The origins of Japan's cult of "studying," more warm weather for Tokyo, and the latest in Otaku Culture from Japan

Japan is a very seasonal place, with specific things done only during the appropriate times of year. August is when you wear a yukata (cotton kimono) and hit the summer festivals, and if you want to enjoy tsukimi or sitting outdoors and taking in the beauty of the full moon, October is the time for that. Right now it's "desk season," when furniture retailers throughout Japan display high-quality study desks for the new crop of first graders who start school in April. Japan is very much a meritocracy, and the way to get ahead in life is benkyo (studying), and so kids are taught from a very early age that hitting the books is a good way to show your thanks to your parents for bringing you into the world. The desks themselves are really very well designed, made of higher quality wood than the desk I have at J-List, featuring built-in bright lights for reading and many small drawers for kids to organize their study materials. They're also designed to grow with the user, with cute plastic mats with anime character art that can be removed when the child gets older. Buying a study desk is event in every child's school life, and it's a cold-hearted parent or grandparent who can resist buying the best for little Taro or Hanako. Is $700 a lot for a study desk for a first grader? I've lived in Japan so long I'm really not sure.

Speaking of seasons, Japan's warmest winter in living memory continues, with many a balmy afternoon -- I was even able to put the top down on my Miata a few times last month, usually unthinkable in February. It's been so warm that the kaika or first blooming of the sakura trees, which is reported on as a point of national pride by the news media here, happened a full month earlier than usual. Except for the strong winds called kara-kaze that blow down from the Japan Alps every few days -- which sound so similar to the F/A-18 jets that race over our house in San Diego from the former "Top Gun" airbase that I sometimes forget whether I'm in Japan or the States -- it's been really turn-off-the-computer-and-go-play-catch-with-my-son weather.

As Japan's general fascination with otaku culture continues to grow, one word you hear a lot is Akiba-kei, which literally means "related to Akihabara," the region of Tokyo traditionally known for its electronics stores but increasingly coming to serve as a center for anime, manga and cosplay culture. There are dozens of "Maid Cafe" establishments where you can go and have cake and coffee served to you by a beautiful girl in a maid outfit, and this category is always morphing into sub-genres, such as Imoto Cafe where all the girls pretend to be your younger sister and call you Oniichan, and Tsundere Cafe where the girls act like stereotypical bitchy-but-cute characters found in most every anime series these days. The latest potential boom in Akihabara might be the Mimikaki Cafe, where a beautiful woman will lay your weary head on her lap and spend thirty minutes with a traditional bamboo ear pick, gently scraping the ear wax out and taking all your cares away. If you're not lucky enough to be in the Akihabara area this week, we've got some substitutes available at J-List that might help you experience this fun side of Japan.

J-List carries PC dating-sim games, fun anime games, all carefully translated into English and compatible with English Windows computers, with stories for all tastes and genres. Today we're happy to announce that the latest title from Hirameki International, Pieces of Wonder, is in stock and shipping. A bold and interesting game in which you must guide three girls -- Amane, Syouko and Taki -- as they battle an alien race intent on taking over our world. A great RPG+ADV with real combat as well as adventures to resolve with each of the girls. Get it now!

This month's Japanese adult video actress is the delicious Arisa Kanno, the elegant and stylish actress performing exclusively with Soft on Demand and their related companies. Arisa-chan was born December 9, 1984, in Tokyo. She's 160 (5'2"), and her "three sizes" are 82 (B), 56 (W) and 82 (H), making for a fabulous hourglass shape that's incidentally called kubire (koo-BI-reh) in Japanese. Her hobbies are running and playing volleyball, her favorite type of man is the strong, self-confident type, and her dream is to run in the Honolulu Marathon someday and study abroad in America.

Also, we've picked the new "H-Game of the Month" and it's a really fun title, Gibo: Stepmother's Sin, a dark exploration of some great themes from Guilty and Peach Princess. You grew up a happy boy, until the day you came home and found your mother in the arms of a man who wasn't your father. Her unfaithfulness destroyed your happy home, and now you are mistrustful of the very word "mother." But one day your father announces that he's getting remarried, but instead of being old, your new stepmother is young and beautiful. How will you test her to see if she's any different from the rest? Available this month only at a special price!

Moseying around the kids' desks while shopping for a new chair for myself. A cute little girl came up to me and said "Hello!" then ran back to her parents. This desk is for little fans of One Piece.

Here's a Super Mario desk for studious gamers.

This being Japan, there's silly English all over the place.

When my son was smaller, he was a Mushi King type, definitely. In case you don't know it, all Japanese kids just love beetles of all types.

On the relationship of foreigners and the Japanese, the "gaijin samurai" and an unexpected crime wave in Japan

All countries have foreigners living in their midst, whether its a Swedish college student working for a season at a ski resort in Arizona or an Iranian assembling windshield washer motors at a factory in Nagoya. Japan's 1.6 million foreigners currently make up around 1.5% of the population here, which sounds like a lot until you consider that the foreign-born populations of countries like Germany and the U.S. is 9% and 11%, respectively. As you probably know from reading J-List, the Japanese word for foreigner is gaijin (GUY-jihn) which could also be translated as "outsider" since the characters literally mean "outside-person." Because the word can carry negative connotations, you'll always hear the more polite word gaikokujin or "outside-country-person" used on the NHK news and in formal situations. Japan's first encounter with Westerners came in 1543, when Portuguese sailors washed up on Tanegashima, an island near Kyushu. To the Japanese, these foreigners were Bigfoot-sized giants, disgustingly unhygienic and very hairy, and they were called Namban (Southern Barbarians) and thought to be the embodiment of Tengu, legendary long-nosed spirits who lived in the mountains and who loved to cause havoc. We do, don't we?

One of the most influential foreigners in Japanese history would have to be William Adams, an Englishman who arrived in Japan with a Dutch ship in 1600 and who was befriended by Ieyasu Tokugawa, the third of the three unifiers of Japanese history. Adams' arrival was good timing for Tokugawa, who put the 19 cannon on the ship to good use at the Battle of Sekigahara, the watershed victory that made him the Shogun (military general) of all Japan and ended Japan's Warring States Period. Adams showed the Japanese how to build the first Western-style ships, and freely shared his knowledge of astronomy and navigation. As he rose in rank in the service of the Shogun, he eventually became his personal advisor and translator. In thanks for his service, he was made the only gaijin samurai in history, given honorary swords and a fief with retainers in present-day Yokohama. If you've read your James Clavell, you know that this is the basis for the book Shogun.

