Japanese Office Spaces

In the movie Tron, there's a great scene where you see this sea of cubicles going on forever, an extremely prescient visual for 1982. I'm pretty sure most people wouldn't look at that part of the film and say, "Wow, that'd be a great place to work!" but in Japan, that might not be the case. Japanese offices are nearly always open, with desks lined up in rows or facing each other so that the only privacy workers have at their desks is whatever reference books they can manage to stack around themselves. Before starting J-List I worked in the local City Office as a "Coordinator of Internationalization," helping to provide various services to foreigners in our city, and it was a rather unnerving experience, working in a room where 30+ people had a direct line of sight to me at any moment. Larger organizations use the open floor office model, too. Once I visited one of our distributors (Tohan) and was surprised to see the entire company working in one cavernous space with rows of desks and hundreds of people buzzing about, without so much as a cubicle wall to hang a Dilbert strip on. One interesting aspect of this open approach to workspace-building is that the bosses are in the same space as their employees, although usually with their desks set in a special location so they can oversee the employees attached to them. At least, working in this way adds a layer of transparency and democratization to the company as a whole, even if it wouldn't be much fun to work in.

The Power of Voice in Japan

The Japanese are masters of influencing emotions using voice, and I'm often amazed at the eerie beauty of the voices that enter my ear here. If you watch anime in Japanese, of course, you know how talented the Japanese voice actresses are, and their ability to bring to life a character that would otherwise be (literally) two-dimensional and inert is one of the major attractions of the genre. One of the most popular voice actresses in Japan today is Aya Hirano, who provides the voices for Haruhi Suzumiya, Konata from Lucky Star and Misa from Death Note, and she can do the most amazing things with a character. But the strangely compelling beauty of Japanese voices isn't limited to anime: you can find females who are specially trained to speak in a uniquely soft way in various professions, too, such as female bus guides, who entertain passengers on long sightseeing trips; ground hostesses, those airport employees who call out your flight number in the most delightful sing-song tones; and Japan's legendary elevator girls, the uniformed women who stand in the elevator and announce each floor for you (although they've almost completely disappeared). It's hard to describe the quality of these sweet voices, which are made possible by weeks or months of vocal training -- there's something about the way they dip down and back up again at the end of a sentence that casts a spell over me. But speaking in a cute voice isn't just for a few professions with high customer visibility. I'll never forget the time I called NTT, Japan's sprawling telephone and Internet provider, to get help with some computer hardware I was having problems with. The voice on the other end belonged to an extremely kawaii-sounding female NTT employee, and bastard that I am, I actually expected her to take down my information and then transfer me to some male technician who would tell me how to fix my problem. I was quite surprised when the cute voice quickly proceeded to help me debug my router and fix the TCP/IP problem I'd been having, solving it in no time. I had to hang my head in shame for a while after that.

Understanding Katakana English

I wrote last time that one of the challenges of living in Japan is getting accustomed to Japanese-accented English, sometimes called katakana English because of the way it's filtered through the syllable-based phonetic structure of Japanese. Back in high school, I listened to the old-school Macross song "0-G Love" for more than a year before it it dawned on me that the phrase was English -- the unfamilar pronunciation confused me enough that I wasn't even able to identify it as my own language. Of course, everyone has an accent when speaking another language, including me, and I might have similar challenges understanding the local English whether I was in Japan or China or Jamaica. Part of the probem is, the special nature of Japanese phonology makes words that are a single syllable to us (like "truck") into three when spoken by a Japanese person (torakku, pronounced to-RAH-kkoo). Some other vocal concepts we take for granted need to be remapped into sounds that exist in Japanese, which is why "where" sounds like "oo-eh-AH" and "twins" comes out like "tsoo-EE-nzoo," which can take a while to get used to. Then there are words that are used differently here, even though they're ostensibly English, like VIP and UFO, which are pronounced as "veep" and "you-fo."

Ah, Mari Iijima, you still got it...

