Being Normal in Japan

Language reflects the society that creates it, and there are many interesting words that give us insight into Japan. I consider myself quite a unique individual, and if you said I was the same as every other American, I might be mildly insulted. But to many Japanese, being thought of the same as everyone else -- embodied in the Japanese word 普通 futsuu, meaning "normal" or "usual" -- is generally considered a good thing. When I was in college, I strove to be as different from everyone else as I could be, reading manga and blasting JPOP music in my car, but I had a Japanese girlfriend who got downright upset when I told her she was "a little different" from other Japanese I'd met. In Japanese this concept is expressed either with 変わっている kawatteiru, a soft word implying "odd" or "different," or the stronger word 変 hen, meaning "strange." (Yes, that's the hen in hentai.) My wife is exactly the same: all she wants, she says, is to be thought of as a normal garden-variety Japanese woman, despite the fact that married a gaijin as strange as me.

Maybe admitting to being different at all makes you into this person.

We Love Japanese TV Commercials

One of the fun things about living in Japan is enjoying the TV commercials here, like a popular commercial for a cockroach spray called Gokiburi Freezing Jet, which freezes bugs without using insecticides. The commercial features "Yuki-Onna" (Snow Woman), a traditional Japanese ghost who breathes cold death on insects. One of the most successful marketing campaigns in recent history has to be Softbank's commercials about a white dog called Otousan (Father), his Japanese wife and daughter, and his (for some reason) black American son, who get together as a family and expound about the benefits of Softbank's family discount packages. The series regularly features famous foreign stars like Quentin Tarantino and Tommy Lee Jones, mainly because Softbank owner Masayoshi Son is a well-known mii-haa, a Japanese word for someone who loves meeting famous people. If you think that little dog is cute, you might be interested in the new Otousan white dog mask we posted to the site today.

Japanese TV commercials are always fun.

Strange Japan: Yahoo and Music CDs

Sometimes it seems that Japan has been custom-made to surprise us all, and I'm not just talking about the Cheeseburger flavored Cheetos they have here. One interesting aspect of Japan is how low-tech the country can be, and in a world in which Google is king and Yahoo a memory of the early days of the Internet, Yahoo Japan is still the leading search engine for most users here, and the Japanese version of Geocities is still going strong. One of the few perks of our small mom-and-pop liquor store is that we get to sell Shonen Jump a day before major book chains, and I'm always amazed at the people who stop by to buy the issue, including men in their 40s wearing business suits and driving expensive Mercedes Benz cars. A huge number of Japanese smoke, and yet they are the longest-lived people on the planet, which is certainly surprising. (My 84-year-old father-in-law smokes like chimney yet is so healthy his doctor asked if he could do an autopsy when he eventually dies so they can find out what his secret is.) I also read that Japan was on track to becoming the world's largest market for music CDs. While digital distribution of music through services like iTunes Japan is certainly popular, there are many fans who prefer to buy music on physical media, which keeps pushing Japan's worldwide share of music CD sales higher.

From Yahoo to music CDs, Japan can seem a little retro

J-List's Study + Stationery Sale is Going On Now

School starts soon in the U.S., and J-List has your back with a new sale on all study-related products! Yes, this month only you can get 3x J-List points on all study products from Japan, including the popular Genki textbook series and kana/kanji flashcards like White Rabbit and Moekana/Moekanji. The sale covers all Japanese pens, pencils, erasers and notebooks, plus Nintendo DS study software, too.

Did You Use your $10 J-List Coupon Yet?

In addition to posting these site updates three times per week, J-List runs a popular Twitter feed and Facebook page in which I share lots of images and product information. This week our Facebook page crossed 100,000 likes, so we're going to have a celebration and give you $10 off any order of $50 or more. To use the coupon, visit either J-List or JBOX.com and enter code FB100K at the cart page. Expires on Aug 11.

"Otaku no Papa wa Gaikoku-jin"

Sometimes I think my family would make the basis for an interesting 4-koma manga series along the lines of Darling wa Gaikokujin, a comic about a Japanese woman who thinks she's found the "perfect" American husband but is surprised when things don't always go as she expects. In the tradition of every magical girl show ever, my daughter would be the main character, since she's quite おっちょこちょい occhokochoi, translatable as "clumsy in a cute way," always needing help from everyone around her just like Usagi, Doremi and Madoka. Her brother would be a glasses-wearing egghead, constantly pointing out her faults, which is what he does already, and we could make jokes based on his over-analytical approach to English compared with her tendency to use words freely without actually knowing what they mean. I think I'd make a pretty cool anime father character, a good-hearted but bumbling American who loves Japanese hot springs baths and who sometimes knows things that Japanese have no idea about (like how to write the kanji for 'rose' 薔薇). Having my wife as the president of their company (since my wife is president of J-List) would create some humorous situations, too -- she could try to pull rank on her husband while at home -- while providing an updated vision of women in Japanese pop culture. So if you have any contacts at a major manga studio in Japan, please send them my way! We've even thought of a name for the manga: お宅のパパは外国人 Otaku no Papa wa Gaikokujin (Your Father is a Foreigner).

Something like this, maybe.

The Joy of Twintail Hair

There are a lot of unique fashions that are either created or enriched by Japan's anime subculture world, like the "Absolute Zone" look, or shimapan, or the trend of building cat ears into everything. Then there's "twintails," the kawaii hair style sported by dozens of anime characters and popular Japanese idols these days. According to the Japan Twintail Association (yes, this exists), this unique hairstyle started showing up as a "charm point" for characters in the early 1980s with shows like Himitsu no Akko-chan and Dr. Slump, but really took off with 1992's iconic Sailor Moon, which officially introduced the concept of moé -- characters specifically designed so that viewers couldn't help but become obsessed with them. Now the twintail look is everywhere, and we couldn't imagine characters like Azusa from K-On!, Kuroko from A Certain Scientific Railgun and Hatsune Miku without their elegant twintails trailing along behind them. The hair style is regularly worn by cute Japanese idol groups like AKB48 and Momoiro Clover Z, and check out this photobook if you're a twintail fan. We even have a new Twintails Tribute T-shirt you might want to check out.

