Getting Out of Tokyo: The U-Turn

Imagine if 25% of all Americans lived around the Washington DC area? It would be pretty crowded, and not very fun to get in and out of around holidays. That's exactly the case with Japan, though, where one in four people live in the sprawling Greater Tokyo Area, and as you can imagine, holidays like the just-ended Obon break end with incredibly long trails of cars as people hurry to get back home in time for work on Monday. While most of Tokyo's residents seem quite happy living in an area with a population density north of 5500 people per square kilometer, some decide they'd rather leave the crowded metropolis behind forever. Japanese who came to Tokyo from a more rural part of the country and decide to return home make what's called a U-Turn in Japanese, in essence giving up their life in Tokyo to return to their hometown to live. Perhaps the area of Japan they originally came from is a little too rural for them, and they'd prefer to live in a city near their home town instead: this is known as a J-Turn, essentially a "partial" U-Turn, since a J looks like half of a U, or something like that. Finally, Tokyo-ites who just want to get the heck out of the city and live a simpler life in a less populated part of thr country make what's known as an I-Turn, from the word inaka, meaning "the boonies." I've got a (gaijin) friend who did this: he worked in Tokyo, saving money while searching for a suitable plot of land to buy in Nagano Prefecture, where the Olympics were held in 1998. Now he's enjoying life away from the bustle of Tokyo, able to do the same work he did before thanks to the Internet. I wonder if the same dynamic is at work in New York or Los Angeles, with cities that get so big they start pushing people out?

Here's a picture of the kisei rush or return-to-Tokyo rush. Would you like to sit in a car for 10 hours on the last day of your vacation?

Funny and Creative English in Japan

It never fails: you're going about our business in Japan, when suddenly you come face to face with some really bizarre English. Like a guy with a hat proclaiming, "Hey bad boy!" or a pretty girl wearing a provocative shirt that asks, "How many people have loved you?" or an air cleaner called "Clean Poo." Often the funny English takes the form of advertising, as companies make use of the kakko ii (cool) status of the English language to evoke emotional responses in customers which may lead to them making purchases, since printing something like "canned beverage makes you refresh" on a can of juice can give an otherwise hum-drum product a real "image up." Similarly, most every can of beer you will find in Japan features an extensive statement of quality, like, "Sapporo beer is made from the finest hops for a delicious taste and refinement," although I've never known anyone's purchase choices to be influenced by the English on the can. Some of my most enjoyable moments as an ESL teacher involved seeing how creative my students could be, like when one wrote that, "Humans cannot travel to Antarctica now, because it is under penguin rule." Although many foreigners in Japan love to find every bit of hidden English around them they can, I find that after being here so long, I almost don't notice it -- it's part of the general background noise of Japan.

Wow, that's a pretty cool T-shirt

Some Pictures of my Weekend

Here are some pictures of my weekend so far, if you're curious.

I thought I'd drive up to our place in Karuizawa, to get away from work a little. Unfortunately it wasn't exactly put-the-Miata-top-down weather, and was very dreary going up and coming back down.

I felt more sorry for the poor people trying to enjoy a fireworks festival in the rain. Bleah...

Useful iPhone trick #1713: bookmark webcams of the roads you need to use to check the weather or traffic situation there. This is the intersection nearest where I turn to get to our place. Actually, the car in the intersection is mine ^_^ Incidentally, the iPhone does things like automatically sync your bookmarks with Safari, so you have everything in the same place on both browsers.

Through the drizzle there's Mt. Asama, the biggest and most active volcano in the area. Some gaijin went urban exploring in a building I've wanted to visit myself, an old observatory for the volcano that's been abandoned for 20 years or so.

More rain. I didn't mind so much once I got th our place since all I do is sit in the onsen for as long as I can and then read and laze around the place. I like this effect.

Fairly cool Kirin beer ad using an image from the 1920s.

My cats. Su-chan is the one with read collar, and Komin is the young cat on right. Su-chan just had three more babies but every time I come near she hisses at me and then hides the babies. She hates me.

