on the ground, they can also be quite superstitious. I'll regularly encounter odd (to me) Japanese beliefs in my daily life, like the other day when my daughter found a spider in her room and my wife warned us not to kill it because it was night, and it's bad luck to kill a spider at night. Or when someone sticks their chopsticks into their rice accidentally. When I planned my trip to Aomori Prefecture, I was going to take my son to both the eastern Tsugaru Peninsula, so famous in enka songs, and the facing Shimokita Peninsula, location of Mt. Osore-zan, a terrifying volcanic place with a name that literally means Mt. Fear. This unearthly spot has been revered for more than 1000 years, a place where blind shamen tell people's fortunes and women leave offerings at a very solemn shrine to babies miscarried before they could be born. When my mother-in-law heard I was planning to go, she got really animated and made me promise not to, so fearful was she that I would bring home some evil spirit or something. I'd been to the place before and I wanted to see Hirosaki with my son too, so we opted to go there and not bother with Mt. Fear.

Osore-zan is the gateway to hell in Japan, or something like that.

Zettai Ryoiki T-Shirts @ J-List

For more than a decade, J-List has sold a line of popular T-shirts with wacky anime and kanji designs, like our best-selling "Now Accepting Applications for a Japanese Girlfriend" T-shirt, or the currently popular Haruhi "No Normal Humans" design. Today we're posting a new T-shirt that's a tribute to one of the most popular genres in anime these days, called zettai ryoiki or "the Absolute Zone," which is the 3-cm space between the top of a girl's stockings and where her skirt begins. That little patch of visible skin is an important part of the design of certain anime characters, from Rin Tosaka in Fate/Stay Night to Taiga in Toradora! and if you're a fan of this unique aesthetic design element, we invite you to check out our new T-shirt!

Silver Week

Japan is currently enjoying a second "Golden Week" holiday this year, naturally called "Silver Week," thanks to three holidays -- Respect for the Aged Day, the Autumnal Equinox and a free-floating holiday that kicks in whenever holidays appear on either side of a normal work day -- arriving in the same week. It's a rare treat for the country that has many hoping the extra leisure time will deliver an economic shot in the arm for hotels and similar industries. So far, many Japanese do seem to be taking advantage of the opportunity to get some quality relaxing time in, which in the Tokyo area means the usual packed roads and trains as everyone tries to leave then return at the same time. Since today is Respect for the Aged Day, my kids are going to make a special dinner for Ojiichan and Obaachan (grandfather and grandmother).

Yay -- another Golden Week-style traffic jam out, then back, into Tokyo.

The Art of Apologizing in Japan

One thing about Japan: they are really are good at apologizing and showing reflection when they've done something wrong. When Alico Japan accidentally leaked sensitive customer data, they ran TV ads during prime time apologizing directly to their customers in the deepest possible way. Similarly, a big part of the reason SMAP member Kusanagi was able to return to work after his arrest for public nudity was that he showed true reflection to his fans over the embarrassment he'd caused everyone. But when actress/singer Noriko Sakai was released from prison last week after her arrest for stimulant use, she was criticized because she didn't look like she was truly sorry for her crimes, appearing in public wearing fashionable clothes and expertly-applied make-up rather than fitting the image of a repentant star who had made a mistake that everyone expected. "She's an actress, performing in a drama about a women who was arrested," one commentator said, "I thought she was going to sing for us, not issue a public apology." I'm a big fan of Noripi and hope she gets back on her feet after this unpleasantness.

Apologizing is a highly developed art form in Japan.