Japan is experiencing an unexpected crime wave, as the rising cost of metals is causing unsavory elements of society to steal anything that's not nailed down. All throughout the Kanto area there are reports of metal pipes, aluminum siding, wires and other metal objects being stolen from homes, factories and other public places, presumably for shipping for sale to hot markets like China. Even something so lowly as the steel gratings on roads are in demand, and yesterday our city was on the national news when it was reported that sixteen heavy grates had been stolen over the past few days. Additionally, there's been a rash of thefts of traditional solid copper fire bells that are hung outside at Japanese fire stations, some of which are more than 100 years old. We hope the culprits are caught soon.

J-List sells a line of unique Japanese-themed T-shirts, warm hoodies and embroidered hats, with wacky and fun original designs on them. Today we've got a new T-shirt that celebrates one of my favorite things, Japanese beer, with a wacky parody logo that looks great. Let everyone know you love delicious Japanese beer with this wacky new J-List T-shirt.

Neon Genesis Evangelion, the ground-breaking anime series from 1995, is popping up everywhere here in Japan. The Japanese post office has even gotten Eva fever with a rare issuing of Evangelion stamps featuring characters from the series. We've managed to get our hands on some of these stamp sets, for fans looking for something really special to add to their collection, on the site now!

Japan as the land of the middle class, thoghts on Japan and Krispy Kreme, and fun Japanese things you can put on your car

Japan is nothing if not the land of contradictions. On the one hand, society has been organized in a vertical structure that puts barriers of politeness in place, resulting in top-down relationships that shuffle more respect to higher-level individuals (senpai, sensei, etc.) while requiring them to play their part by providing guidance and leadership to those younger than them, picking up the tab at restaurants, and so on. On the other hand, the Japanese have managed to achieve what Marx and Lenin could not, creating a society where 90% or more of the people consider themselves to be part of the same equal social group, in this case Japan's sprawling middle class. It's not exactly clear to my gaijin mind why someone driving a BMW 750i would go out of their way to consider themselves in the same group as those of us of lesser means, but for the most part Japanese of all income levels seem to strongly identify with the middle class. While everyone feeling like they're all part of one big happy in-group is certainly a good thing overall, there are some downsides, too. For example, one of the reasons there are so many "personal finance" (loan shark) companies like ACOM, Promise and Lake, which loan money at 20-30% to people who should know better, is that their customers seem to have a desire to "keep up with the Yamadas" and buy things they don't need to reassure themselves that they're not falling outside the main economic group. The cover of the current Japanese Newsweek has a feature article dealing with this strange phenomenon, entitled "it's okay to live a class-differentiated society, Japan!"

One observation I've made before about Japan is that it generally seems to follow a decade or so behind the U.S., with many aspects of society appearing in Japan about ten years after making their debut in the States. Everything from the revolution in e-commerce to laws curbing smoking in public places seems to get started in the U.S. then make its way over to Japan after a several-year delay. Quite a few businesses that are successful in Japan merely watched for new trends to emerge in the U.S. -- like home pizza delivery or NetFlix -- and brought the ideas to market locally before the original company could set up shop here. Perhaps the next trend in ideas being imported from the U.S. will be food-related. A couple of weeks ago, I went to Tokyo and happened to pass the new Krispy Kreme doughnut shop that I'd heard had been built in Shinjuku's south side. I didn't think it would be that popular, though, and I was bowled over by the massive press of people waiting two hours or more for their turn to buy. The sight of slender, stylish Tokyoites carrying three dozen doughnuts back the office was also new to me.

The Japanese have some interesting customs when it comes to driving. When waiting at an intersection, it's considered polite to turn your headlights down (put them in "park" mode) so that you don't blind the person in front of you. When someone lets you in front of them, you flash your emergency lights at them twice to say "thank you." And around our city, young men with nothing to do at night will drive around the train station looking for girls in cars, and when they see them they flash their high beams in a gesture that seems to mean "let's go get some coffee together" (an act which is called nampa, apologies to people in Nampa, Idaho). Another interesting car-related thing they do in Japan is the "Beginner's Mark," a green-and-yellow sign that newly licensed drivers must put on their cars for the first year that lets other cars know that the driver may not have as much experience as a full-fledged driver, and presumably give them a wider berth on the road. Similar to this is a Senior Citizen's Mark, an orange-and-yellow sign that older drivers can put on their car (with either magnetic or suction-cup attachment), a way to let other drivers know they should give you the respect you deserve and get out of your way. I like to imagine the confusion in the minds of Japanese people when they wonder why these only-found-in-Japan signs are being displayed on cars in the U.S. -- which is why we sell both on the site, of course.

J-list carries virtually every PC dating-sim game available in English, and we're always happy to see customers discover the interesting and dramatic world of Japan's "H" gaming culture. We also license and publish "doujin" CG collections, which are created by artists for sale at the legendary Comic Market doujinshi convention held twice a year at Tokyo Big Sight. We're happy to report that two of our popular collections are now available as Internet Download Editions, so fans who missed out on these great collections can get them again. First there's Dream World II, a breathtakingly beautiful collection of several separate releases by Japanese artist Kobayashi Yuji that parodies the characters of Evangelion and more. Then enjoy all three of our previous Creamy Angel CD-ROM releases available as an Internet Download, a staggering gigabyte of top "H" artwork by Japanese illustrator Mashitaka, including his speciality of Ah! My Goddess futanari (um, wow).

Remember that the summer anime conventions are not that far off, and what better way to wow 'em at the shows this year than wearing your very own authentic Japanese high school uniform. J-List has an exclusive arrangement with the famous Matsukameya of Nagoya, a company that brings real high school uniforms to fans all around the world. Here's how to order: check the site for the type of uniform you'd like (we've got several styles of uniforms for girls, and a standard gakuran school uniform for guys, too), and find which size is closest to your body measurements on the chart. Then submit your order, and we'll get your new high school uniform off to you as soon as its delivered to us by the company.

