Big Cleaning 2012

We hope everyone had a great holiday, wherever you are in the world. My family had a more-or-less traditional Japanese Christmas dinner, with baked chicken, mashed potatoes, "Christmas cake" and sushi, and it was great fun. Let's do it again next year!

Now that Christmas has over, Japan is getting ready for the end of 2012 and the arrival of the new year, which is the most important time in Japan. There's lots to do, including buying traditional New Year's foods like mochi, pressed squares of white rice called "rice cakes" in English (this name sounds really strange to Japanese people) which are delicious to eat. The Japanese have a great year-end tradition of cleaning the house from top to bottom, called 大掃除 oh-souji or "big cleaning," and I love it because crossing into a new year with a clean house feels great and mentally prepares you for new challenges. Companies have this tradition as well, and tomorrow the J-List staff will be processing the day's orders early, then we'll stop all work and clean our company from top to bottom, throwing away the past year's accumulated junk and making everything fresh and new.

It's time for year-end "Big Cleaning"!

Awkward Moments as a Gaijin in Japan

As an American living in Japan, I go about my day in a normal way, hitting the gym, filling my tank with gas, swinging by the store to do some shopping, etc., and the people I encounter deal with me pretty much like they would any Japanese person. Still, there are times when being a gaijin in Japan can feel a little strange, like that time (discussed a few updates ago) I went to a concert and found myself the only foreigner in a huge crowd of short, black-haired Japanese female fans. Five years ago I was sitting in a doctor's office when a TV news report about the death of Paul Tibbets, the pilot of the Enola Gay which dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, happened to come up. Suddenly I was acutely aware that I was an American sitting in a room filled with Japanese people, more than a few of whom were old enough to remember the events of World War II, and I probably had one of those big anime sweat drops floating above my head. This experience was repeated almost verbatim yesterday while at my local onsen hot springs bath. There's a TV inside the sauna room, and while I was sitting inside there was a new report about the death of Keiji Nakazawa, the manga artist who created Hadashi no Gen (Barefoot Gen), the famous story about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Mr. Nakazawa was six years old on August 6, 1945 when the atomic comb exploded just 1.2 km from his school; by chance he had been standing in the shadow of a brick wall, which allowed him to survive and tell his story in manga form later. When the news report about his passing was broadcast, the sauna seemed to grow a little more quiet, although that might have been my imagination.

Sometimes it feels strange being an American in Japan.

Thanks for Making Christmas 2012 Great!

Christmas 2012 is behind us, and we'd like to thank everyone for helping to make this the best-ever Christmas in the history of J-List. We sold tons of anime calendars, "Fuku-bukuro" grab bags, cute little cat figures for your phone plus those crazy horse head masks, and we had a great time. If you missed anyone on your Christmas list, remember we can shoot a J-List gift certificate to them for you at the speed of email. Thanks again, and see you next year!

J-List Winter Sale Continues!

Christmas is over, but our special sale continues through the end of December! Through the end of 2012, we're giving a whopping $15 or $40 back when you order items from Japan and choose EMS shipping, which is fully insured and trackable and will arrive at your house in about 4 days. Order $100 or more to get $15 back as a store credit, or $200 or more to get $40 back. Next, we have a special offer on J-List's world-famous anime and kanji T-shirts: buy any two J-List shirts shipping from San Diego and get a free shirt chosen randomly by us.

(As promised, we selected one lucky J-List customer per day over the past month to receive a $50 gift certificate. The winners have already been contacted by "Santa Megumi." Congratulations if you were one of the lucky winners!)

Random Nihongo Lesson

Now it's time for a Japanese lesson, with some fun words you might be able to make use of someday. There's a class of single-word phrases which, for some reason, have many possible translation paths in English, making them challenging (but fun) to use. First there's やはり yahari (it also shows up as やっぱり yappari quite commonly), which you use to express your own expectations about something, roughly equivalent to "I knew it" or "just as I thought." When someone tells you something you didn't know, you can use なるほど naruhodo (nah-roo-ho-doh), which means "I see" or "that's news to me." If you watch an hour of anime in Japanese, you'll likely hear the phrase まさか masaka (mah-sah-kah) at least once, usually said by a shocked character -- it just means "it can't be!" or "you've got to be joking!" Finally there's a great word to pull out when you want to praise someone: さすが sasuga (sah-soo-gah), which roughly means "I always knew you were incredible" or "You never let us down." So if you have a friend or coworker named Yamada-san who does something good, hit him with "Sasuga, Yamada-san!" and know that you've made his day.

Have fun using these random Japanese phrases.

Inefficient Japan

Japan is a wonderful country, full of friendly people and vibrant culture that seems tailor-made to appeal to gaijin like us. Unfortunately, it also happens to be one of the most inefficient places on Earth. While J-List has always made use of the latest Internet technologies to serve our customers better, we often find the Japanese suppliers and distributors we deal with are a decade or more behind us, still sending us 20-page faxes every night rather than PDF files sent through email. I'm a huge fan of RSS, the system websites use to organize their data for easy distribution -- incidentally, the J-List site has excellent support for RSS feeds, allowing you to automatically track certain types of products with tools like Google Reader -- but of course no Japanese publisher supports RSS on their websites, making it harder for us to learn about their upcoming books and order them. There are some very inefficient job categories in Japan, like men whose job it is to guide you to an empty parking space when you arrive at the mall, or people who sit by a road, manually counting the number of cars that go by each hour so the city can track traffic flow. Over the past decade, J-List's home city of Isesaki has been undergoing some major reconstruction, converting train tracks that run through the middle of the city to elevated tracks. On either side of some recently constructed raised train tracks -- exactly at the "location" of the Shinonome Research Lab from Nichijou, as luck would have it -- I noticed that there were always men standing on either side of the tracks, watching the road. It turns out that the clearance of the train tracks is a little lower than normal, so the men stand there to watch for trucks that might be higher than the 3.8 meter clearance and stop them before they try to cross under. Could you imagine being paid to stand and watch a road for 12 hours a day?

