Eating "ekiben" (train station bento) on the Shinkansen

On Sunday I took my son into Tokyo to check out an exhibition on robots at the National Science Museum, where we got to see the famous robot Asimo that can climb stairs and play soccer. We took the opportunity to ride the shinkansen, Japan's famous bullet trains that zip along special elevated rails, which is my all-time favorite way to travel. My son told me he wanted to eat ekiben, the traditional bento boxed lunches that are only sold at train stations. Each Japanese city makes its own unique train station bento lunches, like Masu no Sushi (a round disc of rice with salmon on top that you eat like a pizza) from Toyama on the Sea of Japan, or the famous Kanimeshi (crab meat bento) from Hakodate, Hokkaido. The symbol of the city of Takasaki (where we catch the train) is the Daruma, those round red figures that are displayed in homes and businesses to bring good luck, which are representations of Bodhidharma, a historical figure from India in the 6th century who founded the predecessors to Zen Buddhism and Kung Fu, and who attained his unique round shape by fasting and meditating for so long that his arms and legs disappeared. When it came time to choose which lunch we wanted to eat, we naturally picked Daruma Bento, and ate it in the train as the countryside sped by.

Making some changes to the blog

Just a heads up, I'm going to be making some changes to the way I do the blog posts. Instead of one "super" post with several subjects and today's newly posted items, I'm going to start doing smaller, more conventional posts in a more conventional format. I'm doing this for several reasons, but one of them is so that someone who wants to link to a point I make from another website doesn't necessarily have to be pointing to a post with Zenra Ice Skating, or whatever the latest wacky product is. Feedback on this is greatly appreciated. 

Thinking about elections in Japan vs. the USA, a mechanism for sexual equality, and information you can get from the Japanese news

There are two things that are really strange to watch in Japanese: sportscasters giving the play-by-play of an American football game and news reporting on American politics. With the U.S. presidential race officially underway, everyone is watching the caucuses to see which candidates will look the most "presidential" by the time they're done. The Japanese masukomi -- what the news media is called here, from "mass communications" -- is no exception, following candidates around with cameras and explaining to viewers in extra detail just what is going on, since the American political process is about as confusing to the Japanese as, well, the rules of American football. Japan's political structure is quite different, a British-style parliamentary democracy in which two major and three minor parties compete for seats in the country's two legislative houses, with the party or coalition of parties in power electing the Prime Minister. Because the people don't choose their leader directly as with Presidential elections, there's a lot less dialogue between the Prime Minister and the people when it comes to the issues. The Japanese are often fascinated with the gap between flamboyant American presidents with their positive speeches that start with "My fellow Americans" and the more subdued politicians found in Japan, a country in which building consensus with other lawmakers is valued more highly than individual leadership skills. 

  

I talked last time about how many Japanese women don't seem to set the same goals for themselves as women from the West, in many cases actively wanting to get married and become full-time housewives. Not everyone is this way of course: the more urban the area you're in, the more likely you are to find educated women with good careers they wouldn't give up for anything. But by and large, the majority of females live by the motto that "marriage equals quitting your job." Since Japanese law requires that companies provide equal opportunity to both men and women, companies have evolved a two-track system that lets employees choose whether they want to be on a "career" path or the less-demanding "office work" path. At the bank we use in Japan, there are two kinds of employees: tellers who wear bank uniforms while they help customers, and the managers wearing normal business suits, who are responsible for making decisions and bringing new business into the bank. "Career" employees of either gender have to take qualification tests, move around the company more frequently to expose themselves to all its operations and have their performance measured, but they receive higher pay and promotions; "office" path employees, on the other hand, earn less but have fewer responsibilities. While it's probably not perfect, this system seems to work pretty well. Employees who want to pursue a career in banking can opt for the more challenging path, while those who don't want the added work (or who want the option of being able to quit at any time, say to get married) aren't asked to be more career-minded than they want to be.

Tragedy struck the other day when a man got caught in the doors of a gondola at a ski resort in our prefecture, falling to his death, and I happened to note that the news report stated that he was a "part time employee" of the ski resort. A person's status as defined by how they're employed seems to be somehow more important in Japan than it is in the U.S., and news reports regularly inform viewers of whether the person being talked about is a kaisha-in (full-time company employee), arubaito (part-time employee, from the German word for "work"), komu-in (public employee) and so on. It can be odd to hear this information provided so meticulously, especially when the employment status of the person being reported on has nothing to do with the event in question. One of the most common "people categorizing words" you hear is mushoku, or unemployed, so often tied to reports of crimes in the news. It's not stated overtly, but it seems like the inclusion of a persons employment status in news reports helps viewers know how they're supposed to feel, with the assumption that something that happenes to a homeless man or a "member of a violent gang organization" (the polite way to say a Yakuza gangster) is fundamentally different from a white-collar salaryman.

Thoughts on men and women and marriage, things that surprise foreigners in Japan, and how we sound to the Japanese

Yesterday my wife and I went to our favorite restaurant and noticed that the girl who had been working there was gone, replaced by a young man who was waiting the tables instead. I guessed why the girl wasn't around -- "I'll bet she quit to get married" -- and when we asked the owner, that was indeed the reason. When it comes to men and women there's definitely a different mind set at work over here, with a high number of women actively yearning for kekkon taishoku (leaving employment due to marriage) so they can become housewives, at least until the kids are old enough for them to return to work. While I personally believe women can do anything they set their minds to, the goals that many women in Japan set for themselves can be quite different from what's considered the norm back home. During my career as a teacher I had one student who had really dedicated herself to learning English, studying in the UK and working hard to achieve her goal of becoming a "ground hostess" for JAL, one of the most sought-after careers here. Naturally she threw all this away when a coworker proposed marriage to her, quitting her job and becoming the only perfectly bilingual homemaker in the neighborhood. The challenge for me as an outsider is to keep from judging things like this from my own local world-view, since Japan isn't the U.S. and the U.S. isn't Japan, but sometimes it can be a challenge. 

I talk a lot about how difficult it is for Japanese people to learn English, with its complex grammar and pronunciation rules. But what about the reverse -- how badly to foreigners mangle Japanese when we speak it? First of all, Japanese is just a language, and it's not harder or easier than any other -- actually, the lack of equivelents for some of the complex grammar in English ("she would have been able to go...") is downright wonderful. Of course, foreigners speak Japanese with accents, and these depend on the speaker's native language -- an American speaking Japanese will sound very different from a person from China or Korea. Languages like English use intonation to stress meaning, and it's common for foreigners to accidentally apply these rules to their new language, resulting in speech that goes up and down like a roller coaster compared to Japanese, which is rather flat in intonation. (Remember my theory that Japanese people come from the planet Vulcan.) There are a lot of English words in daily use in Japan, like "weekend" or "elevator," and English speakers tend to say these words with their native pronunciations, not the (correct, in this case) more challenging oo-ee-koo-EN-doh or eh-reh-BEH-tah. Some foreigners supposedly speak Japanese too quickly: when the news program World Business Satellite comes on, I know my wife will make fun of the gaijin commentator from Morgan Stanley as he gives his rambling assessment of the latest economic numbers, somehow moving his head up and down like a chicken. 

When foreigners first come to Japan, there are many things that stand out as odd to them. Using coins for the equivalent of $1 and $5 bills, which Americans aren't used to. Having 50 or more vending machines all without immediate walking distance of wherever you are, and sliding a $100 bill into one to buy a drink. Manhole covers decorated with culturally significant images from each region of the country. Getting a hot meal at a convenience store. Horizontally oriented stoplights, except in Northern Japan, where they hang them vertically due to the heavy snowfall. Stores which let you know they're about to close by playing Auld Lang Syne through store speakers. Drinks with names like Pocari Sweat, Calpis or Volume Up Water. It's all very odd, but that's the fun of going to another country, seeing what it has to offer and comparing it with what you know back home.