Lots and lots of people in line...

Wow, even more people. The line goes all the way down to Tokyu Hands.

Is this the beginning of the end of all those slender Japanese girls that I like so much? [_][_];;

There's so much strange English around me I don't even notice it. But for some reason I felt I had to capture "Gutsy Repair" for all of you.

You may remember that I collect photographs of the little metal "life advice" signs that the local PTA put up about 20 years ago. I found a new one that's great for my daughter: 忠告も君を思う親心, chuukoku mo kimi o omou oya-gokoro, possibly translatable as "Giving advice and warnings to one's children is part of showing our love for them as parents, even if they think we're just yelling at them."

The "Princess Di" of Japan, about Japan as a "vertical" society, and I can see the Sphinx from my house

There's a minor hullabaloo going on between Japan and Australia right now after the publication of a controversial book on Princess Masako, the Harvard- and Oxford-educated woman who became "Japan's Diana" when she married Prince Naruhito, the future Emperor. In the book, author Ben Hills argues that Masako has been made a "Prisoner of the Chrysanthemum Throne" and delves into the various problems she's had to deal with since joining the Japanese Royal Family in 1993 (I have a special commemorative 500 yen coin from back then in my house somewhere). While he overplays things a bit for their dramatic value, it's true that the past 14 years haven't exactly been a Cinderella story for poor Masako-sama, who had visions of reforming Japan's Imperial Household Agency with modern, Western-influenced ideas before the weight of 2000 years of tradition wore her down. The book has brought about quite a backlash from Japan, which highlights one of the odder aspects of this otherwise free-thinking democracy: one does not criticize the Imperial Family. Now that a male heir has been born to Naruhito's younger brother, a lot of the pressure is off poor Masako to get pregnant again. Japanese history is measured in eras that go with the reign of each emperor, with the Showa Era (1925-1989) being the reign of Emperor Hirohito, and the current Heisei Era (1990-present) being the current Emperor Akihito, who is getting on in years. I wonder what the next era will be called?

Last time I talked about how Japan's society is more ordered than the U.S. or Europe, organized in a way that literally creates a pecking order from the lowest to the highest, from the neighborhood dog that comes around sniffing for scraps all the way up to the Emperor himself. There are mechanisms found in Japanese society that reinforce this up-down nature, such as senpai and kohai, a person's senior or junior in a school or organization, a heavy focus on treating people who are older than you with more respect and receiving this respect from those younger than you, and a system of polite language that we could never conceive of in English. In practice, Japan becomes a "vertical" society, where the U.S. is theoretically more "horizontal," and almost nothing is allowed to mess up the tidy little system that exists here. When my sister entered the second grade, the teachers decided she was too advanced and moved her to the third grade, something that would never happen in Japan, as it would mess up the balance that people depend on throughout their lives. One by-product of this up-down structure is that there are barriers of politeness in place that keep me from being "friends" with someone who is much older or younger than me when speaking Japanese with them -- although there's no problem if we converse in English.

Near our house, we can see the Sphinx, the Statue of Liberty, and many other interesting wonders of world. These are pachinko parlors, a major source of entertainment for many Japanese men and women in Japan. An odd game which I don't pretend to understand, you basically buy a bucket of balls for $50, then sit for hours trying to hold a controller in just the right position to make most of the balls go into certain holes in the pachinko machine. Since "gambling" is illegal in Japan, except for certain events like horse, boat and bicycle racing, you don't win money if you get more balls than you started out with -- you get valuable prizes which you redeem for cash at a shady building next to the pachinko parlor. (Remind me to talk about the concepts of tatemae, the way we pretend things are, and honne, the way they are in reality.) Pachinko is quite a competitive business to be in, and operators (who always seem to be getting involved with some crime or another) work very hard to bring in the newest machines in -- with little video screens or cute anime-style characters printed on them, for example, or recently, pachinko machines based on famous anime series.

J-List loves PC dating-sim games, a great way to interact with beautiful girls (or guys) on your Windows computer, and we carry virtually every title available in English for fans, with many titles available in Internet Download Editions. We've recently gone through and added opening and demo movies for many popular games that you can watch, including Brave Soul, Heart de Roommate, the X-Change saga, Yin-Yang!, Pick Me Honey!, Bazooka Cafe and more. Check them out now!

J-List sells a unique line of original kanji T-shirts, with designs that range from hilarious to aesthetically beautiful to just plan cool to wear. We've added several T-shirts and Hoodies to our discount page, which we're closing out to make room for future designs. It's a great opportunity to pick up a great original shirt that won't be available again and get it at a great price too, but you should hurry as quantity is limited and sizes do sell out. If you're a big person you should also check out the site, as we've got several XXL and XXXL sized shirts there for you, all at great prices, too.

Remember that J-List carries over 3000 amazing products you can only find in Japan. One of our specialties is Domo-kun, the super cute plush toy that is the official spokesmonster of NHK, Japan's public broadcasting network. Unfortunately nearly all of the products we carry are out of production and can no longer be stocked by us, meaning that if you'd like to score a Domo-kun pen, plush keychain or the infamous "whenever you ... God kills a kitten" plush toy. So...check our Domo-kun lineup now!

Went to a new restaurant, and thought I'd record the meal I had. I am quite a baka for sukiyaki, and whenever I can eat it like this, I do.

Wow, this place is good -- chopstick instructions in English. I guess writing them in English would be kid of silly.

I don't know if Americans eat much in the way of raw egg (been living in Japan way too long), but it really makes good sukiyaki great for me. Take the boiled meat, put in the egg, and then...

...put it on the rice, so that the egg and soup from the sukiyaki falls down on the rice. Repeat.

They finished off with really good coffee in a really cool Japanese cup. The cost for this meal? Something like $7. And as long time readers may remember, I judge every restaurant by its ice coffee, which was quite good, a solid 8 or 8.5. So I had no complaints at all.