"Twintails" have become an icon of Japanese subculture.

My Favorite Summer Festivals in Japan

Although I dislike the oppressive heat and humidity of summer in Japan, I'm a big fan of Japanese summer festivals, a great excuse to wear a yukata and mingle with hundreds of other people while you drink beer and eat good food. Japanese love to celebrate festivals, and every city and town in Japan has its own unique traditions. Some of the more famous festivals in Japan include the Awa-Odori Festival in Tokushima, Shikoku, which features teams of dancers moving like the foam on the sea (awa) after a wave has crashed (there's a small festival held in Tokyo too); the Daimoji Matsuri in Kyoto, in which the character 大 dai (meaning "great") is written on the side of a nearby mountain with bonfires; and the Nebuta Festival in Aomori, with its famous Edo Period floats. Each festival is different from all the others, but most involve festival-goers carrying a heavy omikoshi (a kind of portable Shinto shrine) through the town and playing of taiko drums while wearing traditional samurai underwear. One of the highlights of a Japanese festival are the food stalls which sell everything from takoyaki and taiyaki to cold beer to a delicious boiled-potato-and-butter treat called Jaga Butter, and I'm always happy to sample what they've got. If you're ever making plans to visit Japan, be sure to look up what festivals will be going on while you're here.

I'm a fan of summer festivals in Japan.

J-List's Thanks Sale for Facebook 100K

In addition to posting these site updates three times per week, J-List runs a popular Twitter feed and Facebook page in which I share lots of images and product information. This week our Facebook page crossed 100,000 likes, so we're going to have a celebration and give you $10 off any order of $50 or more. To use the coupon, visit either J-List or JBOX.com and enter code FB100K at the cart page. Expires on Oct 11.

Four Kana Japanese Words

There's a category of four-syllable (or four kana) words used here that are so loaded with meaning they boggle the mind, and I found they were quite fun to study and use. First is せっかくsekkaku (seh-KAH-koo), which carries the implication of having gone to great trouble to do something for someone only to have them not appreciate your efforts. Another fun word is やっぱり yappari (yah-PAH-ree), which means "just as I thought" or "as I expected" or "Aha! I knew you'd be trying to peek into the girl's bath!" When you learn something that surprises you, you might use the phrase なるほど naruhodo, which can be translated as "wow, I didn't know that" or "I see your point," and in a TV drama, a police inspector might mutter this to themselves as a signal to viewers that he'd found another piece of a puzzle. Finally there's とにかく tonikaku (toh-nee-kah-koo), which just means "at any rate" "regardless of that fact" or just "anyway." When my bilingual son was growing up, he got confused and accidentally combined English and Japanese stems to create the hybrid word toni-way (tonikaku + anyway), which has been a running joke in our family ever since.

Here are some random Japanese phrases for you.

My Favorite Japanese Foods

I've heard that it's impossible to live in a country unless you truly enjoy the food there, and it's certainly true in my case -- I couldn't be happy in Japan if I didn't love eating here. Although some might imagine that the Japanese eat sashimi and sushi every day, in reality the diet here is quite varied, and many common foods aren't Japanese at all. One example is the honorary national food of Japan, curry rice, a thick curry stew eaten over steamed rice that was introduced by the British around 1860. Many foods that we consider "Chinese," like chow mein or fried rice, have intertwined with Japanese dishes for so long that the two are almost impossible to separate, but some foods do maintain a distinct Chinese feel to them, such as gyoza dumplings (aka "pot stickers"). One popular category of food in Japan is donburi, which is any food served over a large bowl of white rice, like 牛丼 gyudon (beef bowl) or 親子丼 oyakodon ("Parent-and-Child Bowl," or chicken and scrambled egg served over rice). One of my favorite dishes is Katsudon, a fried pork cutlet (katsu) served over a bowl of rice (don). Because katsu also means "to win" in Japanese, it's common for parents to serve this to their kids before a big test or sporting event to show their support.

Some of my favorite Japanese foods.

Stock Market Crash In the Sky, Laputa

Tonight one of my favorite films is going to be shown on Japanese TV: Hayao Miyazaki's classic Castle in the Sky Laputa, usually known in the West without the final word since la puta has an unflattering meaning in Spanish. My son and I will be watching, and will join the rest of Japan in tweeting the Spell of Destruction spoken by Sheeta and Pazu at the end of the film -- "Barus!" -- which set a record of 25,088 tweets sent in the space of one second when the film was shown two years ago. As a result, today has been named the Barus Matsuri or Festival of Barus, the day Japan's otakus band together and crash Twitter. Unfortunately for those who play in the stock market, the film's broadcast might just trigger another kind of crash. In a bizarre effect known as The Ghibli Principle, the broadcasting of any film by Studio Ghibli in Japan is supposedly followed by instability in the New York Stock Exchange which often continues for 1-2 weeks. It's nothing more than an urban legend, of course, helped along by the fact that Ghibli films are always shown at 9 pm on Fridays, which happens to correspond to the Friday opening of the market in New York. Fridays, of course, are when the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank announces employment and other statistics about the economy, so it's not unreasonable that the market will tend to be more active around this time, up or down. Of course you should not take investment advice from anime phenomenon ^_^

If you're a fan of Laputa, we've got the film on Blu-ray with full subtitles/dubbed tracks, plus other great products.

Laputa is one of the best animated films from Japan.

