Creative Like a Child

"If Burger King married Dairy Queen, their child would be Jack in the Box." This bit of wisdom was uttered by my Japanese son one day when we were visiting the U.S., and it seemed like a very astute thing for a (then) eight-year-old to say. Every parent knows how creative children can be, making up nonsensical new words in ways adults never could, bound as we are by social norms and expectations. The cool thing is, when you learn a foreign language like Japanese, you get to be just as creative, as you twist your new language this way and that, exploring the boundaries just like children do. This "linguistic second childhood" is also useful as a defense when someone wants to know why you're still watching Gundam or Macross or Evangelion at your age. Since I started learning Japanese in college in 1987, linguistically I'm still only 23 years old!

I'll ignore the obvious In n' Out joke.

Japanese Foot Superstitions

The other day I happened to see my newphew's bare foot, and I noticed that his middle toe was longer than his big toe, and I told him, "Well, it looks like you're going to go farther in life than your parents did." The Japanese superstition that you'll surpass your parents if you have a long middle toe has no basis in fact, but coming from the West it's one more wacky things to discover about the place. There are other foot-related superstitions in Japan, for example, if you cut your toenails at night, you won't be able to be with your parents when they die. Also, if you want to know the weather tomorrow, do what Japanese kids do and throw your shoe as hard as you can. If it lands upright, it will be sunny tomorrow; if on its side, it will be cloudy; and if upside-down, it will rain.

I your middle toe longer than your big toe?

Samurai in New York in 1860?

If you're in the New York area, you might consider checking out the exhibition Samurai in New York: The First Japanese Delegation, which features photographs and other mementos from the first group of Japanese who visited New York back in 1860, arriving on the Kanrin-maru, Japan's first steamship. This was just six years after Commodore Matthew C. Perry had forced open Japan's doors to trade with the U.S., and the delegation -- which included several of modern Japan's "founding fathers" including Yukichi Fukuzawa, who now appears on the 10,000 yen note -- was treated to parades everywhere they went. I've always been fascinated by this era in Japan's history 150 years ago. The country had been essentially closed to all contact for nearly 250 years, essentially frozen in time, and the arrival of those "Black Ships" must have been like first contact with UFOs. I wonder if there were any Japan otakus around back in 1860? (The exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York runs through November.)

The first samurais to visit New York in 1860 made quite a splash.

Skunks and Hummingbirds in Japan

I continue to enjoy my time in the U.S., zooming around San Diego in my Mazda Miata, my favorite car in the world. One drawback of a convertible like the Miata is that you're generally more acquainted with the smells around you as you drive, which in the U.S. often means passing a dead skunk and having to endure its unique aroma. This isn't a problem in Japan, as there are happily no skunks in the country -- that's a nice thing not to have. Hummingbirds, which often flit around my head when I work in the backyard in my house in San Diego, are another bit of fauna that's not found in Japan, and Japanese know of the unique creatures only through picture books. It makes me wonder what Japanese people think of when they imagine skunks or hummingbirds -- I'll bet it's very different from people who live alongside them.

Most Japanese think the smell of a skunk comes from flatulance.

The Japanese Love to Buy American

Japan is absolutely one of the most pro-American countries in the world, with most people possessing a positive view of the U.S., a trait that's used by advertisers to sell various products. Japanese generally have the impression that America is kakko ii -- meaning "good style" or cool -- and are often open to owning items like Zippo lighters, a set of Coleman outdoor cooking gear and clothes from L.L. Bean. Branding your product as American can often bring a boost in sales, which is why companies like Jack Daniels or KFC wrap themselves in images of old Tennessee or Kentucky. Levi Strauss struggled to build a name for themselves in Japan during the 1970s, until they hit on the idea of using iconic Hollywood stars like James Dean, John Wayne and Marilyn Monroe to advertise their jeans (they came cheap, since they were dead), which has to have been one of the most successful advertising decisions ever. And of course Harley Davidson sells a huge number of bikes in Japan, and has many dedicated fans.

American imagery is powerful to the Japanese.

