Reflections on Beef Bowl and Japanese Culture

Over the weekend I took my son out for a bowl of gyudon, steamed beef over rice, the most popular form of fast food in Japan. The restaurant was crowded, so I added my name to the list, writing "Peter" in the katakana writing system that's generally used for foreign names and loan words, and sat down to wait. "Everyone else wrote their last name," my son observed. "Why did you write your first name?" This was an interesting question, and I didn't have an answer for him right away. Ostensibly, names in Japan are written in family name, given name order, so someone named Taro Yamada in English would be Yamada Taro in Japanese. But by unwritten rule, Westerners nearly always continue to use their name in the same order as they do back home. When I was a teacher, I was universally known as "Peter-sensei" by my students, never "Payne-sensei" as you'd expect. I'm pretty sure this is done unconsciously -- the Japanese staff at J-List, who are used to me asking them difficult questions when I'm posting an update, all said they'd never noticed this phenomenon -- and probably because English teachers are supposed to be as "fun" as possible. Having my students use my first name certainly did seem to bring them a little closer to me, so it was never a problem. While Japanese never use English name order for themselves while in Japan, it's not uncommon for TV "talents" (comedians, actors etc.) to choose stage names that sound more like English. When the Los Angeles-born son of legendary martial arts film star Sho Kosugi started his own career on TV here, he debuted using the name of "Kane Kosugi" (in English word order) which underscored his American-ness and the fact that he could speak English fluently, and added a bit of spice to his appeal with fans.

Site Improvement Announcement

We're happy to announce some new features on the site. In the upper left hand corner of the J-List and JBOX.com websites you can see the new Account button which takes you do a series of screens that lets update any aspect of your account information, including changing your password or email address. You can review your order history over the past six months, too, a feature that we've wanted to bring you for a long time. In addition, we're launching a new service that let you know what the current status of your order right in the order history screen. For example, when our staff process your order and starts the packing process, the status will be reflected on the order history for that order, and when, say, a shipping label is printed, that will be posted too. The system is still "beta" but we think it will provide a lot of useful feedback for you, making it easy to see what the current state of your order is. Enjoy the new features, and as always, your feedback is very welcome!

Fun with Japanese Numbers

"You've been in Japan too long when you're speaking English with your gaijin friends, but all references to money are in Japanese." This is a funny phenomenon, but true: even when speaking English, foreigners living in Japan will tend to use Japanese for numbers and yen money amounts. The reason is that the Sino-Japanese numeric system, which came from China, is clunky when converting to the Arabic numeric system. The number system revolves around the unit 10,000 (man, pronounced mahn), rather than 1,000; thus, the number 10,000 is 1 man (ichi mahn、一万), 20,000 yen is 2 man (ni mahn、二万), 100,000 is 10 man (juu mahn、十万) and so on. The conversion from one numeric system to the other is just frustrating enough that most foreigners will be happy to leave their numbers in Japanese, if the person they're talking with understands the words. If you think it's difficult learning to think in units of 10,000, you should try doing math with the kanji-based numbers that come after man, which are oku (億、equal to 100 million), cho (兆、1 trillion) and kei (10 quadrillion, which is so high that I never bothered to learn the kanji for it).

One Small Problem with Japan: Concrete and Asphalt

Japan is a great place, and I love living here. The country is beautiful, the culture always new and fascinating, and the people are very kind. One of the drawbacks to life in Japan, however, is the abundance of concrete and asphalt around me. Roads seem to criss-cross every inch of Japan, even high in the mountains in the center of the country, and it's common for the Japanese government to cover the sides of mountains in concrete to guard against falling rocks, so you can't even see the mountain you're currently driving on. Virtually every river in the country has been extensively "engineered" to guard against dangerous floods, which can make them look quite unnatural, with reinforced concrete slopes on both sides. We have a "vacation mansion" up in the mountains around Karuizawa, which sounds really cool until you learn that the word "mansion" in Japan means an apartment that is owned as opposed to being rented. As we were driving home one weekend, I caught a really nice view of Mt. Asama, a large volcano that's erupted several times over the last century. It was spectacular, with steam coming out of the top and everything, but I was having a terrible time snapping a picture of the mountain without getting a power line in the picture. Kind of lame.