And another thing: Japanese banks close at 3 pm. It's a plot to force men to get married!

A Merry Christmas from J-List!

Well Christmas is here, and soon children all over the world will be nestled all snug in their beds, probably unsure of what a "sugar-plum" is but not caring as they wait to hear reindeer hooves on the roof. What does Christmas mean to you? For me it means having a special dinner with the family followed by the annual viewing of the Charlie Brown Christmas Special and maybe listening to some Mormon Tabernacle Choir songs while opening presents. I join the entire staff of J-List in wishing you the best Christmas ever!

Christmas in Japan, of course, is very different from in other parts of the world. Like Valentine's Day, Christmas is a fun custom imported from the West that exists largely because department stores realized it was a good way for them to sell stuff. Even the Japanese tradition of eating "Christmas cake" on New Year's Eve came about through a clever marketing campaign by the Fujiya Confectionery Company, which decided to adopt the British custom of Christmas cakes to Japan in 1922, though the Japanese version is usually sponge cake with whipped cream and strawberries rather than fruitcake. Although Japanese love Christmas, they sometimes don't seem to "get" the holiday in the same way most of us do in the West, as seen by their custom of playing Christmas music through February or so. It's still cold out, they reason, so why not listen to Jingle Bells one more time?

Best wishes for a very merry and moe Christmas, from all of us at J-List!

Sword Art Online @ J-List

The world didn't end on December 21st, but it did for some the following day, with the airing of the final episode of Sword Art Online. The awesome tale of a massively multiplayer online game in which people die if they're killed in-game, .hack SAO was the smash hit of 2012. If you're a fan of the show, we've got figures, keychains. posters, 2013 calendars, even some interesting parody products. Why not browse our selection of Sword Art Online products and see what we've got in stock?

Ninja or Kabuki Stagehand?

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

You or I would see a ninja, but Japanese would see a kuroko stage hand for Kabuki.

Unique Features of the Japanese Language

The Japanese language is very different from any Western language, and just as English speakers need to get used to the concept of genders for nouns in European languages -- can anyone explain why a spoon is male, a fork female and a knife neutral in German? -- students of Japanese will encounter some new ideas. These include sentences in SOV (subject-object-verb) word order, grammatical "particles" that mark different parts of sentences for you, plus the custom of omitting information from sentences when it's clear from context, e.g. saying 行く？iku? for "shall we go to lunch now?" although all you actually said was "go?" Another new concept is the っ sound, aka "small tsu," essentially a brief pause in the middle of some Japanese words similar to the glottal stop you hear in words like mitten, uh-oh, and Hawai'i. This sound is represented in English by double consonants, as seen in Lotte, purveyors of quality caffeine gum and Rikka, the lovable girl from Chuunibyo Demo Koi ga Shitai. Another issue in Japanese is differentiating long and short vowels, something that we don't have in English. When LEGO used the Japanese word for "imagination" (空想) for its experimental crowd-sourced model project, it wisely changed the spelling to Cuusoo. The more common romanization of kuusoh (with two long vowels) might accidentally be reduced to kuso (with two short vowels), which is a Japanese expletive meaning "poop."

(As usual, I always advise that you lean Japanese from books like the Genki series or White Rabbit flash card series, which "force" you to read Japanese in proper hiragana and katakana rather than in the English alphabet. This helps you learn more accurately and reduces any speaking accent later.)

All About Japanese Offices

Before I started J-List in 1996, I had a brief career as a public employee, working in the local City Office as a "Coordinator of Internationalization" providing various services to foreigners in our city, translating documents for them if they couldn't read Japanese, and so on. On my first day of work I was surprised to see that the department I'd been assigned to included about 25 people, all working in a giant open space with desks in rows, and being in a room where so many people had a direct line of sight to me at any moment was an unnerving experience. This kind of office layout is common in Japan -- at one of our book distributors (Tohan), the entire company works in one cavernous space, with hundreds of employees occupying rows of desks, buzzing around the room or talking to clients quietly on the phone, without so much as a cubicle wall to hang a Dilbert strip on. While this is taking the open office concept a bit too far, running my own company in Japan has given me an appreciation for Japanese style workplaces. At J-List the employees work at an "island" of six desks pushed together, with each having a place to store the projects they're working on, photograph products for posting on the site and so on. I honestly believe the lack of walls improves our communication since you can turn to anyone and ask when such-and-such product will be back in stock, and having everyone working alongside each other helps us all stay focused.

Japanese offices are open, without cubicles or walls.

J-List Gift Certificates, The Perfect Otaku Gift

Christmas is almost here, and we hope everything is getting ready to have a really special time with family and friends. If you're still looking for the perfect gift for a Japan-obsessed person on your list, we humbly recommend our J-List Gift Certificates, which let your recipient buy anything from the J-List or JBOX.com websites. Since we create a high quality PDF file and send it to the email address you specify, you've got the option of either sending your gift via email or printing it out and presenting it to them in person. It's the gift they'll remember forever! J-List gift certificates are processed several times per day and we can get one sent to the email address you specify ASAP.

Our Christmas Sales Are Still Going

Remember, J-List is having three great sales right now. First, we're giving a whopping $15 or $40 back when you order items from Japan and choose EMS shipping, which is fully insured and trackable and will arrive at your house in about 4 days. Order $100 or more to get $15 back as a store credit, or $200 or more to get $40 back. Next, we have a special offer on J-List's world-famous anime and kanji T-shirts. Through the end of December, buy any two J-List shirts shipping from San Diego and get a free shirt chosen randomly by us. Finally, everyone who makes an order is entered into a drawing for a $50 gift certificate, one per day, given away by Santa Megumi on Christmas! And if you're ordering products stocked in San Diego, we now offer a UPS Next Day Air option too.

