The most-quoted phrase by pop Japanologists, the reason for Japanese innovation, and stupid Japanese money tricks

No consideration of Japan is complete without the often-quoted-by-gaijin- who-are-experts-on-Japan phrase deru kui wa utareru (DE-ru KOO-ee wa oo-TAH-reh-ru), which translates as "the nail that sticks up will be hammered down." It describes the tendency of Japan, especially the educational system here, to "hammer down" individuals that don't fit in so that they're brought in line with everyone else. While a classroom full of similar students would probably be easy for a teacher to manage, the idea that students with special talents -- a child gifted in music or math -- might be forced to "conform" to the larger group offends my American idealism. My first employer in Japan had a daughter who was born in the U.S. and grew up speaking mostly English before returning to Japan, but by the time she'd finished three years of Japanese high school, various social pressures (as well as some issues unique to the girl, no doubt) made her actively pretend to not understand English, even though I knew better. The Japanese are quite aware that their country isn't very good at handling special cases, and in some instances a family with an exceptional child will emigrate to a country where the differences can be appreciated and encouraged. The great irony is that many of the most successful people in Japan have violated this rule and stood up as proud as any nail ever did, such as Softbank president Masatoshi Son, cybermall Rakuten founder Hiroshi Mikitani, and flamboyant former professional centerfielder Shinjo. The man who founded Honda stood out, too: as a boy, he wanted to learn how to swim, so he got the idea of swallowing small fish whole and jumping in the water while it was still flapping around inside his stomach.

The Japanese are very good at taking an idea and improving on it, and the entire history of modern Japan involves observing the nations of Europe and the U.S. and seeing what they could adopt and make better. This is known as wakon yosai or "Japanese Spirit, Western Know-How," a phrase that was coined after the Meiji Restoration, meaning that Japan should combine the technology of the West with that "extra something" (which the Japanese insist on calling "plus alpha") that only Japan can provide. My first introduction with Japanese innovation upon arriving here was in one of the most uninteresting places imaginable, the toilet. Most Japanese toilets in homes have a little sink on the top that lets you wash your hands with clean water as it flows into the tank after you flush -- very logical in a country that's both starved for elbow room and very conscious about cleanliness. One of the fun things of living in Japan is keeping mental count of the little innovations there are around me, from vertical parking "elevators" for your car to single-serving drip coffee that sits over your cup to cola vending machines that are only a few centimeters thicker than the length of a can so that they can be placed along the narrow roads in Tokyo. Oh, and those dreamy massage chairs.

There's a wacky thing that Japanese do to money: fold a 1000 yen bill so that 19th century novelist Souseki Natsume (or whoever -- it works with just about any bill) makes sad or happy faces, depending on which way you look at it. I'll teach you how it's done so you can amaze your friends with this great Japanese trick. First, take a bill and make an outward fold where each of his eyes are. Make an inward fold through the middle of his face, so that his eyes are higher than his nose (like little mountains). If you look at the bill from above, the face will look sad; from below, and he'll look happy. Virtually all Japanese known this silly trick, and would probably be surprised if any non-Japanese knew it. Here is the result:

Remember that our newest PC dating-sim game, YUME MIRU KUSURI :: A Drug That Makes You Dream, has gone "Golden Master" and will be on its way to the duplicators soon. We've got some other happy announcements for H-game fans, too. First, we've lowered the price of Yin-Yang! X-Change Alternate by $10, so if you haven't picked up this extremely popular title yet, you have a great excuse to do so now. Then, two of our popular game releases are now available in a new Internet Download Edition: the gorgeous Legend of Fairies and Fairy Nights, fully translated into English and compatible with Window as well as Mac (OS 9/X).

The summer conventions are not too far off. Have you ordered your Matsukameya high school uniform yet? We're starting our convention lineup earlier than normal this year by attending the Star Wars Celebration IV convention in Los Angeles May 24-28. This is only the fourth official Star Wars convention ever held, and my first. It'll be great to rub elbows with Star Wars fans from all over, and we'll have lots of fun and interesting products from Japan for you. So if you can make it to the show, be sure and look for us! See this page for info on the show.

A magic Japanese phrase for you, home ownership Japan-style, and Japan as "producer heaven"

Last time I mentioned the magic words that may be responsible for much of the wa or harmony that Japan is famous for. The phrase is shikata ga nai (sh-kah-tah ga NAH-ee), or in its more common form sho ga nai, which both translate as "it can't be helped" or "I can't do anything about that," and its used in a wide variety of situations. Whether it's the government quietly hinting that a European-style VAT may be in Japan's future or Section Chief Tanaka's flat rejection of your latest suggestion at work, the phrase allows Japanese to accept what they cannot change and shrug off stress that would otherwise build up inside them. The phrase can also be seen on our wacky T-shirt and hat for girls, "I like what I like, so get off my back!" which sums up a lot of my own life. From my idealistic American point of view, it seems that the phrase is trotted out a little too quickly when there's some social injustice or other wrong that needs righting, be it racism or sexism or many other ism's out there, but of course there are things that we can't change in the world and it's very practical of the Japanese to be open about this fact. The phrase is also used to cheer someone up after sickness, heartbreak or other sadness. We had a sho ga nai event this morning when our family cat, Mi-chan (short for "mix" since her fur is black and white), was hit by a car and killed. My daughter's going to be devastated when she gets back from Malaysia, and I'm sure my (very Buddhist) wife will bring up the idea of migawari, or an animal dying to take bad luck away from the family.

A friend of mine is taking a big step in his life, buying a plot of land and hiring a builder to build a house on it for him. Unlike in the U.S., where you usually buy an existing house through a realtor, it's much more common in Japan to buy land and plan your own home from scratch. The Japanese are not fans of "used" homes that someone else has already lived in, though, so if the land you're buying happens to have an older home already on it, it's a given that it will be torn down and replaced. Home construction is a huge business here, and when my friend was looking for a company to build his home he had many options, from large firms like Sekisui that uses baseball star Ichiro for their TV commercials to Habel House, famous for steel-framed homes that are so strong you could keep a pet elephant on the second floor. Japanese companies tend to engage in businesses that might seem a little off-target to some, and my friend could have chosen homes built by Panasonic (PanaHome), Toyota Home (they build your house in parts on the same manufacturing lines as their cars then truck the pieces in), or TBS Home, the house-building arm of the Tokyo Broadcasting Station, I kid you not. He could also have done what many Japanese families are doing and get an "import home," basically a pre-designed kit that's assembled in Canada or Sweden and shipped over, then put together by a local contracting company. In the end he went with a company with the charming name of Wish Home that specializes in building homes of brick. Of course, buildings made of brick are not allowed in earthquake-prone Japan, so the house itself is built so that the structure is actually supported by the internal 2x4 frame, for safety.