As promised, here are a few pictures. Been so busy... :(

This is the pen he got from Prime Minister Hashimoto, if anyone remembers him.

Game with a letter, and is stamped with "Prime Minister of Japan" on it, which made our uncle very proud.

This was the watch he got last year. A gold plated pocketwatch, really nice.

This was the thing though, a beautiful silver cup (like the cups the fliers drank sake out of right before they went off on their kamikaze missions). Stamped with the symbol of the Prime Minister.

And here's the letter from the PM, in extra large letters. Essentially thanking him for fighting for his country so long ago. 

A useful word of Japanese, Japan's seasonal nature, and how to teach an 80 year old Japanese war veteran about the Internet

I've got a bit of a problem. On January 1st we did what we always do, visiting my wife's family, including making our annual trip to her 80-year-old uncle's house. He fought during World War II on the Ise, essentially a battleship on the front and a flight deck on the back which could launch a squadron of fighters. We like to listen to his war stories -- he talks about how he got the scar on his face from shrapnel from an American bomb, and how the only reason he survived the war is because they took the fuel from his ship and gave it to the Yamato for its final sortie. I like my kids to talk with him as much as possible, since it's hard to get the kind of insight he can offer us about the past. Anyway, he's decided he wants to learn how to use the Internet, and is hoping we can help him get online. Now, it can be a challenge for any older person to learn something that complex, but it's doubly hard for him. When he was growing up, it was considered "unpatriotic" to use foreign loan words from English, which resulted in words like "curry" being translated into kanji meaning "yellow sauce with meat on rice" (黄色肉入り汁かけご飯）for the duration of the war, and as a result, people from his generation understandably know almost zero English. Yet here I am trying to explain alien terms like "mouse" "browser" and "window," words that can't be translated into Japanese since they're exclusively used in English. It sure is a challenge. 

One of the more useful words of Japanese you might want to learn is nani, which essentially means "what," and is one of the first words that old-school anime fans from the 1980s like me learned -- we didn't have any of these newfangled "subtitles" or "English dubbed tracks" you kids have nowadays. While you can occasionally hear nani?! (what?!) when watching anime or dramas in Japanese, the word usually takes a more polite form in everyday use. The most common usage would be nan desu ka? (nahn dess kah), which is just "What [is it]?" with an implied subject that's usually clear from the context. If you want to ask what a specific object is, point to it and say kore wa nan desu ka? (ko-REH wa nan dess ka), which is "What is this?" In Japanese, there are "counters," words you use to count different types of items, like mai (for counting flat objects, like sheets of paper or coins) or hon (for counting cylindrical objects like umbrellas). You can combine these counters with nani to ask thing like "how many playing cards?" or "how many pencils?" which would be nanmai? or nanbon? respectively. Put this kanji together with the character for "hour" and you get nanji, what hour, e.g what time is it now. Since this word has the same pronunciation as that dreamy bread served in Indian restaurants (naan), all foreigners are required to make the same corny joke, holding up the bread and asking kore wa nan desu ka? (which would mean either "what is this?" or "is this naan bread?"). 

One thing I've noticed about Japan: it's a very seasonal place. Spring is beautiful with its short-lived cherry blossoms, summer is hot and humid with many festivals, fall is filled with crisp brown leaves, and winter is cold and frosty. I've met Japanese who tell me with great pride that, unlike America, Japan has four distinct seasons, and they enjoy every one of them -- apparently these people haven't ventured outside of Southern California. Japanese people try to avoid being kisetsu-hazure (ki-SET-tsu HA-zoo-ray), which means doing the wrong things for the wrong season, and foreigners regular receive comments like "What's wrong? Aren't you cold?" for wearing short sleeved shirts on warm days in October -- we're too dumb to know that long sleeves should be worn after October 1 regardless of the actual temperature. Once, I was teaching a lesson using an ESL textbook with my students which featured a picture of a boy flying a kite in summer. My students were amazed that anyone would do this -- it turns out in Japan, flying kites (called tako) is something you do on New Year's Day, and almost no one would think of flying kites during any other season. Our lesson turned into quite an interesting cultural discussion.

Learning about trust in a drinking establishment in Japan, why Japanese kids love New Year's Day, and what is a "tish"?

When a person goes to live in a foreign country, it's natural that he encounter some words and concepts that are strange to him, and I was certainly no exception. One of my first huh? moments upon arriving in Japan being taken to a snack, which is a small drinking establishment where you can get drinks poured for you by a pretty woman, belt out a few tunes at the karaoke machine, and get something to eat, which is where the snack part comes in, I guess. I learned something about Japan during my first visit to one of these places: there's a lot more trust here than there is back home. Behind the bar at any snack you can see dozens of bottles of whisky with people's names written on them. This is called "bottle keep," where a customer will buy a bottle for his own personal use and drop by any time to drink from it, and it struck me as amazing that he need not fear that anyone would steal from his $100 bottle. There are other examples of trust in Japan's society. For example, there are umbrellas at our local post office with a sign that says, "If anyone needs an umbrella, please use one of these and bring it back later." Anyone can borrow $20 from a police box for train fare home if they lose their wallet, which should be repaid at the police box nearest your house. They'll take down your information, but since you probably have no ID (having lost your wallet) in such a situation, it's essentially done via the honor system. Finally, if you're making a large purchase of lumber from Cainz Home, the local home center, they'll be happy to loan you one of their small trucks to get it home, free of charge -- even to a gaijin like me. I don't know about you, but I find that being in a society where the trustworthiness of people is assumed naturally is just wonderful, and I'm always careful to make sure I don't betray trust that anyone puts in me. 

New Year's Day is known as oshogatsu, written with the characters for "correct" and "moon," no doubt a holdover from the days when Japan followed the Chinese lunar calendar. It's the favorite day of kids throughout the country because of otoshidama, cash gifts that they receive from their relatives. The amount each child gets depends on the age of the child and of the relationship involved -- kids get more from grandparents than from an uncle they rarely see, for example. My kids both made out like bandits this year, getting around $200 each, although my son got slightly more since he's older, and the oldest son in our household, which carries special status. There are two benefits from this New Year's money gift tradition that I can see. First, knowing that relatives will be handing out envelopes of cash makes kids complain a lot less than visiting family, and this brings everyone together just a little bit. Also, parents use this custom to teach the value of saving money, and the idea of a child blowing all his New Year's money the next day at the toy store is almost unheard of. My son is especially good at saving, and has managed to get more than $1000 in the bank from hoarding his New Year's money over the years. I don't think I ever had that much in a bank account before the age of 25. 

Back during my days as a teacher, one of my more advanced students turned to me and said, "Peter, do you have a tish?" I wasn't sure what a "tish" was, but he made a nose-blowing gesture and I realized he was asking me for a tissue. Because Japanese is a syllable-based language in which you can express, say, the sounds ra, ri, ru, re and ro but not an "r" by itself, pronouncing English words properly can be a challenge. In addition to words like "flat" having three syllables instead of one, due to being forced through the strange filter of the katakana pronunciation system, many words end up with vowel sounds on the end, such as job (JO-bu), big (BI-gu) or end (EN-doh). My student was aware of this fact -- kind of like-ah how Mario-ah speaks-ah -- and tried to truncate any vowels at the ends of English words to make them sound more natural, which is where "tish" came from. 

J-List is coming out swinging in the new year, ready to bring you thousands of great new products from Japan. From exciting toys and anime figures to fun J-Snacks to unique traditional or just plain "wacky" things you never thought you'd come across, J-List promises to make 2008 a great year for everyone with a fascination for Japan. Let us know what we can do for you this year!