Japanese Bone Festival

Speaking of graves, Japan is in the middle of Obon (pronounced "oh, bone!"), a three-day Buddhist holiday to remember the souls of one's ancestors that's kind of a combination of Halloween and Thanksgiving, when all is said and done. Much of Japan shuts down on August 13, 14 and 15th as people travel to their jikka, or "real home," meaning their parents' home or wherever their family's Buddhist altar is located, to spend some quality time with family members. The custom of haka-mairi, making a visit to the family grave, is also important, and Japanese will go to their family's gravestone to wash it with clean water and decorate it with flowers. Ancestors are extremely important in Japan, and Obon is a good time for people to take a break and remember how important family is, including those who have gone on. Just as Christmas has grown beyond its original meaning to become a big part of the culture of the West, many of these traditions are practiced by all Japanese, even if they don't actively consider themselves to be Buddhist. The Obon holidays are also a popular time to travel, and this week hundreds of thousands of Japanese are taking vacations overseas. If you live in a place that receives many Japanese visitors like Hawaii or California and you're wondering why there are so many Nihonjin around, now you know.

The lantersn that light the way for the dead to return home, or something like that

Itadakimasu!

Languages are interesting because each one has its own unique features. For example, double negatives like "I didn't see nothing" are considered incorrect in English, although they're perfectly permissible in Spanish. If you've watched some anime in Japanese or had dinner with a Japanese family, you may have noticed the word that's spoken before eating, itadakimasu, pronounced "ee-tah-dah-ki-MAHS." Essentially meaning "I humbly receive the gift of this food" or less obsessively "let's eat," it's a polite way to thank the person who made the food for you, and the word is interesting because it illustrates some of the "back end" of Japanese grammar. There are two verbs for "to receive" in Japanese, morau and itadaku; the former is a neutral word, which you'd use when telling your wife about the movie tickets you got from a co-worker, but the latter is a polite word that basically means to receive something from someone socially higher than you, like your boss or a guest. (It's the root of the word itadakimasu.) Since subjects are often left off of Japanese sentences, it's conceivable that you might find yourself in a linguistic situation that called for you to understand the overall context of a sentence based on what verb someone chose to use. For example, my mother-in-law might say to me, "Itadakimashita yo," which essentially means "[we] received [something from someone]." It would be up to me to figure out the larger context, namely that we'd received some gift from someone that my mother-in-law wants to be polite to who's standing nearby, and I should come and say thank you to that person for the gift. Japanese can be a confusing language, but with practice, some of these situations start to make sense.

This might be more Japanese than you wanted to know. And if so, I apologize ^_^

Gaijin Bochi: Foreigners' Graveyard

When is a graveyard likely to be filled with tourists snapping pictures? When it's a gaijin bochi, or "foreigners' graveyard," which you can see in several old Japanese cities that have had Westerners living there for a long time, like Yokohama, Kobe and Hakodate. Japanese burial rites involve cremation and placing the bones and ashes of the deceased inside a family grave, customs which are very different from the West, and these special foreigners' graveyards are places where Europeans and Americans can be interred according to their own traditions. The oldest can be found in Nagasaki, the only city where trade was allowed during the Edo Period, and you can see the gravestone of a Dutch trader that dates from 1778. By far the most famous gaijin bochi in Japan is the Foreign General Cemetery in Yokohama, in the Naka Ward region that's been popular with foreign residents for more than 150 years, and it's up there with Chinatown and the Marine Tower on my list of attractions to hit when I'm visiting the city. The cemetery was commissioned by Admiral Perry himself, who requested a place for Westerners to be buried when one of his sailors died during his second visit to the country in his fleet of "Black Ships" in 1854. Whenever I'm there I like to walk through the headstones and wonder what these early sojourners to Japan experienced here, and how things compare to today.

The famous Gaijin Bochi in Yokohama

It's Tough Being an Expat in Japan

Being an expat in another country involves making certain compromises you'd never consider at home. In Japan, it means giving up familiar things like good American peanut butter for the triple-sweet stuff they sell here, or drinking at a bar where the most exotic beer on the menu is Budweiser, or knowing that the box of Kellogg's "Corn Frosty" you just bought wil be gone in two mornings, since it's so tiny. Then there's ignoring the fact that the nachos you were so excited to find came with a packet of tomato sauce instead of salsa, or trying to smile while eating s'mores with your daughter's Girl Scout Troop made with Saltines instead of Graham crackers, since they don't have any Graham crackers in Japan. When I got here in 1991, the world was a very different place, and foreigners here really couldn't be choosey about anything: there was one decent English book store in the entire country, and if you wanted to buy some books, you took the train to Shinjuku and visited the sixth floor of Kinokuniya Book Store. Similiarly, if you wanted to watch some TV in English, you tuned in to Beverly Hills 90210, since there was nothing else on. All-in-all, things have improved immensely, thanks mostly to the Internet but also thanks to various American companies entering the Japanese marketplace and forcing many outdated, dinosaur-esque Japanese companies to change.

