Japan Imports from the UK: Pantsu

One thing I had to get used to as an American living in Japan was how British things could be here. There's a long list of concepts the Japanese borrowed from the Great Britain, including driving on the left, the way trains are called nobori (up) or kudari (down) depending on whether they're headed towards or away from Tokyo, plus major institutions like the postal service and NHK, which were heavily inspired by their British counterparts. The Japanese use many British words (bonnet/dustbin/water closet), have imported the tradition of eating Christmas Cake on December 24, and even have 3 o'clock tea, at least for people with a lot of time on their hands. England has influenced fashions in Japan over the years, too. The famous Japanese "sailor suit" school uniform was imported from England, and the Japanese word for a Western-style business suit (背広 sebiro) is thought to be a contraction of Savile Row, London's famous men's tailoring district. The Japanese have borrowed another word from the British, "pants" (pantsu) which always refers to underwear rather than outer trousers (as it generally does in North America), leading to some potential confusion when Americans first arrive here.

Speaking of pantsu, you may have seen posts on various websites over the weekend about the "latest trend in Japan," girls wearing panties on their faces. "Wearing Women's Panties On Your Face Is All The Rage In Japan," reports Buzzfeed with a straight face, while MSN tells us that "Japanese women have taken to putting panties on their heads, obscuring their faces." While we're big fans of pantsu and sell many interesting types from Japan, the fact is that this Japanese "trend" is just a clever marketing ploy by the publishers of the admittedly awesome Kaopan photobook to promote an upcoming tongue-in-cheek superhero film, and no one is actually doing this, unless it's professional models being photographed. This is not unlike the time a street art performer created a costume that looked like a Coca-Cola vending machine and walked around crowded areas of Tokyo. A New York Times reporter misunderstand and concluded that "fearing crime," Tokyo-ites had taken to disguising themselves as vending machines in order to feel safe in public.

Japan imports many ideas from the UK, including pantsu.

Just A Few Photobooks From Japan...

In addition to the fun Kaopan photobook written about above, J-List has been on a troll posting outstanding glossy photobooks from Japan. Whether you want to see the private rooms of otaku girls, learn to draw "moe" military girls, explore the world of girls with "twin tail" hair or check out some really cute Japanese cats, we've got some great books to check out. Click to see all our glossy photobooks from Japan, sorted by popularity!

Sadness in Guam

I write a lot about how Japan is one of the safest and most peaceful countries in the world. Murders do happen here, but they're rare enough that, whenever one does occur, it's talked about afterwards for months. Japanese become so used to the peace and safety of their country that they develop what's known as heiwa-boke (literally "becoming dull-witted from too much peace") and assume the rest of the world is the same. A group of Japanese tourists learned the truth of this to their cost when they were attacked while visiting the tropical island of Guam by a deranged knife-wielding local, who killed three before he was subdued. Guam, a U.S. possession, is a fabulous place, like a miniature version of Hawaii but without the jet lag (when coming from Japan). It's also an island that counts its local economy by the number of jumbo jets ferrying tourists from Japan, South Korea and China, and everyone there is in shock that something so terrible could have happened.

Sadness in the tropical paradise of Guam.

The Way of Kanji

You never, as they say, forget your first, and I've found this goes for studying kanji, too. While the first kanji I was consciously able to read was 子 ko meaning child, commonly seen in girl's names like Keiko or Aiko, I'd been exposed to another famous kanji character from a very young age without realizing it. In Star Blazers, the (pretty awesome) 1979 English dub of the classic space opera Space Battleship Yamato, the character Dr. Sane sits around drinking "Captain Avatar's spring water" while laughing, dancing and otherwise making merry, but it wasn't until I started studying Japanese that I could read the 酒 sake character clearly printed on his bottle. Another kanji that I learned early on became one of my favorites: 道, michi with its Japanese reading and doh using its Chinese reading. Literally meaning "road" "way" or "path," this character is used in such names as Hokkaido ("the northern sea route") and Tokaido (the great road from Edo/Tokyo to Kyoto). The 道 character is also used in traditional Japanese arts like 茶道 sa-doh ("the way of tea," e.g. tea ceremony) and 書道 sho-doh ("the way of writing," or brush calligraphy) as well as martial arts like 柔道 judo ("the gentle way") and 空手道 karate-do ("the way of the empty hand"). In the new moe anime Girls und Panzer, they create a fictional 戦車道 sensha-do, or the Way of the Tank, the ancient art of piloting a WWII era German tank. (Why not?) If you like kanji, we've still got stock of our 2013 kanji character, one of my favorites.

Girls und Panzer and the "Way of the Tank."

Viewing Japan Through the Internet

Before the Internet, Japan was a truly mysterious place, and it was difficult to access information about the country from the outside world. (Maybe if you were really lucky you could find a friend who'd send you third-generation VHS tapes of Japanese TV once in a while.) Now, of course, getting access to Japan is much easier, thanks to websites like YouTube and J-List. Still, while it's great to be able to find out about the latest in Gothic Lolita cat-ear fashions in Tokyo, viewing Japan through the lens of the Internet is not without its problems, because the stranger aspects of the country will tend to be magnified while the less-flamboyant details are lost. A good example of this phenomenon is ice cream, which can be found in bizarre flavors like miso, squid ink and basashi (that is, horse sashimi, try not to think about it too deeply) if you visit specialty shops in parts of Japan frequented by tourists. And yet 99% of the ice cream actually consumed by anyone is vanilla or possibly green tea. But since blog posts about the popularity of vanilla in Japan wouldn't be interesting to anyone, we're far more likely to be influenced by messages like, "OMG OMG the Japanese have seaweed ice cream!!!11!" when in fact hardly anyone here even knows this exists.

