Is Summer Vacation Too Long?

I caught an article in Time the other day which presented the case against the long three-month summer vacation in the U.S., which (the article argued) was an unnecessary holdover from our agrarian past that harms America's competitiveness in the world today. While the question of whether summer vacation is too long or not may depend on how old you are -- a kid will say it's it's too short while a parent with four loud children might lean the other way -- I'm generally of the opinion that summer vacation in the U.S. is longer than necessary, allowing students to forget most of what they learned the previous year. In contrast to the U.S., Japan's summer break is much shorter, from mid-July through the end of August. Teachers work to ensure the nation's children won't become baka (stupid) by giving them homework to do, which helps them stay at least a little focused on school even while they get sand-between-the-toes at the beach. This summer homework is a common plot device in anime, including the infamous "Endless Eight" episodes of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, in which Haruhi (who is a God) wanted summer to go on forever, so it repeated 15,532 times, until Kyon finally made her finish her summer homework assignments.

Is summer vacation too long? Or is that the frazzled parent in me talking?

Filial Piety and the Japanese

When a person comes to live in a country as different from the U.S. as Japan is, it stands to reason that they'll be exposed to some new ways of thinking. One new paradigm I encountered was the idea of "filial piety" (in Japanese, oya koko, pronounced oh-yah koh-koh), or the respect and honor you pay your parents just because of who they are. I had a friend who'd just become a teacher, and like most Japanese young people she lived with her parents. "But I'm not making much money yet," my friend told me, "so I'm only able to give my parents $300 each month for the household." I don't know about you, but when I was 22 I was still figuring out what I was going to do with my life, not kicking money to my mother to help her with her household finances, and I was impressed that my friend was able to think so selflessly of her parents like that.

Sadly, my friend was not as hot as Yomako.

Taxis in Japan

I happened to see a news report that said that taxis in London had been ranked the world's best, with Tokyo's taxis coming in 5th overall. While I've not had the opportunity to ride in a taxi in London, I was surprised by Tokyo's low ranking, since I've always found taxi drivers in Japan to be the most polite and professional in the world. Not only are Japanese taxis spotless, with their drivers diligently polishing every surface whenever the driver waits for a fare, they make visitors feel welcome thanks to the passenger door that opens automatically for you. Of course not every taxi ride in Tokyo is going to be a smooth one for foreign visitors. There may be language problems since drivers' English skills may vary, or confusion about what is near what in sprawling Tokyo, which is not actually a city but a prefecture with 23 cities inside it. There are also plenty of potential problems due to the chaotic way Japanese city blocks are laid out, and unless you have a map to where you're trying to go, it's possible even your driver won't be able to find your destination.

I've always found taxi drivers in Japan to be outstanding.

My American Hamburg Steak

I'm having fun spending time in my American house with my Japanese daughter, although we both tend to get homesick for familiar foods from Japan. The other day she announced she was going to make "Hamburg" steak for me, which is a hugely popular dish from Japan, essentially a Salsbury steak made with ground beef and topped with various sauces. (To the Japanese, a "Hamburg" is a hamburger steak without bread, while a "hamburger" is the same thing with the bun part included; similarly, a "Frankfurt" is a frankfurter by itself, with no bun around it.) She got all the ingredients together -- ground beef, bread crumbs, browned onions and an egg -- and cooked me some good "Hamburg" steaks, complete with a demi-glace sauce made from that amazing Bull-Dog Sauce mixed with ketchup, and we ate it all over steamed white rice. It was delicious, though it wasn't quite the same as we'd had back in Japan so many times. Eventually we realized what was wrong: the ground beef in America is 100% beef, but most of the time when you buy it in Japan you're getting a 50% beef and 50% pork blend called aibiki, which is why the taste was slightly different.

"Hamburg steak" is one of the most popular dishes in Japan (partially because it's cheap).

Tierrasanta, where Santa Claus wears a Tiara

It's funny how perceptions work differently in different languages. If you're below a certain age, the most famous Chinese name after Mao Zedong (or Mao Tse-Tung if you're even older) is probably Chun Li, the cute fighting vixen from Street Fighter II who shouts "Yatta!" ("I did it!") after she wins a fight. While the brains of English speakers labor over properly memorizing a strange-sounding name like Chun Li, which has no mental hooks for us to attach it with, Japanese have the benefit of being able to internalize the name using kanji characters. Because kanji names have meaning, Japanese might get the impression that Chun Li was a beautiful baby born in the spring, since the characters mean "Spring Beauty." We have a house in the Tierrasanta area of San Diego, and just for fun I asked my Japanese daughter what she thought the name might mean. Her answer was really cute: "It means Santa Claus wearing a tiara crown."

"Tierrasanta" made my daughter think of Santa-san wearing a tiara.

Mid-Summer Greetings Cards

Hello again from Japan, where the zipper in your pants is known as the "window of society" (shakai no mado), one of my favorite random euphemisms.

This has been a difficult summer for Japan. First, the heat has been incredible, contributing to more than 100 deaths and sending thousands to the hospital, including comedian George Tokoro, who plays the voice of Ponyo's father. Japan has also started finding that some of its oldest citizens are in fact dead or missing. It all started when municipal authorities decided to check up on an 111 year old man, only to find a mummified corpse that had been there for thirty years. This may have been part of the man's personal choice to self-mumify himself in a Buddhist custom of purification, but his family is going to have some 'splaining to do about why they kept his pension money for themselves all these years. Another 50 centenarians are said to be missing, including a 113-year-old woman born in 1897, Tokyo's oldest citizen.

Yes, this summer has been a hot one, with temperatures as high as 38 degrees Celsius (100 degrees Fahrenheit), of course with very high humidity. It's the perfect weather for enjoying some Japanese mugi cha or refreshing barley tea, which is the most popular drink in Japan when it's hot out. In Japan there's a nice custom called shochuu omimai or a mid-summer greeting card. Individuals and businesses exchange these cards in July and August, and the various companies J-List works with such as Soft on Demand and dating-sim game companies Will and Nitroplus send us these cards to see how we're handling the hot summer.

Midsummer greetings cards are a nice tradition in Japan.