This is Takashimaya Times Square and Kinokunia (to the left) in Shinjuku's South Side. It's one of the nicer areas of Tokyo. There's a Krispy Kreme nearby too, but I haven't wanted to wait in the 2+ hour long line just to buy doughnuts. Do you like the replica of the Empire State Building?

About Kanji and Land

One of the stranger aspects of Japan's kanji-based writing system is the way many people lose some ability to write characters as they get older, although reading skill is generally not affected. I can read around 2500 kanji, including both the kun (Japanese) and on (Chinese) readings of most characters. My ability to write said characters is another matter, however, and since I haven't studied the language formally for a decade or more, my writing skills are far lower than my reading. (I used to do "kanji battle" tests with my kids as they progressed through elementary school, but had to give it up because I kept getting beaten too badly.) As a foreigner I can perhaps be excused, but the phenomenon happens with native Japanese too: when J-List employees like Tomo or Yasu have to write something by hand in Japanese, it becomes a little more difficult to recall how to write the characters properly. The primary reason for the decline in kanji writing ability is the rise of pasocon (personal computers) and keitai (cell phones), which make producing kanji as easy as hitting a button until the character you want comes up. The technological advances we enjoy have brought great convenience, but at a cost, since almost everyone in Japan's ability to write kanji is lower than it was a generation ago.

Yes, after studying Japanese at SDSU then living here for 17 years (ack! I shouldn't have calculated that), I'm generally able to read most of the kanji characters that I happen across, unless I pick up a book about a specific subject I have no experience in, like biology or Buddhism; Japanese history is also a challenge, since by its nature it's filled with archaic characters that are no longer used, but which are still important when talking about the past, which sucks since it's one of my favorite subjects. Once I was driving with my wife and saw a character on a sign that was new to me; it turned out to be bunjo (分譲), literally meaning "dividing of land into smaller lots for sale." In a country where half the population of the U.S. is crammed into a space 1/25 the size, there's not really any "new" land for people to use, and a major way land is acquired is by waiting for some larger patch of it -- a factory that moved to a new location, or agricultural land being opened for development -- to be divided into smaller lots that people can snap up. Our own prefecture of Gunma is very conservative, and there's a constant battle between groups that want to keep land zoned for agricultural use from being developed, versus people who want to do things like build houses on their own land, and it took us a year to get permisison to build the J-List office, since our land happens to be in one of these special agricultural zones. In Tokyo, the dynamics are different, since there are so many people and so little land, and it's not uncommon for someone to cram a three-story home on a ridiculously tiny plot no bigger than three parking spaces.

All About Japanese Futons

Before you left for work today, did you hang your bed out of the window to dry in the sun? That's what millions of Japanese do each morning, if they sleep on futon, the traditional fold-away bedding that's been used since, well, forever. A Japanese futon is basically a soft sleeping mat, a separate foam mat that goes below that, and a thick blanket on top. Futons are enormously convenient for living in small spaces because they can be folded up and put away in a closet during the day, which allows a room to fulfill two separate roles. Because the sleeping maps absorb sweat, they can become damp, which is why they're hung from the balcony to dry and kill germs; there's almost nothing nicer to sleep on than a Japanese futon that's been hung and beaten to get any dust out of it. While traditional futons are nice, it can be a chore to put them away each morning and lay them out again at night, and over the past couple of decades, there's been a tendency for Japanese to switch to Western-style beds instead, something that my wife's parents recently did when they "reformed" (remodeled) their bedroom last year. Even if they opt for conventional beds for themselves, most every household in Japan has a "guest" futon for use when unexpected visitors need to sleep over, which is great because it takes up almost no space when not in use. Companies often sell wooden-frame futons in the U.S, but these are very different from traditional sleeping futons in Japan, and they're not sold here at all.

Japanese Kanji Names and Goggling

I wrote recently about how Japanese names are (usually) written in kanji, and how there are many possible ways of writing a particular name, just as many Western names have various alternate spellings. One of the challenges when making a new business contact in Japan is learning the person's name characters properly, which is one of the reasons for meishi or "name cards," what business cards are called here. It's extremely rude to write someone's name using the wrong characters, and when it comes time for J-List to send the customary mid-year gifts to the various companies we do business with (distributors, the makers of the anime dating-sim games we publish, and so on), we check carefully to make sure every gift is properly addressed using the correct name. An interesting facet of names being written with unique kanji characters is that when you perform a search using Google or Yahoo in Japanese, you need to already know the correct kanji if you want to get any results. Since this isn't always possible, Japanese net users will often do a search using hiragana or romaji (the Roman alphabet), which generally brings up the Wikipedia page for the person in question, containing the correct characters so that a second search be made. The Japanese government maintains a list of officially approved "name kanji" to keep people from naming their children with improper or archaic characters that aren't used anymore, although parents sometimes take issue with the government telling them what names they can or can't use for their children.