This is similar to the signs that say "no foreigners allowed" which are supposedly everywhere in Japan, at least according to the Internet and activists like Ardou Debit (who wrote a useful book for considering a move to Japan). And yet, in 21 years of living here I only managed to have service declined only once, at a video rental store that had unfortunately had a large number of videos stolen by a foreigner the week before, and when I calmly explained I would never do something like that to them they apologized and let me rent videos from them. The issue isn't about whether or not there's discrimination in Japan -- of course there is some everywhere, though gaijin enjoy a better situation here than foreigners in their own home countries -- but instead, why are certain aspects of Japan magnified so disproportionately when viewed through the Internet? Bottom line, while we all love fun and wacky tidbits of news about Japan, like the bacon and scrambled egg onigiri I saw in Seven-Eleven last night, a lot of the information about Japan we receive needs to be taken with several grains of salt.

The most popular ice cream flavor in Japan is...vanilla.

Our Chocolate + Tenga Sale Continues!

Valentine's Day may be over, but J-List chocolate-and-stress-toy sale is going on all month long! Whether you need some awesome Japanese Kit Kat or Evangelion Chocolate to pick yourself up or would prefer something more physical, J-List has a huge stock of extra-special items for you. Click to see all Japanese chocolate and personal stress toys now!

Slurp Your Noodles! Louder!

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

Do you slurp your noodles properly?

Low Tech Japan (And Japanese Police)

While quaint shopping arcades are certainly nice, the flip-side of life in Japan is that things can be rather backwards technologically, despite the image some may have of Japan as an advanced nation of gleaming glass and steel. My wife discovered this when she volunteered as a parental representative at our daughter's school, which entailed maintaining contact lists and doing simple document creation. She was shocked to find that none of the other parents had any computer skills, and several didn't even own computers, forcing her to do all the work herself. There are other examples of Japan's lower level of technology, including Yahoo Japan's still-thriving Geocities community and the way whenever we do a major print job in Japan, we know we'll be asked to save our Illustrator file in a format from 12 years ago so the printer can work with it. Last year Japanese police made several arrests of people making online death threats, including the director of Gundam 00. It turned out that the threats had actually been sent via a computer virus created by a lonely guy who really liked cats, yet the police had not been aware that knowing the IP address associated with a certain crime was not iron-clad proof of guilt.

Japan can be surprisingly low-tech.

Tamako Market, an Anime About Rice Cakes on Nostalgia

One thing about the Japanese is that they seem hard-wired to appreciate nostalgia, whether it's eating the traditional candy they grew up with during the Showa Period or appreciating the wabi and sabi (translatable as "the tranquil simplicity and beauty found in the old and imperfect") of an old sento public bath. The new Kyoto Animation series Tamako Market draws on this tendency for people to feel natsukashii (nots-ka-shee, meaning nostalgic) about the good old days, centering around a family selling mochi rice cakes in an old-timey shopping street of the type that were popular two decades ago but which are now generally quite deserted. It's kind of K-On! meets Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi with a touch of Angry Birds thrown in, and it's an entertaining snapshot at a simpler side to Japan, back when there were talking birds. If you're interested in seeing what Japan was like back in the Showa Period, we've got some great photobooks and 2013 photo calendars you might like to explore. And we even have mochi.

Tamako Market is an anime about rice cakes and nostalgia.

Children of Men: Japan Edition

My Japanese mother-in-law once remarked that, "I sure don't see many women with big stomachs these days." At first I thought that women were getting thinner, but my wife said no, her mother had been referring to the lack of pregnant women in Japan. It's true -- the birthrate here is among the lowest in the industrialized world, just 1.39 children per couple, and it's more and more common to see companies offering products and services to those over 65 rather than baby-related items. While the falling population is felt most in less-populated parts of Japan -- in rural Mie Prefecture, for example, the maternity wards of three separate hospitals were combined into one location to more efficiently utilize resources, which caused no small inconvenience for expectant mothers in the area -- now it's starting to affect Tokyo, which posted the first-ever drop in population since 1956, as deaths outpaced births for the first time. Last week my wife visited her gynecologist for a check-up, and got a shock. "It's totally different from when I was pregnant with the kids. Back then there were about ten pregnant women in the waiting room, but now there were only two. There were more women there getting fertility treatments than having babies."

"Children of Japan," now a major motion picture.

The "Indirect Kiss" Meme

It's fun to analyze different memes (anime-related or otherwise) as they evolve and change. While some have wide appeal no matter where you're from, like shimapan or the always-goofy horse head mask, some memes are tied to langauge and don't necessarily translate well across borders. Two good examples would be the Dragonball Z "over 9000" meme, which is totally unknown to Japanese fans since they're not watching the English version, and the classic Amuro line from the original Gundam, "You hit me! N- Not even my own father hit me!" well-known in Japan yet not so much among international anime fans. One gag you see in anime a lot is the 間接キス kansetsu kisu or "indirect kiss," which is what happens when a character drinks from a glass or can that someone else has used, or shares the same spoon, chopsticks etc. It's a silly joke, of course, which only elementary schoolers would actually be concerned with, yet in anime it pops up as a plot device quite often.

