Education and high school dropouts in Japan, Japanese in touch with their history, and the biggest shock Japanese get when they go to the U.S.

I caught a post on Slashdot the other day about a surge in high school dropouts in the U.S., and was saddened at the news. In Japan, compulsory education covers six years of elementary school and three years of junior high school, and during that time the basics that everyone needs to know are taught -- math, social studies, kanji, morals, learning to respect your senpai, and so on. High school has never been required, and there's nothing keeping a sixteen year old who has something better to do with his time from not going on past the 9th year of school. Just the same, there's a heavy stigma -- the dreaded label chu-sotsu (中卒) meaning a graduate of junior high school -- against anyone who doesn't make it through high school, and the vast majority of students (96%) do go on. High schools in Japan function as a miniature version of the university system complete with entrance exams, and competition for the best schools -- Takasaki High and Maebashi Girl's School are the highest- ranked in our prefecture -- is fierce, requiring years of preparation to get in. Just as with universities, it's possible for students to aim too high and fail all their tests, and become a ronin, a word which used to mean masterless samurai but which now refers to a student who is in temporary limbo while he prepares for next year's tests.

When Japanese people go to the U.S. they're amazed at the variety of foods available in supermarkets, especially the staggering number of breakfast cereals. "In SAFEWAY, many kinds of corn flakes about one hundred have overpowered me," one of my former ESL students wrote at the time. "I felt a difference of the staple foods." In Japan, gaijin might say the same about the instant ramen, with supermarkets and convenience stores brimming with various brands of noodles in every shape, size, and taste. Instant ramen came into being in 1958 with the introduction of Chicken Ramen by Nissin, and the convenience of noodles that could be stored easily and eaten anytime made them an instant hit, if you'll forgive the pun. Today many large companies compete to bring the best noodle products to market, including such favorites as Nissin's popular Cup Ramen line, the delicious Akai Kitsune Udon ("Red Fox" noodles with fried tofu in each package, yum), and even high-end brands that cost $5 or more per serving. Some numbers for you: Japan eats 5.4 billion servings of instant noodles per year (42 per person on average), the amount of flour used to make this ramen would fill up half of Tokyo Dome, and there are 983 registered brands of instant noodles on the market. I can personally attest to the profitability of instant ramen. During my ESL days, I happened to teach English to the wife of the former president of the Sapporo Ichiban Company, and her house was easily the most beautiful building I've seen outside of Kyoto. Instead of learning any English, we'd often sit in her unspeakably gorgeous tatami room speaking Japanese, drinking green tea and eating delicious manju cakes. This is basically the holy grail of ESL teaching, to find rich people and get them to pay you while they teach you Japanese rather than the other way around.

The other night I went downstairs to my parents liquor shop to get something -- the Japanese custom of building shops and homes together can be quite convenient when you run out of soy sauce or coffee filters or beer, since you've usually got what you need right there in the store. My wife's father and mother were watching a jidai geki, or a historical drama, in this case about the years leading up to the Battle of Sekigahara, where Ieyasu Tokugawa finally defeated his enemies and unified the country under his shogun banner. They were having a very deep discussion about the actions of the main character, an underling of Tokugawa, and how he narrowly saved the day for his lord. Like Westerns back in the 1950's, samurai period dramas are a popular genre of television, with many different shows produced for all ages. The most famous jidai geki on TV is the megabudget Taiga Drama that NHK produced each year, telling dramatic stories from a different part of Japan's past. Perhaps it has to do with higher average age of Japanese people, but it seems they have a lot more interest in their history than folks from the States could ever conceive of, and even younger people like my wife can take quite an active interest in events 400 or more years ago.

J-List carries hundreds of delicious and fun to eat snack items from Japan, including Pocky & Pretz, Pucca chocolate-filled fish-shaped pretzels, candy sushi, and unique varieties of Kit Kat only sold in Japan. Today we're posting this year's first Melty Kiss, the yummy fudge cubes from Meiji that are not only delicious, they've got one of the strangest names of any product we sell. This year's Melty Kiss is excellent, with the delicate taste of cocoa powder on the outside and rich fudge on the inside. Look for Precious Cacao and Strawberry on the site now.

Because I'm late with the daily post, I'll give you some pictures. Here is a giant offering to the goddess Yuko Ogura. Bummer that the power lines had to get in the way...

Outside our window the other day, a real rainbow! There is hope for us all!

Wao! It's a banana!

In reality, it's a banana shaped cake with banana cream inside, packaged in a gift box for giving as omiyage (souvinirs).

Christmas Cake. Do you have yours ordered yet? To our friends in the UK, I know the core concept for this comes from your side of the pond, or specifically from Scotland or something like that, but do you guys have shops marketing Christmas Cakes all over the place?

Being an American in Japan during Thanksgiving, subtleties of Japanese pronunciation, and a cultural lesson for PSP owners

By and large, an American expat living in Japan has two choices when it comes to celebrating Thanksgiving: completely forget about it, or get a bucket of "Kentucky" for the family and pretend it's delicious oven-roasted turkey. Thanksgiving is, of course, an event that's quite unique to the U.S., and since Japanese stores generally lack stuffing, gravy, pumpkin pie filling and all those other good things, it can be awfully hard to get into the spirit of the season. Just the same, you can give thanks for all the good things you have no matter where you live in the world, and this year my family and I are going to take on the challenge of having a real American Thanksgiving in Japan, with a turkey (imported from Australia), cranberry sauce (sent by my mother), sushi (brought over by a friend of ours) and other good things to eat. It won't be completely traditional, but we'll make do somehow. We hope everyone in the U.S. has a wonderful holiday!

When you live in a country as different from your home as Japan is from the U.S., the potential for culture shock is everywhere, even in video games. I ordered Lumines II from the States since I'd enjoyed first version so much, but when I slapped the U.S. release game into my PSP and started playing, something felt strange to me -- for some odd reason, I was having trouble navigating the menus, and kept jumping back to the title screen instead of starting the game. It turns out that, due to differences in how Japanese perceive the symbols X and O compared with the West, Sony had switched the button functions around. While X probably corresponds pretty easily with the idea of "execute" to most Americans, in Japan it's known as batsu and it means "bad" or "no" (as an esoteric aside, a person who's been divorced once is batsu ichi, if twice then batsu ni, and so on). Meanwhile, the circle (maru in Japanese) is the universal symbol for "correct" or "yes" or "good" in Japan, and is the natural choice to mean "accept this menu selection." When a teacher marks answers on a test, she draws circles over the correct answers, and if the student got a good grade, she draws a hana maru or a big flower with a circle inside, the highest praise a teacher can give. Maru sounds lucky, and ships are usually christened with the word as part of their names (although it wasn't all that lucky for the Kobayashi Maru). But perceptions are fleeting things. When a finance company called Maru-Fuku opened near our house, I commented that the name gave me a bad feeling, since mal means "evil" in Spanish, and fuku (good fortune) sounded like "hook" to me. My wife had exactly the opposite impression of the company, telling me that the name sounded to her like it would bring "happiness and good luck to every corner of your home."

Would you like a dorink with that cheeseburger? How about a pair of Edowin jeans? Last weekend I took my kids for a dorive. One of the unique features of Japanese is that it's a syllable-based language, which means that you can express syllables like ka, ki, ku, ke and ko but not a "k" sound by itself. This is part of the reason that the Japanese often have thick accents when speaking foreign languages, since everything must be filtered through this limited phonetic system. The syllable-based pronunciation also has an effect on how some words are used in Japanese, for example, causing the "d" consonant to be expressed as a separate sound, do (doh, as in a deer, a female deer, or what Homer Simpson says), which alters the sound of word like "drink" "Edwin" and "drive" (above) ever so slightly. Just as Japanese anime has been accepted all over the world, there are many fans of Japanese TV dramas, which are invariably called "doramas" by fans due to this slight quirk of phonetics in Japanese.

J-List's "reserve subscription" system is a great way to get the current issues of dozens of popular anime, manga, toy & hobby, fashion and other magazines sent to you each month. Whether you're thrilling at the amazing number of pull-out posters in each issue of Megami Magazine, feeling the pulse of Japan's gothic cosplay or Harajuku street fashion culture, or just checking out the latest in J-Rock, our subscriptions really make it easy to stay in touch with Japan. By customer request, we're giving you a choice now: in addition to the month-to-month revolving subscription we've always offered, you can choose our new annual option, pre-paying a discounted flat fee for one year worth of issues, with SAL shipping included in the price. We originally put the annual subscription in place for libraries and other institutions that prefer to pay once per year (and we're happy to serve these customers), but decided to extend the option to everyone to make it easier than ever to get great magazines from Japan.

Coming to Japan from San Diego, changing Japanese views on alcohol, and Japan Autumn Report

Coming to Japan meant adjusting to many new things, from vending machines that accept the equivalent of $100 bills then bow to you in thanks after you make a purchase to learning that there's a time and a place to pop that little baby octopus in your mouth without thinking about it. I also had to learn to live in a much colder place than my former home of San Diego, California. Of course, just about every place in the world is colder in the winter than Santa Ana-blessed San Diego, where the definition of "frigid" means having to wear long sleeves in the evenings, but learning to stay warm in Japan was a lot different than if I'd just moved to, say, Boston. Following my mother's sage advice about dressing in layers helped, but the problem was really more of a cultural one. The Japanese don't have central heating, and would consider the idea of heating an entire house wasteful. Instead, you heat just the room you're using, usually with a kerosene-electric "fan heater" or a wall-mounted air conditioner (and yes, it does take time to get used to the idea of an air conditioner producing heat). Another popular option is to use a kotatsu (koh-TA-tsoo), basically a table with a blanket over it and a heater inside. Stick your legs under the blanket and you'll be as toasty as you could want to be, which works great until a family member is flatulent inside the kotatsu (one of its few drawbacks).