Although Japan is a capitalist country with a strong market economy cast in the mold of the U.S. and England, there are plenty of differences. One of the major themes of economics in Japan is that it tends to be a "supplier heaven" for companies that manufacture products and provide services, with so much power accumulated into the hands of large companies that it seems a wonder that things can function at all. In general, sellers of products benefit from stricter pricing structures and are able to capture a greater percent of the final purchase price than in any other country. At the rural liquor store my wife's parents run, our markup for beer and tobacco is a piddling 5%, barely enough to pay the electricity in the shop, but this doesn't matter since a shop without beer and cigarettes wouldn't get many customers, so my parents treat them as loss leaders. Price fixing is illegal here, but there's a whole slew of product categories such as books and CDs that are allowed to be sold at manufacturer-specified prices, which is a boon for producers wanting to create stable markets with none of that pesky competition. If you own an apartment building in Japan you've got it made thanks to the "key money" system that usually requires a tenant to pre-pay six months of rent when they move in, which includes "thank you money" and a deposit to the owner as well as to the agent that found the apartment for you, which by the way must be paid every two years. The funny thing about top-heavy supplier-centric economies is that they're always changing, and just as the open field of ideas called the Internet has brought a lot of good in the U.S. and Europe, the fact that change will come to Japan too is, well, sho ga nai.

It gives us great pleasure to announce that our upcoming game, YUME MIRU KUSURI :: A Drug That Makes You Dream, has gone "golden master" and will soon be on its way to the duplicators. This is a really outstanding game set in a totally modern version of Japan in which you play a Japanese student struggling with many of the same problems that real students deal with every day. Your life is about to be turned upside down by three beautiful girls: the grown-up Mizuki who's terrified of her own weakness, the poor transfer student Aeka, and the bizarre cat girl Nekoko. As you interact with these characters and affect each others' lives you can find love, purpose and much more. A super game with dramatic themes, dreamy art and fascinating characters. We hope you're preorder your copy now!

Remember that J-List carries a great for fans of JPOP, the iTunes Japan Music Cards, which are the only way to buy music from the iTMS unless you happen to have a credit card registered inside Japan. Looking for the Doraemon theme song? Want to browse the latest singles by Every Little Thing? Or browse the Japan Hip Hop scene for songs you like the sound of? It's all very easy to do from any Mac or PC running iTunes. The cards come in 1500 and 5000 yen denominations, and are super-easy to use: just log out of your current iTunes account, select the Japan store, click the link to enter an iTMS card number, and you can set up a new account for your Japanese music. You don't even have to muck with Japanese characters in the iTunes application, since it will work

I'm feeling sad about Mi-chan so I'll show you some pictures. This is our cat, taken a few days before she ran got hit by a car.

Animals totally have personalities, and even though it looks like she hated being put in this doll house by my daughter, she was always happy to "gaman" (put up with) anything my daughter wanted to do. A real kid's cat.

This is Mi-chan's brother, Ku-chan (from kuro, black). This dumb cat loved to climb inside people's cars and hid inside a moving can that brought some furniture to us, then got carted off. We *hope* he's alive somewhere but aren't sure.

Mi-chan as a baby, back when we could play Kitten Stick-Ons©.

I joke when I post about things like my wife saying "I'm glad we have pets around, they die in place of family members" but living in the context of a very Buddhist place like Japan, I start to believe it. And if believing it makes it actually work, I'd certainly give up a beloved pet over a family member. So if you died to save one of us from some bad fate, Mi-chan, you have our eternal thanks.

An Incredible Otaku Journey, Earthquakes can be Fun, and Weird Accounting Tricks in Japanese

I got a reminder that Japan is very much a part of the Pacific Ring of Fire yesterday when a 6.9 quake woke me up and gave me a good shake. At the time I was staying at our "mansion" (apartment) at the foot of Mt. Asama, one of the most potentially active volcanoes in Japan, and I quickly looked out the window to make sure the mountain hadn't decided to go all Mordor on us. Aside from jittery nerves, there was no damage where I was, although plenty of older homes collapsed close to the epicenter, and one poor woman was killed by a falling stone lantern, a very "zen" way to go, I guess. Learning to not jump at every little earthquake is all part of living in a place like Japan, and it goes hand-in-hand with developing a taste for seafood and tofu, learning to never pour your own beer, getting used to wearing slippers that are three sizes too small, and being at peace with confined spaces that would make a Space Shuttle astronaut claustrophobic.

Over the weekend a friend and I went on the ultimate geeked-out road trip, traveling to Lake Kizaki in Nagano Prefecture, the setting for the two moe (mo-EH) anime series Please, Teacher! and Please, Twins! The first series is about a beautiful Pocky-eating alien who secretly marries one of the students at the local school, and the sequel is a dramatic love triangle between a boy and two girls that's complicated by the fact that one of the girls is the boy's long-lost twin sister, but none of them is sure which it is. (Twins is the better series if you have to pick just one -- besides being a really good story, it's got the best fan service ever seen. Wow, looks like it's all up on YouTube if you're curious and can stand the English dubbing.) Just about everything seen in the two shows is based on real places in the Lake Kizaki area, and otaku from all around Japan and the world make pilgrimages there, visiting their favorite landmarks and eating Pocky and Pretz, the two signature snacks from the shows. My wife snorted when she heard what we had planned, but no self-respecting Japanese female planning a trip to Europe would miss the chance to visit the Palace of Versailles to see the grandeur first introduced to them in the famous Rose of Versailles anime, or re-enact their favorite scenes from Roman Holiday in beautiful Rome, and my wife's been to both several times.

One aspect of running a business in Japan is developing language skills that I might otherwise never pick up. In addition to needing to be able to read "legalese" for signing licensing contracts and what not, I've had to learn the basic mechanics of accounting in Japanese, which is difficult since I don't understand it in English. As a general rule, legal institutions that work in the U.S. are also present in Japan, and if you have a concept in one country it will probably translate into something similar on the other end. Part of this comes from countries following the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles so that their laws can interoperate, but a lot of Japan's lock-step movement with the U.S. comes from a deeper tradition of generally following behind us in all things -- for example, Japan's version of our 401(k) is ingeniously named the "Japan 401(k)." I recently found one concept that exists in Japan which is quite different from the States. It's called gensen choshu and it means withholding income at the source, which is what happens when you get your paycheck with tax already taken out, but in Japan, taxes are pre- deducted in a wider range of situations. If we were to hire a programmer to do some work for us, we're required by law to pre-deduct his taxes when we pay him, hence for a $1000 job we'd pay him $850 and send the rest to the Tax Ministry in his name, presumably to keep the payment from going unreported. This is a minor inconvenience, but I was surprised to learn that investment income is also pre-deducted in the same way. So when my wife puts money in a CD at 1% interest (still considered a fairly good return in the bizarro world that is Japan), she actually only gets .85% from it, which means she's potentially losing up to a year of earnable interest on other investments she might make that year. I'm sure taxpayers would rise up and revolt over something like this in most countries, but sadly the Japanese mantra of sho ga nai ("it can't be helped") keeps people from demanding change.

J-List is proud to carry the Canon Wordtank, the electronic dictionary for serious students which I used myself for many years. Japan is a country that takes studying seriously, and the Wordtank is loaded with useful features to make learning a foreign language easy. Unlike virtually every other manufacturer, Canon's Wordtank line goes out of its way to be friendly to gaijin, with features like an English menu mode, the ability to look up single or groups of kanji on the screen (useful because it's common for a word you look up to be written with kanji students can't yet read), an English manual, and of course the ability to save words and kanji for later study. I also like the feature that shows you how to write kanji by animating the stroke order -- very handy. Just because the Wordtank is small doesn't mean it lacks brains -- inside its memory you can find 11 complete dictionaries. We've restocked the popular Wordtank G55 on the site now, ready for your immediate order!