One long-running anime meme is the "indirect kiss."

Amazing Cat-Related Products from Japan

If, like the Japanese, you really love cats, then J-List has some interesting products to show you, from plush cat toys to cute cats that live in your iPhone or Android phone to awesome cat-related cosplay and fashion items, to those brain-activated Necomimi Neurowear cat ears (now just $69.95!). Click to see the most popular cat-related products from Japan!

TV Commercials in Japan

One of the more enjoyable aspects to living in Japan is the constant stream of entertaining TV commercials, and I love seeing what random "CM" (as TV commercials are called here) will come up next. Japan's advertisers are good at getting your attention, whether it's through dance routines with business-suited salarymen singing about stomach medicine or cute idols dressed as panda bears while they talk about insurance -- the randomness is one way they break through all the noise. Companies hire popular faces like AKB48 or Kyary Pamyu Pamyu to promote their products, and if they can find a way to put cats in an advertisement, they will, like the popular ad that features cats eating at a "conveyor belt sushi" restaurant with plates of cat food instead of sushi. In addition to being less "talky" than American TV commercials -- often an ad will show a car being driven with no words other than a beautiful woman shouting the car's name as it zooms past -- I believe Japanese advertisers try to show more honesty. For example, an ad for toothpaste will show CG imagery of a toothbrush sweeping away 98% of the food stuck on your teeth but will always leave a tiny amount behind, to avoid making a claim of 100% effectiveness.

TV commercials in Japan are always entertaining.

A Trip to Tokyo Big Sifght

Yesterday several J-List staff members and I went to Tokyo Big Sight to check out the International Gift Show, a large convention where manufacturers and distributors show off various products. It was quite pleasant walking around the convention center with a mere 20,000 people around me instead of the 500,000+ otakus present during the Comiket doujinshi convention, and we had fun scouting for interesting products for the site. I found myself reflecting on how things had changed since I started J-List back in the stone age, when people still used modems and instead of "Googling" we all used Yahoo or (shudder) Hotbot. I decided to see if anyone on my Twitter feed had any questions for me, and a few did.

What inspired you to start J-List in the first place? How well did you know the market when you started?

I started J-List in 1996 after sensing that the time had come to do something interesting with the Internet. I'd laid some of the groundwork by bringing stock to sell at anime conventions in the early 90s, and had run a side business offering JPOP CDs on Usenet. (The name "J-List" refers to the giant list of products I had in an Excel spreadsheet back then.)

How does a Westerner start his own business in Japan?

There were no special barriers to starting a business here, although as with any business you need to understand the language and culture. We learned early on that distributors would only work with corporations they could build trust relationships with, so we made sure to shape our company into the form these distributors expected. My wife is the president of the company, which is good since doing accounting in Japanese would probably break my brain.

Have you faced any problems being non-Japanese? i.e., "we're not doing business with a foreigner"?

There may have been a time when toy distributors would have preferred to avoid the hassle of dealing with foreigners buying toys and figures due to linguistic problems, but by the time J-List was launched they'd really come to appreciate our business, going out of our way to help us since we represented an important source of revenue for them. I realized that whenever the Japanese economy experienced a downturn it would actually open doors for J-List, as companies were forced to think about the outside world if they wanted to survive.

What kind of relationship do you have with post office?

They love us, since we send hundreds of packages a day. They gave us an award thanking us, presented by the Japanese Postmaster General.

What was your biggest challenge?

Perhaps learning to say "no" to carrying new products on the site, which is why we carry everything from cookbooks and bento books to shimapan to Death Star ice makers for your bourbon. There's just too much cool stuff in Japan...

The J-List staff made a trip to Tokyo Big Sight.

Traditional Products from Japan

J-List is much more than an anime shop, and we like to carry products that capture the aesthetic and or kawaii sensibilities from Japan as much as possible. Whether you want to drink tea our of our Lucky Cat tea cups, explore the cuteness of Pandas, or sample traditional candies from Kyoto, we've got lots of fun stuff to browse. Start by checking the most "wishlisted" traditional and home products from Japan!

The Scale of Looking at Japan

One of the most fascinating things about the world is the way our perceptions change as the scale we're observing changes. Something "small" in human scale, like a grain of rice, is huge compared with the next level down (complex living cells), which are far larger than the next level down (say, viruses), going right down to molecules and atoms. Looking at other countries can be very similar. Seen from the U.S., especially away from the two coasts, the various cultures of Asia can tend to blend together, and the average person in Minnesota has little individual awareness about how customs and culture differ between Japan, South Korea and China. (In San Diego I was once asked if I could speak Vietnamese, the idea being that Vietnam and Japan are both in Asia, so...) As you learn more about the countries, of course, things come into better focus.