Most weekends my family and I can be found up in the mountains around Karuizawa, soaking up the healing power of the onsen hot springs and enjoying the "vibrant nature" of central Japan. It's a nice time to drive in the mountains right now, since the leaves on the trees are exploding in fireworks of red, yellow and brown as autumn passes through the country. The Japanese are quite happy about having four distinct seasons, as if it were the only place on Earth to have that honor, and many people make special trips to remote regions to take in the beauty of the leaves as they change color, which is called koyo in Japanese (meaning "crimson leaves"). The other day I noticed that Yahoo Japan has an interactive "Koyo Map" allowing you to check the current leaf status of each part of the country so you'll know what kind of view you'd find there. Just as the symbol of spring is the sakura, or cherry blossom, the beauty of autumn is captured in the momiji (moe-MEE-JEE), the Japanese maple, a beautiful image of Japan in the Fall.

As a rule, the Japanese are rather fond of their spirits, and enjoy a wide range of recreational alcoholic beverages, from sake to beer to one of my favorite drinks, a Grapefruit Sour, a glass of a gin-like alcohol called shochu which comes with half a grapefruit and a juicer, requiring you to extract the juice and pulp and add it to your drink. The last decade has seen a long-term boom in the popularity of wine in Japan, with many people developing a taste for red wines from all over the world, in part to promote good health. Even the humble liquor shop that my wife's parents run has seen quite a transformation in recent years, with the share of traditional sake in the store shrinking (partially due to our sake-buying customers dying of old age) and being replaced by imported wines. My wife and I are signed up with a company that sends us six bottles of wine from a different part of Europe every month, complete with information on the region -- I like to read through the newsletters they send and get a feel for how "winespeak" in Japanese compares with English (it's pretty funny, but not in any way I could ever communicate to you). Every year the Japanese go quite ga-ga over the beaujolais nouveau, a traditional wine from France that goes on sale at midnight on the third Thursday of November, which is transported in huge quantities to Japan by air cargo. I'll have to see about getting a few bottles and give this year's vintage a taste.

J-List has always supported Japan's PC dating-sim games, making sure we stock all English-translated bishoujo games so that fans around the world could experience this fun interactive media from Japan. We're extremely happy to announce that one of the most anticipated anime games to come along in years, Yin-Yang! X-Change Alternative, has been declared "Golden Master" and will be shipping very soon. In this game you play Kaoru, a Japanese boy who possesses a unique form of "yin-yang" DNA that is both male and female. When he accidentally drinks a potion that serves as a catalyst, he's surprised to find his body transformed into that of a girl, which is only the start of all the strange things that are going to happen to him.

A very Buddhist way of looking at your house pets, how to beat the Chinese at kanji, and thoughts on Japan's future

Pets are a part of our household in Japan, and currently we've got a dog (faithful old Sakura) and two cats (black-and-white Mix-chan and all-black Kuro). My wife once remarked to me, "It's important to keep pets in the home. They die in place of family members when the family runs into bad luck." My eyes become little black points like an anime character's at this, as I struggled to understand her statement. She was talking about the concept of migawari (me-gah-wah-ree), literally meaning "substitute for" or "sacrifice for." When our dog Chibi passed away earlier this year, the general consensus among my Japanese family was that he had died in order to protect someone in the family from injury or worse, and everyone loved him a little more for that. Originally a ninja term meaning to dress up a tree to look like a person so an enemy would think it was you and attack it mistakenly, the word refers to anything that takes bad luck in your place, protecting you as it does so. There are many kinds of objects believed to serve as "lightning rods" for bad fortune, including various types of omamori good luck charms or Buddhist statues -- we've even got a cool migawari charm up on the site today.

According to SF writer Isaac Asimov, the only constant is change, continuing change, inevitable change. Sometimes this change can take decades to become visible, and other times you can see trends happen right outside your window. The long-standing tradition of Japan trailing U.S. society by 10-20 years is continuing as the country faces the same kind of pressures on its manufacturing economy that the U.S. started experiencing in the early 1990s. The reasons are similar -- the high cost of building something in Japan leads to more companies outsourcing products to China as industries shift and change. One of the landmarks of the nearby city of Maebashi was a giant Daihatsu factory in the center of town -- they manufactured those cute midget-sized vehicles I used to see driving around on the SDSU college campus. The factory was closed last year, though, and in its place sprang up a new shopping district with supermarkets, clothing stores and restaurants, all of which seemed to mirror some of the changes that the U.S. has gone through over the last decade or two, moving from manufacturing to a service-based economy, and not always smoothly, either. Happily, although there is a trend towards larger, more convenient stores in Japan today, consumers are more concerned with overall quality of service rather than just price, and there are as yet no giant national retail chains that wield an unfair amount of influence over the economy, hopefully staving off "Wal-martification."

Establishing a rival relationship with someone is a smart way to motivate yourself, and I put this tactic to good use while studying Japanese. I had a Chinese friend who was taking level 1 of the Japanese Language Ability Test (JLPT) at the same time as me, and I made up my mind that I was going to beat her score. This was quite a task, since Chinese people have a natural affinity for kanji, the Chinese having invented them and all. But although my friend could read any Japanese sentence and get most of the meaning out of it, she was thrown off by the fact that there are two readings for most Japanese kanji, the Chinese one (based on how the character was pronounced in the 6th century when kanji came to the country), and the local Japanese one. The interplay between these two ways to read a character is subtle, like the Japanese people themselves, and it can be quite difficult to know how to pronounce a character in a given situation. In the end, I beat my friend by ten points, quite an accomplishment for a "white boy" foreigner.

We're having fun around here at J-List, playing with the new item we've posted to the site today: Moe (mo-EH) Soundrop, keychains that play super-cute anime voices when you press them. The latest step in the evolution of Japan's culture of "moe," roughly translatable as the burning, happy feeling you get when you see your favorite anime character, there are eight archetypal cute girls represented in the series, from cat girl to maid to younger sister who calls you "Oniichan!" and more. The recorded voices in the capsule toy keychains sound great, the batteries are replaceable, and best of all, they're very affordable, so you can get the girls you'd like to hear or pick up the whole set.

Interesting careers open to gaijin in Japan, getting used to strange words, and do you know what year it is?

I get a lot of mail from people who'd like to live in Japan someday, and I do my best to offer what guidance I can. Far and away, the most common job open to naive English speakers in Japan is teacher of English as a Second Language. Possible job avenues in this area include the national ESL school chains like AEON, GEOS and ECC; private-contract schools of varying sizes; jobs teaching English to employees of companies; more structured positions at high schools or universities; and the JET program. While it wasn't always a walk in the park, I did enjoy the years I spent teaching ESL before starting J-List, and I'd recommend teaching in Japan to anyone as long as they knew the limitations of the job (a four-year degree is required, and remember that "taught English in Japan" isn't always the best way to fill out one's resume). Still, I am invariably asked what other career paths are open to foreigners here. Other than the usual options you might think of -- translation, editing and checking of already translated works, becoming cast members at Tokyo Disneyland -- there is another up-and-coming career choice, that of a fake minister to perform weddings. While many Japanese get married with traditional Shinto ceremonies, Western-style weddings are still the most popular, and our prefecture has dozens of beautiful Western-influenced wedding halls, such as The Georgian House, which recreates an 18th century British manor so that couples can try to capture that elusive "Princess Diana" feeling at their wedding. In order for a white wedding to feel authentic, you just have to have a real-live foreigner there to say the nuptials. I ran into a friend of mind a few months ago, and he told me that he had almost given up teaching in lieu of his more profitable career as a wedding minister. At around $150-200 per ceremony, it's good work if you can get it, I suppose.

(Remember that I do have an article I've been writing over the past decade giving my now-oh-so-out-of-date advice on teaching ESL. See it here.)

You've been in Japan too long when you see a sign for a "mansion gallery" and know immediately that it's a building built to allow prospective buyers of high-rise condominiums (called "mansions" here) to see what the insides are like before making a purchase. Like every country, the Japanese take words and change them to fit their needs, so that sometimes a native speaker might not know what the original meaning was. For some reason only the Japanese can know, the letter "W" represents the idea of "double," and it's common for companies to use this letter in their product naming to communicate benefits, like the canned coffee I saw recently that promised "W" (double) the delicious coffee taste. The English word "service" often means "free" here, and if the owner of a ramen shop you're eating at uses the word as he hands you a free drink, you'll know what it means. Some other unique uses of English words including referring to screwdrivers as "plus" or "minus," labeling young people who decline to find full-time jobs "freeters," and one that threw me the first time I heard it, "number" for the license plate of a car.

I've talked before about how it's possible in Japan to lose touch with what year it is currently. In addition to the standard Western calendar, the Japanese have a unique system of counting years based on the reign of the current emperor. It's currently the 18th year of the Heisei era (Heisei means "Accomplishment of Peace," written 平成), which began when Emperor Hirohito died and was succeeded by his son, Akihito, so this year is Heisei 18. Before Heisei was the long Showa era (昭和, "Enlightened Peace," from 1925 to 1988), before that was Taisho (大正, "Great Righteousness," 1912-1924), Meiji (明治, "Enlightened Rule," 1868-1911), and so on. When you live in Japan, you quickly learn various dates in the Japanese system, since you need it to fill out forms -- I was born in Showa 43, e.g. 1968, my kids were born in Heisei 7 and 8, and so on. No doubt the Universal Century system of dates in the Gundam universe, which starts when humans first colonize space, is inspired by this system. It'd be kind of cool if we had names for Presidential eras, although we'd spend so much time arguing over what to use.