Japan Olympic Update

Well, the Olympics are here, and Japan is buzzing with sports fever, hoping that their athletes will do well at the games. Ryoko "Yawara-chan" Tani, the darling of the the women's Judo world, was hoping to win her third consecutive gold medal -- her slogan was "Mama demo kin!" ("Even though I'm married and am a mother now, I'm going to bring home the gold!") -- but unfortunately she came away with only a bronze this time. Other athletes hoping to shine include the super-cute "table tennis idol" Ai Fukuhara, women's freestyle wrestling champions Chiharu and Kaori Icho (who are sisters), and the badminton doubles team of Kumiko Ogura and Reiko Shiota, nicknamed "Ogushio" by fans. Japan already has two gold medals, Masato Uchishiba in men's judo and Kosuke Kitajima in the 100m breaststroke, and they're hoping to add to that tally in the next few days. We wish them luck!

Smack that ball, Ai-chan!

The Ogushio girls playing badminton. It's very intense to watch ^_^ Since they work for / are sponsored by Sanyo, they train here in Gunma Prefecture.

Chiharu Icho is the on the left. She could probably kick my butt in no time.

Ryoko Tani, whose name was Tamura before she got married, is probably the single most famous Japanese athlete, who's been a judoka since the age of five or something, kicking and throwing girls much older than her. Bummer that she didn't get her third gold.

This is Yawara!, where Ryoko gets her nickname from. I put thepic here because I like Fashionable Judo Girls.

Types of Friends in Japan

It's funny how how tenuous the meanings of seemingly basic words can be. In English, the word "friend" is pretty straightforward, meaning someone you are somewhat well acquainted or friendly with. Most of my English-speaking "friends" are close in age to me, but I certainly could have a friend who was 25, or 45, or 75 if I wanted to. It's not uncommon for someone who is only a passing acquaintance to be labeled "friend," too, for the sake of convenience or to avoid being rude. In Japanese, however, the word tomodachi (which literally means "those who you go with") and it has a more "close" feel to it than the English word friend. Tomodachi in school years are almost always the same age; otherwise you'd use the term senpai (for upperclassman) or kouhai (for underclassman), which are quite different concepts in Japan's vertically-oriented society. Once, my son was playing dodgeball with a boy he'd known since preschool -- they've played together for years. I talked about the boy with my wife, using the word tomodachi to refer to my son's friend. My wife corrected me, saying the boys weren't friends in that sense, but were instead osana-najimi (o-SAH-NAH NAH-jee-mee), translatable as "childhood friend," a concept that comes up in anime and bishoujo games quite a lot, referring to someone you've been very close to since childhood, and it seems to be both more and less than the English word friend. "An osana-najimi is different from tomodachi," my wife explained to me. "They're always there, and you don't even notice them after a while. You get so used to being with each other, it's like air."

In anime and the games we publish, of course, osana-najimi are all over the place. The standard pattern is the girl who comes to wake you up every morning because you are too much of a sleepyhead to get up yourself.

Bring on the Foreign Babies

I write a lot about how Japan is a homogenous place where everyone considers themselves as having come from the same genetic stock, which can be a useful vehicle for creating a more harmonious society despite the fact that there's actually quite a lot of variation in the local genetic make-up, with plenty of Korean, Mongolian, Russian, Ainu and other DNA hiding under the surface (including some I've contributed). The famous Japanese uniformity might be changing in the near future, though. A new statistic was recently released showing that one in 30 babies born in Japan had at least one foreign-born parent, reflecting both imigration as well as the popularity of kokusai kekkon (international marriage), currently 6.6% of all registered marriages. Japan is a fabulous country, but I for one would love to see some alternate cultural influences here, whether from Korea, Brazil, America or wherever, and an increase in foreigners settling here and raising families would help a lot. My half-Japanese daughter regularly has issues with the other kids who can't seem to understand why she's not completely in sync with them, but if each class had more students who were haafu or who came from other cultures outright, it'd be more acceptable to stand out. Remember my crazy theory that Japanese/foreign couples are less likely to fall into the same "sexless" rut that Japanese couples sometimes get mired in, and thus by intermingling with Japanese, we foreigners can do our part to help repopulate Japan.