RIP Crayon Shinchan Creator Yoshito Usui

Tragedy has struck the manga world with the sad loss of Yoshito Usui, who died after falling a terrifying 300 feet off a cliff while hiking in the mountains in my home prefecture of Gunma. Usui is the creator of Crayon Shin-chan, the spirited kindergartner who is often called the Bart Simpson of Japan, and the manga-ka created comics featuring his trademark characters every month since 1990. Combining sharp-witted humor and interesting social commentary from the point-of-view of a five-year-old, Crayon Shin-chan won fans all over the world, from India and China to Spain and the Netherlands as well as the U.S. While I've enjoyed reading the series over the years, Crayon Shin-chan can be a challenge for parents, since kids love to copy his bad behavior, exposing their butts and calling their mothers by their first names, or asking embarrassing questions like, "Why does the box of tissues in Mom and Dad's room run out faster than in any other room in the house?" Mr. Usui's cause of death is not yet known. Although there was no suicide note or any direct evidence to believe the artist wanted to die, some of the themes in his manga had been causing some to wonder about his mental state, for example a story he drew in 2007 in which the fiancee of the teacher Ume Matsuzaka was killed in a terrorist act while overseas, forcing Matsuzaka to contemplate suicide herself.

The creator of Crayon Shin-chan will be missed by his many fans.

The Golden Rule of Japanese Society

If there's a Golden Rule to Japanese society, it's this: don't cause meiwaku (may-wah-ku), meaning inconvenience or bother, to others. Whether it's trying to keep from making too much noise and annoying your neighbors or avoiding using a cell phone on a crowded train, most Japanese do strive to avoid bothering others, which is something I really like about the country. Sometimes, of course, it can be difficult to keep from causing inconvenience, a fact I learned when I took the overnight bus to Aomori. As soon as the bus pulled out, the lights were switched off completely, and to my amazement everyone in the bus seemed to curl up and go to sleep. I certainly didn't want to destroy the wa around me by switching on my little light and getting some work done on my Macbook, but I wasn't about to go to sleep that early.

You've never had stress until you tried to make no sound and emit no light for 12 hours.

Other Stuff: Onigiri & Conventions

Onigiri (also called omusubi) are the "soul food" of Japan, rice balls that are eaten almost daily here, very similar to sandwiches in the West. Usually triangle shaped, they can in fact come in just about any shape you like, and the staff of J-List loves to find fun items that help you make, say, Pikachu or Hello Kitty shaped rice balls. Why not browse our selection of fun onigiri products now?

J-List will be attending the first-annual Long Beach Comic Con, a new convention that looks like it's going to be loads of fun, from the first-ever appearance of Berkeley Breathed to the Robot Chicken staff, plus (heh). Our staff be in booth 117, so if you're going to be at the show, come say hi!

Japan's General Motors: JAL

The General Motors of Japan, meaning the company that's come to represent the recession more than any other, is Japan Airlines (JAL), currently struggling with a massive debt and lagging operations as the weak economy keeps people from flying. Because the company is partially state-owned, it's going to prove a headache for the new government, although the newly appointed transport minister has already said that bankruptcy will not be considered. JAL certainly is a nice airline, and I like flying with them whenever I get the chance, but I'm pretty sure they have a ways to go when it comes to improving efficiency. When we flew down from Aomori to Tokyo we used JAL, and in the airport I happened to see two flight attendants standing in the lobby, holding little signs that advertised the benefits of signing up for a JAL frequent flyer card. Paying people to stand around and hold signs isn't that rare in Japan -- one of my wife's first jobs standing in the background at events holding a "no smoking" sign and smiling -- but the idea of these highly trained professional women being paid to do absolutely nothing seemed to speak volumes about the company. A decade ago Nissan had a similar problem, an odd psychological resistance to eliminating jobs that couldn't be supported by their business, and it took outside help in the form of Brazillian-French-Lebanese Carlos Ghosn to turn things around.

Struggling JAL is the poster-child of the recession in Japan.

Takarazuka: Girls Who Look Like Boys

It seems that every time I notice a really attractive Japanese actress on TV, like the talented Hitomi Kuroki, my wife tells me, "Yes, she was a Takarazuka performer, that's why she has a kind of power about her." Takarazuka is an all-female theatre troupe founded in 1914 that's kind of the female answer to Kabuki, the all-male theatre tradition that dates back to the Edo Period. In Takarazuka, all the performances are done by women, and the skill with which the male roles are performed is really amazing to see. Just as Kabuki deals with Japanese stories, Takarazuka gets its inspiration from the West, performing stories like Gone with the Wind, Casablanca and to the Rose of Versailles -- there's even a stage version of the Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney game ("Objection!"). To be a Takarazuka performer is a hard life, and those who succeed seem to have an aura of poise and grace around them, often going on to enjoy amazing careers. Another former Takarazuka being talked about these days is Miyuki Hatoyama, the wife of the new Prime Minister. (Yes, the one who insists she flew to Venus in a UFO.)

