Summer fireworks and reflections on language, the poor plight of Sumo's most famous wrestler, and what's up with those Japanese name stamps?

Hanabi (花火), meaning "flower fire" or fireworks, are part of summer in Japan, and you can't watch three hours of anime without an episode involving yukata-clad characters bent over a bucket of water (Japan is very safety-conscious when it comes to fire hazards) as they light fireworks together. Virtually every city, town or village sponsors a big annual fireworks festival sometime during the summer as a way to bring the community together, and to promote our fireworks show the city government distributes posters to local businesses. The other day we were eating at our favorite ramen restaurant and we noticed this year's poster, which proclaimed the ISESAKI A FIREWORKS DISPLAY 2007. My son wondered what the "a" was doing there when the name of the event was just "Isesaki Fireworks Display," but I knew immediately what had happened. The city office employees, ever fearful of making an error in English, decided to trust the dictionary's translation of hanabi taikai as "a fireworks display" verbatim, and that's what made it onto the poster. I wonder if this is the same reason that New Year's cards always seem to say "a Happy Near Year!" in English? (Note, if you ever want to be cruel, ask Japanese people how many years of English they've studied.)

Sumo wrestling is quite famous as a symbol of Japan, although it's been around since prehistoric times. The current top wrestler in Japan's professional league is the celebrated Mongolian Asashoryu (ah-sa-SHO-ryu, "morning blue dragon"), a powerhouse who has won no less than 21 tournaments in his stellar career since attaining the rank of Yokozuna (Grand Champion) in 2003. Unfortunately, things just haven't been going his way lately. First, he ducked out of the summer exhibition bouts in Northern Japan citing an injury but was mysteriously well enough to play in a soccer game with Hidetoshi Nakata for charity, which caused a big uproar in Japan when it was reported. Convinced that Asashoryu had over-stated his injury in order to take a vacation, the Sumo Association called him back to Japan to explain himself. In the end they banned him from playing in the next two sumo tournaments, a first for a Yokozuna, and docked his pay for four months (ouch). As the official national sport of Japan, sumo is taken very seriously, and sumo wrestlers are expected to have "the deepest commitment, the most serious mind..." . Asa has rubbed Sumo Association officials the wrong way in the past, daring to be seen in public in a Western suit instead of the traditional sumo garb, arguing with judges over their calls, and showing elation and frustration after bouts rather than appearing emotionless like the pillar of bushido that he's supposed to be. He also once pulled the top-knot of an opponent a few years ago, which was quite the scandal. As a fellow foreigner I can really sympathize with the poor guy -- it's hard to be something you're not, and seeing the way the press is ganging up on him makes me feel sorry for him. Hopefully he'll be able to hansei (reflect) on things and be a better wrestler for it in the future. (I wish I could give him one of our Yokozuna T-shirts to make him feel better.)

When a gaijin goes to live in Japan, one of the first things he has to do is get a hanko (name stamp) made and get it registered with the city office. These name stamps are used in lieu of signing your name on documents, filling out forms at the bank, and signifying agreement to any kind of contract. A custom imported from China ages ago, name stamps are a big part of contemporary Japanese life, and even companies like Apple and J-List have them, being legal entities. For foreigners fascinated with Japanese characters, there are several ways to write your name. For example, you could choose the most orthodox route and write your name in katakana, the writing system specifically used for that purpose. If this is too boring, you can find kanji that can be read like your name. For my own last name, I might choose the "peh" sound from Peking (北京） since there's no official way to write that sound in Japanese, and the "in" character from Byodoin (平等院), my favorite Buddhist temple in the Kyoto area. Or I could pick a kanji that meant roughly what my name means and "force" a reading onto it, which is called ateji. Since last name comes from the French "pan," something similar to the English last name Baker, I could dig up an archaic kanji for "bread" and declare that this kanji is now pronounced "Payne." No one would be able to read it, but it'd be my kanji nevertheless. Incidentally, J-List has started a great custom name stamp service, allowing up to get the kanji you'd like on one of three cool Japanese stamps. They're fully registrable as legal hanko stamps, too -- order your kanji name stamp now!