Today is "Pantsu Day"

One thing the Japanese love to do is assign random meanings to days based on their pronunciation. Yesterday (August 1st) has been designated as "Yaoi Day" since the date 8/01 can be pronounced as "Ya-oh-ee" in Japanese. Today (August 2nd) has the distinction of being known as パンツの日 Pantsu no Hi, a special day to celebrate all forms of underwear, from shimapan to underwear for your smartphone to the traditional undergarments the samurai used to wear.

J-List 100,000 Likes Facebook Celebration

In addition to posting these site updates three times per week, J-List runs a popular Twitter feed and Facebook page in which I share lots of images and product information. This week our Facebook page crossed 100,000 likes, so we're going to have a celebration and give you $10 off any order of $50 or more. To use the coupon, visit either J-List or JBOX.com and enter code FB100K at the cart page. Expires on Oct 11.

Thoughts on Learning Japanese

One reason I like studying a foreign language like Japanese is the way it teaches you about your own brain, and whenever I'd undertake the (always difficult) process of internalizing some new bit of vocabulary or grammar -- which all too often requires that I "trick" my own brain in devious ways -- I could feel the synapses stretching to accept the new information. One thing I learned is that the brain doesn't want to process what it isn't already familiar with, and sometimes a Japanese person would ask me a question but my brain refused to react, treating the strange words as static rather than as something that required a response. During college I had a Japanese girlfriend (these come in rather handy, let me tell you), and once she told me to wait for her by the 自動販売機 jido hanbai-ki, the "automatic selling machine" e.g. a vending machine. I didn't know this word, so my brain substituted the nearest thing it was familiar with, 自転車 jitensha or bicycle, which is why I found myself waiting in vain for her by the bicycle racks instead.

Ami is waiting for me by the vending machine.

We Love Japanese Snacks

One fun aspect of living in Japan is visiting convenience stores and seeing what new snacks have been released. While some American products like Wrigley's gum, Coca-Cola and Dr. Pepper and have been around for a century or more, Japanese consumers generally favor new products when they shop, forcing manufacturers to come up with fresh ideas at a faster pace. There are some old standbys that never change, of course -- Kompeito, Peko-chan Milk Candy, or that bizarrely-named homogenized fish sausage -- but in general you can be sure you'll see something new every time you go into a store. Like tasty Okonomiyaki Pretz stick snacks, Japanese Cheetos in bizarre flavors, and a whole line of Popin' Cookin' gummy treats you make yourself. Of course J-List has a huge selection of Japanese snacks, if you're curious to browse. You might start by checking our most popular Japanese snacks by sales ranking, or else sort by "wishlist" popularity ranking. Warning, browsing J-List's snack page might make you hungry.

It's fun to surf Japan's "snack culture" in conveience stores.

Late Night TV In Japan

It's always fun to turn on late night TV in Japan and see what interesting shows I can find, like one called Woman on the Planet in which they drop a young Japanese woman into cities like New York or Barcelona for a month and film what challenges she faces while there. Another show is Mania Manual, in which famed cosplayer and otaku queen Shoko Nakagawa introduces people who have some kind of interesting "mania." (This word means "personal obsession" as the Japanese use it, and is essentially a polite way to call someone an otaku without raising negative connotations.) The episode I saw introduced a woman who loved the incredibly detailed food replicas which are displayed in the windows of restaurants so you can see the quality of the food before you go in. She'd spent her life collecting these food replicas, filling a room of her house with them and making trips to Tokyo's Kappa-bashi shopping district to buy more every week. The camera followed her as she made her weekly shopping trip and explained her rationale behind each purchase, which was not so different from the complex system I use to decide whether to add new a Star Wars figure to my collection or not.

A late-night show that introduces people's obsessions.

Cool Products Wednesday, July 31, 2013

We're big fans of Oreimo, aka I Can't Believe My Sister Is This Cute and we carry dozens of products for fans. We have figures, like awesome Kirino and Kuroneko offerings, magazines loaded with free stuff for otakus, Bull-dog Sauce (Kirino's favorite, we assume) plus that great new 2-in-1 Oreimo game for PSP. Click to view the most popular Oreimo products, as ranked by our customers.

Imperfect English Teachers in Japan

One of the main ways for foreigners to come work in Japan is as teachers of English as a Second Language (ESL), which I did for several years before founding J-List. While speaking your native language for a job sounds easy, in practice it was quite challenging. I graduated from SDSU with a minor in linguistics and a "theory and practice of teaching ESL certificate," and even I ran into trouble when a particularly motivated student wanted to know "why" a certain sentence could work with an infinitive verb while others required a gerund instead. While Japanese like learning from native English speakers, they're often shocked when they learn their sensei often has less conscious knowledge of English grammar than they do, or when he can't spell a word correctly, or (gasp!) when he makes a there-their-they're error on the blackboard only to be corrected by a student. I was terrified of letting my students down, and spent many hours studying English grammar as the Japanese do -- more or less like a mathematic framework built into English rather than part of a living, evolving system -- and hopefully did okay by them.

Japanese can't believe that we don't know everything about English.

A New Miyazaki Anime!

There's a new Hayao Miyazaki film in theaters right now, and since it's arguably my job to watch anime, I decided to go see it last night. It's called 風立ちぬ Kaze Tachinu (English title "The Wind Rises") and is the story of Jiro Horikoshi, a young boy who wants to become a pilot but he can't because of his bad eyesight, so he decides to design airplanes instead. As Jiro travels to Tokyo to attend engineering school, the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 hits, and he helps a young girl named Naoko and her mother get home safely. When he encounters Naoko again a few years later, an extremely moving love story begins. When famed animator and director Hideki Anno of Evangelion and Nausicaa fame asked to be allowed to work on the film, Mr. Miyazaki surprised him by offering him the lead role instead, because he had become fascinated with Mr. Anno's unique voice. I thought The Wind Rises was a great film, and I hope it gets a lot of attention around the world.