Hot Japanese Female Politicians, Lack of Children

Taro Aso is getting down to business as the 92nd Prime Minister of Japan, forming his cabinet quickly after his landslide election. One of his first moves has been to appoint Yuko Obuchi, the 34-year-old daughter of the former Prime Minister who sadly died in office, as a new Special Minister in Charge of Measures Dealing with the Falling Birth Rate. Obuchi, who happens to hail from J-List's home prefecture of Gunma, might be the perfect person to serve as poster child for the issue, since she's got a lot of visibility as a young female lawmaker (following recent political trends, she's quite the hottie), and she has a one-year old baby, too. The problem of shoshika, literally "fewer children-ization" or the increasing dearth of children in Japan, has got a lot of people worried as its effects start to be felt in earnest, and Japan's population is projected to drop from 130 to 100 million by the middle of the century if things don't improve. Already Japanese cities are being forced to close some elementary schools, tearing them down or re-purposing them for use as general municipal buildings. There are many reasons why Japanese women are waiting longer to start having children and are having fewer when they do, with everything from the high cost of raising a child to changing social roles to a general lack of patriotic spirit among Japanese suggested. Prime Minister Aso will likely face more debate on the issue if an election is called in the next few months, as is expected, and the opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) has been floating a plan to pay each household $250 per month for every child they have. Personally, I'd feel better about bringing children into a world where the government is solvent and not wasting its money in silly ideas, but that's just me.
(This is a chart of the Japanese birth rate, going form 4.5 children per female in 1947 to 1.4 today. The dip you see in the middle is the year of Hinouema, the Year of the Fire Horse, 1966. According to superstition, girls born in this year are supposedly very headstrong, and parents avoid having children in this year to avoid having daughters that can't find husbands.)

Announcing the Beginning of Pocky Season

Chocolate Season has Begun! J-List is happy to announce the return of chocolate snacks to our website, now that it's cooled down here. We're busting out all the new flavors of Pocky for the 2008-2009 chocolate season, with an excellent new Crush Pocky in an extra large package and two new flavors of Dessert Pocky, the richest and most delicious stick snack ever. In addition, we've classics like Original Pocky and Men's Pocky back on the site. As usual, you can buy individual boxes or opt for shrinkwrapped cases at a special discount price.

Japan's New Otaku Prime Minister

Japan's next Prime Minister has been decided, and as expected, it's to be Taro Aso, who received more than 95% of the votes by his ruling Liberal Democrat Party. One of the few really interesting Japanese politicians, he worked his way through college at Stanford before his parents called him home to keep him from becoming too "Americanized," so he went to England to complete his studies instead. He mined diamonds in Sierra Leone, represented Japan in the Olympics in 1976 at Clay Pigeon Shooting, and he's quite technically minded, having assembled his own PCs from the motherboard up for the past ten years. When discussing Japanese politicians, the word "thoughorbred" often comes up, and this term applies to Aso-san as well: his father was a former cabinet member, his grandfather a former Prime Minister, and he's the great great grandson of Toshimichi Okubo, one of the most important reformers of the Meiji Restoration of 1868. It's well know that Aso-san is a fan of Japan's manga and anime culture, which has helped him attain popularity among younger Japanese, especially among 2channelers and the English anime-related blogosphere. He supposedly reads three volumes of manga a day, sometimes on the Diet floor, and much of the recent recognition of the importance of Japanese popular culture have come from Aso-san, who has said he would like to create an international "Nobel Prize" for manga. His interest in comics -- for example, he promoted education about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima using the famous manga story Hadashi no Gen (Barefoot Gen) -- has caused the term "Manga Diplomacy" to be coined, and it will be interesting to see how his ability to name all the Lucky Star characters will color his leadership. One of the most refreshing things about Japan is their ability to have elections without contemplating the religion of the candidates in question in the slightest. When I mentioned to my wife that Aso-san happened to be a devout Roman Catholic, a rarity in a Buddhist country like Japan, my wife was surprised to hear it. At no time had the issue even been brought up by the Japanese news media.

This is the picture that "outed" Aso-san as an otaku and won him millions of fans on the Internets. They call him Rozen Aso now.