Keeping Up with the Gaijins

History is in all of us, and each nation has its own unique quirks or features that come about as a result of its own past. For the Japanese, the arrival of Perry's black ships in 1853 brought them face-to-face with the fact that Japan couldn't stand against nations like the United States and Great Britain. After the "respect the Emperor and expel the foreign barbarians" revolution that ejected the last Tokugawa Shogun in favor of a government formed around the Emperor (which theoretically "restored" the Emperor to power, hence the term Meiji Restoration), the country underwent an unprecedented program of modernization, retiring the old system of feudal domains (han) for a modern prefectural system based on that of France and introducing education to the people. One of the forces driving this was Japan's desire to be seen in a positive light by foreigners from the powerful countries of the West, and today, the Japanese are still very concerned about how they appear to gaijin. Many large-scale public works, such as the first Shinkansen line launched in 1964, coincide with international events like the Olympics, when foreigners would visit Japan in large numbers and "oo and ah" over their technical achievements. It's like Japan is still trying to prove to the West that they've left the backwards feudal nation they were 150 years ago behind.

Japanese and Mexican Beans

Yesterday I took my wife out to my favorite Mexican restaurant in San Diego. While she scarfed down the refried beans she said, "This is delicious. I guess I'm not Japanese anymore." She was referring to the fact that virtually every Japanese detests Mexican style beans, and the mark of a Japanese person who's lived in the U.S. for some time is that they can eat all types of Mexican beans. I've got a theory that both beans and pickles are at the heart of each culture, and it always takes time to learn to appreciate the differences in one place if you come from another. And sure enough, I love nothing more than a crunchy Vlassic dill spear, while Japanese usually hate American pickles, much happier to eat traditional Japanese versions like pickled eggplant, daikon radish, or -- I swear I am not making this up -- fish intestines, all of which I can't stand. Incidentally, you can try Kyoto-style Japanese pickles with our popular Traditional Food Drops candies.

It's usual for Japanese people to hate Mexican style beans.

The Only Gaijin in the Room

Because I live in a smaller rural city in Japan, there are fewer foreigners around me, and it's not uncommon for me to find myself the only non-Japanese person around. When I take my family to the Shinto shrine to pray for good luck in the new year on January 1st, for example, I'm likely to find myself in a huge crowd of Japanese faces with nary a Westerner in sight. This is less due to the paltry number of foreigners in our part of the country and more to cultural differences, e.g. most of the Brazilians or Peruvians or Canadians living in Japan are at home doing their own thing rather than standing in the freezing cold trying to experience Japanese New Year's Day culture. Sometimes being the only foreigner around can take real courage. Once I went to a concert by a minor group called Personz, which wasn't the sort of band to attract gaijin fans. Not only was I the only non-Japanese in the entire concert hall, but most of the other attendees were short Japanese females, which meant I stood a head or more above everyone, the better for every pair of eyes in the room to lock onto the strange barbarian in row 23.

Being the only gaijin can be a challenge.

Random Japanese Concepts and the "Saemoe" Tournament

Each language is structured in different ways, and it's fun to learn a little bit about how they work. In English, we have four demonstrative pronouns -- this, that, these and those -- but in Japanese there are three, kore (koh-ray) meaning "this" associated with something close to me, the speaker, sore (soh-ray) or "that" for something near you, the person I'm speaking to, and are (ah-ray), "that over there" for something far from both of us. (You nearly always ignore plurals in Japanese.) Often meanings are imported wholesale from Chinese, like a group of kanji-based words that use the character sai, meaning "most," which is how you can express ideas like biggest (saidai ), smallest (saishou), highest (saikou, which also carries the slang meaning of "awesome" if you ever wanted to know how to say this in Japanese), or lowest (saitei, which is also a pretty potent insult). The Japanese interwebs are about to start buzzing with the new Saimoe ("most moe") Tournament, in which otaku vote on who the cutest anime characters are. Last year Taiga from Toradora! took the prize -- I wonder who will win this year?

"Beat" Takeshi and the Cycle of Death and Rebirth in Buddhism

Japan is a Buddhist country, and this manifests itself in some interesting ways. Several national holidays are Buddhist for example, such as Obon in August when the entire country shuts down for three days so everyone can return to their parents' homes to greet the spirits of dead family members who return home for a visit. One concept I've encountered quite often is rin-ne (REEN-neh), the endless cycle of death and rebirth, which basically says that a person's children will lead pretty much the same life as their parents, a pattern that can be hard to break out of. One good example of the cycle of rin-ne being broken is acclaimed comedian/director "Beat" Takeshi Kitano. His father was Kikujiro, a poor house painter who drank all the time, and it was expected that Takeshi would follow in his father's footsteps. Takeshi's mother Saki, however, was adamant that her son would break away from their family's cycle of poverty, so she did part-time jobs secretly to save money to buy study books so her son could attend university one day. I'd say it worked out pretty well.

Takeshi Kitano's mother was determined to break the rin-ne cycle.

Japanese and Tipping

Over the weekend I took a day off to spend some quality time with Mrs. J-List, visiting a nice hotel in downtown San Diego where we could relax after this year's hard anime convention season. We had fun walking through the historical Gaslamp District, which is so hard to enjoy properly during the chaos that is the San Diego Comi-con, and had a nice dinner together. While we were there, my wife did what Japanese people always do when visiting the U.S., stressing out about every tip we paid to servers at restaurants, the hotel staff that brought our bags up, and so on. There is no tipping in Japan, of course, and so Japanese who go abroad read travel books about this exotic custom to make sure they're doing it just right. While I'm usually happy to toss a few bills on the table and leave it at that, my wife meticulously calculates the proper 15% tip amount each time, and always makes sure she has a pocketful of $1 bills ready in case we need to leave unexpected gratuities.

Japanese obsess about leaving tips in the U.S.

WTF, Japan?

