My Favorite Japanese Word: 勤勉 (kinben)

One of my favorite Japanese words is 勤勉 kinben (pronounced keen-ben), which means industrious, diligent, and studious. Just as America has always had the Protestant Work Ethic to serve as a model for what hardworking people should aspire to, Japan values diligence and hard work as excellent traits for a person to adopt. Doing an hour or two of overtime each day is probably the norm at most Japanese companies, where employees show their やる気 yaruki (hardworking spirit) to their colleagues and boss in a unit that everyone can easily recognize, time. The pinnacle of the kinben concept of hard work is the 徹夜 tetsuya, which means working all night in order to get the important project finished, and if an employee pulls an all-nighter to get his work done on time, he'll probably gain a lot of respect from his boss and coworkers. This Japanese tradition of working and studying hard has rubbed off on my son, and as he prepares to take the last tests of his high school career, he can often be seen cracking the books until 1 am or later, something that would have been unthinkable for me until I got to university.

A Japanese proverb: "Diligent hard work is the mother of success in life."

Traditional Kimonos and Japan

When I came to Japan back in 1991, Terminator 2: Judgment Day was playing in theaters, the first George Bush was President and the NCSA Mosaic browser -- the first program we'd be able to identify as a web browser -- wouldn't be released for another two years. My first impression upon arriving at Narita was surprise at seeing even more Asians here than in San Francisco followed by general amazement at the number of high-tech vending machines selling canned coffee to me. I was also surprised to see several women wearing kimonos in the airport or on the train, which seemed impossibly beautiful to me. Kimonos are one of the most famous traditional clothing of Japan, still an important symbol of the country despite the fact that most Japanese only wear them a few times in their lives, such as at weddings or coming-of-age ceremonies, though the wife of a former president of the Sapporo Ramen company I used to teach English to wore a kimono often. Naturally there are several variations to what we think of as a kimono, including yukata (colorful cotton kimonos, usually worn at summer fireworks festivals), happi (a short summer kimono), and so on. If you're interested in Japan's beautiful kimonos and other traditional apparel, we've got some interesting items for you to browse.

Traditional kimonos in Japan.

We Love Strong Anime Females

If you want to make an anime drinking game, there are plenty of classic situations you can start with. Like, take a drink whenever a school club's existence is in danger because there aren't enough members, whenever a male main character is brave enough to fight demons with his bare hands yet can't summon the courage to ask a girl for a date, whenever a character that was just introduced in an adversarial role becomes the new "transfer student" in the class at the end of the episode, or whenever a character trips and falls in a way that provides fanservice. Another theme that's seen quite a lot is strong female characters who fight to defend the men they love, boldly declaring 守ってあげる mamotte ageru ("I will protect you"). Whether it's Mikasa fighting to save Eren, Asuna defending Kirito after a betrayal or the classic Eva scene when Rei tells Shinji, "You won't die, because I'm going to protect you," strong female characters often end up becoming the most memorable in anime. Another good example of this theme is the new Witch Craft Works in which a mild-mannered male main character with no particular direction in his life (take another drink) finds that Ayaka, the popular school idol, is really a fire witch whose only goal is to protect him from murderous magical enemies.

Strong protective female characters are a big theme in anime.

Awesome Chocolate from Japan In Stock

Valentine's Day is not far off now, and J-List is loaded with unique Japanese chocolates, from Evangelion to Hello Kitty and awesome Japanese Kit Kat. Whether you're a female giving chocolate to the special boyfriend/husband/father etc. in your life (which is the custom in Japan) or are going the other way around, the gift chocolates we've got in stock right now are great!

The Japanese Love Mayonnaise

There are certain things the Japanese just seem to really like for reasons that are difficult for foreigners to understand. Like the Carpenters, whose music seems to be far more popular here than in the U.S. Or Colombo, whose crime-solving gruffness is popular enough that he can still be seen regularly on TV here. Another thing the Japanese like a lot is...mayonnaise! It's true: the Japanese love mayonnaise and put it in salads, on traditional Japanese dishes like Okonomiyaki, and even on pizza and french fries (often alongside ketchup, so you can dip your fries in either or both). A person who loves mayonnaise is known as a mayoler in Japanese, and this is a joke that pops up in anime from time to time. Last week there was some bizarre news from the Kansai area about a rash of attacks by a deranged 25-year old male who was attacking random people by squirting mayonnaise down their shirts. Happily the dangerous villain has been safely apprehended, making Japan safe for us all once again.

If you like mayonnaise, you should come to Japan right now.