American uniqueness vs. Japanese uniformity, a new debate on "beautiful Japan" and the little joys of living in Japan

Just as Americans are accustomed to thinking of our country as a union of semi-soverign states, each with its own unique history and traditions, one of the hallmarks of Japan is "uniformity." During my bachelor days I travelled around the country quite a bit, going from cold but vibrant Hokkaido in the north, through the barren Northern Honshu area where sad enka songs were born, and all the way down to modern, bustling Hiroshima, and one thing that has always stood out for me was how similar many thing were. Roads, signs, telephone poles, the way schools are constructed, all seem to be following one master blueprint, with little or no variation between regions. There are exceptions of course -- the cold climate of Northern Japan requires sturdier architecture to withstand the heavy snowfall compared to the rest of the country -- but by and large many aspects of life in Japan are remarkably similar whether you're in Tokyo or Kyushu or wherever. The educational experience is uniform, too, with less variation across regions than I experienced in the seventh grade when I move from a school in Maryland to one in California. I was reminded of this fact when I picked up an item we're posting today, Re-Ment's Pucchi Elementary School series, detailed miniatures of objects found in schools in Japan, from the ubiquitous Japanese "randosel" backpack to textbooks and bento boxes those yellow hats that first graders wear so cars can see them. It's amazing that the company can create a set of miniature toys that virtually every Japanese will recognize and feel nostalgic over, no matter what part of the country they're from.

It's fun to live in Japan. You get to enjoy many good things, like the warm feeling of hot canned coffee on a cold train platform, or the thrill of finding a girl's phone number scrawled on the back of a chopstick wrapper after a night at an izakaya bar. Just as a Hemmingway aficionado might get a thrill out of retracing the road from Paris to Pamplona, it can be fun for those gaijin of the otaku persuasion to visit some of the locations in their favorite anime series. Tokyo's a good place for this, since the images of the city are well-represented in anime and manga, from Tokyo Tower (a regular fixation of the CLAMP artists) to the famous "Scramble Intersection" to iconic buildings like Shibuya 109 or the inverted pyramid at Tokyo Big Sight. I remember my first trip to Tokyo back in 1991, when I stood before the famous Studio Alta giant TV (giant for 1991, anyway), realizing I had finally arrived in Japan for real. Last weekend I went with a friend up to Karuizawa, a nice mountain town that happens to be the setting for the outstanding series "Please, Twins!" It was a lot of fun, roaming around the town and seeing what places from the anime series we happened to come across.

One of the first words of Japanese I learned was utsukushii (oo-tsoo- koo-SHEE), which means "beautiful" (and the kanji, 美しい, is also quite nice to look at). It's a word that's on a lot of lips in Japan these days, thanks to Shinzo Abe, who declared in his first speech as Japan's 90th Prime Minister that the goal of his cabinet was to create "a beautiful country, Japan." This has gotten everyone from J-Bloggers to pundits on television debating just what a "beautiful country, Japan" should be. Beautiful, as in cleaner, and respecting the natural environment more? Beautiful as in, a society where people value kindness to others, and swear off cynicism? A country that holds on to its culture and history? I've always been impressed with the way Japanese can debate subjects in a lively way, and many TV shows are built around this concept, taking, say, a panel of lawyers or doctors or politicians and throwing out topics for them to debate and discuss on camera, even daring to openly debate weather Japan should arm itself with nuclear weapons to counter North Korea. I hope the new debate on a how the new "beautiful country, Japan" can be realized produces some good suggestions for the future.

What Japanese think of foreigners who learn their language, odd ways to get cell phone customers, and American politics seen through Japanese eyes

I'm often asked what the Japanese think of foreigners who go out of their way to learn the language. I guess the idea is that Japan, with its long and unique history that included 250 years of isolation from the rest of the world, might not always be happy that "foreign barbarians" are taking in their linguistic secrets. I've found that nothing could be further from the truth, and by and large, Japanese are always pleased to meet a foreigner who has learned their language. Most of them have gotten over the silly idea that Japanese is the most difficult language in the world, and they can even handle the idea of "white boy" foreigners being able to write kanji. Popular variety shows often include a token Japanese-bilingual foreigner who can make witty banter with the other "talents" and add a bit of spice to the show. Some of the more interesting guests include godfather of gaijin Dave "dyes his hair blonde, ha-ha" Spector, the attractive former model Caiya, and Wikki-san, a Sri Lankan who studied so hard he got into Tokyo University using the test that normal students take (not the easier one for us foreigners). Of course there is one downside to learning "too much" Japanese, that more than few gaijin out there will back me up on, I'm sure. It seems that the more nihongo you know, the less mysterious and attractive you can seem to some members of the fairer gender, and I've known foreigners who spoke less Japanese than I do to be more popular with girls than me (although YMMV, of course). Since this phenomenon doesn't seem to have an official name, I'll christen it Peter's Inverse Law of Japanese Learning and see if the label sticks.

Well, the U.S. elections are over, and the dust has been settling all week long. American politics are covered closely in Japan, as they are all over the world, and once again I got a strange out-of-body "gaijin experience" watching the coverage in the local language, not unlike the bizarreness of seeing an American football game with sportscasters giving the play-by-play in Japanese. America's system of government is quite unique in the world, and isn't well understood by most people here, so there was plenty of explanation about how the various aspects of our system works. In Japan, elections called immediately after, say, a vote of no confidence by the Diet, or the Prime Minister dissolving the Diet himself, as he did when he ran into opposition to his privatization of the post office last year. Only familiar with this system, my Japanese father-in-law mistakenly though the election meant a immediate change in President, which would have been the case here.

The decision to allow cell phone users to take their phone numbers with them when they change carriers has had a big effect on the industry, with Japan's "big three" phone companies trying to take market share away from each other. Mammoth NTT DoCoMo has the largest piece of Japan's multibillion portable phone industry, and they're under attack by rivals who are daring to actually compete head to head with them. Newly christened Softbank/Yahoo hired the sexy Cameron Diaz to pimp their new phones, which worked so well that the company had to stop taking new applications, as their system was quickly getting overloaded. But it was AU by KDDI that stole the most users away from competitors, grabbing 200,000 new customers in two weeks by directly touting their leadership in customer satisfaction. However, their choice of a hip rock song by the Stones for their commercials was a little odd, since "I can't get no...satisfaction" has the opposite meaning from what they seem to think it does -- which tells you how carefully Japanese listen to song lyrics. This reminds me of the time I went to a friend's wedding and they were playing "Alone Again, Naturally" by Gilbert O'Sullivan, basically the last song you'd ever expect to hear at such a setting.

You may have noticed those phone straps that we sell on J-List. These are "netsuke" (net-TSOO-keh), a Japanese tradition that started out as hand-carved good luck charms carried on the end of a draw-string money bags back in the Edo Period. When portable electronic gadgets like cell phones came along, Japanese adapted these traditional cute objects for the modern age, attaching them to just about anything from cameras to keys to Nintendo DS and Sony PSP. Today we've got some attractive "Kimono Netsuke" on the site, in a variety of colors and styles, with a single beautiful printed on each.

We're big fans of Dan Kim, creator of the many quality webcomics over at Clone Army. In addition to his "serious" works like Penny Tribute and Kanami, he does hilarious parody comics his classic take on the relationship between Sakura and Tomoyo from the CLAMP anime, called Tomoyo42's Room. Check out a great tribute to his creative works with two new shirts we've just released, a standard size and fitted girl's cap sleeve, featuring his great art.

The Three Great Views of Japan, howling winds and volcanoes in my prefecture, and my wife's strange link to Monty Python

Quick, do you know how many Great Lakes there are on North America? The answer is five. The reason I know this is, the official name of the Great Lakes in Japanese is Go-daiko or the Five Great Lakes (五大湖 in Japanese). The Japanese can be really organized at times, and they like to codify things into little lists to make them easier to manage, not unlike the classic Seven Wonders of the World ranking. Have you read the Four Great Tragedies of Shakespere (四大悲劇）? I didn't know there only four of them, but this is the term the Japanese use to describe Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello and King Lear. These "most famous" mini lists are positively legion in Japan, and no matter what subject you're interested in, there's probably a "best three" list for you. If you're planning a trip to Japan, you might want to hit the Nihon Sankei　（日本三景）, the Three Most Beautiful Views of Japan, which are the gnarled Japan Pines of Matsushima, the view from the top of Amano Hashidate Mountain in Kyoto and the floating arch at Miyajima. How about the Three Rare Delicacies of the World? Caviar, foie gras and truffles. The Three Great Soups? Bouillabaisse, Shark's Fin and Tom Yan Kung. How about the Three Great Guitarists of the world? Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page. There is even an official listing for the Three Great Brands of Ham in the world. There's a Japanese Wikipedia page on this if you want to delve in deeper.