Understanding Japanese society through business cards, some fun Japanese words that are pregnant with meaning, and all about Shinjuku

I was making up some Japanese business cards for one of my employees yesterday, trying different layouts and fonts to see what looked best. As I worked on the design for the "name card" (as business cards are called here), something seemed wrong to me, but I couldn't put my finger on it. Then it hit me: I'd left off one of the most important parts, the job title. Organization is very important in a place like Japan, and just as the entire country is ordered into prefectures, cities, towns and villages, with no unincorporated areas anywhere, people are generally expected to fit into pre-defined slots, e.g. programmer, graphic designer, accountant, city employee, and so on. Everyone must have an occupation associated with their name for people to know how to categorize them, and when proper categories aren't available, allowances are made, such as the recent additions of sub-groups like "freeter," a person who only works part-time jobs without ever officially joining a company as a full-time employee or starting a career; or NEET, a term for a young person living with their parents and "Not in Educational, Employment or Training," i.e. loafing and surfing the net all day. When I started J-List, I encountered some opposition from my wife's family, who didn't think it was a good idea to trade a secure career teaching English for the uncertainty of starting a business on the Internet. I realized later that this was because the concept of an "entrepreneur" was not defined as a valid category in their minds, and they didn't know how to feel about a son-in-law who didn't fit neatly into one of the pre-defined slots...which suited my American sense of individualism just fine.

Any way you look at it, English is a convoluted language, with grammar and vocabulary taken haphazardly from many sources, including Olde English, French, Greek, Latin and listening to young people these days, Japanese. The Japanese language is much the same, originally based on the indigenous (pre-6th century) language of the Yamato people dwelling in the Nara Valley, influenced by 1500 years of kanji and 250 years of national isolation, and then exposed to a huge amount of foreign loan words in modern times. There's a category of four-syllable (or four kana) words used here that are so pregnant with meaning they boggle the mind, and as is often the case with nihongo, you can't ask yourself why they mean what they mean but must instead just accept them as gestalt units. First is sekkaku (seh-KAH-koo), which carries the implication of having gone to great trouble to do something for someone only to have them not appreciate your efforts. Another fun word is yappari (yah-PAH-ree), which means "just as I thought" or "as I expected" or "Aha! I knew you'd be trying to peek into the girl's bath!" When you learn something that surprises you, you might use the phrase naruhodo (nah-roo-hoh-doh), which can be translated as "wow, I didn't know that" or "I see your point," and on a TV drama, a character picking up some information from subtle, unspoken clues might mutter this word to themselves as a signal to viewers that he'd found another piece of a puzzle. Finally there's tonikaku (TOH-ni-kah-koo), which just means "at any rate" "regardless of that fact" or just "anyway." When my bilingual son was growing up, he got confused and accidentally combined English and Japanese stems to create the hybrid word "toni-way" (tonikaku + anyway), which has been a running joke in our family ever since.

One of the first things I did after arriving in Japan back in 1991 was hop on a train to Tokyo to explore Shinjuku, one of the most famous parts of Japan's sprawling capital, which I'd only glimpsed through the window of manga and anime until that time. One of Tokyo's 23 wards, Shinjuku is a bustling mini-city unto itself, with sprawling department and electronics stores, restaurants and drinking establishments. Because it happens to contain some of the only stable land in the earthquake-prone area, virtually all of Tokyo's high-rise buildings are located in Shinjuku, including the monstrous 48-story Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building (Tokyo's "city hall") and virtually everything seen in the film Lost in Translation. Shinjuku Station is the busiest in the world, with a mind-boggling 2 million passengers passing through each day as they rush to get to work or home. The station is so massive that the only thing to do is divide Shinjuku into quadrants based on what train exit you're using, e.g. take the east exit to score some good Indian food, or the south exit to get to that one good bookstore, and so on. Shinjuku's Kabuki-cho section is one of Japan's leading drinking districts, too, and a complex economy has formed around the thousands of tired salarymen who get rid of their daily stress there, throwing some back with co-workers before heading home.

Japan as the land of safety, small conveniences of living in Japan, and the reason for that wacky "Engrish"

I've written before about how Japan is a very safe place -- so safe it might just kill you with boredom. Swimming pools in Japan generally have two or more lifeguards on duty at all times, although it'd be pretty hard to drown since the water is never deeper than your waist, and dangerous things like diving boards are not allowed. My son and I didn't realize what we were missing until we went to visit family in Maryland, and got to jump off the high dive at the local pool, something a non-Olympic swimmer could only dream of doing in Japan. People are constantly bombarded with silly safety messages here, which remind you to "stand behind the yellow line" on train platforms because apparently trains are dangerous or something, and there's even a voice to tell you how to get on or off an escalator safely in department stores. Now the latest trend in obsessive safety thinking is condemning swings, sliding boards, jungle gyms and other equipment at playgrounds due to an infinitesimally small number of tragic accidents involving children at play. Japan is nothing if not the land of duality, though, and just as it tries to "think of the children" on the playground, the country still lacks some of the basic safety attitudes we take for granted in the U.S., like always using approved child carseats when driving, using baby gates to keep little ones from dangerous parts of the home, and so on.

There are some key areas where the U.S. is well ahead of Japan, including availability of Mexican food and the proliferation of sports bar-themed restaurants with excellent beer. One area where Japan has a comfortable lead, though, is the delivering of packages via its takuhai (private delivery company) system, as seen in the Ghibli animated classic Kiki's Delivery Service except with packages being delivered by polite, efficient men in trucks rather than by a witch and black cat on a broomstick. One of the great conveniences of flying out of Japan is being able to send your suitcases to the airport via companies like Yamato or Sagawa for around $9 per suitcase, allowing you to hop on the train or bus to the airport without a lot of heavy stuff to lug along with you. I recently bought a used Mac G4 tower from a friend to use as a backup server at J-List. My friend dropped the heavy box off at the 7-11 at 9 pm on a Sunday night, and the package reached me, two prefectures away, less than 12 hours later. Total cost? Just $15.