Thoughts on the Japanese fascination with Europe and the U.S.

Just as many in the U.S. and Europe have a fascination with all things Japanesque, the Japanese have their own fixation with the West. A lot of this comes from Japan's unique history: for 250 years it was a "closed country," and it was punishable by death for anyone to leave Japan or for foreign barbarians to enter. The only exception was Dejima, a tiny artificial island in Nagasaki Bay, where the Dutch were permitted a trading colony. When Commodore Perry sailed into Yokosuka Bay and forced the Shogun to open his doors to trade, it was a culture shock for Japan that was not entirely unlike what we'd feel if UFOs suddenly landed at the United Nations. As the Japanese fervently studied the West they gained great respect for its accomplishments, which can take some pretty interesting forms today. For some reason Manekin Pis, that statue of a boy peeing in Belgium, is extremely famous in Japan, and there was even a punk band that named themselves the Piss Kids in homage to this, translating from the Japanese name of the statue. The story of Anne Frank is also extremely well known here in Japan (you can read it in manga form), as are stories like Anne of Green Gables. The Japanese have expressed their fascination with the city of Paris by building a scale replica of the Eiffel Tower (Tokyo Tower) and a miniature version of the Palace of Versailles, erected as a residence for the Crown Prince. And don't get me started on the copy of the Statue of Liberty in Odaiba, across the bay from Tokyo. It's all quite silly.

Sony Life Insurance? Panasonic Home? Kanebo Gum?

One thing you get used to when you live in Japan is companies selling products that are, well, unexpected from the point of view of a Westerner. Dell makes computers and Ford makes cars, but if Ford started making computers we'd all wonder what was in their drinking water. But it's quite common for Japanese companies to enter a wide range of businesses under the same brand, a concept I was introduced to at the age of five when I saw a commercial for Yamaha lawnmowers, and wondered how the company could also make the electric organ we owned at the time. You know Sony for their home electronics, but in Japan, Sony is also famous for life insurance, online banking, high-end make-up products, as well as being the licensor for Thomas the Tank Engine products. Building homes is big business in Japan, and companies like Panasonic and Toyota own companies that build homes under those brands -- there's even a builder called TBS Housing, operated by the Tokyo Broadcasting System, of all people. Mitsubishi is famous for their cars, but they're also busy making trains and home electronics and selling securities, and they are the leading manufacturer of pencils in Japan. Oh, and make up company Kanebo also markets chewing gum and medicine under the same brand. Weird, eh?

Rising Divorce Culture in Japan?

It's often said that Japan's society follows a decade or so behind the U.S., and looking at such areas as the adoption of laws about smoking in public places or child safety seats in cars, that statement seems to be pretty accurate. Sadly, Japan's divorce rate has also followed this trend, and the number of couples calling it quits is higher than ever. Currently there are 2.3 divorces per thousand people in Japan, compared with around 3.6 for the U.S, 2.2 for Canada, and 2.8 for the U.K. These numbers sound pretty much in line with the rest of the world, except when you consider that just a generation ago Japan's divorce-per-thousand was under 1. The social pressures that have been driving the increase are many, including less economic reliance on the husband by women and a decrease of stigmas about being batsu-ichi, or "one strike out," a common slang for someone who has been divorced once. A big trend is the rise in jukunen rikon, or "middle-aged divorce," when couples find their marriage can't survive the husband retiring and hanging around the wife and her friends all day (the term for such husbands is nure-ochiba, noo-reh-OH-chi-bah, a wet leaf that sticks to your shoe and won't come off, no matter how hard you shake it). This trend has been aided by recent laws making it easier for women to claim half their husband's pension if they were together for a certain number of years, which has lead to many books and articles advising women on the best "divorce strategy."

