Speak Japanese using English Words you Already Know

You may know that if you want to to express "you're welcome" in Japanese you can say "don't touch my moustache" and the meaning will be communicated, since this phrase is similar to dou itashimashite. There are plenty of other English words that happen to match up closely with Japanese ones, from "cheek show" which sounds like chikusho! ("Damn!") to "bimbo," which happens to mean "poor" in Japanese (binbo). Some people will say "yada yada yada" to indicate unimportant details, but in Japanese the similar-sounding iya da means "no" or "I dislike that." When you announce something with a lot of fanfare you might say "Tada!" but this word (tada) happens to mean "free" (as in beer) in Japanese. Often everyday names seem to sync up with Japanese words in odd ways. I have a friend name Debbie who everyone calls Deb, but this isn't very flattering in Japanese as debu means "fat"; similarly, people named Jimmy might not want to use that name in Japan, as it happens to mean plain and boring (jimmi). You can sometimes combine names to make other words, like Ben, Joe (benjo) which means "toilet," or Joe, Ken (joken) meaning "condition." Finally, the name of Chewbacca from Star Wars sounds like someone who is crazy about kissing (chu baka), while his nickname of Chewie sounds like Japanese for "beware of..." (chuui), as seen in our popular Beware Perverts wacky kanji T-shirts. Now you know some (probably useless) Japanese!

You can speak Japanese using English words you already know!

Time to Buy a New Cell Phone

Over the weekend I went with my son to get him a new keitai, or cell phone. Portable phones are so ubiquitous in Japan that NTT has actually started removing some payphones from public areas due to lack of use. With the penetration rate for cell phones near 100%, things can get pretty competitive between the three cell phone companies, who offer bonuses of up to $250 for defecting from other companies. As usual, it was fun to browse the lineup of phones offered and see how they differed from what's available back home. While most phones sold in the U.S. are made by Nokia, Motorola or South Korean manufacturers, nearly all handsets sold here are from well-known Japanese companies, and you can buy co-branded units like a Sharp Aquos phone to go with your Aquos flat-screen TV or a "Wooo" phone sold by Panasonic under that brand. As usual the current lineup of phones are long on style, many being so beautiful you might have trouble identifying them as phones. Most support common features such as "1-seg" TV viewing, screens that slide sideways to allow you to view PC-style websites during your morning train commute and support for electronic payment systems that let you touch your phone to a magnetic plate to pay for train tickets, food and so on. I'm amazed at the breakneck pace the industry runs at, and the life of a given model of phone is only four months or so, after which time the manufacturers have to upgrade it or risk falling behind. Japan's cell phone culture is cool, but it may end up harming the country's long-term standing as a technically advanced nation: the phones are so good that many forgo owning computers, and thus often don't have basic skills that most of us take for granted, like how to use a spreadsheet.

Cell phones in Japan are fun, but are they harming Japan's future?

The Duality of Words in Japan

One of the skills you need to acquire when you come to live in Japan is the ability to deal with the "duality" of words, the strange tendency of linguistic concepts to split into two. For example, many European cities have two names, like Venice or Florence in English and Venetia or Firenze in Italian, and the Japanese seem especially adept at picking the city name you're least familiar with to use, causing confusion for English speakers. This eventually leads to a better understanding of the world, including that "win" (Wien) coffee with whipped cream on top has nothing to do with winning anything, and the wieners that kawaify your bento apparently come from Vienna. Any reference to a name from the Bible in Japanese will usually use the original Hebrew/Greek/Aramaic version, i.e. Yohane instead of John, so learning Japanese can lead to picking up other tidbits of interesting knowledge along the way. This idea of linguistic duality pops up in other places in Japan, too. First of all, there are fundamentally two ways to read any kanji, using the on or Chinese reading or the kun or Japanese reading. For example, you use the Japanese reading mizu for the kanji for water written by itself, but the Chinese reading sui when it's joined with other characters, like suido, "water pipe." Finally, virtually every place name in Japan comes in two versions, the modern one that everyone uses and the old Edo Period name. For example, Nagano Prefecture is famous for its soba noodles, and it's common for restaurants to advertise themselves using the old name of Shinshu, to associate themselves with the natsukashii (nostalgic) old days.