Wisdom on Living in Japan

When foreigners come to live in Japan, there are certain skills they will need to acquire. When I first arrived in Japan back in 1991, I was surprised to see that almost none of the roads in Japanese cities had names, which made it extremely difficult to learn my way around. I had to get good at visualizing routes inside my brain and learn how to refer to roads in vague terms ("the road with the beauty shop and the convenience store") when asking for directions. Another skill is getting accustomed to the accents of Japanese people you'll be interacting with, which can be quite a challenge, as your brain doesn't immediately understand that someone asking for uu-OH-tah wants a glass of water. When speaking Japanese with people, you'll need to get good at identifying the subjects of sentences since they're often left off when the meaning is otherwise clear from the context, or at least faking understanding in certain situations, such as the time I was picked to stand up and conduct the Maebashi Philharmonic playing Beethoven's Symphony No. 5. Afterwards, the MC asked me something that I didn't catch, and rather than embarrass myself on the stage with hundreds of people watching me, I replied with the non sequitur so desu ne, which should mean "yes, that's so" but in effect doesn't mean anything.

Speed Racer Service Centers

Would you get your car serviced at a Speed Racer Service Center? I sure would. It's an interesting gimmick by entrepreneur and former Super GT race driver Tetsuji Tamanaka, who licensed the characters from Tatsunoko Production's venerable "Mach GoGoGo" to create a chain of Speed Racer-branded service centers, gas stations and used-car dealerships designed to bring a well-known face to the "total carlife support" they offer their customers. The familiarity of the character Go Mifune (as Speed is called in Japanese) combined with the current income level of the generation that grew up watching the original show has proven to be a big win for the company, which is opening franchise shops throughout Japan that do everything from buying used cars for sale through its national network to auto painting and that annoying sha-ken car inspection that drivers of older cars must pay $1500 for every two years. This isn't the only company that ties anime to car culture: there's also a chain of car repair shops that uses the famous Space Battleship Yamato logo and characters to promote themselves. These businesses are somewhat unique though: while anime is enjoyed by literally everyone at some point in their lives here, it's not usually something you see while driving down Main Street very often. Like Cowboy Bebop and Akira, Mach GoGoGo is one of those shows that became far more popular internationally than it ever was inside of Japan, and I for one am glad to see that Speed Racer hasn't been forgotten in the country of his birth.

Of course, they also have their own sexy Race Queens:

Trying to Get Into the BBC

I got a good laugh the other day while watching an episode of Comedy Central's The Daily Show. During the "Moments of Zen" compilation of coverage of the two political conventions, British comedian John Oliver tried to walk into the BBC's preparation room, despite not having an official pass. "I'm British," he said, with his proper accent, "and you don't need a credential to be British. My voice is my credential." It was extra amusing to me because I'd done a very similar thing in Japan. A decade or so ago, they held an international speed-skating competition in my prefecture, so I decided to go check it out. As I went to find my seats in the bleachers, I happened to notice a door for coaches and other VIPs, most of whom were from the U.S. or Europe, and on a hunch I wondered if I could get into that room just by being American. The Japanese person watching the door didn't want to let me in at first, but the right mixture of appearing to be in a hurry and speaking English at him rapidly got the job done, and I got to enjoy the skating competition while helping myself to beers and munchies. It wasn't very nice of me, of course, but it was an experiment I felt had to be made at the time.

(The BBC bit starts around 3:10 or so)

Wacky English T-Shirts!

During the Sports Festival, I engaged in a little hobby of mine: hunting for bizarre English T-shirts. For some reason, the parents who attend these sporting events often choose to wear T-shirts with the most interesting English phrases on them, so every year I walk around with my camera and see what I can see. My search got off on the right foot when I came across a young woman whose shirt said, "Gluttons: Smile Positive and Good Heart," followed by a man whose shirt proclaimed "Make Up Foundation For This World." Some of the slogans I saw seemed quite deep ("Music: Make a Recording, Life 83% Full"), while others were more perplexing ("Sense of Pitch 1962, Rosegirl"). Sometimes the messages were silly ("You're my Hearo [sic], Fashion Icon!!") while others tried to offer insight into that elusive concept of "freedom" which Japanese often associate with the USA ("Liberty Bell is Prime Wish -- I Love Me"). Of course, no one gives a second thought about what their T-shirts have printed on them in Japan, since for most people, English is primarily a decoration that's considered kakko ii (cool) and not something actually used for communication, which is why there's no problem with displaying a message like, "Definite Difference: That Oneself Cannot Be Ruled Is Not Free." Of course, we've been known to sell a wacky T-shirt or two here at J-List, but in Japanese rather than English. If you like the idea of having a wacky shirt with aesthetically beautiful kanji that no one around you can read, why not browse our lineup now?

