Japanese Calendar, J-List Sale Update

Japan is a very seasonal place, where different things done in each part of the year. Right it's "calendar season," the time to pick the awesome calendars you'd like to spend 2010 with. Japanese calendars are beautifully printed, with large, glossy page. While we've got a huge selection of popular anime calendars, we always make it a point to pick a wide range of calendars to offer, including gorgeous photo calendars of Japan in all seasons, calligraphy and art calendars, beautiful idols wearing kimono, plus the always popular Lucky Cat calendar offering. Click this link to browse all calendars, or here to see the top 50 calendars this week. (Also, we've got an HD review of the Totoro and other calendars up on YouTube if you like.)

Just a reminder that we're having a "J-List Birthday Sale" around here this month, giving you a gift certificate worth $5 for every $100 you spend on the site this month, which gives you a nice excuse to add another few boxes of Pocky or bento items to your cart if you're near the next $100 level. It's also a great time to start your holiday shopping since J-List is a wonderful place to find rare and fun items to make the Japan-obsessed person on your list really happy this year.

Fun with Hello Kitty

J-List sells rather a lot of Hello Kitty products from Japan, and it makes us happy to see how popular they are with our customers, from the bento boxes and accessories we stock, to the fun plush toys and even uniquely Japanese products like Shinto good luck charms featuring Japan's most kawaii kitty. We have a microwave rice cooker that lets you enjoy steamed white rice without the need to buy an electric rice cooker, training chopsticks for those still perfecting their chopstick skills, super Hello Kitty products for stress relief, and even a product for people who absolutely hate the famous Sanrio character. This year is Hello Kitty's 35th year as Japan's unofficial ambassador to the world, and we've got a huge selection of amazing items for you, including the two just-released Hello Kitty Anniversary Books. Click here to view all Hello Kitty items, and here to view the top 50 Kitty-chan products on the site this week.

Moero Downhill Night Download Now Shipping!

J-List loves to promote the PC dating-sim games from Japan (aka eroge), like the fantastic Deus Machina Demonbane, which we posted for preorder last time. Now, an update on the newest English-language game to be released, Moero Downhill Night. Unfortunately due to a production error, the game is currently being repressed, which will take another few weeks. Since so many people want to play this great Initial D-esque racing & dating simulator, we've got a great announcement: we've posted the game for download sales right now! So you have the option of ordering the package version (and waiting for it to be printed), buying the download version right now, or getting the special download + shrinkwrapped set! Click the graphic above to visit the game's official site and see the awesome CG racing scenes (created by the Initial D staff, incidentally)!

Are you involved with retail anime or related products? J-List operates a wholesale-only company in San Diego for making our wacky Japanese T-shirts, cool PC dating-sim games and other products available to retail shops, and would love to serve you. We've recently relaunched our wholesale website, so if you'd like to know more, please drop by either PCRdist.com (PC games, manga and apparel) and PCRstyle.com (family-friendly apparel and games only).

Japan's Literary Celebration

This year is the 100th year of the birth of Osamu Dazai, one of the major Japanese writers of the 20th century, who created a fascinating body of work including short stories like Run, Mellos! and major novels such as The Setting Sun (the story of an aristocratic family in the aftermath of World War II) and the semi-autobiographical No Longer Human. Japan is a very literate country, and they've always had a tradition of raising their great writers and poets up for all to see. While only former presidents appear on U.S. currency (except for good old Ben Franklin), Japan has featured many of its writers on its money, including Souseki Natsume, writer of "I am a Cat" and other books, who was on the previous 1000 yen note; Inazo Nitobe, who first wrote about bushido for the West and who adorned the former 5000 yen note; and the current 2000 yen note, which features both female novelist and poet Ichiyo Higuchi and the famous Murasaki Shikibu, writer of The Tale of Genji.

Japan has a long tradition of celebrating its writers by putting their faces on money.

