Thoughts on Tokyo, the truth behind internationalization, and the triumph of inefficiency

I went into Tokyo on business yesterday, and as is often the case, I was amazed that the city is able to function as well as it does with its massive daytime population of 14 million -- a whopping 5655 people per square kilometer. Just as New York is comprised of several boroughs, Tokyo is made up of various parts, including 23 wards (ku), 26 cities (shi), and even sections designated as towns and villages (determined by population size), in effect making the metropolitan area operate more as a prefecture than as a city. Although Tokyo has an extensive system of freeways and major roads, driving there is the most stressful thing you can imagine, and I nearly always take trains, since there's nothing more convenient. The end result of this is that I have no perception of the geographical layout of Tokyo at all, but only think of the city in terms of which train line will get me to Shinjuku or Akihabara. Yesterday I was delayed by the bane of Tokyo train riders, the jinshin jiko, which means "injury accident" but is a polite way of saying that someone decided to end it all by throwing themselves in front of an oncoming train.

One of the things any pop Japanoligist can tell you about are the Japanese traditions of tatemae and honne (TAH-tay-MAH-eh and HON-neh), two concepts which are woven into the fabric of Japan's society. Tatemae, meaning "facade," represents the the ideas expressed in public, or the way we pretend society is, while honne is the way we really feel, or the way the world really is. Ever since coming to Japan I've heard a lot about kokusai-ka, a word that means "internationalization" and which supposedly represents Japan's desire to open up to the rest of the world and experience other cultures and new ways of solving problems. Frankly, I've always felt that this was a prime example of tatemae in action -- something that sounds good in a newspaper article but is meaningless in practice -- since the average Japanese, just like the average American or Korean or Frenchman, has a natural tendency to believe that the way things are done in their country is intrinsically better than anywhere else. However, I was surprised to find a little honne after all, when my daughter told me the kinds of international foods they've been dishing up at lunchtime at her public elementary school: Korean bibinbap rice bowl, Indian kima curry with naan, Italian focaccio bread, French mille-feuille for dessert, and so on. The idea is to improve the kids' minds by exposing them to various foods from around the world, and I think it's a great one.

Sadly, one of the major economic themes of Japan today is the triumph of inefficiency. When you drive past road construction, there are sure to be several men whose job it is to stand by the road with orange flashlights, ostensibly directing traffic even though everyone ignores them. Then there are the ever-present "parking old men" who do nothing more than stand in parking lots and direct you to a parking spot that you could have easily found yourself. Japan is a very cash-centric country, and personal checks (or cheques, for our European readers -- internationalization!) don't exist here at all. When individuals or businesses need to send money to someone, they usually go to the bank and execute a manual bank transfer (furikomi), paying a $6 fee to the bank for this privilege. And just today I saw another classic example of inefficiency: people who are paid to sit by the side of the road and click a clicker as cars drive by, to count the numbers of cars using a given road at a set time. Japan is supposed to be a technically advanced country, so why don't they come up with a high-tech device that can do this?

Just a heads up: J-List stocks virtually every PC dating-sim game in English, including older classics like the Himeya games, Hobibox's Viper series and Love Love Show, and the collection of three classic games by G-Collections, DOR. Several games are close to selling out, so if you're a collector of Japan's unique H-games, you might consider picking them up before they go.

Pictures from my trip to Tokyo, hopefully with improved quality since I am using a camera now, not my phone. Thi sis the famous Yama-no-te loop line that goes around Tokyo.

Ad for Nova, the English school that promises you a "study abroad experience without leaving your local train station area."

Some parts of Tokyo are new and spiffy, like Shinjuku and Shibuya. Then there are the old places, which can't have changed that much in the past 50 years. Asakusa-bashi is one such place.

They've made a branch of the Yoyogi Animation School in Akihabra -- smart move.

Wanted!! Pinky Street...

The mathematical aspects of Japanese grammar, Japan and its environment, and ways to fluster a Japanese person

A show I like a lot is NHK's Eigo de Shaberanaito ("I must say it in English"), which helps motivate Japanese learners of English by, say, showing actresses with no special language ability taking on difficult challenges like interviewing famous Hollywood stars who visit Japan. In last night's episode, a Japanese fan asked Patrick, the token gaijin-who-can-speak-Japanese- really-well you see on a lot of television shows, how he learned to speak the language so well. His answer was that, to him, Japanese was a very "formulaic" language, with a simple sentence structure that's straightforward and "markers" for the various parts of the sentence, such as the subject (wa, in Japanese は), the object (o, を), the predicate (ni, に), and so on. I agreed with this statement 100% -- the grammar of Japanese is almost mathematical in its directness, and from my very first year at SDSU I found it a pleasant challenge, even taking into account the parts of sentences that get omitted because everyone understands that information already. Something that helped me a lot in the beginning was memorizing a particular sentence then "swapping out" the subject, object, etc. with other words, until I had internalized it.

Japan is truly the land of contradictions, and sometimes it seems impossible to know the real Japan. Take the issue of the environment, for example. On the one hand, Japan is an ultra-industrialized country that has sacrificed a huge portion of its limited land mass to the twin Gods of Asphalt and Conrete, covering much of the country with roads and dams and Shinkansen tracks. An over-reliance on public works to stimulate the economy has led to a staggering amount of waste, with many projects of dubious benefit, such as mummifying the sides of mountains with concrete to guard against possible rockslides. When you point out that Japan has caused harm to its environment, the argument is made that the country's large population -- 1/2 that of the U.S., crammed into 1/25 the space, or even less if you take away all the uninhabitable mountain areas -- makes it impossible for Japan to be as concerned with environmental issues as the U.S. or Europe, and the inevitable Japanese mantra shigata ga nai (it can't be helped) is trotted out. And yet, there are many ways the Japanese show real vision when it comes to the environment. Gomi (garbage) is always separated into "burnable" and "non-burnable," with the former incinerated in high-tech facilities that burn the trash and trap most of the harmful gases that result -- and heat the local town's swimming pool at the same time. Cars are taxed annually on the sizes of their engines, with a gas-guzzling Toyota Crown owner paying around $800 per year while owners of fuel efficient small cars or hybrids pay a mere $30. Every few days a guy drives around our neighborhood calling for old newspapers to recycle, which he'll trade rolls of new toilet paper for. And when you go to the store to buy more Charmy Green dishwashing liquid, you have the choice between buying a regular bottle or a refill pack that costs slightly less and doesn't add to the gomi problem.

Want to know how to fluster a Japanese person? Ask them pronounce difficult English words, such as the word "jewelry," which twists L and R sounds in unnatural ways. Other words the J-List staff reports as being difficult are "McDonald's" (which takes six syllables to say in Japanese, Makudonarudo), "strawberry daiquiri" and that old standby, "election." There are two words for love in Japanese, too, and if you want to have some fun ask your Japanese friends what the difference between them is -- they'll stumble as they try to come up with a way to explain the difference. The two words are koi (恋, which usually describes romantic love) and ai (愛, a higher kind of love that is used for family or anyone who's very dear to you, or the steady, slow-burning love of marriage). Incidentally, these two words are combined into a compound word to make a general word for love, which is ren'ai (恋愛）.

The "top 20" links on the main J-List and JBOX.com pages are a good way to browse the most popular products we sell, allowing you to quickly see what other manga, DVD, magazine, photobook, toy, Japanese study and other items other J-List customers are buying that week. Now we've updated our scripts so that you get to see the top 50 products in each category, a great way to see the most popular products neatly organized for you. We also recommend hitting the "3 days update" link which makes it easy to browse items updated in the last 3 days only, so you can see what's new and updated at J-List!

I bought a new camera, the very nice Canon Ixy LI3 and the smallest one they make (almost the smallest camera sold in Japan). This camera purchase came about after I finally realized I hate my phone's camera, which had been significantly downgraded from the previous model, and I was tired of taking blurred photos with it. So readers who have requested that I post more pics, hopefully you will get more pics.

Wow, Mac technologies taking up two of the three icons. That's not bad. As a long time Mac user, it's not always been easy to take stupid manufacturers who take a generic product like an EIDE hard drive and then mark that it's only compatible with Windows. Come on, guys.

Home made Valentine's Day cake for me, yum! It's nice having an appreciative wife and daughter in the home.

Also, some really yummy homemade chocolates.

This is Hayami Mokomichi, pretty much the #1 heartthrob in Japan right now, something that is bound to happen if your name is weird like "Mokomichi." He adorns my wife's wall.

Valentine's Day and Chocolate in Japan, learning about Japan through "fighting five team" shows, and Japanese linguistic poverty

Tomorrow is Valentine's Day, and all throughout Japan men are looking forward to receiving the gift of chocolate from females around them, in keeping with the custom here. There are two kinds of chocolate a man can receive, the first of which is giri choco or "obligation chocolate." which female coworkers might give to males they work with because they feel it's expected of them. Then there's the stuff that we all really want to get, honmei choco or "true heart chocolate," hand-made chocolates, cakes or other treats from our wives, daughters or girlfriends which show their love and appreciation for us. Of course, when you are given a gift in Japan you always have to give something back (this is called o-kaeshi), and so Japan's marketers have created White Day on March 14, a day when men who received chocolate must give something back (often white chocolate or, if she's okay with it, sexy underwear).