The Japanese and Simplified English

Whether you're talking about Singapore or South Africa, Jamaica or Japan, every country is going to adapt the English language to their own local needs. In Japan, people generally learn six years of English in junior high and high school, yet because no one really needs it once they've taken their college entrance exams, it often becomes more of a decoration for society. One pattern I've noticed is that English gets shortened or simplified in ways that might seem strange to us. For example, a student of mine wanted to tell me that she'd found out she was pregnant but didn't know how to say it in English, so she pointed at her abdomen and exclaimed, "Baby in!" Hair conditioner in Japanese is called "rinse" (shortened from "cream rinse"), so it makes perfect sense to Japanese people that "rinse in shampoo" would be what conditioning shampoo would be called. In Japanese a convertible like my Miata is known as an "open car," a name which gets the job done without adding any unnecessary complexity, while an RV your family can sleep in is referred to as a "camp car." One of my favorite Japanese word simplifications are Phillips and regular screwdrivers -- the Japanese just call them "plus" and "minus."

Would you like to wash your hair with "rinse in shampoo"?

By the Light of the Fireflies

It's funny how different inputs -- such as a simple song -- can push different emotional buttons depending on what culture you hail from. When most North Americans hear the Scottish folk song Auld Lang Syne we probably immediately think of New Year's Eve, of saying goodbye to the old year with a large beer in our hands. Hotaru no Hikari, or Light of the Fireflies, is the title of the Japanese version of this song, and in Japan it's sung at graduations. The chorus tells the story of hard-working students who wanted to study so much that they read books by the light of fireflies they'd captured in a jar, or the moonlight reflected off snow. It can bring a tear to the eyes of Japanese who hear it sung, and a totally different image from one we might conjure up in the same situation. Incidentally, the song is also played by stores as they're about to close, and if you've ever visited Japan and wondered why they were playing Auld Lang Syne over the store speakers, it was a polite request that you complete your purchase and leave.

In Japan, Auld Lang Syne is played at graduations and shops when its closing time.

Repeating Words Are Cute-Cute

One fun group of Japanese words consists of a single word repeated twice, which makes the words more charming and fun to use. For example, the word moe can be said to describe the warm, fuzzy feeling you get when contemplating your favorite anime character, but repeating the word -- e.g. moe moe-- adds an extra ingredient that makes the new word more playful and expressive. Likely based on the way Chinese kanji are sometimes repeated to create a plural or add additional meaning, the grammatical construction isn't limited to Japanese words. For example, a couple that shows affection for each other is called love-love in Japanese, and there's that ice cream with the cute name of Hello Hello. Some other repeating words include moshi moshi, how Japanese people answer the phone; tsubu tsubu, any candy or food with bits of fruit inside; pika pika, meaning brand sparkling new or in the case of Pikachu, crackling with energy; and my favorite caffeine gum, Black Black.

When two people are very close they are love-love.

A Bagful of Coins

Today I was doing some cleaning in my home in the San Diego when I came across a large bag of change containing U.S. coins. "Alright!" I exclaimed, then I sat down to count the money I'd discovered, but to my chagrin it came to less than $10. In Japan when you have a large bag of coins, you have some real money, thanks to the 100 and 500 yen coins (roughly corresponding to $1 and $5), which enable someone with a pocketful of change to buy pretty much anything they might need. Although the idea is not a popular one, I hope that America can start taking its iconic $1 bill out of circulation in favor of those awesome dollar coins they have these days, which make you want to start storing your money in treasure chests. Coins can be used for thirty years or more, compared to less than two for paper bills, and making the switch to $1 coins would save the U.S. government half a billion dollars a year. And after the conversion is done, having some coins in your pocket will mean you'll be able to buy lunch.

If you have a pocketful of yen, you have a lot of money.

Let's Analyze Fuzzy Japanese Grammar

A language reflects the character of the people who use it, and vice-versa. One interesting bit of Japanese grammar students learn early on is the verb ending masho, which corresponds to "let's..." as in "let's eat" (tabemasho), "let's go" (ikimasho) or "let's not smoke" (tabako wo yamemasho). In situations where verbal or written warnings would be worded in a command form in English (e.g. do not smoke, do not ride on the escalator backwards), it's common for Japanese to express the same message with this softer "let's..." verb form, essentially making statements like "let's put our telephones into vibration mode" (maanaa modo ni shimasho) or "when a pregnant woman or elderly person gets on the train, let's give our seat to them" (seki wo yuzurimasho). These statements subtly create a warm and fuzzy atmosphere of cooperation that make people want to do their part for the good of everyone, an important pillar of Japanese polite society. Every year, the Japanese tax office sponsors commercials featuring famous TV personalities walking to their post office to mail their income tax forms -- "Let's fill out our tax forms accurately and honestly," is the message. I wonder which approach is more effective?