My Two Personalities (Japanese and English)

When a person learns a foreign language they actually develop a second personality, which takes over when they're speaking that language. In Japanese, I'm a very different person, so much so that I'm often surprised myself. Japanese people tend to be humble, and when I'm speaking the language I'm able to sincerely humility in ways that I couldn't be if I were speaking English, and yes, I do bow while speaking on the phone. My wife on the other hand is much more assertive in English than in Japanese, since English is just built that way -- you always say the subject of sentences and use "yes" or "no" to clearly indicate your opinion, unlike in Japanese where meanings are often more vague and nuanced. It's always enjoyable to observe how this "English personality" works in my kids when I take them to the U.S. In English, my daughter is cute and feminine since she usually plays with other girls in the States, but in Japanese, she's a pure tomboy, even using the male first person pronoun (boku) the one that girls should use (atashi).

Cultural Comparisons and Ninjas

It's funny how we're all wired to perceive things a certain way, depending on what culture we come from. When my daughter was younger, we took her to an eye doctor in the U.S. for some tests, and the doctor showed her some pictures and asked her to identify them. She wasn't able to answer properly, not because of some problem with her eyes, but because the pictures -- silhouettes of household objects -- looked strange to her since she'd grown up outside the U.S. When I went to see a kabuki play in Tokyo for the first time, I was confused by the story, and not just because of the archaic Japanese the actors were speaking. As the story progressed, men in black costumes would appear on stage and scurry around, moving props and background objects. To my eyes, they looked like classic ninja, ready to strike their enemies dead, yet for some reason the characters on stage ignored their presence and went on with the story. It turns out I was looking at kuroko, stage hands who manipulate objects during the performance but who are supposed to be ignored by the audience. These unique "invisible shadows" show up on other performance arts, too, especially bunraku, a play put on using highly detailed dolls that are manipulated by a puppet master who wears the kuoroko clothing, making him invisible to the audience.

Other Stuff: Costumes & Demonbane

Halloween is right around the corner, but there's still time for you to order an awesome complete cosplay set from J-List. We've got dozens of anime costumes to choose from, from Toradora! to Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni to Naruto and Bleach, and many fun accessories, too, including anime wigs that will make you feel like your favorite anime character. We also have popular cosplay magazines like CosMODE and Layers, which are filled with useful articles and reference photos for you to make your next cosplay extra special. Browse all anime costume products now!

J-List is extremely happy to announce that preorders for Deus Machina Demonbane is now available for preorder on our site. J-List has long been a champion of PC dating-sim games from Japan, working to make them available in English to fans all over the world. It's a great day for fans of these unique games from Japan indeed, as the first game to be translated -- the awesome Demonbane -- can now be preordered. The game, which is in translation now, is one of the most awesome visual novels ever, and we're extremely happy to be able to offer it to you. Click here to view the official site for the game, or visit here to preorder the game from J-List. Be sure to check the NitroplusUSA blog to see when new content is added, too.

On the Lack of Lawsuits in Japan

The unceremonious ending of several major public works projects by the recently elected Democratic Party of Japan has been a big change in a country where projects historically are never cancelled once they've received an official blessing. The policy changes highlight another big cultural difference between Japan and the U.S., too: the lack of litigation as way of redressing issues between parties. While no one may be a fan of lawsuits, they do have their place in a free society, allowing individuals and groups to seek redress when they feel they've been wronged in some way, and if these changes were happening in the U.S., some legal challenges would certainly be filed. So far I've seen only one case of a Japanese company threatening legal action: Fuji Heavy Industries is demanding compensation from the government for agreeing to buy 62 Apache helicopters then actually only ordering ten of them.

Fuji Heavy Industries licensed the Apache from Boeing but only sold ten of them.

Yaeba, a "Charm Point" in Japan

During my time in Japan, I've been able to observe some of the more interesting traits of the females around me. Japanese girls in their teens or 20s are generally in touch with their "inner kawaii" and are capable of making a wide range of cute manga-like gestures and facial expressions without warning. Thanks to the grid-like organization of hiragana, it's easier to enter Japanese text with the number pad on a phone than it is in English, and on trains you can see females typing rapidly with their thumbs. Japanese females are extremely group-oriented creatures, and seem unable to go to the bathroom without bringing their friends with them, a social phenomenon called called tsureshon. Another interesting feature of Japanese females is the tendency of many of them to have crooked teeth, called yaeba (ya-eh-ba). Instead of being viewed as a negative, yaeba are often thought of as being cute, and many idols and singers use their imperfect teeth as a "charm point" to win more fans. This isn't universal, of course, and increasingly people here are getting crooked teeth fixed at a young age (both of my kids wore braces). These cute teeth show up in anime, too, represented two-dimensionally as a single fang protruding from the mouth.