Gyoza Troubles in Japan

Japan is in an uproar right now over a food poisoning scare involving frozen dumplings called gyoza -- you may know them by their North American name of "potstickers" -- imported from China. The dumplings were tainted with toxic pesticides which made dozens of consumers sick, including a five year old girl who nearly died. The Japanese are a very group-oriented people, and when there's a general movement in one direction others are willing to follow, and right now everyone is falling over themselves to avoid all frozen foods, even products that weren't made in China. The ruckus is making itself felt in Japan's business world, too: a proposed three-way merger between mammoth Japan Tobacco and two smaller makers of frozen foods is in danger of being called off because JT was the company that distributed the problem dumplings. The whole thing kind of reminds me of the period after 9/11, when Japanese tourists stayed away from Hawaii in droves out of fear of terrorists, quite a silly thing to think, all things considered. Poison aside, gyoza is one of my all-time favorite foods in the world, and I love to obsess over the ratio of soy sauce, vinegar and spicy sesame oil that I dip them into before eating them. While the food poisoning scare has hurt makers of frozen foods, supermarkets and Yokohama's Chinatown distract, business was booming at our local ramen-and-gyoza shop when we went there last night. The "Master" (what you call the owner of any kind of small shop in Japan) seems to be doing a very brisk business right now, with many families coming to eat food they can trust.

My Favorite Japanese Food, "Nabe"

It's winter in Japan right now, the season for one of my favorite dishes, nabe (NAH-beh). The word means "pot" and refers to any kind of food you make in a big open pot and eat with everyone gathered around, conversing while taking things out (boiled meat, fish, tofu, vegetables, etc.). There are many varieties of nabe, from spicy Kimchee Nabe (as they are wont to do, the Japanese have adopted the national food of Korea as one of their own) to the famous Chanko Nabe from Nagasaki that sumo wrestlers eat. Another famous variety of nabe food is Sukiyaki, one of my all-time favorite dishes. Aside from being delicious and a great way to warm up in the colder months, nabe is the ultimate "social food" which makes for great conversation, since everyone sits around the pot to take food out of it rather than eating from their own plate. It also allows uniquely Japanese concepts like enryo, the tendency for people hesitate when taking, say, the last piece of tofu before asking of anyone else would like it, to work in the group. (We do have some great bilingual books on how to make Japanese food like nabe, although most are out of stock due to their popularity. You can backorder any of them and we'll send the when they come in.)

Thoughts on Japanese Politics

The U.S. Presidential race is on, with the various candidates debating the issues publicly as they jockey for votes on Super Tuesday. With American politics being followed internationally -- I've gotten into some fascinating discussions with friends from Australia, Canada and the U.K., who all understood U.S. politics a lot better than I understood theirs -- the issues being discussed in the U.S. right now are probably familiar to many around the world. Japanese politics, on the other hand, are a little more subtle, so I thought I'd talk about that subject today. There are three major political parties in Japan: the Liberal Democratic Party, which has ruled the country almost continuously since the end of the war; the Democratic Party of Japan, which currently controls one of the country's two legislative houses; and the New Komeito Party, which still has unofficial ties to the Sokka Gakkai religion, the closest thing to "Evangelical Buddhism" there is here. It's hard to define what being conservative and liberal might mean in the context of Japan, but for the most part conservatives are pro-business, favor close ties with the U.S. even if it means having to take part in overseas conflicts that most Japanese citizens are against, support rural farmers in exchange for their political support, resist pressure over Yasukuni Shrine, oh, and they naturally revere the Emperor. On the other side of the fence are mavericks like Tokyo Mayor Shintaro Ishihara, who literally wrote the book on Japan saying "no" to outside pressure from the U.S. and who has run Tokyo well even if he steps on the toes of some commercial interests. (There are some flavors of socialism, including a Japan Communist Party, but they have so little traction with voters it's almost funny.) Currently there's a spat going on inside the ruling coalition over how funds collected from taxes on gasoline should be used. Under the current law, automobile-related taxes may be used only for building of roads, despite the fact that there are plenty of perfectly fine roads already made. Conservative members of the legislation are fighting tooth-and-nail to ensure that every yen of road taxes be used for more roads, even if it means projects people won't benefit from, while their opponents push for either a lowering of gasoline taxes or loosening of restrictions on what the money can be spent on.

