What we can learn about culture and Star Wars from Japanese comedians, some reverse sexual discrimination, and all about "What is your Hobby?"

"What is your hobby?" This is one of the first phrases of English conversation that Japanese students learn, along with "What is your name?" "Where are you from?" and "What is your blood type?" My students at the time were aged 18-20, that period when you're sure you've had all of life's major experiences and don't need to form any new opinions, and some regular responses included Mayumi's stated love of doraibu (going driving with friends), Misako's constant talk about baito (working a part-time job, from the German word arbeit), or good old Kiyoko, who always replied "going shopping with my mother." Because I'm an emotional, idealistic American, I always did my best to get the students to give more information to the class about what really excited them, to get them to do more with their precious youth than they were doing. But except for a few students who had a particular passion for something they could share with the class -- the Beatles, American pro wrestlers, traveling around Japan taking pictures of trains -- getting my Japanese students to be excited about anything was always a challenge.

Speaking of hobbies, one of mine is comparing the cultures of Japan and the U.S., in case you haven't guessed, and sometimes you don't need to look any farther than the people who make us laugh, comedians. While most famous comedians in the U.S. come from the stand-up circuit or through the hallowed gates of Saturday Night Live, comedy in Japan is a little different. One form of traditional Japanese comedy that's been around for centuries is rakugo, literally "fallen words," which involves a lone comedian sitting Japanese- style on a zabuton cushion located very near the audience. The interesting thing about this style of performance is that, rather than using new comedy material, the monologue that the comedian tells is one of an already established library of a hundred or so such humorous stories, although a good rakugo-ka will add his own unique touches. There's a TV show where rakugo comedians do battle to see who is the funniest, and when they get a laugh they get another cushion, so that by the end the winner is sitting on a tower of them. (And in fact, a way of saying "that was funny" is Zabuton, ichi mai, or "I'll give you one zabuton cushion for that.") Another pillar of Japan's comedy world is manzai, humor involving a two-man team that includes a dim-witted boke (boh-KAY, meaning fool) and his sharp-tongued tsukkomi (tsu-KOH-mi, meaning straight foil) sidekick, who act out complex comic sketches together. Manzai has been popular throughout the 20th century and has had a great influence on many areas -- for example, the characters of C-3P0 and R2-D2 indirectly owe their existence to this humorous tradition, via the films of Kurosawa. The most popular manzai team in Japan today is Bakusho Mondai, who are regular guests on news programs where they bring their witty commentary to bear on the events of the past week. If you've happened to see the Japanese version of Apple's "Get a Mac" ads, the duo playing the Mac and PC are two halves of a manzai comedy pair. (We have an English book of rakugo monologues on the site today if you're interested.)

Normally when you think of a subject like sexual discrimination you think of women not being offered the chance to do what they want on an equal footing with males, but I had a little lesson in reverse discrimination last night. My wife, mother-in-law and our two kids were heading to Malaysia for a week to visit a family friend, leaving me home alone -- the Holy Grail for any married man, since I can walk around the house in my underwear, put my feet on the table, and drink out of the milk carton with impunity. Before she could leave, though, my wife was compelled to prepare a week's worth of meals for me, as if my male-ness made me totally unable to fend for myself in for seven days, like some comedy version of a husband from the 1950s. And that, I realized, is one aspect of the relationships between men and women in Japan, a kind of yin-yang (to bring a sufficiently Asian image to my theory) in which the man is responsible being the "great black pillar" (daikoku-bashira) that holds up the household, while the woman does her part to ensure the happiness of the family from the inside. Sounds overly simplified to put it like that, I know, but from within the context of living in Japan, it really works well.

Today we've not one, not two but three wacky new Japanese T-shirts for you on the site. The Japanese are an incredibly expressive people, and they can take something as bland as ASCII letters or generic hiragana and katakana characters and turn them into incredibly expressive images. We've got three new limited-run T-shirts featuring popular emoji ("emotional characters") that capture the heart and soul of the Japanese BBS 2ch and look really cool at the same time. See them on the site now!

J-List carries region-free DVD players that make it child's play to enjoy region-encoded DVDs from Japan, Europe and other countries. Our players are specially manufactured to ignore the pesky region codes that try to keep you from watching the discs you want to enjoy, and are fully compatible with DVDs from all regions, including PAL and RCE discs. Even better, they're loaded with features, like the ability to play DIVX/AVI files burned onto DVD-R media. We've lowered the price on our popular RJ-200 progressive scan/surround sound DVD player, making it even easier to snap up one of these half-height demons and watch any DVD you like.

I see I forgot to post pictures of the hidden micro brewery in the mountains of Gunma. Well, here you go. Here are the taps.

Good roaring Dwarven fires, too.

In general, any time I get the chance to eat wood-fired pizza, I take it.

Like all Japanese breweries, there were three types, very blonde, medium and very fruity, and very dark/stout. I found the middle path to be the most delicious.

This is what the Japanese call a "Margherita" Pizza.

I just love the construction of this place, all wood, with huge pillars of wood visible inside. It was so unexpected to find such a good place in a town with a winter population of a few hundred.