There are many ways to approach an understanding of Japan -- through its anime, or JPOP music, or perhaps through Japanese television dramas, which are quite interesting. Another way you might enter into an exploration of Japan's pop culture is through the Super Sentai TV show series, the "fighting five team" shows in which color-coded heroes do battle with evil minions, invariably combining into a giant robot to finish off the giant monster-of- the-week in a big explosion at the end. Ever since creating Secret Sentai Goranger three decades ago, Toei has created a new series every year, making adjustments to the stories and characters along the way -- changing them to ninja or galactic police officers, for example. Since most every Japanese person watched these shows when they were small, you can ask them which "sentai generation" they belonged to. J-List's Daisuke and Tomo loved Electronic Team Denjiman (1980), while my wife was there for the original Goranger series (1975). I got to experience these shows alongside my son as he was growing up, too. He loved Emergency Rescue Team GoGo-V (1999) more than anything else, and it was a real eye-opening experience for him when we got a tape of Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue (the U.S. version of the same series) and got to see the fire engine that transformed into a robot to do that corny "ladder punch" in English. I'll never forget the last episode of Time Ranger, when the characters took their Time Robo back in "time" to visit all the past five-team shows. The Super Sentai series has links to other shows, of course, such as the venerable Kamen Rider (Masked Rider) and anime classics like Science Ninja Team Gatchaman and Voltron.

One of the curses of the Japanese is their unique kana-based phonetic system that breaks every sound down into consonant+vowel or vowel-only syllables, which leads to Japanese being very phonetically impoverished and is the reason why Japanese often have thick accents when speaking English. One of the simplest words to you or I is probably the word the, yet the closest you can come to this pronunciation in the katakana writing system is za -- the dental fricative sound is quite alien to the Japanese vocal system. The Japanese Ministry of Education has recently started teaching English in elementary schools, but since there aren't enough native English teachers in Japan, the special classes are being taught by my daughter's normal homeroom teacher. The kids had to learn to sing Puff the Magic Dragon by writing katakana characters over the English lyrics, which came out as Pafu, za majikku doragon, livedo by za shee... Fortunately, my bilingual daughter was there to help them with the pronunciation, and she was a big hit.

J-List carries the amazing DVDs of Yulia Nova, an amazing Russian model who was discovered by Japanese photographer Satoshi Kizu and became a huge success here in Japan, as well as across the Internet, where her amazing body and matching charm made her a hit on the Internet. J-List carries all of Yulia Nova's DVD releases, and just for you, we've lowered the price of the first three DVDs to just $19.95 each, making this a great chance for you to pick up her first three discs and experience her loveliness.

This year's Meat Day celebration in Japan, my lust for American cell phones, and the meaning of "recycle" in Japan

The Japanese often play with numbers in interesting ways, converting the numerals into sounds to make messages. Through a phonetic system I still don't understand completely, the number 084 can be read ohayo (good morning), 39 can be san kyu (which sounds like the English word "thank you"), and 4649 can be yoroshiku (pleased to meet you). Yesterday was February 9th, and since the numbers 2 and 9 can be read niku (which means "meat" in Japanese), butcher shops across Japan have decided to label the day as Meat Day, a special day to celebrate meat in all its many forms. February 9th is also my wife's birthday, and rather than getting the big plate o' sushi that we usually get on birthdays, we decided to head out for some yakiniku, a fun category of restaurant in which everyone sits around a grill built into your table and cooks meat and vegetables over a flame. Yakiniku (which just means "cooked meat") is a traditional Korean barbecue meal, slightly customized to Japanese tastes of course, and in addition to various kind of beef, chicken and vegetables, you can order kimchee and various Korean favorites. As with other Japanese dishes like sukiyaki or chanko-nabe (both basically pots of food you cook in the middle of a table, with everyone taking what they want to eat out), eating your dinner as a family together is one of the most enjoyable aspects of yakiniku.

Well, the unthinkable has happened: I'm starting to feel envious of cell phone users in the U.S. Oh, Japan still leads the design wars when it comes to making thin, stylish phones with cool 3G features like high-speed Internet, GPS, 3.2 megapixel cameras and even a phone with a 4 GB hard drive for listening to tunes. However, more and more I find myself looking at those cool Treo-type smart phones with those little keyboards and wish they sold things like that here. Part of the problem is that it's quite easy to enter Japanese text with a phone, since it's all syllable based -- entering arigatou （ありがとう） takes just five characters, which you enter by hitting the number keys (the 1 moves you through the A-I-U-E-O line, the 2 key is the KA-KI-KU-KE-KO line, and so on). Japanese who are used to keypad text entry can go very fast, and knowing Japan, somebody will have come up with a standardized test for fast and accurate typing using this method. Entering English text on a keypad is hell, though, and it takes several minutes just to peck out a simple sentence. Since there's little demand for phones with Blackberry-like features here, there isn't a single such device on the market in Japan, meaning that if I want get some email done out of the office, I have to bring my whole Powerbook with me.

One category of business that really took off over the past decade is the "recycle shop," Japanese parlance for a shop that buys stuff that people don't need anymore, cleans it up, and sells it for a profit. Today, everything from rice cookers to washing machines to skis to console games are bought and sold in Japan's new retail underground. The most successful of these stores is BookOff, a chain of used book stores that has hundreds locations in Japan. His shops include spin-off brands such as ToyOff (they sell "almost new" children's toys), PetOff (used stuff for your pet), and the very oddly named HardOff (used computer hardware and electronics). The other day I was eating Indian curry and noticed a store across the street called Golf Partner, a similar chain that took the "recycling" approach to selling golf clubs, allowing golf fans to buy used clubs cheaply. They seem to be doing well -- they have a national network of stores and promise to be able to search for any type of club from any manufacturer.

Among the many unique products J-List brings you are Comic AG, a super magazine of English-translated "H manga" that comes out about every two weeks. Each issue overflows with 80 pages of manga from top Japanese artists like Tohru Nishimaki, Fujio Okamoto and Yumisuke Kotoyoshi. While we have a huge selection of back issues, we're running low on some of the past issues like vol. 8-12, and when they're gone they won't be available again. Why not browse our selection of Comic AG issues, or go for a regular subscription?

Explore a new side of Japan with the unique PC dating-sim games that J-List sells, a great blend of story, characters and "H" done as only the Japanese could. With game concepts ranging from the hilarious (X-Change series) to the dramatic (Kana My Sister, who is dying of a terrible disease) to explorations of various interests like maid cosplay (I would have to recommend Little My Maid, a favorite of mine). Since the games all have multiple endings you can play agan and again and get a new ending each time, as you try to find all the endings and graphics in each game. Browse our incredible line-up of our "H" games now!

History and our "national personality," famous Japanese of the world stage, and putting dogs to sleep in Japan

History is in all of us, and each nation has its own unique quirks or features that come about as a result of its own past. For the Japanese, the arrival of Perry's black ships in 1853 brought them face-to-face with the fact that Japan couldn't stand against nations like the United States and Great Britain. After the "respect the Emperor and expel the foreign barbarians" revolution that ejected the last Tokugawa Shogun in favor of a government formed around the Emperor (which "restored" the Emperor to power, hence the term Meiji Restoration), the country underwent an unprecedented crash program of modernization, retiring the old system of feudal domains (han) for a modern prefectural system based on that of France and introducing education to the people. One of the forces driving this was Japan's desire to be seen in a positive light by foreigners from the powerful countries of the West, and today, the Japanese are still very concerned about how they appear to gaijin (usually translated as "foreigner," although a more accurate translation of the term would be "outsider"). Many large-scale public works, such as the first Shinkansen line, seem to be created to coincide with international events like the Olympics, when foreigners would visit Japan in large numbers and "oo and ah" over their technical achievements. It's like Japan is still trying to prove to the West that they've left the backwards feudal nation they were 150 years ago behind.

This tendency to be concerned with the opinions of the International Community manifests itself in many interesting ways. For one thing, the Japanese love nothing more than to have one of their own number recognized internationally. From writers like Kawabata and Mishima to directors like Kurosawa and Miyazaki and the many Japanese athletes who have made names for themselves abroad, the Japanese are always tickled when a local boy makes good. One of the most respected Japanese today is Etsuro Soto, one of two main sculptors working on the Sagrada Famila cathedral in Barcelona, Spain, which gives people here enormous pride. Another Japanese active on the world stage is Ken Okuyama, one of the main designers at Ferrari and the lead force behind the Enzo, who has won design awards for his creations, to the great happiness of Japanese.

Every country is different, and I bump into these little differences just about every day in Japan. Our family dog Chibi passed away last week, but a few months before I remember having a discussion about him with my wife's family. Although he was old, Chibi was still quite genki (a word that can mean many things, from "I'm fine" to "cheerful" to "energetic," but in this case "healthy"). But if Chibi were to really get sick, so that he were in pain, I asked, would we have him put to sleep? The room suddenly got very quiet -- apparently this is one of those topics you just don't bring up in Japan, much like estate planning for people before they die or how a person who's last name means "the rice field by the mountain" can actually believe his ancestors were samurai. Chibi is happy to be alive, I was told, and we would never think of interfering with the number of his days by ending them early. In this, I sensed an incredible respect for life, although the issue of euthanasia for a beloved pet in pain is certainly a difficult question.