Right now the wind is howling outside my window, as winter lets us know that it's on its way. This wind is called kara-kaze, the dry, cold gale that races across the Kanto Plain this time of year. Gunma is a mostly mountainous prefecture in the center of the country's main island of Honshu, dominated by three large volcanic mountains, Akagi, Haruna and Asama. We're quite thankful for these mountains, since in addition to providing us with beautiful scenery, great skiing and a fun place to drive mountain roads while listening to Initial D background music with track names like "Speedy Speed Boy," they keep the majority of the winter snow on the Sea of Japan side of the country, away from Tokyo. The most active volcano around here is Mt. Asama, a hulking mass that can always be seen venting steam out of its cone. Mt. Asama had a major eruption in 1783, turning the local village of Komochi into "Japan's Pompeii" (and possibly one of the Three Great Volcano Disasters of Japan? I'll have to look that up). It erupted gain two years ago, essentially picking the entire Kanto area up and dropping it a meter or so down. There's something about living in Japan that makes you understand where the Shinto concepts of kami spirits who reside in mountains comes from...

Japan is all about politeness, and there are several linguistic and social mechanisms the Japanese have evolved to make human interaction go more smoothly here. One important concept is modesty (in Japanese, "kenson"), a trait that most everyone here values, which is why complimenting a Japanese person on how good their English is will generally result in strong statements of disagreement by the complimentee. The other day I was sitting in a coffee shop with my wife when we happened to see a neighbor who runs a small toy shop near us. What ensued was a brief war of politeness between my wife and our neighbor, with each side trying to verbally humble themselves before the other. "You have so many cars parked at your company. You must be doing well, to have so many employees," he'd say, and my wife would reply with something like, "Oh, but it's very hard running an online business since the Internet never stops for a holiday." She would then compliment him on the recent renovations to his shop and how nice they looked, whereupon he'd shoot back with, "But there are no customers, since few people pass our store, and every month we operate in the red." It went on for a while, both of them unknowingly channeling Monty Python's Four Yorkshiremen sketch while I watched in amazement. The practice of putting one's self down as a way of raising others up is a fine art in Japan, and should only be attempted by skilled professionals -- don't try it at home.

Things that can always freak a gaijin out, the Japanese penchant for talking over songs on the radio and what is a "real house"?

No matter how long a person lives in Japan, there are always things that can bring on what expats here call a "Japan moment," the feeling of utter amazement at something you've just encountered. Maybe it's something cute, like a big truck playing the Main Street Electrical Street Parade song as it backs up instead of a boring beep-beep-beep sound, or that first time seeing the plastic Colonel Sanders in front of KFC wearing his "Santa Wear" (Santa Claus Suit). Maybe it's a food item, like strawberry and whipped cream sandwiches, or one I saw a few days ago, ham and cheese on French Toast, complete with syrup pre-applied to the bread. You never know what will bring on that sense of "only-in-Japan" next -- driving through an extremely rural town and coming across a replica of the American Statue of Liberty? Seeing a nondescript building with "Oh!" carefully painted on it? Meeting someone who has taught English for 30 years yet has never been outside of Japan, and who asks you "Where is your domicile?" instead of "Where do you live?" Of course, it's always important to remember Obi Wan's Law, that our perceptions depend on our point of view. Once we were having a rare feast of fajitas, and we'd invited a friend from Peru. Silly American that I am, I assumed that he'd be familiar with Mexican food, but it was all totally alien to him, and he'd never even seen a Mexican tortilla nor did he have any idea how to eat one.

There's another minor area of "gaijin shock" that has to do with listening the radio. The other day I was driving in my Mazda "Road-star" (Miata), and thought I'd give FM Gunma a listen. The announcer was about to play a famous song by singer Momoe Yamauguchi called Cosmos, supposedly the "most requested song in the Autumn." It was quite a beautiful tune, or it would have been, if the girl on the radio would have been so kind as to shut up and let her listeners hear the song. Instead, she yapped away, giving a detailed background of the song (it topped the charts in 1977), talked about the singer's career (debuted in 1972 on a talent show, retired in 1980, singing her live single "thank you for your kindness, thank you for your tenderness" amid many tears), and read some of the requests from listeners asking to hear the song. Call me a picky foreigner, but if the song's that good I'd like to actually hear it, not some radio personality talking while it's playing. I've asked Japanese people about this, and have been told "the Japanese don't listen to music all that carefully" and no one really cared if someone was talking while a song was playing. This is probably why no one but me takes exception to the Christmas music that invariably plays in February...

Oh goody, I managed to find the song in question in case you're dying to know what kind of song it is. The link is here (WMV and Windows required, it looks like, since I had to run this page in Parallels on my MacBook Pro to get it to work).

All societies go through changes as the decades march by, and Japan is no exception. While the U.S. has wrestled with shifts in the "post" nuclear family due to increases in divorce and single parenting, one rock that has helped Japan's society is the importance of the jikka (JI-kah, pronunced with a small pause between the syllibles, a "small tsu"). Literally meaning "real house," a jikka is the house where one's parents live, or where they lived if they've passed on. It's also the location of the family's Buddhist Altar, a wooden altar with a figure of Buddha inside that's used for saying prayers and lighting incense for dead ancestors and let them know they haven't been forgotten. At certain times during the year, mainly New Years' Day and the August Obon holidays, people return home to be with family at their jikka, and so on, not unlike going home for Thanksgiving but with a lot more cultural formality.

For fans of the interactive dating-sim games published by Hirameki International, we're happy to announce that Yo-Jin-Bo -The Bodyguards- is in stock and shipping now. A great English-translated anime game for your PC or Mac, in this game you take on the role of Sayori, an ordinary high school student who is magically transported back in time to Japan in the feudal ages. Your goal is to save the lovely Hatsuhime, princess of the Mochizuki clan, from assassination, and you'll have three eccentric but loyal bodyguards ("yojimbo" in Japanese) to help. It's an incredibly deep game with a huge cast of interesting characters and a great story. Get your copy now!

Remember, now is the best time to select your 2007 Japanese calendars, since we've just gotten in a huge volley of items in stock, including many calendars that won't be coming in again before they sell out for the season. In case you were wondering what the top-selling calendars are this year, we'll tell you. For anime calendars, the Ghibli calendar is in the lead as usual, followed by the Shirow Masamune offering (the first in several years) and strong showings by Negima and Bleach. For traditional and art calendars, the beautiful kimono paintings of Haruyo Morita is in the lead, followed by Traditional Scroll Illustrations, the Joy of Bento and Famous Castles of Japan. We sell plenty of cute Japanese idol calendars, and this year Aki Hoshino, Yuko Ogura and Yua Aida are all doing great. Finally, "other" calendars that are very popular this year include Domo-kun, Gackt and that old standby, Japanese women in traditional onsen hot springs. Check out our stock of calendars now!

A delicious food that brings people together, naughty words in Japanese, and the tragedy of "ijime" in Japan

Last night we went to a friend's house to have one of my favorite dishes, nabe (NAH-beh), a word that just means "pot" and refers to any kind of food you make in a big open pot and eat with everyone gathered around, conversing while taking things out (boiled meat, fish, tofu, vegetables, etc.). There are many varieties of nabe, from the spicy Kimchee Nabe that our friends made for us last night (as they are wont to do, the Japanese have adopted the national food of Korea as one of their own) to the Kiritanpo variety enjoyed in Northern Japan, and the famous Chanko Nabe from Nagasaki, huge pots containing many different ingredients which are traditionally eaten by sumo wrestlers. Another famous variety of nabe food is Sukiyaki, one of my all-time favorite dishes. Aside from being delicious and a great way to warm up in the colder months, nabe is a genuine "social food" which makes for great conversation, since everyone sits around the pot to take food out of it rather than eating from their own hoarded pile. It also allows uniquely Japanese concepts like enryo, the tendency for people hesitate when taking, say, the last piece of tofu before asking of anyone else would like it, to work in the group. (We do have some great bilingual books on how to make Japanese food like nabe, although most are out of stock due to their popularity. You can backorder any of them and we'll send the when they come in.)

One sad aspect of Japan's society is ijime (ee-jee-MEH), the cruel bullying that happens in school and other situations. We're all human, of course, and various forms of hazing can be found in any group, from college fraternities to West Point to making the new guy at McDonald's count all the pickles in the pickle bucket as an initiation ceremony. There are some reasons why ijime is an especially bad problem in Japan, including the strictness of the top-down senpai-kohai relationship system and the practice of having students sit in the same class with the same members for an entire year rather than giving each student a different hourly schedule, which means that any problem between students is magnified many times. You can see examples of ijime in Japanese animation stories, too, such as the classic tennis show Aim for the Ace, which is closely parodied by Gainax's Aim for the Top: Gunbuster (which we have paid no small tribute to). When the main character is chosen for the tennis team even though she barely knows how to hold a racquet, she becomes the target of teasing by the other members, who do things like put thumbtacks in her shoes. Of course, ijime can happen to anyone, and my wife even had problems with some of her co-workers at a company she used to work at. Once, everyone was going out to eat at a French restaurant, and they told her to dress in plain clothes. When she arrived in jeans, she saw that everyone else had secretly dressed up, just to embarrass her. Sad to say, but my half-American daughter has been the target of ijime in her almost-homogenous school from time to time, for example when the other girls cruelly say "What's that? I can't understand English" when she speaks to them in Japanese. We make sure we're supportive and let her know she shouldn't pay any attention to what some silly kids say. She is Japanese, and American, and has both passports to prove it.