I brought some of these back for my father in law, although I know he won't like them. I'll just have to help him drink them ^_^

The man who created the Yamato theme song, all about the traditional game Karuta, and thoughts on corn soup

I've written before about how the meinichi (命日), the anniversary of a person's death, is very important in a Buddhist country like Japan, and once a person has passed on those left behind will remember him or her on this day. Today happens to be the meinichi of Hiroshi Miyagawa, a person who's had no small impact on Japan's animation industry, as well as myself. He was the composer who wrote the music for Space Cruiser Yamato, shown in the U.S. as Star Blazers, essentially the first anime series associated with the now-familiar concepts of dramatic, sequential stories with problems that are resolved and multi-faceted characters who die, fall in love and generally act like real people. Several years before John Williams gave us the music for Star Wars, Maestro Miyagawa showed the world what could be achieved with extremely melodramatic and high-quality music even in something as mundane as an animated series. His single most famous creation was the Yamato theme song, which he composed after being asked by Producer Nishizaki to envision "an iron ballad," and the song is regularly performed by marching bands from the Maritime Self-Defense Forces to my daughter's 4th grade class. The Yamato franchise, with its Gamilon-planet-bombs-as-allegory-to-World-War-II themes, was incredibly campy, but for many it was a first wonderful bridge to Japan.

If you love "corn potage," then get to Japan as fast as you can, since people here just can't get enough of creamed corn soup. Right now I'm sitting in Steak House Miya, a Japanese restaurant that serves both regular and "hamburg" steak, famous for a tangy daikon sauce that the server pours over your sizzling plate, then a napkin is draped over the whole thing to keep it from burning you as the sauce cooks into the meat. Beside my steak and plate of rice is a bowl of corn soup with corn flakes sprinkled on top, which tastes good enough, I guess. As an American, when I think of soup I think of the Campbell's classics like chicken noodle, tomato, and vegetable beef, but these are as alien here in Japan as Green Tea Butterscotch and Rose Flavored Gum are in most parts of the world. Types of soup that the Japanese prefer instead include creamed pumpkin or carrot soups, healthy wakame (seaweed) or miso soup, or if at an Italian restaurant, perhaps some minestrone. When you get sick in the U.S., most people think of eating chicken soup, but in Japan the most common remedies are drinking a tea with ginger in it or swallowing down a raw egg in sake -- yum.

I wrote last time about the traditional Japanese card game karuta, which gets its name from the Portuguese but is based on games played in the Imperial Court in ancient Kyoto. Karuta consists of two decks of cards, one featuring hiragana characters and another with poems or phrases that correspond to cards in the first deck. Two players scatter the hiragana cards on the floor randomly and assume a position that allows them to grab cards easily, then a third person starts reading the poems one by one. The most famous karuta game is the Hyakunin Isshu, which features poetry about one hundred historical figures in short tanka form. As kids hear one of the 1300-year-old poems -- perhaps the one about the poet Ki no Tomonori, which goes "In the peaceful light/Of the ever-shining sun/In the days of spring/Why do the cherry's new-blown blooms/Scatter like restless thoughts?" -- they grab the card that corresponds with that phrase before their opponent can find it, and whoever gets the most cards wins. Another popular variation played in our prefecture is Jomo Karuta, which substitutes poems about the beauty of Gunma, from the fiery Mt. Asama to the bustling hot springs resort at Ikaho. Playing karuta is good on many levels, since it teaches children to read, is competitive and fun to play, and it also instills them with a link to the past that I think Americans can't easily comprehend. It can be used to teach many things, too. For example, my daughter is learning the flute, and her teacher cleverly makes the kids play a version of karuta that teaches them musical terms, like da capo and staccato.

J-List has been involved with licensing and translating Japan's amazing PC dating-sim games for years, and we've built a great lineup of really amazing story- and character-centric games for bishoujo gaming fans that allow you to take your relationship with Japan to a whole new place. Our games are available in shrink-wrapped CD-ROM packages as well as Internet Download Editions, and there are titles for every taste, from cat girls to maids and highly evolved dramatic stories and more. We're happy to announce that we've completed our initial testing with Microsoft's new Windows Vista operating system (32-bit), and are happy to announce that all our games are compatible with the new platform. So whether you're using Vista now or plan to in the future, our great dating-sim games will be compatible.

Remember that J-List carries the extremely high-end school uniforms for guys and girls made by Matsukameya of Nagoya, a company with an outstanding reputation in Japan. Our sailor uniforms are all custom made to your exact size specifications and available in many styles, making it easy for you to have the coolest costume for the summer anime conventions. We also carry a really cool item: authentic Japanese school bags, the kind high school girls carry to school, made of high quality materials and loaded with pockets to hold all your stuff.