More random pics from my Flickr account. These are the buttons that call waitresses to your table in restaurants. WHY??? do they not have this in the U.S.?

Hanging out in a bookstore. The latest Mazda fun book.

Beat Takeshi, who is really quite famous (it must be all those fans of Johnny Mnemonic), has a new book out

The #1 busybody in Japan, this is (sort of) fortune-teller Kazuko Hosoki, who is on TV five nights a week.

Cool clothes from a "frea market."

Earthquakes and Japan's islands, a parable about the sexes in Japan, and an update on the Imperial Family's problems

Japan is an atoll of more than 3000 large and small islands, with the major ones being the main island of Honshu (HONE-shu, "main province"); the northernmost island of Hokkaido (ho-KAI-doh, "north sea road"); southern Kyushu (KYU-shu, "nine provinces," since there used to be nine of them in the old days); and tiny Shikoku (shi-KOH-koo, "four countries," since there were, and still are, four prefectures there). Japan was formed by volcanic activity, and as such, it's home to more than a few earthquakes -- in fact, we've managed to feel about five small quakes today while working. Although the land mass of Japan is small -- equal to the state of Nebraska -- it's spread out over a wide area, and if you lay Japan over a map of the USA, it easily stretches from sea to shining sea. Whenever there's a big quake somewhere in Japan, we know we'll get emails from family members asking if we're okay, even though the shaking is often hundreds of miles away from us.

I've written before about how Japan is a very different place from the U.S. or Europe when it comes to the relationship between men and women. On the one hand, Japan is a male-centric society in which it is joshiki (accepted common sense) that the husband be the "big, black pillar" at the center of the household, and women are more often than not happy with this arrangement. When the famous blue pill for men came along, it was approved for sale in Japan in record time by Japan's male politicians, while women had to wait 30 years to for the Pill to be legalized here. On the other hand, it's the women in Japanese families who control the household finances and make sure the various goals of the family are managed properly, and the image of a salaryman husband buttering up his wife for a little more allowance this month is not uncommon at all. My Japanese mother-in-law gave me her own Buddhist-tinged philosophy once, so I'll pass it along to you here. A woman is the ground, she told me, and a man is the seed planted in the ground. If the ground is firm and strong, the tree will grow tall and provide cover for the ground. Since everything eventually falls on the ground (the rain, the various troubles that happen to us all in life), there's a fundamental difference between men and women that can never be reconciled, only accepted. It's a little "zen" for some people, but it was an interesting way of looking at the issue, I thought.

In other news, Japan is in the middle of another debate about the sexes that will determine the future direction of the Imperial Family. The current Emperor is Akihito, known in Japan as the Heisei Emperor since this is his era according to the Japanese way of counting years. His son is Prince Naruhito, and he and his Oxford-educated wife Masako (the "Princess Di" of Japan, if you will) have a daughter, Aiko-sama, whose name happens to translate as "love child." Because Naruhito's younger brother Prince Akishino has also fathered two daughters, there are no male heirs to continue the line of the Emperors, which goes back through 125 rulers to the year 660 B.C., according to legend. Prime Minister Koizumi supports the idea of allowing Aiko to become Empress, since there is precedent for this in Japan's history. Predictably, conservative politicians are against the idea, with one argument being that if Aiko married someone from outside the Imperial Family, the male Y chromosome from the current line would be forever lost, replaced by the Y chromosome of whoever she marries. I hope they find a good solution to the problem.

RSS, if you don't know, is a very convenient way to read news and other posts on the Internet, from blogs to mainstream news sources. There are many stand-alone RSS readers for all computer platforms, or you can try an online news aggregator like Newsgator (the one I like, since I can read blogs with my phone). If you want to follow J-List's updates and new product posts with an RSS reader, we've posted links to feeds on the left side of the J-List and JBOX.com sites.

Remember that J-List carries a great for fans of JPOP, the iTunes Japan Music Cards, which are the only way to buy music from the iTMS unless you happen to have a credit card registered inside Japan. Looking for the Doraemon theme song? Want to browse the latest singles by Every Little Thing? Or browse the Japan Hip Hop scene for songs you like the sound of? It's all very easy to do from any Mac or PC running iTunes. The cards come in 2500, 5000 and 10,000 yen denominations, and are super-easy to use -- just log out of your current iTunes account, select the Japan store, click the link to enter an iTMS card number, and you can set up a new account for your Japanese music. You don't even have to muck with Japanese characters in the iTunes application, since it will work in whatever language you have it set to.

An easy Japanese pronunciation guide, fun with the word "origami" and glottal stops and you

I clearly remember an episode back in the third grade. I had checked a book called Flying Origami by Eiji Nakamura out from the library. The book was great, filled with really cool Japanese paper airplanes to make, but there was just one problem -- I had no idea how to pronounce the word origami, which was just too difficult for my nine-year-old brain to handle. Little did I know I'd end up living in Origami Central one day, which goes to show that you never know where your life will take you. Anyway, I've decided to present a "quickie pronunciation guide" for Japanese, in case it will help anyone.

First, understand that Japanese is a syllabic language, meaning that sounds always come in consonant + vowel syllable pairs (e.g. ka, ki, ku, ke, or ko, never just a "k" sound by itself), or as a single vowel syllable. The exception is the letter "n," the only consonant that can appear by itself, without which we wouldn't have the word ramen (and that would be a travesty). Vowels are easy as pie in Japanese -- there are only five, identical to the ones in Spanish. They are:

A - "ah" rhyming with "fall"
I - "ee" rhyming with "feel"
U - "oo" rhyming with "fool"
E - "eh" rhyming with "let"
O - "oh" rhyming with "go"

When you see a word like origami, just break it into syllable-sized chunks, pronouncing all the letters and squeezing it into the "Japanese phoenetic grid": oh-ree-GAH-mee. There are no diphthongs in Japanese -- a vowel all by itself is treated as a syllable separate from what it's next to, so a name like Miura would be three syllables, mee-OO-ra. When you see a Japanese name or word, try not to let the pronunciation rules of English get in your way. We had a friend named Tomoe (toh-moh-EH), but English-speakers always called her "Tomo," thinking that the "silent e" on the end of her name should be ignored. Other things to keep in mind: a g sound like ge or "gi" is always hard (as in go), never soft (as in giraffe), hence the third sound in Evangelion is indeed a hard "g," in case you were wondering. The sound u is always oo, never "you." And the ra-ri-ru-re-ro sounds are closer to an "L" sound than "R" in English, hence the word "ramen" is about 80% of the way to "lamen," pronunciation-wise. Of course, the best way to learn to pronounce Japanese is while learning the hiragana and katakana writing systems. Remember that J-List has many cool products to help you start studying the language, if you want to give it a try.

A somewhat unique aspect of Japanese is the "small tsu" (小さい「つ」) a special kana character the indicates a brief pause between syllables, not unlike the short stop you can hear when saying words like "button" or "kitten." Linguistically it's called a glottal stop, and while many languages have them, you usually don't have a way to express them in writing. Usually expressed in the Roman alphabet with double consonants, some words that have this brief pause include gakkou (gah-[small pause]-KOH, school), nattou (nah-[small pause]-TOH, fermented soybeans) and matcha (mat-[small pause]-CHA, green tea powder).

The Japanese love onomatopoeia, and there are many odd sound words used in Japan. One of the strangest is mokkori (there's that "small tsu" again), which is the sound of something rising suddenly (e.g. the sound of a tent being pitched), a word made famous among anime fans by the classic City Hunter anime series of the 1980s. This wacky linguistic concept is embodied in here, a loveable character on our latest T-shirt. This upstanding little guy is a mushroom (what did you think he was?) who is a real straight-shooter. One of our wackiest Japanese T-shirts ever, it's guaranteed to get you lots of attention from cute Japanese coeds who see you walking across campus.

At J-List, we sell lots of DVDs, including many high-end indies JAV or anime titles from Japan, such as the excellent films of Hayao Miyazaki, which are zoned for region 2 (Japan and Europe). For customers who want to enjoy DVDs from all parts of the world including Japan, we humbly recommend the three region-free DVD players we sell, which are fully compatible with North American television systems and have full 1-year warranties. We've discovered a cool new feature in the AMW M-280, the portable 7" DVD player we sell for just $148. In addition to its many innovative features, this player will play MP3 music burned onto a DVD-R disc, allowing you to burn 4+ GB worth of tunes anywhere you want to play them (in your car, at home, etc.). Really cool!

Japan and its paper doors, young people who imitate James Dean, and bilingualism tricks with kids

Japan's come a long way from the classic image of "paper houses," but paper is still commonly used in modern Japanese homes. Shoji are sliding wooden doors with paper glued to them, allowing you to separate rooms and provide privacy and insulation. The doors slide sideways, so they don't take up any room in cramped houses, and they bring a healthy Japanese touch to any room, even western-style ones. Shoji have a tendency to turn yellow when they get old, so every few years you should replace the paper. Tearing the paper off the doors is just about the funniest thing in the world, and our kids are all too happy to help us do this when called upon. The shoji paper market is quite large, with many different companies competing to sell you the best paper for your shoji doors. Variations include shoji that are hard to tear (they've got cotton fibers in them), shoji you can hang by just running an iron over the paper, and shoji with various interesting patterns woven into the paper.

