Japan, Bacteria-Resistant Nation

I happened to see that the venerable Ticonderoga Pencil Company had brought out a line of pencils that are "bacteria resistant" thanks to a special coating on the pencils's surface called MicroBan™. This kind of sales gimmick is everywhere in Japan, a country where germs are so worrisome to people that it's not rare to see someone going about their day wearing a surgical-style health mask (without or without Hello Kitty on it), even before the current H1N1 problem. The Japanese seem particularly sensitive to the thought that germs might be getting on themselves or their loved ones, and many products are promoted as being anti-bacterial, including the desks my kids study at, the sheets and pillows we use, and just about every household appliance you can think of. They even rolled out special "bacteria resistent" hand railings for escalators at major train stations in Tokyo recently.

This hand railing at Ueno Station advertises itself as "bacteria-resistant."

Duality with Japanese Language

One fact about learning Japanese I've written about before is the odd "duality" your brain starts to perceive. In general, most kanji have two pronunciations, a Chinese reading roughly based on the original Chinese word, and a Japanese reading which has been shoe-horned in to fit that character's meaning over the years, and knowing which to use can be a challenge. The word "cold" in French is froid, and it's used exactly the same way as we use it in English, but this convenient 1:1 translation doesn't always work in Japanese, where they have separate words for coldness in the air (samui) and coldness to the touch (tsumetai). Another example of a simple concept becoming more complex is "sister," which is translatable as oneesan for an older sister and imoto for younger sister. There are quite a few English words that get split into multiple versions, too. The device used to smooth out wrinkles in clothes is an airon (iron) but the thing you hit a golf ball with is an aian, a completely different word as far as the Japanese are concerned. If you're thirsty, you can drink drink water from a gurasu (glass) while looking through the garasu of the window -- those two words have also become separate concepts. Honestly, remembering which word to use can actually make your brain tired at the end of the day.

Which is it? I'm not sure! Help me! (It's a gurasu, not a garasu.)

Dams, Damn Dams and the Politicians Who Cancel Them, Part II

The changes in Japan's political world continue, as the Democratic Party of Japan works to implement its "Manifesto" of campaign promises. Last week it was announced that Seiji Maehara, the minister of land, infrastructure, and tourism, had frozen 48 out of 56 dam projects that were under way in Japan, refusing to fund any contracts this fiscal year. The government seems to be targeting public works projects as a way of freeing up tax money to make good on its promise of paying families a monthly allowance of $250 per child in the hopes of raising the nation's birthrate. Honestly, I'm kind of torn on some of these changes. On the one hand, wasteful public spending is a huge problem in Japan, a country positively addicted to construction as a way of propping up employment, and building projects that provide questionable public benefit should be eliminated. On the other hand, cutting projects already started is wasteful too, and will increase unemployment in the construction sector, which is already being pummeled. My initial reaction to the cancellation announcement was, "How the heck could Japan have thought it needed 56 more dams at this point in its development?" although with 2800 currently operating dams, Japan has a lot less than the 75,000 in the U.S. Incidentally, there are "dam otaku" in Japan who love to take pictures of their favorite multiple-arch reverse-pump turbine gravity dams for their scrapbook. Those Japanese are so wacky!

The future of dam construction construction in Japan is looking cloudy.

Macross Ultimate Frontier on the PSP

Over the weekend I had some fun with my copy of Macross Ultimate Frontier, a superb game for the Sony PSP that lets you re-live all the battles of the entire Macross series, from the 1982 original series and epic "Do you remember love?" 1984 movie to all the later series, all the way up to the most recent Macross Frontier. We're happy that the PSP and DS have turned into such great platforms for anime fans to enjoy games direct from Japan. Another popular title is the Miku Hatsune Project DIVA in which you must do fun things like teach Miku to dance and sing and outfit a virtual room for her. You also get to enjoy many shots of her her legendary shimapan. Why not take a moment to browse all the cool PSP and Nintendo DS games from Japan we have in stock?

Japanese Study Tools

Last time I came up with some examples of strange approaches to language learning the Japanese take. There's another interesting tool the Japanese use to master English: a subset of the International Phonetic Alphabet, which is a standard way of expressing sounds. In general, the "basic" level of Japanese are the two syllable systems hiragana and katakana, which can express, say, the sounds sa-shi-su-se-so but not the consonant "s" by itself, and no vowels in between the main five. Students will make katakana notes above English words to help themselves remember pronunciation, but this is catastrophic for them from the standpoint of ever learning to speak naturally. A better idea is to use special "pronunciation symbols" to help students wrestle with sounds that don't come naturally to them, like the above sentence. Can you read it?

More on Cute Japanese Poses

I wrote recently about the "peace" sign that the Japanese are fond of making whenever they see a camera, despite the fact that no one is consciously aware of where the gesture came from or what the "peace" in question might be referring to. The "V for Victory" sign is just one of a great many super-cute poses that women from Japan (and Korea, Taiwan etc.) are capable of. Some others include puffing up the face in a cute pout, looking sad while drawing invisible tear tracks with a finger, reenacting Sailor Moon's transformation pose while winking, and making several variations of nyan nyan (cat girl posing). Whenever I see one of these manga-like poses there's an almost feral reaction that takes place in my brain, causing me to think kawaii thoughts, but that might just be me. It's hard to know where this bizarre posing culture came from, but I believe it's tied to the rise of the Puri-Kura or "Print Club," those automated photo machines that took Asia by storm in the 1990s and which are still found in all the fashionable parts of Tokyo.