Swastika Shock in Japan

J-List has a popular Twitter feed and Facebook page, and I like to post random slice-of-life thoughts from Japan. When Google Maps for iOS came out a few days ago, I took it for a test-drive to see how good it performed in my semi-rural Japanese city. While the streets and turn-by-turn directions worked fine, the satellite data for my city is particularly bad, looking like it was photographed by the first Sputnik. I tweeted a screenshot showing this, and received several questions about why there was a swastika on my map. This is actually a "manji," a 4500 year old symbol from Sanskrit used in the Hindu and Buddhist religions. In Japan it's used to indicate the location of Buddhist temples on maps and totally unrelated to the Nazi version, which is pointing the other direction. You learn something new every day!

You can even type a swastika as a character with your computer. Turn on Japanese input and type まんじ (manji) and hit the space bar and 卍 will appear. 

The swastika (reversed actually) is closely associated with Buddhist temples.

Macross: Do You Remember the Early 80s?

As a card-carrying fan of oldschool Japanese animation and pop culture, I make it a point to enjoy both cool new series like Sword Art Online and Chuunibyo Demo Koi ga Shitai as well as the classics. 2012 happens to be the 30th anniversary of Super Dimensional Fortress Macross, one of the pivotal shows from the 1980s that's responsible for the industry becoming what it is today, and I decided to re-watch the entire series in Japanese. 1982 was a very different time from 2012, and I found myself noticing lots of differences between modern anime series, starting with the lack of Korean and Chinese staff names shown in the ending credits -- anime today is absolutely a "pan-Asian" industry, but this wasn't true thirty years ago. The language was slightly different back then, too: characters often addressed each other using the word オタク otaku in its original meaning of "you and your family" rather than its current definition, which would be unthinkable today. For maximum irony, I decided to watch it on Blu-ray in full 1080p, and it was fun to identify little pieces of dust as they danced around on the animation cels, though overall the show holds up great considering it was released in the same year as MS-DOS 1.0. Incidentally, if you're a Macross fan, got lots of cool products on the site like the new Macross the First manga reboot plus the upcoming "ultimate" Macross 30th Anniversary PS3 game.

I'm re-watching the original Macross for its 30th anniversary.

Japanese Snacks Shipping from San Diego!

J-List has a conveniently located shipping center in San Diego, California, which is great if you're in a hurry to get anime and kanji T-shirts, San Diego-based Fuku-bukuro grab bags in time for Christmas, you've got some great options. We also stock Japanese snacks in our San Diego office, and we've posted a huge update of delicious Japanese food items you should see. We've got everything from U.S. based Hello Kitty snacks and delicious udon noodles and authentic ramune drinks and more. We even have the only shimapan Pocky you're likely to see this year. Click to see all San Diego-based Japanese snacks and drinks now!

We Love Japanese Toilets

When foreigners visit Japan, they naturally focus on areas of the country that stand out to them as unique, like maid cafes in Akihabara, pachinko parlors, love hotels and of course Japan's high-tech toilets. Most toilets you're likely to encounter in residential homes or hotels here are "washlets," those awesome toilets that wash and dry your butt for you and also have a "bidet" feature, though being male I'm sure I don't know what that is. They were invented in 1980 by the TOTO Corporation -- no relation to Dorothy's little dog, the name is actually short for 東洋陶器 Toyo Toki, meaning Eastern Ceramics -- and were originally developed for use in hospitals before the company decided to try selling them commercially. Japanese toilets increase your comfort by keeping the seat heated to the perfect temperature for you (this is called a "warmlet") then by washing your backside when you're done doing your business. They're popular with Japanese women, who always seem to suffer from chronic constipation, since the stream of water can be a big help. The toilets have other features, too, like cool LED lights for trips to the bathroom at night, hydraulically operated seats that open for you, and white noise generators to mask any sounds you might make while doing your business, which Japanese females hate, dainty feminine things that they are. TOTO and its competitor INAX are trying to build a market for high-tech Japanese toilets outside Asia, but so far it's been slow going, perhaps due to taboos regarding toilets in the West. I imagine most homes in Europe and the U.S. don't have conveniently-located electric sockets right by the toilet, either.

I am a big fan of Japanese "washlets."

Costco Japan Report

Yesterday I took my life into my own hands, daring to go to Costco on a Sunday. I'm a big fan of the company and the way they've brought American-style warehouse shopping to Japan, which has enabled Japanese to experience the joys of imported wine and frozen waffles and Dr. Pepper. A Japanese Costco store is almost exactly the same as the stores back in the U.S., right down to the signs advertising USDA Choice Beef, though they probably have better selections of sake in the liquor aisle than the stores near you. While the company is doing a great job in their Japan stores, there are a few things they might consider changing in the future. They sell giant frozen pizzas here just like back in the States, yet I don't know a single Japanese person who has an oven large enough to cook one; why not sell two smaller pizzas instead? Ditto on the large frozen turkeys they sell: since almost no one in Japan has a proper oven, perhaps Costco should consider an optional cook-it-for-you service like Honey Baked Ham. The company's tiramisu deserts come in a container so large that shocked Japanese describe it as a "bucket," and even my family couldn't hope to finish our giant pumpkin pie, so I brought half in to work to let the J-List staff share. I was happy to find Costco selling frozen burritos, something you don't really miss until you live in a country that doesn't have them. Unfortunately they'd chosen to sell bean burritos, perhaps not knowing that Mexican refried beans are to Japanese as the fermented natto soybeans are to Westerners. (They should go with beef or chicken burritos instead.) 

So if there are any Costco executives reading this, my consulting rates are very affordable, and you can probably pay me in dinner rolls.

The tiramisu from Costco is the stuff of legend in Japan.