A new film by Hayao Miyazaki, The Wind Rises.

My Son Goes to Kyoto

If you happen to be in Kyoto right now and see a tall, lanky boy who kind of looks like Keima from The World God Only Knows, that's my son. He went down to Kyoto with some friends to do some sightseeing and make some memories of his last summer in high school, and will be exploring Japan's ancient capital for a few days. They're all going down on the "Youth 18 Ticket," a discount ticket sold by Japan Rail that lets you travel anywhere you want on slow but charming local trains for around $24 per day, which is great if you have more time than money and/or want to see the countryside in a way that's not possible when traveling by air or bullet train. My son asked me what sights he should see in Kyoto, and I listed some of my favorites: the Gold and Silver Pavilions, the Hall of 33 Bays with its 1000 carved Buddha statues, and Ryoanji, the ancient zen temple with the "sea of rocks" that you can spend hours contemplating. I gave him another piece of advice: search for sightseeing information in English rather than Japanese. There's an odd tendency for Japanese people to take their own country for granted, to think that amazing places like Kyoto are "kind of okay," whereas we foreigners can really appreciate them with the passion they deserve. As a result, searching for tourism information in English could yield very different results compared with searching in Japanese.

My son is in Kyoto now, and I'm jealous.

Sword Art Online Products In Stock

Sword Art Online has started showing on Toonami in the U.S., and if you love the show you'll be happy to see that we've got dozens of products for SAO fans, from the import PSP game to gorgeous figures and even SAO apparel for keepin' it real while at work. Click to browse the top SAO products now!

The Mechanics of Kanji

Kanji is one of three writing systems used to write Japanese, used to express advanced cognitive concepts in sentences. (The other two are hiragana, generally used for grammatical particles and simpler elements of sentences, and katakana, for writing foreign words and names.) Since I'm interested in the mechanics of how languages work, I'll talk about the kanji 定, which is one of my favorites (in part because it's fun to write), and how it can be used to express some advanced vocabulary words. The character itself means specified, fixed, definite or ordered, and by itself it's usually pronounced 定め sadame, a poetic way to say fate or destiny. Hook the character up with other Chinese characters and you can express more advanced concepts, like 予定 yotei (in advance + specified = a person's schedule), 決定 kettei (to decide + specified = something that has been officially established or decided), or 設定 settei (to set + specified = settings, as in the settings in a software program). It all looks hopelessly complex at first, but when you have a base of 300-500 kanji or so, it's not that difficult to puzzle out the meanings of new compound words based on the individual characters. Once you've studied enough Japanese, you can go to countries like Hong Kong, Taiwan or Malysia and read 25-40% of the characters on signs and in menus, which can be surprisingly helpful.

The first rule is kanji is, you have to embrace its difficulty.

Japan Population + 1

A lot of people talk about the falling Japanese population, but the staff of J-List is doing something about it. While the world coos over the Royal Baby, J-List has had our own addition, with the birth of a healthy son named Liam to our French web designer and his Japanese wife. Japan, of course, has one of the lowest birthrates of the industrialized world, with just 1.39 children born per woman, and the government has been very proactive about trying to reverse this trend. Our own city gives a bonus of $4200 to any woman who becomes pregnant to help offset medical costs, and all parents receive $150 per child under the age of 15 each month to help encourage more babies. There's no better place to have a baby than Japan, too: the facilities at maternity hospitals are top-notch, and my wife got to spend five days eating French cuisine (a specialty of the hospital she'd picked to give birth at) while she recuperated and nurses provided training and guidance regarding the newly delivered bundle of joy. Still, the high costs of raising a child through university coupled with the stress of life in crowded Japanese cities keep most couples from having more than one or maybe two children.

J-List is doing our part to raise Japan's birth rate.

Do They Have McDonald's in America?

I'm safely back in Japan, the land where everything is extremely clean and well-ordered. Now I'm trying to get used to the incredible heat and humidity that was waiting to greet me, and keep my jet lag at bay long enough to finish this update...

"Do they have McDonald's in America?" This is a question an adult student of mine asked me once, and it was a strange one, since what could be more American than Big Macs and Happy Meals? Yet somehow the student had been sure McDonald's was a Japanese chain. It can be surprisingly easy to get the wrong idea about famous companies. A Japanese friend I knew decided to become an engineer so he could work for "the famous American company, Sony" (as a child he'd assumed that since Sony wrote its name in English, they must be American), and I myself spent several years certain that Motorola was a Japanese company for some reason. Sometimes this brand confusion is due to the companies themselves. You may think of Häagen-Dazs as a purveyor of delicious ice cream from Denmark, but the brand actually came from The Bronx, New York, and the name is just clever marking. When anti-Japan riots seized China last year, a mob burned down a "Japanese" Samsung factory, convinced thanks to the company's advertising that it was a Japanese brand. Have you ever gotten confused about what country a certain company is from?

"Do they have McDonald's in America?"

Hatsune Miku x Sony PSP, PS3 and PS Vita = Pantsu

If you've got a Sony PSP, PS3 or PSVita and like Hatsune Miku, you should browse the Hatsune Miku Project Diva titles we restocked today. They're awesome rhythm games with great costumes and music and sometimes, pantsu. And all Sony game platforms are region free, so you can play them no matter where in the world you're located.