Then we realize that looking at one country as a unit might not be enough. In Japan, the two most famous regions are Kanto, where Tokyo, Yokohama and J-List's home prefecture of Gunma are (though people from Tokyo invariably think we're part of the northern Tohoku region), and Kansai, home of Osaka, Kyoto and Kobe. Naturally, there's a world of subtle differences between these two regions in terms of dialect, food and customs -- supposedly Osakans are similar to Americans in that they show their emotions right away rather than hiding them like Tokyo-ites, and unlike people from Tokyo, Osakans are less likely to pretend they don't want to eat the last piece of pizza out of politeness. But viewing Japan has Tokyo-vs-Osaka might not be enough detail, and you can always delve more deeply and discover another level. Last week J-List had our "New Year Party" at an izakaya which promised to provide authentic "Kagoshima style cuisine." I've never been to the southernmost Japanese island of Kyushu, where the city Kagoshima is, so I had no idea how authentic their claim was, but it certainly was fun to experience a new level of Japan.

Some interesting differences between Tokyo and Osaka.

Ramune's 140 Year History

I'm a fan of Strike Witches, a fun anime that blends cute moe girls with World War II-style mecha and, er, pantsu, though naturally I only watch it for the animation and story. In the new Strike Witches movie there's a scene in which a sailor on a Japanese aircraft carrier tosses Yoshika an ice cold bottle of Ramune, so I thought I'd write about that today. Ramune is a lemon-lime flavored Japanese soft drink (the name comes from the English word "lemonade") first bottled in Kobe in 1872, making it older than Coca-Cola or Dr. Pepper. It made use of the then-newfangled Codd-necked bottle design that placed a glass ball inside the bottle to create an airtight seal, requiring the purchaser to carefully push the ball down then hold the bottle at a level angle while drinking. Because Japanese Imperial Navy ships carried equipment for making carbon dioxide, Ramune was a popular on-board drink since the sailors could manufacture it themselves while at sea. The sight of a Ramune bottle is sure to cause Japanese to exclaim natsukashii (nots-ka-SHEE), meaning "that makes me feel so nostalgic I could die," and virtually all Japanese claim to remember growing up playing with the glass Ramune marbles. The Ramune brand isn't owned by any one company but (like the Kewpie Doll) is generic, manufactured by several different bottlers throughout Japan. If you're interested in trying some authentic Ramune soda, we've got several awesome flavors in stock in San Diego.

Ramune has an amazing 140 year history.

Awesome Hatsune Miku Products

We love Hatsune Miku, the super-cute twin-tailed Japanese singing sensation who has become a worldwide sensation. We carry tons of products featuring Miku-chan, from figures to plush "leek" toys to her authentic shimapan, and also the popular PSP and PS Vita dancing games that everyone should try. Click to see the top Hatsune Miku and Vocaloid products from Japan!

Remember: Our Chocolate + Tenga Sale!

February is here, and that's a great excuse to grab some awesome chocolate from Japan, whether you're buying it for that special guy or girl or just like chocolate, and this month we're having a great 2x J-List Points Sale on all chocolate products, from the newest flavors of Pocky and Kit Kat to the new Evangelion and Hello Kitty gift chocolates we've got in stock. We've got more good news, though: we're also having a great sale on all stress toys, including TENGA, anime-themed parody toys, massagers and lotion. So everyone will be happy this month! Don't forget to take advantage of our new lower shipping rates, too!

The Japanese, English and Katakana

It's quite well known that, despite six or more years of studying English, Japanese people aren't always great at communicating with the language, and there are several reasons why this is so. Japan is an island nation where English is almost never used outside tourist-ey areas like Kyoto, and English is usually studied for the sake of passing university entrance exams then forgotten by most people. Another problem is katakana, the writing system that allows words like "illustrator" or "political manifesto" or "image change" to be used in Japanese directly, which is very convenient. Because you can only access a limited number of sounds with the system, however, expressing English this way results in a thick "katakana accent." In the same way that Japanese people shouldn't study English through katakana, non-Japanese should avoid studying Japanese using "Romanized" Japanese (written with the English alphabet), as your brain will always try to mistakenly apply the wrong rules of pronunciation to what it sees. The word for "10,000" in Japanese is 一万 ichi man (lit. one unit of 10,000), and when I meet a new foreigner in Japan, I can tell if he or she has studied Japanese properly by the way they pronounce this word. If they pronounce 万 as the English word "man" (with a short "a" sound), I know they learned the word written in the English alphabet, but if they pronounce it mahn (with a long vowel) I know they probably learned Japanese after starting with hiragana first.

(Remember that J-List stocks lots of Japanese study products, whether you want to just learn the basics or go on to study more. We recommend the Genki textbook series and White Rabbit flashcards as a good place to get started with a study program.)

Matsumoto Leiji, Space Opera Master

One of the greatest names in the history of anime and manga is Matsumoto Leiji, creator of classic space operas like Space Battleship Yamato, Galaxy Express 999 and Captain Harlock. Matsumoto Leiji was born in 1938, the son of a military test pilot who later trained tokkou butai ("special attack squadron") pilots, more commonly known as kamikaze to you and me, and this likely colored Leiji's later works. Leiji was a struggling creator of girls' manga when his wife, also a shoujo manga-ka, found commercial success when she was asked by the Takara toy company to design their new fashion doll Licca-chan; this enabled her husband to pursue his true love, creating science fiction stories. I'm very much in debt to Mr. Matsumoto, whose works introduced me not only to animated stories that had proper beginnings and endings with characters who fell in love and died in dramatic ways, but to the great romance that was possible through the limitless medium of animation. Mr. Matsumoto is in France now, celebrating an amazing 60 years as a creator of manga and anime while surrounded by his many adoring fans.

The works of Matsumoto Leiji have had a big effect on my life.

Made in Japan in Trouble?