Bizarre Japan Mystery #442: "frankfurt" and "hamburg" are what frankfurters and hamburgers without bread are called.

Hey Baby, What's Your Blood Type?

I remember reading through old Saint Seiya manga back in college, wondering why they always write the blood type of each character along with their name, age and astrological sign, and now I know: in Japan, it's believed that you can tell a lot about a person's personality and character traits from his blood type. Type A people are neat, tidy, and plan things meticulously, almost to a fault. Type B are "going my way" (as the Japanese say), meaning that they do their own thing without worrying about the opinions of others, and don't plan things out in advance. They can be messy, and tend to act on impulse, too -- I am type B, and my wife is always commenting on why do some things I do based on my blood type. Type O people have a private world inside their minds, supposedly, and they're quick to become passionate about something, but then change to something else just as easily; type O people make good leaders. Finally, AB people have "two faces," one that they make in front of some people and another one they keep to themselves. Could there be something to it all? If you're feeling the urge to get into Japan's fun blood type culture, we've gotten in some cool phone straps today that let you announce your blood type to everyone.

Blood types mean a lot in Japan.

Newspapers in Japan Still Genki

Around the world newspapers are having a rough time as circulation continues to drop, thanks in part to the changes brought on by the Internet. This isn't really the case in Japan, where circulation at newspapers still remains high, around 10 million for the Daily Yomiuri and 8 million for Asahi Shimbun. Part of the reason for the relative health of the industry is related to how connected the large media companies are to everyone's lives here: Yomiuri, for example, also owns the Nippon TV broadcasting company and the Tokyo Giants. Also, newspapers sell for a higher price in Japan, $2 for the daily editions, making Japanese newspapers less dependent on advertising for profits. Finally, they benefit from people like my father-in-law who gets five newspapers each day, including three dedicated sports newspapers. While I like to sit back with a paper occasionally, I get most of my news from the net thanks to RSS feeds, which make it easy to follow just the information you want from news sites, blogs and other sources of information using dedicated RSS readers or services like Google Reader. (J-List also has an extensive RSS feed system too, allowing you to automatically view all updated products on the entire site, view new bento items only, and so on.)

Difficult English and the Japanese

"Where is your domicile?" This was what a Japanese man I ran into at a party asked me, by way of making small talk. It gave me pause because it's not the clearest and most direct way to ask someone where they live, although it's not grammatically wrong. There are quite a few instances where English-speakers living in Japan find themselves dealing with more complex words than they might be used to in their daily lives. When you go for a ride on the Shinkansen, there's a sign in English asking passengers to avoid smoking in the vestibule, which I gather is what the area between the cars is called. Another English word I didn't know before coming to Japan was "alight" meaning to exit a vehicle, which I encounter whenever I ride the bus to the airport. I guess the idea is that if you've gone out of your way to learn a language, there's a tendency to want to use the longest and most complex words you can. And I've been guilty of this, too: I remember stubbornly writing every word I could in kanji even though my Japanese friends told me that they used simpler hiragana for those words instead.

Why learn difficult words if you're not going to use them?