When you learn a foreign language, the first thing you usually learn are the "naughty" words. However, people studying Japanese are often surprised to learn that most of the bad words they're used to in English don't "map" over very well. The most common Japanese insults include baka (BAH-kah, stupid), aho (ah-HO, the Osaka version of the same word), and boke (BOH-kay, basically meaning "nim-wit"). Almost all the anatomical words you may be used to just don't work in Japanese, nor does the "F" word, which doesn't even exist, except occasionally in English as a foreign loan word. The most basic Japanese swear word is probably kuso (KOO-soh), the "s" word, yet it's interesting to note that it's not considered a bad word, as it's used in children's anime like Yu-Gi-Oh quite often and no one thinks anything of it. It addition to the primary meaning, the word kuso can also refer to various bodily products. The stuff that comes out of your nose is hana-kuso (nose-sh--), and ear wax is mimi-kuso (ear-sh--). Sleep in your eyes that builds up while you sleep is me-kuso (MEH-kuso), and plaque on your teeth is called ha-kuso. Now you know some interesting Japanese vocabulary words!

Good news for fans of our Japanese calendars: we've gotten in a huge shipment of our most popular 2007 anime, JPOP, idol/actress, traditional, art and other calendars, and we've posted them to the site, complete with updated photos so you can see how good the insides of these calendars are. There's no better way to spend the coming year than with a slice of Japan on your wall. Since J-List goes far behind carrying merely the top 20-25 releases, instead carrying a huge selection of these great poster-sized glossy calendars, you've got a huge selection to browse through while you decide which you'd like to by. But fair warning: our current stock represents the last stock we'll get of many calendar items, so we recommend that you order sooner, rather than later, to avoid the agony of not getting that Ghibli or Domo-kun calendar you had your eye on disappearing from the site.

J-List would like to remind you that we've got a huge selection of cool and wacky products from Japan, which would make great gifts for the anime fan or general Japan-lover on your Christmas list this year. If you're wondering what to get the anime fan on your list who has everything, we're sure we've got some great products, from our above-mentioned calendars to great toys and Totoro blankets and wacky T-shirts and our patented "wacky things from Japan." It is of course best to buy early so you can take advantage of cheaper shipping -- why not browse the site and make your order now?

The triumphant return of an old Japanese favorite, a milestone for my son, and a source of sadness in Japanese society

Imagine if a food you ate every day were suddenly unavailable, say, hamburgers, just to pick an example. With no more hamburgers available, restaurants would do their best with alternatives, bringing out, say, pork burgers or lamb burgers or veggie burgers. Consumers would probably be bummed about not being able to order their favorite food, but they'd muddle through somehow. This is basically what happened when Mad Cow Disease fears caused Japan to halt all imports of beef from the U.S., which rendered one of Japan's most popular dishes, gyudon or beef bowl, extremely rare. Beef bowl is the quintessential home-grown fast food in Japan, a simple dish of stewed beef and onions on steaming hot rice that costs around $3.50 and can be wolfed down in about two minutes -- I like mine with raw egg poured over it so the rice sticks together nicely while eating with chopsticks. Restaurant chains like Yoshinoya served millions of bowls every day before it all came to a screeching halt two years ago, when the ban went into effect. Finally, though, beef imports have resumed and you can get a delicious bowl of the artery- clogging stuff once again. I was so happy to have my old friend back again, I had to snap a picture for posterity.

Japan is a great country, with beautiful temples and shrines, friendly people and a fascinating culature. Sadly, not everyone can see how wonderful Japan is, and far too many here choose the easy way out by committing suicide. It seems that every day brings bizarre news of people who make this sad choice: a family of four in a strange suicide pact...a woman who lost her fiancee in the terrible train derailment last year and wanted to be with him...one of guards at the Imperial Palace. One terrible source of anguish are students who are the recipients of ijime or bullying, such as one 13-year-old who took his own life as a result of abuse from the other kids on his basketball team. School-related suicides aren't always limited to the students, though. Last week, the principal of a high school in Ibaraki Prefecture, just up the road from us, committed suicide when it was reported that his school was foregoing teaching some required G.E. courses to better prepare students for the specific subjects that they'd need for the upcoming college entrance exams. I'm not sure what's different about Japan and most other countries when it comes to looking out for No. 1. Some odd symptom of post-industrial society? Latent cultural memories from the time when samurai committed seppuku? I personally think the answer lies in the lack of open communication and resistance to adopting a system for counseling people in need.

Now for some good news: my son passed level 2 of the Step Test, the primary test for measuring English ability in Japan. Like the Japanese Language Ability Test (JLPT) that foreigners study for, the Step Test is organized into multiple levels, with levels 4 for elementary school kids, level 3 for junior high, level 2 for high school and level 1 for college-age and professionals. My son hates it when people at his school assume that his English is good because he was born haafu (half), so he went all out to study for the test, despite the fact that he had to cover both English and the kanji for the Japanese parts of the test, as he's only in the 5th grade and hasn't learned high school kanji yet. As is often the case in Japan, the existence of a rival helped motivate him: he wanted more than anything to beat Kimishima-kun, a very smart boy in his class who has been studying at Kumon schools, which have a very good reputation here. Although I have been critical of Japan's reliance on testing and measuring in the past, I've come to see that having a series of goals for self improvement, be it learning a language, mastering typing or learning to use an abacus, is really a good thing. It'd be nice if a universal system of tests like this existed in the U.S. (other than in Boy and Girl Scouts, which is actually somewhat similar, in the way they encourage students to aim for higher ranks).

There's nothing quite as mysterious as kanji, the writing system used in Japan to express ideas, and Westerners are often fascinated with how this aesthetically beautiful pictographic system works. We've posted two new wacky Japanese T-shirt for kanji lovers, a great way to wear something really unique. The first shirt reads "Ganko," which means stubborn and hard-headed and unwilling to sacrifice one's ideals, a cool shirt if this describes you. Then there's "Ore-ryu," a word that literally means "My Style" or "Going My Way" (or alternately, "I'm doing my own thing my own damned way," depending on how deep you want to get with the translation). Two great new Japanese T-shirts for you!

It's here! It's here!

Ahhh, delicious, stewed beef on rice...

Time to show you some of the pictures from the Halloween bash that I've been forgetting to post. This girl was so cute!

The one on the right is Mozart.

Other students show off their costumes.

Here are my own. Anakin and Leia.

Here my son reinacts an exciting scene from Star Wars Episode II.

Foreign accents and how they work in Japan, daylight savings time in Japan, and the joy of root beer

A recent commercial featured a voice saying, nihon-jin wa urusai! which means that Japanese are loud and obnoxious and fussy. Was this an insult to Japanese consumers? Not at all -- the commercial, for Nescafe instant coffee, was actually saying that Japanese were picky when it came to how their coffee tasted, a good thing from their point of view. The voiceover was done using a foreigner speaking accented Japanese, which results in an interesting "otherness" that's just what the doctor ordered for advertisers looking for a way to subliminally tie their product to the image of exotic foreign lands. Just as different dialects can bring up different emotional responses in listeners -- the Imperial officers in Star Wars wouldn't seem so evil if they weren't speaking with British accents -- Japanese pronounced in a non-standard way can create unique settings for listeners. Another example is Suntory using a Chinese-accented voice to talk about how authentic its oolong tea is, or Lotte using a little girl speaking Finnish-accented Japanese to promote its gum with xylitol (which comes from Finland). It's quite common for radio DJ's to speak a strange English-influenced form of Japanese that makes them sound like foreigners, inflecting the usually flat tones with emotional highs and lows that makes the ear think it's listening to English even though the content is in Japanese. In this way, they've essentially created an artificial dialect of the language to go along with traditional ones like Osaka-ben, Kyoto-ben and so on.

There are two kinds of people, those who drink root beer and those who don't. Generally, Japanese fall into the second category, as the venerable American beverage tastes to them like Salonpas, a muscle cream similar to Bengay. My family loves the stuff, even my Japanese wife, who got tired of being teased by her kids and me as a nakama-hazure (nah-kah-mah HA-zoo-ray), or outsider, because she was the only one who couldn't drink root beer. Thanks to a company Kobe, the Foreign Buyers' Club, gaijin who live in Japan can get access to just about anything from the U.S., from Rice Crispies to Campbell's Soup to American peanut butter (they have Brit and Aussie stuff too). The only catch is, you have to buy in supermarket cases, which usually means buying 12 cans of refried beans, sixteen boxes of Hamburger Helper, that sort of thing. We just got our most recent order in, so we've got plenty of Raisin Bran, Aunt Jamaima pancake mix, and A&W for making root beer floats. Like most Asian countries, the Japanese are fond of their pickles, which include such varieties as pickled daikon radish, eggplant and the pickled kimchee octopus I had for dinner last night (really). Still, there's just no replacement for good old Vlassic dill spears from home, so I'm very happy to have a supplying my refrigerator right now.

If you're in North America you probably set your clock an hour back on Sunday. Most people grumble about having to remember to set their clocks forward and back in the spring and autumn, this isn't a problem in Japan, the only industrialized country that has not adopted the Daylight Savings Time system in one form or another. Instead, we have to deal with the other extreme -- if I stay up past 3 a.m. watching Japan's bizarre late-night TV or downloading the new episode of Battlestar Galactica from iTunes, I often get to go to sleep with the rising sun peeking in through the curtains.

American-style shopping in Japan, the shadow of MC Hammer in TV commercials, and what does baseball have to do with ham?