Although Japan's economy is limping along with little if any real growth, its official unemployment rate is an enviably low 4.2%. Even accounting for some differences in the way the data is calculated (supposedly it'd be about a percentage point higher if the same method as the U.S. were used), that's still lower than many other countries. But the actual job situation in Japan is far from rosy, of course. Because there's been essentially no inflation over the past 20 years (about the only thing that got more expensive since I came here was Coca-Cola, which went from 100 yen to 120 yen in 1993), wages have also not grown much during that time. Also, five years of an incredibly strong currency have caused many of Japan's most illustrious brands to move jobs to other countries in order to stay competitive. Recently a report was released showing the number of Japanese employed in manufacturing was under 10 million, the lowest number since 1961, and this has really come as a shock to people here. In some ways it's an unavoidable step in the evolution of an industrial economy -- when I was taking economics courses in university in the late 80s the topic of how the U.S. had "lost the manufacturing war" to Japan was hotly discussed, and now the same thing is happening to Japan. All is not lost, of course: Japan's engineering skills are incredibly high, and there are many options open to the country as it tries to find the best path going forward.

Japan's manufacturing jobs are in peril.

Don't Forget J-List's February Chocolate + Tenga Sale

February is here, and that's a great excuse to grab some awesome chocolate from Japan, whether you're buying it for that special guy or girl or just like chocolate, and this month we're having a great 2x J-List Points Sale on all chocolate products, from the newest flavors of Pocky and Kit Kat to the new Evangelion and Hello Kitty gift chocolates we've got in stock. We've got more good news, though: we're also having a great sale on all stress toys, including TENGA, anime-themed parody toys, massagers and lotion. So everyone will be happy this month! Don't forget to take advantage of our new lower shipping rates, too!

How Kanji Works

Kanji, of course, are the characters that communicate meaning in written Japanese, imported from China around the 4th Century A.D. They look like random chicken scratches if you're not familiar with them, but there's actually a lot of logic built into them. For example, the character for "woman" is 女 (read onna on Japanese), which is incorporated into characters with related meanings, like 姉 (ane, older sister), 妹 (imouto, younger sister), 姫 (hime, princess) or 結婚 (kekkon, marriage). There are many situations in which you can guess what a character means based on what elements -- called "radicals" -- it contains. While mastering kanji is a big challenge to Western students of Japanese, I found the best approach was to embrace the difficulty, jumping in despite how hard it can look at first, starting with easier manga and singing songs at karaoke. Also, focusing on reading skills and worrying less about learning to write kanji is a good idea, since in the age of computers and cell phones almost no one hand-writes kanji any more, even Japanese people. If you're interested in learning kanji (either a little or a lot), J-List just happens to have a great selection of textbooks, study notebooks, flashcards, and so on.

Biting social commentary from Ouran High School.

The Japanese, Soy Beans and Devils

Everyone knows that rice is the staple food of the Japanese, and it really is -- most people in Japan eat a big bowl or plate of rice with nearly every meal, and they pretty sure that Westerners always have a big basket of bread beside their plate when we eat. The "other" staple food in Japan would have to be soybeans, which are the source of a great variety of Japanese foods. Miso soup, a hot soup made from fermented miso paste, is an extremely healthy dish that's enjoyed with every traditional Japanese breakfast, and served with other meals. Tofu is another popular food, used in many Japanese and Chinese recipes, or good served chilled on a hot afternoon with soy sauce poured over it. Natto are the famous fermented soybeans that are popular in much of the country, although less so in the Kansai/Osaka area, to say nothing of my mouth. My kids eat it all the time, and when they want to tease me they come up to me and breathe Natto breath on me -- ugh. Japan couldn't get through a day without soy sauce, the single most common condiment in Japanese kitchens, even more than salt and pepper. Finally, soybeans play an important cultural role each February on Setsubun, the traditional end of the year according to the old lunar calendar, which is this Sunday. On that day, children will throw dried soybeans at an oni (devil), usually the father of the house wearing a scary paper mask, and shout 鬼は外！福はうち！oni wa soto! fuku wa uchi! ("In with happiness! Out with devils!"). As with most Japanese customs, it's quite old, dating back to the Muromachi Period (1337-1573).

Setsubun is a day for throwing soybeans at ogres.

The Japanese Love Crooked Teeth

An important aspect of the Japanese concept of 萌え (moe, pronounced mo-EH) is extreme cuteness through endearing physical and/or character defects, which serve to make that character more charming to fans. Some of these defects include clumsiness, bad vision requiring glasses, extreme shyness, being terrible at cooking, a strand of hair that refuses to be combed down (ahoge), and so on. (Hmm, now that I think about it, I think my wife married me because of various defects in my personality that she wanted to "fix"...I wonder if there's any kind of connection here.) Another big moe element is crooked teeth, called 八重歯 (yaeba, pronounced yah-eh-ba), which are popular both in meatspace (AKB48's Tomomi Itano is probably the most famous yaeba idol currently) as well as the 2D world of anime and video games, where crooked teeth are represented by a single fang in the mouth. Yaeba are so popular that you can now have them artificially added to your teeth, by visiting a dental clinic and asking for tsuke-yaebe, fake caps that sit on top of your real teeth to give you that cute "imperfect beauty" look. What do you think?

The popularity of yaeba fangs is going strong.

J-List's Chocolate + Tenga Sale is Back!