I'm fascinated by the enigmatic women of Takarazuka.

Additional Info on Tolls

I got some feedback on the free road post from a reader and thought I'd throw out some more information for any who are interested.

Basically, everyone dislikes having to pay to use the freeways, of course. Spending $25 to drive down to Tokyo is no fun, and spending $150 to go all the way up to Aomori would be equally bad. One of my thoughts though is, suddenly making this stable structure obsolete raises a ton of issues. Like, do you make the roads free for everyone, or just families? Do you do it all the time, or just on weekends, as the current "go anywhere for $10 on Sat-Sun and holidays" policy works.

How about for trucks that bring goods around the country, will they drive for free? If so, how will that effect the wholesale pricing structure of every company in Japan? When Yamato (the delivery company, not the battleship) delivers Totoro plush toys to J-List, we pay shipping, obviously. But what's to stop us from demanding that Yamato halve their shipping rates since the freeways no longer cost them as much? What about the few thousand employees work work to collect the tolls now, where will they go when they have no jobs? How many vacations will be cancelled ahead of time because everyone is so worried about the traffic jams that will clog every freeway? Everyone in Japan just shelled out $120 for these little ETC readers so they could get the $10 freeway discount, but now if they make all roads free, where do we apply for a refund? These are the kinds of things being discussed in the country these days.

I'm really torn between liking and hating the new Prime Minister. On the one hand, the old LDP was a joke, unable to bring about the slightest reforms and basically unable to lead without changing PM's every year, just about. (Aside, Japan has had 12 leaders since I came here in 1991, while the U.K. has had just three.) They were extremely wasteful, tearing up roads just to create jobs, damming every river in the country, and doing things like building a Shinkansen to Hokkaido despite the fact that airplanes are clearly more efficient than trains. Yet the new DPJ are so foolish, being so anti-business that they're going to do things like set arbitrary emissions reduction targets without even asking business leaders what they think is possible. And it's hilarious how they talk about the environment while basically giving everyone a reason to drive for free.

I feel sad for Japan, since I love the country so much is such a basket case. Hope things look better soon.

Politics Update from Japan

Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) leader Yukio Hatoyama is all over the news these days as he prepares to take over administration of the government after his party's landslide victory last month, creating what will be only the third cabinet not led by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) since 1955. It may be rough going, though, and already some of the DPJs's plans are facing difficulty, such as the proposal to make all of Japan's freeways "free." The idea is getting little support from local governments who depend on the income from tolls to build roads, and also from green-minded politicians who point out that encouraging people to drive more than they do will increase carbon emissions. Although Hatoyama has positioned his party as a down-to-Earth group focused on protecting the average voter, even going so far as to refuse to work with a well-known business organization (Keidanren) to avoid its influencing his government, he's not exactly the Japanese version of Joe Six-Pack. His party criticized the LDP for its dynasties of politicians -- all three of Japan's last three prime ministers are sons or grandsons of former prime ministers, a concept referred to as "thoroughbred" here -- yet Hatoyama is no different there, as his grandfather held the job back in the 1950s. I just hope Japan can get some actual leadership this time, since that's what Japan seems to be lacking in more than anything.

Japan might make its freeways truly "free," but what repercussions would there be?