Different Kinds of "Green Tea" from Japan: Ryoku-cha, Matcha, and Beyond

Although coffee and Western tea are popular in Japan, many prefer the wide variety of Asian teas that would likely be perceived as "green tea" to most Westerners. The word for tea in Japanese is cha, and like many concepts that are especially important to every day life here, the word usually gets the "honorific" prefix o, making ocha. Popular varieties of tea enjoyed regularly include ryoku-cha, a slightly weak green tea; mugi-cha, a pleasant-tasting tea made from barley that's enjoyed in the hot summer; or genmai-cha, tea with roasted grains of unhulled rice in it. Oolong-cha, a dark refreshing tea from China, is perhaps the best-selling bottled beverage in Japan; it's nice because it cuts through oil, washing down anything greasy you've eaten, and the Chinese use it to clean the fingers while eating. Coca-Cola became the leading drink maker in the Japanese beverage market by being very smart about local tastes, and their popular Sokenbi-cha, which blends many different types of tea, is one of the top-selling bottled teas on the market. The other type of green tea is matcha, a bitter tea made from powder, used in the Japanese tea ceremony and is also a popular flavoring for ice cream and traditional sweets. The best matcha tea comes from Uji, a town a few kilometers outside of Kyoto, and this year's Matcha Kit Kat goes out of its way to advertise Uji Matcha on its box.

Japanese People think Americans Know Every English Word Ever Made

Before I started J-List, I taught English as a Second Language (ESL) to a wide range of Japanese students, including kids, OLs (female company employees) and even some elderly learners. Because I spoke Japanese, my services were quite in demand, since of course the first thing you look for in an English teacher is that he be fluent in Japanese -- kind of makes you understand why they aren't better at English than they are. For a while I had a weekly class teaching some retired women, and we had a lot of fun, with them telling me all the things that Americans seem to be interested in when they come to Japan, like what part of the city was bombed during World War II. During one lesson one of the ladies was telling me about the various charities she was involved in, including the local Rotary Club and UNESCO. "I'm also a Soroptimist," she proudly told me. This word was unfamiliar to me, so I asked her what it meant, and I'll never forget the look of shock on her face. How could I, a native speaker of English, not know this word? Didn't every speaker of English know every word? Getting over her surprise, she explained about the Soroptimist Society, an international organization that works to improve the lives of women around the world, which is also active in Japan. This tendency of Japanese to assume that every English speaker knows every word in the language happens with doctors, too, who spend years amassing knowledge of medical conditions in English then want to try them out on foreigners they encounter.

Funny Japanese place names: Eromanga??

There are some pretty hilarious place names in the world, like Hell, Michigan, Hookersville, West Virginia or Lord Berkeley's Knob, Scotland. There are some that sound funny to the Japanese, too. The second largest city in Idaho is Nampa, which happens to be a common slang term that roughly means "girl hunting," what bored young people in Japanese cities usually do on weekends. The Boyne Valley near Dublin, Ireland causes snickering when rendered into katakana, since boin is the sound of soft, round things going, well, "boing." In Holland there's a town called Scheveningen, which comes out sounding like sukebe ningen in Japanese, meaning "depraved human being" (I'm sure they could use some of our T-shirts there). In Texas, Michigan and Alaska there are towns with the name of Onalaska, which happens to sound like onara-suka, which is "Did you have flatulence?" in polite Japanese. The prefecture of Siliana in Tunisia gets more attention than it otherwise would, since it sounds like shiri and ana, a person's rear end and hole, respectively. The most common "catch-all" Japanese insult is baka, meaning "stupid," but in Osaka they prefer the term aho, and I'm sure the town of Ajo, Arizona gets at least a few additional tourists each year because of this name. But the strangest accidental place name would have to be Eromanga, a mining town that's the farthest point from the sea in Australia, with a name that sounds like manga comics that are naughty. Similarly, there's an island near Australia named Erromango, which got miss-transliterated as Eromanga in the Nintendo Wii weather program, making it an instant legend in the eyes of Japanese gamers.