I Left My Heart in Kamakura

If you ever come to Japan, be sure and visit Kamakura, a charming city located about 50 km south of the Tokyo-Yokohama sprawl, which makes a really nice day trip. A picturesque city by the sea with a very long history, it hosts many temples and shrines, the most famous being the Tsurugaoka Hachimangu, founded in 1063. Old stuff like this always floors me as an American, since nothing any ancestor of mine is half that old. Kamakura is most famous for the giant bronze statue of Buddha, the second largest in Japan, and this alone would make the city worth a trip even if it weren't one of the prettiest places in Japan. Kamakura is also home to one of the most famous train lines in Japan, the Enoshima Electric Railway (nicknamed Enoden throughout Japan), which has been in operation since 1900 and which is beloved by Japan's many train otaku, who come from miles away ride on it.

More Pictures from Japan

More pictures I had in my camera. Enjoy!

So nice to be back in Japan. I get to eat really good Indo again! In our prefecture the best Indian food can be found at a restaurant called Mahatma New Dehli, but we managed to find a place that's actually better.

Shot of where the warehouse will be. That's our house in the background, which is both 40 years old and very new since we've been adding onto it and "reforming" it so much.

It'll be nice having space to expand our stock once again.

More pictures of cell phones from Japan, since I had to go to au to cancel my old phone. This is a line of Color Therapy phones.

Follow up to Casio's popular "toughened" phone, which was one of the few keitai phones sold in Japan that was also available in the U.S. I have *no* idea why some of these Japanese phone makers aren't even trying to bring their phones out in the U.S. as well. It's bizarre, maybe it's not profitable for them for some reason?

Reason #722 to love Japan. Just sitting at the onsen and there's a variety show on anime theme songs, featuring the guy who sang the original Yamato theme.

It's funny how much cred these old guys have in Japan. My wife will regularly point out an actor or singer and tell me what anime history they have. Like Masato Ibu, the voice actor for Desler/Desslock from Yamato, or Narumi Yasuda, the actress who got her start singing the "Kaze no Tani Nausicaa" song. And this from a woman who doesn't have an otaku bone in her body -- it's just part of the cultural background here.

Fish, Japan and Me

When I was a boy, I had some issues when it came to fish. I lived on the East Coast of the U.S., and for some reason, going to the beach in the spring in Maryland meant seeing (and smelling) hundreds of dead fish that would wash up on shore, not really something the Beach Boys would be likely to sing about. Never one to give up easily, I remember going out into the water to try to swim, and feeling all those dead fish bumping against my body as I moved through the water, a trauma that pretty much turned me off of eating fish for the next twenty years. Happily, I came to Japan, a country that takes a lot of good things from the sea, and was able to develop a real appreciation for all types of fish, from sushi and sashimi to the many kinds of broiled fish eaten as part of Japanese cuisine. When going drinking with friends, I'm apt to pick an izakaya that offers really fresh fish -- there's nothing like everyone gathering around a delicious hokke (which the Internet tells me is atka mackerel - I can never remember its name in English) and grabbing the soy sauce-dabbed fish with chopsticks. To me, the pinnacle of fish enjoyment is a sushi restaurant called Edokko, located in Narita City, near the airport. If you've ever got a layover there and want to try the freshest fish in Japan, with neta (the fish part of sushi) that's so big it falls off the rice, head to Narita Station and ask any taxi driver where Edokko sushi is. We were there last weekend and I can still taste it.

I just love izakaya food.

Japanese Names

Japanese names are generally written in kanji, the Chinese characters introduced to Japan around the 6th century A.D. Family names, which are written before given names rendering the terms "first name" and "last name" fairless useless here, usually contain two kanji characters; as with English last names such as Smith, Japanese family names like Tanaka ("in the rice field"), Yamada ("the rice field on the mountain") and Ishii ("the stone well") seem to indicate humble origins, despite the insistence by every Japanese that their ancestors were samurai warriors. Until January of this year, women had been required to take their husband's family name when they got married, but the law was recently changed to allow for married couples with differing family names. When it comes to deciding on a name for a new baby, there are many choices available to parents: even for a simple name like Yuko, there are a half-dozen or so common kanji to choose from, or they can opt for no kanji at all, writing the name instead in hiragana for stylistic reasons. Because there are so many ways to write a particular name in kanji, it's quite common for people to have no idea how to read someone's name properly, and when two people meet for the first time, there'll often be small talk about what characters they write their name with.