Crooked teeth can be quite a "charm point" in Japan,

The Definition of "Macross Buzzkill"

Another tragedy struck the anime world, with the news that Kazuhiko Kato, the composer of the "Do You Remember Love?" song from the 1984 Macross movie, had committed suicide in a hotel in Karuizawa. The timing of the sad event was especially pointed for me, since I was in the middle of my "Weekend of Macross geekery," playing the new Macross Ultimate Frontier (quite frankly the best anime game ever made) on my PSP, and was playing just as the news popped up in my twitter feed. The announcement of Kato-san's death was sad for other fans as well, coming just hours before the Macross Crossover Concert, with five singers including Mari Iijima performing for fans. There are of course many cool songs in the anime world, but for me, "Do You Remember Love?" was the song, the very first one I heard in Japanese, which I vowed to understand someday. Mr. Kato had many achievements in his life including writing many beloved songs and forming a band called The Sadistic Mika, which became the first Japanese band to tour in Great Britain back in the 1970s.

Ai Oboete Imasu ka? composer Kazuhiko Kato will be missed.

Peter's Tips on Learning Japanese

At J-List, we like to encourage interest in learning Japanese, since it's such a rewarding language to study whether you're just trying to master hiragana and katakana or are going for the Japanese Language Proficiency Test this December. People are all different, and it's no surprise that we learn in different ways. In general, my advice is to find what "floats your boat," in other words sample a lot of different aspects of Japan to see what aspect of the country you're interested in, be it history, traditional culture and martial arts, anime and popular culture or what have you. Another bit of advice I can offer is to be "8x" about studying Japanese, by which I mean try several approaches at once to see what works for you rather than just trying one thing. (I translated JPOP songs for friends while reading manga and watching anime, then eventually got interested in Japanese literature.) Another thing you might try is writing a diary in Japanese, which gives you an excuse to practice writing (always a good idea), and you can see how far you've progressed by reading your old diary entries later. I did this for several years, although I had to give it up when I started J-List, which (as Apu from the Simpsons says) puts great demands on my time. Although in a way, I never stopped writing a diary about my life in Japan at all -- you're reading it right now.

An artist's conception of what keeping a diary in Japan is like.

Mixed Bathing in Japan

Japan has had a culture of bathing in public baths and natural volcanic hot springs for centuries, and I've really become an aficionado of this great aspect of the country since my arrival in 1991. Everywhere I drive, I've got my "bath kit" in the car with me, so I can stop at any roadside hot springs and get clean. One of the more famous images of Japan is male-female "mixed bathing" (called kon'yoku), although I have some bad news for would be mixed bathers -- it's almost impossible to find these baths anymore. As Japanese society has evolved to become more Western, the idea of men and women bathing together has faded, and in all my journeying I only managed to find one official mixed bath. This doesn't mean that men bathing in a public bath need go without females around them, however. For some odd reason, it's perfectly normal for the cleaning lady in these baths to enter when the men are washing themselves, to tidy the buckets or check the temperature of the water, and no one thinks anything of it here.

Sadly, mixed bathing is a lost art in Japan outside of anime comic-relief stories.

Of S'Mores and Curry and "Cultural Buttons"

It's interesting how each of us has a set of special "cultural buttons" which bring up different images when pressed. As an American, when I think of going camping my brain conjures a mental image of sitting around a campfire and eating S'mores, which are delicious sandwiches made with two graham crackers, Hershey's chocolate and a marshmallow you've just toasted over the fire. But when the Japanese think of camping, the first on their mind is...making curry? Yes, the Japanese idea of "roughing it" involves peeling potatoes, washing pots and building a fire so they can boil up some first-rate curry rice, complete with a special kind of rice cooker for steaming rice over a flame called a hango. Making curry rice in the great outdoors requires a lot of cooperation from different members of a group, and when it all comes together it's not only a delicious meal, but it brings people together. When my daughter was doing Girl Scouts, the scout leader used to bring ingredients so the girls could eat S'mores just like they do in America. But since there are no graham crackers here in Japan, she brought Saltines, which isn't the same thing at all...