Long and Short Vowels in Japanese

What a difference an elongated vowel can make. Japanese is quite different from English, having had a totally unique developmental history -- it's supposedly related to Mongolian, Basque, Turkish and possibly Hungarian, don't ask me how -- and it sport linguistic concepts that are strange to English speakers at first. One is a strong differentiation between short vowels (like the o in ocha) and long vowels (the first syllable of tofu, the second syllable of Shirow's name). If you've ever wondered why someone whose last name is Sato writes it as Satoh or Satou, it's because he's trying to express the longer second syllable as accurately as he can, even though it might not make any different to how we pronounce his name in English. Sometimes these vowels can cause transliteration issues. For example, shoujo (with a long vowel) means "girl," while shojo (short vowel) means something else entirely (a girl who is still, ahem, pure). Which spelling is correct? It can be hard to say. Accuracy can only be taken so far -- otherwise we'd be wearing Doumo-kun T-shirts and listing Japan's capital as Toukyou.

Doumo attack...?!

Harajuku for Old Folks: Sugamo

The combination of one of the lowest birthrates in the world coupled with the lack of an inflow of new blood in the form of immigration threatens to start taking its toll in Japanese society, and already you can see signs of the country's graying. Like the time I went to go to a toy store that I'd been to many times, only to find that it had gone out of business and been replaced by a store selling...Buddhist altars and grave stones. (That was a shocker.) These days an area of Tokyo called Sugamo is popular with older Japanese as a place to buy products to help you live a long and healthy life, like bright red underwear, said to bring good luck and good health in Japan. They sell many healthy foods, like garlic miso, too-- sounds delicious. There's also a Shinto shrine where people can pray for good health and long life, and it's said if you wash a particular statue of Buddha with your own towel that part of your body will be healed. I love the tag line for Sugamo: they bill themselves as the toshiyori no Harajuku, or Harajuku for older people.

Red underwear is considered lucky by older Japanese.

Japan and England

Being an American in Japan has been a good opportunity to learn more about...England. Yes, Japan has always had a special affinity for the British Isles, and some aspects of Japan that can seem strange to us Yanks actually come from Great Britain. When I got to Japan I wondered at the way some trains were called nobori ("climbing") while others were kudari ("descending"), and after a while I figured out that it referred to whether the train was going in the direction of Tokyo or not, which was likely borrowed from England back in the day. Some other U.K.-derived cultural elements include a British-style teatime in the afternoon and the idea of eating "Christmas cake" during the holidays. In addition to driving on the left-hand side of the road, the Japanese have imported words like "bonnet" (the hood of a car) and "saloon" (for a sedan), plus other terms like dustbox and, er, water closet (W.C.). Like the British, the Japanese use the word "pants" to mean underwear, which of course comes through as pantsu in anime. This can be potentially embarrassing for people who use the word a general term for trousers.

A British train table from 1850, showing "up" and "down" trains just like in Japan.

Learning to "Think" in Japanese

I try to promote study of Japanese on J-List because it's been such a satisfying journey for me. One challenge for anyone learning a new language is the elusive goal of "thinking" in that language, of having ideas and expressing emotions without your brain using its native tongue first and converting those thoughts into the target language. One feature of the Japanese people is that they usually dislike making errors, and many of my students would spent a few seconds "pre-caching" what they were going to say before speaking, which can really drag the conversation down. In my own case, I found wrapping my brain around Japanese grammar difficult at first, until I learned to treat sentences like mathematical equations, memorizing, say, watashi wa ko-hi ga suki desu (as for coffee, I like it), then practicing swapping out the subject and object until I could use that one sentence type to express a lot of ideas without thinking about it. I never fretted about making mistakes in front of others, and I'm sure the Japanese members of the Japan-America Friendship Club at SDSU were quite entertained by me.

Thinking in a foreign language is really not as difficult as it seems at first.