The weather wasn't that good for a road trip, especially in a convertible, but we didn't care.

We drove quite far -- the trip was 500 km round trip, taking us through many beautiful rural mountains and highways.

After only getting lost a little, we eventually arrived at the lake.

It was easy to find all the landmarks thanks to the various otaku sites that document where everything is.

This is the Lawson from episode 1 where Miina talks with Maiku for the first time. The premise of the show is that Maiku (Mike), Miina and Karen are half Japanese since they've got blue eyes. Yet only two are related...

The fumikiri (train crossing) from the opening credits was the next stop in our wacky little journey.

Umino Kuchi Station is the veeeery rural train station that services the place, and the final scene of the series.

Here's the inside. It was eerie being here, since everything in the show was done with perfect accuracy. Kind of like how cool it would be to be allowed to walk around in the Bag End set that they built for Lord of the Rings, but a lot less so.

There was a mini-shrine put there by fans and a notebook where people wrote messages to each other at having come to this spot. Pictures, poems, people's emotions were all recorded.

Then we went to the Daily Yamazaki Store, which was the model for Herikawa Shoten, where the twins worked.

This is the nice lady who owned the place. Basically, after Please Teacher was such a success, a representative from Bandai came by one day and asked her if they could have permission to "shoot pictures of" her shop. She thought it was for a documentary and said okay. A year later, suddenly her shop has been transformed into Otaku Central, but she didn't seem to mind. She was happy to have an American she could talk with, since I guess most of the ones who venture by don't speak the language.

She had a map where people can write where they're from, write messages and everything.

There was only one thing left -- to located the house where the three lived. It turned out to be pathetically easy since there are only about 30 houses in this village.

I wanted to go talk with them and ask how they felt about being the most famous inaka house in all otakudom, but I didn't have the nerve.

Finally, we swung back to the playground, where I shot a picture of the sliding board. Then it was time to go home, back to reality, at least for a little while.

What we can learn about culture and Star Wars from Japanese comedians, some reverse sexual discrimination, and all about "What is your Hobby?"

"What is your hobby?" This is one of the first phrases of English conversation that Japanese students learn, along with "What is your name?" "Where are you from?" and "What is your blood type?" My students at the time were aged 18-20, that period when you're sure you've had all of life's major experiences and don't need to form any new opinions, and some regular responses included Mayumi's stated love of doraibu (going driving with friends), Misako's constant talk about baito (working a part-time job, from the German word arbeit), or good old Kiyoko, who always replied "going shopping with my mother." Because I'm an emotional, idealistic American, I always did my best to get the students to give more information to the class about what really excited them, to get them to do more with their precious youth than they were doing. But except for a few students who had a particular passion for something they could share with the class -- the Beatles, American pro wrestlers, traveling around Japan taking pictures of trains -- getting my Japanese students to be excited about anything was always a challenge.

Speaking of hobbies, one of mine is comparing the cultures of Japan and the U.S., in case you haven't guessed, and sometimes you don't need to look any farther than the people who make us laugh, comedians. While most famous comedians in the U.S. come from the stand-up circuit or through the hallowed gates of Saturday Night Live, comedy in Japan is a little different. One form of traditional Japanese comedy that's been around for centuries is rakugo, literally "fallen words," which involves a lone comedian sitting Japanese- style on a zabuton cushion located very near the audience. The interesting thing about this style of performance is that, rather than using new comedy material, the monologue that the comedian tells is one of an already established library of a hundred or so such humorous stories, although a good rakugo-ka will add his own unique touches. There's a TV show where rakugo comedians do battle to see who is the funniest, and when they get a laugh they get another cushion, so that by the end the winner is sitting on a tower of them. (And in fact, a way of saying "that was funny" is Zabuton, ichi mai, or "I'll give you one zabuton cushion for that.") Another pillar of Japan's comedy world is manzai, humor involving a two-man team that includes a dim-witted boke (boh-KAY, meaning fool) and his sharp-tongued tsukkomi (tsu-KOH-mi, meaning straight foil) sidekick, who act out complex comic sketches together. Manzai has been popular throughout the 20th century and has had a great influence on many areas -- for example, the characters of C-3P0 and R2-D2 indirectly owe their existence to this humorous tradition, via the films of Kurosawa. The most popular manzai team in Japan today is Bakusho Mondai, who are regular guests on news programs where they bring their witty commentary to bear on the events of the past week. If you've happened to see the Japanese version of Apple's "Get a Mac" ads, the duo playing the Mac and PC are two halves of a manzai comedy pair. (We have an English book of rakugo monologues on the site today if you're interested.)

Normally when you think of a subject like sexual discrimination you think of women not being offered the chance to do what they want on an equal footing with males, but I had a little lesson in reverse discrimination last night. My wife, mother-in-law and our two kids were heading to Malaysia for a week to visit a family friend, leaving me home alone -- the Holy Grail for any married man, since I can walk around the house in my underwear, put my feet on the table, and drink out of the milk carton with impunity. Before she could leave, though, my wife was compelled to prepare a week's worth of meals for me, as if my male-ness made me totally unable to fend for myself in for seven days, like some comedy version of a husband from the 1950s. And that, I realized, is one aspect of the relationships between men and women in Japan, a kind of yin-yang (to bring a sufficiently Asian image to my theory) in which the man is responsible being the "great black pillar" (daikoku-bashira) that holds up the household, while the woman does her part to ensure the happiness of the family from the inside. Sounds overly simplified to put it like that, I know, but from within the context of living in Japan, it really works well.

Today we've not one, not two but three wacky new Japanese T-shirts for you on the site. The Japanese are an incredibly expressive people, and they can take something as bland as ASCII letters or generic hiragana and katakana characters and turn them into incredibly expressive images. We've got three new limited-run T-shirts featuring popular emoji ("emotional characters") that capture the heart and soul of the Japanese BBS 2ch and look really cool at the same time. See them on the site now!

J-List carries region-free DVD players that make it child's play to enjoy region-encoded DVDs from Japan, Europe and other countries. Our players are specially manufactured to ignore the pesky region codes that try to keep you from watching the discs you want to enjoy, and are fully compatible with DVDs from all regions, including PAL and RCE discs. Even better, they're loaded with features, like the ability to play DIVX/AVI files burned onto DVD-R media. We've lowered the price on our popular RJ-200 progressive scan/surround sound DVD player, making it even easier to snap up one of these half-height demons and watch any DVD you like.

I see I forgot to post pictures of the hidden micro brewery in the mountains of Gunma. Well, here you go. Here are the taps.

Good roaring Dwarven fires, too.

In general, any time I get the chance to eat wood-fired pizza, I take it.

Like all Japanese breweries, there were three types, very blonde, medium and very fruity, and very dark/stout. I found the middle path to be the most delicious.