On Being a Gaijin in Japan

The word for "foreigner" in Japanese is 外人 gaijin, which actually meals "outside-person" (e.g. outsider), but since this word can have negative connotations, the word 外国人 gaikokujin ("outside-country-person") will always be used on official documents or the TV news. Probably the single biggest difference between Japan and the West is that here, 98% of the county comes from more or less the same genetic stock, which means that foreigners stand out much more than we would in, say, Paris or Budapest. This can sometimes be a challenge, since I often find that I'm the only foreigner present in a place, whether it's working out at the gym or in a crowded hall during a concert. Some foreign friends I've had over the years have been bothered by standing out so much, or at the occasional stares (always by children rather than adults, as this is the most polite country in the world), saying that Japan was like "living in a fishbowl." I just ignore any odd attention I may find myself receiving, perhaps breaking the ice with a polite konnnichiwa.

So, what's it like to be a gaijin in Japan?

Japanese Election 2012 Results

The Japanese election is over, and as expected, the conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) scored a big win. The LDP ruled Japan almost continuously since 1955 until they were booted out of power by the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) in 2008. Voters returned the reigns to the old guard for several reasons, including frustration over the rocky economy and unfulfilled promises in the DJP's "Manifesto" plus four years of ineptly handled foreign diplomacy, which caused important international relationships to suffer, including Japan's ties with the U.S. They are also betting that the incoming Prime Minister Abe (ah-bey, not like the American President) will be better able to resist encroachment from China on the Senkaku Islands, a dispute which caused terrible anti-Japan riots this year. There's hope that the business situation will improve for Japanese companies, too. While the DPJ had been positively hostile to business, refusing to listen to advice from the Japan Business Federation (Keidanren) or aid important companies like Panasonic, Sony and Sharp, the election of the pro-business LDP has already sent the stock market here soaring.

The Japanese election is over and old guard is back.

J-List Sale Reminder

Remember, J-List is having three great sales right now. First, we're giving a whopping $15 or $40 back when you order items from Japan and choose EMS shipping, which is fully insured and trackable and will arrive at your house in about 4 days. Order $100 or more to get $15 back as a store credit, or $200 or more to get $40 back. Next, we have a special offer on J-List's world-famous anime and kanji T-shirts. Through the end of December, buy any two J-List shirts shipping from San Diego and get a free shirt chosen randomly by us. Finally, everyone who makes an order is entered into a drawing for a $50 gift certificate, one per day, given away by Santa Megumi on Christmas! And if you're ordering products stocked in San Diego, we now offer a UPS Next Day Air option too.

Cool Gift Ideas From J-List

J-List is hard at work processing the orders we're receiving every day, getting everything out the door to our customers. There are some great Christmas gift ideas, from our Fuku-bukuro grab bags to our trademark J-List T-shirts to our iTunes Japan prepaid cards and always-fun J-List Gift Certificates, which are send in high quality PDF form to the email address you specify. How can J-List serve you today?

North Korea is the Least Fun Country to Live Next To

While I generally enjoy living in Japan, there are a few things I dislike. Having to pay $22 to see a movie in a theatre or $35 for a pizza, which are exotic "Western" imports and thus expensive, though 100-yen-per-plate sushi offsets this somewhat. The voices of politicians shouting at me through loudspeakers during Japanese elections is also something I could do without. It's also no picnic living next to North Korea, the least fun nation on the planet, which operates state-sponsored programs to counterfeit Japanese currency and smuggle illegal drugs into Japan, and has kidnapped at least 17 Japanese citizens since 1977 to serve as language teachers for North Korean spies. Now North Korea has launched a long-range missile, I mean a peaceful satellite, a three-stage ticket that splashed down off the coast of the Philippines. While the belligerent act was clearly intended to threaten Japan and South Korea, the message is clear: North Korea can strike at any country in Asia and even reach the West Coast of the U.S. So, anyone want to trade places with us?

North Korea launched another missile. That means I get to use this graphic again.

Regardless of My Adolescent Delusions of Grandeur, I Still Want an Accurate Translation!

The act of translating from one language to another can be a complex process, which is why reading documents that have been machine translated is so amusing. The other day I was was reading the Wikipedia page for the popular Kyoani series Chuunibyo demo Koi ga Shitai! (中二病でも恋がしたい！) , and I realized I wasn't satisfied with the English translation they'd listed, which was "Regardless of My Adolescent Delusions of Grandeur, I Still Want a Date!" (This had been taken from the English website of TBC, the show's producer, making it semi-official.) First of all, this translation assigned a subject ("I") that is specifically missing from the original, implying that Yuuta wants to experience love with Rikka, his eyepatch-wearing odd little friend, when really the statement applies to both equally. Also, the word 恋 (koi) is an important one, encompassing the burning, almost compulsive feelings you have for someone when you're experiencing romantic love with them, and "have a date" didn't seem to capture this very well. (Incidentally there's another word for love, 愛 (ai), that describes the deeper, long-term love you feel for family or a partner of many years, plus the compound word 恋愛 (ren'ai) covers both koi and ai in one word.) So I clicked the "edit" button and changed it to, "Even People With Adolescent Delusions of Grandeur Want to Fall In Love!" Do you like my translation?

I'm rooting for Rikka and Yuuta in Chu2koi!

"Kurisumasu" (Christmas) in Japan

Here in Japan it's beginning to look at lot like Christmas, or as it's known locally, Kurisumasu. In addition to being an important day for the 1% or so of Japanese who are Christians, December 25th in Japan is a festive time when children look forward to a special present from "Santa-san" and couples plan a romantic dinner together. Just as Japanese cities compete against each other to make the prettiest sakura displays in April, they work hard to create beautiful lit-up areas for couples to walk through -- some of the best can be founded in Shinjuku, Ginza and the Roppongi Hills area. For a gaijin expat living in Japan, nothing says "Christmas" like being asked to play Santa Claus and hand out presents to children, and I've donned the red suit and fake beard many times. At one visit to a preschool operated there was a question-and-answer period when kids could ask me anything they wanted. One asked, "Santa-san, what's your favorite food?" and I kind of freaked him out by answering "reindeer hamburger steak." Then there was the year I was asked to play Santa for a Buddhist preschool near J-List, which was kind of odd since you don't normally associate festive Christmas icons with Buddhism. The kids sang Christmas songs while holding candles and lotus flowers, though, and we all had fun.