Here are some of the pictures I took:

Autumn in Japan: School Sports Festivals!

Autumn is upon us, and in Japan that means one thing: School Sports Festival, a special event held at all elementary schools where kids run relays, do tug-of war, have egg toss competitions, perform dances that they've been practicing for months, and so on. Known as undo-kai in Japanese, pronounced "OON-doh-kai" and having nothing to do with the undo feature on your computer, the Japanese tradition of a special day when kids can show off their athletic abilities to their parents began in 1874 when an English teacher named Frederick William Strange organized the first "outdoor games" as a way for Japanese to learn about Western sports. Today, Sports Festivals are held across Japan, which turns out to be quite profitable for companies like Panasonic and Sony, who are all too happy to sell this year's hot new video cameras to all the oya-baka ("parent-fool"), the word for parents who go ga-ga filming their own kids. Saturday was my daughter's last Sports Festival of elementary school, and we dutifully gathered to cheer her on during the various events she was in. It's an annual tradition at the school that the sixth graders treat everyone to a brass band performance of the theme to Space Battleship Yamato, aka Star Blazers, and everyone did a great job.

Cash Society Japan

I remember my first payday after coming to work as a teacher in Japan, being handed an envelope containing my entire month's salary in cash, which was quite a surprise to me. Japan has always been a very cash-oriented society, with no equivalent to personal checks or money orders, and when making purchases most people will pay in 10,000 yen bills. Credit cards exist here of course, but they're much less common than in the U.S., and to get one you need to pass a strict credit check and have been employed at the same company for at least a year -- a far cry from the pre-approved credit cards I'd get in my mailbox back in college. A few years ago, we bought the plot of land behind our home, I remember going to pay for it in cash, counting out the bills for the previous owner as we finalized the contract. Of course, the only thing constant in the world is change, and Japanese are slowly adopting alternate ways of paying for products, such as Suica, a rechargeable contractless smart card that can be used to pay for train tickets, food purchases and so on. One of the most innovative ideas I've seen in a long time are the cell phone with Suica cards built into them, so all you need is your phone and you can pay for just about anything.

Of course, if you want cash we've got both yen and dollars on J-List.

Food Fraud

Each year the organization that publishes the Standardized Kanji Test announces the "kanji of the year," the character that best sums up the events of the past twelve months. Previous characters have included inochi (life) in 2005 to mark the terrible young lives lost in suicides that year, tora (tiger) due to the historic Hanshin Tigers' victory in the Japan pennant, and ikusa (war) in 2001, when the U.S. invaded Iraq. The kanji of the year for 2007 was nise (nii-SAY), meaning "fake" or "fraud," due to the large number of food-related scandals that became news, including a famous restaurant caught labeling normal meat as high-grade Kobe beef and serving leftovers to customers, a confectionery company that sprayed water on stale slices of cake so they'd look fresh enough to sell, and Hokkaido-based "Meat Hope," which despite its awesome name got in trouble for intentionally mis-labeling its products. So far, 2008 has been more of the same as food scandals continue. The most egregious one so far has been a company called Mikasa Foods, which bought inedible rice that had been contaminated with pesticides and seawater (it said) for use in glue production. In reality, it relabeled the rice and sold it to more than 370 companies, which used it to manufacture everything from food to sake to beer and more -- bleah.