Japan and the Entrepreneural Spirit

The economy here in Japan has certainly been better, and it seems that every day brings more news of production being scaled back in this industry or that. A big part of the problem for Japan is that their economy is closely tied to exports, which exposes companies to extra weakness when there's a slowdown in the rest of the world. But there are other problems with Japan, or at least they look that way to me when viewed from my point of view as an American living here. First of all, the country is positively addicted to building things like dams and roads and quasi-educational facilities like the Chiaki Mukai Memorial Science Center, built to celebrate Japan's first female astronaut. These projects are important, except when they're a big waste of money, like the time our city became nationally famous when the mayor (who lived next door to me) decided that we needed a brand new Ferris Wheel despite the perfectly good one we already had. Related to this is amakudari ("descending from heaven"), in which government beauracrats guide large public projects through the approval process then retire to receive lucrative jobs with the companies that directly benefited from those projects. Another challenge is the low amount of "entrepreneurial spirit" among many Japanese. When I see news of employees getting risutora (what layoffs are known as in Japanese, from the English word "restructure"), I always wonder if one of them won't take the opportunity to make the proverbial lemonade and go into business for themselves. There are actually some benefits to starting a business in a recession, including lower costs, the ability to hire good people cheaply and a great chance to learn how to be a bootstrapper, but I've not met many Japanese who would agree with me. More often than not, they'd fall back on that famous Japanese mantra of sho ga nai ("it can't be helped").

Sometimes the Japanese seem to lack the entrepreneural spirit.

Rice and Japan

Rice is the staple food of Japan, eaten two or three times a day by most people, and it's so ubiquitous that the word for rice (gohan) doubles as the word for "food" or "meal." Japanese usually eat white rice steamed in electric rice cookers that are owned by virtually every household (although there other convenient ways to enjoy hot steaming rice at home). Rice is usually eaten as a side dish to other foods (hamburger steak, sashimi, etc.), and many Japanese imagine that Westerners each every meal with a big basket of bread on the side. Supposedly, the idea of eating a small amount of a main dish with a lot of rice comes from Japan's wartime past, when everyone was poor and had very little to eat except rice -- it was common for kids to eat Hinomaru Bento, or bento of white rice with only a single red pickled ume plum in the middle, so that it looks like a Japanese flag. The best rice in Japan comes from Niigata Prefecture, on the Sea of Japan side of the country (the Snow Country in Kawabata's famous novel, if you've read it). It's called Koshi-Hikari, and restaurants proudly boast of serving only this type of rice to their customers. The latest trend in rice is to print cute moe anime girls on the side, which seems to have helped sales quite a bit.

The latest trend in rice is printing cute anime girls on the packaging.

Critical Thinking and Japanese Education

Because my son goes to a special immersion school in which the curriculum follows the guidelines set down by the Ministry of Education but with 60-70% of the classes taught in English, there are some differences between the education he's receiving and a standard Japanese one. The other day we went down to the school to attend Parents Participation Day, and one of the events they had prepared for us was a debate in which the students would discuss issues like, should drink vending machines be put in the school, or should chemical fertilizer be used for growing crops. I thought the debates went well, with the students researching many interesting points on both sides, but my wife had a negative reaction to them, saying, "If they want to learn to debate, they should wait until university." It seems that critical thinking isn't something that's associated with compulsory education in Japan, and the idea of students taking stands on various issues was a strange one to my wife, although it didn't seem that odd to me. I wonder if a decade or so into the future debates like the one the students demonstrated for us might not be more common. One of the themes of Japan as a nation is that it cares a great deal about the image it projects to Westerners. When the collective body of gaijin living here points out things like, there is very little free-style essay writing in Japanese schools, the government reacts by adding essay writing, as they did some years ago; and when we foreigners voice opinions along the lines that Japanese students spend too much time studying, they introduce programs like yutori kyoiku, the national policy of "easy-does-it education" in which school hours were cut back to allow students more free time (a policy that's since been reversed due to Japan's poor standing in national tests against the other nations of Asia).

Japan often changes its educational practices in reaction to the opinions held by foreigners.

Japan's Most Loyal Dog

I was in Tokyo over the weekend, waiting for a friend at the most famous meeting place in Japan, the statue of Loyal Dog Hachiko in Shibuya. Hachiko was an Akita-ken owned by a university professor in the 1920s, who would wait patiently for his master to return on the train every evening. One day the man failed to return, having died of a heart attack while at work, yet the loyal dog continued to wait for his master for years until he eventually died, too. Local residents erected a statue to the dog which has become such a famous landmark that you can tell anyone in Tokyo "meet me at Hachiko" and they'll know the exact spot. I noticed that the Japanese Ministry of Finance was putting Hachiko to work this tax season, using his famous image to encourage civic-minded Japanese to accurately declare their income via a sign around his neck that read, "Have you filed your income tax declaration with the Tax Ministry yet? Please be sure and do it as soon as possible!"