Funny-Sounding Words of Japanese

While there are many innovative ways of studying Japanese, including self-study programs with flashcards and textbooks, online study programs and so on, I usually recommend the method I used, a formal language program in a university (in my case, SDSU). When you study Japanese in a classroom setting, there are several stages you go through, including massive shock when you first encounter the hiragana writing system, relief when you realize it's not that hard to get down after all, then amazement as your brain starts "reading" written Japanese without your conscious involvement, just as it does for English. You also learn that some Japanese words sound extremely funny to us, and the first time you encounter the word 時々 toki-doki (meaning "sometimes"), there'll always be some giggles since this sounds similar to "okie-dokie" in English. Other words that can cause sniggering include 母 haha, which means "my mother" but sounds like laughing, 父 chichi, which means "my father" but sound like something soft and warm in Spanish, and たこ tako, a delicious Mexican treat to most of us but meaning "octopus" in Japanese. It's easy to remember the Japanese word for "apple," which is 林檎 ringo, as in Ringo Starr, and then there's the word 貧乏 binbou, which means "poor" (as in lacking money) but is pronounced exactly like the English word "bimbo."

Okay, that's all for now. It's off to Japan for me!

Yayoi (right) is the binbou character in Idolmaster. She's also kind of a bimbo.

Japan Election Update

While I was busy meeting customers here in San Diego, Japan was having yet another election, this time for the upper legislative house. Japan has a British-style Parliamentary system which is terribly confusing to my American brain, but it seems to involve separate elections for both houses of the national legislature as well as for prefectural and city representatives...all of which translates into burst eardrums for me, thanks to Japanese politicians' penchant for driving around shouting from speakercars the week before the election. Sunday's election resulted in a big win for Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his Liberal Democratic Party, clearing the way for serious economic reform and deflation-busting, or at least that's the idea. One big change lying in store for the Japanese economy is a consumption tax (sales tax/VAT) hike from its current 5% to 8%, then to 10% a few years down the road. This is causing causing an economic boom right now as people rush to make big-ticket purchases before the rate goes up, but there's concern that things will crash whenever the tax hike finally goes into effect.

A big win for Prime Minister Abe and "Abenomics."

Advertising Tissues From Japan

It's the end of another San Diego Comic-Con, and as usual it was a blast. We sold tons of J-List T-shirts, kawaii plush toys and bottles of Tentacle Grape, and talked with many avid fans. I've been attending the show since the mid 80s, back when it was small enough to fit in the tiny San Diego Civic Center. I laugh as I look back at how "big" I thought the show was back then, at around 12,000 attendees, less than 1/10 the current number.

If you visited the convention and walked by our booth, one of our staff probably handed you some Japanese pocket tissue with our website information on it. Advertising businesses with printed pocket tissue has been popular in Japan ever since 1969, when a paper manufacturing company in Kochi Prefecture hit on the idea of using inexpensive packets of tissue to advertise products. Just about anywhere you go in Japanese cities, you'll see people standing on street-corners, handing tissues to passers-by and thanking them for considering the business that's being promoted -- usually a bank advertising this week's rates, or in Akihabara, the newest cat girl maid cafe. J-List has been printing these tissues and shipping them with orders for more than 15 years, and also brings them to conventions to hand out to people, sometimes getting ironic laughs for some reason. Of course you don't have to attend a convention to get free J-List tissues: just make an order from our site, and you'll get a packet included with your order, along with our super-cool "anime eye glasses." (Note that J-List tissues aren't included with orders that would be damaged by their inclusion, such as a thin doujinshi comic, and are subject to availability.)

You'll never be without tissue in Japan.

Manga Sale This Month on J-List

A reminder: this month we're having a very nice promotion for you, a 2x points sale on all manga on the site! This includes the gorgeous all-ages manga we have, from Evangelion to Yotsubato to Highschool of the Dead, as well as the ecchi manga products we have, with very genre you can think of and a few you can't. Click to browse all manga volumes on the site now!

Slurping Noodles at the San Diego Comic-Con

We're having loads of fun at the San Diego Comic-Con here in always-sunny San Diego, selling tons of Tentacle Grape and J-List T-shirts and copies of English-translated visual novels, and are saying hi to the many fans who come by the booth to shake hands. Please note that this year we're in a new location, in booth 4929, rather than our normal spot in the dark recesses of the 100 aisle. Hope to see you during the show!

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 静かですね shizuka desu ne (you eat very quietly, don't you?). There are some other areas where table manners differ between the Japan and the West. In Japan, it's perfectly okay to pick up your ramen bowl and drink the soup from it directly, although drinking out of a bowl might get a child smacked in the U.S. It's okay to slurp Asian noodles, but spaghetti is another matter, and the image of an old Japanese man loudly vacuuming his pasta off the plate is very unsophisticated.

When eating noodles, it's okay to slurp.

The Trouble with Sumo Wrestling

Sumo wrestling is the official sport of Japan, enjoying special status and support by the Japanese government. It's more than a sport, really, since it's closely tied to Shinto religious ceremonies going back centuries, and legendary figures from Japan's history like Toyotomi Hideyoshi and Oda Nobunaga were sumo aficionados. Over the past few years the sport has really fallen from grace due to a series of scandals that have rocked the Japan Sumo Association and its fans and harmed its image with fans. These have included wrestlers who were caught with marijuana and ejected from the sport, officials who were found to have ties with yakuza criminals, a high-profile bar fight in which Mongolian wrestler Asashoryu used his mighty strength against another patron, plus a sad incident in which a young wrestler died as a result of hazing by older wrestlers. Another big problem is 八百長 yaoyacho, the organized fixing of matches between wrestlers since, once one wins 50% of matches in a tournament, he has the same chance of promotion whether he wins 90%, and thus can agree to lose some bouts to his friends to help their scores. Brought to light by the authors of the book Freakanomics, who used statistics to prove the problem existed, it's being dealt with strictly by officials as they attempt to rebuild trust with fans. Fun fact: the way to say arm wrestling in Japanese is 腕相撲 ude-zumou, literally "arm sumo wrestling."

Fun fact: arm wrestling is "arm sumo" in Japanese.