Announcing the start of 2008 Calendar Season! Every year about this time, J-List starts taking preorders for the outstanding calendars from Japan, which are printed exclusively for the Japanese market. The calendars we sell every year come in two volleys: first, we post dozens of amazing calendars that capture the natural beauty of Japan; the delicate imagery of a tea garden; the aesthetic beauty of Japanese sushi or bento; kanji calendars for students; lovely idols in kimono and more. Most of the JPOP and anime calendars will be posted in a couple weeks. Browse the amazing 2008 calendars we've got on the site for you now and get your preorders in!

Masi Oka of Heroes visiting Japan, contemplating Japanese culture through its food, and more dogs in Japan than babies

I knew it would happen: Heroes is starting to get popular in Japan. This morning I turned on the TV and caught that gaijin-that-other-gaijin- love-to-hate Dave Spector (we dislike him because his Japanese is so much better than ours, and because he dyes his black hair blonde to look more "foreign" on camera, poser). He was interviewing none other than Masi Oka, the Star Wars CG-programming uber-geek with an IQ of 189, who plays the time-bending salaryman Hiro Nakamura in the NBC show. Japan is extremely sensitive to the opinions of people in the West, and any Japanese who raises the reputation of the country in the eyes of the world, such as manga-ka Shirow Masamune, baseball star Ichiro or the pop group Pizzicato Five, gets enormous street cred at home. Dave Spector seemed almost giddy as he interviewed "the most famous Japanese man in the world today" despite the fact that, you know, he's not even Japanese. When one of Dave's jokes fell flat, Masi calmly said, "You just made time stop for me. I think you might have super powers." The newscasters seemed thrilled to see that the word "Yatta!" ("I did it!") had apparently entered the English lexicon through the show.

Although the Japanese have a strong food culture, with various types of noodles, nabe (nah-beh) dishes like sukiyaki that are cooked in a central large pot in the middle of the table, and various good things from the sea like sushi and sashimi, they also embrace cuisine form the West. When we go out to dinner, we've got many choices, including American chains like Denny's (which has carved a niche selling extremely traditional Japanese dishes, go figure), Italian (a dozen or more choices in a 5 km radius), and our personal favorite, Indian naan. Although famous for eating rice, which they usually consume three times a day, they've taken pan (bread) and adopted it into many forms beyond the normal sliced type. If you're hungry for a snack, grab some curry-pan, baked with curry inside, or maybe some yakisoba-pan, a long roll with chow mein noodles inside. Many types of Japanese bread are sweet, which we'd consider to be something like a doughnut, like melon-pan (said to make you smarter, since it sort of looks like a shriveled brain) or cornet (a Japanese version of a French roll with chocolate cream inside, and there's much debate about which end you should eat first). One of the most famous types of bread is is an-pan, a kind of round piece of bread containing sweet Japanese beans. Whenever I go to the bakery, I buy a loaf of French bread with camembert cheese baked inside -- yum.

Japan has a famously low birthrate of about 1.29 children per female, and the country's population is now on its way down, having officially peaked sometime in 2006. The situation is made worse than it would otherwise be by the lack of immigration into the country -- while the population of the United States and Europe is augmented by new people coming in to live, the number of new foreigners in Japan doesn't rise appreciably from year to year. In fact, I saw the other day that the population of dogs has now passed the number of children aged 10 and under, so there are now more poodles, dachunds and chihuahuas being walked by their owners in parks than kids playing there. While I'm not sure sure how serious the problem of a slowly declining population really is -- it's not like the country is going to cease functioning tomorrow or anything -- it is a problem that future generations will have to deal with. Japan does do what it can to make it easy for people to come here -- it's usually possible for a foreigner to get a permanent residence visa in five or six years -- but given the cultural and linguistic differences between the rest of the world, it's unrealistic to expect immigration to turn things around. Hopefully, they'll come up with a way to keep their race from dying out between now and the year 3000, when the number of Japanese in the world is projected to be...27.

My weekend trip to Akiba, times when Japanese do or don't apologize, and the history of the stapler in Japan

I took the train into Tokyo on Sunday to meet a friend in Akihabara, the area of Tokyo famous as the electronics and all-around underground pop culture capital of Japan. I hadn't been there on a Sunday in a while and was bowled over by the sea of people I saw, from otaku of every stripe doing their their shopping to middle-aged men headed home with computer purchases under their arms. Part of the reason it was so crowded was that the majority of Japanese get their monthly pay on the 25th, so people were flush with cash to go shopping with. Every Sunday they close off the main street and let people take it over for their own purposes. I caught an interesting "guerilla live" or street concert where singers will appear out of nowhere with a portable karaoke machine and start singing natsukashii (nostalgic) anime theme songs while a crowd of listeners gathers around and cheers. It was pure fun.