Happy New Year from J-List, observations on culture and gaijin, a dearth of new adults in Japan, and Japan as "supplier heaven"

Akemashite omedetou to all J-List readers! We had a nice, quiet New Year's Day, relaxing in the morning and watching Ratatouille with the kids, since 2008 is the Year of the Rat according to the Chinese Zodiac. After that we did what we do just about every year, going to our local Shinto shrine to pray for good luck in the new year. When we were done we wandered around the grounds, buying new omamori good luck charms for all family members and browsing the stalls that sold everything from chocolate covered bananas to takoyaki (batter balls with bits of octopus meat inside, yum). As is often the case, I found myself the only foreigner standing in a long line of thousands of people, which takes a little getting used to: the knowledge that everyone around me is pretending not to bend their ear to listen to what this American who is speaking Japanese is saying while kids stare at me like I've just arrived in Admiral Perry's Black Ships, can be disconcerting. 3% of the population of our small city is made up of foreigners, mostly from countries like Brazil, Peru and Iran, yet as usual I couldn't find a single non-Japanese on the grounds of the Shrine, preparing to partake in this fun bit of Japanese culture. I don't believe the lack of other gaijin at the shrine has to do with differing ideas on religion, as the traditional first prayer of the New Year is cultural, not religious. Instead, I think it has to do with the foreign population not wanting to accept the Japanese culture that's all around them, and the xenophobic Japanese being perfectly happy to go along with this arrangement. This is something that local governments in Japan should try to change: there should be a lot more cultural mingling between foreigners who live in Japan and their Japanese hosts, with ideas traded both ways. Well, that's my own little wish for 2008. 

In Japan, a person is legally considered to be an adult at the age of twenty, and in January towns across the country hold ceremonies celebrating the coming of age of their young people, who gather at the local Culture Hall to pose for pictures in their smart-looking new suits and colorful kimonos before enduring boring speeches from the mayor and city councilmen. This year brings a reminder of Japan's population problems, however, with official numbers published by the government setting the number of new seijin (legal adults, individuals born in 1987) this January at just 1.35 million, a 1.08% drop from last year. Notably, the number of new adults this year is even lower than the last Hinoeuma year, 1966, when millions of Japanese couples avoided having children due to a widely-held superstition that girls born in the fifth cycle of the Year of the Horse will be too strong-willed to find happiness or husbands, which yielded just 1.36 million new adults when they came of age in 1986. Many other countries have issues with declining birth rates, but in Japan, an island nation with only a small amount of immigration, the problems are magnified. 

I've written before about Japan being a "supplier heaven," for companies that manufacture products and provide services. In general, sellers of products benefit from stricter pricing models and are able to capture a greater percent of the final purchase price than in any other country. Products like beer or cigarettes sold at the rural liquor store my wife's parents run yield less a mere 5% profit for them, and many other products, from books to CDs to makeup, are generally sold with a fixed pricing structures that would be unthinkable in the U.S. today. One of the first shocks a foreigner coming to live in Japan gets is "key money" that must be paid before moving into an apartment, totalling six times one month's rent, which covers things like a deposit, a fee to the agent who found the apartment for you, and "thanks money" paid to the owner for graciously allowing you to live there. Another unique practice in Japan is hotels that charge per-person, requiring you to pay, say, $150 for one person to stay or $300 for two. Surprisingly, it's been the arrival of large American companies like the major Hollywood studios or Western hotel chains to the Japanese market that's brought about the most change in recent years, as they import more customer-friendly business and pricing models and force less efficient Japanese companies to follow or get left behind.

J-List site is temporarily down

Sorry for any inconvenience. The J-List site is currently down and images on jbox.com are not working. It's a DNS issue and we're hard at work on it. Sorry to anyone trying to use the site right now. 

[Edit]  Oh, that was fast. Okay, site should be back up now!

Back in Japan and getting ready for New Year's, my respect for hard work, and a great way to get money in 2008!

Hello again from J-List. Once again we've made the hop from San Diego to Japan, traveling the 5443 miles (8759 km) from our American home to our Japanese one. The flight was fine, although bumpier than normal due to the extra turbulence in the skies in winter. 

We've returned just in time for our favorite time of year, oshogatsu, or the New Year's Day holidays. Unlike the happy, boisterous fun that is New Year's in the U.S. and elsewhere, Jan. 1 is a very solemn day in Japan. Today is New Year's Eve, and everyone is rushing around doing everything they need to get done before the holidays, like finishing up their o-soji ("big cleaning") so they can face the new year with a clean house, and readying various decorations for the home. It's customary to eat Japanese soba (buckwheat) noodles on the last day of the year, which supposedly helps everyone enjoy long lives, and December 31st is the busiest day for restaurants that serve noodles. But the most important activity that takes place on New Year's Eve is watching Kohaku, the Red and White Song Battle, an annual live show put that's been put on by NHK every year since 1951 in which female singers (the red team) battle male singers (the white team) to see which side can put on the most extravagant performances. The Kohaku show is "the" music event of the year, comparable to the Academy Awards in the U.S., and virtually every top star will be there, from Leah Dizon to Gackt to the singers in Hello! Project and enka greats Saburo Kitajima and Sayuri Ishikawa. After the Kohaku show ends at 11:45 pm, NHK broadcasts Yuku Toshi, Kuru Toshi (Year Going, Year Coming) showing solemn images of people making their way to beautiful Shinto shrines, Buddhist temples, Christian churches and Muslim mosques to do hatsu-mode (ha-tsu MOH-day), the first prayer for good luck and happiness of the New Year, overlaid with the sound of a bell that chimes 108 times. Then, the TV display flashes "0:00," letting you know the New Year has silently arrived. 

Japan is nothing if not the land of the "boom," and you never know what will become popular next. Right now, thousands of cell phone users are displaying an image of the enigmatic Yoshihiro Miwa as their screen wallpaper, which is rumored to increase a person's luck with regards to money, what with yellow being the feng shui color for wealth and all. A survivor of the Nagasaki atomic bombing who went to Tokyo to become a famous cabaret singer, Miwa was very close to writer Yukio Mishima, the guy who tried to bring about a pro-Emperor coup by the military then committed seppuku when the soldiers laughed at him. Author of 20 books and an accomplished stage performer and director, Miwa-san may be most famous internationally as the voices of the wolf goddess Moro and the Witch of the Waste in Princess Mononoke and Howl's Moving Castle. If you're curious to see if this Japanese superstition is correct, try setting your cell phone's wallpaper to this picture and see if you get more money in 2008! 

One thing I really like about the Japanese is the tradition of kinben (KEEN-ben), or diligence and hard work, as an ideal for people to aspire to, essentially the local version of the Protestant Work Ethic. By and large, this diligence is usually measured in terms of time rather than raw effort, and doing an hour or two of overtime each day is probably the norm for most Japanese companies, allowing employees show their hard work to their colleagues in a unit that everyone can easily recognize, time. The highest expression of kinben is the tetsuya, the all-nighter, working so hard that you work all night long to finish your important project. If an employee in Japan works all night on a project, he will probably gain a lot of respect from his boss and coworkers (the term also applies to studying all night for a test). Recently I asked my wife what the "worst" job in Japan was considered to be, the one parents tell their kids they'll end up doing if they don't study hard (when I was a boy it was "ditch digger" but it may have changed since then). She told me that Japanese don't usually speak ill of a profession like that, since someone has to do it after all, and in fact, many of the jobs some might consider to be "bad" such as road construction or the guys that empty the BOT-ton toilets in older homes that don't have pluming yet, are actually good in a way, since they pay much higher due to the fact that few people are willing to do them. 