Goma-suri

One of the more challenging aspects of learning a foreign language is picking up idiomatic expressions, which can be terribly random and confusing to outsiders. For example, the way to express the concept of "brown-nosing" (i.e. kissing up to your boss or teacher) is ごまをする goma o suru, literally meaning "to grind up someone's sesame seeds for them," since lickspittle underlings would supposedly grind sesame seeds for their boss in order to win points with him. If you want to try this word out on Japanese people you know, just say goma-suri! (which would mean something like "stop trying to flatter me!") when a Japanese person praises you for something, then watch them jump out of their shoes in surprise that you know a word like that. Japanese spend many thousands of hours memorizing the strange idioms and turns of phrase we use in English, never quite sure why it could be possible to "rain cats and dogs," or why something simple is a "piece of cake" or "easy as pie" but not the other way around. As is usually the case with language, asking why something means what it means doesn't get you very far, so encapsulating what you're trying to learn as a defined unit and figuring what situations it works best in is usually the best approach.

Griding up sesame seeds is a piece of cake.

J-List is at San Diego Comic Con + Special Sale

J-List at San Diego Comic Con

The San Diego Comic-Con has become the premier worldwide festival for celebrating all manner of nerd culture, from comic books to sci-fi to anime, and we love attending the show every year. We'll have lots of T-shirts, plush toys, horse head masks and English-translated eroge at the show for everyone, plus our trademark J-List pocket tissues and the new anime eyeglasses, too. Please note that this year we'll be in a new location, in booth 4929, rather than our normal spot in the dark recesses of the 100 aisle (we assume they moved the entire Anime Alley to the other side of the room). This is near the south end of the Convention Center, not against the north wall as in past years.

Learning a Foreign Language with Anime and Manga

I happened to see an article that officially declard anime and manga to be good ways of learning a foreign language. This didn't come as news to me, since I've used this method to assist my Japanese studies ever since the beginning. Manga can be a good tool for studying Japanese because it's mostly spoken dialogue, which gives you lots of input to read and understand and (eventually) to use yourself. The kanji used in manga may seem challenging at first, but in truth only 500-700 characters are used in most manga, often with furigana (hiragana characters written above a kanji character to help with pronunciation), so it's not that hard to get the hang of reading. I also used anime to teach my kids English, "strategically" buying boxed sets of series they wanted to watch then pretending that there was only an English track on the disc. (I also made sure 100% of the movies we watched were imported from the U.S., so they had to get them in English or not watch them at all.) Of course, you have to take the Japanese used in anime and manga with several grains of salt and remember that it's as stylized and unique as the English used in movies. Don't make the mistake I did, learning most of my Japanese from Fist of the North Star and walking around talking like Kenshiro, if you can avoid it!

My kids learned English basically so they could watch my "English only" Rayearth DVDs.

Of Japanese Culture and Potato Chips

I finally made time to finish the second season of Ore no Imouto ga Konna ni Kawaii Wake ga Nai, aka There's No Way My Younger Sister Is This Cute. The second season was surprisingly good, with lots of "feels" -- especially for fans of Kuroneko and Ayase ♡ -- and more character development than I dared hope for. I like to watch random episodes of anime and see what interesting cultural points I can uncover, like the scene in episode 1 of K-On! when Tsumugi shyly adds her french fries to a pile that Ritsu and Mio are eating from, in order to remove an invisible barrier between herself and the other members of the Light Music Club. In episode 12 of Oreimo, Kyosuke has an impromptu party with all the girls, and there's a shot of various drinks and snacks laid out on a table, including a bag of potato chips that's been split down the center so that its contents are laid out to the air. This is a very Japanese thing to do when entertaining, to open all the snacks so that they will go to waste if guests don't dig in and eat, due to a cultural phenomenon known as 遠慮 enryo. Literally meaning restraint or reserve, or as a verb, to refrain from doing something, enryo is manifested as the Japanese tendency to hesitate to take offered food or drink out of politeness. If anyone is to relax and have any fun, you have to break through these social barriers, and forcing people to eat in order to avoid wasting food is one way to go about it.

Learning about Japanese culture through potato chips.

A New Anime Season + Genshiken

It's time for a new anime season, even though I still haven't caught up with the previous one. There are some nice new shows starting up this time, including a "second season" of Bakemonogatari, more High School DxD. a reboot of the Rozen Maiden gothic doll series, and an anime based on the popular (and ecchi) Cho Jigen Game Neptune games for the PS3. I'm also happy to report that, for the first time in six years, we've got new Genshiken to watch. Genshiken is a slice-of-life series about a "circle" (what a club at a university is called) dedicated to the study of Modern Visual Culture, mostly related to anime, manga, games and cosplay, and along with the Daikon IV opening animation, Gainax's seminal Otaku no Video and Welcome to the NHK, it's really come to define what being otaku is. What I like best about the series is its realism, the way different types of fans (Gundam plamo builders, 'layers, BL loving fujoshi, ) interact with each other in realistic ways, and nitty-gritty details like how they go about getting jobs after college are part of the story. The new series features all your favorite characters plus some new ones, and updates the story nicely...though how is it they're making Bakemonogatari and Oreimo jokes if the story is supposed to be set in 2004-2005?

It's great to have new Genshiken to watch.

J-List @ San Diego Comic-Con, And a Sale!

J-List at San Diego Comic Con

The San Diego Comic-Con has become the premier worldwide festival for celebrating all manner of nerd culture, from comic books to sci-fi to anime, and we love attending the show every year. We'll have lots of T-shirts, plush toys, horse head masks and English-translated eroge at the show for everyone, plus our trademark J-List pocket tissues and the new anime eyeglasses, too. Please note that this year we'll be in a new location, in booth 4929, rather than our normal spot in the dark recesses of the 100 aisle (we assume they moved the entire Anime Alley to the other side of the room). This is near the south end of the Convention Center, not against the north wall as in past years.