As everyone knows, the Japanese are capable of coming up with some amazingly creative (?) English phrases, like "Body Feels EXIT," "Get Chance and Luck," "Fappy, Fax Makes It Happy" or "All Your Base Are Belong To Us." There are several reasons why this happens, including the fact that the Japanese nearly always learn English in a bubble, sitting passively as grammar and vocabulary are explained to them in Japanese by Japanese teachers, with the amount of linguistic input from living, breathing native English speakers being quite limited. Also, when a Japanese person studies English for six years (high school) or ten years (college), it's understandable that they'll want to strut a bit and use what they've learned, even if it results in something like "For restrooms, go back towards your behind." But the biggest reason there's so much colorful English here has to be that, to many Japanese, English is really just a decoration, something to sprinkle around to add color to one's environment without thinking about it too deeply. I was reminded of this fact over the weekend, when I took my family to the Pizza La in Karuizawa and sat down in the to enjoy some pizza. Perhaps because Karuizawa is a town discovered and colonized by Europeans soon after the Meiji Period, the restaurant had a bookshelf filled with English books for customers to browse through while they ate...although no one in the place was showing any interest in them. My family dug in though, each finding some interesting book to page through -- I scored a biography of Hemingway from the 1960s that looked interesting. We even did something we'd never have done in the U.S., liberating some of the books to read at home, since it was clear no one was going to be wanting them anytime soon, and an unread book is such a lonely thing. I'll make it up to the Pizza La people by bringing some of the English childrens' books my kids are too old for by next time I'm in the neighborhood.

One of the fun things about visiting Tokyo is walking down the street and getting pocket tissue handed out to you by people advertising businesses like banks, hairdressers, or newly opened restaurants. J-List lets you experience this thrill with the free authentic Japanese pocket tissue packet that we include with most every order you made from us. We say "most," because we won't include tissue with orders in cases where the tissue would bend or damage your order (like a thin magazine or doujinshi). You can also buy ten of our wacky pocket tissues for the low price of just $3.00, if you have an especially runny nose.

Our weekly (almost) trip to the mountains was pretty cool this time around.

One of the books from the Pizza La (and yes, it does take time to learn to stop saying Pizza LA, as in Pizza Los Angeles) was a great book on the Titanic.

Shots from an electronics store where I'd dashed in for something. This is the NTT Docomo Mushroom.

Softbank, aka Vodafone, is kicking butt with their phone types. This is a great series of phones based on the PANTONE color chart.

And more!

Speaking of kicking butt, they've been scoring big with some famous names.

A new appreciation for American medicine, all about the word 'baka' and a really annoying girl in a yellow dress who I can't stop listening to...

It was Thomas Paine -- a possible ancestor of mine, although I somehow doubt it -- who uttered the words, "These are the time that try men's souls." Strike the word "men" and insert "gaijin" and you know what it's like to be sick in a country like Japan. Although I resisted as best I could, it seems I've managed to pick up the bug that my wife and daughter had, and now I'm pecking away at the computer while wearing one of those Japanese health masks, and feeling quite miserable. No matter how much I may like Japan, one of the fundamental rules of human beings is that when you're feeling under the weather, you want familiar remedies that you know will work. Japan has plenty of cold and flu medicines on the market, with names like Benzablock, Paburon, Ruru and even a local version of Contac, but they just don't seem be strong enough for my oversized American body. There are differences in how medicines are sold, too -- I'll never forget the first time I got sick in Japan, trekking feverishly to the supermarket to buy medicine because that's where you go in the U.S., then being told that I had to find a drug store instead. Happily, I always keep a small stockpile of American medicines in the house, from Nyquil to Dimetapp and Vicks Vapor Rub and so on, so hopefully I'll be okay in no time.

Without a doubt, one of the most famous words of Japanese is baka, the all-purpose insult that takes the place of many more anatomically colorful words in English. Meaning "stupid" or "idiot," the word is used by Japanese of all ages, from three-year-olds to the elderly. Someone nearly hits your car in an intersection? Let fly with a baka yaro! ("stupid jerk!"). Your gaijin husband who shall remain nameless mistakes a mimikaki ear scoop for one of those spoons used in Japanese tea ceremony? The proper response to this would be, baka ja nai? ("what are you, stupid?"). The word is also used to describe someone who goes overboard with love of something, like "oya-baka," parent-fool, the word for mothers and fathers who are absolutely ga-ga over their own kids; and "tsuri-baka," meaning fishing-fool, someone who likes to fish so much that he does it whenever he can. The word is also found in Japanese proverbs, like Baka ni tsukeru kusuri wa nai," or there is no cure for stupidity." The word baka (馬鹿） is written with the characters for "horse" and "deer" and there's an interesting legend about how this word came to be. It seems that in ancient China there was an Emperor who was not very well liked by his retainers. One day, one of his underlings presented the Emperor with a deer, instead of a horse as was customary back in those days. When the Emperor pointed out that it was a deer, the man insisted that no, it's a horse. He kept this up until he convinced his lord that the deer was, in fact, a horse, and thus Emperor became famous throughout the land for being so stupid that he couldn't tell the difference between the two animals.

Another trait I respect about the Japanese is their tendency towards kinben (KEEN-ben、勤勉), or diligence and hard work. The famous image of an industrious Japanese salarymen is one that everyone is familiar with, but children in Japan are encouraged to work hard, too, with a general culture that expects kids to put in 1-2 hours of studying per evening, on top of any juku night classes they may attend. Several times a week there are quiz shows that aim to interest the minds of young people, like Test the Nation, which presents questions to viewers and lets them keep track of their own scores. We're big fans of TV Champion, a show that usually pits teams against each other doing things like baking bread in the shapes of famous buildings or making works of art out of origami. Last night's episode involved four very smart kids who underwent an amazing battery of quiz questions before a winner was finally determined, and our whole family was hanging on every question. One of my favorite food items sold by J-List are Shigekix (shi-geh-kicks), super tart "hard gummy" candies in flavors like lemon, cola and ramune. In their newest series of TV commercials, which I've posted in the product descriptions on the site, a strange but irresistible girl in a yellow dress sings a song inside the brains of students, tying the BCAA Amino Acids and Gaba in their products and the stimulation of the tart taste to students hoping to do better in their studies.

More random pics that I'm not sure if I've posted yet. This is just about the most attractive building in our city, a little community center and bus stop. This is where our bus goes to/from when we go to Narita .

I ducked into the Toys "R" Us to see if they had new Star Wars figures (they had nothin'). They did have a cool item for Yamato/Star Blazers fans, including a real Wave Motion Gun for you to shoot.

My camera. Whee.

SIgn in our local soba restaurant.
"Please smoke as little as possible."

Update on the Ferris Wheel project -- thanks to reporting from these fine people at TBS, it looks like the project has been scrapped. Banzai!