An expected bit of Irish in Japan, thoughts on Japan's slow-changing educational system, and all about the concept of "kakko ii"

Yesterday was St. Patrick's Day, a celebration of all things Irish in the U.S. and, presumeably, Ireland. As you might imagine, there isn't a lot of awareness of this day in a place like Japan, which knows nothing of shamrocks or leprechauns or pots of gold buried at the end of the rainbow. However, we managed to have our own little Irish Experience nevertheless. While taking our customary weekend drive up the mountains around the resort town of Karuizawa, we came across an interesting-looking restaurant that served wood-fired pizza and home-brewed beer, a rarity in a country that favors large, easily-taxable industries. Among the beers they offered was an authentic Irish Stout, and I was so shocked at the concept of drinking a rare and delicious brew on a mountain in an extremely rural corner of Japan that I had to have three of them. One thing you can say about Japan is, you never know what it's got in store for you next.

The subject of Japan's compulsory educational system is a complex and interesting one. Officially begun as part of the modernization program of the 1870s, Japan's schools are responsible for teaching young people everything they need to function in life, from reading and writing of kanji to math and science to social skills suitable for Japan's group-oriented culture and being able to say "Fine thanks, and you?" when you ask them how they are in English (a very important skill, to be sure). Public schools are extremely conservative and resistant to change, and it's amazing how much is the same at my daughter's elementary school compared with when her mother went there 25 years ago...or her grandmother, who attended the same school 50 years ago. This is good on the one hand because it creates a continuum of experiences that crosses generations, such as playing the Japanese educational game "Karuta" that teaches respect for local culture -- even something like Japanese school lunches have cultural threads that we foreigners can never comprehend. On the other hand, Japanese public schools seem trapped in a time-warp without any significant plan for the changes students will face this century, including fierce competition from every country in Asia. I sometimes wonder if Japan's educational system can go on changing so little.

Japan can be a very style-oriented place at times, and it seems that everyone is concerned about looking good. The universal word for "cool" in Japanese is kakko ii (KAH-koe ee, lit. "good style"), while the opposite is kakko warui (KAH-koe wa-roo-EE, "bad style," e.g. dorky). Another word that describes an absence of coolness is dasai (dah-SAI, out of fashion, uncool, n00b), which supposedly started out as a derogatory word for people from half-rural, half-urban Saitama Prefecture, just north of Tokyo, essentially to Japan's capital what Orange County is to Los Angeles. Many Japanese also have a great appreciation for what's known as dasa-kakko ii, or something that's both lame and cool at the same time, or perhaps cool specifically because it's out of sync with current mores. Some examples of dasa-kakko ii might include the hair styles or fashions from the 1970s, that scene from Mobile Suit Gundam when Amuro sits in the cockpit desperately reading through the manual as he trying to find the mecha's weapons, the movie Willow, anything featuring Vin Diesel, and the artist formerly and currently known as Prince.

Remember that J-List carries cool computer peripheral and iPod products by Japan's leading company, Elecom. From stylin' USB computer mice to their trademark katakana mouse pads and keyboards to stylish speakers for your iPod, Mac or PC, Elecom has great stuff for you. We also carry the bizarre-but-cute Mogmo Kun, a push little monster that "eats" your USB flash drive or similar shaped device in order to protect it. So cute! All products are fully compatible with computers and iPod products around the world.

How to sub-divide Japanese groups into "zoku" (tribes), all about Japanese rice, and what's that blue spot on Taro's butt?

Words always reflect the people that use them, and vice-versa. In American English our notions about individualism and not going with the flow no doubt color the language we use in subtle ways, and Japan's language is similarly affected by its culture. Japan is a country where 80% or more of the people feel a strong need to consider themselves part of the Middle Class and where the word futsuu (foo-TSOO), meaning "normal" or "the same as everyone else," never carries a negative connotation. One interesting way of organizing people into sub-groups is the term zoku (族), translatable as "family" or "tribe," a tongue- in-cheek way of dividing the population up into quasi-anthropological categories. One of the most famous of these sub-groups are the otaku-zoku, the species of human that surrounds himself with manga, anime and pop culture from Japan -- we don't know anyone like that, do we? The poshest address in Tokyo is Roppongi Hills, a high-rise mini-city in Tokyo, and the fashionable people who can afford to live there are known as Hills-zoku. Often the word is used to give a name to a new social trend, such as hotaru-zoku, the "firefly tribe" of males whose wives have forbidden them from smoking in the home, forcing them out onto the veranda at night where their cigarette tips dance like fireflies. Some other sub-species of Japanese are mansion-zoku, people who live in high-rise apartments, oddly referred to as mansions; neko-zoku, those who like their cats way too much; and keitai-zoku, people obsessed with their cell phones all the time. Which zoku are you?

Rice is the staple of every Japanese household, the most important food in the country since cultivation began back in the Yayoi Period (300 B.C. ~ 250 A.D.). Eaten with three meals a day in many households, rice is such a big part of food culture here that the most common word for rice, "gohan," also refers to any food or meal. To prepare Japanese-style rice, you must wash it for several minutes to remove the edible white powder it's packed in, then put it in your electric rice cooker and press the button -- very convenient. The old U.S. commercials for Uncle Ben's Rice boasted that the grains won't ever stick together, but Japanese rice is supposed to be sticky enough so that you could use it to stick stamps on letters instead of licking them. Being the basis for Japanese civilization, rice is almost considered holy, and mothers tell children to eat all their rice because there are 88 gods in each grain who will get angry if rice is wasted. One the great mysteries of Japan is why virtually every woman seems to suffer from chronic constipation. The answer of course is that they eat too much rice, a natural cure for soft stools, but trying to get Japanese to listen to such a suggestion is just impossible.