Last weekend my son and I decided to stop by Aeon, a sprawling American-style shopping mall that recently opened near us, featuring 150 shops and a large-scale department store filled with good things for consumers to buy. We were sorry we'd bothered, though, since 25,000 people or more were also converging on the place, resulting in huge traffic jams for miles around. The shopping center follows the U.S. model so closely that my son and I felt we had been transported back to San Diego, and I was tempted to pull out a $20 bill to pay for our Starbucks, instead of Japanese yen. One of the most important rules for success in business is, wait for the next inevitable paradigm shift to come along and take advantage of it it when it does, advice which American companies seem to be taking, judging from the number of stores like Gap and Body Shop that were chasing a new type of Japanese shopper. How land is allotted and used in Japan is a very complex subject, and the new Aeon shopping center had been plunked down in the middle of an area designated for rice-farming, supposedly forbidden to all construction. No doubt the developers got special permission from the city in the interests of economic development.

The Japan Series, Japan's national baseball championship, is over, with the Nippon Ham Fighters beating the Chunichi Dragons 4-1 in the 5th game. It was a big win for the Hokkaido-based team, which hadn't claimed a championship in 44 years, but also very big for Tsuyoshi Shinjo, who played for the New York Mets and San Francisco Giants a few years back. The flamboyant baseball player, who has amused fans by dressing in costumes like Darth Vader, Spiderman and the Power Rangers, announced that he would be retiring this season, and yesterday's win was his last game as a professional ball player. By the end of the game he was in tears, so much so that his last at-bat was an easy strike-out. It was interesting to see the many changes that have taken place in Japanese baseball during the time I've been here. In addition to the standard two foreigners that the team fielded -- never more than two, by unofficial agreement among the teams, to preserve the Japanese-ness of the game -- the Fighters' star pitcher was young Yu Darvish, a lanky half-Iranian half-Japanese with a killer fastball, and the manager that brought the team to victory is Thomas Brad Hilton, formerly of the Texas Rangers.

When that old Pepsi commercial featuring rapper M.C. Hammer singing "Feelings" when he's given a Coke was shown here, it created problems for Pepsi, since Japan is among the many nations that doesn't allow companies to compare their products directly to competitors ("our product is better than brand X"). When companies do make a statement that a product is better, lasts longer, etc. you invariably see the words "compared with this company's previous products" on the screen in small letters. It seems like the tendency for companies to avoid direct comparisons might be lessening somewhat, though. Recently the government has required that cell phone companies allow users to keep their phone numbers when they change companies, allowing consumers to flit between providers at will, and as a result, Japan's #2 phone company ("au by KDDI") has started a big push for market share, touting their #1 customer satisfaction and actively courting switchers. Maybe we'll see those Mac vs. PC commercials on the air in Japan someday?

Do you dig JPOP music? Apple's iTunes music store is a great way to gain access to thousands of Japanese artists. There's just one problem: unless you happen to have a credit card registered in Japan, you can't buy from the store. There is one great way that people around the world can get in on these Japanese tunes, however: buy the prepaid iTunes music cards that J-List sells, which make it a snap to surf over to the iTunes Japan store with the iTunes you've already got installed, browse their offerings, and make your purchases with your Japanese account. Music purchased at the iTunes Japan store is fully compatible with iTunes and iPod, no matter where you live. It's a great time to try the iTunes Japan store, because BMG/Sony has just added their catalog to the Japan store, so there's more cool music to choose from than ever before.

Checking one's cultural preconceptions at the door, all about Tokyo and surrounding areas, and J-Drama update

When you come to a place like Japan, it's always best to check your cultural preconceptions at the door and keep an open mind, since you're sure to encounter things that don't mesh with your "cultural reality." We like driving around with our handy Alpine Navi, or GPS car navigator, which is nice to have if you find yourself lost or get the sudden urge to find the nearest sushi restaurant. The clever map shows small and large roads, indicates traffic jams, and marks hospitals, schools and convenience stores clearly. It also shows the many Buddhist temples that dot Japan with the universal icon, the swastika. Seeing swastikas on maps does take some getting used to, but in reality the icon is thousands of years old, used since prehistoric times and found in ancient Rome, Persia, and throughout the Hindu and Buddhist world today (in China the symbol denotes vegetarian food). In the end, encountering these little differences in culture is good for everyone since it makes us understand the world better.

Since the Meiji Restoration of 1868, the official capital of Japan has been Tokyo, a name which means "East Capital" in homage to the Chinese cities of Beijing ("North Capital") and Nanjing ("South Capital"). It's a sprawling mesh of trains, roads, and concrete, with a population of 12 million, a number which rises significantly during the day as people come in from the surrounding regions to work. Tokyo isn't a city at all, but a prefecture unto itself, with 23 "special wards" as well as cities, towns and (don't ask me why) villages established inside its borders, like New York's boroughs carried to a bizarre extreme. Tokyo is so massive that it spills out of its borders, creating one unbroken urban continuum around it. Japan's capital is bordered by Yokohama to the south, home the best Chinese food in the country; Yamanashi Pref. to the West, a nice place to take in Mt. Fuji; Chiba Pref. to the East, home of Tokyo Disneyland and the setting of the seminal cyberpunk novel Neuromancer; and poor Saitama Pref. to the North. For some reason, it seems that regions that live in the shadow of famous cities can get negative reputations, like New Jersey or the Orange County area of California ("living behind the Orange Curtain" a friend from Garden Grove used to say to me). Poor half-rural, half-urban Saitama has certainly been cursed in this way, so much so that the main slang word meaning "dorky" or "uncool" in Japan -- dasai, pronounced dah-SAI -- comes from this prefecture's name.

Yesterday was the funeral of Takuya Fujioka, the actor who played the grandfather on the long-running Japanese drama "Wataru Seken wa Oni Bakari" (translatable as "Nothing but Devils in the World" although the official English title seems to be "Making It Through"), who passed away at the age of 76 last week. One of the most popular shows on TV today, the drama follows the (usually unhappy) life and times of the Okakura family, who run a ramen shop, focusing on the five grown Okakura daughters. The plots are absolutely mundane, dealing with issues like wives not getting along with their mothers-in-law, headstrong kids who refuse to go to school or show respect to their elders, and so on. I positively hate this twisted Japanese take on the Brady Bunch, since just crossing through a room with the show on TV is enough to trap you for the next hour, like a fly in molasses. The show has been running off and on for fifteen years, a rarity the J-Drama scene, where series are usually limited to 15 weekly episodes with a climactic resolution at the end.

The social problems of "hikikomori," a Japan population update, and budding awareness of a scary holiday

One social problem that's being talked about more and more in Japan is hikikomori (hee-kee-KOH-MOH-ree, 引きこもり), a Japanese term that refers to young shut-ins who withdraw from society, preferring to stay cooped up in their rooms and refusing to leave the house for months at a time. A strange phenomenon that's becoming more and more prevalent in countries like Japan and South Korea, aided by the growth of the Internet and vibrant all-online communities, the problem is a growing national concern. The topic of shut-ins has been cropping up more and more in anime these days, as the medium matures and is able to express itself in new ways. One show called Rozen Maiden centers around a hikikomori main character who refuses to go to school, instead spending his days ordering occult goods from the Internet (he accidentally buys an animated gothic doll who enslaves him to her will). Another anime that's likely to bring Japan's shut-ins together as a generation just as Gainax's Otaku no Video did with otaku fifteen years before is Welcome to the N.H.K. In this popular manga and anime, the story isn't about Japan's famous public broadcasting station (also known as the Domo-kun people), but the Nihon Hikkomori Kyokai, or Japan Shut-in Association, which figures into the story. I wonder if it'll be shown on Cartoon Network someday?

As Japan's population continues to decline, especially in rural areas, smaller towns and villages are doing what they can to respond to the problem. In many cases, this takes the form of gappei (GAH-peh), or merging, combining regions to form new communities to hopefully spur economic growth. This is what happened where J-List's own Tomo lives, when the former town of Omama, population 22,000, combined with several surrounding areas to form Midori City, with three times the population and a cool, urban-sounding name. Near his house, there's an elementary school with 35 students -- not 35 students per class or per grade, but 35 students in all six grades. Hopefully the new status as part of a larger city will enable municipal leaders to combine the school districts into larger units where kids can have friends and a more normal school life. Towns with shrinking populations are trying to deal with their predicament another way, by closing redundant hospitals and other public facilities, moving their functions elsewhere. In one small town in Mie Prefecture near Osaka, residents lost the only hospital where they could give birth, requiring an hour's journey to the nearest facility instead.

Halloween is neigh, and all through Japan you can see the devilish grin of Jack-o-Lanterns, as decorations in stores at least, if not on display in front of homes. Halloween isn't exactly a part of the normal Japanese cultural fabric, but year after year this unique Celtic-and-American export finds its way into the hearts of kids here, who learn about the holiday as an extension of learning English, and sometimes get to dress up. When we enrolled my son at the experimental English school, we didn't know that we were putting full-blown Halloween back into our expat lives, but since the school hosts a giant Halloween party every year where everyone comes in costume, we've had reason to go all-out. This year my kids are going as Anakin Skywalker and Princess Leia.

Happy news for Shirow fans: his popular 2007 calendar, the first one issued in several years, is in stock and shipping now. This calendar features all-new art created by the talented illustrator who created Ghost in the Shell, the anime that inspired the Wachowski Brothers to make The Matrix. His calendar is proving very popular this year -- we ordered more than a hundred but sold half of those just on pre-orders.

Okay, some random pictures for you. This is probably the only Ham and Cheese on French Toast sandwich you're likely to see today.

It was moving day for us in Karuizawa. This is my son, insisting that I squoosh him in the car with the other stuff.

Like I always say, "Stay it with Flowers."