When I first got to Japan, I had an interesting experience: while sampling the local "Kentucky" I saw two high school girls standing around smoking and trying to look tough. They noticed me, and one boasted, "We are furyo!" I didn't know the word at the time, but the joy of kanji is that you can often understand concepts by working out what the characters would mean when put together. Fu is "not" and ryo is "good," and the combination (pronounced foo-RYOH, in kanji, 不良) means "bad" in a juvenile delinquint sort of way. From the rockabilly boom of the last decade to the more ominous boso-zoku street gangs who drive down the street on motorcycles modified to be extra loud and annoying, a lot of Japanese young people seem to be dedicated to this James Dean-esque idea of acting tough, of rebelling against mainstream Japanese society by smoking, cutting school uniform skirts very high, and (gasp!) dying their hair brown. Another word for these mostly-harmless street punk types is yankii (YAHN-kee), which is often thought to be related to the word "yankee" (because of their "American" colored hair), but it actually comes from a word in Osaka dialect. Whenever there's a Japanese festival you'll see these tough-looking kids out in force, standing around in their funny baggy clothes and looking vaguely scary. I used to make a point of approaching them and starting improptu English conversation classes with them, since their shy reactions when asked to speak English were priceless.

It's funny, the way children pick up language. As my kids were growing up, I spoke English to them, although they'd usually speak Japanese back to me despite my efforts to pretend I didn't understand. When we'd go to the U.S., my kids would get a real dose of English from the other family members, and (being kids) would double their vocabularies every day. One day when my son was about four, I asked him, "Would you mind if I went to dinner with your Mom tonight?" I intentionally used a phrase using "mind," which is the bane of Japanese people since you have to answer "no" if you mean "yes" and vice-versa, to see if he understood the question. To my surprise, he knew about this and answered me correctly ("No, I don't mind, you can go"). Somehow the kid had internalized a difficult grammatical structure that still torments his mother from time to time.

We've got a new treat for people who'd like to learn how to draw anime or manga-style art: the here book, a really well-done book with lots of articles on how to improve your art, use tools like Photoshop to color, and really build your own style as an artist. We've got it on the site as a downloadable item -- it's really great!

The buzz around Horie's arrest, Horie as a "standing nail," and info on Japanese names

Japan is all abuzz about the arrest of entrepreneur Takafumi Horie and his staff on investor fraud charges. A highly visible public figure, Horie (pronounced ho-ree-EH) is the Michael Dell-esque Japanese businessman who dropped out of the prestigious Tokyo University to start a website-creation company that would grow into Livedoor, a sprawling Yahoo clone with more than 50 businesses. In open emulation of American business practices, Horie grew his empire by acquiring other companies, and even launched an almost unheard-of hostile takeover bid for control of Fuji TV. Clearly a member of Donald Trump's "brand yourself and toot your horn" business philosophy, he was a regular fixture on television, and wrote books that were very influential with the younger generation.

A core concept that any pop Japanologist needs to know is the often-quoted- by-gaijin-who-are-experts-on-Japan phrase deru kui wa utareru (DE-ru KOO-ee wa oo-TAH-reh-ru), which translates as "the standing nail is driven." This describes the tendency of Japanese society to react unfavorably to those who don't conform as they should, and force them back in line -- individuals who stick out too far are "hammered down" and put in their place. The term certainly applies to Horie, who would meet high-ranking Sony executives while wearing jeans and T-shirt and who openly showed his lack of respect for established "old Japan" media companies. Horie-shacho was arrested under suspicion of various degrees of book-cooking, including announcing the purchase of companies whose shares he'd already bought secretly, to profit when the stocks then rose in value. While certainly no Enron-grade scandal, it's enough for Japan's Big Media to give him the smack-down they've been saving for him for some time. Unfortunately the scandal has caused a big drop in the market here (which has been termed "Livedoor Shock").

You may be familiar with the fact that, in Japan, family names are used before first names -- therefore the famous Japanese director Akira Kurosawa is known as Kurosawa Akira here. It can get confusing when you're switching from English to Japanese and back again, and once you get used to names being said one way, it feels very odd to go and reverse the order. The whole name order thing is all made even more confusing because of the fact that Westerners don't usually get their names reversed, so that I am Peter Payne even in Japanese (not Payne Peter). Even some Japanese use the English order for names, if they want to go out of their way to emulate stars in the West and sound kakko ii (cool): there's an action star in Japan who grew up in the U.S., and he goes by the name of Kane Kosugi just to sound like a gaijin.

Some bugs crept into our RSS feed, which allows you to track the newest products on J-List or JBOX.com using any RSS-reading application. We've gotten the problem fixed though, and both feeds are back up. The link for the feeds can be found along the left side of our website main page.

Gramatical challenges in learning Japanese, a Lone Wolf in Japan, and how Kit Kat brings hope to millions

Some languages are similar to each other, such as the Romance Languages that share features like genders for nouns, or English and French, which intermingled in the years after the Norman Conquest. Other languages are quite different, with linguistic features that can be difficult for learners to wrap their brains around at first. While I believe that no language is intrinsically "harder" than all the others -- each language is unique with its own features -- there are some aspects of Japanese grammar that were quite alien for a native English speaker like me.

One of the biggest challenges for learners of Japanese is dealing with what isn't stated in a sentence. My sister, who is fluent in German and lives near Luxembourg, once told me that the purpose of German grammar was to get the subject and the verb as far from each other as possible (to confuse people trying to learn the language, I guess). In Japanese, the goal seems to be removing as much information from a sentence as you can, and one of the first things a student learns is that the formal sentences in the textbook like Watashi wa anata ni tegami wo kakimasu (私はあなたに手紙を書きます, "I will write you a letter") are nearly always reduced to almost nothing by Japanese speakers (Tegami kaku ne, 手紙書くね), since everything else can be implied. There are other linguistic concepts that take some getting used to, too. One are "giving" words like ageru and yaru, which mean "to give" and are for use with people above your level (your boss, your senpai) and below your level (a child, a dog), respectively. When connected with other verbs, the recipient of an action can be inferred without it being openly stated. There are two versions of the verb "to be (in a place)" depending on whether the subject is animate (a person or animal) or inanimate (a car, a mountain), which can throw gaijin learners a curve from time to time. Finally, while we have "here" and "there" in Japanese, there are three in Japan -- "here" (koko) "there" (soko) and "way over there" (asoko), and the interplay of these concepts and how they shift when speaking can take some getting used to.

When a gaijin comes to Japan, it's common for certain words or kanji characters to insinuate themselves into his mind as kakko ii (which means "cool"). One word I distinctly remember liking was ippiki okami (ee-PEE-KEE OH-kah-mee, 一匹狼), which means "lone wolf" and describes people who are very individual-minded, happy to do things outside of a larger group. People who are ippiki okami live life without worrying about what others think, something the Japanese describe with the English words "going my way." Now we've got a cool new T-shirt, featuring the ultimate Lone Wolf ever, Golgo 13. See it on the site now!

At J-List, we go out of our way to find items you can't find anywhere else, and one of our favorite products are the Japan-only flavors of Nestle Kit Kat, which is the "real" Kit Kat since the stuff sold in the U.S. is made by Hershey's under license. Kit Kat has become a hugely successful product in Japan in part because its name sounds like kitto katsu ("you shall surely be victorious"), and parents buy it for their kids to show their support while they prepare for the all-important college entrance exams, which is going on right now. To help Japan's thousands of entrance-exam students, Nestle has brought out new Sakura Kit Kat, a delicious cherry flavored treat with breathtaking images of cherry blossoms on the box. The new Kit Kat TV commercial shows a worried girl about to start her college entrance exam, who is touched when she discoveres a box of Kit Kat her mother had slipped into her bag. The tag line is "Don't worry, the cherry blossoms will bloom for you." See the commercial here (Windows Media required). We also have a cool "sampler set" of all new varieties of Kit Kat for the 2005/2006 season for you.

In addition to our amazing lineup of English-translated dating-sim games, J-List also brings you amazing collections of doujin CG collections. Many of Japan's doujinshi artists create comic-book style books, while others turn to Photoshop instead, making beautiful computer-based CG art. We've licenced several of these CG works directly from the artists, so we can bring you great works in their original, mosaic-free form. Look for convenient sets of these cool CG collections, at special prices!

Now back to more pictures from the AVN show. This is some girl riding on a vibration machine. It was quite a thing to watch.

Normally you only get to take pictures like this in Japan.

The famous Ron Jeremy.

I didn't expect to see a Dorothy dress at the show. I thought that was a Japanese thing.

Japanese Buddhist attitudes about land, and ruminations on when I first arrived in Japan

One big difference between Japan and America is the attitude people have towards land and personal mobility. In the U.S. it's quite common for a person to move several times over the course of his life, to go to a region where jobs are better, move into a larger house as he moves up the ladder of life, or just make a new start in a new part of the country. Since houses are bought and sold regularly, it's common for people with similar income levels to accumulate near each other, a mechanism that's at work in every American community to some extent. The Japanese, however, are more likely to stay in the same place for their entire lives. The reason, it turns out, is related to Japan's Buddhist culture: since families generally have an established ohaka (grave) where all family members will eventually be interred, the idea of permanently leaving that area is almost unthinkable -- at the very least, when you died you'd be far from loved ones who wouldn't come to visit your grave very often. Because of this desire to stay on the same land forever, differences in wealth naturally develop, and it's not uncommon to see beautiful, newly constructed homes located next to shabby old buildings built decades ago.