I love Japanese public baths (sento) and hot springs (onsen, pronounced own-sen), and take my kids every week -- sometimes twice. Public baths hail back from the Edo era when people didn't have private baths in their homes, and had to go to community facilities to get clean. Hot springs have a long history in Japan, and popular onsen towns like Kusatsu or Beppu have been around for more than 1300 years. Once, when my son was younger and we were in an onsen together, he took me aside and asked me why a little boy playing in one of the baths had a blue bruise on his rear end. This is the famous Mongolian Spot (mokohan in Japanese, meaning "the Old Spot of Mongol"), a blue bruise-like spot which is found on Chinese, Japanese and Mongolian children, including my own kids when they were young. (See link here -- um, it is okay to link to something like this, right? ^_^) The spots go away when the children reach age five or so. In Japanese, the word for someone who is still a wet-behind-the-ears greenhorn is ao ni-sai ("still blue 2-year-old"), which is probably related to this spot.

J-List has been involved in licensing great "doujin" CG artwork and publishing it in CD-ROM format for years, and today we're happy to announce that the Borderline Collection vol. 2 & 3 are available again as Internet Downloads. The breathtakingly beautiful creations of illustrator Sakaki Naomoto (who incidentally designed the J-List logo girl), these two collections are filled with great images for fans and collectors. Check them out now!

So, I'm taking the kids to Mahatma, the Indian restaurant that I blog about from time to time. I took my wife here on our first date. We're were going for some of this...

Or maybe some of this, a plate of tandoori chicken, which my son loves more than anything. On the way there I joked with the kids if they wanted to go to Mahatma or to McDonald's instead, which is very amusing since who would go to McDonald's when they could have this instead?

Then we get to our table, and apparently some funny Indian person has decided to bring a menu from a McDonald's in India, just to play with our minds.

I really have no idea what the differences would be. No beef or pork, right? So I guess India is a lame place to be a sheep.

Like most Americans, I get my knowledge of India from the Simpsons episode where Apu gets married. Just kidding!

People who are interesated in Mother Theresa should hunt down Penn and Teller's episode where they strip away some of her halo. It's quite an eye-opener. Unfortunately doesn't look like it's up on Youtube or anything.

How Cup Ramen became a part of our food culture, a new trend in vending machines, and my thoughts on the enigma of the "Japanese Female"

You may have seen that Momofuku Ando, the Father of Instant Ramen, died recently. Momofuku, whose name meant "one hundred happiness," was born in Taiwan and emigrated to Japan after the end of World War II. Seeing shivering customers waiting in line to buy ramen noodles, he got the idea for ramen that could be made easily at home, and started various experiments with pre-cooked noodles that eventually resulted in Chikin (sic) Ramen, released by his company Nisshin in 1958. He didn't stop there, though: he revolutionized the noodle industry again in 1972 by inventing Cup Noodle, the first ramen in a Styrofoam cup. Initial sales were slow until the Asama Resort Hostage Incident, when members of the Japan Red Army fled from police and took a woman hostage in a resort home in Karuizawa. When the country tuned in to watch the drama unfold on TV, they saw images of policemen standing in the cold eating Cup Noodle, and sales skyrocketed. (Hayao Miyazaki made use of this image with Detective Zenigata, too.) But not every product Momofuku made turned out to be a good idea. In the 1970s Nisshin rolled out a line of instant rice called Cup Rice, but it failed because of the special place hand-washed white rice has in Japanese households. Momofuku was a smart businessman who said, "I'm not selling noodles. I'm providing more free time to my customers." He passed away at the age of 96, still healthy and possessing all of his teeth. His secret of life? Eat instant ramen every day, and also eat a fresh sardine, head, bones and all, for the calcium.

The Japanese are nothing if not efficient, and what could be more efficient than a vending machine that works 24 hours a day and never needs health care? You can buy most anything in a vending machine in Japan, from hot canned coffee and creamed corn soup to film to tobacco and even beer -- there's a slot to stick your drivers' license into to verify your age. Near my house, there's a machine that sells 2-kg bags of rice in case you run out on short notice, and Tokyo's Akihabara region is famous for canned "oden" (oh-DEN), a traditional food that includes boiled squid, radish (daikon), pressed fish (chikuwa), and eggs. Since vending machines are so ubiquitous here -- there is one for every 23 Japanese -- manufacturers have to keep on their toes and introduce new features that will delight their customers. One company has done just that, creating a large vending machine that dispenses a variety of drinks from Coke to green tea to a frothing cappuccino. A TV screen shows you exactly what's happening to your drink inside the complex machine, and it's positively mesmerizing to watch the metal arm pick up a cup and move it to the steamed milk dispenser, wait for the espresso to drop, screw on a lid for you, then place your drink on the serving tray.