Anakin Skywalker prepares to conquor a galaxy.

Meanwhile, back at the Tantive IV... I had to train her to say "Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi, you're my only hope," since she doesn't know the films as much as Kazuki and me.

Conflicting themes in the medical industry in Japan, all about convenience stores, and how our brain names objects

Japan is a land of conflicting themes, of high tech phones and glittering gadgets alongside abandoned pachinko parlors and that old guy who drives around selling baked sweet potatoes (a local delicacy), where no one gives a second thought to undressing in front of strangers in the public bath but where a women would die before sunbathing with her top off like they do in Europe. The medical industry in Japan can be confusing, too, a thought that occurred to me watching a show on the other night in which famous TV entertainers ask hard-hitting questions of medical professionals. On the one hand, Japan has an effective network of large and small hospitals that promote good health and regular medical check-ups. There are two systems to ensure that full-time employees of large companies and workers in smaller companies/self employed people have health insurance, which has contributed to the Japanese having the longest life expectancy of any nation. Not everything is rosy, however. Since medical costs are tightly controlled, salaries for doctors are low compared to the U.S., and American companies that provide expensive drugs and medical equipment are frequently unwilling to invest in the local market. Japanese hospitals are consistently 20 years behind the rest of the world when it comes to things like organ transplants, and patients are often better off going overseas for some kinds of treatments. Going to the hospital involves a bit of Russian Roulette, since you never know what quality of care you'll receive, as with the recent case of a pregnant woman who died of a stroke while waiting for a hospital to accept her (happily, her baby was saved). Partially for this reason, patients make heavy use of the shokai or "introduction" system, asking a trusted general practitioner to formally introduce you to a specialist or hospital rather than just taking your chances.

How the brain assigns names to objects and how we categorize these objects in our world is something you might not think about much, but living in Japan, I notice some interesting things. In the movie Pulp Fiction, Bruce Willis's character makes a sharp distinction between a motorcycle and a "chopper" (a motorcycle with an elongated front end), which is silly on the one hand since there's very little difference between the two, but is nevertheless something we all do in language. In my own dialect of English, at least, a thumb is not considered a finger, and a pickup truck is defined as being a separate concept from a car, despite their similar function. Naturally, the Japanese have their own list of language quirks, such as concepts of "leg" and "foot" both represented by the same word (ashi) or the tendency for Japanese to insist that green and yellow-green are completely separate colors. While talking with my son, he'll use the word "tire" referring to the wheels on a plastic car (to me, a tire must be made of rubber), or "string" when asking where the wire for the Powerbook is, which make sense to him but sound odd to me. Language is interesting because it's a way to reflect on how our brains work, to read a little of the source code that makes up our own internal firmware.

As a foreigner, it's always fun to see what they have at the local convenience store (conbini in Japanese). There are dozens of convenience store chains here, dominated by Seven Eleven Japan, which created the category in 1974 by adapting an American concept with Japanese-style distribution practices and eventually grew to be Japan's largest retailer, much larger than the parent company. Convenience stores offer many products, including Japanese-style food (bento, noodles and onigiri/rice balls), various bread products (both sliced white bread and various specialty breads like Melon Pan and Curry Pan), drinks like canned coffee and bottled green tea, all manner of candy and gum, and lately, iPods and iTunes music cards. The concept of personal checks doesn't exist in Japan at all, and most people pay their monthly bills by taking them to their local convenience store where they can be read by the cash register. In the winter, I love to go to a convenience store and get niku-man, a Chinese bun which is basically meat inside steamed bread -- yum. There are microwave burritos to be had here, but be warned: with ingredients like scrambled egg & ham or pizza and sausage, the might not be what you're used to. Like Japanese banks, convenience stores here compete by trying to appear as similar to each other as possible (a concept that could only work in Japan), and by and large, you won't find something in one chain that's not available everywhere. The newest trend in convenience stores is Natural Lawson, a chain of shops that go out of their way to carry health-conscious items, organic vegetables, and so on.

The art of Shirow Masamune, the creator of Ghost in the Shell, is really amazing to behold, and preorders for his 2007 calendar (the first issued in several years) are already more than half sold out at J-List. Today we've posted his dynamite Togihime Zoushi 2, a book containing dozens of his incredible artistic creations that no Shirow fan will want to be without. Please note that stock is limited and the work is permanently out of print -- if you're a fan of Shirow's artwork, don't delay in picking up this new item!

Remember that Christmas is not too far off, and J-List is a fabulous place to look for unique and special gifts for that special someone on your list. Whether they're a card-carrying member of the otaku generation or merely like fresh and new concepts that only the Japanese could come up with, we've got the perfect gift ideas right here. Calendars are an especially nice gift, and we've got hundreds of amazing anime, JPOP, swimsuit idol and other calendars to browse through. Why not consider giving a J-List gift certificate, which can be issued in any amount and can either be sent in an attractive physical box, or as a printable PDF gift certificate sent through email.

Commomorating Karaoke Culture Day, a cruel joke on the population front, and all about mixed bathing in Japan

Japan is a big fan of naming special days to create awareness about things we take for granted, like Sweet Potato Day (Oct. 13) or Rubber Manufacturing Day (May 6) or Teddy Bear Day (Oct. 27, the birthday of Theodore Roosevelt, from who the name originates). Why do I know these silly dates? Because every time I start my car, a computerized voice greets me and tells me what special day it is. Today happens to be Karaoke Culture Day, a day to pause and think about the beneficial effects karaoke has had on all or our lives, or something like that. Karaoke sprung into being in 1971, created by musician/inventor Daisuke Inoue, who had been asked by customers at a live house he performed at to record instrumental versions of his songs so they could sing them at company events. With the recent invention of high-tech 8-track tape players, stereos were getting smaller, and Daisuke got the idea for a portable song machine with a microphone jack that would allow people to sing their own songs. The company he founded to market tape-based karaoke machines launched the modern karaoke industry, but it fell on hard times when Laserdisc-based karaoke came along and stole the marketplace, causing Inoue to step down as president to take responsibility for not leading the company more effectively. Unfor- tunately for Daisuke, it never occurred to him to patent the idea or trademark the name "karaoke," mistakes which would cost him hundreds of millions. The name, incidentally, comes from "kara" (empty, as in karate, which means "empty hand") and "orchestra." Since I learned Japanese in part by hanging out at Japanese karaoke restaurants in San Diego and reading the words as they appeared on the screen, I tip my hat to Mr. Inoue, and hope he's enjoying his retirement.

The population of the United States has just hit the 300 million mark, an event that seems like a grim joke considering that Japan's population has probably reached its peak of 127 million at just about the same time, and has started to decline as deaths outstrip births. I guess I'm not quite sure how to feel about the issue of population shrinkage. On the one hand, Japan has a high population compared its small size, with 327 people per square km, compared with 383, 27 and 3 for England, the U.S. and Canada, respectively, so it seems that the idea of a lessening of population pressures could be a good thing. But does a falling population mean that an eternally shrinking GDP is in Japan's future? Some people suggest this, but I don't buy it, since Japan is currently an extremely inefficient place, and if they can manage to copy just a fraction in productivity gains seen in the U.S. in recent years, the economy can grow even if the overall population declines. In reality, the macro-level changes that Japan is facing on the population front are likely to affect the average person far less than more localized trends, such as the tendency for young people to flee the extreme rural parts of the country for larger cities. During my bachelor days I travelled from one end of Japan to the other, visiting places like Aomori Prefecture at the top of Japan's main island of Honshu, known for its apples and sad enka songs, and Tottori Prefecture, home of Japan's only desert. These regions are very sparsely populated, with lonely train stations that have so few passengers passing through that it isn't feasible to keep even one employee there -- hence, you buy your ticket and give it directly to the train conductor when you got on the train. As usual, I'm sure the changes Japan is going through are things that will just be dealt with as we go forward in human history.

Bathing in public baths (sento) and hot spring spas (onsen) is a fun part of life in Japan, and something my family and I are big fans of. By and large, being in the buff in front of others is something you don't give a second thought to -- it's just part of the culture here, like beer vending machines and aloe flavored yogurt. While Japan is famous for images of men and women bathing together, kon'yoku or mixed bathing is actually very rare these days -- I've only found one mixed bathing bath, and believe me, I've looked hard. Although men are strictly forbidden from entering the womens bathing area, there's an unwritten rule that female staff may enter the men's bath to clean at any time, despite the natural state of all the men bathing inside. Usually the women are obasans (older women in their 50s or so), but every once in a while an attractive younger woman will come in to straighten the buckets or check the bath temperature, causing the occasional dash to hot water by gaijin who shall not be named.

Calling all fans of Japanese calendars! We've gotten a huge volley of 2007 calendars in stock, and have posted them to the site for you to browse. Among the calendars we have on hand and ready to ship out to you are Domo-kun (a great item for fans of NHK's famous brown spokesmonster), gorgeous idols like Mihiro, Yukie Kawamura, and Sonim, super anime characters like Boy Detective Conan, Negima, My Neighbor Totoro, beautiful images of Japanese castles and gardens, and more. We also have two items that I can't recommend highly enough: this year's outstanding Ghibli Totoro and Kiki's Delivery Service 3-D calendars, which feature Totoro standing by the famous bus stop and Jiji the Cat, both of which are great for displaying photos in when 2007 is behind us.