I've talked before about how an important trait among Japanese is kenson (KEN-son), meaning humility or modesty. It's much better for a person to be self-effacing -- for example, to deny a compliment on how good their English is -- than to appear boastful and proud, which is why it can be difficult to say something nice about a Japanese person without them disagreeing with you. For all the noise made about Japan not apologizing for certain past events, Japanese people pretty much apologize at the drop of a hat, and there are many situations where the Western concept of "thank you" would be expressed as sumimasen ("excuse me for inconveniencing you") instead. This isn't always the case, of course. For example, most people will refrain from apologizing after a car accident as it could imply accepting fault. Another example of not apologizing would be our bank, the largest in our prefecture, famous for their haughty attitude because they're #1. No matter what small mistake their staff might make -- forgetting to credit a money transfer, say, or improperly filling out a document requiring it to be done over -- the bank's employees are trained never to apologize. This is called tonosama shobai (toh-no-sah- mah SHO-bai), roughly translatable as "running your business as if you're a feudal lord in ancient Japan," and I guess it's a way to show your customers that you are an extremely strong leader in your field, since no other company could get away with that kind of crap. If you've ever wondered at some of the bizarre actions taken by Sony over the years -- the hubristic attitude that nothing could assail their strong position in video games, the Sony-only media formats, the rootkit DRM scandal of last year -- now you know what the concept is called in Japanese.

When English speakers come to Japan, we're generally pleased to hear familiar words being used around us. Although phrases like "after service" (service after a purchase), "plus alpha" (meaning "a little extra something"), "unit bath" (a bathroom designed as a single unit) and "recycle shop" (any shop that sells used items) might sound a little odd, at least they're easy to figure out without too much trouble. Not all foreign loan words come from English: there are words like arbeit (part-time job, from German), enquette (questionnaire, from French) or pan (bread, from Portuguese) that we must get used to. Then there are words whose origins can be incredibly confusing, such as why the Japanese word for stapler is hochikisu. It turns out that the E.F. Hotchkiss company made fine "paper fasteners" (staplers) at the beginning of the 20th century, and a shipment made it to Japan around 1910. The Japanese were fascinated with this ingenious device and, not knowing it was called, dubbed it a "Hotchkiss." If you think something as boring as a stapler can't be innovative, you should check out the TAMAHOTCHI, the cute new egg-shaped stapler that's shaped like an egg, but one that staples papers for you quite handily. Winner of the Good Design Award!

Welcome to Akihabrara, abbreviated Akiba since it's hard for Japanese people to say too,

Basically, there are lots of electronics stores, including some very old school places that frankly don't like all the otaku types who have been taking over the area. DVD stores, manga stores, an Animate, a few dozen Maid Cafes. You know, all the good stuff.

Walking along the man Chuo Dori road. To the left was a huge line of people waiting to get some idol's autograph.

Oo, gotta watch that.

This is the first live (i.e. live performance) I sat in on. She was singing 1980s stuff, which is the best (to me). Yes, I am old school... Interesting to note that she's wearing a U.S. made anime shirt.

This was another performance, but the girls were handing out advertisements for a shop while they sang, so it felt rather spammy.

Headed back. I saw this and wondered if they have any idea what the hell Esperonto is?

My daughter's summer art project. "Drinking and driving, don't ever do it!" Recently my wife and both kids were hit from behind by a drunk driver. The strength of the BMW she was in saved them, but it was a scary, scary thing. Try to see the detail on the guy drinking a bottle of bourbon inside the blue car.

I conclude this blog post with a picture of my stupid cat displaying his "fuzzy dice."