February is here, and that's a great excuse to grab some awesome chocolate from Japan, whether you're buying it for that special guy or girl or just like chocolate, and this month we're having a great 2x J-List Points Sale on all chocolate products, from the newest flavors of Pocky and Kit Kat to the new Evangelion and Hello Kitty gift chocolates we've got in stock. We've got more good news, though: we're also having a great sale on all stress toys, including TENGA, anime-themed parody toys, massagers and lotion. So everyone will be happy this month! Don't forget to take advantage of our new lower shipping rates, too!

Shoes On your Bed

When foreigners come to Japan, one of the first cultural differences they run into is the custom of taking shoes off before going into a house. Japanese homes (and some offices, including J-List) have a lowered area at the front door called a genkan where you leave your shoes before going inside. After you've lived here a little while, it becomes second nature to open the door, kick off your shoes (or if you're the obsessive type, neatly line them up), and go inside. To the Japanese sense of cleanliness, anything having to do with your feet is dirty under any circumstances -- actually, the genkan area is essentially considered "outside" the house. Recently my family has been hooked on the Paranormal Activity movie series, a quasi-realistic ghost story told through video and security camera. In one scene, a character sits on her bed while still wearing her shoes, something that'd be completely unthinkable in Japan.

This looks really strange to the Japanese.

All About the Japanese Yen

The currency of Japan is the yen, a word that means "circle." (The Chinese yuan and Korean won both mean the same thing, with all three names having the same etymology.) While there are many different denominations of paper bills used in the U.S., Japan has just three in circulation, for 1000, 5000 and 10,000 yen. The current face on the 1000 yen note is Hideyo Noguchi, a famous researcher who helped isolate yellow fever before, er, dying of yellow fever, while the 5000 yen note carries the face of Ichiyo Higuchi, a female novelist from the Meiji Era. (The faces on the previous versions of the currency were a bit more interesting, featuring novelist Natsume Souseki and Inazo Nitobe, a Japanese who converted to Quakerism and wrote the first book on bushido, The Way of the Samurai.) The all-important 10,000 yen note, the symbol of Japan's economic power in the world, is reserved for Yukichi Fukuzawa, one of the "Founding Fathers" of modern Japan. He was one of the first Japanese to travel to America and Europe, and he wrote the first books explaining Western institutions to Japanese before founding Keio University, more or less the Yale of Japan.

Some information about Japan money, if you want it.

The Japanese Love Insurance

There are certain things that the Japanese love, including cat ears, mayonnaise, and green tea Kit Kat. They also love...insurance? Yes, it's true: despite having only 2% of the word's population, the nation of Japan pays 18% of global insurance premiums. My Japanese wife loves to buy insurance, making sure we're protected from just about everything imaginable -- she even has "golf insurance" that covers injury to herself or others while on the golf course and gives an instant $10,000 bonus should she ever get a verified hole-in-one. While many names of insurance companies in Japan will probably sound familiar to you -- there's MetLife Japan, Mitsui-Sumitomo Life, the Aflac duck of course -- some might come as a surprise. Sony's insurance arm is one of the fastest growing companies in Japan, selling auto, cancer and health insurance for pets. The biggest insurance company in Japan (and in fact, the world) is one you probably don't think of often: it's the Japanese postal system, which offers banking and insurance services in addition to picking up J-List packages for delivery every morning. The postal insurance arm has a staggering $1.3 trillion in assets.

Japanese people love to buy insurance.

Remember, Lower Shipping Rates at J-List!

Remember our good news: we've lowered our shipping rates for products shipping from Japan, so you can now order all the awesome anime artbooks and cosplay products and delicious Japanese snacks you want from Japan and pay less for them. All rates have been reduced, from the speedy and fully trackable EMS, the affordable first-class airmail, economy airmail (SAL) and so on.

We Love Hello Kitty Stuff

One of our favorite hobbies is trawling Japanese shops to find fun and interesting Hello Kitty products from Japan to delight you with, and I think we do a pretty good job. If you browse the most "wishlisted" Sanrio products on the site today, you'll see lots of fun products, like the Hello Kitty Bilingual Guide to Japan, lots of kawaii chocolate for Valentine's Day, random ways to keep warm with Hello Kitty and more.

Johnny Kitagawa: Idolmaster

One of the most enigmatic people in Japan is Johnny Kitagawa, founder of Johnny & Associates (or "Johnny's Jimusho" in Japanese). This is the talent agency that's been responsible for virtually every popular Japanese boy band from SMAP to Tokio to Arashi and Hey! Say! JUMP. Born in Los Angeles in 1931 to Japanese parents, Johnny spent several years in an internment camp during World War II according to the Japanese Wikipedia entry. After the war, he joined the U.S. military as a Japanese language interpreter and was sent to work in the U.S. embassy in Tokyo. This is when (according to legend) he befriended some teenage boys he met in Yoyogi Park and organized them into a singing group called The Johnny's, launching his career as a band manager. Over the next twenty years he tweaked his formula, borrowing from the business model of the Monkees as a way of tailor-making talent to appeal to certain fans, until his bands started taking over the pop culture world during the late 80s. Although he's one of the most influential men in the entertainment industry, he makes Truman Capote look like an extrovert, shunning all media contact. Until yesterday, that is, when he made his first-ever TV interview, appearing in a segment for NHK's world news, though his face was not shown directly in the program.