J-List would like to wish everyone a safe, warm and wonderful New Year's holiday tomorrow. Within the month of December, you wish someone a Happy New Year by saying yoi o-toshi o (YO-ee oh-TOH-shi oh), which literally means "[have a] good year." After January 1st arrives, you switch to akemashite omedeto (ah-keh-MASH-tay oh-meh-deh-TOH), literally "congratulations on opening the New Year." It's polite to use this second greeting the first time you see a Japanese person after the new year arrives. Well, until next time, yoi o-toshi o, everyone!

Comparing my kids Japanese and American personalities, more on what makes Japanese people tick, and all about sitting on the floor in Japan

We hope you had a wonderful Christmas holiday, wherever you are in the world. We had a great day, complete with turkey, lots of champagne and authentic Yorkshire Pudding.
It's interesting, being in the U.S. with my Japanese family and observing how my kids are taken over by their "American personalities" the longer they stay here. The Japanese have a saying to the effect that boys will take after their mother and girls will be like their father, an idea which I'd poo-poo'ed as a superstition until our kids were born. Our son is very Japanese, and although he has a lot of knowledge of English to draw on, he's often so shy about making mistakes that he'll refuse to open his mouth at all, a lot like his Japanese mother. My daughter takes after me, though: she seems very American in all that she does, and she's never shy about opening her mouth to speak English. While my son gets along quite well in Japan, my daughter's "American-ness" sometimes causes minor problems for her in her school, with the many meaningless rules she has to follow getting her down at times. All of these problems go out the window here in America, where (as seen from our Japanese life, at least), anything goes -- a person can do anything and be anything they want, and our daughter is positively glowing here in the States. One of the biggest rules in Japan is "act your age" (ii toshi shite), and generally speaking, people do what's expected of them according to their age group, which usually doesn't involve collecting Star Wars toys into their thirties. When my mother bought me a cool remote controlled R2-D2 toy for Christmas, my wife commented that it'd be very rare to find a Japanese man my age receiving a gift like that.

One aspect of living in Japan every foreigner must come to terms with is sitting on the floor. The Japanese do a lot of floor sitting, and even the most modern Western-style house will probably have at least one traditional Japanese-style room with tatami mats. One of my favorite things in Japan is the kotatsu, a low table with a heater inside and a blanket between the frame and the tabletop, which lets you get warm by sticking your legs inside. Since Japanese homes lack central heating, and it'd be far too expensive to heat the whole house anyway, kotatsu are very economical, as you're only heating a small space used by several people at once. They're also great for improving family life, since everyone will jam their legs inside and have a conversation rather than scattering around the house to do their own thing. The only negative to kotatsu? When Jiichan (grandfather) has flatulence inside the blanket part, causing a huge problem for everyone.

Each country in the world has what the Japanese call kokumin-sei, a kind of "national personality" or a list of traits that most people from that country tend to share. For example, Americans are seen by the Japanese as being optimistic almost to fault, believing that virtually any problem can be solved. We're also extremely friendly, even with people we don't know well, which can be hard for them to understand. The Japanese kokumin-sei is quite unique, too. In general, Japanese tend to be very peaceful, and go out of their way to avoid conflict with others. They're concerned with the image Japan presents to the world, and some major construction projects such as Japan's first bullet trains were done partially to make foreigners oo and ah when they came for the 1968 Tokyo Olympics. Also, most Japanese tend to be extremely modest, and it can be surprising when Westerners compliment a Japanese on their English ability, only to have them vehemently deny the remark. In my single days, I traveled all around Japan, hitchhiking or riding trains (there's a cool ticket called "Youth 18" which lets you ride as far as you want for $24, a bargain as long as you don't mind riding the slow local trains for 16 hours a day). Once, I encountered a boy and his mother while traveling near Hiroshima, and as we talked, the boy was going on and on about how baka (stupid) he was, so stupid that he'd never amount to anything at all. It surprised me to hear anyone talk like this about himself, much less an educated youth from one of the world's richest countries, but I realized later it was a kind of polite self-effacing that didn't mean much.

Thoughts on Christmas in Japan vs. America, my surprising first Christmas in Japan, and Japanese food for poor single men

Well, the stockings are hung by the chimney with care, and we're all getting ready for a wonderful Christmas around here. My family got in from Japan a few days ago, and the kids are fully into "American Christmas mode," shaking all the presents to try to guess what's inside. The holiday is a relatively recent cultural import to Japan, and Christmas there can be a little different from what you may be used to. To the Japanese, Christmas is usually more of an excuse to have a fun party than a solemn time for family, or more recently, an extra reason for parents and grandparents to spoil the kids by getting them something from Toys "R" Us. Christmas Eve is also a day for lovers to go on that special date, generally considered more important than Valentine's Day, and if you want to take your sweetheart out to a nice restaurant you might have to plan ahead a few months. 

I'll never forget my first Christmas in Japan. I'd not expected the Japanese to be very religious, so after arriving in my city I was surprised to find myself surrounded by a kind community of Japanese Baptists who ran a friendly church complete with a kindergarten for the local children. I enjoyed observing my new friends and seeing how similar they were to folks in the U.S. -- there seemed to be no differences at all, other than the language. In the grand tradition of Americans living in Japan, I was asked to play "Santa-san" for the kids, and I had great fun ho-ho-ho'ing as I handed out presents, as always being careful to speak only English, since that's what language Santa Claus presumably speaks. (I've since donned Santa suits dozens of times -- there must be something especially Christmassy about my personality as seen from the Japanese point of view.) I was of course surprised to find that Dec. 25th wasn't even a holiday in Japan, and driving in a traffic jam on that particular day takes some getting used to, I can tell you. One unfortunate aspect of Christmas for foreigners who haven't been "in country" too long is homesickness, since Dec. 25th is always a hard day to be away from family, no matter where you are in the world. Bottom line, Japan is a nice place, but the best place to enjoy Christmas is home with the people you love. All of us at J-List sincerely wish you and your loved ones a wonderful and warm Christmas holiday this year! 

I'll never forget my single days back in college, surviving on foods like frozen waffles, Campbell's soup, Kraft Macaroni and Cheese and that great friend to the pool college student, Top Ramen, which could be had for 3 for $1 back in the day. Japan has its own varieties of "bachelor food" too, so easy to make that even a single guy could handle it. First and foremost is the category known as "cup ramen," which seems to be as close to the hearts of Japanese consumers as cold cereal is to Americans. There are hundreds of varieties, from cheap noodles in a styrofoam bowl to the high-end "nama type" noodles which are fresh, not dehydrated, for a more authentic ramen experience. Next comes Bon Curry, boil-in-bag curry that allows you single men who can't prepare Japan's staple dish from scratch to enjoy it nonetheless. Poor men living alone love to eat "sea chicken" (tuna fish) mixed with mayonnaise spread over rice with a dollop of soy sauce, too. Japan is a country that puts great store in doing things the "proper" way, and when it comes to a single man (or woman) living alone, this is defined by cooking rice using a rice cooker on a daily basis. When I was living alone, everyone I knew would ask me "Are you cooking rice for yourself everyday, as you should?" almost as a greeting, not unlike "How are you?" They were invariably amazed that a foreigner could wash and prepare rice for himself without help.