Karaoke is a Mirror for Japanese Society

The J-List staff had fun at our New Year's Party on Friday, eating and drinking on J-List's tab as a reward for their hard work over the busy Christmas season, followed by a few hours singing "You wa Shock!" (YouTube link) at a nearby karaoke box. I've always been a fan of karaoke, having used it to help me learn Japanese, since learning vocabulary by memorizing songs can be an effective memory tool, plus it gives you new connections to the country that are more important than the vocabulary words you happen to pick up. Karaoke is a good topic to explain the concept of 空気 kuuki, which literally means "air" and by extension, the social atmosphere around a given group. When you pack ten people into a small karaoke box, obviously making sure everyone in the group has fun is important. I love to sing a lot, but if I hog the karaoke machine others might not be happy, so handing the karaoke book song input computer device thing to someone who hasn't had a turn yet is good manners. Japanese have a natural tendency to demure to others in social situations, a concept called 遠慮 enryo (to refrain from doing something out of politeness), and it's important to break through this by encouraging those who haven't sung yet to choose a song, of course without pushing too hard in case they really dislike singing in front of others. If you're with a group of otakus it's fine to sing anime songs to your heart's content, but this might turn off people from different groups, so I make sure my repertoire of songs includes general songs as well. People who aren't good at understanding the often complex social situations around them are called K.Y. in Japanese (for 空気読めない kuuki yomenai, meaning "can't read the air"), and part of learning a language like Japanese involves becoming sensitive to the subtle social cues around you.

You can learn a lot about Japan from singing karaoke.

Do You Love Super Sonico?

Last night I started watching the new Super Sonico The Animation series, a fun show if you like music, fanservice and the ever-voluptuous Sonico-chan. Sonico is more or less the modern embodiment of moe: stylish and feminine with amazingly large, er, eyes, and her "charm points" are her doji chara (cute clumsy girl character) nature and the AKG headphones that have apparently been surgically fixed to her ears. Sonico is the semi-official mascot of Nitroplus, the company responsible for such awesomely dark visual novels as Saya no Uta, Deus Machina Demonbane and Steins;Gate as well as the Madoka Magica anime. Sonico made her first appearance at a musical event in 2006, and since then she's taken the company in a new direction, exploring the nature of moe cuteness and serving as a vehicle for everything from hug pillows to sexy figures. Since her name is somewhat similar to a certain famous electronics company, there's a tendency for Japanese to think she's an official character for Sony, which might explain why Nitroplus writes her name using hiragana rather than katakana, e.g. そに子 instead of ソニ子. Can you imagine of Sony were hip enough to make a character as cute as Sonico for their mascot? I'd kind of like to live in a world like that.

There's a new Super Sonico anime to watch, if you like really big...headphones.

2014 Anime Calendar Sale at J-List!

J-List is having a great 2014 Japanese Calendar Sale, with reduced prices on all calendars plus 25% off the total if you grab two or more, to help you help us clear the stock our. We've got everything from Totoro desktop calendars to Sailor Moon schedule books to awesome art calendars by Tony Taka and Shirow Masamune. Browse our selection now!

J-List New Year's Party

We're rushing today's update a bit because tonight is the 新年会 shin-nen kai or New Year's Party of J-List. Similar to the year-end parties held in December, a Japanese-style New Year's Party is an opportunity for companies or other groups to officially mark the start of a new year while engaging in "nomunication," that is, communication while getting smashed. We've reserved a room at a local izakaya, a traditional bar-restaurant that serves delicious food in addition to frosty mugs of beer and bottles of hot sake, where we'll eat and drink as we re-dedicate ourselves to the important work of building a bridge from Japan to the rest of the world out of Sailor Moon figures, Mountain Dew Cheetos and pantsu. Everyone have an awesome weekend, and enjoy the update!

Today is J-List's official New Year's Party. Time for sake!

Popular Cars in America vs. Japan

I saw that, for the 12th year in a row, the Toyota Camry was the top-selling car in the U.S. It was quite interesting to see because here in Japan the Camry is much less popular, coming in something like 65th in the sales rankings. Here the top selling car is the Honda N-Box, seen at bottom left, a very square car of a popular style known as ワンボックス ("one box") in Japanese. One trend that's been prevalent in recent years is young people showing less interest in buying large, expensive cars, and manufacturers have had to get good at creating small car designs that are fun and stylish while still costing under $14,000 or so. These cars often have colorful names like the Nissan Note, the Honda Vamos, the Daihatsu Naked or the brand new Suzuki Hustler (seen at bottom right), which is causing a lot of smirking on the Internet for some reason. Incidentally, if you ever wondered what the word Camry meant, it comes from 冠 kanmuri, which is Japanese for "crown." Toyota has a strange obsession with this word: they make a luxury car called Crown and have made cars named Corona (Spanish for crown) and Tiara in the past.

Popular cars in the U.S. vs. Japan are quite different.