No matter how long a person lives in Japan, there are always things that can bring on what expats call a "Japan moment," the feeling of utter amazement at something bizarre you've just encountered. Maybe it's something cute, like a big truck playing the Main Street Electrical Street Parade song as it backs up instead of a boring beep-beep-beep sound, or that first time seeing the plastic Colonel Sanders in front of KFC wearing his "Santa Wear" (Santa Claus Suit). Maybe it's a food item, like strawberry and whipped cream sandwiches, or the ham and cheese on French Toast complete with syrup pre-applied to the bread I saw once. You never know what will bring on that sense of "only-in-Japan" next -- driving through an extremely rural town and coming across a replica of the American Statue of Liberty? Seeing a nondescript building with "Oh!" carefully painted on it? Meeting someone who has taught English for 30 years yet has never been outside of Japan, and who asks you "Where is your domicile?" instead of something simple like "Where do you live?"

Great placement on that door, guys.

Sushi in the U.S. vs. Japan

Normally when I come to the U.S. the last thing I want to do is eat Japanese food, since there there are so many other choices here, like Mexican and Thai and Chinese. (Chinese food does exist in Japan, but in a very different form from what you'd find at Panda Express, often melded so closely with everyday Japanese dishes that no one can tell the two apart.) This trip, however, I've been in the U.S. for so long doing stuff with my American family that I started really craving nihonshoku (Japanese cuisine), so last night I took the family out for the best sushi I know of in San Diego. Sushi in California and Japan are naturally a little different. First of all, the most common way to eat sushi in Japan is kaiten-zushi or conveyor belt sushi, which is cheap and convenient, although traditional places are common, too (though they are pricier). We laughed out loud at some of the menu items with names that would never fly in Japan, like Kabuki, Last Samurai, Yakuza and Gaijin Rolls. As is often the case when eating "Japanese" food in the U.S., the Master (the owner of the shop) was Korean. Which was okay with me -- the fish was fresh and good, and he gave us kimchee (Korean pickled cabbage) to eat for free.

Sushi in the U.S. is a little different from Japan. Not bad, just different.

Big Problems in Sumo Land

Sumo wrestling is the official sport of Japan, enjoying special status and support by the Japanese government. It's more than a sport, really, since it's closely tied to Shinto religious ceremonies going back centuries, and legendary figures from Japan's history like Hideyoshi and Nobunaga were sumo aficionados, although contestants fought to the death back in those days. Recently the sport hasn't been able to catch a break due to a series of scandals that have rocked the Japan Sumo Association and its fans. It started with a marijuana scandal which resulted in several wrestlers being ejected from the sport for trafficking in illegal substances, and things got worse when a teenage wrestler in training died as a result of bullying by other members of his sumo stable. (Not sure why, but a house where a team of sumo wrestlers lives and practices is always called a 'stable' in English.) Maverick Mongolian wrestler Asashoryu was forced to quit in shame after he smashed in the face of a patron in a bar, which wasn't exactly in keeping with the hinkaku (dignity) required of Grand Sumo Champions. Now the existence of gambling ties to yakuza gangsters has come to light, which has enraged fans and caused NHK to boycott broadcasting the Nagoya tournament. I've always loved the uniquely Japanese character of sumo wrestling, and hope the sport can clean its house and get things back to normal soon.

The sumo world is facing some big problems.

Otakon 2010

Unfortunately I'm not able to attend Otakon, the awesome East-Coast anime convention, this year. But that doesn't mean you can't score some great J-List stuff, since our East Coast team will be there, with fabulous manga, dating-sim games, and J-List tissues for everyone who stops by to say hello. We'll be at booth 0119 -- see you there!

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Careful When Ordering Mango Juice From a Pretty Waitress

When you learn a foreign language, you definitely need to develop a sense of humor. Like the other day when I was talking about the concept of katami, which are the treasures of a person who has died which are distributed to friends and family members. But I'd gotten the word wrong, substituting kataki, which literally means a sworn enemy who you must kill. So instead of talking about the big fur cap my father left me when he died -- otosan no katami -- I had said kataki, implying that this object was the hated enemy of my father which I was duty-bound to destroy. The best thing to do when you do screw up like that is to embrace the awkwardness, since you'll definitely never make that mistake again. And be careful when ordering mango juice from a pretty waitress...

The word manko, referring to the female genitilia, is the worst word of Japanese -- way too similar to "mango."

Visiting the Anime Holy Land

One of the coolest things an obsessive anime fan in Japan can do is seichi junrei, e.g. making a "pilgrimage to the holy land," which in this case refers to visiting places from your favorite anime series. Whether it's traveling to Lake Kizaki in Nagano Prefecture, where Please Teacher/Twins was based, trawling the backstreets of Tokyo that provided the setting for Bakemonogatari or communing with moe spirits in the K-On! school (which is a decommissioned elementary school), pretty much every anime these days is based on actual reference locations. Whenever my wife snorts at the idea of otaku traveling around Japan to visit places from their favorite anime, I remind her of her first trip to Rome, when she visited all the places Audrey Hepburn went to in the classic film Roman Holiday, even eating gelato by the Spanish Steps. Obsessions are so much fun! (By the way, we've posted a handy guide to visiting famous sites from anime series to the site today.)

You can visit the places in your favorite anime someday.

Harry Potter Loves Star Wars

"If there's a bright center to Britain, Number Four Privet Drive is the street that it's farthest from." I recently got a new TV, and proceeded to break it in by watching the nerdiest movies I could find, which naturally included Star Wars: A New Hope and the first Harry Potter film. As I watched these two movies back to back, I was struck by how similar the two main characters were, a connection I'd not made before, though it's quite obvious in retrospect. Both were delivered by bearded men to be raised by unsupportive uncles, where they would grow up after much hardship to find that they were really wizards (though one was called "Jedi"), receiving rare magical items that belonged to their fathers which would help them to defeat a Dark Lord. Anime is fun to de-construct, too, breaking down memes into their component parts and seeing what inspirations came from where -- a Hollywood movie here, a reference to an old TV show there.

Harry and Luke, heroes of a thousand faces.

San Diego Comic-Con Wrap-Up

Well, the San Diego Comic-con is over, and the J-List staff is tired, but still exhilarated. As usual, it was awesome getting to meet so many J-List fans, shake lots of hands and even sign an H-game package or two. We also handed out about 20,000 of our trademark J-List pocket tissues, too.

Goodbye to the San Diego Comic-con, we'll see you next year.