The history of Valentine's Day in Japan, thoughts on why the Japanese are so harmonious, and a really cute picture of the Yamato

You probably know that they do Valentine's Day a little differently in Japan than in the West. Here, Feb. 14th is a day for women and girls to give chocolate to men and boys, and all throughout Japan, millions of fathers, husbands, boyfriends and would-be-boyfriends look forward to scoring some chocolatey goodness. In Japan, you never receive a gift without giving one in return, called o-kaeshi, and March 14 has been designated as "White Day" when males give something back to females who gave them chocolate the month before. (In South Korea they've taken this a step further with "Black Day" on April 14th, a day when single males who didn't receive chocolate bitterly eat black noodles, wallowing in their single-ness.) My son and I were looking forward to some delicious handmade chocolate today but we're out of luck, as both my wife and daughter are bedridden with this year's bout of influenza that's going around. Zan-nen! (ZAHN-nehn, meaning "what a bummer!")

In case you'd like to know the history of Valentine's Day in Japan, I'll tell you. The first Valentine's Day advertisement in Japan appeared in Showa 11 (1936), when a chocolate shop in Kobe called Morozoff promoted its wares as being perfect for lovers to enjoy together. World War II got in the way, and it wasn't until after the war that people could think about anything as frivolous as chocolate. In 1958, the manager of the Isetan department store in Shinjuku got the idea of having a Western-style Valentine's Day chocolate sale, but it was a total flop -- they sold just five boxes of chocolates! Attempts to raise awareness of the day continued with poor results, but in the 1970s, chocolate maker Morinaga hit on the idea to promote Valentine's Day as a day for women to give chocolate to boys and confess their love, and the rest is history. Currently, 60% of females in Japan report giving chocolate to someone, which makes for a lot of happy fathers, husbands, boyfriends and would-be-boyfriends.

I've talked before about what the Japanese call kokumin-sei (koh-ku-meen- SAY), a kind of "national personality" that's basically the essence of what makes Koreans so Korean and the French so very French. One of my favorite aspects of the Japanese is their dislike of confrontation and general willingness to get along with each other on a daily basis. By and large, you won't find yourself being hassled much in Japan, and even some of the scarier people you might encounter, like yakuza in the public bath with their full-body tattoos, are quite polite as long as you're polite to them. This harmonious attitude extends to the legal system, too, making lawsuits extremely rare. When there's an automobile accident, for example, the two insurance companies work it out between themselves, weighing the various factors before coming to an agreement on how to divide fault between the two parties, and it's virtually unheard of to have issues decided in a courtroom. There are quite a few identifiable mechanisms that help the Japanese get through the day harmoniously, like the mantra sho ga nai" which means it can't be helped," and the basic golden rule of society that you should never cause meiwaku (inconvenience) to others. There are some possible theories about why the Japanese are so good at getting along. Perhaps it comes from having to learn to live in a small country with many people around, or maybe it has to do with Japan's decision to become a peaceful country after their defeat in World War II, or just maybe it's a by-product of the long period of absolute rule by the Shogunate during the feudal Edo Period. My own theory comes from the ethnic name of the Japanese people, the Yamato, which is also Japan's first name for its own country, dating back to the 4th Century. The characters literally mean either "Great Peace" or "Great Harmony," and it seems natural to me that a country with such a name would value getting along with one another in a peaceful way.

Remember that you can get all the great anime, manga, toy/hobby, fashion, and other magazines in Japan sent to you each month, thanks to J-List's popular Reserve Subscription service. Here's how it works: for most items, you have the option of either paying month-to-month or paying for a full year in advance. If you choose the former option, we'll reserve the current issue of the magazine(s) you want each month, charging them to a credit card on file if like, or else by check/money order or Paypal. The amount charged is the same every month, e.g. $8.50 each issue of Newtype Japan, plus the shipping. If you want to choose the annual payment option, you can pay for all the issues and SAL shipping together and get a discount. The annual option is great for anyone who wants to pre-pay for the issues (including libraries and universities who use our services), and our convenient month-to-month option is recommended for anyone who wants the flexibility to stop or change subscriptions at any time.

Some friends of ours just built a new house (on top of a restaurant), and invited us over. It was built by our friend Mr. K.

Is this not cool? It's like a showroom for Pier 1 Imports, but in a good way.

Like many in Japan, they had only a little room to work with, so their tatami room is only a 4-jo. You measure rooms in Japan using tatami mats, e.g. this room is quite big, it must be a 20-tatami (jo) room, and so on.

Picture from in front of our favorite soba noodle restaurant. This is the same racoon-dog thing as in the Ghibli film Raccoon Wars.

My, he is happy to see us! This is just one of the many ways Japan can confusing poor gaijin. Supposedly the testicles on these raccoon statues are good luck, although I couldn't comment on the penis.

The warmest winter ever in Japan, all about the Japanese kanji character 'ki' and excitement at my son's school

We've been watching the extra-cold winter dumping lots of snow on the U.S. this year and feeling more than a little guilty, what with Japan experiencing the warmest winter its had in decades and all. The previous 1960 record for the latest snowfall in the Tokyo area has already been smashed, and with the bizarre T-shirt weather continuing, there's talk that this might be the first snowless winter since they started keeping records back in 1876. One of the most enjoyable times to be in Japan is sakura season, when the cherry blossoms bloom with exploding fireworks of beauty, but it's been so warm this year that everyone is sure the sakura will bloom at least a full month earlier. There's also a lot of concern that with such mild weather this year, there'll be less snow in snowpacks in the mountains, leading to water shortages in the summer.

Sometimes part of the fun of studying a language like Japanese is "surfing" the linguistic elements that are totally different from anything found in one's native language. One of the most common kanji characters is ki (気）, a rather all-purpose concept for expressing abstract ideas (read chi in Chinese). Although it can be translated as spirit, soul, nature, heart, mood, feeling, or atmosphere, it mainly deals with (spiritual) energy and a person's awareness. The character is found in some elementary words that students of the language encounter right away, such as genki (happy, energetic), tenki (weather) or kuki (air). The word can express intention (seppuku suru ki = the intention to commit ritual suicide, wish I could think of a better example ^_^), and feelings or emotion (kimochi ii = that feels good). In anime series like Dragonball Z, when a character gets so filled with energy that he literally glows with fire, the word for that fire would be ki. The concept is also used in martial arts and yoga, which seek to focus the mind's ki in beneficial ways -- it also pops up in words like kiai, the verbal yell you release when focusing your strength on a task. The word can be found in several Japanese idioms that are used quite often, such as ki wo tsukete (be careful; literally "fix your body's energy and attention on the task at hand"), or ki wo tsukau (to be considerate of; literally "to use your ki on behalf of another person").