Some thoughts on the series "Lost," how to brighten a Japanese salaryman's day, and how learning Japanese can get you fewer dates

I've caught the "Lost" bug, and am enjoying watching the series on DVD here in San Diego. One interesting aspect of the show are the sub-plots involving Jin and Sun, a Korean couple who are marooned on the island. Since the husband doesn't speak English, there are large swaths of dialogue in Koran, which makes me think I'm back in Japan with my wife watching Hanryu Dorama or the South Korean soap operas that are so popular these days. Although Japanese and Korean have a similar grammatical structure, with "particles" that mark the subject and object of a sentence, and similar word order, the two languages are quite different. The only words I can pick out of Korean are Chinese-derived words, like "promise" "goal" "air current" and so on -- not nearly the level of ability to read Chinese that I get for "free" by leaning Japanese (about 20%).

When I came to Japan in 1991, I was extremely motivated to learn Japanese, which was a good thing since the idea that you can learn a language through osmosis just by living in that country is flat wrong. I took advantage of every opportunity to advance my studies, listening to JPOP music and watching anime and Japanese dramas, which helped me get lots of vocabulary input. When I encountered a Japanese person, I'd engage in a brief "language battle" with them to determine which of us had the higher language skills, and thus which language I'd speak with that person -- and I hated to lose. Then one day I was in Tokyo, looking for a coin locker to put my bags in, and a middle-aged salaryman who was clearing his out said "Please use this one" to me in English. I thanked him in fluent Japanese, but after that I realized that I'd done him a real disservice. This man would probably have only have a few chances to use his English each year, and yet I had stubbornly refused to oblige him. Since that day, I've resolved to speak English to Japanese people more, which usually causes their face to brighten just a little. And if you really want to make a Japanese person's day? Compliment them on their English and ask if they've studied in the U.S. or England. It's usually pure B.S., but they'll be happy all day long.

One thing gaijin who attain fluency in Japanese can attest to, though, is that the more you learn Japanese, the more some doors close. Japanese often think of foreigners as fun to be around, and part of that fun flows from both sides not being able to understand each other perfectly, which somehow makes us more "exotic." If you go out to karaoke with Japanese, they'll enjoy themselves more if you sing a ridiculous version of "September" by Earth, Wind and Fire than if you're able to belt out the latest enka hit by Daisuke Kitagawa. At bars and clubs, too, foreigners who don't speak much Japanese can find themselves more popular with Japanese girls than gaijin who can read all 1945 characters of the joyo kanji (the characters designated for "general use" by Japan's Ministry of Education, which defines what it is to be literate in the language). Foreigners who learn too much Japanese might find the dating scene to be somewhat different, too, as some girls who might be interested in the exotic feel of a "real" gaijin might be turned off by our extensive knowledge of the late Edo and Meiji Restoration Periods (stuff that the average Japanese never cares about). Of course, I wouldn't want to go out with a girl who was turned off by me having too much interest in her country and language, and all people are different -- my wife was interested in me specifically because of my fondness for memorizing odd Japanese proverbs.

The interesting status of voice actors in Japan, shortening foreign words in English and Japanese, and ways that the Japanese aren't so polite

Anime has really gotten big in the U.S. in recent years, changing the face of popular culture as people are more in sync with the anime world. This isn't a new phenomenon in Japan, of course, where animation has been a part of everyone's lives since the old days of Mighty Atom, Giants no Hoshi and the original Gegege no Kitaro. One thing I've often noticed is that the voice actors -- seiyu in Japanese -- in anime are often extremely famous in Japan, with many of the top stars essentially becoming household names. When legendary voice actor Yasuo Yamada, who provided the voice of Lupin III, died in 1995, it was a national tragedy, and everyone grieved to lose the original voice of Lupin. (He was replaced by a comedian who did Lupin III impersonations on variety shows.) Some other voice actors who are well-known to the average Japanese person include Akira Kamiya, voice of Kenshiro from Fist of the North Star, the muscular Kinniku Man, and Ryo from City Hunter, and of course Tohru Furuya, who's played Amuro Rei from the iconic Mobile Suit Gundam along with a host of other roles. Perhaps the most famous voice actor of all is Nobuyo Oyama, the voice of the lovable robot cat from the future, Doraemon. When she retired in 2005, my kids stopped watching the show entirely, since they couldn't accept Doraemon with any voice other than the original. My wife watches lots of American TV dubbed into Japanese, and it's quite fun to play "pick the anime voice actor" while watching an episode of CSI: Miami with her. Oh, that's Inspector Zenigata!

One thing I've noticed is that people from all countries will reduce complex words into smaller chunks to make them easier to work with. In Japanese, it's common for various words to be abbreviated and reduced, to make them easier to say, especially English words which can be cumbersome when rendered into the Japanese phonetic system. For example, the Nintendo Entertainment System was sold here as the Famicom, short for Family Computer; similarly, if you want to go out to eat at a restaurant like Denny's or Coco's, just ask for the nearest famires (family restaurant). Words that are hip with young people tend to get abbreviated the most -- such as diji-kame (digital camera), ge-sen (game center) and sutaba (Starbuck's). Often companies will go out of their way to get people to think of their products in these abbreviated versions, advertising names as Pure-ste (Playstation) or Dora-Kue (Dragon Quest) to make them more familiar to customers.

The Japanese are famous for being polite, even when visiting Presidents throw up in the lap of the country's Prime Minister, as Bush I did on a visit here. It's quite silly, but when I first game to Japan, one small bit of culture shock for me was feeling that stop signs were "rude," because they used the informal command verb tomare ("Stop!") rather than some longer, more polite form. Although the Japanese generally are considerate, there are times when foreigners like me might consider what they do to be rude. First of all, the Japanese love to read over a person's shoulder, and if you're typing something in Japanese on a laptop, well, don't be surprise if a crowd gathers behind you. My mother taught me not to reach over people's plates when eating dinner together, but to ask for someone to pass the item to me; apparently the Japanese didn't get that memo, as it's common here to reach across the table to get what you need while eating. Similarly, Americans don't usually drink soup out of bowls, however it's almost a requirement that you do so here, since there are no spoons. Oh, and while eating any noodle dish like ramen or soba (not spaghetti!), you're expected to slurp your noodles as loudly as possible, and not doing so will likely elicit comments about how quietly you eat.

We've got some good news for fans of PC dating-sim games: the newest title from G-Collections, Snow Sakura, is in stock and shipping now. A super game that will appeal to a wide range of gamers, Snow Sakura puts you into the role of Yuuji, an average Japanese youth surrounded by a circle of beautiful girls (lucky guy). Although you grew up with your energetic cousin Saki, why Kozue, enigmatic senpai Rei, ditzy Misaki and your clumsy teacher Misato, for some reason you can't remember much about those days, only that you made a promise to one of the girls under the magical Snow Sakura tree, which somehow blooms year-round, even in the dead of winter. A great game in the tradition of the best interactive visual novels from Japan (*cough* Kanon *cough*), that we recommend for its great story and characters. Best of all, we've decided to give everyone a little present, and have lopped $5 off the price of the game for all new orders as well as existing preorders. This super game is now it's in stock -- make your order now!

Needing a sixth sense to communicate with people from other countries, this year's kanji, and all about "smorking"

Talking with people from other cultures often requires a sense for words that's quite unrelated to speaking a foreign language. Sometimes, someone says something to you that just makes no sense at all, and it's up to the deep part of your brain responsible for language processing to make the connection. Before I started studying the language, we had a Japanese foreign exchange student who stayed at my house. Once she praised me for something by telling me I was "good head." After more than a little confusion, I figured out that she was telling me I was smart, and this is indeed how you express this concept in Japanese (atama ga ii, lit. "good head"). Soon after arriving in Japan, I had a conversation with a student who was trying to tell me how good Mitsubishi vehicles were. "They are very good. They make...army's car. You know, boom!" My cranial density kept me scratching my head, until I realized he meant tanks. Whenever my wife comes to San Diego she has varying degrees of success communicating with my American family, who can't always figure out that when she says something about "the glass" being green all year round she's really talking about grass.