Ohaguro: Black Teeth in Japan

Perhaps it's because I come from a country without a very long history, but I really love walking in old places like Kyoto, strolling down streets that have been used for 1500 years or more. You can almost see the beautiful women of the Edo Period and earlier, wearing elegant kimono and flashing a smile complete with black teeth. Black teeth? Yes, it's true: for much of Japan's history women had a strange custom of applying black makeup to the teeth to stain them. Called ohaguro, the custom was associated with married women and was done because black things were considered especially beautiful. Based on archeological evidence from Japanese burial mounds historians know that the practice of dying teeth existed in prehistoric times, and it shows up in the famous Tale of Genji and the ukiyoe art of the Edo Period. If you think it sounds a little terrifying, you're not alone: there's a classic Japanese ghost story about a specter (yokai) called Ohaguro-bettari, who haunts old shrines while wearing a bridal kimono and smiling with a mouth full of blackened teeth. Kowai! (Scary!)

In days of old, married women would paint their teeth black.

Differences Between Tokyo and Gunma

I took a trip down to Tokyo yesterday for a meeting with a company about some dating-sim games. As usual, it was nice to get down to the city and feel the urban chaos all around me, and engage in one of my favorite activities, people watching. Whenever you go from my home prefecture of Gunma into Tokyo -- a 100 km journey which takes about 45 minutes on the fast Shinkansen train -- you notice a few differences. First of all, everything in Tokyo is smaller and more cramped, and even the tables in Starbucks are about 40% narrower than what I'm used to. People in Tokyo are much more fashionable, of course, and walking around Shibuya is like being transported into an issue of FRUiTs or Kera, and it can be hard not to openly gawk at all the hip people who pass you on the street. Tokyo is an interesting city to compare with other world capitals -- for one thing, although it holds 12 million people, it's one of the cleanest cities in the world. Although Tokyo does have its attraction, it can be quite a tiring place to spend the day, and I'm usually glad to take the train back home, where the population density is much less than 5500 people per square km.

Tokyo is the center of fashion and culture in Japan. But then you knew this already.

Seasonal Japan and Autumn-Limited Beer

Perhaps it's because I'm from San Diego, where the only two seasons are "nice" and "slightly less nice," but I never thought that much about the four seasons before coming to Japan. All of that went out the window when I got here and suddenly found my life changing a little bit each month as the calendar marched forward. Japan is a very seasonal place, and there are strong customs defining what should be done at each time of year -- for example, cold noodles are great in the summer, and once summer is over suddenly no one eats them anymore. It's part of the Japanese psyche that they look strangely at anyone who isn't perfectly in sync with this invisible seasonal timetable. For example, once I decided to go down to the famous Shonan Beach near Yokohama to check it out, but there was one problem: I was planning my trip during the first week of September. This caused everyone I knew to warn me about how dangerous it was to go to the seaside, and how typhoons could easily sweep me out to sea ...despite the fact that it was only a few days after the end of August. Right now, everyone is getting into "Autumn mode," ready to enjoy delicious matsutake mushrooms and the tinting of the leaves on the trees while drinking the limited Aki-Aji ("Taste of Autumn") beer from Kirin.

Autumn is time for appreciating the golden leaves while drinking Kirin Aki-Aji beer.

Fun Japanese Vocabulary Words: Sukkiri Shita and Beyond

The other day my wife gave me a haircut, since she insists that the place I usually go to -- the barber shop located inside an onsen near my house, surely one of the greatest achievements known to man -- makes it too short. When she was done giving me a trim, I shook my head and said, "Sukkiri shita!" (pronounced soo-KEE-REE shta, with a tiny pause after the first syllable and a final syllable that sounds like a cross between dee and ree), which meant, "I feel really refreshed [to have my long hair cut off]!" Sukkiri is one of an extensive group of commonly-used short adjectives that are loaded with information, and they're fun to study because they're so different from anything we have in English. Some others are bikkuri (bi-KOO-ree), meaning "I was so surprised"; sokkuri (so-KOO-ree), said when two people look exactly the same, pittari (pee-TAH-ree), said when something fits extremely well, e.g. that jacket fits you to a "T"; and yappari (ya-PAH-ree), meaning "on second thought" or "just as I suspected." Some of these words are already known to some fans of Japan, like pokkari (po-KAH-ree, "to float in the air like a cloud") which is where Pocari Sweat gets its name from, and yukkuri (yu-KOO-ree), from the famous Touhou "Take it Easy!" meme.