This is what the Japanese call a "Margherita" Pizza.

I just love the construction of this place, all wood, with huge pillars of wood visible inside. It was so unexpected to find such a good place in a town with a winter population of a few hundred.

I brought some of these back for my father in law, although I know he won't like them. I'll just have to help him drink them ^_^

The man who created the Yamato theme song, all about the traditional game Karuta, and thoughts on corn soup

I've written before about how the meinichi (命日), the anniversary of a person's death, is very important in a Buddhist country like Japan, and once a person has passed on those left behind will remember him or her on this day. Today happens to be the meinichi of Hiroshi Miyagawa, a person who's had no small impact on Japan's animation industry, as well as myself. He was the composer who wrote the music for Space Cruiser Yamato, shown in the U.S. as Star Blazers, essentially the first anime series associated with the now-familiar concepts of dramatic, sequential stories with problems that are resolved and multi-faceted characters who die, fall in love and generally act like real people. Several years before John Williams gave us the music for Star Wars, Maestro Miyagawa showed the world what could be achieved with extremely melodramatic and high-quality music even in something as mundane as an animated series. His single most famous creation was the Yamato theme song, which he composed after being asked by Producer Nishizaki to envision "an iron ballad," and the song is regularly performed by marching bands from the Maritime Self-Defense Forces to my daughter's 4th grade class. The Yamato franchise, with its Gamilon-planet-bombs-as-allegory-to-World-War-II themes, was incredibly campy, but for many it was a first wonderful bridge to Japan.

If you love "corn potage," then get to Japan as fast as you can, since people here just can't get enough of creamed corn soup. Right now I'm sitting in Steak House Miya, a Japanese restaurant that serves both regular and "hamburg" steak, famous for a tangy daikon sauce that the server pours over your sizzling plate, then a napkin is draped over the whole thing to keep it from burning you as the sauce cooks into the meat. Beside my steak and plate of rice is a bowl of corn soup with corn flakes sprinkled on top, which tastes good enough, I guess. As an American, when I think of soup I think of the Campbell's classics like chicken noodle, tomato, and vegetable beef, but these are as alien here in Japan as Green Tea Butterscotch and Rose Flavored Gum are in most parts of the world. Types of soup that the Japanese prefer instead include creamed pumpkin or carrot soups, healthy wakame (seaweed) or miso soup, or if at an Italian restaurant, perhaps some minestrone. When you get sick in the U.S., most people think of eating chicken soup, but in Japan the most common remedies are drinking a tea with ginger in it or swallowing down a raw egg in sake -- yum.

I wrote last time about the traditional Japanese card game karuta, which gets its name from the Portuguese but is based on games played in the Imperial Court in ancient Kyoto. Karuta consists of two decks of cards, one featuring hiragana characters and another with poems or phrases that correspond to cards in the first deck. Two players scatter the hiragana cards on the floor randomly and assume a position that allows them to grab cards easily, then a third person starts reading the poems one by one. The most famous karuta game is the Hyakunin Isshu, which features poetry about one hundred historical figures in short tanka form. As kids hear one of the 1300-year-old poems -- perhaps the one about the poet Ki no Tomonori, which goes "In the peaceful light/Of the ever-shining sun/In the days of spring/Why do the cherry's new-blown blooms/Scatter like restless thoughts?" -- they grab the card that corresponds with that phrase before their opponent can find it, and whoever gets the most cards wins. Another popular variation played in our prefecture is Jomo Karuta, which substitutes poems about the beauty of Gunma, from the fiery Mt. Asama to the bustling hot springs resort at Ikaho. Playing karuta is good on many levels, since it teaches children to read, is competitive and fun to play, and it also instills them with a link to the past that I think Americans can't easily comprehend. It can be used to teach many things, too. For example, my daughter is learning the flute, and her teacher cleverly makes the kids play a version of karuta that teaches them musical terms, like da capo and staccato.

J-List has been involved with licensing and translating Japan's amazing PC dating-sim games for years, and we've built a great lineup of really amazing story- and character-centric games for bishoujo gaming fans that allow you to take your relationship with Japan to a whole new place. Our games are available in shrink-wrapped CD-ROM packages as well as Internet Download Editions, and there are titles for every taste, from cat girls to maids and highly evolved dramatic stories and more. We're happy to announce that we've completed our initial testing with Microsoft's new Windows Vista operating system (32-bit), and are happy to announce that all our games are compatible with the new platform. So whether you're using Vista now or plan to in the future, our great dating-sim games will be compatible.

Remember that J-List carries the extremely high-end school uniforms for guys and girls made by Matsukameya of Nagoya, a company with an outstanding reputation in Japan. Our sailor uniforms are all custom made to your exact size specifications and available in many styles, making it easy for you to have the coolest costume for the summer anime conventions. We also carry a really cool item: authentic Japanese school bags, the kind high school girls carry to school, made of high quality materials and loaded with pockets to hold all your stuff.

An expected bit of Irish in Japan, thoughts on Japan's slow-changing educational system, and all about the concept of "kakko ii"

Yesterday was St. Patrick's Day, a celebration of all things Irish in the U.S. and, presumeably, Ireland. As you might imagine, there isn't a lot of awareness of this day in a place like Japan, which knows nothing of shamrocks or leprechauns or pots of gold buried at the end of the rainbow. However, we managed to have our own little Irish Experience nevertheless. While taking our customary weekend drive up the mountains around the resort town of Karuizawa, we came across an interesting-looking restaurant that served wood-fired pizza and home-brewed beer, a rarity in a country that favors large, easily-taxable industries. Among the beers they offered was an authentic Irish Stout, and I was so shocked at the concept of drinking a rare and delicious brew on a mountain in an extremely rural corner of Japan that I had to have three of them. One thing you can say about Japan is, you never know what it's got in store for you next.

The subject of Japan's compulsory educational system is a complex and interesting one. Officially begun as part of the modernization program of the 1870s, Japan's schools are responsible for teaching young people everything they need to function in life, from reading and writing of kanji to math and science to social skills suitable for Japan's group-oriented culture and being able to say "Fine thanks, and you?" when you ask them how they are in English (a very important skill, to be sure). Public schools are extremely conservative and resistant to change, and it's amazing how much is the same at my daughter's elementary school compared with when her mother went there 25 years ago...or her grandmother, who attended the same school 50 years ago. This is good on the one hand because it creates a continuum of experiences that crosses generations, such as playing the Japanese educational game "Karuta" that teaches respect for local culture -- even something like Japanese school lunches have cultural threads that we foreigners can never comprehend. On the other hand, Japanese public schools seem trapped in a time-warp without any significant plan for the changes students will face this century, including fierce competition from every country in Asia. I sometimes wonder if Japan's educational system can go on changing so little.