The Japanese government is always saying things like, "Let's pay our taxes correctly!"

Hikikomori is Listed in the Oxford Dictionary of English

I saw in a news article that the word hikikomori (pronounced "hee-kee koh-moh-ree") had officially found its way into the Oxford Dictionary of English, Third Edition, which was published last week. Translatable as shut-ins, stay-at-homes, agoraphobes or -- as my daughter delicately suggested, "indoor people" -- hikikomori are individuals who have pulled back from society, shunning human contact often in favor of online interaction. Although there are reclusive types in every society, the large numbers of Japanese NEETs -- meaning "Not involved in Education, Employment or Training" -- has the government worried, since 1.2 million citizens not working or paying taxes can't be good for the bean counters. The phenomenon of hikikomori is often taken up in popular manga and anime culture, including such works as Welcome to the N.H.K. and Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei / Goodbye Mr. Despair, and is often romanticized as the ultimate expression of otaku spirit. Incidentally, J-List has great T-shirts for aspiring hikikomoris and otaku, so check them out.

Hikikomori is now an English word.

Of San Diego, And Reverse Culture Shock

My daughter has returned home to Japan after staying a month with me here in the States. During her time here we did a lot of fun "San Diego-ey" things like taking a bicycle ride from the top of beautiful Mt. Soledad down to the seaside and exploring the La Jolla coves in a kayak, and I think she had as much fun as a thirteen-year-old teenager can admit to. She also got to improve her English skills quite a bit. Right about now she'll be arriving back in Japan and, besides being exasperated at how hot and humid it is there, she'll start the several day process of "reverse culture shock." After a month of being surprised that a "small" drink in the U.S. is so much larger than anything seen in Japan, now the reverse will happen, and she'll be unable to accept that the largest size drink the restaurant offers is just 12 oz. Of course I'm ready to go back to Japan too -- I need to eat onigiri!

We've had lots of fun doing San Diego-ey things this summer.

Japan's Pension Reforms In Trouble: KHAAAANNN!!!

Japan is trying to reform its national pension system, but recent political turmoil -- the fall of Yukio Hatoyama's government over his wishy-washiness on U.S. base issues and subsequent poor showing in Prime Minister Naoto Kan's first election -- has made that a difficult goal to achieve. In Japan there are two different Social Security-like systems, Employees Pension Insurance for anyone working for a large company with 20 or more employees, and National Pension Insurance for workers in smaller companies and anyone who is self-employed. Like Social Security in the U.S., enrollment in a pension system is mandatory, but there's no mechanism to force people to make their payments into the National system, making it easy for younger Japanese to essentially opt out entirely. (Several politicians including the current Prime Minister got in trouble for not making their payments a few years ago.) Considering the challenges Japan faces, they really need strong leaders who will work together to find the best answers for the country.

Every year J-List brings a huge number of awesome Japanese calendars to our customers, which feature the best anime, JPOP, traditional photography and other themes. We're happy to report that 2011 Calendar Season is officially started! While it'll be another couple weeks before we get the bulk of this year's calendars in (still waiting for the big list to be released), you can start browsing now.

Japan's pension system is so complex, they have to make horrible graphics like this to understand it.

Onigiri Color Codes

If you were to plan a picnic, you might pack a basket containing things like sandwiches, potato salad or maybe some pickles, but a Japanese person would almost certainly bring along onigiri, those delicious rice balls. Formed using the honorific "o" prefix that can be seen on many Japanese words and nigiri, meaning "to squeeze," onigiri are a popular way to grab a quick snack on the go. Although they can be as simple as a hunk of salted rice pressed into a triangle shape, there's usually a bit of fish, konbu seaweed or ume plum inside, and nori covering the outside. Onigiri are a major product category for convenience stores in Japan, and even before a new gaijin learns to start reading the language around him he often memorizes the all-important onigiri color code at Seven Eleven -- red for salmon, blue for "sea chicken" and so on. Onigiri are a staple of bento culture, and Japanese housewives get up extra early to press rice balls to include in lunches for their kids or husbands, just as my own mother made peanut butter and honey sandwiches for me all those years. Along with popular bento items, J-List sells many onigiri related products on the site -- click and browse some of them now.