If I were to wake up someday and find that I'd suddenly become immortal, perhaps I'd have enough time to write a book on the subject of Homo Sapiens Sapiens Japanus Feminas, that of the Japanese female. In the fifteen years I've lived in Japan, I've known quite a lot of Japanese females, including my wife, various ESL students, friends and a few girlfriends (not in that order), yet I'd be lying if I said that they were anything but a mystery to me. A primary characteristic of Japanese women is that they generally live by the mantra chanto suru, meaning "do everything properly, the way it's supposed to be done," and you can see this reflected in many ways. Japanese females are very organized and are apt to suddenly pull out daily calendar books and schedule dates weeks or months in advance. They're also very meticulous when it comes to money, and it can be entertaining to watch two or more Japanese females eat at a restaurant then spend five minutes calculating who should pay for what down to the last yen. If taking a trip, try to have a Japanese woman plan it for you and everything will go much more smoothly, something I learned when we took our vacation to Guam last year. Many Japanese females have a highly refined sense of kawaii, or cuteness, whether it's decorating their room in Hello Kitty or referring to themselves in the third person to create a mysterious yet "coquettish" image. Judging from the success of our wacky kanji T-shirt that says "Now Accepting Applications for a Japanese Girlfriend," I'm not the only one fascinated by the enigma of Japanese women. We hope that J-List can help you understand these wonderful creatures a little better.

In addition to our world-famous wacky Japanese T-shirts, J-List also makes hooded sweatshirts that are incredibly soft and warm, just the thing to have around in the chillier months. Today we're happy to announce the return of the popular Caroline Blue Totoro Hoodie, which had been taken out of circulation while we searched for a new company to supply us with the uniquely colored blanks. Like all our other hooded sweatshirts, these Totoro hoodies are the best money can buy, made with extra-soft 80-20 blends that will stay soft through many washings, far superior to the 50-50 blends at other companies. All T-shirts and hoodies are printed in the USA by our expert staff in San Diego, and of course all sizes are full U.S. sizes. Why not browse our selection of hoodies for yourself or someone you know who would love to be wrapped in a warm kanji message?

All about Mt. Fuji, how taking responsibility can lead to cleaner bathrooms, and thoughts on bathing and how the brain works

You can't think of Japan without also thinking of the country's tallest and most famous mountain, Mt. Fuji. An active volcano 12,388 ft (3,776 meters) high that rises gracefully from the prefectures of Shizuoka and Yamanashi, Mt. Fuji is an incredibly beautiful image of Japan. In Japanese its name is Fuji-san, with 'san' being the correct pronunciation for the character for mountain, although it's read 'yama' in other situations according to a secret code that foreigners can never seem to figure out. Along with taking pictures of beer vending machines and making that first pilgrimage to Kinkaku-ji, the Golden Pagoda of Kyoto, climbing Mt. Fuji is a popular activity among visitors to Japan, and if you're ever planning to be here during the climbing season (July 1 to August 31), you should give it a try. You start from the 5th level, the highest point that vehicles are allowed on the mountain, and take one of three paths up to the topmost 10th level. As you ascend, you go rapidly from the middle of summer to the middle of winter, so you have to have lots of extra clothes with you to put on as the temperature drops. You continue to climb, passing the various stations along the way and rasping as the air gets thinner and thinner. When I did my ascent, I slept for a few hours at one of the little inns that are at each station, and woke up at 4 am to finish the rest of the climb and arrive at the top at dawn. It was, of course, a breathtaking experience. Traditionally mountains are associated with Shinto, the indigenous religion of Japan, and Mt. Fuji has been considered a holy place for thousands of years.

Today my wife and I ate at a restaurant that serves my favorite food, Hamburg Doria, which is a hamburger (Salisbury) steaks baked inside a rice and white sauce casserole. (Aside: one of the more bizarre aspects of Japan is that hamburger meat and a frankfurter without a bun are called hamburg and frankfurt respectively.) I used the bathroom and was pleasantly surprised to find it very clean. I saw the reason for this immediately: there was a clipboard hung by the door with the name of the employee in charge of cleaning, with an indication of when the room had last been checked along with his initials. It was an example of the Japanese word sekinin (seh-ki-NIN), meaning taking responsibility for something: by making sure that not only the manager but the customers see how often good old Negishi-san has cleaned the bathroom, the management could ensure that he'd do his darnedest to make everything was done right. I've seen this system used in other places, too, for example in the Gainax Phone Club I belong to, which lets me get little Flash animations from Gainax anime shows for my phone, such as one of Asuka saying "Anta baka?!" to me when I go to make a call. Each section of the club's site displays the name of the Gainax employee responsible for creating interesting content, which no doubt plays a role in making sure each employee does his best. I'd have to say that taking responsibility is something the Japanese are very good at.