Christmas in Japan is a happy time for couples and foreigners dressed like Santa-san.

The Last Chance to Get Gifts from Japan In Time for Christmas

Well, this is it: Friday and Saturday are the last days to order products from Japan and get them in time for Christmas. Whether you're looking to get some awesome Totoro plush toys or those warm, soft Totoro blankets, special Japan Hello Kitty products, our popular Fuku-bukuro grab bags or other cute things from Japan, order in-stock items by Saturday, and your order should arrive within time. Since we're having a great sale on EMS orders from Japan, this means we pick up up to $40 of your order, too. But hurry -- there's no time to lose! Why not get started by browsing the most awesome products on J-List, as ranked by our customers?

J-List's Pre-Christmas Sales Are Still Going On

Remember, J-List is having three great sales right now. First, we're giving a whopping $15 or $40 back when you order items from Japan and choose EMS shipping, which is fully insured and trackable and will arrive at your house in about 4 days. Order $100 or more to get $15 back as a store credit, or $200 or more to get $40 back. Next, we have a special offer on J-List's world-famous anime and kanji T-shirts. Through the end of December, buy any 2 J-List shirts shipping from San Diego and get a free shirt chosen randomly by us in the size you choose. Finally, everyone who makes an order is entered into a drawing for a $50 gift certificate, one per day, given away by Santa Megumi on Christmas! And if you're ordering products stocked in San Diego, we now offer a UPS Next Day Air option too.

Kanji, Kanji Everywhere

When Japanese couples get ready to have a child, they naturally start making lists of possible baby names. While most names are based on kanji characters -- and just as there are a dozen variations on the spellings of names like Jason or Ashley, there are different kanji characters parents can choose from -- it's perfectly okay to keep it simple and choose a name in hiragana. When it was time for our kids to be born, we made sure to consult our family's Buddhist priest to make sure the name we were considering didn't have bad omens attached to it (for example, names with animal kanji in them were a bad idea, we were told). My wife also made sure to choose a name for our daughter that had the same number of strokes (written lines) as her own name, so her "strong luck" would pass to her daughter. The list of this year's most popular names for babies in Japan was recently released, so I've posted it below. The most popular boy's name was Len, the same as the popular Vocaloid character, and anime fans probably won't be surprised to see that the most popular name for girls right now is Yui, as it seems every other anime has a character with that name these days.

Speaking of kanji, today (December 12) is kanji-no-hi, or Kanji Day. Each year the organization that publishes the Standardized Kanji Test (and the kanji practice tools for the Nintendo DS) announces the "kanji of the year," the single character that best sums up the events of the past twelve months. The character is announced at a ceremony at the beautiful Kiyomizu-dera temple in Kyoto, where the head Buddhist priest writes the character on a large sheet of paper while everyone watches. The character for 2012 has been announced, and it's...kin, meaning "gold," a word that summed up the year thanks the gold medals Japan won at the London Olympics, the recent award of a Nobel Prize to Shinya Yamanaka for cellular research, the the financial popularity of the newly opened Tokyo Sky Tree, and just maybe, the release of Persona 4 The Golden. I personally would have gone with datsu "to remove" to reflect the efforts of many Japanese to end nuclear power in Japan (called datsu genpatsu), or perhaps shima (island), since so much trouble was caused over disputes with China and South Korea over silly islands that no one would want if the other side didn't claim it also. Last year's kanji of the year was kizuna, meaning "bonds," which describes the precious bonds that tie us all to one another, which were sorely tested when Japan experienced an unprecedented 9.0 magnitude earthquake and tsunamis. Kanji for previous years have included sho, "hot" in 2010, a year when many died from the unusually hot summer; shin, "new" in 2009, a year of renewal; and ki "return" in 2002, to mark the return of five Japanese who had been kidnapped by North Korea.

The most popular name for girls is Yui.

Japan's Female "Announcers" Are Lovely

One of the most enviable professions for women in Japan is joshi-ana, the female "announcers" (aka newscasters or presenters) who deliver the news and provide commentary during sporting events with such elegance. Japanese female announcers are universally loved by all, hailed for their grace and charm, and there are websites that track their popularity from week to week, only some of which are creepy. Many Japanese announcers are haafu, like Elena Hayama, who is half Japanese and half French, and this increases her mystique and popularity since she can speak both languages. TV announcers are also used to promote products in Japan. When I was in Tokyo, I noticed a train ad for a brand of toothpaste called To Be White, promoted as "the toothpaste that makes newscasters' teeth so white." Should we carry it on J-List?

Everyone loves joshi-ana, female newscasters.

The Most Popular Products This Christmas

Browsing the most "wishlisted" products on J-List is just about the best way to see what products are the site are most popular, and you can see all the most awesome anime and plush toys, random Japanese snacks, and other products that our customers are most interested in. If you order in-stock items by EMS before the 15th or the 16th, they should arrive in time for Christmas. This means you can get that extra awesome DX Kit Kat 30 Piece set to grandma's house in time, or some Totoro plush toys, or maybe a Fuku-bukuro grab bag from Japan.