Let me tell you, washing off freshly cut hair in hot springs is to die for.

Bento Article at New York Times = Awesomeness

Big shout out to the New York Times, who wrote an interesting article about Japanese bento culture (registration required) mentioning us, and our friend Maki over at JustBento.com. Bento, which J-List is proud to off to the world, is a fun way to enjoy a delicious and beautiful lunch. In addition to being much more economical than eating out, bento is healthier because it features "built in portion control." Seeing my wife make bento for my daughter, I can say that bento can bring families closer together, too. You can view the best-selling bento boxes on J-List with this link, browse the most popular bento and onigiri accessories here, or view all the bento products we sell here.

The #1 bento box at J-List right, the classic Hello Kitty Wagara Traditional Bento Set.

Japan [hearts] The Beatles

It's hard to over-estimate the cultural impact the Beatles have had on Japan, and over the decades many a student of English has learned the language by translating and analyzing Beatles song lyrics. This is true of Tomo, the J-List employee who keeps our site stocked with interesting DVDs and Hello Kitty shoulder massagers. When he came to work here ten years ago, I'm sure he never expected to meet an American quite like me, who had embraced Japanese popular culture to learn about Japan just as he had done the opposite to learn about American and Europe. One day we were talking about the classic 1972 song "Alone Again (Naturally)" by Gilbert O'Sullivan, which a former student of mine had ironically played at her wedding, clearly not understanding the words of the song. For some reason I'd been sure that the song had been sung by the Beatles, and I'll never forget the look of utter shock on his face that an American could get a fact like that wrong -- it was quite a surprise for him. Tomo was tickled to receive his copy of the Beatles Box Set of remastered discs today, which he got a day earlier than the rest of the world thanks to Japan being a day ahead. He picked up the "stereo" version, but also plans to get the "mono" version -- a total outlay of $700!

As Peter proves once again that his favorite anime is K-On, and he can't use any other anime for a web graphic.

Nosebleeds in Anime

When you start to watch anime, you naturally encounter some concepts that may seem strange at first. Like those giant, emotion-filled eyes, the way a character will get a huge sweat drop on their head to show they're frustrated, or the strange phenomenon of sneezes being caused by people gossiping about you. As you watch, you learn some of the more subtle nuances, like the concepts of senpai and kohai I talked about last time, or the way certain characters will become enamored of someone of the same sex in an extremely dramatic and/or entertaining way without warning. Another odd concept that took me a while to figure out were the nosebleeds that happened whenever a character (usually male) suddenly sees a female in a provocative situation. The joke, which has its origins in gag manga from the 1960s like Dokonjo Gaeru and Inakappe Taisho, is a euphemism for blood flow to another region of the body entirely, and it's a fun way to express the concept on-screen. Today, the anime nosebleed has come to be a meme all by itself -- there are even anime/manga in which nosebleeds are a central part of the story.

What weird anime thing confused you at first?

The anime nosebleed took me a while to get used to.

Taxes in Japan

I got a question about how taxes work in Japan the other day from a Twitter follower, so I thought I'd write about that. By and large, Japan models its tax system on that of the United States, and the details of how taxes are declared and collected are quite similar between the two countries, as are the tax rates. Some differences do exist, however. For example, when J-List pays the salaries of our employees, the equivalent of Social Security (the National Pension System) is not automatically deducted but must be paid by the individual manually. Although everyone who isn't enrolled in the similar Welfare Pension System (for employees of larger companies) is required to make National Pension payments, many young people don't bother since the consensus is that the system won't be worth much when it comes time for them to retire. Another difference is how taxes must be pre-deducted when making some payments to individuals. For example, if we were going to pay a designer to create a spiffy T-shirt for our site, we'd have to withhold 10% of his payment and send it to the National Tax Office on his behalf, something that's not done in the U.S. The consumption tax in Japan is a reasonable 5%, and since the tax is always hidden in the displayed price, no one thinks about it much.

Taxes in Japan are similar to the U.S., with a few differences.