The French Soldier Who Changed Japan

It can be fun to pick random people in Japan's history and examine them. Like Ranald MacDonald, the first English teacher in Japan, a bank employee who became obsessed with Japan's policy of national isolation, so in 1848 he caught a ride on a whaling ship and entered the country pretending to be a shipwrecked sailor. He was caught and imprisoned in Nagasaki where he taught English to government officials for several months before being sent home. Another interesting foreigner who played a role in Japan's history is Jules Brunet, a French military officer sent to Japan by Napoleon III to help modernize the army of the Shogun at the end of the Edo Period. When the "revere the emperor, expel the foreign barbarians" movement succeeded in symbolically "restoring" the Japanese emperor to power in 1868, a conflict called the Boshin War broke out, and Jules was right in the thick of the fighting. The pro-Shogun forces eventually fled to Hokkaido where, at Jules' suggestion, they declared a Western-style independent republic complete with elections and a president, though things came to an end a year later with the Emperor's forces invaded. While I love the age of Internet- and Amazon-enabled convenience we live in now, if I could go back in time to see the Japan that Jules Brunet saw, I'd do it in a heartbeat.

Jules Brunet participated in several battles that formed modern Japan.

Did you pick up new calendars for 2014?

J-List is happy to announce our big 2014 Japanese Calendar Sale! We still got an excellent lineup of popular anime, Japanese idol, art and photo and ecchi calendars from Japan, which are printed on huge glossy poster-sized pages that are great to hang on your wall. We lowered the prices of all calendars today, and as an extra bonus, you get an additional 25% off your total for grabbing two or more calendars. Tony Taka, Shirow Masamune, and Coffee Kizoku are all in stock, but only a few copies are left, so hurry!

Playboy Clothing Brand in Japan

There are some fundamental differences between Japan and the West, for example the way there are no anatomically-based swear words in Japanese, with the most common insult being 馬鹿 baka (stupid). When my daughter started junior high school, she went online with her mother to buy some clothes she needed for the coming school year, including brands like Beverly Hills Polo Club, School Scene, and of course, Playboy. Say what? It turns out that in Japan, the famous bunny logo is extremely popular with young girls, who think it looks oshare (oh-SHA-reh), or stylish, elegant and chic. Hiding my surprise, I asked her what "Playboy" was, and she replied, "It's a famous maker of girls' clothes. Don't you know anything, Dad?" I shrugged -- if the symbol was removed from its special meaning in the U.S., I guess it didn't matter if some 13-year-olds had little bunnies sewn into their socks. Of course sometimes it doesn't work out so well. A few days ago the Japanese internet reacted with shock when someone realized that one of the performers in a children's TV show had offensive English printed on her clothing (link NSFW).

Japanese don't think anything of a young girl with Playboy socks.

Entrance Exam Hell 2014

January marks the start of 受験シーズン (juken season), when thousands of Japanese high school students take the most important tests of their lives, the dreaded university exams, and junior high school kids also take exams to enter high school. These tests are so difficult that students prepare for them for a solid year (if not longer), and when my son did his "juken hell," he wasn't able to go see the newest Harry Potter movie with me because of his studies -- can you imagine being that focused on a goal at the age of 15? While many Japanese have to endure these tests twice (once to enter high school and again to go to university), my son had the good fortune to get into a high school affiliated with a university, so he's got a direct route in. Instead of an entrance exam, he had to write a long graduation thesis, and he chose to do an analysis of how different kinds of tastes are perceived, with a focus on the ramen served at his school's cafeteria. During his research he read several books related to nutrition and became quite annoying, constantly critiquing the nutrional value of the meals my wife cooked.

Japanese students are entering juken hell.

New Yuri Anime: Sakura Trick

So far the winter 2014 anime season is shaping up to be a good one, with several decent shows I want to follow. In addition to a Super Sonico anime and new seasons of the moe-tastic Saki and Chuunibyo, there's a new girl's love show in town. Being a card-carrying fan of yuri, or anime, manga or games about the drama that's created when girls fall in love with other girls, I was happy to see Sakura Trick, a no-holds-barred show about girls who become obsessed with each other and with kissing. There are several approaches to telling a good yuri story, for example with uplifting and stylized characters (Revolutionary Girl Utena), showing us the realistic nitty-gritty of relationships (Aoi Hana), or delivering both emotional and physical satisfaction, a trademark of the Sono Hanabira ~ A Kiss for the Petals series. You can also base your show around fun slice-of-life gags like Yuru Yuri, which seems to be the approach Sakura Trick is taking. While watching yuri anime is always fun, you can enjoy these themes in just about any anime thanks to the tradition of fans creating romantic relationships where none exist, which is known as "shipping" in case you're not familiar with the term, a word that comes from "relationshipping" which supposedly got started on X-Files discussion boards back in the 90s. Some usage examples include "I can't stop shipping Toshino Kyouko and Sugiura Ayano, orz" or "a certain swiming anime has changed the meaning of 'free shipping' forever." If you want to see some great yuri fanart pictures, follow J-List's Facebook, Tumblr or Twitter feeds!