This is Yamada Taro, the most common name in Japan, or rather, the name that everyone thinks is very common but is actually very rare, like John Smith in English or Ivan Ivanovich in Russian (don't ask me why I happen to know that).

iPhone vs the Giant Cell Phone Robot

I got my Japanese iPhone 3G, and am currently experiencing that state of gadget-derived bliss known as "Nerdvanna." While I was waiting for them to process my phone, I wandered around the Softbank store to check out what other models they were selling, so I could do my semi-regular "State of the Cell Phone in Japan" post and also see what kind of competition the iPhone was up against. There was quite a lineup: a water-resistent phone that can be submerged for three minutes without damage (great for people who check their mail in the bath, I guess), a very thin cell phone with a 5.2 megapixel camera, and models made specifically for young children or the elderly. The company's "Premium" line of phones that come with leather or wood-grain exteriors was very stylish, as was the vibrant series that offered a phone in any of the Pantone colors -- wow. Japan is very big on Wanseg, a sub-set (i.e. "one segment") of the digital TV spectrum that lets you watch fairly passable TV on your phone, and many models trumpeted this feature, even offering slidable screens so you could watch widescreen TV without turning your phone. This being Japan, there was even a phone that could transform into a robot, based on a popular drama called Keitai Investigator 7. Still, while the slender and stylish phone offerings were nice, I've been extremely happy with my iPhone. The ability to use the web and email almost as easily as I do at J-List, and extend the functionality of the phone with a killer new third-party app or three each week, have been a big win for me.

Fun Japanese Words to Learn

Life is a little more fun when you know Japanese, whether it's to communicate with nihonjin who can't use English or to catch the attention of cute Japanese coeds on campus. One word you can get quite a lot of mileage from is sugoi (sue-GO-ee), which means "amazing" or "incredible" and which can be used just about any time you need to praise someone. See a Japanese man who's adept at playing the Super Mario theme on an accordion? Just tell him sugoi! and your meaning will be instantly communicated. Then there's daijobu (die-JOE-boo), which means "okay" or "alright" and is generally one of the first words a person learns after coming here (well, one of the first anyway). Want to ask if someone is alright with your menu selection at a restaurant, or if they're okay after bumping into that drunk salaryman just now? Just say Daijobu? and they can reply, Daijobu (Sure, I'm fine). Finally, another fun short word you can find some interesting uses for is zan-nen (ZAHN-nen), which means "what a shame!" or "how unfortunate!" If someone misses the answer to a question or otherwise fails at something, you can pull this word out and get some laughs from them. It's used a lot by Japanese game show hosts when a guest makes a wrong answer and misses out on the $100,000 prize.

Familiar Things in San Diego

Hello from Japan, where the pound key on a phone (#) is called "sharp" (as in a musical note) and where screwdrivers come in "plus" and "minus" varieties.

Whenever I'm in the U.S., I like to "surf" the culture shock I naturally experience as a result of having lived for so long in Japan; it's fun to observe the differences between the two countries, from the size of a "small" drink to foods that really don't need to exist, like Chocolate Marshmallows. During my last trip, though, I was actually surprised at how many things I saw in San Diego that were quite familiar to me. First there was Book Off, a used book store chain serving the Japanese community of San Diego, which took me by surprise since they're all over the place here in Japan. Later I saw a sign advertising Gulliver, a Japanese company that buys used cars and resells them through its own network of dealers, a business model that makes sense in Japan, where there is no tradition of selling your own car through the Auto Trader. My wife and I went to the store to buy milk and found Yakult, the popular Japanese yogurt drink that's such an institution, they have their own baseball team (the Yakult Swallows), and in a movie theatre, we observed that they'd started showing commercials before films, another import from Japan (there's nothing like watching a commercial for Parliament cigarettes before a movie). But one of the biggest surprises came when we went to our local Costco. One of the employees heard us speaking Japanese, so he approached us and started reciting the prayer to Buddha, namyo horen gekyo, and told us that he was a member of Sokka Gakkai, the evangelical Japanese Buddhist religion which was founded in 1930 and which now has a presence all around the world. We came away from Costco with edamame beans and mikan (those little Japanese oranges), so we were feeling quite at home by the end of the day.