Another Reminder on our EMS Sale

Remember, J-List is having three great sales right now. First, we're giving a whopping $15 or $40 back when you order items from Japan and choose EMS shipping, which is fully insured and trackable and will arrive at your house in about 4 days. Order $100 or more to get $15 back as a store credit, or $200 or more to get $40 back. Next, we have a special offer on J-List's world-famous anime and kanji T-shirts. Through the end of December, buy any 2 J-List shirts shipping from San Diego and get a free shirt chosen randomly by us in the size you choose. Finally, everyone who makes an order is entered into a drawing for a $50 gift certificate, one per day, given away by Santa Megumi on Christmas! And if you're ordering products stocked in San Diego, we now offer a UPS Next Day Air option too.

December is "Forget-the-Year" Party Season

December is the month for bonenkai, the year-end parties Japanese hold in December that literally means "forget-the-year party." (After the new year arrives, you switch to shinnenkai or "new year party.") A tradition going back to the Kamakura Period (1185-1333), a bonenkai party is a good time to reflect on the events of the past year while eating good food and imbibing large amounts of alcohol, or oolong tea, if you prefer. During this time of year everyone is inundated with advertisements for beer companies promoting their products, hoping patrons will remember them while having their year-end get-togethers, and of course Ukon hangover-curing drinks do the same thing. Over the weekend I went down to Tokyo and had an enjoyable forget-the-year party with a friend from Italy and this lovely lady, and am now ready to say "so long" to 2012 and hello to 2013.

At the Ghibli Character Year End Party.

Kanji, Ateji and Anime

Kanji are the Chinese characters which were imported into Japan around the 5th century A.D. Unlike the hiragana and katakana syllaberies, which only express sounds like ka, ki, ku, ke and ko, kanji have actual meanings attached to them. Fundamentally there are two ways to read any kanji character: the Japanese reading and the Chinese reading, with the former generally used for more elemental concepts like air, water, and house, with the latter for more more advanced concepts like atmosphere, water pressure, and residence. There's another way to read any kanji, however, and that's basically any way you like, thanks to something called ateji, which means "substitute pronunciation" (basically attaching an arbitrary reading for that character). Two good examples of this are the Japanese titles of A Certain Magical Index and A Certain Scientific Railgun, which defines "index" and "railgun" using kanji characters and force an English pronunciation for the words with overlaid katakana. In a recent episode of Chunibyo demo Koi ga Shitai ("Even People With Adolescent Delusions of Grandeur Want to Fall In Love"), Rikka makes kanji shirts that say "Evil Eye" and "Dark Flame," using the ateji system to make kanji readable in English. J-List sells kanji name stamps that allow you to get your name in kanji, and ateji is one way to convert a Western name into kanji characters. For example, I have a friend who's last name is Lockwood, and he uses the characters for "lock" and "wood" for his name stamp.

Forcing English readings on kanji characters is easy with ateji.

The Japanese ♡ Cats

There are a few things that the Japanese really love. First, they love nature, which is slightly confusing since they also love concrete, and when driving in the mountains it's not rare to see that an entire mountainside has been covered in concrete "just in case there might be a rockslide someday." Japanese people love mayonnaise and eat it on french fries, just like they do in parts of Europe, and there's even a slang word to describe people who love the stuff ("mayolers"). They love the four seasons, and walking down the street you're likely to be accosted by a random person who will tell you how great Japan's four distinctive seasons are. Finally, the Japanese truly love cats. There are "cat cafes" where you can spend some quality cat time when you need a mental pick-me-up, and cats like Maru regularly become as popular as idols in Japan. Also, Japanese use Lucky Cat (in Japanese, maneki neko) to beckon good luck into their home or business, a custom we like a lot. Incidentally, we have some rather amazing cat-related products on the site, including Catbus plush toys for Totoro fans, if you want to see. (Yes, you can still get them in stime for Christmas by choosing in-stock items via EMS.)

The Japanese really love cats.

Shuffle! is In Stock Now!

Remember that the gorgeous English-translated eroge Shuffle! is in stock and shipping. One of the most famous visual novels ever brought out in English, Shuffle! is the story of a lucky guy stuck between two cute princesses who both want to marry him, a problem a lot of guys I know would like to have. It's got a fantastic reputation with the fan community, is 100% uncensored and DRM free, and we think all fans should own a copy!

J-List Special Sale Update

Remember, J-List is having three great sales right now. First, we're giving a whopping $15 or $40 back when you order items from Japan and choose EMS shipping, which is fully insured and trackable and will arrive at your house in about 4 days. (Yes, there's still time to get items by Christmas, as long as you order in-stock items using EMS before December 15.) Order $100 or more to get $15 back as a store credit, or $200 or more to get $40 back. Next, we have a special offer on J-List's world-famous anime and kanji T-shirts. Through the end of December, buy any 2 J-List shirts shipping from San Diego and get a free shirt chosen randomly by us in the size you choose. Finally, everyone who makes an order is entered into a drawing for a $50 gift certificate, one per day, given away by Santa Megumi on Christmas!

Buddhist Superstitions and Japan

One thing that surprised me about the Japanese was how superstitious many people here are, and there are many beliefs held by people here that seem odd to foreigners, such as, don't cut your fingernails at night or you won't be able to be with your parents when they die, don't whistle at night or snakes will come and get you, and so on. Many of these beliefs come from Japan's unique flavor of Buddhism, which seems to be very death-oriented -- for example, it's bad luck to sleep with your head to the north (kita makura), as dead people about to be cremated are laid with their heads pointing north. In this vein, there's a complex system of lucky and unlucky days according to a Buddhist calendar, with six different days that cycle throughout the month. It's good luck to get married or start construction on your home or take delivery of a car on the luckiest day (called Taian), but if you were to get married on the unlucky day (called Butsumetsu), you'd probably end up divorced and unhappy. The six days, and their kanji meanings, are Sensho ("win first"), Tomobiki ("take away with"), Senpu ("lose first"), Butsumetsu ("Buddha's Death"), Taian ("Great Calm"), and Shakkou ("Red Mouth"). Supposedly, it's lucky to do things in the morning on Sensho, but it's unlucky to do anything in the morning on Senpu -- wait til the afternoon instead on that day. Never have a funeral on Tomobiki, as the soul of the deceased will be taken away instead of staying near his loved ones. Many of the traditional 2013 calendars J-List stocks, such as the Lucky Cat art calendar, display this "lucky day" right on the calendar pages, if you're interested in following this Japanese tradition for any reason.