While the star-making success of Johnny's & Associates (J&E) has been phenomenal, there've been some serious issues too, including accusations of improper contact between Mr. Kitagawa and some of his talent over the years. (In 2002, the talent agency sued weekly magazine Shukan Bunshun over these accusations and was awarded $80,000 in damages, though this amount was reduced on appeal.) The funny thing is, almost none of this negative news is ever reported in the Japanese press, and it's a given that, should any serious scandal involving a Johnny's-kei performer emerge, it will be ignored by the mainstream press. This is due to the great influence J&E holds over the media, since TV networks know that if they report news negative to the talent agency they'll be blackballed and won't get any stars for their TV programs. This problem is only limited to Johnny's performers -- when the mother of AKB48 member Minami Takahashi was caught in a relationship with a minor, every news source ignored the story, citing "privacy concerns for those involved" that no one else would be entitled to. This willingness of Japan's masukomi (from "mass communications," e.g. the news media) to censor itself at various times is definitely one of my least favorite aspects of Japan.

Johnny's-kei units rule the boy band market in Japan.

Early Retirement Boom in Japan

Japan is currently experiencing a wave early retirements as dozens of teachers, police officers and other public servants move their scheduled retirements up several months. The reason is a coming reduction in the amount of "retirement bonus" public employees will receive, a change that takes effect in April. In Japan there's a huge class of komuin ("koh-mu-een," civil servants), a permanent bureaucracy modeled after Her Majesty's Civil Service in England that includes all teachers, police officers, firefighters and administrative employees in Japan. When a Japanese civil servant retires, he receives a one-time "retirement bonus" of around $300,000 in addition to his normal pension, and this bonus amount is scheduled to be reduced by $15,000 for people retiring after April. While no one cares if the guy who stamps your passport retires two months early, many teachers have been retiring in the middle of the school year, which means they can't be with their students when they graduate in March. This is viewed as a serious breach of responsibility in Japan.

Japanese public servants are rushing to retire early.

Remember, J-List Has Lower Shipping Rates!

J-List has some good news that customers will be happy to hear: we've lowered our shipping rates for products shipping from Japan, so you can now order all the awesome anime artbooks and cosplay products and delicious Japanese snacks you want from Japan and pay less for them. All rates have been reduced, from the speedy and fully trackable EMS, the affordable first-class airmail, economy airmail (SAL) and so on.

Keep Warm in Winter, Japan Style

There are some interesting and unique ways of keeping warm, Japan style. First we've got our super warm "kairo" heating pads, which I couldn't survive without, plus those fizzing bath tablets that send bubbles up your bath, and more. The other day I mentioned haramaki, clothes that you wrap around your mid-section while sleeping, and several customers asked us to get some of these for the site...and here they are.

Gaijin World Problems

While it's generally fun to be a foreigner living in Japan -- the people are nice, the sushi is cheap and vending machines thank you politely after dispensing your can of hot corn coup -- there are of course certain unique challenges that we gaijin face. So in the tradition of the #FirstWorldProblems Internet meme, here are some #GaijinWorldProblems for you.

• Slippers are half the size of your feet, but your guest offered them to you, so you have to wear them.
• Search engines default to Japanese language on new computers, making you spend several minutes figuring out how to force the browser to search in English.
• Can't go skiing or bowling, the shoes they rent out are way too small for big gaijin feet.
• Bumps head all the time, needs surgery for loose cataract every few years.
• Takes a shot at using keigo (formal polite Japanese), gets exalting and humble verbs reversed.
• Is slightly above average weight, so Japanese assume he's a famous Pro Wrestler and ask for his autograph.
• The girl handing out pocket tissues advertising high-interest credit card loans has been told not to bother handing tissues to foreigners.
• Someone compliments your Japanese ability, you feel insulted all day.
• Can't find the "open" and "close" buttons inside the elevator because they're written in English.
• Spends several months with no English speakers around except ESL students, now talks like Forrest Gump.
• Too tall to fit in a kigurimi full-body costume.
• Policeman asks to see your gaijin ID card, turns out he just wants to practice his English with you.
• Enjoys motsu nabe until he learns what motsu means (beef tripe, e.g. beef intestines).
• Goes for all-you-can-eat pizza at Shakey's, the only pizza they have out is corn and mayonnaise.

Another minor challenge for foreigners is learning to sit on the floor. While Western-style furniture like comfortable sofas and chairs are common in Japan, most homes have one or more washitsu (Japanese style rooms) complete with tatami mats and little cushions to sit on called called zabuton (literally, "sitting futon"). In my house, we often eat with my wife's parents, with everyone sitting around the kotatsu heater grabbing from a large pot of food boiling away in the center (naturally not motsu nabe). Even after living for so long in Japan, an hour or so of sitting on the floor starts to get uncomfortable, and I'll usually switch to a nearby chair when no one is looking. I remember when I met my future mother-in-law for the first time: she took me out to experience a really traditional Japanese tea ceremony, which requires that you sit in seiza ("correct sitting") position with your entire body's weight resting on your knees and feet for about 10,000 hours. Japanese always expect that foreigners won't be able to sit for long in that position, so of course I had to prove her wrong, gritting my teeth as the blood stopped flowing through my legs. I guess I made a good impression since she let me marry her daughter.

Sitting seiza style is not easy for foreigners.