Japan can be a very style-oriented place at times, and it seems that everyone is concerned about looking good. The universal word for "cool" in Japanese is kakko ii (KAH-koe ee, lit. "good style"), while the opposite is kakko warui (KAH-koe wa-roo-EE, "bad style," e.g. dorky). Another word that describes an absence of coolness is dasai (dah-SAI, out of fashion, uncool, n00b), which supposedly started out as a derogatory word for people from half-rural, half-urban Saitama Prefecture, just north of Tokyo, essentially to Japan's capital what Orange County is to Los Angeles. Many Japanese also have a great appreciation for what's known as dasa-kakko ii, or something that's both lame and cool at the same time, or perhaps cool specifically because it's out of sync with current mores. Some examples of dasa-kakko ii might include the hair styles or fashions from the 1970s, that scene from Mobile Suit Gundam when Amuro sits in the cockpit desperately reading through the manual as he trying to find the mecha's weapons, the movie Willow, anything featuring Vin Diesel, and the artist formerly and currently known as Prince.

Remember that J-List carries cool computer peripheral and iPod products by Japan's leading company, Elecom. From stylin' USB computer mice to their trademark katakana mouse pads and keyboards to stylish speakers for your iPod, Mac or PC, Elecom has great stuff for you. We also carry the bizarre-but-cute Mogmo Kun, a push little monster that "eats" your USB flash drive or similar shaped device in order to protect it. So cute! All products are fully compatible with computers and iPod products around the world.

How to sub-divide Japanese groups into "zoku" (tribes), all about Japanese rice, and what's that blue spot on Taro's butt?

Words always reflect the people that use them, and vice-versa. In American English our notions about individualism and not going with the flow no doubt color the language we use in subtle ways, and Japan's language is similarly affected by its culture. Japan is a country where 80% or more of the people feel a strong need to consider themselves part of the Middle Class and where the word futsuu (foo-TSOO), meaning "normal" or "the same as everyone else," never carries a negative connotation. One interesting way of organizing people into sub-groups is the term zoku (族), translatable as "family" or "tribe," a tongue- in-cheek way of dividing the population up into quasi-anthropological categories. One of the most famous of these sub-groups are the otaku-zoku, the species of human that surrounds himself with manga, anime and pop culture from Japan -- we don't know anyone like that, do we? The poshest address in Tokyo is Roppongi Hills, a high-rise mini-city in Tokyo, and the fashionable people who can afford to live there are known as Hills-zoku. Often the word is used to give a name to a new social trend, such as hotaru-zoku, the "firefly tribe" of males whose wives have forbidden them from smoking in the home, forcing them out onto the veranda at night where their cigarette tips dance like fireflies. Some other sub-species of Japanese are mansion-zoku, people who live in high-rise apartments, oddly referred to as mansions; neko-zoku, those who like their cats way too much; and keitai-zoku, people obsessed with their cell phones all the time. Which zoku are you?

Rice is the staple of every Japanese household, the most important food in the country since cultivation began back in the Yayoi Period (300 B.C. ~ 250 A.D.). Eaten with three meals a day in many households, rice is such a big part of food culture here that the most common word for rice, "gohan," also refers to any food or meal. To prepare Japanese-style rice, you must wash it for several minutes to remove the edible white powder it's packed in, then put it in your electric rice cooker and press the button -- very convenient. The old U.S. commercials for Uncle Ben's Rice boasted that the grains won't ever stick together, but Japanese rice is supposed to be sticky enough so that you could use it to stick stamps on letters instead of licking them. Being the basis for Japanese civilization, rice is almost considered holy, and mothers tell children to eat all their rice because there are 88 gods in each grain who will get angry if rice is wasted. One the great mysteries of Japan is why virtually every woman seems to suffer from chronic constipation. The answer of course is that they eat too much rice, a natural cure for soft stools, but trying to get Japanese to listen to such a suggestion is just impossible.

I love Japanese public baths (sento) and hot springs (onsen, pronounced own-sen), and take my kids every week -- sometimes twice. Public baths hail back from the Edo era when people didn't have private baths in their homes, and had to go to community facilities to get clean. Hot springs have a long history in Japan, and popular onsen towns like Kusatsu or Beppu have been around for more than 1300 years. Once, when my son was younger and we were in an onsen together, he took me aside and asked me why a little boy playing in one of the baths had a blue bruise on his rear end. This is the famous Mongolian Spot (mokohan in Japanese, meaning "the Old Spot of Mongol"), a blue bruise-like spot which is found on Chinese, Japanese and Mongolian children, including my own kids when they were young. (See link here -- um, it is okay to link to something like this, right? ^_^) The spots go away when the children reach age five or so. In Japanese, the word for someone who is still a wet-behind-the-ears greenhorn is ao ni-sai ("still blue 2-year-old"), which is probably related to this spot.

J-List has been involved in licensing great "doujin" CG artwork and publishing it in CD-ROM format for years, and today we're happy to announce that the Borderline Collection vol. 2 & 3 are available again as Internet Downloads. The breathtakingly beautiful creations of illustrator Sakaki Naomoto (who incidentally designed the J-List logo girl), these two collections are filled with great images for fans and collectors. Check them out now!

So, I'm taking the kids to Mahatma, the Indian restaurant that I blog about from time to time. I took my wife here on our first date. We're were going for some of this...

Or maybe some of this, a plate of tandoori chicken, which my son loves more than anything. On the way there I joked with the kids if they wanted to go to Mahatma or to McDonald's instead, which is very amusing since who would go to McDonald's when they could have this instead?

Then we get to our table, and apparently some funny Indian person has decided to bring a menu from a McDonald's in India, just to play with our minds.

I really have no idea what the differences would be. No beef or pork, right? So I guess India is a lame place to be a sheep.

Like most Americans, I get my knowledge of India from the Simpsons episode where Apu gets married. Just kidding!

People who are interesated in Mother Theresa should hunt down Penn and Teller's episode where they strip away some of her halo. It's quite an eye-opener. Unfortunately doesn't look like it's up on Youtube or anything.

How Cup Ramen became a part of our food culture, a new trend in vending machines, and my thoughts on the enigma of the "Japanese Female"

You may have seen that Momofuku Ando, the Father of Instant Ramen, died recently. Momofuku, whose name meant "one hundred happiness," was born in Taiwan and emigrated to Japan after the end of World War II. Seeing shivering customers waiting in line to buy ramen noodles, he got the idea for ramen that could be made easily at home, and started various experiments with pre-cooked noodles that eventually resulted in Chikin (sic) Ramen, released by his company Nisshin in 1958. He didn't stop there, though: he revolutionized the noodle industry again in 1972 by inventing Cup Noodle, the first ramen in a Styrofoam cup. Initial sales were slow until the Asama Resort Hostage Incident, when members of the Japan Red Army fled from police and took a woman hostage in a resort home in Karuizawa. When the country tuned in to watch the drama unfold on TV, they saw images of policemen standing in the cold eating Cup Noodle, and sales skyrocketed. (Hayao Miyazaki made use of this image with Detective Zenigata, too.) But not every product Momofuku made turned out to be a good idea. In the 1970s Nisshin rolled out a line of instant rice called Cup Rice, but it failed because of the special place hand-washed white rice has in Japanese households. Momofuku was a smart businessman who said, "I'm not selling noodles. I'm providing more free time to my customers." He passed away at the age of 96, still healthy and possessing all of his teeth. His secret of life? Eat instant ramen every day, and also eat a fresh sardine, head, bones and all, for the calcium.