A gaijin's first visit to Japan is a giddy time, and I remember my first days here very well. I woke up at the crack of dawn -- jet lag will do that to you when going from East to West -- and went out for a walk to see what I could see. After greeting an elderly woman, I bought some UCC canned coffee from a vending machine (which bowed to me, via a small screen), and marveled at a sign letting me know I was entering the village of Fujimi, which means "View of Fuji." In the old days, supposedly, you could see Mt. Fuji from that village when the conditions were right, despite the fact that Fuji-san is 150 km to the south of us. I distinctly remember being amazed at the design of everyday objects here, such as the toilets with hand faucets on top (allowing you to wash your hands with the clean water that flows into the tank after you flush), or with the little slit in butter containers that allows you to keep a butter knife inside but still get the lid on. I was unlike most foreigners in Japan because I'd studied the language for four years at SDSU before coming here, so I could basically get around town and talk to people (and put my foot in my mouth really, really well). Still, I remember being extremely frustrated at not knowing vocabulary words for the things I wanted to say, so I attacked the language ravenously, reading manga and studying until I could express myself the way I wanted.

Our big news today is that Enzai - Falsely Accused, the very first yaoi game to be released in English, is in stock and shipping now. For years we've been attending anime conventions and yaoi fans have been begging us to bring out BL games in English. Their passion won us over, and now we have the first PC dating-sim for yaoi fans in stock and ready for immediate order. The game is great, too, an innovative story based in Napoleonic France in which you assume the role of Guys, a youth accused of a murder he didn't commit. In prison for life, he must accumulate various forms of evidence to clear his name, aided and hindered by the various characters in the game. If you like Japan's unique yaoi themes, we hope you'll support us and get the game!

Since J-List is physically based in Japan, we're able to bring you amazing toys and other items unavailable anywhere else. One of the most popular products we've ever sold were the Furuta Star Trek ship collection, incredibly detailed ships from the Star Trek series made for the Japanese market. We're happy to report the newest Furuta Trek series is in stock: Star Trek Federation & Alien Ships Collection Beta (meaning set 2; Alpha was set 1). The series features the original refit Enterprise from Star Trek: the Motion Picture, the U.S.S. Pasteur and Rio Grande, a Kazon Raider, and the long-awaited Borg Cube. We usually buy these toys by the truckload, but this time we were only able to get our hands on a few cartons, so we recommend serious Trek fans to snap these up ASAP. We also have the Alpha series in stock.

Congratulations to our own Jun, the guy who handles all J-List snacks, gum and traditional products, whose baby girl was born yesterday. Little Renka was 3144 grams. Mother and daughter are doing fine.

Time to buy the omikuji, the little paper that tells your fortune for the coming year. This one is pretty cool -- you get a little gold talisman to keep with you, all for just 100 yen.

I got the little rake, which supposedly means I'll do well in business this year.

My wife's omikuji. I distinctly remember these things being hellishly hard to read before, with very hard kanji, but the ones they had this year were easy to read, with furigana (the little hiragana they write next to kanji to show you how to read them). Nice of them to think of poor gaijin like that.

When you're done with the fortune paper, you tie it to this tree.

Next we selected our daruma for the new year. They had pink and green ones but that was kind of too newfangled for us.

Although my wife is not from the Osaka area, she loves takoyaki, which are little balls of batter with a bit of octopus meat inside. We got some to take home with us.

The concept of honesty in Japan, our New Year's Day prayer, and winter snow report

I've always believed that people will be what you expect them to be, and if you assume that people are honest, they generally won't let you down. This principle seems to be at work in Japan, a country that certainly has more than its share of honest, upstanding people. One of my first experiences in culture shock here was going to my local Seven Eleven and seeing a brand-new car in the parking lot with the key in the ignition, idling away while their owner ran in to pick up some milk or eggs. I can't say that I've seen too many cars sitting unlocked with the engines running in the U.S., but here no one thinks much about it here, since no one would be so rude as to actually steal your car. An American friend of mine recently went to test-drive a new car, and the dealer handed him the key without even getting a copy of his license, which surprised him too -- the dealer just forked over the key and told him to have fun with the test-drive. Another friend managed to lose his wallet no less than four times in different parts of the country, once as far away as Kyoto, and all four times the wallets were delivered to the police with cash intact. There is crime in Japan, to be sure, and bad people here just like everywhere else, but by and large I've been happy with the honesty I've encountered during my time here.

Yesterday was New Year's Day for us, as we did our Hatsu-moude (ha-tsu MOH-day) or first prayer of the New Year, which is usually done on Jan. 1st. We pulled out all the stops, visiting our local Shinto Shrine to throw money in the offering box, then made our wishes for health and happiness in 2006. We got our omikuji, a kind of extended fortune cookie without the cookie, that gives advice about the coming year and what you should be cautious of. Finally, we bought a new Daruma for our house, a New Year's custom. Our not-quite-New Year's Day continued, as we went to visit my wife's uncle, the one who fought in World War II and would have gone off to die with the Yamato if his ship hadn't developed a convenient mechanical problem at the last minute (he's got a killer scar on his face from a piece of shrapnel from an American bomb). At his house, we played a traditional card game called Karuta, in which players must listen to segments of Japanese history and find the the same text in cards laid out on the table, a fun way to teach kids history they wouldn't otherwise be able to learn.

It's been a rough winter in Japan so far, with parts of the country receiving record snowfall, even places along the Sea of Japan that are used to a lot every year. The problem has been so bad that huge amounts of snow piling up on older houses have been causing them to collapse, killing the usually-elderly inhabitants -- a staggering 90 people have died since the heavy snows began. Warm weather after the heavy snowfall has added to fear of avalanches in parts of the country, and in some places the Self-Defence Forces have been dispatched to help people deal with the snow.

We have some good news for fans of Yulia Nova, the lovely Russian goddess whose DVDs J-List carries exclusively: we've gotten her newest DVD titles in stock for you today! The three new Yulia DVDs feature all-new footage shot over the past year, and let you enjoy Yulia's beauty and Moscow in the Spring, Summer and Winter.

We're declaring war on our remaining stock of 2006 calendars, slashing the prices on almost everything while we close it all out. We've still got an amazing selection of traditional calendars (Famous Castles of Japan, soba noodles), anime calendars (Tsubasa Chronicle, Pokemon, more), JPOP (Morning Musume, BoA), lovely bikini idols (Yu Yamada, Nana Katase), Japanese pro wrestler calendars, classic Japanese cars, and more. Once these calendars are gone they'll be gone for good, never to come back again. Why not browse our calendar selection and find something special to hang up in your home, office, dorm or wherever. The large poster-sized calendars J-List sells are printed exclusively for the Japanese domestic market and aren't available outside of Japan.

We interrupt the adult video show for...Peter's Hatsu-Moude trip. This is our family's Shinto Shrine, which has a huge tunnel of torii arches for you to pass through.

My son Kazuki.

The actual praying. There's something about times when you clap three times before praying (to get the God's attention) and other times when you don't. This was a "don't clap" time.

This is "Red Fox" (Akai Kitsune, no relation to Samson & Son) that means...something. At this shrine, you put abura-age or fried tofu as an offering. This is somehow related to a popular udon-in-a-bowl you can buy, Akai Kitsune, which has fried tofu inside.

We also bought our omamori for the year, which must be replaced on an annual basis. We bought kotsu anzen (traffic safety) charms for the kids, a health one for me, and a "success in business" one for our company.

The music scene in Japan, ways to stay cheaply in Japan, and all about Valentine's Day

The music scene in Japan is rich and varied, with its own unique ebbs and flows of visual rock, hip hop, R&B, indies and even enka, the traditional music that fills the same role for the Japanese as country music does in the U.S. The flagship of Japan's music scene is JPOP, and just as anime and manga have found a place in the hearts of fans all over the world, there is no aspect of Japan's pop world that isn't followed by aficionados in other countries. It's interesting to live in Japan and watch the march of progress in the pop scene here, the rise and inevitable fall of influential producers like Tetsuya Komuro (whose "Komuro Family" ruled the 1990s), Morning Musume creator Tsunk, and boy-band kingmaker Johnny Kitagawa of Johnny's Entertainment Group. Every year there are various music-related fashion trends, like when Amuro Namie created a generation of "Amullers" that imitated her slinky style, or the effect on fashion of the chic Kumi Kouda now. The past is often prelude, too: when we started J-List in 1996, there was no hotter JPOP team than Ami and Yumi of Puffy. Now, a decade later, they've made a name for themselves outside of Japan and even have their own cartoon series. Currently a bubblegum pop song by mock Pro Wrestler and comedian Koriki and his stylish backup singers is one of the most popular songs in Japan -- see the music video right here.