J-List's Official New Year Party is Tonight

Today is the day of J-List's official New Year Party, and when we're done with work we'll all gather at an izakaya (traditional Japanese bar-restaurant) to officially mark the start of another year for our company. I write a lot about how you can understand Japan through kata, a word that can mean shape or mold but in this case refers to pre-defined social forms that everyone adheres to, and formal get-togethers like this are definitely important in Japanese organizations. While most companies might prefer to hold a Year-End Party in December as a way of saying otsukaresama deshita ("thank you for your hard work") to employees over the past year, J-List is too always too busy filling hundreds of orders per day (thank you!) to do this. Instead we have our annual get-together in January as a New Year Party, when things have calmed down a bit. After we re-dedicate ourselves to covering the world with Japanese Kit Kat and ridiculously cute cat products from Japan, we'll probably go out for a few hours of karaoke.

A scene from the 2013 J-List New Year Party (artist's conception).

Good News from J-List: Lower Shipping Rates!

J-List has some good news that customers will be happy to hear: we've lowered our shipping rates for products shipping from Japan, so you can now order all the awesome anime artbooks and cosplay products and delicious Japanese snacks you want from Japan and pay less for them. All rates have been reduced, from the speedy and fully trackable EMS, the affordable first-class airmail, economy airmail (SAL) and so on.

Exceptions in the Japanese Language

When you study Japanese, you have to come to grips with the fact that, while the rules that govern how the grammar and writing system work are surprisingly straightforward and logical, there are also lots of exceptions to these rules. Japanese sentences are marked with easy-to-understand "particles" that denote the subject, object, predicate and so on, which is all very nice…except for that fact that many of these words are omitted in actual use since they're clear from the context. If you watch anime in Japanese you'll quickly learn that -chan is a name suffix for girls and -kun is for boys...and yet, when Sugo chains Asuna in the second arc of Sword Art Online he calls her "Asuna-kun," which probably confused some viewers. (The -kun name suffix is gender-neutral in certain settings, including formal, military etc.) While the standard way to write Japanese is to use hiragana for basic words (grammatical particles, etc.), kanji for more complex words, and katakana for foreign loan words like "anti-aging" (a health-related term that's been repurposed to describe Japan's efforts to update its aging infrastructure). However, there are some English words that have been in use in Japan for so long, they've gone and gotten kanji assigned to them, in violation of those neat-and-clean rules. Three examples of these somewhat archaic words are 珈琲 koh-hii for coffee, 煙草 tabako for tobacco/cigarettes, and 倶楽部 kurabu for club.

Writing "coffee" in outdated kanji gives shops a "ye old shoppe" old timey feel.

Peter's Unified Theory of Japan, Part 33

Part of Peter's Unified Theory of Japan is that the Japanese greatly desire to be seen in a favorable light by other nations, especially the countries of the West. A lot of what the Japanese do, such as the creation of Japan's high-speed Shinkansen train system in time for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics or the massive renovation of Narita Airport right before the 2002 World Cup, were largely done so foreigners who visit the country would oo and ah about how advanced Japan is. There is no higher honor for Japan than to have one of its own attain fame around the world, and various men such as writers Yukio Mishima and Yasunari Kawabata, directors Akira Kurosawa and Hayao Miyazaki and illustrator Shirow Masamune have become legendary inside Japan in part for attaining fame in the world stage. The Japanese are also fascinated with the interest foreigners take in their culture, and it's common to see TV shows featuring gaijin who know more about certain subjects, say history or anime, than Japanese people do themselves. France has really embraced Japan's culture of bento, and the other day I caught a show detailing the popularity Japanese boxed lunches have found in Paris, with customers ordering them in Japanese restaurants, making beautiful works of bento art and so on.

The Japanese are tickled when foreigners embrace their culture.

Popular Varieties of Green Tea in Japan

Before coming to Japan, I knew the Japanese drank "green tea," but naturally it was destined to be more complicated than that. It turns out that there are a dozen or more varieties of Asian and Western teas the Japanese consume, and during my time here I've worked hard to embrace them all. The most general word for green tea is お茶 o-cha, the o being the "honorific particle" that's placed before words that have extra respect in Japanese society, and the type of tea most familiar to us would be 煎茶 sen-cha, a weak green tea that's good for casual drinking hot or cold. Some other major varieties of tea include ほうじ茶 houji-cha, a delicious green tea that's been roasted, 玄米茶 genmai-cha, roasted green tea that contains unpolished rice, 麦茶 mugi-cha, delicious cold barley tea for the summer months and 抹茶 matcha, the dark green tea made from matcha powder, used in tea ceremony. This covers most of the major types of tea that are considered "Japanese," but Chinese teas are also popular here, especially oolong and jasmine. Of course the Japanese love Western black tea (called 紅茶 koh-cha, lit. "red tea"), and you can find all the major varieties here. Tea is nearly always drunk without sugar, and when Japanese go to Chinese-speaking countries like Taiwan or Malaysia, they're flabbergasted to see bottled oolong tea with added sugar in it. J-List stocks some great types of Japanese tea and related products, if you want to browse.

Tea is king in Japan.

Japan Loves Tea

J-List has lots of interesting tea-related products on the site for you, whether you'd like to sample popular varieties of Japanese tea, view traditional products related to tea ceremony etc., or browse our selection of interesting tea cups from Japan. What interesting things can J-List show you today?