The Japanese are nothing if not efficient, and what could be more efficient than a vending machine that works 24 hours a day and never needs health care? You can buy most anything in a vending machine in Japan, from hot canned coffee and creamed corn soup to film to tobacco and even beer -- there's a slot to stick your drivers' license into to verify your age. Near my house, there's a machine that sells 2-kg bags of rice in case you run out on short notice, and Tokyo's Akihabara region is famous for canned "oden" (oh-DEN), a traditional food that includes boiled squid, radish (daikon), pressed fish (chikuwa), and eggs. Since vending machines are so ubiquitous here -- there is one for every 23 Japanese -- manufacturers have to keep on their toes and introduce new features that will delight their customers. One company has done just that, creating a large vending machine that dispenses a variety of drinks from Coke to green tea to a frothing cappuccino. A TV screen shows you exactly what's happening to your drink inside the complex machine, and it's positively mesmerizing to watch the metal arm pick up a cup and move it to the steamed milk dispenser, wait for the espresso to drop, screw on a lid for you, then place your drink on the serving tray.

If I were to wake up someday and find that I'd suddenly become immortal, perhaps I'd have enough time to write a book on the subject of Homo Sapiens Sapiens Japanus Feminas, that of the Japanese female. In the fifteen years I've lived in Japan, I've known quite a lot of Japanese females, including my wife, various ESL students, friends and a few girlfriends (not in that order), yet I'd be lying if I said that they were anything but a mystery to me. A primary characteristic of Japanese women is that they generally live by the mantra chanto suru, meaning "do everything properly, the way it's supposed to be done," and you can see this reflected in many ways. Japanese females are very organized and are apt to suddenly pull out daily calendar books and schedule dates weeks or months in advance. They're also very meticulous when it comes to money, and it can be entertaining to watch two or more Japanese females eat at a restaurant then spend five minutes calculating who should pay for what down to the last yen. If taking a trip, try to have a Japanese woman plan it for you and everything will go much more smoothly, something I learned when we took our vacation to Guam last year. Many Japanese females have a highly refined sense of kawaii, or cuteness, whether it's decorating their room in Hello Kitty or referring to themselves in the third person to create a mysterious yet "coquettish" image. Judging from the success of our wacky kanji T-shirt that says "Now Accepting Applications for a Japanese Girlfriend," I'm not the only one fascinated by the enigma of Japanese women. We hope that J-List can help you understand these wonderful creatures a little better.

In addition to our world-famous wacky Japanese T-shirts, J-List also makes hooded sweatshirts that are incredibly soft and warm, just the thing to have around in the chillier months. Today we're happy to announce the return of the popular Caroline Blue Totoro Hoodie, which had been taken out of circulation while we searched for a new company to supply us with the uniquely colored blanks. Like all our other hooded sweatshirts, these Totoro hoodies are the best money can buy, made with extra-soft 80-20 blends that will stay soft through many washings, far superior to the 50-50 blends at other companies. All T-shirts and hoodies are printed in the USA by our expert staff in San Diego, and of course all sizes are full U.S. sizes. Why not browse our selection of hoodies for yourself or someone you know who would love to be wrapped in a warm kanji message?

All about Mt. Fuji, how taking responsibility can lead to cleaner bathrooms, and thoughts on bathing and how the brain works

You can't think of Japan without also thinking of the country's tallest and most famous mountain, Mt. Fuji. An active volcano 12,388 ft (3,776 meters) high that rises gracefully from the prefectures of Shizuoka and Yamanashi, Mt. Fuji is an incredibly beautiful image of Japan. In Japanese its name is Fuji-san, with 'san' being the correct pronunciation for the character for mountain, although it's read 'yama' in other situations according to a secret code that foreigners can never seem to figure out. Along with taking pictures of beer vending machines and making that first pilgrimage to Kinkaku-ji, the Golden Pagoda of Kyoto, climbing Mt. Fuji is a popular activity among visitors to Japan, and if you're ever planning to be here during the climbing season (July 1 to August 31), you should give it a try. You start from the 5th level, the highest point that vehicles are allowed on the mountain, and take one of three paths up to the topmost 10th level. As you ascend, you go rapidly from the middle of summer to the middle of winter, so you have to have lots of extra clothes with you to put on as the temperature drops. You continue to climb, passing the various stations along the way and rasping as the air gets thinner and thinner. When I did my ascent, I slept for a few hours at one of the little inns that are at each station, and woke up at 4 am to finish the rest of the climb and arrive at the top at dawn. It was, of course, a breathtaking experience. Traditionally mountains are associated with Shinto, the indigenous religion of Japan, and Mt. Fuji has been considered a holy place for thousands of years.

Today my wife and I ate at a restaurant that serves my favorite food, Hamburg Doria, which is a hamburger (Salisbury) steaks baked inside a rice and white sauce casserole. (Aside: one of the more bizarre aspects of Japan is that hamburger meat and a frankfurter without a bun are called hamburg and frankfurt respectively.) I used the bathroom and was pleasantly surprised to find it very clean. I saw the reason for this immediately: there was a clipboard hung by the door with the name of the employee in charge of cleaning, with an indication of when the room had last been checked along with his initials. It was an example of the Japanese word sekinin (seh-ki-NIN), meaning taking responsibility for something: by making sure that not only the manager but the customers see how often good old Negishi-san has cleaned the bathroom, the management could ensure that he'd do his darnedest to make everything was done right. I've seen this system used in other places, too, for example in the Gainax Phone Club I belong to, which lets me get little Flash animations from Gainax anime shows for my phone, such as one of Asuka saying "Anta baka?!" to me when I go to make a call. Each section of the club's site displays the name of the Gainax employee responsible for creating interesting content, which no doubt plays a role in making sure each employee does his best. I'd have to say that taking responsibility is something the Japanese are very good at.

Being so busy with J-List, it seems I never seem to have enough time to unwind in the evenings. Fortunately, bathing is a big part of daily life here, and by taking a good book into the bath with me I can get clean and get my reading done at the same time, although it makes for some funny looks in the public bath. I'm currently working on a fascinating book by Carl Sagan in which he explores the brain and how it evolved. In a chapter about how memory works, he discusses how its possible to wake up after a dream so vivid we're sure we'll be able to remember in the morning, yet due to the way that our brains are wired, the memory of the dream invariably slips away from us, unless we write it down to talk about it with someone. I can certainly say that studying a foreign language like Japanese enables you to discover of these interesting limitations of the brain, too. For example, merely thinking about a kanji character or a vocabulary word won't force it to be stored in longer-term memory. To internalize new information you need to attack it from several directions, perhaps by recalling the information from flashcards or a system like the "Zebra Check Set" study system, writing example sentences, or the hands-down best way to never forget a new word or grammatical point: try to use it in casual conversation but fail miserably, embarrassing yourself in the process. It's not fun, but at least you'll never forget that word.

Do you have a blog or website, and do you like dig J-List's brand of fun Japanese pop culture? If so, then we hope you'll join the Friends of J-List affiliate program, a great way for you to link directly to products you think are cool and get paid back from J-List either in cash or store credit, your option. Our affiliate members tell us our program is outstanding, very easy to use, with all orders listed very clearly. Since all graphics are hosted by us, you don't even need to spend any bandwidth, and best of all, J-List's commissions are the best in the industry. We'd love to have you join the Friends of J-List! For more information, see the link on our site.