Fish Names in Japanese and English

The other day I went out to a seafood restaurant with my wife and daughter, who are visiting from Japan. As they looked to me to help them decide what to order from the menu, I discovered a strange linguistic gap in my brain: I was almost completely ignorant of fish names in English. My awakening as a lover of seafood occurred after I arrived in Japan, and as a result I could tell you the subtle differences between saba and hokke and aji, though I had no idea which was which was what on an English menu, and what we should order. Like all Japanese, my wife assumes that I know every word of English automatically because I'm a native speaker, and she can't understand how gaps in my knowledge could be possible. In the end we got sushi and were very happy with it.

I learned to love fish in Japan, and I often don't know fish names in English.

"Like, or Love?"

Suki desu ka? One of the first useful words a student of Japanese learns is how to say "like" (suki), which is pronounced quickly so that it sounds rather like the English word "ski," leading all students to immediately make the joke sukii ga suki desu ka? (Do you like skiing?), since the words sound similar. The word suki is often a student's introduction to the concept that a word or idea in one language might have many possible meanings in another language, depending on the situation. Right off the bat, suki can mean "like" (in the context of your favorite food or hobby) or "love" (when said in reference to another person). Like all Japanese words there's some ambiguity involved, which is the subject of more than a few melodramatic misunderstandings in anime and manga. For example, if a girl was looking at a cake and said suki desu, she could theoretically be expressing her love of cake, or else she could be confessing her feelings for a boy who was also in the room. Once I saw a variety show in which former JAV actress Ai Iijima walked around New York, asking Americans kyonyu suki? which sounds like "Can you ski?" in English, but is really asking if they prefer women with large oppai. It was funny to see the Americans on the show nodding their heads for the camera at her question. Try it on your friends!

In Orange Road, Madoka had to use English to clearly ask Kyosuke's feelings, since Japanese was too vague to be of use.

The 100th Anniverary of the Invasion of Korea

This year marks the 100th anniversary of Japan's invasion of the Korean peninsula, which started a 35 year period during which the entire nation of Korea was officially annexed by Japan -- high schools in Pyonyang even participated in the Koshien high school baseball tournament in Osaka, the same Koshien that's celebrated in baseball manga today. I'm going to use my great knowledge of Japan and predict that the Japanese government will issue an apology to the governments of the two Koreas over the next few weeks. I'll go out even further on a limb and state that, although this will be the eighth official apology Japan has made to Korea (this doesn't include numerous heartfelt expressions of regret by the Emperor of Japan, whose statements lack the force of law), people on the other side of the Sea of Japan the Eastern Sea will not be impressed. There will be angry words exchanged between netizens of Japan's 2ch BBS and their counterparts in South Korea, and maybe a new wave of DDOS attacks back and forth. Business as usual, in other words.

As I've written before, it's hard to know how to feel about all this. Japan did terrible things, and hasn't properly educated its young people about what it did. On the other hand, over-educating your population on every wrong that was done to you in the past, as Korea (and China) do regularly, is just unhealthy. They also beat the dead horse of Japan's WWII crimes to create a nationalistic unity, deflecting cricitism against their own failings and winning votes as good as any American politician who raises fears of attacks by Muslim terrorists if the other party wins the election does. Japan did bad things, but part of the reason we judge them so harshly is that it happened during 20th century, the era of photography, rather than in the 19th century or early, when Great Britain was doing the exact same things -- creating an empire by force, starting with the country that lay immediately to the west of it -- without it being documented photographically. Or have I lived in Japan so long that I am hopelessly biased to their side of things? Love to hear your thoughts.

Maybe South Korea can take this opportunity to thank Japan for whatever apology that is coming and say, "Okay now, it's been a century, you don't need to apologize any more. We're moving on." But that would probably be overly optimistic.

Tensions ahead for Korea and Japan?

J-List Comic-Con Update

We're enjoying our time at the San Diego Comicon, which is a a fantastic celebration of worldwide popular nerd culture. If you're at the show, we hope you'll come see us at booth 129 in the heart of "Anime Alley" and say hi, and check out the selection of items we have for you. Remember that we're having a special week-long sale for everyone who isn't lucky enough to be here in San Diego with us. Through Sunday, for every $100 you buy on J-List, you'll get a $5 coupon to use with your next order.

We are loving life at the San Diego Comicon right now. Come visit us at booth 129!

Uniformity in Japan

Just as Americans are accustomed to thinking of our country as a union of semi-soverign states, each with its own unique history and traditions, one of the hallmarks of Japan is "uniformity." During my bachelor days I travelled around the country quite a bit, going from cold but vibrant Hokkaido in the north, through the barren Northern Honshu area where sad enka songs were born, and all the way down to modern, bustling Hiroshima, and one thing that has always stood out for me was how similar many things were. Roads, signs, telephone poles, the way schools are constructed, all seem to be following one master blueprint, with little or no variation between regions. There are exceptions of course -- the cold climate of Northern Japan requires sturdier architecture to withstand the heavy snowfall compared to the rest of the country, including veritically oriented traffic lights rather than horizontal ones -- but by and large many aspects of life in Japan are remarkably similar whether you're in Tokyo or Kyushu or wherever.

Traffic lights in Japan always look like this, except in the colder parts.

Japanese Food is Very "Herushii" (Healthy)

One interesting aspect of living in Japan is getting used to the, ah, unique pronunciations of English words the Japanese often employ. For example, the Japanese word for "healthy" is kenko-teki, but for various reasons -- mainly related to the Japanese having positive feelings about anything expressed with English words -- the worth "healthy" is often used as-is, written in the katakana writing system as a foreign loan word (ヘルシー）. Due to limitations of Japanese phonetics, however, it sounds like herushii, something that took me quite a while to become accustomed to. Some other "English" words that are mangled by Japanese pronunciation include "micro" (pronounced MEE-cro about half the time), and "theme" (which is teema in Japanese, due to the fact that it actually came from the German, not English). J-List is happy to be working with Nitroplus, the legendary game company that publishes Demonbane, but in Japanese their name is actually pronounced like "nee-tro" rather than the English word "nitro." Confusing much?

Japanese food is considered very herushii?