Being so busy with J-List, it seems I never seem to have enough time to unwind in the evenings. Fortunately, bathing is a big part of daily life here, and by taking a good book into the bath with me I can get clean and get my reading done at the same time, although it makes for some funny looks in the public bath. I'm currently working on a fascinating book by Carl Sagan in which he explores the brain and how it evolved. In a chapter about how memory works, he discusses how its possible to wake up after a dream so vivid we're sure we'll be able to remember in the morning, yet due to the way that our brains are wired, the memory of the dream invariably slips away from us, unless we write it down to talk about it with someone. I can certainly say that studying a foreign language like Japanese enables you to discover of these interesting limitations of the brain, too. For example, merely thinking about a kanji character or a vocabulary word won't force it to be stored in longer-term memory. To internalize new information you need to attack it from several directions, perhaps by recalling the information from flashcards or a system like the "Zebra Check Set" study system, writing example sentences, or the hands-down best way to never forget a new word or grammatical point: try to use it in casual conversation but fail miserably, embarrassing yourself in the process. It's not fun, but at least you'll never forget that word.

Do you have a blog or website, and do you like dig J-List's brand of fun Japanese pop culture? If so, then we hope you'll join the Friends of J-List affiliate program, a great way for you to link directly to products you think are cool and get paid back from J-List either in cash or store credit, your option. Our affiliate members tell us our program is outstanding, very easy to use, with all orders listed very clearly. Since all graphics are hosted by us, you don't even need to spend any bandwidth, and best of all, J-List's commissions are the best in the industry. We'd love to have you join the Friends of J-List! For more information, see the link on our site.

Here's the Hamburg Doria. This is at a restaurant called Flying Garden.

Hmm, can you feel the heat of the ceramic bowl as the rice bakes to the sides? Juwa juwa juwa... (that's the sound of the meat still cooking)

Here's the clipboard in the bathroom. Negishi-san is really doing a great job.

Confusing sign. It doesn't have anything to do with men, or soul, or Seoul, or Menthol. The Japanese title translates as "Soul of Noodles" (men in Japanese).

The Japanese concept of "joshiki" (common sense), why there are rice fields everywhere in Japan, and would you pay $3500 to meet Michael Jackson?

One concept that's always interested me is joshiki (JOH-sh'kee) the Japanese "universal common sense" or knowledge that all reasonable people are supposed to possess here. The Japanese have a vast storehouse of this knowledge and it's one of the reasons why Japan seems to be such a harmonious place when viewed from the outside. Have a traffic accident? The insurance companies will work out the percentages of who was at fault according to guidelines the industry has established, so there's never a need for a lawsuit. Going to have a baby? Virtually all babies are born in traditional hospitals, and you almost never hear of alternate birthing methods. Quite a lot of people around the world have chosen a vegetarian lifestyle, but in Japan, it's joshiki that a meal will generally include meat or fish along with vegetables and white rice, and so there are almost no vegans here at all. When I go to the U.S. this summer, one thing that's on my list to do is straighten out my legal affairs and make a new will, something every family man should consider doing regularly. My wife was curious about why I needed to do this, though -- it seems that the Japanese common sense system covers death quite tidily, with all assets distributed in a logical manner, and there's seldom any cause for someone to have a written will in place.
A new Mediterranean-style restaurant opened near a built-up part of our city, so my wife and I went to give it a try. On one side of this restaurant was a bank, a convenience store, and a gas station. On the other side was...a large rice field with a farmer in it, busily preparing his field for the coming planting. Japan is funny that way, mixing industrial, commercial, and agricultural land in ways we wouldn't ever consider doing in the States. Even in Tokyo you can find agriculture going on in areas that seem way too urban to support it. Because there's only a little bit of land to go around, the laws that govern how you can use land are quite strict, and agriculture is given a special status. For example, the area where J-List is located is officially designated as agricultural land, only to be used for growing crops, except for certain circumstances such as plots of land that face the road or individuals building a business that contributes to society, such as a school. When representatives of companies J-List does business within Japan visit us, they're invariably surprised to see a high-tech IT business standing in the middle of fields of swaying rice, which definitely appeals to our rebellious nature.

Would you pay $3500 to see Michael Jackson? That's what several hundred Japanese fans did last night, attending a dinner with the former star and getting to talk with him briefly, and pose for photographs, and most of the attendees said it was a bargain for the chance of a lifetime. The former King of Pop arrived in Japan this week to the cheers of thousands of fans who had camped out at Narita Airport to greet him, and he was soaking all the attention up. He also made a surprise appearance on the popular TV show SMAP x SMAP, in which the five-member "talent" team cooks an exquisite meal on camera while they talk with the guest. You cant have a famous visitor to Japan without Queen of Movie Subtitles Natsuko Toda at his side, and she was there, translating for Michael and the SMAP members as they did their best to make him feel welcome in Japan.

As an dyed-in-the-wool old-school anime fan, I've had some pretty fun moments, from standing for the first time in front of the Studio Alta TV in Shinjuku to that first visit to Tokyo Tower, the icon featured in most every CLAMP anime. I've posed in front of the Shibuya 109 building, slept in my car so I could be among the first 5000 in line for the Comic Market, and even sung the Yamato theme song on the top of Mt. Fuji, in Japanese of course. Another event in my life as an anime fan came when we got the incredible Space Cruiser Yamato 1/350 scale toywe're posting to the site today in, one of the coolest items we've ever carried at J-List. A huge model of Japan's most famous battleship, it's loaded with features, from guns that move by remote control to a Wave Motion Gun that fires. Check it out now!