Last time we officially announced that our new yaoi PC dating-sim game, Absolute Obedience, was in stock and shipping, and now we've got another announcement for fans of this popular genre from Japan: J-List's San Diego staff will be attending the upcoming Yaoi Con in San Francisco, October 20-22 in the heart of San Francisco. We'll have our great English-translated BL games as well as other fun stuff for you to browse, and our famous J-List tissue, of course. If you'll be at the show, please come by and say hello to us! You can see more information on the convention here.

What's up with those big eyes and colored anime hair, and, understanding Japan's great Meiji Restoration adventure

Many people first experience Japan through its animation, which has been a staple of entertainment here since Astro Boy was first broadcast back in 1963. I remember being surprised at the oversized eyes in the shows I loved as a child -- although in comparison, the eye-to-face area ratio is much higher now than in the old school shows of the 1970s. I was similarly surprised at the rainbow of hair colors found on most anime characters. Creating characters with hair in colors of green and blue and pink allows animation designers to be as expressive as possible and come up with characters who contrast sharply with the somewhat drab concrete-and-power-lines reality of modern Japan. There are subliminal messages embedded in the hair color choices, too. For example, red-haired characters are usually fiery and spirited, while the stereotypical refined girl from a wealthy family will often have blue hair. Black or brown are often used to represent the hair color of "Japanese" characters, who are more likely to be identified with by local viewers, and are generally more conservative (compare Amuro Rei to the flamboyant Char Aznable from the original Gundam series). While anime characters might sport bright shades of the rainbow on their heads, people in Japan don't actually have such colorful hair, do they? The answer is yes: despite the inability of hair-dye companies like Gatsby to make colorful hair "cool" among young people, many older Japanese seem perfectly happy to wear blue, purple and pink tints in their hair. Why this fashion trend is limited to people aged 80 and older is a mystery to me.

I love to study the Meiji Restoration, an event that probably has no equal in the history of the rest of the world. During the Edo Period (1603-1867), the line of Tokugawa Shoguns ruled Japan and kept it closed to outsiders. This changed with the arrival of Admiral Perry and his Black Ships, who forced Japan to trade with the United States and the rest of the world. A movement of young revolutionaries who opposed any contact with foreigners rallied around the Emperor, traditionally a powerless figurehead, and sonno joi (son-NOH JOH-ee) was their famous slogan, meaning "Respect the Emperor, expel the foreign barbarians" (it's one of our most popular T-shirts). As soon as they actually gained power, the leaders of the movement realized they couldn't very well go along ignoring the rest of the world forever, so they started negotiating with foreign powers. This displeased Saigo Takamori, a powerful member of their group, and he rebelled against the new government (these were the events in The Last Samurai, if you saw it).

During this intense period of change, Japan had to make some interesting and difficult choices. First of all, the government had to eliminate the annual stipend that anyone in the old samurai class was entitled to, which was a major political issue back then -- they mostly traded the stipends for government jobs. The government needed to do more to ensure that progress wasn't erased by disgruntled anti-reformers, so in 1871 they abolished the old system of "han" domains in favor of the current network of 47 prefectures, organized along totally new lines and with all-new names. Because of this, every part of Japan has two names, its modern one and its old name, such as Kozuke for our prefecture of Gunma, Ezo for Hokkaido, and so on. (Can you imagine all of the U.S. states being erased and redrawn along alternate lines?) Another important event of the early Meiji Era was the Iwakura Mission, when many of the Founding Fathers of the Meiji Government such as Hirobumi Ito and Toshimichi Okubo -- as famous as Benjamin Franklin and Paul Revere to the Japanese -- toured the United States and Europe as Japan's first official diplomatic contact with the outside world. They negotiated treaties and observed how advanced the rest of the world was technologically, and what they saw formed the basis for Japan's long road to modernization.

(Small aside, I found a killer photo of Edo taken in 1865 or 1866, here. Is this not the coolest thing you've ever seen? A photograph of Tokyo from the Edo Period!)

J-List has long been a pioneer of PC dating-sim games, a fun genre of character- and story-based games for PCs in which you interact with cute anime girls as you move through the story, trying to find the keys to unlock their hearts. This year we released the first-ever yaoi PC dating-sim, Enzai - Falsely Accused, for the many fans on the other side of the aisle, and we've been really happy with the response we've gotten. Now we're happy to announce that our second English-translated "BL" game is in stock and shipping, the long-awaited Absolute Obedience by Langmaor, a unique game set in a highly stylized version of post-war West Germany. Featuring a great game system with twelve chapters and the ability to play either as the dapper Louis Hardwich or his uncouth sidekick Kia WelBehenna, this is an outstanding title that anyone interested in the genre should pick up. Check it out now!

Japanese tricks to memorize anything, fun with "companions" in Tokyo, and thoughts on evangelical Buddhism

Hello again from Japan, where it's believed that only good things happen on Friday the 13th.

There was a lot of buzz last week about Akira Haraguchi, the Japanese man who recited 100,000 digits of pi from memory, breaking his previous record of 83,431 digits. It seems incredible that the human brain could memorize so many numbers, but when I heard the story I knew exactly how he did it. The Japanese are very adept at coming up with phrases which help them learn important information, especially dates, which in Japan's test-centric educational system are far more important than issues like, why did this historical event take place and how did it affect future events? Whether it's memorizing that the Kamakura Military Government was established in 1192 by using phrase ii kuni o tsukuro (lit. let's make a good country), remembering that the Treaty of Versailles was made in 1919 with iku iku, pari wa berusaiyu (Go! Go! Versailles is in Paris, translatable other ways if you like since iku can mean something sexual), or storing the date of the Reformation of 1517 as ichigo, ii na (I love strawberries), the Japanese can memorize just about anything thanks to the ability of their language to tie numbers to syllables. The English translation of the classic phrase to help memorize pi starts out like this: "Okay, let's go. According to the husbands of good girls, who take their crying selves down to the pier, insects in the rocks are chirping loudly in the darkness." And so on, carried to a Herculean extreme. To this day, my wife can rattle off thirty or forty of the elements on the Periodic Table thanks to memory phrases she learned more than twenty years ago, but I can't get past Helium. (Small note: we recommend the Zebra Check Set for those who want to try out Japanese study methods, it's a great system.)

When I first came to Japan I happened across an advertisement recruiting girls to work as "companions." I was shocked, since this seemed like a very immoral career path indeed, but I was misunderstanding the term. In Japanese, a companion is a girl who works certain events to promote products, smile and generally look pretty. Also called "campaign girls" or "event girls" they're a variant of the creature known in the West under the scientific name boothbabus attractivus, and you don't have to go far in Tokyo to bump into some. I went drinking with a friend last weekend, and in the hip Shibuya district there was an island of beautiful girls, showing off the latest Panasonic music player and getting lots of attention from passers-by. With the rise of moe culture (pronounced mo-E and referring to the burning, happy feeling when you look at super-cute anime characters), there's been more than a little joining of these companions with cosplay, and in Akihabara I encountered pretty girls handing out tissues while wearing maid outfits, costumes from Evangelion, you name it.

Before I came to Japan in 1991, I had many pre-conceived notions about what I would find, and one was that I would not encounter many Japanese with strong religious beliefs. Although this has held true for the most part, I was surprised to find that there were many religions active in Japan, including Baptists (I was asked to play "Santa-san" at the local Baptist Church my first Christmas here), Catholics (there's a Catholic church in Maebashi that was mysteriously saved when the city was bombed in the final days of World War II), Mormons (they give free English lessons), even Jehova's Witnesses (who hand out a Japanese version of the Watchtower). Another powerful group that has its roots in the Nichiren school of Japanese Buddhism is Soka Gakkai, the only "evangelical" Buddhism I've seen, in that adherents actively try to sign new members up. Being a "new" religion (founded in 1930), I've always felt that the church was similar to the Mormon Church in the U.S. in many ways. Since the end of World War II, Soka Gakkai has expanded into all corners of Japan, and grown so influential that they even formed their own political party, the Komeito, which is the third largest party in Japan (although there are supposedly no longer any ties between the party and the group anymore, and it's taboo to mention the two together in the Japanese press). There are quite a few high-profile members of Soka Gakkai religion, including Orlando Bloom. There is criticism of some of the tactics the group has used to get and keep members, and a quick search on Google brought up pages that were both very much for and against the group. The URL for the group's international site is here if you want to take a peep.

J-List brings the best magazines in Japan via our reserve subscription system, with great offerings like Megami Magazine (apparently dedicated to going out of business by giving cool posters and other items to readers), Goth-Loli Bible (gothic cosplay culture), Hiragana Times (bilingual articles on Japan), FRUiTs and Kera, Shoxx and Cure, Newtype and Animage, and of course popular classics like Urecco. We've added two new magazines today, for people who want to stay on top of the Japanese gaming scene: Playstation Magazine which follows all things on the Sony gaming front including PS3 and PSP, and killer Famitsu DS, with loads of information on the DS front in Japan. Sign up now!

Okay, I have extra time today so I'll throw up some pics.

This is Shibuya on a Saturday, at the famous "scramble intersection" (so named because you have to scramble across or get hit by a taxi). By the way, there's a 90% chance this guy got lucky with the girl he's nampa'ing.

Walking towards the HMV.

Talk about an advertising budget. The upcoming remake of "A Sailor Suit and a Machine Gun" is really getting the big plug. This is one of the most iconic buildings in Tokyo, the Shibuya 109 building.

Mind-bending advertising for some department store.

Gorgeous event girl at the Panasonic booth. It's fun to play with their minds, like trying to get them to speak to you in English like they do on TV shows here. Is she not lovely?