How many words for "rice" do the Japanese have?

There are many large and small challenges you encounter when learning Japanese. For example, it's difficult being at peace with the idea that your brain actually can learn to read hiragana and kanji just like it perceives written English, and breaking through this barrier is an important early milestone. Another small challenge is translating single-word concepts in English into Japanese, which is usually more complex. For example, just as the Eskimo supposedly have many names for snow (which turns out not to be all that true), there are multiple words for rice that are used on a daily basis, like uncooked rice (kome), unpolished rice (genmai), steamed rice that's ready to eat (gohan, which also refers to all food), newly cultivated rice (shinmai, also used to refer to a new employee at an organization), and so on. Being an island nation, the Japanese eat various types of plants grown in the sea, which we call by the unappetizing name of "seaweed." Major categories include nori, the dried, green seaweed eaten with sushi; wakame, green leaves eaten in soup; and konbu, a kind of seaweed that's almost black, used as flavoring in soup or eaten on rice. The Japanese similarly have about five different kinds of tea which would probably be called "green tea" by the average Westerner but which are all very different.

More thoughts on Senpai and Kohai, and the origin of the word Honcho

I wrote last time about how living in Japan puts you in tune with the system of senpai and kohai, or seniors and juniors in a school or organization, and how even foreigners living here unconsciously organize themselves according to how long they've lived in the country. This vertical social system may seem odd to Westerners, but it generally works well in this country that has to cram half the population of the U.S. into a land mass the size of Montana. My daughter walks to school with a group of kids from our neighborhood organized into a unit called a han. When she was small, the oldest child became the leader, or hancho (which is where we get the word Head Honcho in case you wondered), who was responsible for making sure the younger kids kept up with group and that no one was being bullied. Next year, my daughter will be in the sixth grade, and it'll be her turn to help protect the younger kids in the group each morning. Although this top-down system works well through university, it gets stressed when it encounters the real world. While the senpai/kohai system used to work in parallel with the ages of individuals, so that a person at a certain age was always of higher rank than employees younger than him, today it's quite likely for a 35 year old to change jobs and find himself working with a 25 year old, who is the senpai and must be shown respect, even though he's younger.

Japanese ASCII Art Can Make you Cry

I've always been amazed at how expressive the Japanese can be, whether they're inventing new English words to describe products in amazing ways or creating onomatopoeia that capture not only, say, the pakku pakku sound of rapidly eating (which is where Pac-Man gets his name), but the sound of silence or of softly falling snow. Japanese net users are also very creative when it comes to making art with ASCII that expresses emotions and adds character to computer-based communication. A few months ago someone made a BBS post called "Sorry About Baseball" that was a tribute to his mother, decorated with extensive ASCII art. The post was picked up by other users who added music and made animated versions using Flash that have many crying in front of their computer monitors. It's the story of an uneducated mother raising her son alone, despite being very poor. One day, she received tickets to a baseball game, and the boy was overjoyed at the prospect of seeing his first live game; but when they got to the stadium, they found that they weren't actual tickets, only coupons for a discount on regular tickets, which they couldn't afford. On the train back home, the mother showed a tear and said, "I'm sorry for being so stupid."The boy dedicated himself to his studies, eventually winning a scholarship to college so he could make his mother proud. Years later, as she lay dying, his mother woke up and said, as if suddenly remembering something, "I'm sorry about the baseball game." He tried to tell her "I had fun," but he couldn't make his voice work.