Fall Traffic Safety Week

It's time for Traffic Safety Week in Japan, when awareness of various automotive safety issues is raised throughout the country. Originally begun in 1948 in response to the increase in motor traffic in regional Japanese cities, the government officially adopted a twice-annual Traffic Safety Week system in 1962, designating April 6-15 in the spring and September 21-30 in the fall as special periods to promote "safety driving" (as the Japanese invariably call it). Everywhere you go for the next ten days, signs and flags will remind drivers to slow down, and there'll be plenty of police checkpoints looking for drunk drivers, people not using their seatbelts, and so on. Since Japan is crisscrossed by so many railroads there's a big problem with drivers trying to run train crossings as they close, and during this week groups like the Lion's Club will stand at train crossings wearing Haruhi Suzumiya-like "traffic safety officer" armbands to make sure drivers stop at the train crossings properly. The Japanese care a great deal about traffic safety, and often carry Shinto good luck charms specifically made for that purpose.
Yes, nothing gets the chicks like traffic safety awareness.

Ne-ver Ending Japanese Grammar Lesson

If you've paid attention while watching Japanese anime or, ahem, other videos in Japanese, you've might have noticed the word ne. This is an interesting Japanese grammatical particle that usually goes on the ends of sentences and serves several purposes, mostly related to asking for confirmation of information or agreement with an opinion. Here are two examples:

アイスコーヒー二つですね？ Aisu kohii futatsu desu ne?
You'd like two glasses of iced coffee, is that right?

今日は、暑いですね。Kyou wa atsui desu ne.
It's hot today, isn't it?

Other functions of the all-purpose Japanese particle ne include softening a sentence so its meaning it less harsh (Chotto furorimashita ne. You've gained a little weight, haven't you?); emphasizing what you want to say (Kondo chanto kiite kudasai, ne. Please listen closely next time, alright?); working as a pause in sentences, like "um" in English; and to get the attention of the listener before speaking. Girls use ne more often than men and with a higher intonation, so males should use the word with caution lest they appear effeminate, although guys speaking Japanese will mess this up all the time (it's part of our charm). Even if you don't speak any Japanese at all, just memorize the phrase ne! and pull it out whenever a Japanese person says something you want to agree with, and watch the look of surprise on their face.

Kawaii, ne?

All About Older Japanese

Most Western nations are facing the problem of ageing populations, but Japan is really leading the pack, with its combination of a very low birth rate, healthier diet and a good medical system. Japanese older people are just like elderly from any other part of the world, sometimes friendly and interesting to talk to, and other times unwilling to take crap from anyone as they dive for the last pair of shoes at a department store bargain sale. As an American living in Japan, it's can be interesting to strike up conversations with older Japanese, who will often talk about what the war years were like for them, or the time they saw General MacArthur, and there's an unspoken acknowledgement of all that's changed in the past 60 years. Since it's generally expected that the oldest son or daughter will take over the family house and care for the parents in their silver years, elderly folks generally have the benefit of lots of family around them, at least in the semi-rural prefecture where I live. Partially because of this system, and also (I've been told) because Japanese rarely leave the area where their family grave is located, you don't see people migrating to a different part of the country when they retire as is the case with Florida. The main social activity of Japanese retired people seems to be going to the doctor's office every day to sit and chat with friends while they wait to be seen by the doctor for some (usually imagined) pain, and if you ever get sick in Japan you'd better have a strategy for getting to the doctor's office early. While most of the older people living in my neighborhood are very genki (healthy, full of energy), there's one poor woman whose back is stuck at a 90 degree angle, making her unable to stand up at all. I'd always assumed this problem came a lifetime of planting rice by hand, but supposedly it's caused by a chronic vitamin B1 deficiency that was a chronic problem in the first few decades of the 20th century.