Japan's most famous dog is put to work by the Japanese tax office.

My New Dentist

Ask any gaijin living in Japan about dentists here and you'll probably hear a lot of complaints. I recently changed dentists because my old one loved to break routine dental work into multiple visits, like the time he took 18 months to put in an implant I needed. My new dentist is much more efficient, taking only one visit to fix my mushiba, or "bug tooth," the oh-so-cute word for dental cavities in Japanese. Apparently he hadn't worked on many Americans, and he went out of his way to tell me that the material he was filling my tooth with was made by 3M in the U.S., and to carefully explain exactly what work had was doing, since foreigners have a reputation for wanting more information from dentists and doctors than they normally provide patients. Like many businesses in Japan, the dental clinic doubled as the dentist's family home, with an attractive glass-and-concrete front door for patients to enter through and a residence built above. This is a common practice in Japan, and most of the convenience stores in our prefecture feature rooms built above for the manager to live in. My own house follows this business + residence pattern, too: the rear part of our house is a two-story domicile for our family, and the front is the liquor shop my wife's parents run. That's right, I live in a liquor shop -- why do you think I like living in Japan so much?

Many business are designed with residences built into them.

Misconceptions between Japan and the West, or, Do they have McDonald's in America?

It can be easy to get the wrong idea about other countries, and it's not uncommon for people to carry misconceptions around with them for years. Like the student of mine who asked me if they had McDonald's in America -- she'd eaten Makudonarudo all her life and had assumed it was a Japanese chain. Or an exchange student friend of mine who was sure that HBO was some kind of euphemism for "H-video." Japan is famous for its love hotels, places where couples can spend some quality time together, important in this privacy-challenged country where people in their 20s often live with with their parents, and sometimes their grandparents. Before the current word had been coined, these establishments were referred to as "motels" (mo-teru), with the result being that many Japanese think that America is littered with love hotels along every freeway. We can get the wrong idea about Japan and the Japanese, too. When I arrived here, I was sure all vehicles would be unbelievably small, yet there are plenty of large cars on the road, and I even see imported Cadillacs quite often. I expected Japan to be so expensive I'd have to sell my retinas if I wanted to eat a steak, yet I can gorge myself on Indian food for far less than what it would cost me to eat at the Star of India restaurant in San Diego. Whenever there's an earthquake that makes the international news I know I'll get emails from family members asking if I'm okay, as if Japan were such a tiny country that every quake could be felt. In reality, Japan's about the size of California but spread out so that it would reach from New York to Dallas, so most quakes are too far away to be felt. Oh, and and teriyaki sauce? The Japanese almost never eat it.

Do they have Makudonarudo in America?

The Joy of Enlightenment in Anime

I've written before about the "joy of enlightenment," the mysterious thrill your brain gets when it solves a puzzle or gains some new insight. Being a student of Japan means having many opportunities to overcome large and small linguistic and cultural hurdles, and it's one reason I encourage people to take an interest in studying the Japanese language. After writing about how Japanese often show affection for famous stars, TV shows etc. by reducing their names into abbreviated versions like the anime series Kare-Kano (His and Her Circumstances) and Puri-Kyua (Pretty Cure), I realized that the currently popular show Toradora followed this naming system, and wondered what it could possibly stand for. I searched my memory for several minutes until the answer suddenly popped into my head: the female lead character is Taiga (tiger), which is tora in Japanese, while the guy she's maybe kinda sorta attracted to is Ryuji, written with the kanji ryu for dragon (dora). The satisfaction of having perceived the answer was great, not unlike the (incredibly rare) times when my wife has trouble remembering how to write a certain kanji character, and I'm able to produce it for her.