Back when I was single, I did a fair bit of traveling around Japan, hitchhiking or riding trains on "Youth 18" tickets, which allow you to go anywhere in Japan for around $25 a day, as long as you don't mind taking 14 hours to get from Osaka to Tokyo. (Poor gaijin like me who live in Japan don't get to buy the spiffy Japan Rail tickets that tourists from overseas have access to.) I've been from Hokkaido to Hiroshima and have really enjoyed getting out and seeing the country. During my travels I've stayed at various places, including conventional "business" and less-conventional "love" hotels, western-style youth hostels, minshuku (a kind of Japanese bed & breakfast where everyone eats and sleeps in a big communal room), and "saunas" (a public bath with a sauna with a central room where you can sleep on the floor for free, trying to ignore the snores of everyone around you). But I've always been a fan of capsule hotels, the miniature honeycomb-like hotel rooms found in larger Japanese cities, a great way to sleep on the cheap. Inside your capsule you have everything you need: bed, blanket, pillow, a little TV, radio with alarm, and a curtain for privacy. Capsule hotels usually have large communal baths and saunas, too. They're cheap, too: you can stay in the heart of Tokyo's hip Shibuya district for around $40.

Valentine's Day is not far off, in case you wanted to do something special and Japan-related this year. Rather than being a day for couples to go on a special date together, "Valentine Day" has become a day for women to show their devotion to men by giving them chocolate. For casual giving there are hundreds of prepackaged chocolate gift boxes sold in stores, and often female office workers will give small boxes of giri choco or "obligation chocolate" to male co-workers to be nice to them, knowing that they will get a return gift on March 14, designated as White Day. Girlfriends, wives and daughters will often make hand-made chocolates for their special men to show their love and thank them for working hard. If you'd like to give this a try this year, we've got a selection of chocolate molds that you can pour melted chocolate or cake mix into, and J-List sells dozens of amazing chocolate treats from Japan, from Japan-only Kit Kat varieties to Pocky and much more.

This is Charlie and Helicopter Man.

Another beautiful girl, dressed as a Miko, or Shinto Shrine Maiden.

Giant penis. Getting it up every day was a big challenge.

We all really liked the tall girl, who towered above me.

Standing in the "Nihonjin Line" at Narita, Japan's truck gap, and Japanese tax-related civic spirit

"You know you've been in Japan too long when you think it's cool to stand in the 'Japanese only' line at Narita airport." The first time a foreigner comes to Japan, he stands in the line for gaijin with the other foreigners while his paperwork is processed. Visa-holders who leave Japan intending to return must get a special re-entry stamp in their passports, and if you have this you get to stand in the shorter line for Japanese -- and this is what I did yesterday, after my 10+ hour flight from LAX to Narita, which brought me back to my cold, windy adopted country. After clearing customs, I took advantage of one of the great conveniences of Japan, Yamato Delivery Service, who will take a person's heavy suitcase and deliver it to their door for around $15, saving me from lugging it onto the bus. Yearning for a taste of home, I bought a quick onigiri, a triangular ball of rice with nori seaweed on the outside and salmon on the inside, and some oolong tea, and got on the Azalea Bus (named after the official flower of our prefecture, Gunma) for home.

Whenever I flip between the U.S. and Japan I know I'm in for a little culture shock, whether it's being amazed at the giant size of a "small" drink at McDonald's in the States or the "short" capuchinos sold at Starbucks in Japan. This time I was struck by the cars I noticed on the road. For the most part, the cars in Japan are pretty much the same ones you see in any other country, although they often have funny names like Soarer, Town Bee, Bongo Friendee, Thanks Chariot and Super Saloon. But there's one category of auto that's almost totally missing from Japanese streets: the venerable pickup truck. While pickups by Ford, Toyota and other companies comprise a large percent of car sales in North America, the situation is quite different in Japan. Here, the very idea of a "truck" is a boxy, industrial thing, used by companies for hauling but never owned as an icon of convenience or style. Well, que sera, sera, or as the Japanese say, junin toiro, which literally means "ten people, ten colors" (e.g., everyone has their own unique preference).

In many ways Japan's tax system is similar to the U.S., since the two countries follow the GATT, which governs how accounting rules between countries work. Japan's version of the IRS is the Zeimusho (税務署）, the Ministry of Taxation, and every city has a Tax Office to organize the collecting of the various national, prefectural and city-level taxes. One difference I've noticed between the U.S. and Japan is that there's a lot more "community building" here, with mechanisms designed to bring about a feeling of happy, patriotic spirit when it comes to paying of taxes for the national good. My mother-in-law is a long-time member of the local Kanzeikai, a formal union of business-owners, accountants and other professionals whose stated goal is the "encouragement of honest and accurate paying of taxes." Last year the Kanzeikai members took a government-sponsored trip to Mongolia to see how taxes are collected in that country -- the 15% sales tax there made Japan's 5% consumption tax look very small by comparison. Another activity of the group is to stand on street corners and hand out pocket tissues (the kind you get with J-List orders) with slogans promoting the accurate declaration of income on tax forms as a person's civic duty. They also have seminars to educate members about how important taxes are to society. At one function, my wife was shown an educational movie about what kind of world we'd live in without taxes. For example, if your house was on fire, the fire department would give you a choice of "speedy" or "economy" dispatch services and then charge your credit card before sending out the trucks. The picture above is this year's feel-good "let's all pay our taxes" idol, Yukie Nakama (see her calendar here).

We've got good news for fans of our 2006 calendars: about 30 previously sold-out calendars are back on the site, as we go through and remove old orders in the system. This is a great second chance to get that excellent anime, JPOP, Japanese actress, traditional or other calendar that was sold out before. But our stock is severely limited, so we recommend that you browse our calendars right away before the calendars you want are gone again.

Japanese aesthetics not found in Vegas, how computers display Japanese, and bilingualism

We're on our way back from Las Vegas, tired but sated from our time here. The AVN show was good and we had a lot of fun, although at times I was somewhat overwhelmed by the scale of everything. I found myself thinking of one of the things I like about Japan: the tradition of wabi and sabi. Translatable as "sober refinement and elegant simplicity," the words basically boil down to "less is more," and serve to describe much of what I like about the products we sell at J-List. The girls and products on display at the show were certainly very flashy and nice to look at, but there was definitely something lacking because there was no restraint, nothing left to the imagination. The classic example of the Japanese aesthetic tradition of wabi and sabi says that a single rose in bloom is more beautiful than a whole rose garden. Another example I like to use is the American Godzilla film made back in the 1990s, which made sweeping changes to Toho's long-running series to add elements they thought would appeal to American viewers. Instead of a lone, legendary creature that is the focus of so much of our attention, the American film added hundreds of baby Godzillas for maximum thrill and action at every turn. It definitely lacked the wabi and sabi of the original films.

One of the major challenges for computers over the past two decades was getting to the point where something as complex as Japanese characters could be displayed and used easily, and thankfully, modern OSes like Mac OS X and Windows XP (Pro only) have support for Japanese built-in. Kanji is displayed using two bytes instead of one for English, which allows the 3000 or so complex kanji and kana characters used in Japanese to be expressed. Just as ASCII governs how characters will display on your computer monitor, there are encoding systems that convert bytes to actual Japanese characters. Unfortunately, there are several different codes out there, such as JIS, Shift-JIS and ISO 2022, and every once in a while an email message or web page will be made with the wrong encoding system from the one I've got set, resulting in the dreaded "moji-bake" (MOH-gee bah-KAY), in which text turns into meaningless goobledygook on-screen. Fonts in Japanese work pretty much the same as Western ones, with Postscript, Truetype etc., although since there are so many characters they have to describe, the fonts are huge, with some fonts in my Powerbook weighing in at 10 megs and up. Since Japanese fonts are more complex than western ones, they have room for cool characters, like hearts, pictures of telephones, icons for weather and the "onsen mark" that indicates where hot springs are in Japan. As far as the Japanese font is concerned, the special characters are just alternate kanji defined for words like "telephone" "music" and so on. The additional characters you can type using Japanese fonts helps make online ASCII art-style images like the Mona Neko from the 2ch BBS easier to create.

My Japanese wife and I work hard to raise our children so that they'll be bilingual in both English and Japanese. We do our best to encourage English, for example by buying only DVDs from the U.S., so if the kids want to watch a movie, they have to watch it in English. Getting them to actually speak English at home can be difficult though, since the kids know that I understand Japanese. Pretending not to understand and asking them to repeat what they just said in English doesn't work very well, so we try to come up with other ways to tackle English together. Sometimes we play "American family" and speak only English, but since we all know Japanese, it's hard. What works best is when we leave the kids in the U.S. and then disappear, which naturally forces them to speak English to everyone. There's nothing like immersion for language learning.

For the new update, the J-List staff has posted tons of new products, including new kawaii toys (Noma Neko straps!), Totoro items, anime trading cards, Hello Kitty items, snacks, restocked Domo-kun plush toys, and much more (more than I can write down, having just gotten in from Vegas anyway). For our 18 plus customers, we've got tons of new products too, including new DVDs, UMDs for all Sony PSPs, lovely "H" manga, doujinshi (including futanari), and a lot more. See all the new items on the site now -- see them all here.

Remember that J-List has extended our free shipping sale of CD-ROM dating-sim games through the end of January, which gives you a great excuse to order a bishoujo game or six and save a bundle. Our interactive dating-sims are a fantastic genre of entertainment from Japan, and we have interesting games for PCs for all tastes and interests. Why not browse our PC dating-sim games and find some you'd like to play?