One of the most popular "talents" (an all-purpose word meaning singer/actor/ comedian/whatever) in Japan is Takuya Kimura, a member of the popular group SMAP, the male idol band that dominates much of Japan's music scene. Takuya, who plays the voice of Howl in Howl's Moving Castle, has been called both the "sexiest man in Japan" as well as the domestic version of Brad Pitt, mainly because Levi's hired "Kim-Taku" for their jeans commercials to counter Edwin's successful line of commercials featuring "Bra-Pii." Although they started out as a Backstreet Boys-like group, SMAP has utterly woven itself into the fabric of Japan's pop culture, and you really can't turn the TV on without seeing one or more members of the group hosting a variety show or doing their gourmet cooking competition thing or pulling some gag on the air, like when George Lucas came to Japan and they presented him with a beautiful Japanese sword, which turned out to be a cheap plastic light saber. Recently there's a rumor going around that Takuya and his wife, former singer Shizuka Kudo, are going to put their daughter in my son's special English elementary school this April, which has set the hearts of the school mothers all aflutter with thoughts of Japan's sexiest man attending parents' day with them.

J-List sells a unique line of original T-shirts, hoodies and embroidered hats featuring funny and wacky kanji messages, and today we've gotten in a cool new design for you. Every once in a while you hear of a Japanese man who wasn't able to resist his own particular urges, and who got in trouble peeking at pretty girls. Our new wacky T-shirt warns people who see it to beware of nozoki -- peeping toms, who like to watch women secretly -- with a hilarious new design. Check it out on the site, now!

Heh, I'll tell you my own favorite game. All those newfangled video games are okay, but I'm still loyal to the original Unreal Tourmanent, released in, I think, 1999. I'm using it on my Intel MacBook Pro, and the fact that it plays so nicely (even with 300 bots, see below) in Rosetta is really an amazing thing.

The reason it's so fun is that there's a nuke you can use to kill your enemies.

Of course, that's not fun enough, so here's what I do. Load the game, type SUMMON WARHEADLAUNCHER unless I'm on a level that has the nuke, get the warhead, then type ALLAMMO. Then instead of having one pansy nuke you have 999 of them. Muhahaha! LOADED is another fun command that gives you all weapons in the game.

You can then addbots if you like so that you have 100, 200 or more enemies to kill rather than the default of 16. Note that adding too many bots at once can overload the machine since most of the bots appear at the same few spawning spots which causes them to explode, and the computer has to draw 100 x 300 bits of expanding flesh on your screen.

This lets you discover a new kind of game, where basically everyone is trying to kill you but you've got a nuke. You can do fun game of trying to kill everyone else (up to 300 bots) without using any weapons other than the nuke. This means you need to shoot and duck behind obstacles, or shoot at the ceiling to take out someone before they get too close. It's quite a challenge. Another fun thing is to slow the game down so you can set up extra beautiful kills.

There's something about running down the hallway in the contrail of a tactical nuke you've just shot that's so much fun. Incidentally I've played this game so much in the past my eyes actually got infected. That's not good, is it?

Ah, beautiful stress relief... I realize my love of cheating at games goes back to my Captain Kirk complex, since I look up to him as the father I didn't have (Captain Kirk, Carl Sagan and Ernest Hemingway). I guess using NOCLIP or god mode in a game is just my own answer to the Kobayashi Maru test.

A Yakuza gang war in Tokyo, my trip to the concrete jungle of Tokyo, and how the wisdom of China is at work in Japan today

Japan has a reputation for being a peaceful place with very little in the way of violence, giant monsters emerging from the sea and smashing Tokyo notwithstanding. This happy image was somewhat shaken this week when a minor gang war broke out in Tokyo, with several shots fired back and forth and one gang boss killed. Japan's Yakuza have been around for centuries, and usually go about their business in a very orderly fashion, with the major groups -- Yamaguchi-gumi in Osaka and the smaller Sumiyoshi-kai and Inagawa-kai in Tokyo -- respecting each others territory. This harmony was broken when some members of the 3rd-ranked Inagawa Group of Tokyo allowed the traditional protection money collected from restaurants and bars in Roppongi to go to the Yamaguchi group, which amounted to the Osaka mafia muscling in on territory that wasn't traditionally theirs. Some arrests have been made so hopefully we've seen the last bit of fighting. The Yakuza like to pretend they're modern day Robin Hood anti-heroes, but their various criminal enterprises, including ultra-high interest loans and protection scams, cause great harm to people. The term Yakuza is a phonetic play on the numbers 8, 9 and 3, which add up to 20, representing the worst possible hand you can get in a traditional card game played since the Edo Period.

Yesterday I went to Tokyo on business, just a 45-minute Shinkansen ride away. Whenever I visit Japan's capital I experience a brief period of localized culture shock as I adjust to having that much concrete and steel around me, and having my own personal space cut down to a fraction of what it is in our home prefecture of Gunma. My eyes always go a little wide when I see the, er, extremely beautiful and fashionable women riding trains or crossing the famous "scramble intersection" in Shibuya, so different from the more down-to-earth females back home that it seems to my eyes like the difference between regular television and HD-TV. Even the men are image-conscious in Tokyo, reading magazines like Smart or Myojo and no doubt being subtly influenced by the endless stream of boytoy "talents" from Johnny's Entertainment, Japan's most successful talent management company. Passing through Shinjuku, I spied one extremely fashionable youth who was busy playing with a pink Nintendo DS, and it occurred to me that in Japan today men and women are in open competition to see which set can be more fashionable and stylish -- an odd phenomenon that probably wouldn't happen in the U.S., unless I've really been away too long.