Sakura Trick is a new yuri kissing anime I like a lot.

Big sale on 2014 Japanese calendars!

J-List is happy to announce our big 2014 Japanese Calendar Sale! We still got an excellent lineup of popular anime, Japanese idol, art and photo and ecchi calendars from Japan, which are printed on huge glossy poster-sized pages that are great to hang on your wall. We lowered the prices of all calendars today, and as an extra bonus, you get an additional 25% off your total for grabbing two or more calendars. Kantoku, Tony Taka, Shirow Masamune, and Totoro are still in stock, but only a few copies are left, so hurry!

Japanese Don't Expect Gaijin to Speak English

One theme I write about a lot is that Japanese don't always expect Westerners to speak Japanese, and will occasionally reply in barely intelligible English despite the fact that you're speaking normal Japanese to them. Over New Year's we visited my "J-Family," and my wife's uncle wanted to tell me about some renovations he'd made to his house the previous year. The only word of English he knew was "house," so he spent an hour talking to me in Japanese, but using that word in English whenever he needed to refer to his house. When I came to Japan I was so fired-up about learning Japanese, I'd refuse to speak English with Japanese people under any circumstances. Once a Japanese businessman kindly gave me the coin locker he'd been using, saying "please use this" to me in English, and I thanked him with fluent, polite Japanese. Later I felt bad: he'd probably only had this one chance to talk with a foreigner that entire year, and I should have graciously thanked him in English.  

A nice picture of a house. You are looking at the house, right?

 

Murder in Japan

One good thing about living in Japan is that it's a very safe country where you're unlikely to meet with violence and death. Yesterday I was reading through my RSS feed and saw the good news that murders in Japan had fallen to just 936 for 2013, the lowest number since World War II. It isn't all sweetness and light in Japan however, since when murders do happen, there's a tendency for the crimes to seem especially shocking and brutal, like the woman who killed her sleeping husband then sawed his body up, distributing the parts in various parks in Tokyo, or the tragic slaying of a 12 year old girl by her classmate in Sasebo, Kyushu, which gave rise to the "Nevada-tan" Internet meme. Ironically, right below the article about the low number of murders in Japan was a report about a 73 year old woman who was killed by a neighbor using a sickle of the kind Rena likes to wield in When the Higurashi Cry, which is a very sad thing to happen. Of course, remember that news reports about Japan from the Internet are always warped, since bizarre news stories are over-reported, the same way you're more likely to find articles about how the Japanese love squid ink flavored ice cream when in fact the most popular flavor here is vanilla.

Japan's murder rate is the lowest since WWII.

Long vs Short Anime Series

There are generally two kinds of anime series these days: those that run for 12 weeks -- a single anime "season" -- and series that are double this length, running for 24-26 episodes or so. One observation I've made, both as a fan and as an anime retailer, is that shorter series tend to have much less impact on fandom than longer shows, and it's all too common that an excellent 12-episode series which got lots of attention from fans while it was airing will be forgotten the minute the last episode arrives. When's the last time you thought about Ben-To (an anime about finding half-priced bento at supermarkets), Kannagi (Shinto spirits become real girls who do moe things), Mayo-chiki! (a "reverse trap butler" anime with great character design), NakaImo (a mystery anime in which one of the girls in a harem is secretly the main character's younger sister), or Chu-Bra! (a show about, er, cute girls and their bras). Individual fans might carry the torch for these shows for years, but as a group fandom seems to forget about them all too quickly, which means fewer figures and other products that allow the animation studios to recover their costs. The series that stay in our hearts for years tend to be longer, like Attack on Titan, Sword Art Online, Clannad and Toradora. Of course there are exceptions to the 12-episode-series-are-forgotten-quickly rule, including AnoHana, Angel Beats and Madoka Magica...so maybe the key to making a memorable shorter anime series is to make fans cry? I had found the Kyoto Animation series Chuunibyo Demo Koi ga Shitai to be one of the best-executed shorter anime series ever, with a tight story that entertained on every level, so I was certainly happy to see another season show up!

A new season of Chuunibyo Demo Koi ga Shitai.

Anime Chocolates for Valentine's Day

Just a reminder that Valentine's Day is about a month away, and as usual we've got great anime-themed chocolates for you to order. This year we've got awesome Evangelion chocolate + gift sets, which come with cool metal keychain/phone straps, plus Rilakkuma Valentine's Day chocolates. Browse the new Japanese chocolate items now!