Las Vegas, the Japanese concept of "face," and the best sauce for your eggs

Hello from happenin' Las Vegas. We're here at the AVN Expo and having lots of fun talking with customers and flirting with the beautiful girls at the show. We were also graced with the presence of Helicopter Man, a very nimble JAV actor who has an amazing style. Remember, if you'll be at the Sands Expo Center this weekend, come by booth 1174 and say hi!

One area that's not well understood about Japan is the concept of "face." If you've read too many James Clavell novels, as I did before heading for Japan, you might think that Japanese people are highly concerned with avoiding any loss of face. In reality, I have seldom even heard the concept mentioned, and in fact it took me a few years of living in Japan to even learn how to express the idea of "losing face" in Japanese (which is usually expressed as kao wo tsubusu, which literally means "to have one's face crushed"). Although the concept is not that common, I have managed to have my face crushed a few times. Once, I introduced a friend into an English teaching position at a nearby facility for people with disabilities, where a Japanese friend of mine worked. Because I'd made an official introduction -- shoukai in Japanese -- the person should have taken care to do an extra good job, since my reputation was on the line as the person who had gotten her the position. When she flaked and stopped teaching the lesson, it made me look very bad, and I had to apologize to the students. Another time I've observed the somewhat rare concept of "face" was at a school I taught at back in the mid 1990s. Over the course of 10 years or so, the school had managed to accumulate so much bad debt the bank itself would be in danger of going under if the school defaulted on their loans. This would be a huge embarrassment to the bank manager who had okayed all the bad debt, so the logical thing to do was to continue loaning money to the unprofitable school so it could continue to operate, losing even more money. It made it another six years then finally went under, presumably giving the bank manager in question time to retire and push the mess onto someone else, and avoid having his face crushed.

Soy sauce is a popular flavoring in Japan, and is used more often than salt and pepper to improve the flavor of food -- I realized one day that my wife doesn't even keep salt and pepper in our kitchen, since she never uses them. Another popular sauce used by the Japanese goes by the descriptive name of "sauce" (soh-su, although it's officially known as tonkatsu sauce). It's a delicious thick sauce that compliments many kinds of foods, especially fried food like potato croquettes. Both soy sauce and tonkatsu sauce are sometimes poured over eggs in Japan, and a debate has raged for years at J-List as to which tastes better. Personally, I think nothing improves fried eggs than a dabble of Kikkoman soy sauce, but apparently I am in the minority, as most of the other J-List staff favor the thicker tonkatsu sauce on their eggs. In case you're interested in making the same comparison, we've gotten Bulldog's delicious tonkatsu sauce in stock on the site for you.

How would you like to spend the year with a beautiful Japanese girl? We still have dozens of super 2006 calendars in stock, including some excellent swimsuit idols like Meguru Ishii, Hiroko Sato or half-Japanese half-British Becky. Maybe you like the grown-up Haruka Ayase? Or how about the talented and beautiful actress Yukie Nakama? We've still got tons of 2006 calendars in stock, ready to go out to you ASAP. And starting now, all calendars will get free shipping tubes!

How Japanese buildings are incubated, about Japanese eye color, and an invitation to Vegas

"You've been in Japan too long when you believe that buildings are made by incubating the site in blue plastic sheeting for nine months." Japan is, as I've mentioned before, a "construction nation," and a huge segment of the economy is driven by various public and private construction projects -- kind of like military contractors in the U.S. Even in the dark days of the mid and late 1990s recessions, there was a steady stream of new roads, homes and buildings (especially pachinko parlors) being constructed. When the Japanese build a tall building, they do it right: as the framework is being built, the exterior or the building is completely enclosed in sheeting so that a hammer dropped from one of the upper floors won't cause a hazard to people below. Up goes a giant plastic cocoon that says ANZEN DAIICHI ("safety first") on the side, and a few months later a skyscraper is hatched. When you're not used to seeing buildings being constructed this way, it can look quite strange, almost as strange as the bamboo scaffolding that's used alongside buildings in Hong Kong -- bamboo is a strong, light material that's readily available, after all, although it's certainly not used this way in Japan.

What color are your eyes? All Japanese people have brown eyes, although if you ever ask them what color their eyes are, they'll tell you "black" (because the center of the eyes are indeed black). Japanese are often interested in the eyes of foreigners, since they come in different colors, something totally unknown in Japan (although they do have color contact lenses here). When I tell Japanese that my eyes change color depending on what I'm wearing, ranging from green to hazel to blue, they usually don't believe it's possible. Once, I was asked by my former Spanish teacher, a Japanese woman who grew up in Peru, if I saw the world through a blue or green tint because of the color of my eyes. This was just about the weirdest thing anyone has ever asked me in my life.

Now we're off to Sin City for a convention, the always-fun AVN Adult Entertainment Expo that runs January 5-8 at the Sand Expo Center, where we'll have our unique Japan-related products on display, in addition to cool freebees like our Japanese Pocket Tissue. If you're going to be at the show, we'd love for you to drop by and say hello! All customers who mention J-List will get a free gift just for coming by. For info on the show, see this page.

Since J-List is physically based in Japan, we're able to find hundreds of amazing products for our customers each month, including many bizarre and fun items that can't be found outside of Japan. We often find ourselves setting trends, from kanji T-shirts to the "strange ratio" cute canines known as The Dog and more. We've also been involved with the amazing OH! Mikey, the bizarre TV show acted with mannequins that tells the story of the Fuccons, a parody of an American family that has come to live in Japan. With great characters like Mikey (an average, er, American boy), Barbara and James (his outrageous parents), spoiled Laura (his cousin, who has a crush on him), and the hilarious Tony and Charles from England, OH! Mikey is non-stop hilarity at its best. Now the series is being released in the U.S. -- and you can get the first special sampler DVD for just $5.98 from J-List!

J-List is happy to make our popular PC dating-sim games available to fans all over the world, and we've got a mind-boggling lineup of English- translated titles from companies like Peach Princess, G-Collections, and JAST USA, with interactive "H" games for every taste. We've decided to extend the free shipping for all CD-ROM games through the end of January, allowing everyone to experience these long-playing multi-scenario PC games, which are fully translated to English and free of the pesky mosaic that's on the Japanese versions. January is a great time to deck out your game shelf with excellent dating-sims for your Windows computer!

Akemashite Omedetou, all about Japanese banking, and forces at work on banks in Japan

Hello and Akemashite omedetou gozaimasu to everyone. We hope you had a really fun New Year's blast -- we certainly did, although it was a little bizarre. We're here in San Diego, so we had a pretty traditional (for America) celebration, with champagne, funny hats and the Times Square countdown on TV. But we didn't want to give up our Japanese-style Dec. 31st experience, so we ate traditional toshi-koshi ("crossing into the new year") noodles and mochi (the oddly named 'rice cakes' which is just white rice pressed into squares that are heavenly toasted and covered with soy sauce). For the first time in ten years we were unable to watch the big JPOP extravaganza Kohaku, the most-watched show of the year in Japan, but we've got it waiting for us on the DVR at home.

The subject of Japanese banks is an interesting one. There are two kinds of traditional Japanese banks, the so-called "city banks" like Sumitomo or Tokyo-Mitsubishi, which are well-known national institutions; and the hundreds of small and medium-sized provincial banks that serve the regions outside of Tokyo. The banks do pretty much what you'd expect them to do -- hold deposits, make loans and offer various financial services -- but there are some big differences. First of all, Japanese banks are the most conservative in the world, and they are terrified of new ideas; as a result Japan's online banking world is a decade behind the likes of Wells Fargo. While most businesses try to differentiate themselves from their competitors, Japanese banks nearly always compete by trying to be exactly like their peers, right down to the interest rates offered, which are so low you'd laugh (one of the best rates offered by our local bank is 0.1% on a 5 year CD). This seems to be related to the concept of shinrai, or trust -- if a bank acts exactly as you expect it to, it earns your trust more quickly.

There are two external forces at work on Japan's banking world right now. One is Japan Post, the soon-to-be-privatized post office. In addition to delivering the mail, Japan Post acts as the largest bank in the world, securing the deposits of millions of Japanese families with an unbelievable $3.5 trillion in cash -- about equal the annual GDP of Japan itself. Despite the reality that Japan has a perfectly healthy banking sector that could provide these services, the government-backed postal savings system plays the part of the proverbial 800 lb. gorilla and interferes with the normal functioning of banks -- and pays no taxes by the way. The other force Japan's banks have to contend with are the gaishi-kei, foreign and foreign-backed banks that are the principle source of actual competition in the banking world. Some, like the all-online Shinsei Bank, even have -- gasp! -- gaijin CEOs! From offering much higher returns on investments (a full 1.25% rate on a 5 year CD) to providing innovative products like dollar or euro accounts inside Japan, to slashing the outmoded fees that normal banks charge (such as $7 to transfer $50 to someone a few miles away), these young instutions are finding many new ways to entice consumers.