Remember that J-List has great PC dating-sim games you can buy, with many titles available as Internet Download Editions starting at just $24.95. We're extremely proud of the lineup of great games we've built, and hope you'll try this fun way of interacting with Japan on a new level. We've got games that are humorous and games with highly defined stories and even games that can make you cry. Check out our lineup of PC dating-sim games today!

The needless tragedy of 'ijime,' what's easy and hard about learning Japanese, and the Japanese as the most expressive people on the planet

The other day I went to my son's school to watch the various end-of-year performances the students had prepared for the parents, which included putting on a puppet show and school TV news report all in English, and the entire fifth grade performing a symphony concert for us, too. While I was walking through the halls, I noticed a big poster that said "STOP THE IJIME" with the slogan "we cannot allow bullying to continue -- your courage will end it forever" written below. It's a sad fact that ijime (ee-jee-MEH), the bullying and hazing that happens in schools, is a major social problem here in Japan, and all too often it's given as a the trigger leading to a young person's untimely death. There are several reasons why ijime is such a problem in Japan, beyond the bully-before-you-are-bullied mind-set that is probably present in all kids to some degree. First of all, the Japanese custom of keeping classes of students together all day throughout the school year, with teachers coming and going each hour, might be good for imparting group cooperation skills for forming lifelong friendships, but it also amplifies problems between students. If you have to sit next to a cruel jerk for one hour a day you could probably get through it, but all day, every day, for a whole year? Teachers also sitting together in a large room rather than individual offices is a problem, too, since it makes it difficult for a student to talk to one teacher, especially bad when a teacher is part of the problem. Finally, the near total lack of counseling and therapeutic medicine is also part of the problem, and all too often all kids can do is that most Japanese of activities "gaman" (meaning to endure patiently).

Each language is special, with unique features that may cause confusion for speakers of other languages. Romance languages like Spanish and French have noun genders, forcing English speakers to puzzle over why a pen is feminine while a pencil is masculine. Although Japanese do consider it a point of pride to think of their language as being especially hard to learn, I am convinced that no language is intrinsically more or less difficult than all the others. Still, there are some barriers to learning Japanese that must be overcome, starting with the two syllable-based writing systems, hiragana (the wavy looking one) and katakana (the boxy, masculine looking one), which you can tackle by memorizing the shapes and what sound they make (we can help). Kanji is also no small challenge, although you'd be surprised how much you can read with just a few hundred characters under your belt after a year or two of study. Grammatically there are some confusing areas, such as having to get used to two different verbs for to be (in a place), aru (ah-ROO) for inanimate objects, and iru (ee-ROO) for anything that moves, like people or animals. Whenever you learn something new, it's important to test it to find the limitations on that new piece of information so your brain can internalize it, and I remember bugging my sensei about which verb was correct for objects like zombies, cyborgs, and Venus Fly-Traps.

There are times when the Japanese seem to be the most expressive people in the world to me. First of all, the fact that nearly everyone has taken several years of English allows for Japanese to use the language as a tool of expression without letting all the biases against bad grammar and meaningless words get in the way. This leads to the Japanese being able to create new English words to fit their needs, like Balance Up (a calorie balanced snack), Wordtank (Canon's popular electronic Japanese dictionary), Meltykiss (delicious fudge squares, love 'em) or the famous Walkman by Sony, which had to sound really silly the first time you heard it. They're also able to express more when writing text on a computer or cellular phone, since Japanese is a two-byte language, allowing fonts to go beyond the limits of mere ASCII, adding everything from musical notes to common symbols as standard characters. Finally, the tradition of putting kana above kanji to show how it should be read is often extended in innovative ways. In Yu-Gi-Oh, for example, they can put an unfamiliar word like Black Magician in English and write tiny kanji that explain the meaning above it, creating a single gestalt for the eye that performs both functions. Similarly, someone translating a Harry Potter novel might use the English word Quidditch but write characters for "air broom ball" above it in kanji, making all aspects of the word instantly clear at a glance.

We're happy to have our Domo-kun T-shirts and warm hoodies back on the site for you, and J-List customers seem very happy to have them available again. We forgot to mention that our hooded sweatshirt now includes an XS size -- a first, since this color is usually not available in this size -- making Domo-kun a great item for customers needing youth sizes.

We love to bring you fun an interesting things from Japan, and today we've got Fresh Cuts, an outstanding collection of the most interesting indies music from Japan today, brimming with 16 tracks by bands like Baggy Chopper, Maria Gadet and Guitar Vader. It's in stock in San Diego and ready for your order.