A gaijin needs to learn the onigiri color codes to survive in Japan.

The "Japanese Girlfriend" Method of Studying

There are many ways of approaching the study of Japanese. You can follow the traditional approach, studying with Japanese textbooks like the Genki series. Or try learning through popular culture, like manga and JPOP songs or even dating-sim games. Another study method I've employed at various times is the "Find a Japanese Girlfriend" approach, wherein you find an attractive Japanese girl to date and share language with. While softer and more huggable than even the best kanji wall poster, there are some drawbacks to choosing this path to mastering nihongo. The biggest is that the language used by women and men is quite different, with the best example being the first and second person pronouns used by each group. For example, males will usually use the neural boku or the more manly-sounding ore (oh-reh) to refer to themselves, while females use the more formal watashi or cute-sounding atashi, and if you pick up too much Japanese from your significant other, you might sound more effeminate than you'd like. Incidentally, we have a fun line of T-shirts, hats and hoodies for anyone interested in finding their own Japanese girlfriend or boyfriend -- click and browse our fun products!

One way of studying Japanese is the "Japanese girlfriend" method.

Only 109 Days Til the Japanese Language Proficiency Test

If you're studying Japanese or plan to, there's a good chance you'll need to take the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT), the primary test for students of Japanese. Taken by 500,000 applicants each year, the test was begun in 1984 in response the increase in interest in Japan by people all over the world, and is held each December all over the world (and in East Asian countries, again in July). This year some changes are being introduced into the test, essentially bringing it from four levels of difficulty to five, to make it easier for students to rise one level each year. The new system starts at level N5 (the easiest) and goes all the way to N1 (the hardest, needed for entrance into a Japanese university), with level N3 essentially falling in between the old levels 3 and 2, to make it easier on students. I have fond memories of my own JLPT study days, of stressing out over kanji pronunciations or how to use a certain bit of Japanese grammar, and I find myself envious of anyone studying for the test this year. The sign-up deadline is this September, so if you're interested in taking the test, register right away to avoid the agony of missing your registration. There are just 109 days before this year's test -- if you need study supplies, textbooks or other products to help you learn, J-List has you covered!

If you need to prepare for the JLPT, J-List can help.

Yo Dawg, I heard you like sulfur...

I remember when I first learned the Japanese word for "name" -- which is namae, pronounced nah-mah-eh -- I noticed the similarity between the two words and wondered if the Japanese could have borrowed theirs from some Western language. It turns out that this isn't the case, and the parallel between the two is purely accidental, a surprisingly common occurrence known as a "false cognitive" in linguistics. In Japanese you thank someone by saying arigato, which is very similar to the Portuguese word obrigado, but this is another example of unrelated words accidentally having similar pronunciations. Or the word so, which by an amazing coincidence corresponds perfectly with the word "so" in English as in so desu ka? "is that so?" Or the way the Japanese word for "road" is doro, essentially the same word with the syllables reversed. Another minor coincidence I found: the word for sulfur in Japanese is iwo, yes as in the famous World War II battleground Iwo Jima, which literally means "Sulfur Island." Guess which body in the solar system is famous for its sulfur volcanoes? Jupiter's moon Io, pronounced in Japanese (and Greek) exactly like the word for sulfur.

For perfectionists: I know that "Iwo" is meaningless rendered in proper Romanized Japanese. It's an old construct from a previous age that's been trapped in its current form due to the famous name of Iwo Jima. The word for sulfur is 硫黄 (いおう), which would be iou if Romanized correctly. Which is funny since the name for the moon of Jupiter is the same.

"Yo Dawg, I heard you like sulfur, so I put some 硫黄 in your Io and now you have sulfur volcanoes."