"I hate it when someone smorks in my face." For whatever reason, the English word "smoke" is often rendered as "smork" in Japan. The issue is how the Japanese perceive certain sounds, especially the "r" phoneme that's not familiar to them. Because Japanese is a syllable-based language in which you can express sounds like ka, ki, ku, ke or ko, but not the consonant "k" by itself, English words like "hello" "goodbye" or "beer, please" must be forced through this rather alien phonetic system, resulting in haroh (the final "h" representing an elongating of the previous vowel), guddobai and biiru puriizu. The very first fast food I ate in Japan was a McDonald's clone called First Kitchen (home of the world famous scrambled egg burger, yech), and I remember some confusion as to whether the company was First Kitchen or Fast Kitchen. Without the full repertoire of English sounds, the Japanese render the latter as fasuto and the former as fahsuto, with the longer middle vowel serving the role of the "r" in "first." This rule gets over-generalized in some words, which is why the long middle sound of the word sumo-ku (smoke) ends up as "smork."

Every year a single kanji character is designated by the Kanji Examination Association which represents the events of that year, and this year the character is...itsuwari, which translates as falsity, lies or deceit. It was a big year for being lied to in Japan, with many scandals in the headlines. First, the problems with missing Social Security payments, which meant that thousands of workers wouldn't get credit for money they paid into the system decades ago. Learning that the freshness date on the food they order may not be accurate also shook the trust of consumers in Japan -- McDonald's got caught changing the dates on salads so leftovers could be sold the following day, and they'd been doing it for years. The scandal at the Ministry of Defense, in which Deputy Defense Minister Yoko Yamada demanded various perks in exchange for the awarding of lucrative contracts, resulted in a raid on the Japanese version of the Pentagon by prosecutors. Today there was an official ceremony at beautiful Kiyomizu Temple in Kyoto in which a famous Buddhist priest wrote the character with a large calligraphy brush while hundreds looked on. The kanji for previous years have included inochi (life) in 2006, during which so many young people committed suicide; ai (love), after the birth of Princess Masako's daughter Ai in 2005; sai (disaster), in tragedy-laden 2004; and tora (tiger), celebrating the Hanshin Tigers victory in the Japan Series in 2003.

And still, the crack team of J-List employees is churning out packages left and right, making sure that orders both in Japan and San Diego go out in a timely manner. J-List's unique position, actually being based in Japan, really allows us to bring you a huge selection of mind-blowingly unique products from Japan, like our good luck Poop Hat, or those cool Santa Lucky Cat display items, or the cool Christmas ornaments we have on the site now. You can browse all new items using this link. Having trouble making up your mind what to give? We've got a few ideas for you.

Goodbye to New York, examining Japan's Buddhism and Shinto religions, Buddhist Altars, and fun linguistic coincidences

Well, our fun time in New York is at an end, and now it's time to head back to San Diego, which is a far less Christmassy place to be, all things considered. I have many memories of this convention, although my favorite was no doubt being surrounded by Domo-kun booth babes. It was a lot of fun, spending so much time in this amazing city, and I'll never look at New York quite the same way after this trip...

Japan is a mix of traditions taken in from different periods of time, and you can see this when studying the religions of the country. The original religion of Japan is Shinto, written with the characters kami (gods or spirits) and way or road, making it similar to other "the way of" words like shodo (writing + way = calligraphy), sado (tea + way = tea ceremony) or the martial art judo (flexibility + way). Shinto essentially finds kami, or spirits, in things like mountains, trees and rocks, making it seem very much to me like a Native American belief with its strong basis in nature. In the sixth century Buddhism was introduced into the country, and amazingly the two religions generally learned to treat each as an aspect of the other, allowing for much less conflict than you'd expect. Now, the various sects of Buddhism (which are as confusing to me as understanding the nuances of the Protestant churches are for my wife) are by far the most important religious tradition in Japan, and most families will surround themselves with Buddhist traditions even as they visit Shinto shrines on January 1st to pray for good luck in the New Year, or get married in Western weddings in beautiful churches.

One of the most famous everyday symbols of Buddhism in Japan is the butsudan, or household Buddhist Altar, which nearly every head-of-family household will maintain, unless they specifically identify with another religion. As far as I've been able to tell, Japanese Buddhism is primarily about respecting and remembering your ancestors, since (as my wife has told me), without your ancestors, you certainly wouldn't be here. Every morning my mother-in-law wakes up and makes an offering to her mother and father, by ringing a bell and burning a stick of incense for them. I've always thought that the absolute knowledge that you'll be remembered and loved by those you leave behind is one of the most comforting aspects of Japanese-style Buddhism. A butsudan is only maintained by the head of a household, the father or oldest son in a family, and if, say, a family has five children who move into homes of their own, they won't keep one but will return to their parents home on special events like the O-Bon holidays in the summer. A Buddhist altar is quite complex, filled with tablets on which are inscribed the names of your ancestors and an image of Buddha meditating, along with various other symbolic images. If you asked me what the most bizarre thing I've seen since coming to Japan is, I'd have to answer opening the newspaper and seeing an ad from a Buddhist altar store advertising a big sale on all the latest butsudan and grave stones. Wacky!

It's always fun to see what natural coincidences occur between languages. A Swedish friend of mine who's married to an Indian woman mentioned that the word for "no" in both Swedish and Hindi happened to be the exact same. This happens between Japanese and English, for example in the word "so" which has the exact same meaning in both languages (so desu ka? = is that so?). You probably known that "thank you" in Japanese is arigato, which sounds suspiciously like the same word in Portuguese, obrigado, although the Japanese word was in use before the Portuguese came to the country, making them unrelated. Most adjectives in Japanese end in an -i ("ee") sound, such as takai (high, expensive), yasui (cheap) or tsuyoi (strong), which is odd since many adjectives in English end in the same sound, like friendly, early or heavy. For the linguistically minded out there, these are known as false cognates, an accidental matching up of languages which seems related but which are totally separate in background.

My hop to New York, narrowly dodging staying in the city's worst hotel, and comparing it to the Star Wars Cantina

I've made the long hop from Japan to New York, and I'm now enjoying the 19 degree (with wind chill) temperatures. We're here to attend the New York Anime Festival, Dec 7-9, and can be found either at booth #408 or #340, with our great Domo-kun T-shirts, hoodies and hats as well as manga, PC dating-sim games and more. This show is going to be a really excellent one, with thousands of fans of many great companies all coming together, and we hope to see you there! Update: if for no other reason, come for the Domo-kun booth babes!!!!!

Its fun to "surf the culture shock" wave when in a new city, and New York has been a great place for this so far. I've stood on freezing subway platforms that look like they came out of a level of the game Max Payne (no relation, by the way), done power-shopping at the multi-story Toys "R" Us in Times Square, and narrowly avoided staying in New York's worst hotel. It's been extremely exciting, and we haven't even gotten started with the convention yet. Everyone knows that New York is an extremely international city, but the Star Wars Cantina-esque variety of cultures and languages around me has really been a surprise. I've gotten into a political discussion over delicious pasta with a family from India, debated similar issues with a taxi driver from Pakistan, and gotten into interesting conversations with people from the top of the world (Sweden) and the bottom (Australia). I'm staying in a very Jewish neighborhood, so I'm getting to see what a real Hanukkah celebration is like, too. It struck me that New York must be the perfect opposite of clean, homogenized Japan, where even speaking your a regional dialect of the language is frowned upon, at least in Tokyo.