Taiga and Ryuji make a great couple.

Beef Bowl and other Domburi Foods

Although Japanese foods like sushi, sashimi and sukiyaki are famous all over the world, the Japanese have an incredibly varied diet. A week's menu might feature curry rice, the Japanese adaption of a British version of the famous Indian food; all manner of broiled, stewed or raw fish; a joining of Chinese and Korean cuisine with kimchee fried rice; a tasty plate of seafood pasta; and delicious omrice, an omelette over flavored rice with a ketchup heart drawn on top. One category of Japanese food I like is domburi, basically big bowls of rice with various things on top. The most famous of these foods is gyu-don, Japan's ubiquitous beef bowl, enjoyed a million times a day at fast food restaurants like Yoshinoya and Sukiya of Yokohama. There are other types of foods served on rice in a big bowl, like katsu-don, fried pork cutlet on rice (yum), or Oyako-don, which means "parent and child rice bowl" and contains chicken mixed in with eggs served on rice (hence the wacky name).

More Fun With Japanese Abbreviations: PA / IC / TPO / NG Edition

I talked last time about the Japanese penchant for abbreviating Japanese or kana-based English words, either to make unwieldy phrases easier to use or to show affection for their favorite drama, anime or tarento (TV talent). It's also quite common for Japanese to create English-based abbreviations for everyday words, which they invariably expect native English speakers to somehow magically understand just because they're written using the Roman alphabet. During GW (Golden Week) we might want to drive up to the mountains, so we'd get on the IC (interchange, or freeway on-ramp) then stop at a PA (parking area, or freeway rest stop) along the way to eat. While filming a CM (TV commercial), an actor made an NG ("no good," meaning an on-camera blooper), then forgot his TPO ("time, place, objective," i.e. his overall social situation) and cursed loudly. In some cases these abbreviated English words seem strange to Americans, but it turns out they've been imported from Britain, as with WC, meaning Water Closet (no, not that one). Anime fans tend to learn a lot of these specialized abbreviations, such as OP and ED (the opening and closing theme songs in an anime), or OST and BGM (original soundtrack and background music), which can lead to confusion when talking with non-fans who don't know what the heck you're talking about. Some of the "English" abbreviations that become popular in Japan are actually based on Japanese words, such as the slang KY, short for kuki yomenai or "can't read the air," referring to a person who isn't good at picking up on the feelings of those around him. Another slang word is TPI, supposedly used by high school girls to describe unfashionable males -- it stands for t-shatsu pantsu ire or a man who has tucked his T-shirt into his underwear.

A P.A. is a Parking Area, where you can buy food, gas etc. within the closed freeway system.

Japanese Snow Monkeys

Onsen (pronounced OWN-sen) are the volcanically heated baths that are so popular in Japan, and some hot springs like Arima Onsen near Osaka or Dogo Onsen on the island of Shikoku are mentioned in Japan's oldest written documents, indicating that the Japanese have been taking volcanically heated baths for longer than they've been writing kanji. But humans aren't the only creatures that like to take a hot bath here in Japan. If you visit Jigokudani ("Hell's Valley") in Nagano Prefecture, you might catch a glimpse of Japanese monkeys beating the cold of winter by going for dip in the hot water. Japan's "snow monkeys" are quite a famous image of winter, and the sight of a monkey family enjoying a hot bath together just like a human one is very touching.

Japanese monkeys take a dip in the hot springs.

Hey, let's go to Kyoto!

Spring is here, and that means something special to the Japanese: sakura, the cherry blossoms that make the country blaze with beauty for a week or so, then blow away in the wind til next year. Although the first blossoms are still a few weeks away, Japan is starting to buzz about the coming Season of the Sakura (no, not that one), which can be enjoyed in practically every park, temple and shrine when the time is right, so common are cherry trees here. For the next few weeks, we'll all be tormented by TV commercials beckoning us to Japan's beautiful city of Kyoto, showing the most breathtaking scenes of cherry blossoms you can imagine followed by the city's official slogan So da! Kyoto e iko! ("Hey, let's go to Kyoto!"). You can tell how passionate Japan is about its cherry blossom culture by studying the many related words they use, like kaika ("first opening of the flowers"), zenkai ("fully opened" i.e. full bloom), sakura zensen (the "cherry blossom front" that moves up the country), and so on. I'm certainly ready for some flower viewing with friends and family!