Geek Culture has Become Very Cool Lately

I'm grateful for many aspects of the modern world we live in. Like the high-speed Internet connection that enables me to work alongside my staff in Japan despite the fact that I'm currently 5620 miles (9044 km) away from them. Or being able to read reviews of restaurants on my smart phone while wandering around looking for a place to eat. I'm also very pleased with the way "nerd culture" has become so accepted by the world at large. This wasn't always the case, and I'm sure a generation ago a professional man who kept a huge collection of Star Wars figures in his office, as I do, would be viewed in a strange light by his coworkers. Of course, not everyone is as plugged into this fun nerdy culture as you or I. Once during a previous San Diego Comicon I saw an SDSU student who had GREEK WEEK printed on his T-shirt. I misread his shirt, and said, "I thought your shirt said 'geek week,'" which made the man visibly upset. I was surprised at his reaction -- what could possibly be wrong with someone thinking your shirt had "geek" written on it? Then it dawned on me that he probably wasn't as tuned in to geek-driven pop culture as I was, and thought I was insulting him.

Nerd culture has become very cool in recent years. Which is a good thing.

Do You Believe in Ghosts?

One interesting aspect of the Japanese is how superstitious they can be, at least as seen from my contemporary American point of view. Whether it's getting one's future told through tarot cards or a palm reading or the famous beliefs about people's personalities being determined by their blood type, most Japanese have some ways of thinking that might be thought of as unique. There's a complex system of old wives' tales that people follow -- don't cut your fingernails at night or you won't be able to be with your parents when they die, don't ever write a person's name in red ink or they'll die, don't whistle at night or snakes will come and bite you, don't sleep with your head pointing to the north -- which I've learned to respect, or at least work around in my daily life.

Ghosts are another popular area of Japanese supernatural culture, so much that there are TV variety shows made on the subject quite often. Some people are said to be reikan no aru hito, that is, people who have a greater than average sense of ghosts and apparitions, and my Japanese wife and daughter are definitely in this group. Once after my father passed away, my daughter (who was about five at the time) turned to empty air and shouted, "Stop watching me!" My wife thought I'd gotten out of bed and was standing there looking at my daughter eating her breakfast, but I was still asleep, and the general consensus was that she was "sensing" the spirit of my father who had come to visit us. Recently my wife and daughter were having a fight, and they both thought they saw my mother's face reflected in the window at the same moment (she also passed away recently). That stopped their fight in a hurry, I can tell you.

Ghosts are a popular Japanese superstition, er, belief.

Learning Japanese in Japanese

When I started my third year of Japanese at SDSU, there was a new book we were required to buy: a Japanese dictionary, the same type used by Japanese junior high school kids to look up words in their own language. From that point on, rather than spit out the meanings of vocabulary words in English, we were required to learn the Japanese explanation for words. So for a word like gambaru (in English, to work hard, to do one's best) we had to memorize a long sentence explaining what it meant in nihongo. Although we all grumbled a lot, it was really good for us, since it exposed us to more ways to express ideas in our new language. While I've been on my extended trip to the U.S., my daughter has been learning English from a tutor to help bring her English reading level up. She learned all about Benjamin Franklin in English, for example, with no opportunity to cross-reference the new words she was learning with Japanese, which helps her gain confidence when speaking even though it's hard for her at first. (Incidentally, we recommend the Kanji DS Dictionary for the Nintendo DS, since it contains many useful dictionaries including J-E, E-J, kanji and a straight Japanese-language dictionary for looking up words natively.)

My daughter learned about Benjamin Franklin in English.

Japan Organ Transplant Law Update

I saw a news report about a new Japanese law governing the harvesting of living organs from brain-dead donors which had just gone into effect. You might be thinking that I'd accidentally picked up a newspaper from 25 years ago, but no -- Japan is only just catching up to the rest of the world in this important area. Previously organs from individuals who had signed a donor card could be harvested for transplants, but there was a catch -- only persons aged 15 or older were eligible to sign the donor cards, which was essentially a death sentences to anyone under that age who needed a new heart or liver but lacked the resources to travel outside of Japan to obtain one. One of the themes of Japan as a nation is that it is "behind" the U.S. and Europe in terms of its social structures, who are generally seen as as more "advanced" by the Japanese in general. It's nice to see this aspect of Japanese society being updated.

Why am I not surprised that Japan's donor cards are kawaii??

Would You Like Some 'Nutsmeg' Spice?