Social Security Hotel

I went to Tokyo to meet a friend yesterday. He's working for the prestigious Tokyo University, the top ranked school in Japan, and it was interesting to take in a part of the city I'd not seen much of before. The hotel we stayed at was called Eminasu, and I was surprised to see a large sign stating proudly that the hotel had been built with money from the National Pension System, the equivalent to Social Security in Japan. Yes, there's so much money sloshing around in funds like the pension system and Japan Post deposit accounts that legislators are quite unable to keep their paws off it, and regularly launch grand hakomono (lit. "box-thing") construction projects to foster economic development, provide services for citizens and (of course) secure lucrative employment for the former government employees who were directly involved with said projects when they retire. (This is known as amakudari or "descent from heaven.") Sometimes the system works okay, as in the case of the hotel we stayed at, providing a good room at a slightly subsidized rate since the government-operated hotel didn't need to generate a profit. But there are plenty of horror stories of massively wasteful construction projects made with taxpayer funds, like a sprawling resort hotel at the top of a mountain that no one ever stayed at and a now-bankrupt theme park designed as a replica of a Turkish village, complete with a full-sized Trojan horse. How fitting.

They have these hotels all over. You can stay at this one in Kyoto if you like.My hotel room was $80 per night, so I presume the ones in Kyoto will likely be the same.

The rooms certainly look nice!

Japan's Internet is #1 in the World

Japan has the best Internet connectivity in the world, according to a newly released study which compared actual data-transfer rates and overall customer satisfaction by Internet users around the world. Sweden came in second, followed by the Netherlands (#3), South Korea (#5), Germany (#9), France (#12), the U.S. (#16) and the U.K. (#24). The results were interesting to me because Japan lagged behind the rest of the world in adopting the Internet throughout the 1990s, with significantly higher prices and lower connection speeds. A lot of the slow Internet development was due to NTT, the 800 lb gorilla of the telecommunications world here, a former government-run monopoly that owned all the lines ISPs needed to lease in order to do business, and which generally kept a lot of competition out of the marketplace by functioning as the country's largest ISP directly. It turns out that having a less competition might have been a good thing in the case of Japan, since NTT and its subsidiary companies were able to execute technology roll-outs more efficiently than if it'd been up to a hodge-podge of companies, as is the case with the U.S. J-List connects to the net through hikari fiber or an optical fiber line, although it was a long wait to get our office wired for the fast connection. We actually had to make a formal request to the mayor's office (my wife happens to have the same last name as him, so we let the staff think we were related), and they passed along our request to NTT, who made sure J-List was the first customer connected in our city. Having fast, efficient Internet despite the lack of competitive pressures might seem puzzling, but it's quite common for Japan to seemingly violate the rules of Capitalism yet have things turn out okay in the end.

Wither Morality in Japan?

"Children who are able to greet others properly won't be steered wrong in life." This is one of the many tidbits of wisdom hung on metal signs put up by our local PTA, and every time I drive down a street I haven't been on before I'm strangely compelled to keep my eyes open for new signs. "People who don't show respect to their parents won't receive it from their own children." Japan is a unique industrialized nation in that its ideas on morality were never based on the Bible, unlike Western countries, and I've always been interested in how the Japanese define the concept. All elementary school kids have a class called dotoku (morality) in which they learn about various (of course secular) issues, such as how recognize and stop ijime, how to be thankful to others, and so on. "Weak-minded children are caused by over-protective parents." Yes, pinning down the basis of Japan's thinking on morality is a challenge. Is it based on Buddhism? I haven't been able to identify any active lessons that Japanese Buddhism imparts to its followers other than to be respectful of your family members, especially those who have gone on to the next world. It's a question I hope to find the answer to some day.

This one says, "Parents show their loving concern for their children when they offer advice to them." Sounds lame in English but better in Japanese.

A Taco Revolution in Japan?

"How many Taco Bell sauce packets do you have in your glove compartment?" I've got a lot, and whenever I go to the U.S. I make sure to bring back more, since they're awfully convenient and taste good, too. We had soft tacos for dinner the other day, and it was a reverent experience, with everyone making each taco with care and eating it slowly, savoring each bite. Unlike Hong Kong with its mish-mash of food cultures, with all manner of cuisine from Asia, Europe and everywhere else mixed together, Japan can be rather closed-minded about what it eats, which makes it hard to find some of my favorite items. The amazing thing about the tortillas we ate this time, though, was that they were bought here -- I kept re-reading the Japanese text on the package, unable to believe my eyes. Could this be the beginning of a renaissance of culinary internationalization in Japan? My fingers are so crossed.