The cherry blossoms in Kyoto are as beautiful as the city's marketing machine is brilliant.

The Joy of "Haafu," Revisited

I've written before about the Japanese affinity for attractive faces that are haafu, or half-Japanese and half-Western, and it seems that every time I turn on the TV I see a beautiful star like Becky, one of the top "talents" in Japan these days. The popularity of hybrid features extends to newscasters like Crystal Takizawa or Helene Hayama, who have accumulated many fans with their unique un-Japanese look. This love of blended Caucasian features seems to fill a special need in Japan, a country that believes itself to be almost entirely of the same genetic stock, although this is largely a social myth. Foreigners can be scary and unpredictable, like the crazy man who stripped naked and took a swim in the Imperial Palace moat a few months ago, or they might speak rapidly at you in English, or do something else that's unexpected. But a person who combines both Japan and America or Europe will likely be more approachable, speak Japanese and do the things you expect them to do. To many Japanese, the blending of East and West represents the ideal, as visualized by the fashion doll Licca-chan, more popular than Barbie here. Licca's mother is a Japanese fashion designer and her father is a musician from France, and she can speak both languages. That's so cute! Of course, haafu stars are popular with J-List customers, too, as seen with enigmatic stars like who bring fans the best of both worlds like Maria Ozawa or Cecil Fujisaki.

Half-French Helene Hayama is a bridge between East and West.

Electronics Shop Language Lesson

Every once in a while I encounter a Japanese person who, for whatever reason, can't accept the fact that I speak their language. The other day I went to the denkiya (electronics store) to pick up some items and browse all the bright and shiny things they had on display. The store I was in had an excellent selection of Japanese massage chairs, and I decided to sit a spell and read email on my iPhone, since getting a shiatsu massage while doing email is a pretty cool combination. The minute I sat down, a female employee of the store appeared and, in rather broken English, started explaining the various benefits of owning a $3000 massage chair. Despite the fact that my replies and counter-questions were all in Japanese, she kept explaining in English, pushing buttons on the remote control to demonstrate the various functions of the chair. In the end I gave up and spoke English to the lady, who never seemed to register that I had lived in Japan for years and spoke the language fluently.

An electronics shop is a great place for a language lesson.

Japanese Kana Abbreviations

The other day my daughter asked me if I wanted to play Mari-Suma with her, and I replied that I'd rather watch an episode of Ame-Fani instead. She was speaking of playing Mario Smash Brothers on the Wii while I was talking about America's Funniest Videos, and we were both engaging in a rather strange Japanese custom of shortening words into smaller chunks. Like everyone, the Japanese don't want to use words that are long and clumsy so they developed a system of reducing words into (usually) four kana characters to make them easier to use. Foreign-derived words can be especially awkward, and so it's common to hear shortened words like Ame-komi (American comics), Yafu-oku (Yahoo auction) or pasokon (personal computer). The abbreviations are often created as terms of endearment by fans, and you could almost measure popularity based on which stars have these shortened Japanese nicknames and which do not, i.e. Brad Pitt is more popular than Harrison Ford because everyone says Burapi but no one uses Harifo. Anime series and games often receive the abbreviated name treatment, too, like Mari-Mite for Maria Watches Over Us or Sukisho for the game "I Like What I Like, So It Can't Be Helped" (also a slogan on a popular shirt we make). Some of the words you already know are actually the result of these Japanese word reductions, like the Nikkei stock average (short for Nihon Keizai Shimbun, or Japan Economic Newspaper) or Pokemon.

A book explaining the rules of Ame-Futo, or American Football.