Of Math and Star Wars

I'm convinced that people can do anything they decide they can do. For example, I'm not good at math, and if you give me a difficult math problem I'm positive I won't be able to solve it for you. But if you were to change the math problem into something I care about, such as Star Wars, I'm sure things would be different -- a word problem calculating the speed at which the Death Star orbited the planet Yavin would be pretty awesome. I drive a Mazda Miata with a stick shift, and I love the car, driving it everywhere when I'm in San Diego. My Japanese wife cannot drive a stick, and refuses to get behind the wheel of my car because she's sure she'll end up stalled on a steep hill with cars behind her honking angrily. If only she'd decide that she could drive a stick, I'm sure she'd suddenly do much better, and if she could do that then maybe I could decide to be good at math, too.

(Incidentally, the Japanese word for a standard transmission on a car is "mission," and so I tease my wife by saying "Mission: Impossible" to her, which is a really bad joke, but actually one of my better dajare gags.)

How long would the Death Star take to orbit Yavin traveling at 4000 mph?

San Diego Comic-Con is Here Again!

We're getting ready for the San Diego Comicon, which is going to be a blast. We hope you'll come see us at booths 129 and 228 in the heart of "Anime Alley" near the East end of the convention center. We'll be loaded with awesome J-List T-shirts, Totoro and Ponyo plush toys, PC dating-sim games, Samurai Sword Umbrellas and more good stuff. For those not fortunate enough to be able to attend the convention, we have some happy news -- a special week-long sale! During this week, for every $100 you buy on J-List, you'll get a $5 coupon to use with your next order.

Party time, San Diego Comicon is here again!

Kanji Is Fun

One of the challenges in learning Japanese is tackling kanji, which is not easy for Westerners, as it's a very different paradigm from anything we've ever used. The usual way to learn kanji is to start at the beginning, with ichi, ni and san and all the other characters covered in the first grade, and going from there. Some kanji you encounter early on include jin, or person, which is added to the end of countries to make that nationality (e.g. America-jin is an American, nihon-jin is Japanese), and ko, a word that means "child," or in some situations, "girl." I remember learning that adding the -ya kanji for "roof" to nouns made a word meaning a shop that sold that item, e.g. hana (flower) + ya = hanaya (a flower shop). When I learned the word for car (kuruma), I haltingly asked my teacher if I could say kuruma-ya to mean a shop that sells cars, and the answer was correct. In making the mental leap myself, I'd taken my first step into a larger world.

Dressing Up To Go To Wal-Mart?

Although I try to avoid going to Wal-Mart, sometimes I find myself needing something that's convenient to buy there. Last night at 10 pm or so I asked my Japanese wife if she wanted to with me so she could pick up American make-up, soap and other items she likes to stock up on when in the U.S. Her response was amusing to me: "I can't go. I don't have time to put on make-up and dress nicely." I explained that if she dressed up in special clothes to go to Wal-Mart at 10 pm she'd be in the only person in America doing so, and she decided that a T-shirt was okay to go out in after all. The episode illustrates the Japanese view of kakko (kah-koh), lit. style or fashion, and how they often place a lot more importance on how they look than we might in the U.S. It's also common to find skiers, golfers or surfers in Japan with exquisitely chosen outfits and equipment, before they've even begun to learn the sport in question.

Do you dress up to go to Wal-Mart?

Throwing Yen Away

If you walk around San Diego and happen to see some Japanese yen coins on the ground, I might have put them there. Since I arrived from Japan, I've been finding yen in my pocket that isn't worth terribly much, so rather than carry it all the way back home with me I've been dropping the coins in parking lots and on sidewalks for others to find. I often do the reverse when I'm in Japan, tossing pennies or dimes or quarters from the U.S. that I happen to have carried back to Japan with me onto the ground, where they might be picked up by someone and puzzled over. Perhaps there's some high school student who isn't sure of their future, I reason, and finding a "lucky penny" from the U.S. will push them to study English more. Or perhaps finding a cool Japanese five-yen coin with its stylistic "zen" design and hole in the center (so you can carry your coins on a string) will make someone's day in the U.S. It's silly, of course, but if I can make one person happy by tossing a few coins around, I'd consider it a good exchange.

If I have yen I don't need, I like to toss some coins to the four winds.

Of Personal Checks, Garbage Disposals, Bread and Tissue

When going to the U.S. from Japan, there are little things you notice. First, being able to pay for something by writing a personal check is convenient, yet something that's totally unknown in Japan, where people usually use cash for purchases, and the concept of checks doesn't exist at all. Garbage disposals are another thing -- it's so easy to get rid of uneaten food and other nama gomi (lit. "raw garbage") with one, but they aren't allowed in Japan because of all the rice people eat, which would clog the pipes. In Japan bread only lasts a couple of days before it goes stale, yet bread in the U.S. seems to last for two weeks or more, presumably due to higher levels of preservatives. And tissue in the U.S. is markedly different from Japan. Not only is it more expensive -- you can get a five-pack of large boxes of tissue for $3.00 at Japanese stores, which seems ridiculously cheap to me -- but the sheets are thick and luxurious, almost too much so, and I get the impression that it's made that thick so they can give you fewer sheets in each box. And what's up with rose scent? Every time I sneeze I feel like someone has put perfume inside my nose.

Tissues in the U.S. are different from Japan is subtle ways.

Peter's Favorite Places to Visit in Japan

In the tradition of the Seven Wonders of the World, the Japanese are keen on organizing famous places into convenient sets of three. The three most beautiful Japanese gardens are Kenroku-en in Kanazawa Prefecture, Kairaku-en in Mito and Koraku-en in Okayama, for example, while the three best night views of Japanese cities are Hakodate, Kobe and Nagasaki. In that tradition, I present to you...Peter's favorite three things to see in Japan. Number three would have to be Byodo-in temple near Kyoto, a serene building built in 998 A.D. which can be seen on the back of the Japanese ten yen coin. Next is Todai-ji, the beautiful temple in Nara that houses the largest bronze statue of Buddha in Japan, a wonderful area to explore. And my all-time favorite place in all Japan is Sanjusangen-do, or the Hall of Thirty-Three Bays, a fabulous elongated building in Kyoto housing 1001 wooden statues of Buddha. Walking the length of the 850 year old building to see all the statues all will really change the way you view the world.