Japanese females have a huge arsenal of cute posing gestures.

"Eternal Questions" in Japan

Japan is a great country, and I like living here a lot. But no matter how long I stay here, it seems there'll always be some "eternal questions" that we foreigners will never figure out. Like, why is every mannequin in department stores a gaijin, and why does no one ever notice the total lack of mannequins with Asian features? Why would anyone need house-style curtains for your car? How can the Japanese have such a high standard of living that heated toilet seats wash your butt while talking to you in soothing tones, yet almost no one has central heating? How can the Japanese write irony-free haiku about the "vibrant nature" all around them when 97% of their rivers are dammed? The other day I was going for some sushi with my daughter when she turned to me and asked, "Why are the green traffic lights called 'blue'?" It's a big source of confusion to foreigners here, why green traffic lights are referred to with the word ao (ah-oh) meaning "blue" instead of midori meaning "green." (I know there's an answer, that the Japanese word ao has historically referred to both blue and green, but it's kind of fun keeping the question unanswered and mysterious.)

Just what the hell is this traffic signal supposed to mean, anyway?

More Fun with Japanese Gestures

Because it's funny as hell, here's a "mocumentary" on the Asian peace sign and other cute gestures they do, which are totally and spookily accurate in Japan (and Taiwan, presumably).

Area 88: My First Manga

I've achieved a small milestone in my life, finally finishing the first manga I ever picked up. The series was Area 88 by Kaoru Shintani, the tale of a Japanese airline pilot shanghaied into joining a mercenary air force in the Middle East where he must fly combat missions for money if he's ever to return to Japan, and his fiancee Ryoko. Area 88 was one of the first Japanese manga comics brought out in English 22 years ago (ack!), and although the original English-language run didn't last long, it was the beginning of a big change for the U.S. in terms of accepting a new form of visual culture. Young people these days might not believe me, but there was a time when a person had to learn to read Japanese if he wanted to know how a particular manga story ended, which turned out to be a good thing for me since reading all the classic comics of the 80s and 90s exposed me to tons of useful kanji and vocabulary words, eventually finishing all 13 volumes of Area 88. If you'd like to try studying Japanese through its manga culture, J-List has some great tools to help you, from the Japanese in Mangaland series to many great manga volumes with furigana beside the kanji to make them easier to read.

I finally got around to finishing Area 88, the first manga I ever read, this time in Japanese.

English Grammar Hell

If you want to watch a Japanese person count mentally, ask them how many years they studied English. The answer will be "six" if they've graduated from high school, or "ten" if they've been to college. Although they do study English for many years, it's not uncommon for Japanese to not really master the language very well, in part due the dry, academic way English grammar is covered in school. Did you know there were five fundamental types of sentences in English? They're SV, SVC, SVO, SVOO, and SVOC, and although I studied linguistics in college I'm not sure what they mean, though ESL students here meticulously memorize them for the next test. The Japanese are also good at coming up with ways of remembering which verbs must be used in gerund form ("stop smoking" but not "stop to smoke") and which can take either gerund or infinitive verbs (both "I like to eat chocolate" and "I like eating chocolate" are okay). Seen from the viewpoint of a native speaker, it's quite unnatural to create a framework for comprehending English grammar that doesn't actually help you, you know, speak the language at all.

If English is your native language, go hug your parents right now.

Correct Way of Holding Chopsticks

One of the themes I cover a lot is how there always seems to be a "right" way of doing things in Japan, which feels odd when coming from the more diverse U.S. For example, every kanji character taught to children has a specific stroke order, and students who can write a character correctly but not in the proper order will still get it wrong on a test. The Japanese obsession with doing things the "right way" is so intense, their version of "chicken scratch" lines we use when counting in the U.S. is the character for "correct" (tadashii). There's one right way to hold chopsticks, too, although it's not uncommon for a person to develop their own style of chopstick-holding, and I remember having discussions with my ESL students about how this person or that held their chopsticks "funny" while eating. My son is one of those people who holds his chopsticks in a non-standard way, although I'll be darned if I can see any difference. Recently he got his first official girlfriend, and the two of them went into Tokyo to visit an amusement park and have dinner together. He was nervous enough about eating with chopsticks in front of his girlfriend that he went out of his way to order curry, so he could eat with a spoon.

As with most things in Japan, there one "correct" way to hold chopsticks.

Japan Suicide + 1

Sadly, Japan is a country with a high suicide rate, at around 30,000 annually, which is approximately the same number as in the U.S. despite Japan having less than half the population. The situation is getting worse with the bad domestic economy, and it's feared the number might be the highest ever this year. There's one more sad death to report: former Finance Minister Shoichi Nakagawa was found dead, presumably due to an overdose of sleeping pills. He's the guy who gave a press conference at the February G7 summit in Rome while extremely inebriated, causing much embarrassment to Japan when videos of his slurred speech were broadcast all over the world. He'd supposedly been depressed after he lost his bid for reelection in the Japanese election in August.

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.