Transliteration is the act of transcribing from one writing system into another, for example from Japanese to the Roman alphabet, and it's not an exact science, which is why we have alternate spellings for words and names in other languages, like good old Muamar Gaddaffi/Khadafi/Quadhafi, Mao Tse-Tung/Zedong, or Hanukkah/Chanuka for that matter. There are several aspects of Japanese that make writing Japanese words in English an inherently vague and challenging process. For example, there are long vowels in Japanese that are meaningless when written out in English since they don't change how foreigners pronounce the words. The correct way to write "pretty girl" in Japanese is "bishoujo" with the extra 'u' in the middle, and yet it's often shortened to "bishojo" for brevity's sake. Is it better to leave the long vowels in the word, although it complicates pronunciation and makes the words harder to remember, or should they be omitted? There's no simple answer -- although writing long vowel words with the shorter spelling is "wrong," it's no worse than the way meanings and pronunciations changed when French melded with English after 1066. Famous place names like Tokyo and Osaka also have long vowels that are cut to avoid making the name needlessly long -- since no one wants to write Toukyou and Oosaka. Another area where there is vagueness about how to write Japanese words or names in English is L and R. Actress and Tokyo University graduate Rei Kikukawa's first name could be transliterated as Lei without it being wrong, so is it okay to do this? There's often little agreement and so both names might be used sometimes -- there's no "right" way to write it. It can be very confusing, especially to search engines that can't tell that two similar words are the same.

One of the amusing things about living in Japan is seeing what can only be described as "American branding," selling a product by draping it in red, white and blue and associating it as closely as possible with the USA. Japanese generally have the impression that America is kakko ii -- literally "good style" or cool -- and are often open to owning items like Zippo lighters, a set of Coleman outdoor cooking gear and clothes from L.L. Bean. Branding your product as American can often bring a boost in sales, which is why the American restaurant chain Coco's adds "The California Restaurant" to their signs here, and why when companies like Jack Daniels or KFC communicate their advertising messages to their customers, they wrap themselves in images of old Tennessee or Kentucky. Levi Strauss stumbled trying to build a name for themselves in Japan during the 1970s, until they hit on the of using iconic Hollywood stars like James Dean, John Wayne and even Marilyn Monroe to advertise their jeans (they came cheap, since they were dead), which has to have been one of the most successful advertising decisions ever. The other day I happened on a store called Way Out! American Spirit that offered a variety of interesting and somewhat mundane things from the U.S., including thick Charmin paper towels, BIC pens, hard-to-find-in-Japan delicacies like chips and salsa and Swiss Miss Cocoa, and T-shirts with the Union 76 logo on them. It was quite interesting to stand there and watch what American products the Japanese shoppers were picking up.

The Japanese only started accepting Western culture only relatively recently, with the ending of the Edo Period and the Meiji Restoration of 1868, when the Emperor was theoretically "restored" to power after centuries of having things run by the Shoguns. One thing I've always found interesting is the number of words in daily use here that remind you of the differences between what is Western and what is Japanese, many of which employ the kanji yoh, meaning "Western." When you get up in the morning, you probably put on some clothes, but in Japan, you put on yoh-fuku, or "Western clothes," the word used to separate the shirts, trousers and other things you wear from wa-fuku, or Japanese style clothes like kimono or yukata. If you go to a restaurant that serves spaghetti and "hamburg steak," you're eating yoh-shoku, or Western-style food, which is treated as a separate category entirely from the various types of Japanese or Chinese dishes eaten here. Japanese film aficionados break into two groups, those who enjoy yoh-ga or films from American and Europe, and fans of hoh-ga, or Japanese film. And while I've become quite accustomed to living in Japan, I still prefer the good old yoh-shiki toilet with a seat I can sit on to the seatless wa-shiki toilets, which require just a little too much dexterity to use sometimes.

Before I started selling Hello Kitty ice cube trays and Totoro bento boxes, I was an teacher of ESL, or English as a Second Language. I taught English to students from the age of three all the way up to an elderly woman whose family business was running the local Buddhist temple, which was always an interesting conversation topic. During my years as a teacher I accumulated quite a collection of English textbooks, vocabulary cards, and various games I would play in class. One such game was "English baseball" in which teams of students would get "hits" if they answered questions using English, which I passed many a lesson with. Another is the popular Japanese game "fruits basket" in which you put, say, ten chairs in a circle and put one child in each chair, with one more standing in the center. This child must ask a question like "Do you like bananas?" and all kids who like bananas must change seats as quickly as they can. The one left in the center is "it" and must ask the next question to the group. Another fun game is the classic Simon Says, which is good because it allows kids to listen and react without actually having to produce any speech, which mimcs how children acquire language. I'd have to prepare my students for a shock, though, whenever I told them, "Simon says...touch your chin," since chin (or more accurate, chin chin) is a common word for a boy's private parts used by children. Which makes that line in the Three Little Pigs just a little too embarrassing...

A big scandal in the Japanese Pentagon, fine dining in Tokyo, and Japan and its Beverly Hills 90210 connection.

Maybe my post on Wednesday about the Japanese not seeming to care about government waste was read by someone important. Former Vice Defense Minister Takemasa Moriya is in trouble for a sling of violations, including taking bribes ('scuze me, "birthday gifts") and other improper favors in exchange for aiding defense contractor Yamada Corporation win lucrative single-bid contracts. Moriya, an important enough bureaucrat that he accompanied former Prime Minister Koizumi to Washington and posed in pictures with U.S. administration members, reportedly received millions of yen in free golf trips and other entertainment, and even got contractors to help his daughter get into a university in the U.S. (The daughter made headlines herself when she got a hose and sprayed water on news media and Diet officials who had come to deliver a subpoena to her father.) He isn't the only one in trouble: his wife Sachiko, who reportedly demanded even more free wining and dining than her husband, was also arrested. Today Japanese prosecutors raided the Defense Ministry -- the equivalent of the Justice Department raiding the Pentagon, if you can wrap your mind around that image -- to search for additional evidence of official corruption. They should have figured the guy was crooked -- he's got the same name (phonetically at least) as the Dwarven kingdom overrun by Orcs and a Balrog in Lord of the Rings...

You never know what will become popular on Japanese television. One year it might be former Chicago Bears lineman Bob Sapp making muscle poses while the Morning Musume girls squeal with delight, then comedian Razor Ramon shaking his hips in his "Hard Gay" persona. Currently the two-person Japanese "character unit" known as Dillan & Catherine seems to be popping up on TV a lot. Comedian Takeshi Nadagi plays a caricature of Dillan McKay from that bastion of 1990s goofiness, Beverly Hill 90210, which was extremely popular in Japan and which laid the groundwork for the current "overseas drama boom" of shows like Lost and 24. He sports poofed-up hair and jutted-out chin, and he speaks using expansive, exaggerated Japanese like the voice overs of the show, since Americans are expected to be overly-emotional about everything. Beside him, Catherine is the stereotypical American girl with a blonde wig, setting up Dillan's silly "American jokes" or getting mad at him for accidentally calling her Brenda or Kelly. The highlight of each stand-up routine is when Dillan zooms onto the set on an old curved handlebar 10-speed bicycle seen in the show. As usual, it's fascinating to see pop culture continue to grow and mutate into new forms as it moves around the world, and isn't it great that the Internet lets us see it all so easily? Maybe someone will cosplay Dillan & Catherine at an anime convention in the U.S., and the circle will be complete.