When the Japanese think of camping, they think of a big pot of steaming curry.

Fun Anime Snacks from J-List

J-List, of course, carries tons of fun anime toys and figures for you to browse, and we also stock many rare and wonderful snack items direct from Japan. So it makes sense for us to go out of our way to carry the best anime-themed snacks we can find for our customers, which we do . See some fun items, like the Lucky Star Cornet Cookies (which incidentally come in a flat gift-style box, so you can give them to others as gifts); the delicious traditional snack Konpeito, as seen in Spirited Away; the wonderful Sakuma Drops candy, from Grave of the Fireflies; and the delicious Milk Caramels from Morinaga, as seen in the Totoro sequel "Mei and the Kitten Bus" (which is only viewable at the Ghibli Museum in Tokyo). Why not browse our new Anime Snacks page, or check out the top 50 snack items this week?

The Enigmatic "Returned Japanese"

I often write about how Japan is a homogeneous place in which 99% of the people consider themselves to be of the same genetic stock, despite the obvious variations in skin color, facial shape and body type among supposedly "pure" Japanese, who of course contain varying amounts of Mongolian, Korean, Ainu and other blood in their veins. This "myth of Japanese uniformity" may seem strange to Westerners, but in reality it's a useful social tool that the Japanese have used to create a happy society ostensibly free of discrimination, since almost everyone is "included" in the overall social group as an equal. (This is the theory, anyway.) No matter how far this happy social umbrella may be stretched, though, there are certain groups within Japan that it just can't cover, which include zainichi ("residing in Japan") Koreans and Chinese, who in many cases were born and raised here yet don't take Japanese citizenship for cultural reasons; Okinawans, who have a unique culture separate from Japan; the Ainu, the original residents of northern Japan; gaijin like me, living and doing various jobs here; and historically, burakumin, the "untouchables" who lived at the bottom of society.

Another group that doesn't fit perfectly into the neat Japanese social fiber are the kikoku shijo, a word which literally means "girl children who have returned to Japan from a foreign country" and refers to any Japanese (male or female) who has come back to Japan after living abroad for several years when they were younger. These "returned Japanese" have a unique status in society here, since they naturally can't be expected to fit in perfectly or write every kanji. Kikoku shijo people are supposedly "KY" -- a Japanese word meaning kuuki yomenai or "can't read the air," meaning that these Japanese from overseas have trouble understanding the subtleties of social interaction all around them. It's common for organizations to have special rules for these individuals, for example universities usually have separate entrance exams to allow a certain number of students who have lived abroad to enter. Anime is especially well populated with these "special" nihonjin, who often seem to be everything the Japanese themselves are not: tall with fiery Western features, fluent in foreign languages and given a free pass to act differently from everyone else. Some famous "returned Japanese" characters include Asuka Langley Soryu and Mari Illustrious Makinami (who may both also be haafu, a related trope as far as anime is concerned), and Kaede Kimura from Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei, who always manages to flash her underwear then threaten to sue anyone who happened to see.

Anime is well populated with "returned Japanese." Which is your favorite?

Autumn, Beautiful Leaves and Kotatsu

Autumn is starting to make its presence known in Japan, with beautiful hues of red and orange and yellow starting to show on the trees. This is the season that makes me want to stop whatever I'm doing and go to Nikko, a collection of temples and a five-storied pagoda that are just about the single best sightseeing spot in the Kanto (Tokyo) area, especially when the leaves are just starting to turn. Fall is also time to break out the kotatsu, a low table with a blanket over it and an electric heater inside. During the colder months, everyone in the family will sit around the kotatsu with their legs stuffed inside, feeling warm and toasty while avoiding the waste of heating an entire room. The symbol of a kotatsu with a bowl of mikan oranges on when it's cold outside it is a great image of the country.

Autumn is my favorite season to enjoy the beauty of Japan.

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.