My Japan Reconsideration: the Concept of "Senpai"

Before I started J-List, I worked as an ESL teacher, sharing my native language with Japanese students. One Friday, an American co-worker and I took a new teacher who had just arrived in Japan out drinking, so we could get to know him and start showing him around our city. As we imbibed beer at the izakaya bar that was the popular haunt with the English teacher crowd back in the day, something was nagging at me, reminding me of something I was forgetting to do. Finally, I realized what it was, and I turned to my co-worker. "Dave," I said to him, fighting back the weirdness that comes from speaking Japanese with another foreigner, "you realize that you and I are senpai now? And you know what that means." He groaned, but nodded. To the new teacher, Dave and I were senpai, or senior, because we'd been in Japan longer than him, and he was our kohai, or junior. The Japanese social order absolutely required that we go out of our way to guide and help him get used to Japan, and that meant that we had to dig into our wallets and pick up the tab for the night. The social rules were quite clear on the subject, and we had to obey or be in opposition to those rules, which is not a good thing to be in Japan. It's interesting to note that the new teacher was older than both of us, yet still the time-in-a-place-or-organization took precedence over age.

Anime and Japanese Pop Culture Are Everywhere

One thing I really like about being so involved with Japanese popular culture is the global nature of it, how it appeals to so many people around the world. Whether it's singing the theme song to Heidi, Girl of the Alps with a roomful of German fans at a convention near the banks or the Rhine, hanging out with bloody Battle Royale cosplayers in Rome, or finding manga series that I struggled with in college for sale in English at my local bookstore in San Diego, I'm always amazed at how anime and related culture have been accepted by all of us. Back in 2006 a crowd protesting in the Gaza Strip helped their message reach a wider audience by printing a picture of Haruhi Suzumiya -- star of a mind-bending anime series about a girl who yearns to meet ESPers, time travelers and aliens, and gets her wish -- on their sign. The image was picked up by the Japanese press, who were amazed to see the popular anime character in so remote a place. I think part of the reason we can all embrace Japan's pop culture so freely is actually because of its distance from most of us, its lack of connection to our own historical or cultural backgrounds (or hang-ups), which removes barriers that might otherwise make it harder to accept something so different. In short, while we may argue over issues like religion, politics and economics, we can all agree that Godzilla knocking over Tokyo Tower looks pretty awesome, or that "Haruhi-ism" is pretty cool. So, world peace through shared popular culture, everyone!

Understanding Cultural Differences Through CSI: Miami

When you live in a place like Japan, you never know what cultural wrinkles you'll discover next. Maybe you'll stick your chopsticks upright in your rice (which is only done during funerals), pour your own beer (bad manners to do it yourself), or accidentally order some gyumotsu because you didn't know it was pan-fried beef intestines (yuck). My wife and I are both hooked on CSI: Miami, but because of the language difference, she usually watches the Japanese-dubbed broadcast on satellite channel Wowow while I stick the good old English version. During an episode we watched in English last night, the character Delko called his sunglass-wearing boss Horatio Cane by the nickname "H." "What did he just call Horatio?" my wife asked, not sure she'd heard correctly. "Oh, you know, Horatio's nickname is his first initial," I said, and her eyes went wide with surprise. For reasons unknown, the letter "H" has become the universal euphemism for anything related to sex in Japan. For example, if a person is "H" (always pronounced with a Japanese accent, ecchi) he or she thinks about it too much, and the most common way to refer to the act in general is H suru or "to do H." Thus, the idea of leaving Horatio's nickname intact in the Japanese version of the show was just not going to work, and the lines were rewritten.

All about the Japanese word "Gambaru" (do your best)

One word that comes up in anime a lot is gambaru (gahn-BAH-roo, alternately written ganbaru, in Japanese 頑張る), a happy, cheerful term which means to do one's best, to work hard, to give one's all and so on. It's usually heard in its formal form gambarimasu (gahn-bah-ri-mass, "[I will] do my best!"), or else as a request, e.g. gambatte or gambatte kudasai (gahn-BAH-tay koo-da-sai, "please try hard!"), or alternatively in its "command" form, gambare! (gahn-BAH-ray, "Do your best!"). If you want to learn some phrases to surprise Japanese people with, these are good places to start, since everyone will react positively to them. In a country that embraces hard work and diligence as much as Japan, it's not surprising that this term is used on an almost daily basis in many different situations. Japanese salarymen are expected to gambaru at work, while their kids gambaru in their studies at school, and the sick must do the same while they work to get over their illness. As long as a person is giving his all, he's got the seal of approval from Japanese society in general.