Always get married on a "lucky" day to avoid divorce down the road.

Anime = Emotional Communication

My favorite aspect of anime is the way characters communicate emotion to viewers in ways that go beyond what's possible in the real world, aka "meatspace." Character designers are excellent at making use of subtle visual cues to really make their characters come alive, for example using blue hair on a female character to create the image of purity or mystery or communion with nature, or giving characters like Asuka from Eva and Yoko from Gurren Lagann red hair to reinforce their fiery personalities, and of course who can say no to a really cute eye patch? I love to observe the various facial expressions animators create, like the odd "blue forehead lines" that indicate frustration, or the "so embarrassed my soul is about to come out of my body" face. Of course, anime characters wouldn't be nearly as memorable without the highly trained voice actors that bring them alive. The other day I was at the gym working on my "Toradora diet" (I'm re-watching the entire series on my iPhone while running on a treadmill). When the highly emotional Christmas party episode played, with its amazing performance by voice actress Rie Kugimiya, it was hard to keep from choking up.

Anime is good at communicating emotions.

More Good News for English Eroge Fans: Shuffle! ships

Man, it's a great time to be a fan of English-translated eroge and visual novels. Not only did we just ship a great set of combo games at a new low price -- they are Crescendo and Target: Phermone, Idols Galore and Slave Pageant, Absolute Obedience and Enzai, and Amorous Professor Cherry plus Kango 1 & 2 -- but we just posted the excellent moe racing game Moero Downhill Night Blaze in packaged and download versions. Now we've got even more good news: the awesome English visual novel Shuffle! has been released and is shipping now. Grab a copy!

J-List Sale Reminder

Remember, J-List is having three great sales right now. First, we're giving a whopping $15 or $40 back when you order items from Japan and choose EMS shipping, which is fully insured and trackable and will arrive at your house in about 4 days. (Yes, there's still time to get items by Christmas, as long as you order in-stock items using EMS before December 15.) Order $100 or more to get $15 back as a store credit, or $200 or more to get $40 back. Next, we have a special offer on J-List's world-famous anime and kanji T-shirts. Through the end of December, buy any 2 J-List shirts shipping from San Diego and get a free shirt chosen randomly by us in the size you choose. Finally, everyone who makes an order is entered into a drawing for a $50 gift certificate, one per day, given away by Santa Megumi on Christmas!

Conveyor Belt Sushi is the Best

The other night it was time to celebrate my daughter's birthday, so we all got into the car and went out for sushi. While there are many options for sushi available, including one place I know where live fish swim around in a tank making it possible for you to choose which one you want to eat tonight, we opted for a simple kaiten-zushi or conveyor belt sushi restaurant. This popular alternative to a traditional-style sushi was invented in 1958 by an enterprising restaurant owner in Osaka who was having trouble staffing his restaurant, so he came up with a way for very few employees to serve many customers at once. According to research, a lot of the popularity of conveyor-belt sushi comes from the way the products scroll by from right to left, which creates a pleasant, almost hypnotic sensation in the brain. The companies work hard to create the best customer experiences -- the chain we were at lets you order items with a touch panel, and another chain near us has a separate conveyor belt with a train that delivers your sushi right to you!

I love eating sushi in Japan.

Japanese Words You Already Know

It's time for your lesson in Japanese words you already know, because they have the same pronunciations as English words. Bose makes excellent speakers, but in Japan the term bozu means a bald-headed Buddhist priest, and by extension, anyone who is bald. The word for "geography" is chiri, which sounds like the country of Chile, guaranteeing lots of bad puns about the geography of that country. (Japanese also believe that all spicy food originates from Chile.) Japanese know the story of the Three Little Pigs, but the part about "not by the hair of my chinny chin chin" is mysteriously absent here, since chin chin (pronounced with long vowels, like "cheen cheen") is a somewhat cute-sounding word for a penis. Here are some other Japanese words you already know.

Cheek show! -- Damn! (chikusho)
Psycho! -- That's great! (saiko, pronounced "sai-koh")
Bimbo -- Poor, no money (binbo)
Hen -- strange (it's the hen in hentai)
She knew -- [I] am going to die (shinu)
Show you -- soy sauce (shoyu)
Oh, you -- hot water (o-yu)
Ohio -- Good morning (ohayo)
Never never -- sticky (like natto, fermented soybeans, pronounced neba neba)
"E" -- good, ok, sometimes "no thanks" (ii)
Ski -- [I] like [that] (suki)
Haha -- one's own mother (will always incite giggling in Japanese 101 class)

Sup, dawg, I heard you like the geography of Chile.

Understanding Japan Through "Kata"

I often write about a useful method for understanding Japan through the concept of kata, a word that can mean "mold" (to shape things), "model" (as in the model number of car), "type" (for classification, also used for blood type), as well as the customary postures taken in martial arts. In a wider sense, the word describes pre-defined social conventions that are an important part of living in society. When a Japanese person starts a new job or attends a wedding or joins a school club, there's a pre-set list of social forms he or she can follow in order to ensure interactions go smoothly, and they usually do. A year ago the grandmother of Yasu, the J-List employee who keeps our site well stocked with artbooks, manga and Japanese study products, passed away, and it was absolutely required that my wife and I immediately make a visit to his home and offer our condolences in person, since we're his employers. The idea of kata can take other forms, too. When the heavy concrete slabs in a tunnel in Yamanashi Prefecture collapsed, tragically causing the deaths of nine people last Sunday, I knew exactly that police would have to make a show of searching the offices of freeway operator NEXCO as well as the home of the company's president for evidence of falsified inspections, all of which are pre-set social forms the police have to follow in a situation like this.