It's said you can find your own face among the Buddha statues.

Too Many Eulogies

So far this has been a heck of a year for losing awesome people, including Gary Coleman, Dennis Hopper, J.D. Salinger and the "Great Bird of the Anime Galaxy" Carl Macek. Now Peter Fernandez, who provided the voice of Speed Racer, wrote the famous theme song and directed all the episodes has passed away at the age of 83. Like Robotech creator Carl Macek, Peter was responsible for guiding a generation of young people towards Japan, although no one knew the word "anime" back in 1967. He single-handedly created the impression that dubbed Japanese animation sounded "funny," with odd syllables tacked onto the ends of sentences to make the mouth movements fit better. My mother met Mr. Fernandez at an auto show and talked his ear off about her nutty son who learned Japanese and went to live in Japan all because of Speed Racer (there was a little more to it than that, Mom). Incidentally, Peter's influence on the anime community wasn't all positive. After the success of the first two seasons of Star Blazers/Space Battleship Yamato, the melodramatic anime series about the battleship Yamato being converted into a spaceship to save Earth from destruction, Peter was brought in to produce the third season, the Bolar Wars. Since he didn't know the (excellent) voice acting staff that had done the first two seasons, he brought in all new talent, which unfortunately rendered season three unwatchable to old school fans like me, since the voices are all wrong.

Speed Racer reaches the finish line in the sky, uh-huh.

Faux Pas in Japan

Before I came to Japan in 1991, I took four years of Japanese at my alma mater, SDSU, so compared to most first-time gaijin I spoke quite a lot of Japanese. I could do many useful things, like ask directions when I got lost (which was a frequent occurrence, as there are no street names in Japan), and I knew just enough Japanese for me to put my foot in my mouth really, really well. Yes, I've committed many faux pas during my time in Japan, such as trying to impress a pretty girl by speaking Japanese to her, but accidentally using onna kotoba, words that women use which are the bane of male students of Japanese, or committing a deadly slip when ordering mango juice, since "mango" is dangerously close to the worst word that exists in Japanese. (Manko is the word for the female reproductive area.) In Japanese hospitals, thermometers are always used in the armpit, but I put one in my mouth, causing much shock among the nurses, who had never seen anyone do such a barbaric thing. And then there was the time I bought my wife some pretty flowers, only to find out that I'd accidentally bought kiku no hana (chrysanthemums), which are only used as offerings to the dead on special Buddhist days -- that really got a laugh out of her.

Very pretty, but only for dead people.

Grind Up Those Sesame Seeds

In a recent update I mentioned that the way to express the idea of "brown-nosing" someone was goma o suru, literally meaning "to grind up someone's sesame seeds for them." If you want to try this word out on Japanese people you know, just say goma-suri! ("stop trying to flatter me!") when someone says something nice to you, then watch them jump out of their shoes in surprise that you know a word like that. This phrase is one idiom that's commonly used in Japanese, although it sounds strange to us since the cultural image of an underling winning points with his boss by grinding his sesame seeds is so different from what we're used to. Japanese spend many thousands of hours memorizing the strange idioms and turns of phrase we use in English, never quite sure why it could be possible to "rain cats and dogs," or why something simple is a "piece of cake" or "easy as pie" but not the other way around. As is usually the case with language, asking why something means what it means doesn't get you very far, so encapsulating what you're trying to learn as a defined unit and figuring what situations it works best in is usually a good approach.

If you want a raise, grind up your boss's sesame seeds.

Prime Minister KHAAAN! Suffers a Setback

The Japanese election was last Sunday, and as expected, the ruling Democratic Party of Japan lost ground, giving up a total of ten Upper House seats. It was a big setback for Prime Minister Kan (warning, sound will play), who took over after Yukio Hatoyama's fail whale inability to resolve the base-related issues on Okinawa, make all freeways free and magically put $250 per child into the bank accounts of every family in the country each month. The opposition Liberal Democratic Party picked up seats, despite having no viable plan to fix what's wrong with Japan and no stand-out leaders as far as I can tell. Another winner in Sunday's election was Your Party...no, I don't mean your party, but Your Party, also known as Minna no Toh (lit. "everyone's political party"), which combines some popular reform policies of the DPJ with the pro-business stance of the LDP, the better to form a coalition with either group. While I'm not against the new party's principles, any political party whose official English name is Your Party is just asking to be mocked by Stephen Colbert.

The Democratic Party of Japan faces a setback.

Japan's Foreign Population Dips

Like all countries, there are various foreigners living in Japan, and the "made in Japan" TV you bought last month was likely assembled in part by hands from Brazil, Peru, India, Korea, and so on. Last year the number of foreigners living in Japan declined for the first time since 1961, dropping by about 31,000 from the previous year to 2.2 million people, or 1.72% of Japan's population. The reason of course is the bad economy and accompanying slashing of jobs in factories in 2008 and 2009, although most of those jobs have happily recovered. Having the number of foreigners living in Japan drop is a bad situation in part because many see immigration as the last chance Japan has to turn its population decline around. Since Japanese are only having 1.3 babies per couple on average, it's up to immigration to help provide economic vitality as the country ages. Yet Japan has essentially zero people coming from the outside to settle permanently, compared with 1.2 million legal immigrants who enter the U.S. to live and work each year, contributing to the tax base and in many cases taking American citizenship and adding greatly to our country.

Japan's foreign population dropped for the first time since 1961.

Is Japan Strange?

If you read blogs about Japan at all, one question that gets asked a lot is, "Why is Japan so strange?" And looking at images of middle-aged salarymen wearing Lucky Star cosplay and kawaii gravure idol Aki Hoshino with nylon stockings over her head which are then pulled up, making her face look ridiculous, one might think that Japan is just a tad odd. But as I've written before, there's a tendency for only those aspects of Japan which look strange or ridiculous to our gaijin sensibilities to be reported on the Internet and by the masukomi (the news media, shortened from the English "mass communications"). When nothing bizarre happens in Japan, there's only silence from the country, but once a man tries to legally marry his favorite Love Plus video game character, people start wondering that they're putting in Japan's drinking water. I remember growing up in the 1970s watching the awesome Monty Python and Benny Hill on American TV, and I had a somewhat warped impression of the U.K. as a result. Yet nothing less bizarre and hilarious could have broken through the cultural wall, so that's what we got.