All about trains and fuzzy blue rabbits from London, linguistic quirks of the Japanese language, and finding someone's "secret talent"

One thing I like about living in Japan is the rail culture here, so very different from the freeway- and automobile-based transportation system of Southern California. Trains have crisscrossed Japan since the first tracks were laid down in 1872, and you can go just about anywhere you want by rail, either a speedy bullet train between major cities or convenient local train when taking shorter trips. While you still need a car to really get around out in the inaka (boonies) where we live, residents of larger cities like Tokyo can easily get along without owning a car, and considering that a monthly parking space can cost up to $500 per month, that's probably a good thing. One of the most convenient train lines in Tokyo is the Yama-no-te loop line, which circles all of Tokyo and provides an easy way to get to most locations, as well as a fun drinking game for college students: get off at one stop, drink, get on the next train and go one station down, drink some more, repeat. There are plenty of advertisements in trains for various products, and every once in a while a company will buy every spot of advertising in a Yama-no-te train when it really wants to get its message across. The other day I got inside a train and was amazed to see pictures of Brits wearing cute plush rabbit ears, with the slogan "Go! London" everywhere, designed to make Japanese tourists think about taking a vacation there. I'm certain the advertising campaign succeeded in making Japanese feel all warm and fuzzy about Londoners.

One of the more interesting aspects of having bilingual kids is the conversations you can have with them about how they perceive their two languages. My kids grew up speaking Japanese primarily, but many trips to the U.S. and interaction with me kept their English skills up to speed. I like to ask them if they feel their personalities are different when switching from one language to the other, and seeing what insights they might have for me. The other day my son asked me what the difference between the words sutoraiku (strike, with a 'ku' sound on the end, ストライク) and sutoraiki (the same, this time with a 'ki' on the end, ストライキ) was. Japanese is quite impoverished phonetically, with just five vowels compared to the twelve vowel sounds we produce in English -- for example, the schwa or the unique way a New Yorker pronounces the first syllable of "coffee" -- and they sometimes split English words into chunks that are easier for them to digest. The words strike with a 'ku' sound on the end is the term Japanese use for a strike in baseball or bowling, but the word with a 'ki' on the end is a labor dispute, two very different concepts in the minds of the Japanese. Some other split words include mishin (a sewing machine) vs. mashin (any machine, mecha or robot); bureiki (what stops your car) vs. bureiku (what you take when you're tired); and one that I invariably mess up, garasu (glass, what your windows are made of) and gurasu (a glass that you drink out of).

Socially, Japan is a different place from the West, and human relationships often have more formality than they might in the States. Therefore it takes time to really get to know a Japanese person, and it's not uncommon to keep on discovering things along the way, even years later. One interesting aspect of Japanese relationships that pops up from time to time is kakushi-gei (ka-ku-shee-GEI、隠し芸), the "secret talent" that people will hide from everyone else, only to pull out suddenly for dramatic effect. Jun is the J-List employee who brings you delicious snacks and "wacky things from Japan." When he first started working here we took everyone out for Indian food to welcome him, and he showed us his secret talent of being able to eat curry and rice deftly with his hands like they do in India, a skill he'd picked up while traveling the Silk Road. Once I took DVD and Japan iTunes-card meister Tomo out to dinner at a Japanese curry restaurant but realized I didn't have enough money to cover his meal, so he ordered the 1300 gram Super Curry Plate, which you get free if you can eat three pounds of rice and curry within 20 minutes -- he did it with time to spare. Other J-List staff members have secret abilities, too, like Yasu, who can do a great Eddie Murphy impression in Japanese; super-packer Saori, who possesses vast knowledge of American punk bands; and our newest employee Asami, proficient in Brazilian martial arts.

Are you ready for White Day, on March 14th? This is the day when men who received a gift of chocolate on Valentine's Day give some sort of return gift -- okaeshi in Japanese -- to the wives, girlfriends, daughters and female co-workers who gave them something. It's pure marketing fluff, of course, but kind of fun, and companies are happy to take advantage of the event by thinking of ways to sell products. Even Apple gets into the spirit of White Day their Japan store page, by suggesting that men buy engraved iPods for their better halves as a way of saying "Thanks for the chocolate!"

We've got a big announcement for you all today, with the return of our Domo-kun T-shirts and hoodies to the site. As you probably know, Domo-kun is the incredibly cute official spokesmonster for NHK, Japan's public broadcast system (the initials stand for Nippon Hoso Kyokai in case it ever comes up in casual conversation). We've got our classic Domo-kun men's T-shirt, our stylish Fitted Tee for girls, and a super item for those in cold parts of the world, our super-warm Domo-kun hooded sweatshirt. Check out the great new Domo-kun items on the site now!

I don't know why, but Ueno Station, located in Northn Tokyo, is my favorite.

There's something really old about it, and you can feel the Taisho Era still present on every train platform.

Competition has actually come to Japan's cellphone world, and I'm happy to see it. Here KDDI's "au" company, the one I use, is taking aim at NTT Docomo with their twin spokeswomen, Yukie Nakama (who looks kind of creapy here) on the left, and Ryoko Shinohara (who sang the theme song to the Street Fighter II movie way back in 1994), in a nice Spring-themed ad series.

More pictures of the ads. They talk about something called the Republic of London Bunnies, which is so cute I think I'll stop reading the ad lest I give myself "cuteness poisoning."

They have cool dalmations in London?

Popping into a convenience store, where they're selling "White Day Guilt" to all men who haven't bought their White Day return gift yet.

"Gentle as the breeze, deep as the ocean, constant as the moon, mysterious LOVE." Thank you, Hello Kitty.

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.