Understanding Japan in terms of kata is quite useful.

J-List Sale Update

Remember, J-List is having three great sales right now. First, we're giving a whopping $15 or $40 back when you order items from Japan and choose EMS shipping, which is fully insured and trackable and will arrive at your house in about 4 days. (Yes, there's still time to get items by Christmas, as long as you order in-stock items using EMS before December 15.) Order $100 or more to get $15 back as a store credit, or $200 or more to get $40 back. Next, we have a special offer on J-List's world-famous anime and kanji T-shirts. Through the end of December, buy any 2 J-List shirts shipping from San Diego and get a free shirt chosen randomly by us in the size you choose. Finally, everyone who makes an order is entered into a drawing for a $50 gift certificate, one per day, given away by Santa Megumi on Christmas!

New English Eroge Combo Packs!

We've got a nice announcement for fans of our English-translated visual novels and eroge today: a new line of discounted shrinkwrapped games on DVD-ROM with multiple games on the discs, a great way for you to play the best eroge in English with uncensored graphics! We've got combo sets of Crescendo and Target: Phermone, Idols Galore and Slave Pageant, the excellent yaoi titles Absolute Obedience and Enzai, plus a super pack with Amorous Professor Cherry plus Kango 1 & 2. Not only do these great game packs let you get multiple games for a low price, they're great for collectors who want to own the games in physical formats. All games are DRM-free.

Christmas in the Sky, Laputa

Japan is starting to get into "Christmas mode" as cities turn on beautiful illumination in parks and other public areas and couples start planning for that special date. Christmas is definitely seen as a special time for people in love, second only to Valentine's Day, and sales of condoms grow around 8% this month. Naturally Christmas is much loved by children, who look forward to getting special presents from parents and grandparents. It's also the season for anonymous gifts being left for orphans, which has become one of the nicer holiday traditions lately. Several days ago an anonymous person going by the name of Colonel Musuka (the villain of the Castle in the Sky Laputa film by Hayao Miyazaki) donated school backpacks and other gifts to a facility for disadvantaged children in Tokushima, Shikoku. He was following in the footsteps of other kind-hearted Japanese who have given gifts using pseudonyms like Tiger Mask (a popular pro wrestling manga from the 1970s) and even "Jason" of the Friday the 13th movie series. What a great tradition!

(A note about Col. Muska. He's become a meme generator in Japan, and literally every one of his quotes from the Miyazaki film are regularly incorporated into funny parody videos on Nicodouga and YouTube. Sadly the quotes aren't as well known to fans outside Japan so the gags are hard to bring over. If you know Laputa and want some laughs, here's a silly "Unreleased Laputa Edition" that I've spent many hours laughing over with my kids.)

"Christmas will live. It will return it to life! The power of Christmas is the dream of all children! "

The Pompeii of Japan

Over the weekend I had some free time, so I decided to get in the car and head off in a random direction. I ended up in a village called Komochi, whose main claim to fame is that it was totally destroyed when nearby Mt. Asama (the most active volcano on Japan's main island of Honshu, even today) erupted in 1783, killing thousands and making it the "Pompeii of Japan." The upside to the whole volcano thing is lots of onsen hot springs, and happily there were several in the area to choose from. Since I am a furo-bito (the name for someone who loves taking hot springs baths), I keep a full bath kit in my car, including toothbrush, razor and shaving cream. While you may have heard that men and women bathe together in Japan (called kon'yoku), but sadly this has become quite a rarity. I've only been able to find mixed bathing once in my many years of onsen-bathing in Japan, and believe me, I've been avidly searching.

Actual onsen bathing is not quite as awesome as this.

Japanese Late-Night TV Report

I like to watch late-night TV in Japan because there's always something interesting to see, like the show in which 100 PET bottle rockets were strapped to a crash dummy to see if they offered enough combined power to enable a man to fly (they did barely, though things didn't end well for the dummy). Late-night is also prime time for most anime shows, since nearly all the popular moe series like K-On! and Sword Art Online are shown in the midnight-to-2 am time slot. Another category of TV programs are "ranking" shows like Count Down TV and Ranking Oukoku (Ranking Kingdom), which track the popularity of everything from music to manga to Vienna sausages from week to week. The other day I caught a similar show called Docchi Mania! ("Which One? Mania!") in which various topics that people feel obsessive about (the Japanese use the English word "mania" to describe this) are hotly debated to determine which is best. In the past the show has compared soba vs. udon for noodles, Ginza vs. Roppongi for Tokyo night life, and even the benefits of Tochigi Prefecture vs. J-List's home prefecture of Gunma. The episode I caught pitched two rather strange Japanese foods against each other: natto, the famous fermented soybeans vs. tamago kake gohan, aka steamed white rice with raw egg and soy sauce mixed in, considered a delicacy by many for some reason. Both groups argued their cases fervently, but because several judges were from Osaka (a region famous for hating natto), raw-egg-on-rice won out. Is Japanese TV random or what?

Late-night "ranking" TV shows are popular.

Moero Downhill Night Blaze is Now Shipping!

We've got some great news for fans of English-translated visual novels and eroge: the third chapter and final chapter of the Moero Downhill Night mountain racing series of eroge titles in stock and shipping now. The third game is great, an extension of the story and characters seen in the second title, and in addition to the great "H" you expect, this is the first-ever game of its kind to offer real 3D racing, which really adds a fun dimension to the gameplay. This game was delayed by last year's terrible earthquake and tsunamis -- the Japanese company that made the game had the bad luck to be based in northern Japan, though no one at the company was hurt -- and we're glad to get it out to you finally!