The influential Michelin Guide to restaurants has come to Tokyo, with its first-ever volume published ranking 150 establishments. The result? The city's restaurants received 191 stars, even more than Paris, causing the company to proclaim the city to be the world's best place to eat. The Japanese are nothing if not fascinated with how they're viewed by Westerners -- whenever an international event like the Olympics approaches there's a spate of renovation so that everything is nice looking for visiting gaijin -- and the first printing of the Michelin Guide sold out in days. Tokyo certainly is a fun place to eat, although it can be expensive, such as the time I spent $80 for dinner and margueritas for one at Tokyo's sole El Torito's location. But the variety of good things you can find in Tokyo, from traditional Japanese to ethnic foods of every variety and everything in between, almost makes it worth the higher cost. My favorite part of Tokyo is without a doubt the Shibuya area, home of the famous statue of the faithful dog Hachiko and a huge playground for young people, with thousands of food choices compressed into a tiny space, including my favorite Italian restaurant, which advertises itself with the slogan, "A lot of people talk about Mediterranean food, but we're doing something about it!"

Fans of PC dating-sim games, we've got more good news for you: the newest title by the creator of Bible Black is in stock now. Discipline: The Record of the Crusade is a fantastic game with a huge cast of characters and tons of beautiful artwork. This classic game is on the J-List site right now, ready for your immediate order, on the J-List side.

The plight of the poor Japanese taxi driver, finding government waste very close to home, and how to sound like a dirty old man in Japanese

I wrote a couple weeks ago that taxi fares were going to be going up 7%, a rare instance of inflation in a country where prices generally stay the same for years. Unlike the U.S., Japan is a very centralized place where change always happens from the top down, and I found it interesting to note that the decision to allow the raise in rates for the whole country was handled by a single government ministry in Tokyo, not decided on a local level as you might expect. The higher rates are to give drivers a long-overdue raise, since most of them are earning what they made in the 1980s, and with no custom of tipping in Japan to help make up the difference. Not every taxi company is raising their rates, however -- some are keeping them the same, which effectively introduces price competition in an industry where none existed before. While most of the world takes it for granted that taxi drivers will usually be from some often unpronounceable country, that's not the case at all here, where virtually 100% of drivers are Japanese -- after all, would you get into a cab driven by someone who couldn't read kanji? Once, I did catch a TV show about an American who had decided to become a taxi driver and had passed all the required tests, but the fact that this was rare enough to make national TV shows how uncommon this is.

Near our house, the powers that be have decided we need a new road, which would run alongside a neighbor's vegetable garden providing us with three routes out to the main street where we currently have two. They purchased the land, brought in machines to flatten the ground and laid gravel in preparation for the construction of the road. Next they did...nothing, allowing the half-built road to sit there for months. They're waiting, I'm told, for the next budgetary cycle to roll around, at which time they'll get more money from the central government to finish the project, and we'll finally have three ways to get out to the street -- yippie. The fiscal equivelent to unnecessary surgery, construction projects are often extremely wasteful in Japan, like a 500 meter ditch dug beside a road where a 20 meter one would have sufficed because budgetary aid is only available for projects of a certain size or larger, or a bridge and tunnel across Tokyo harbor that costs $40 to use yet takes slightly longer than just driving around on the normal roads. What's amazing to me is how little anger there is on the part of taxpayers when waste like this occurs, which is related to the Japanese tradition of saying shikata ga nai (or more colloquially, sho ga nai), meaning "it can't be helped," at the drop of a hat. To paraphrase Bill Watterson, I know the government is inefficient, but why isn't it ever inefficient in our favor?

The only constant is change, and Japan has had to deal with rather a lot of change over the past 150 years, essentially, going from a feudal country still in the Middle Ages to a modern, industrialized democracy in decades where other nations took centuries. This has brought about changes in the language, as Japan was forced to interface with the outside world more. Japanese is a linguistically impoverished language, with only 5 vowels usually paired into syllables with consonants (ka, ki, ku, ke, ko, etc.), and due to a quirk of phonetics, the sounds "ti" and "di" sound could not be accurately written using the normal kana system. Without a way to express these sounds, foreign words like "Disneyland" and "party" could not be correctly represented, and would be converted to "Desneyland" and "parteh," which sound strange to the ear. It seems a "patch" was introduced at some time in the last few decades, allowing the sounds to be expressed in katakana by combining two similar characters, but unfortunately there's a whole generation of older Japanese who learned a slew of foreign loan words with the older, strange-sounding pronunciations. Now a common caricature of an old Japanese man is one who is sukebe (dirty-minded) and tries to catch a glimpse of a girl's panteh while riding the train. Since the last thing in the world a Japanese person expects a foreigner to do is use these oddly-pronounced English words, I like to go out of my way to use them just for the shock value of it.

You should see the downstairs area of J-List: it's filled with about 500 packages of every size and shape, great anime toys and calendars and DVDs and other items that we're shipping out to customers around the world. J-List is primed and ready to serve you this Holiday season, so why not take this opportunity to browse the J-List site and see what cool new items we have for you?

All in all, "here are your gums" is not something you'd expect to hear outside a discussion of orthodontics, but a Japanese friend of mine said it to me once. She was handing me a big bag of gum I'd bought that day, and had assumed that since each piece of gum was individually wrapped, it was proper to pluralize the word. Without a doubt, telling which nouns can be counted (one apple, two cars) from ones that must be organized into groups first (one bag of gum, three pieces of furniture) is a big challenge for Japanese learners of English. There's nothing like count nouns in Japanese, a language where you don't even indicate plural vs. singular unless you need to be specific for some reason, and the often arbitrary nature of them -- why are jeans and underpants counted as "pairs" anyway? -- can be a challenge. My friend demonstrated this when she wrote on the outside of a folded-up note to me, "This is not a trash!" (to make sure I didn't throw it away accidentally).

Japan is a unique place, and the economic forces that cause this kind of business or that to spring up can be interesting to observe. During my 16 years in the country, I've seen quite a few businesses that don't exist in the U.S., or if they do, I've certainly never come across them. First and foremost, Japan has a lot less space than the U.S., and in especially crowded areas like train stations it's common to see people eating tachi-gui soba, or noodles that you eat in a tiny noodle shop while standing up, with nary a stool to sit on in the whole place -- which becomes part of the fun, after a while. Normally remodeling bathrooms presents a challenge because you can't bathe during the construction, but not in Japan, where there are at least three large public bath / sauna / hot spring baths within easy driving distance to my house. If you are out and find you've had a little too much to drink, you can call a daiko, essentially a taxi service with a spare driver who will follow you home in your car, so you have it the next morning. Similarly, I've recently seen izakaya, cozy Japanese bar-restaurants, advertise a pick up and drop-off service: an employee from the company will pick you up and then drop you off at home when you're done with your party. Finally, for those times when couples feel the need to be alone, there are always Japan's famous Love Hotels, where you can enjoy a clean, private environment, with or without the Arabian Nights theme or Alcatraz theme.

You don't often think of Japan as a miltary power, but the three branches of the Self Defense Forces represents one of the largest militaries the world, ranking behind the U.S., Great Britain, France and Germany in size. Due to its warlike past, the existence of Japan's armed forces is a potentially touchy one, and the government takes certain steps to avoid having its military appear threatening to its neighbors. For example, it shortens the range of all Japanese fighters by giving them smaller fuel tanks, and never uses the word "military" (in Japanese, gun, pronounced "goon") in any official capacity to refer to itself. The Japanese are an extremely peace-loving people, so much so that there were huge demonstrations when the government decided to send unarmed peace-keepers to Cambodia in the 1990s. Japan also sent 600 SDF personnel to Iraq to assist with rebuilding efforts despite heavy political opposition, but since the soldiers are forbidden from combat, they're being defended by units from other countries. Just about everything in Japan, it seems, has to have a cute mascot associated with it, and the JSDF is no exception: Prince Pickles and his girlfriend Parsley-chan are on the job, defending peace and acting as the official face of Japan's military. Or if you prefer, check out the popular line of Female JSDF members rendered in little anime-style PVC figures, a very popular toy line in Japan now.