You know you've been in Japan too long when your mother sends you a bottle of nutmeg spice for Christmas, and a Japanese person asks what it is, upon which you immediately answer, without having ever heard what the spice is called in Japanese, "This is nutsmeg, which is great in warm milk." For some inexplicable reason of phonetics, some English words are imported into Japanese in their plural forms. Words like shirt, suit, swimsuit, peanut, and sport always appear with the 's' sound on the end, even if you're discussing the word in its singular form. In Japanese, one refers to a suitcase as a suitscase, and it takes the brain a few months to get over the weirdness of this -- ditto for learning to ask for peanuts butter or watching the Fruits Basket anime. There seem to be three reasons for some English words being mapped to their plural versions in Japanese. First is the rather convenient lack of singular/plural in Japanese grammar -- saying hana ga kirei means either "the flower is pretty" or "the flowers are pretty" depending on how many flowers you happen to discussing. Also, the softer 'tsu' ending on the plural forms is easier for Japanese to pronounce than a hard 't' consonant sound. Finally, converting some words to their plural forms also avoids the dreaded L/R confusion that can be a problem in the language. Because "fruit" and "flute" would have the exact same pronunciation when rendered in katakana, the writing system used for expressing foreign loan words, the musical instrument became furu-to and the edible stuff became furu-tsu.

There's nothing like fresh nutsmeg in warm milk, mmm.

25 Years after JAL Flight 123

Yesterday marked the 25th anniversary of the tragic crash of Japan Airlines Flight 123, which occurred in my home prefecture of Gunma, as fate would have it. I learned of the crash one day when I suddenly decided to ride my bicycle 40 km to check out some caverns I'd heard about. (I had lots of free time for random stuff before I started J-List.) My wife shuddered when I told her where I was headed, and she said, "I could never go out there, that's where that plane went down in 1985." JAL flight 123 took off from Haneda airport headed for Osaka, but suffered a massive failure of its hydraulic system, which made it impossible to control the plane. After an agonizing 32 minutes in the air, it crashed. Adding to the tragedy, an American military unit arrived on the scene to aid the survivors of the crash but was ordered to stand down by the Japanese military, who then didn't arrive until the next morning. The disaster was the largest loss of life in a single aircraft crash ever, and it's even more legendary because of one very famous passenger: Kyu Sakamoto, who sang the Sukiyaki Song, the first Japanese language song to hit #1 in the U.S. Here's a link with many different versions of this epic song: http://www.jbox.com/sukiyaki. The man also sang another epic song from the 20th century, Ashita ga Aru (There Will Be a Tomorrow), the unofficial theme song of recession-ripped Japan.

Kyu Sakamoto was one of the victims of JAL Flight 123.

Filial Piety in Japan, and University

Last time I talked about the concept of filial piety, or oya koko, which is the respect you pay to your parents because without them you wouldn't be here. This formalized tradition of respecting your parents is part of Confucian teachings which exerted influence on Japan during the Edo Period (1603-1868). In the U.S. the top universities are private schools like Harvard, Princeton and MIT, while inexpensive state-funded schools (like mine, SDSU) are lower in the rankings, but in Japan this is reversed: the public universities are where everyone wants to go, in large part because they're much cheaper than their private counterparts like Waseda or Keio. One way kids show oya koko to their parents is by studying extra-hard so they can get a cheap education at Tokyo or Kyoto University, which are around $6000 per year. As a father with two kids who will be starting university in a few years, this is one kind of parental respect I am very much in favor of.

If you can pass the test to get into Tokyo University, your parents will be happy.

Advice for Finding Accommodations Inside Japan

One of my Twitter followers asked me if I had any recommendations for his upcoming trip to Hokkaido, Japan's northernmost island. While I don't have any specific knowledge about the best places to stay up there, I do have some general advice for finding accommodations inside Japan. The first time I went to Kyoto I took my trusty Lonely Planet travel guide with me, which was loaded with information on places to stay. But one thing was odd: in every ryokan inn or youth hostel I stayed in, nearly all the guests were gaijin (foreigners) like me, with nary a nihonjin (Japanese) in sight. I eventually realized the other gusts were all using the same travel book I was, and since then I've made it a point to use Japanese-language travel information sources when I can. Another tip: considering exploring Japan through minshuku, which are awesome budget versions of Japanese inns, rather than full-service hotels. The down-to-earth feel of these family-owned lodgings is great, and the people you'll meet there are fascinating, too. For a slightly more Western feel, search out pension inns, a kind of Japanese/European bed & breakfast that's also fun to stay in.

Is summer vacation too long?; I've had some great times staying at inexpensive minshuku inns.

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!