Thinking About "Love" in Japan

Do the Japanese say "I love you"? It's an interesting question that touches on cultural issues as well as linguistic. There are several ways to express the concept of love in Japanese, with the most casual being 好きです suki desu ("I like you") or 大好きです dai-suki desu ("I 'big-like' you"), both of which imply romantic love when used with a person as the object; or the phrase 愛してる ai shiteru, which specifically means "I love you." As a general rule, Japanese couples verbally express love for each other a lot less than is done in the West. Part of this is just the culture -- strong feelings like love are not displayed openly since (I've been told) saying a thing over and over again can rob it of its real meaning. Instead, Japanese couples in love rely on a concept baffling to foreigners called 無言了解 mugon ryoukai, or "wordless communication," a kind of telepathic text-messaging that enables an idea to be perfectly understood by both parties even though it's never stated overtly. The concept of love can seem quite abstract in Japanese, and there are multiple Japanese words for the term. The word 恋 koi usually describes romantic love, while 愛 ai is a higher kind of love that is used for family or anyone who's very dear to you, or the steady, slow-burning love of marriage. These two words are combined into a compound word to make a general word for love that marries both sides, which is 恋愛 ren'ai.

The concept of "love" is rather deep in Japan.

Riding Trains in San Diego

I've been enjoying the last quiet weekend before the chaos of Comic-Con descends on us all, after which time I head back to Japan. One thing I like to do is play tourist in my own hometown, picking up coupon books intended for visitors and going on sightseeing trips like the bike-and-kayak tours they have in La Jolla, which really give me an appreciation for my own city that most San Diego locals never get. I realized I'd never ridden the San Diego Trolley, so I decided to take the train over to Old Town to do some sightseeing, though it was mostly of margaritas (funny how that tends to happen). On the train ride back, the trolley stopped for a few minutes, and my Japan-honed train riding instincts made me concerned. In Japan, when the trains stops suddenly it nearly always means there's been a 人身事故 jinshin jiko or "human injury accident," which is a polite way of referring to a person who decided to check out of the rest of their life by jumping in front of a train, usually during rush hour on Tokyo's busy Chuo line. Happily, the train had only stopped because of a traffic signal and got moving again after a few moments.

A train stopping in Japan is cause for concern.

Hot Summer is Hot

The poor staff of J-List is sweating in Japan this summer as temperatures climb above 40°C/104°F, with correspondingly yucky humidity. This year the high temperatures have claimed at least 12 lives, mostly elderly Japanese who didn't remember to drink lots of extra water and avoid doing extraneous activities outdoors. Happily, most homes and offices in Japan have strong air conditioning units to combat the hottest part of summer, though there are downsides to this, including the sore throats I always seem to get when sitting in an air conditioned room for too long, as well the "air-con wars" I have to have with my wife, as we battle to set the appropriate temperature for the living room. (Naturally, the closer to freezing, the happier I am.) If you want to enjoy summer Japan style, we recommend drinking authentic Japanese mugi cha (refreshing barley tea), using these various innovative ways to keep cool, plus authentic jinbei kimono-pajamas for keeping comfortable at night!

Japan is having a very hot summer this year.

J-List Is Coming to the San Diego Comic-Con

J-List at San Diego Comic Con

The San Diego Comic-Con has become the premier worldwide festival for celebrating all manner of nerd culture, from comic books to sci-fi to anime, and we love attending the show every year. We'll have lots of T-shirts, plush toys, horse head masks and English-translated eroge at the show for everyone, plus our trademark J-List pocket tissues and the new anime eyeglasses, too. Please note that this year we'll be in a new location, in booth 5028, rather than our normal spot in the dark recesses of the 100 aisle (we assume they moved the entire Anime Alley to the other side of the room). This is near the south end of the Convention Center, not against the north wall as in past years.

Tanegashima, Gateway to Japan

Japan, of course, is a volcanic archipelago made up of four main islands, which are Honshu, the largest, about the half the size of California; Hokkaido in the North, famous for dairy products and potatoes; Kyushu in the south, always first to be exposed to new ideas from the outside world, from Buddhism to Christianity to American movie theatre chains; and Shikoku, where Ehime pearls come from. Being an archipelago, there are thousands of smaller islands (6000+ actually), including Sado, where heretical Emperors were banished back in the day; Yakushima, the unspoiled tropical island that served as the basis for the jungles of Princess Mononoke; plus a few silly rocks that are causing much drama and rending of garments between Japan, China and South Korea.

Another interesting Japanese island is Tanegashima, a 57 km long island south of Kyushu that's unique for several reasons. First, it's the site of the first contact between Japanese and Europeans, and it was here the first Portuguese trading ships landed from Macau to establish the nanban ("southern barbarian") trading network. I like to imagine what it must have been like when the two worlds touched for the first time -- something akin to a UFO landing, I'm sure. Since the Portuguese brought the first guns into Japan, the island's name became synonymous with firearms, and for centuries the Japanese flintlock rifle was known by the name of Tanegashima. The island is also the home of Japan's space program, which has caused it to enter popular culture as Japan got better at launching sattellites into space. At least two recent anime productions, the gorgeous 5 Centimeters Per Second and Robotics;Notes, have been made with Tanegashima as the exotic setting.

Tanegashima is an island with a fascinating history.

Tipping Culture in Japan

It's the calm before the storm as J-List gets ready for the San Diego Comic-Con next week, preparing the T-shirts, plush toys, horse head masks and English-translated eroge we'll be offering at our booth. We hope to see you at the show this year!