Then again, maybe Japan is a little strange.

Japan, a Land Without Lawyers?

What would you do in a world without lawyers? Well, for all intents and purposes that that's the reality of life in Japan, a country that has just one lawyer for every 7325 people, compared with one per 288 individuals in the United States. Lawyers are extremely rare in Japan, and I've only met one during my 19 years in the country, despite having several friends in the U.S. who hold law degrees. Since people obviously need to file various legal documents at different times in their lives, there's a lesser official called shiho shoshi (which Google tells me translates as "administrative scrivener") who can file papers related to starting businesses, buying land and so on. Like politicians, doctors and certified public accountants, lawyers in Japan belong to a class of occupations that have a special status, and they're called by the respectful title of sensei. And I'm pretty sure they don't have lawyer jokes in Japan.

If you want to live in a place with no lawyers, come to Japan.

My Route 66 Weekend Vacation

Over the weekend I came across a cool map of old Route 66 in my house in San Diego, and decided to take an impromptu road trip to the historic American highway -- like, leaving immediately after throwing some clothes in my mother's prized Mazda Miata. Road trips are always fun, but when you're coming from a cramped, urbanized country like Japan, which has around half the population of the U.S. crammed into 1/25 the land area, there's something special about getting out on the open road and driving for hundreds of miles. They have freeways in Japan, but for the most part you only use them when making a long-distance journey like going from my home prefecture of Gunma down to Tokyo, not for short hops around town. Instead, most driving in Japan is on normal roads, with traffic lights, road construction and pachinko parlors all around you, and you could easily drive for an hour and only have travelled 20 km or so.

At the Grand Canyon, I happened to drive past the Flintstone's Bedrock City Campground, an RV park designed to look like the world of Fred Flintstone, right down to the rock-wheel car he drove in the animated series. The first word out of my mouth when I saw the amazing place was dasa-kakko ii. This is a combination of the word dasai (da-sah-ee), which means uncool, out of fashion or cheesy, and kakko ii (kah-koh ee), which means cool or "good style." Put together, the two words describe something that's both campy yet awesome nevertheless, meaning something like "dorky-cool" in English.

I also stopped by the Grand Canyon, beautiful as always; this campground was dasa-kakko ii or "dorky-cool."

Godzilla Day is My Blogger Anniversary Day

This Sunday is my 12th anniversary as a J-blogger. J-List has been around since 1996, but I trace my beginning as a blogger to the Japanese release of that awful American Godzilla film. I went to see the film with my wife, and as we drove back to our house I was so full of comments I had to send a J-List email update at 3 am to get them all out. I wrote about how the Japanese films illustrated the concept of wabi and sabi, translated as "sober refinement and elegant simplicity," the esthetic idea that a single rose blooming is more beautiful than one hundred roses, or that a single monster battling all of Japan is more beautiful than a hundred baby Godzillas running around New York. I got an enormous amount of feedback from customers asking for more commentary like that, and I realized that J-List isn't in the business of selling anime figures and bento boxes and "Looking for a Japanese girlfriend" T-shirts, but is instead all about being a bridge of ideas to Japan for people around the world.

Strangely enough, I'm thankful to this guy for helping me become a better blogger.

Food is a Natural Cultural Bridge

San Diego has a vibrant Asian community, and driving down the Convoy Street will introduce you to a wealth of restaurants serving Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese and other types of cuisine. Yesterday some friends invited me out to a place called Yakyudori for good ramen and Sapporo beer, and everything was delicious. While we were eating, I realized everyone in our group seemed to know all the Japanese words related to the food we were enjoying, from shoyu (soy sauce) ramen to katsu (fried pork cutlet) to edamame beans. It then occurred to me that food is a natural area that bridges Japanese and Western culture, providing an easy toehold for people to mingle language and ideas back and forth. There are many other "natural cultural bridges" that make it easy to share information between East and West, such as kaiju monster movies, martial arts, anything awesome related to samurai and ninja, and of course the ecchi stuff. Are there any other natural bridges between Japan and the rest of the world you can think of?

Food is an natural cultural bridge between East and West.

How 'Bout my Crooked Teeth?

One of the highlights of Anime Expo was the concert given by the two singers of Macross Frontier, the 25th anniversary sequel to the original Macross series. The concert featured May'n, who performs the singing voice of the sexy Sheryl Nome, and Megumi Nakashima, the voice of Ranka Lee, and it was a blast. Besides the live stage, the concert hall featured two giant TV screens which showed close-up video of the stars as they sang. This was great, but for one problem: seeing both singers close-up like that made me really want to take them to a good orthodontist. For someone reason, Japanese often have crooked teeth which look strange to Westerners, almost like they've got too many teeth for their mouth. These teeth are often fixed with braces as children, although just as often they're left the way they are since, well, they're considered to be very cute. Crooked teeth are called yaeba (yah-eh-ba) and as far as I can tell, they function in Japan the way a beauty mark works in the West: a tiny defect in a person that becomes their "charm point."

I'd have given my eye teeth to take these girls to a good orthodontist.

In Japan, Yes Doesn't Mean Yes

Leave it to Japan to turn something as simple as "yes" and "no" into something more complex than it needs to be. But because of the differences in language and culture, sometimes even these simple concepts can cause confusion. "Yes" in Japanese is hai, and in addition to affirming a statement or question, it's also used to let the person whose talking to you know you're listening attentively. This is called aizuchi, words of agreement that a Japanese will say while listening to another person. It's not uncommon for gaijin to assume that a person saying hai...hai to us is actually agreeing with what we're saying, when in fact the opposite may well be true. "No" in Japanese is iie (EE-eh), but in a society with as many shades of grey as Japan, its actually quite rare to hear a statement or question answered with such a flatly negative word. It's more common to hear something like chotto (CHOE-toe, which literally means "a little") used to vaguely hint that the cookies you'd baked didn't taste very good ("well, they're a little..."), rather than a direct negative statement ("no, I don't like them"). One of the more common uses of iie is in response to someone thanking you for something, in which case it means something like "No, don't mention it."