In a very real sense, the culture of Japan flows from China, just as everything in the West from laws and courts to roads originally came from ancient Rome and Greece. China is so much a part of Japan's history that you couldn't express ideas without thinking in kanji, the pictographs that Japan imported along with Buddhism in the 6th century A.D. (this is in contrast to the two Koreas, who have largely decoupled their language from kanji in favor of the "purity" of the home-grown hangul writing system). Just as elements of classical languages survive in our speech ad infinitum, the Chinese language pops up in Japanese from time to time, for example in the poetic phrase shimen-soka (she-men-SOH-kah), which means "being surrounded by enemies on all sides and totally betrayed." The wisdom of China also survives in the form of proverbs that the Japanese have imported, such as the old standby ningen banji saiou-ga-uma, which means "All human affairs are like Saiou's horse." This refers to an old Chinese story about a man named Saiou whose horse ran away, making everyone say how unfortunate he was. "How do you know this is a bad thing?" he asked. His horse came back, bringing another horse this time, and when people congratulated him on his good luck, he asked, "How do you know this is a good thing?" He then or bad happens, no one can say for sure if it is truly a good or bad thing in the end. It's kind of like marrying an 80-year-old billionaire -- in the end, who can say if it will be a good thing or not?

Today is February 9th, which according to the usually-incomprehensible- to-gaijin Japanese numbering system is "Meat Day" (Niku no Hi, 肉の日), since 2/9 can be read ni ku meaning meat in Japanese (refer to Yakuza, above). Today is also my wife's birthday, so we're off to enjoy Korean Barbecue, a popular delicacy in Japan. Have a nice weekend!

Some random images. I have in my home a brand new Magic Window from 1973, which set me back a bit on eBay. Just thought I'd show it to you.

Made and printed in the U.S.A. Pretty spiffy.

Not a great picture of my setup at home (which will be upgraded to a Mac Pro if Apple would *deign* to get a new machine out for us). I've never seen these Japanese notebook computer racks that hold your laptop upright for cooling purposes. They're quite nice to use.

That's?

Kicking back at the family restaurant we go to a lot for lunch, called Joyful, a name which somehow makes me happy. This is the steak part of the menu.

Of course, at a cheap place like this a "steak" is always a "hamburg steak."

Of course, the highlight of the manu is, Yuko Ogura appearing in it. Don't ask me, I don't know what she has to do with Hamburg Steak.

The reality of "learning Japanese," Japan's special relationship with garbage, and the history of the Japanese Postal Mark

One thing I've heard from foreigners who have recently come to Japan -- and which I've probably uttered myself a long time ago -- is the phrase "And then, when I've learned Japanese..." This is amusing to me since you never actually "learn" any language in the sense of suddenly becoming completely competent in all aspects of its use. A foreigner living in Japan naturally stakes out the important areas of his life or work and attains working fluency in those areas, usually not bothering with aspects of the language that will probably never touch him. After four years of study in college and a decade and a half of living in Japan I'm able to function in a wide variety of situations here, including business settings, dealing with family and friends, ordering a pizza and giving directions to my house, attending funerals and weddings and so on...but if I were suddenly thrust into the world of a banker, a politician or a daiku carpenter who builds houses using traditional Japanese techniques, I'd be completely lost. Similarly, my wife is perfectly functional in English in most cases, yet when its time for the CSI broadcast on NHK, I know she'll flip the TV into Japanese mode since the show lies outside of her established linguistic boundaries. As your life meanders on and the way you use language changes, naturally your language skills will change too. When I became a father, I realized that I didn't have a clue how to speak Japanese "baby talk," so I started that aspect of my language education. In the process of running a Japanese company I've had to learn how to read contracts in Japanese to make sure I didn't accidentally sign away my house or something, and now I'm quite comfortable with most Japanese legalese.

Every morning my car greets me and gives me my daily "What day is today?" trivia point, informing me that today is Ice Cream Day (May 9), Natto Day (July 10), Haiku Day (August 19) and UFO Day (June 24), and so on, and every time I get in my car I never know what wacky and esoteric new information I'll be presented with. Tomorrow is "Japanese Postal Mark Day," celebrating the establishment of the unique symbol used to indicate a place where you can find postal services here, which looks like the marriage of a capital T with an equals sign, or like the katakana symbol for te (テ）. The Japanese post office was established in 1871, just four years into the reign of the new Emperor Meiji that proved to be a watershed moment in the modernization of the country. In 1887, as part of a national revitalization effort, the Postal Service announced that the English letter "T" would be the new symbol of the Post Office of Japan. Ten days later, the ministry sheepishly admitted that they had mis-read their own symbol, and the actual symbol of Japan's postal organization was the one that's in use today. The "postal mark" symbol is officially registered with the International Standards Organization and is included in all Japanese fonts on personal computers.

One of the first words a foreigner who comes to live in Japan learns is gomi, the most common term for garbage in Japanese. The reason is that Japan -- a nation that ranks 63rd in the world in terms of land area yet 10th in terms of population -- must understandably take some special measures to make sure its trash situation doesn't get out of hand. As newly arrived gaijin must learn, trash can be disposed of on designated days, and must be separated into various categories (burnables on Tuesday and Friday, non-burnables on Wednesday, organic trash every other week) and disposed of in approved bags you can buy in stores in that city. Although the words "environmentally conscious" don't spring to mind when you think of Japan, with its custom of covering the sides of mountains in concrete on the off chance there might be a rock slide someday, the country has been recycling for decades as one way of reducing the amount of trash generated by society. When you buy shampoo or bathroom cleaner, you're presented with a choice: a regular plastic container, or a cheaper refill-only package that lets you refill the bottle you've already got at home and cut down on what you throw away. There are many laws on the books requiring that you take special steps to safely dispose of old cars, computers and televisions, and it's common for home electronics stores to take away your old stuff for free when you buy something new, to save customers from the hassle of paying a recycling company money to take care of their old junk.

Since I'm talking about shampoo, here you go, some pictures of shampoo. Yes, I did get some rather odd looks taking these, thanks.

I've often thought this would be a good name for shampoo... This is one of the refill only packages, of course.

Another one. This one is Nuance Airy, whatever that is.

Wash your hair with black, sooty charcoal, yes!

From across the room, Tommy Lee Jones was silently watching me with eyes that were somehow sad.