One of first cultural differences between Japan and the U.S. we encounter is the difference in tipping culture. While we're often expected to pay gratuities in restaurants, hotels and taxis in the U.S., there's no custom of tipping at all in Japan, despite the fact that the service you receive in shops and restaurants is nearly always excellent. There are times when I'd like to be able to leave a tip to reward especially helpful service in Japan, but if you tried to give tip a Japanese person they'd be confused and possibly even insulted, since it would feel dishonest for them to take any money other than their normal hourly wage. While giving a fair tip for good service is certainly reasonable, sometimes there can be problems. A couple years ago I took our Anime Expo booth staff out to a restaurant called Trader Vic's, and we all ate a pretty large meal. Not noticing the fine print on the bottom of the receipt that said "a 20% gratuity will be added for parties of six or more," I left a large-ish tip in cash for the staff, who seemed to be smiling more than usual for some reason. I noticed the automatic gratuity later and was saddened the restaurant staff hadn't had the honesty and integrity to tell us that a tip had already been added to the bill and nothing further was needed, which would have ensured that I return to the restaurant every year rather than boycotting them. The Japanese staff members who were with us shook their heads sadly, since restaurant staff angling to get a double tip would have been inconceivable in Japan.

Tipping culture is nonexistent in Japan.

Manga Sale on J-List This Month!

This month we're having a very nice promotion for you: a great 2x points sale on all manga on the site! This includes the gorgeous all-ages manga we have, from Evangelion to Yotsubato to Highschool of the Dead, as well as the ecchi manga products we have, with very genre you can think of and a few you can't. Click to browse all manga volumes on the site now!

Japanese vs. Gaijin

I'm often asked how Japanese view the gaijin that live in their midst, disrupting the harmony the country is so famous for. It's quite a complex subject, which reaches deep into the Japanese psyche and across Japan's 470-year history of dealing with these smelly, tall and hairy barbarians from across the sea. For the most part Westerners in the Japan of today exist in a special place where the rules don't apply, at least the same way they do for the natives. Western foreigners are mysterious, physically different from Japanese in obvious ways, and every time an American or a Brit or Australian enters an electronics store to inquire about a product, the Japanese staff get a little nervous. In addition to being fearful they'll be called upon to use English (even if we are speaking fluent Japanese to them), from the point of view of straight-laced Japanese people, we foreigners are awfully good at doing things no one expects, which is a source of stress for them. Often the first (and sometimes only) contact a Japanese person will have with a Westerner over the course of their lives is the happy, outgoing eikaiwa (English conversation) teacher they had in school, and often the image of Westerners is defined by this first cross-cultural exchange. As a result, the Japanese generally go through life expecting foreigners to be happy, energetic and positive, expressing their emotions openly...which pretty much matches my own personality.

Japanese feel some anxiety when it comes to dealing with gaijin.

Anime Expo 2013 Wrap-up Post

Well, we're done with another Anime Expo, and this one was loads of fun as usual. We greeted many fans who stopped by our booth to say hello, sold a ton of our English-translated eroge and visual novels, moved more than a few pairs of shimapan striped panties ("for cosplay or other uses"), and sold a bunch of our popular anime grab bags. Our customers were happy to receive our trademark J-List pocket tissues, as well as the new J-List anime glasses, which you can also get when you make an online order shipped from our Japan or San Diego offices. Thanks to everyone who came by!

At the show, we had an official panel where we introduced our wonky little company to fans and also made some announcements of visual novels we'll be releasing in English. These included the future release of the Steins;Gate PC edition; the upcoming third volume in the Lightning Warrior Raidy yuri dungeon crawling series; Shiny Days, the gorgeous sequel (prequel actually) to the smash hit game School Days; the fandisc for My Girlfriend is the President; two very ecchi new games by Code Pink; and a gorgeous witch training game Little Witch Romanesque. The panel was a big success, except for a snafu with the convention staff that caused us to be given a much smaller room than in previous years (sorry again to the fans who were not able to get into the room). You can read the complete list of newly licensed visual novels on the JAST USA development blog, and if you want to get your hands on our newest game catalog, which features one of three new posters on the back, just make an order from our Japan or San Diego offices and we'll send you one with your order.

Anime Expo is my favorite fan event for various reasons. First, everyone is in the room is the same "tribe," largely on the same wavelength about anime and Japan despite the fact that some may be passionate about Touhou while others are off in an entirely different genre, cosplaying Attack on Titan. (Some of them might just be a little punch-drunk.) While I also love more general shows like the San Diego Comic-Con, the reality is that only a small subset of the attendees there are focused on Japan and its various forms of popular culture, and as a result many of the people who stop by our booth there have no idea what that "fat gray kitty" is (his name is Totoro, he's not a kitty). During the show I had some deep discussions with friends and fans who tagged along after our panel on the most existential of questions, how to properly pronounce names like Evangelion and Madoka Magica. In Japanese, both names contain a hard 'g' sound, Evan[geh]lion Madoka Ma[gi]ka, despite the tendency for the human brain to apply the rules of English spelling and soften the 'g' sound. This one reason it's a good idea to make sure you learn the hiragana and katakana writing systems, even if that's all the Japanese language you ever study: it will help you read and pronounce the Japanese you see more accurately, and it's also kind of cool to learn to read a writing system other than the English alphabet. We have great Japanese study tools like the Moekana and White Rabbit flashcard sets in stock if you want to browse them.

Anime Expo was a blast, with lots of cool fans; fans were happy to see Steins;Gate is coming.

Do You Want Some Anime Glasses?

Remember, we've got a new set of J-List Anime Glasses designs for 2013, which are free with any purchase! When we brought out the first set of fun cardboard glasses two years ago, our customers loved them, and now we've got a whole new set of glasses for you with awesome new designs. You'll receive one random set of anime glasses with each order (either shipping from the U.S. or Japan), while supplies last of course.