Here's the Hamburg Doria. This is at a restaurant called Flying Garden.

Hmm, can you feel the heat of the ceramic bowl as the rice bakes to the sides? Juwa juwa juwa... (that's the sound of the meat still cooking)

Here's the clipboard in the bathroom. Negishi-san is really doing a great job.

Confusing sign. It doesn't have anything to do with men, or soul, or Seoul, or Menthol. The Japanese title translates as "Soul of Noodles" (men in Japanese).

The Japanese concept of "joshiki" (common sense), why there are rice fields everywhere in Japan, and would you pay $3500 to meet Michael Jackson?

One concept that's always interested me is joshiki (JOH-sh'kee) the Japanese "universal common sense" or knowledge that all reasonable people are supposed to possess here. The Japanese have a vast storehouse of this knowledge and it's one of the reasons why Japan seems to be such a harmonious place when viewed from the outside. Have a traffic accident? The insurance companies will work out the percentages of who was at fault according to guidelines the industry has established, so there's never a need for a lawsuit. Going to have a baby? Virtually all babies are born in traditional hospitals, and you almost never hear of alternate birthing methods. Quite a lot of people around the world have chosen a vegetarian lifestyle, but in Japan, it's joshiki that a meal will generally include meat or fish along with vegetables and white rice, and so there are almost no vegans here at all. When I go to the U.S. this summer, one thing that's on my list to do is straighten out my legal affairs and make a new will, something every family man should consider doing regularly. My wife was curious about why I needed to do this, though -- it seems that the Japanese common sense system covers death quite tidily, with all assets distributed in a logical manner, and there's seldom any cause for someone to have a written will in place.
A new Mediterranean-style restaurant opened near a built-up part of our city, so my wife and I went to give it a try. On one side of this restaurant was a bank, a convenience store, and a gas station. On the other side was...a large rice field with a farmer in it, busily preparing his field for the coming planting. Japan is funny that way, mixing industrial, commercial, and agricultural land in ways we wouldn't ever consider doing in the States. Even in Tokyo you can find agriculture going on in areas that seem way too urban to support it. Because there's only a little bit of land to go around, the laws that govern how you can use land are quite strict, and agriculture is given a special status. For example, the area where J-List is located is officially designated as agricultural land, only to be used for growing crops, except for certain circumstances such as plots of land that face the road or individuals building a business that contributes to society, such as a school. When representatives of companies J-List does business within Japan visit us, they're invariably surprised to see a high-tech IT business standing in the middle of fields of swaying rice, which definitely appeals to our rebellious nature.

Would you pay $3500 to see Michael Jackson? That's what several hundred Japanese fans did last night, attending a dinner with the former star and getting to talk with him briefly, and pose for photographs, and most of the attendees said it was a bargain for the chance of a lifetime. The former King of Pop arrived in Japan this week to the cheers of thousands of fans who had camped out at Narita Airport to greet him, and he was soaking all the attention up. He also made a surprise appearance on the popular TV show SMAP x SMAP, in which the five-member "talent" team cooks an exquisite meal on camera while they talk with the guest. You cant have a famous visitor to Japan without Queen of Movie Subtitles Natsuko Toda at his side, and she was there, translating for Michael and the SMAP members as they did their best to make him feel welcome in Japan.

As an dyed-in-the-wool old-school anime fan, I've had some pretty fun moments, from standing for the first time in front of the Studio Alta TV in Shinjuku to that first visit to Tokyo Tower, the icon featured in most every CLAMP anime. I've posed in front of the Shibuya 109 building, slept in my car so I could be among the first 5000 in line for the Comic Market, and even sung the Yamato theme song on the top of Mt. Fuji, in Japanese of course. Another event in my life as an anime fan came when we got the incredible Space Cruiser Yamato 1/350 scale toywe're posting to the site today in, one of the coolest items we've ever carried at J-List. A huge model of Japan's most famous battleship, it's loaded with features, from guns that move by remote control to a Wave Motion Gun that fires. Check it out now!

Remember that J-List has great PC dating-sim games you can buy, with many titles available as Internet Download Editions starting at just $24.95. We're extremely proud of the lineup of great games we've built, and hope you'll try this fun way of interacting with Japan on a new level. We've got games that are humorous and games with highly defined stories and even games that can make you cry. Check out our lineup of PC dating-sim games today!

The needless tragedy of 'ijime,' what's easy and hard about learning Japanese, and the Japanese as the most expressive people on the planet

The other day I went to my son's school to watch the various end-of-year performances the students had prepared for the parents, which included putting on a puppet show and school TV news report all in English, and the entire fifth grade performing a symphony concert for us, too. While I was walking through the halls, I noticed a big poster that said "STOP THE IJIME" with the slogan "we cannot allow bullying to continue -- your courage will end it forever" written below. It's a sad fact that ijime (ee-jee-MEH), the bullying and hazing that happens in schools, is a major social problem here in Japan, and all too often it's given as a the trigger leading to a young person's untimely death. There are several reasons why ijime is such a problem in Japan, beyond the bully-before-you-are-bullied mind-set that is probably present in all kids to some degree. First of all, the Japanese custom of keeping classes of students together all day throughout the school year, with teachers coming and going each hour, might be good for imparting group cooperation skills for forming lifelong friendships, but it also amplifies problems between students. If you have to sit next to a cruel jerk for one hour a day you could probably get through it, but all day, every day, for a whole year? Teachers also sitting together in a large room rather than individual offices is a problem, too, since it makes it difficult for a student to talk to one teacher, especially bad when a teacher is part of the problem. Finally, the near total lack of counseling and therapeutic medicine is also part of the problem, and all too often all kids can do is that most Japanese of activities "gaman" (meaning to endure patiently).

Each language is special, with unique features that may cause confusion for speakers of other languages. Romance languages like Spanish and French have noun genders, forcing English speakers to puzzle over why a pen is feminine while a pencil is masculine. Although Japanese do consider it a point of pride to think of their language as being especially hard to learn, I am convinced that no language is intrinsically more or less difficult than all the others. Still, there are some barriers to learning Japanese that must be overcome, starting with the two syllable-based writing systems, hiragana (the wavy looking one) and katakana (the boxy, masculine looking one), which you can tackle by memorizing the shapes and what sound they make (we can help). Kanji is also no small challenge, although you'd be surprised how much you can read with just a few hundred characters under your belt after a year or two of study. Grammatically there are some confusing areas, such as having to get used to two different verbs for to be (in a place), aru (ah-ROO) for inanimate objects, and iru (ee-ROO) for anything that moves, like people or animals. Whenever you learn something new, it's important to test it to find the limitations on that new piece of information so your brain can internalize it, and I remember bugging my sensei about which verb was correct for objects like zombies, cyborgs, and Venus Fly-Traps.