At J-List, we've always been fans of the unique PC dating-sim games, and you can choose from an incredible selection of interesting games (including many games by download). We're happy to announce that Enzai - Falsely Accused, the very first PC yaoi game ever, has gone "golden master" and will be shipping soon. If you haven't preordered this great game yet, we hope you'll do so soon, to show your support for this fascinating new genre of interactive adventure games from Japan. Set in Napoleanic Europe, Enzai is the tale of Guys, a young man in prison for a crime he didn't commit, a fascinating multi-scenario mystery that you have total control of.

J-List currently has an amazing lineup of 3000 products from Japan, a truly mind-boggling selection of items for every taste. Did you miss checking through our 2006 anime, JPOP and gorgeous idol/actress calendars, with newly reduced prices? Looking for something wacky but fun from Japan, like our authentic tabi "ninja boots" or Japanese headbands? How about our amazing selection of Japanese snacks or gum? Or a downloadable dating-sim game for your PC? You'll always see a new side of Japan every time you browse J-List's products. To browse all our products in order of last update, click here

Remember that J-List is having a great sale on our close-out T-shirt designs, which we're getting rid of older shirts to make room for new creations. In addition to the reduced prices, you also get free shipping in the U.S. and Canada (or half price shipping for international customers). It's the last chance to buy such wacky designs as It Is Forbidden to Commit Seppuku, so check out our selection now!

Every month we present a new JAV star as "this month's girl." The selection for this month is the delightful indies idol Izumi Hasegawa, a gorgeous starlet who acts on the Moodyz label mostly. Born on March 12, 1983 in Tokyo, her "three sizes" are 88 (bust), 59 (waist) and 85 cm (hip). She's acted in a wide range of works, playing the cute girl-type, then an elegant female teacher (complete with glasses, gotta have the glasses), then taking on a mass of big black men from the USA. Her blood type is O, and her interests are karaoke, shopping, and going to hot springs (onsen).

On the Japanese concept of "normal," ideas that Japanese can't come up with, and how to be rude to the Emperor

Hello again from J-List. We're still enjoying our vacation in the U.S., this time in beautiful San Luis Obispo, where we've come to enjoy some natural hot springs (an American version of the onsen that we love so much in Japan). We're doing the whole tourist thing, visiting Hearst Castle, tasting wine, and eating corn chowder and potato pancakes at the Apple Farm Inn (a family tradition, whenever we're in the area).

Language always reflects the society that creates it, and there are many interesting words that give insight into Japan. I know that I consider myself quite a unique individual, and if you said I was the same as everyone else, I might be mildly insulted. But to many Japanese, being thought of as pretty much the same as everyone else -- embodied in the Japanese word futsuu, meaning "normal" or "usual" -- is not a problem at all, at least on the surface. When I was in college, I strove to be as different from everyone else as I could be, reading manga and blasting JPOP music in my car, but I had Japanese friends who made funny faces if I ever implied that they were very different from other Japanese, using either the words kawatteiru (meaning "odd" or "different") or the stronger hen ("strange"). At one of the Japanese bishoujo game companies we work with, there was a slightly odd programmer who legally changed his name to Reiji Abe, or in Japanese name order, Abe Reiji (ah-BEH REI-ji), because he wanted his name to have the same pronunciation as the English word "average" in Japanese. As an unique, individual American, sometimes I am hard pressed to understand Japan...

One thing about Japanese people: they often have a glorious, unifying sense about things, which is called joshiki which just means common sense. Joshiki pervades Japan, and helps explain why virtually all kids go to normal schools (there's no homeschooling in Japan) or why all babies are born in traditional hospitals (alternate birthing methods are very rare). I consider it a good thing that Japanese tend to be on the same wavelength on many important issues, although there are times when they seem to be incapable of conceiving of certain things that, say, might occur to foreigners, above the obvious like child carseats (which weren't required in Japan until 1999). A friend of ours runs a company and has rather a lot of debt, several loans at different interest rates. I suggested to him that he get one new loan at as low a rate as possible and use it to retire all the other loans he had, and this was the most brilliant idea he'd ever heard -- apparently no one thinks of things like that here. Sometimes the ideas that occur to gaijin are better left unstated though. In Japan, the kanji character kimi refers to the Emperor (as in Kimigayo, the Japanese National Anthem), yet the word is also a very informal word for "you," roughly translatable as "hey dude." I observed that, since kimi also refers to the Emperor, it might be acceptable to use this informal pronoun when addressing the Emperor himself -- surely an idea that could only occur to a gaijin. Bottom line, I don't think the irony of my suggestion was appreciated by the Japanese staff of J-List.

Remember that J-List carries the excellent region free DVD players by Lasonic, which allow you to enjoy DVDs from all countries, not just the U.S. and Canada. Whether you want to watch the high-end indies or anime DVDs from Japan, or enjoy discs from Europe, Australia or South America, the Lasonic players we've got are excellent for you. The players also play just about anything you can throw at them -- VCD, DVD-R/RW/R+ and more. But best of all, they're incredibly affordable, starting at just $68 for the Karaoke-enabled DVD-7880K, $109 for the full-featured DVD-7050, and just $148 for the take-anywhere M-280, which has a 7-inch wide screen and great features. All players are shipped out of San Diego for your convenience and are fully warranted.

Since this is the last J-List update of 2005, it's a good time to look back over the past year, which went by so fast our heads are still spinning. 2005 was a great year for J-List, and we brought cool products from Japan to tens of thousands of customers. We hope you'll continue to expect great things of J-List in 2006! So until next time, we'll say yoi otoshi o ("Have a Happy New Year"), which is what you say in Japanese before Jan. 1st -- after the New Year arrives, you break out with the akemashite omedetou (which literally means "Congratulations on opening the New Year").

Japanese Daruma, the seasonal nature of Japan, and a sad day for Japan's Adult Video World

One of the coolest images of Japan, to me, are the Daruma, the unique red, roundish dolls that are quite visible in Japan around this time of year. A Daruma is a representation of Bodhidharma, a historical figure from India who founded Zen Buddhism and what would become Kung Fu, and who attained his unique shape by fasting and meditating for so long that his arms and legs disappeared -- although I just know that if I were to ask my Japanese wife about this she'd throw up her hands and tell me she has no idea what I'm talking about. Like Japan's Lucky Cat, which beckons good fortune (especially in business or money) into your home, a Daruma is an object that promises to bring you good luck. The doll originally comes with no eyes drawn in, and when you make a wish for the New Year, you blacken one of the eyes with ink. If your wish comes true during the year, you color the other eye, and a Daruma displayed in a home or business with both eyes colored in is a statement of having attained success. While the Daruma is ostensibly a Buddhist icon, it's become associated with Shinto rites such as New Year's Day, and has kind of "jumped" from one Japanese tradition to the other. Every city in Japan stakes out a "meibutsu" or "famous thing," some object or food that it is famous for, and Takasaki, our neighboring city, just happens to be famous for these beautiful Daruma Dolls. Their official train station bento is Daruma Bento, too, which is well-known throughout Japan.

One of the first things I learned about Japan after going there in 1991 was that it was a very season-focused country, with specific customs and activities for each time of year. Want to buy a warm coat? Buy it in the winter months, since no store will stock them at any other time of year. How about a swimsuit? They're not available outside of May-August for love or money. Fireworks are popular in high summer, but if you wanted to get them at another time of year (for example, to throw your own Guy Fawkes Day bash), you're out of luck. Sometimes J-List customers will wonder why we don't have any stock of our cool "tatami" sandals (actually called "zori" in Japanese) right now, and the reason is that our shoe distributors shut down all production of sandal-type shoes when summer ends, and our backorder of these shoes probably won't be filled until April or so. Calendars follow a similar pattern, and as the very strict "calendar season" that lasts from September to December ends, no calendars will be available in Japan until the 2007 season rolls around. The moral of the story is that if you see something cool on J-List, such as our still-amazing selection of over a hundred 2006 calendars, it's better to snap it up sooner rather than later, since all too often the item will disappear from the site forever.

There's been a tragedy in Japan's AV world: innovative indies director Hajime, of Hajime Planning, has died suddenly. Hajime started out as a salesman inside Japan's maverick indies AV studio Soft on Demand, working his way up through the ranks until he was able to become a director, creating the kinds of videos he wanted to see made under his Hajime Kikaku label. He always had a knack for making interesting productions using off-the-street raw talent, with fresh ideas like "Study of Whale Shower." J-List's Tomo had a great relationship with Director Hajime, and attended his funeral yesterday. The ceremony was a Who's Who of Japan's AV world, with everyone in attendance, from SOD founder Ganari Takahashi to Dogma director Tohjiro to stars like Kurumi Morishita, and even the legendary Kazuhiko Matsumoto (who invented the most infamous AV genre to come out of Japan in the past decade) was there. Hajime was very happy to be able to have his works reach fans outside of Japan through J-List, and we were very glad to be able to help people around the world learn about his amazing works.

Remember, J-List is having a great free shipping sale (or half price shipping, for customers outside the U.S. and Canada) on our close-out T-shirt and hoodie designs. We've got dozens of wacky Japanese T-shirts, with original designs that are bold and interesting and show off your love of Japan to everyone. We've added our long-selling "It is forbidden to urinate" T-shirt (which is based on signs you can actually see in Japan, believe it or not) to our reduced price/free shipping sale. Browse our selection now, before your size sells out!