Yes means yes, unless it doesn't. No means, "Don't mention it." .

Driving in the U.S. vs. Japan

Driving in the U.S. after living in Japan for so long presents certain challenges. Like the U.K., Australia and New Zealand, Japan drives on the left side of the street, which means you need to pay attention to what other cars are doing when switching from one country to the other to avoid any problems. Although it's not that difficult to make the switch -- just make sure you're closer to the center of the road than your passenger, whichever country you're in -- I find it's impossible to keep from accidentally trying to get into the wrong side of a car, no matter where I am. Similarly, although automobile controls are identical no matter what country you're in, the turn signal and windshield wiper controls are reversed between the U.S. and Japan. This increases the likelihood that I'll accidentally turn my wipers on when making a turn, usually when a group of attractive girls happens to be watching me. In Japan, there's a 5-second delay between when one traffic light turns red and the next changes to green, which means there's always a stream of cars running every red light since people know they have a few more seconds to make it across. This time delay doesn't exist in the U.S. however, which is a very important thing to keep in mind when driving.

Like the U.K., the Japanese drive on the left, which causes me to get in on the wrong side of the car sometimes.

$50 Hello Kitty Melons

The other day I saw a post about the newest in wacky fruit goodness from Japan, a high quality yubari melon with Hello Kitty's face embossed into the skin. For those not used to Japan's world of high-end fruit, the price of this rare treat -- a cool $55 -- might have seemed excessive, although it was pretty much what anyone would pay for a really delicious hand-grown melon shipped in a special gift box. Japan is really into gift giving, and there are two gift seasons called chugen (in the summer) and oseibo (in the winter) during which families give gifts to people who have helped them especially, like neighbors or teachers or anyone whose sesame seeds they want to grind up. (The way to express the idea of "brown nosing" someone in Japanese is goma o suru, lit. to grind sesame seeds for someone.) Popular gifts include delicious boxed fruit, gift boxes of beer or sake, useful household items lke detergent or soy sauce, rare steaks of Kobe beef, and other really awesome stuff. It's also common for employees to give gifts to their bosses, to butter them up before the summer and winter bonuses seasons. You can even find gift items on J-List's popular Anime and Gift Snacks page...

In Japan, giving $50 melons as gifts is an important part of the culture.

All About "Sumimasen"

You may know the Japanese word sumimasen, which generally corresponds to "excuse me" and is one of the more useful phrases to learn, but like most aspects of Japan there's a little more to it than appears on the surface. First and foremost, sumimasen (soo-mee-mah-SEN) is used in any situation where you need to apologize for something small, such as causing someone inconvenience by bumping into them in the street, calling the wrong number, or ordering curry with beef intestines accidentally because you couldn't read the kanji in the menu, then asking for something else instead. Many situations which would call for a "thank you" in English work better with sumimasen in Japanese, something I learned at a public bath a few weeks after first arriving here. We'd stayed a few minutes after closing time, causing minor inconvenience to the staff who no doubt wanted to get home, and as we left my Japanese coworker said sumimasen to them ("we're sorry for taking too long in the bath") rather than the phrase I would have used, arigato ("thank you for letting us stay a few minutes past closing time"). When I asked about this, I was told that "'Thank you' sounds cheap. 'Excuse me' is a better word for Japanese people." The sumimasen phrase is also used when asking for service in a restaurant, and one difference between Japan and the U.S. is that in Japan, it's okay to loudly use the phrase to indicate that you're ready to order, whereas in the States you usually close your menu and sit quietly to be noticed most of the time. Like many Japanese phrases, you can use the all-purpose word domo (which loosely means "very") to add a layer of politeness, e.g. domo sumimasen! ("I'm really sorry!").

Sumimasen is one of the most commonly used words in Japan.

Slurp Your Noodles in Japan

Japan is probably the only country where eating too quietly will get comments from people around you. The correct way of eating Japanese and Chinese noodles like ramen, udon and soba is to slurp them while holding your face near the bowl, sucking in the soup along with the noodles. There's no upper ceiling to how loud you're allowed to slurp, and making these noises is one way of letting whoever prepared the noodles for you know that you think they're delicious. When foreigners come to Japan, they usually eat their noodles without making these noises, prompting Japanese to say shizuka desu ne ("you eat very quietly"). There are other differences in eating etiquette. In Japan, it's perfectly okay to pick up your ramen bowl and drink the soup from it directly, although drinking out of a bowl might get a child smacked in the U.S. It's okay to slurp Asian-style noodles, but spaghetti is another matter, and the image of an old Japanese man loudly vacuuming his pasta off the plate is very unsophisticated. Some table manner no-no's are related to Buddhism, including the taboo against sticking chopsticks straight up in rice or handing food to someone else chopsticks-to-chopsticks (both of which are part of funeral ceremonies in Japan).

Eating some foods quietly is considered strange in Japan.

Japanese Girls Think Their Fathers Are Unclean

Well, we're done with Anime Expo, and what a fun time it was. Thanks to everyone who came by to say hello during the show!

In the last season of Lost, Japanese actor Hiroyuki Sanada -- quite well known outside Japan due to his being in Ring and The Last Samurai -- played the role of the mysterious priest Dogan, who keeps the smoke monster out of the temple or something. My wife has a been a fan of his since his Japan Action Club days, and was thrilled to be able to enjoy some lines of dialogue in her native language, rather than in the many difficult dialects of English that Lost is so good at. In his first scene, Dogan refers to an "infection" (kegare) that one character had been exposed to. It was a word I knew well, because it's what my Japanese daughter says if I try to kiss her good night. For some reason, Japanese girls have a major issue with their fathers once they reach a certain age, which seems to go beyond the general fear of "cooties" that all teenagers might feel. In Japan people take baths every day, and a family will use the bath water for several family members, since all washing is done outside the tub, but my daughter insists on taking her bath before me every night, so my fatherly bacteria won't infect her. It's not that she hates me or anything -- we get along great. She's just decided that, like all fathers, I am simply unclean.

So what do you think? If you're female, do you hug and kiss your father, or push him away because he smells bad and makes dumb jokes?

Japanese girls often view their fathers as "unclean."