There are times when the Japanese seem to be the most expressive people in the world to me. First of all, the fact that nearly everyone has taken several years of English allows for Japanese to use the language as a tool of expression without letting all the biases against bad grammar and meaningless words get in the way. This leads to the Japanese being able to create new English words to fit their needs, like Balance Up (a calorie balanced snack), Wordtank (Canon's popular electronic Japanese dictionary), Meltykiss (delicious fudge squares, love 'em) or the famous Walkman by Sony, which had to sound really silly the first time you heard it. They're also able to express more when writing text on a computer or cellular phone, since Japanese is a two-byte language, allowing fonts to go beyond the limits of mere ASCII, adding everything from musical notes to common symbols as standard characters. Finally, the tradition of putting kana above kanji to show how it should be read is often extended in innovative ways. In Yu-Gi-Oh, for example, they can put an unfamiliar word like Black Magician in English and write tiny kanji that explain the meaning above it, creating a single gestalt for the eye that performs both functions. Similarly, someone translating a Harry Potter novel might use the English word Quidditch but write characters for "air broom ball" above it in kanji, making all aspects of the word instantly clear at a glance.

We're happy to have our Domo-kun T-shirts and warm hoodies back on the site for you, and J-List customers seem very happy to have them available again. We forgot to mention that our hooded sweatshirt now includes an XS size -- a first, since this color is usually not available in this size -- making Domo-kun a great item for customers needing youth sizes.

We love to bring you fun an interesting things from Japan, and today we've got Fresh Cuts, an outstanding collection of the most interesting indies music from Japan today, brimming with 16 tracks by bands like Baggy Chopper, Maria Gadet and Guitar Vader. It's in stock in San Diego and ready for your order.

All about trains and fuzzy blue rabbits from London, linguistic quirks of the Japanese language, and finding someone's "secret talent"

One thing I like about living in Japan is the rail culture here, so very different from the freeway- and automobile-based transportation system of Southern California. Trains have crisscrossed Japan since the first tracks were laid down in 1872, and you can go just about anywhere you want by rail, either a speedy bullet train between major cities or convenient local train when taking shorter trips. While you still need a car to really get around out in the inaka (boonies) where we live, residents of larger cities like Tokyo can easily get along without owning a car, and considering that a monthly parking space can cost up to $500 per month, that's probably a good thing. One of the most convenient train lines in Tokyo is the Yama-no-te loop line, which circles all of Tokyo and provides an easy way to get to most locations, as well as a fun drinking game for college students: get off at one stop, drink, get on the next train and go one station down, drink some more, repeat. There are plenty of advertisements in trains for various products, and every once in a while a company will buy every spot of advertising in a Yama-no-te train when it really wants to get its message across. The other day I got inside a train and was amazed to see pictures of Brits wearing cute plush rabbit ears, with the slogan "Go! London" everywhere, designed to make Japanese tourists think about taking a vacation there. I'm certain the advertising campaign succeeded in making Japanese feel all warm and fuzzy about Londoners.

One of the more interesting aspects of having bilingual kids is the conversations you can have with them about how they perceive their two languages. My kids grew up speaking Japanese primarily, but many trips to the U.S. and interaction with me kept their English skills up to speed. I like to ask them if they feel their personalities are different when switching from one language to the other, and seeing what insights they might have for me. The other day my son asked me what the difference between the words sutoraiku (strike, with a 'ku' sound on the end, ストライク) and sutoraiki (the same, this time with a 'ki' on the end, ストライキ) was. Japanese is quite impoverished phonetically, with just five vowels compared to the twelve vowel sounds we produce in English -- for example, the schwa or the unique way a New Yorker pronounces the first syllable of "coffee" -- and they sometimes split English words into chunks that are easier for them to digest. The words strike with a 'ku' sound on the end is the term Japanese use for a strike in baseball or bowling, but the word with a 'ki' on the end is a labor dispute, two very different concepts in the minds of the Japanese. Some other split words include mishin (a sewing machine) vs. mashin (any machine, mecha or robot); bureiki (what stops your car) vs. bureiku (what you take when you're tired); and one that I invariably mess up, garasu (glass, what your windows are made of) and gurasu (a glass that you drink out of).

Socially, Japan is a different place from the West, and human relationships often have more formality than they might in the States. Therefore it takes time to really get to know a Japanese person, and it's not uncommon to keep on discovering things along the way, even years later. One interesting aspect of Japanese relationships that pops up from time to time is kakushi-gei (ka-ku-shee-GEI、隠し芸), the "secret talent" that people will hide from everyone else, only to pull out suddenly for dramatic effect. Jun is the J-List employee who brings you delicious snacks and "wacky things from Japan." When he first started working here we took everyone out for Indian food to welcome him, and he showed us his secret talent of being able to eat curry and rice deftly with his hands like they do in India, a skill he'd picked up while traveling the Silk Road. Once I took DVD and Japan iTunes-card meister Tomo out to dinner at a Japanese curry restaurant but realized I didn't have enough money to cover his meal, so he ordered the 1300 gram Super Curry Plate, which you get free if you can eat three pounds of rice and curry within 20 minutes -- he did it with time to spare. Other J-List staff members have secret abilities, too, like Yasu, who can do a great Eddie Murphy impression in Japanese; super-packer Saori, who possesses vast knowledge of American punk bands; and our newest employee Asami, proficient in Brazilian martial arts.

Are you ready for White Day, on March 14th? This is the day when men who received a gift of chocolate on Valentine's Day give some sort of return gift -- okaeshi in Japanese -- to the wives, girlfriends, daughters and female co-workers who gave them something. It's pure marketing fluff, of course, but kind of fun, and companies are happy to take advantage of the event by thinking of ways to sell products. Even Apple gets into the spirit of White Day their Japan store page, by suggesting that men buy engraved iPods for their better halves as a way of saying "Thanks for the chocolate!"

We've got a big announcement for you all today, with the return of our Domo-kun T-shirts and hoodies to the site. As you probably know, Domo-kun is the incredibly cute official spokesmonster for NHK, Japan's public broadcast system (the initials stand for Nippon Hoso Kyokai in case it ever comes up in casual conversation). We've got our classic Domo-kun men's T-shirt, our stylish Fitted Tee for girls, and a super item for those in cold parts of the world, our super-warm Domo-kun hooded sweatshirt. Check out the great new Domo-kun items on the site now!

I don't know why, but Ueno Station, located in Northn Tokyo, is my favorite.

There's something really old about it, and you can feel the Taisho Era still present on every train platform.

Competition has actually come to Japan's cellphone world, and I'm happy to see it. Here KDDI's "au" company, the one I use, is taking aim at NTT Docomo with their twin spokeswomen, Yukie Nakama (who looks kind of creapy here) on the left, and Ryoko Shinohara (who sang the theme song to the Street Fighter II movie way back in 1994), in a nice Spring-themed ad series.

More pictures of the ads. They talk about something called the Republic of London Bunnies, which is so cute I think I'll stop reading the ad lest I give myself "cuteness poisoning."

They have cool dalmations in London?

Popping into a convenience store, where they're selling "White Day Guilt" to all men who haven't bought their White Day return gift yet.

"Gentle as the breeze, deep as the ocean, constant as the moon, mysterious LOVE." Thank you, Hello Kitty.