Japanese Test English

The other day my son took a standardized test to measure his academic ability compared with other students in Japan. While he aced the math and science sections, his English test result was a surprising 86%. How could a boy whose English is so good he can watch any movie without subtitles and appreciate the subtle humor of Monty Python have gotten anything but an A? It turns out that in Japan, "test English" is a unique subject unto itself, completely separate from the living language used to communicate ideas to people, and when students translate a sentence from English into Japanese they need to follow certain forms to show they understand the underlying grammar. For example, there are different ways to translate "I will study tomorrow" and "I'm going to study tomorrow," although the two concepts are pretty much the same, and not knowing how to do this hurt my son's score. Now that he's starting juken hell, preparing for his high school entrance exams, I'm sure he'll have questions about the correct use of English grammar that I won't be able to answer to his satisfaction. For example, the Japanese spend a lot of time learning the proper use of the pronoun "whom," yet at least in my dialect of English (West Coast United States), it's a totally dead word, only used in certain specific situations (e.g. "To whom it may concern").

Japanese test English is quite unrelated to the living language you or I use.

Internet-Influenced Advertising in Japan

It's interesting to see how the Internet continues to change the world we live in. In Japan, it's common for print advertisements and TV commercials to present viewers with a computer search box suggesting a keyword they might use to find the company's website later, a practice called uebu yudo or "web guidance" in the advertising industry here. I guess there's something "organic" about customers doing a search for a product themselves compared with typing a URL in manually or clicking a link, though since so many companies are employing this technique, I have to wonder how effective it is. Another variation: ads that present an interesting story then end with the phrase, "To see the rest, visit our website," like the SoftBank commercial in which the cute dog Otosan saves a girl from being hit by a piano, after which viewers must access the company's website to see if the dog was killed by the piano or not. Recently I noticed another new change leaking from the net into realspace: right-to-left scrolling comments, the kind seen on Nico Douga, Japan's local answer to YouTube. In Nico videos, users can type in comments (like "Nice Boat") which will scroll by while other people watch the video, a visual annoyance to some yet an interesting way to feel like you're contributing to the wider shared popular culture. I caught a variety show adding these scrolling comments to video it was showing in an attempt to make its program more interesting to web-savvy viewers. Could this be the next big mega-trend from Japan?

Could Nico Video-style scrolling comments be the Next Big Thing?

Senpai and Kohai in Japan

I write a lot about the Japanese concepts of senpai, an upperclassman in a school or a senior in an organization, and kohai, the opposite, and how important these concepts are for understanding the country. Foreigners in Japan unconsciously pick up on the senior/junior system, too, and try to help newly arrived visitors get their "gaijin legs" as quickly as possible, just as they were helped by others when they got here. Back when I was an English teacher, a friend of mine and I took a newly-arrived teacher at our school out for drinks so we could get to know him. I suddenly realized the situation we were in, and said to my friend (in Japanese, so the new teacher wouldn't understand), "You and I are the senpai here. We have to pay for these drinks." He nodded, aware of the social obligation of our situation, and the two of us picked up the tab over the protests of the new guy. The role of a senpai is a complex one: you get extra respect, but you must act as a mentor and help those under you.

What was your first senpai anime? I'd have to go with the classic Orange Road.

Innovation and Recession

It's interesting to see the way economic hard times bring out new innovation in people and companies. I read a news report that the convenience store chain Lawson was going to join forces with a popular line of drug stores to allow customers to buy medicine more conveniently. There are many laws that govern how medicine is sold in Japan, and even "over the counter" medicines can only be carried in stores that employs a licensed pharmacist to give advice about this product or that. Under the new plan, there'll be a pharmacist on site at your local convenience store, ready to help answer questions and give basic medical advice -- maybe it will catch on and be the Next Big Thing in convenience stores. I've been through so many economic downturns here in Japan that I'm convinced that Japanese companies are unable to discard their business-as-usual attitudes and innovate at any other time.

Lawson is "Your Town's 'Hot Station.'"