On psychology and jealousy of gaijin living in Japan, thinking about Japanese grammar while in the bath, and using the Far Side in English class

I've written before about the psychology of ex-pats living in Japan, such as the the Three Stages of Eye Aversion we foreigners seem to go through when encountering other gaijin on the train the first few times, or our distaste for foreigners who do something rude then take the polite silence of the Japanese around them as a sign that it's okay to keep doing it. Then there's that odd built-in resentment of other gaijin who have been here longer than us and/or who speak Japanese better than we can, which I learned about when I came here after studying the language at SDSU for four years. This confused the Americans, Canadians and Brits I hung out with, since most of them started studying after arriving here, and they weren't sure how to categorize me. Foreigners living in Japan can be especially jealous of the annointed "gaijin talents" who get to to be on TV just because they can be funny and/or insightful while speaking Japanese. A good example is the Egyptian fortune-teller Fifi-san, who has gotten quite a following of fans with her appearances on variety shows lately. For a wedding present my father gave me the autobiography of Donald Keene, an American translator who came to Japan soon after World War II ended and got to hob-knob with all the great Japanese writers of the postwar period, from Yasunari Kawabata to Dazai Osamu to Yukio Mishima -- lucky bastard. As a general rule, any given foreigner will tend to be mistrustful of the theories put forth by other gaijin (hence, whenever someone disagrees with me I can defend myself based on this principle).

When you go to an onsen (OWN-sen), a public hot springs bath, it's important to have all the essentials with you, and in my car I keep a basket with all my bath-related stuff in it -- toothbrush, razor, large rubber bands that let me keep the shower nozzle from shutting off every 10 seconds, and a notepad for writing down all the ideas for J-List posts that come to me while soaking. I recently bought new toothbrushes, changing my normal one from blue to purple, which prompted my son to comment on my "Mace Windufication," after the Jedi Master in the Star Wars films who uses a purple lightsaber. When I started learning Japanese, I wondered how some of the linguistic concepts we use all the time in English would be represented. Japanese is based on kanji for its higher vocabulary functions in much the same way that English is based on Latin and Greek, and complex ideas like "capitalism" or "carbon dioxide" can be rendered in kanji quite logically (資本主義 and 二酸化炭素 in case you were curious). One useful character is bakeru (化ける, to change, to transform), which is read ka in its Chinese form, and this character corresponds to the concept of "-ification" or "-ization" (i.e., a change from one state to another). Some examples of words that make use of this character are kyouka (強化、KYO-ka, strong + change) meaning "strengthen"; oubeika (欧米化, oh-BEI-ka, Europe + America + change), essentially meaning "Westernization"; and the big problem in Japan these days, shoushika (少子化、sho-SHE-ka, few + child + change), or the declining number of children throughout the country. So when my son noted the change in my toothbrush color, the word he used was "Mace Windu-ka." Can you guess how you'd say "otaku-ification" in Japanese?

Before I got into the business of writing about Japan to people all over the world I taught ESL, and I had rather a decent horde of teaching materials accumulated, from workbooks for teaching elementary school age kids to dozens of textbooks and also a game called "English Baseball" where students were asked questions in English and would make a "hit" if they were able to answer correctly. One pre-lesson activity I liked to do was bring my favorite Far Side comics into class and start a discussion around them. As you might imagine, the jokes I thought was hilarious -- "Shocking the anthropological world, a second 'Lucy' is discovered in Olduvai Gorge" (it's Lucy Van Pelt), or "Great moments in evolution" (a bunch of fish have just hit their baseball up onto land and must now evolve legs if they want their ball back) received puzzled looks from my students. Clearly, what Japanese (or Germans, or Koreans) find funny won't necessarily be viewed the same way by Americans, and I suspect Japanese would be more amused by character-based humor that blends unexpected situations for that character. The one Far Side joke that always got a laugh with my Japanese students was "Cat Showers" (a cat in a shower with a giant tongue licking his body).

Interesting foods Japanese eat in the summer, a Japanese gadget that washes your butt for you, and why Japan might need more lawyers

Japan is a country that's definitely in touch with its seasons, and they celebrate each time of year with many different traditional events, from cherry blossom viewing in April to enjoying the turning of the leaves in the Fall. It's summer now, the time of festivals and wearing yukata cotton kimonos and geta wooden shoes while enjoying fireworks, and there are many foods that help people survive the sweltering temperatures. Having a long tradition of eating noodles, many Japanese naturally enjoy cold soba or udon noodles during this season, as well as "angel hair" udon noodles called somen. One of our favorite summer foods is called hiyashi chuka (hee-YA-shee chuu-KAH), essentially a plate of cold ramen noodles in a tangy sauce served with tomatoes, cucumbers and strips of scrambled egg on top. Watermelon is always a treat but it can be such a mess, so I usually reach for Watermelon Bar, a delicious brand of watermelon ice cream with chocolate "seeds" that tastes so good. One of the most famous of all summer foods is not one I'm too fond of: unagi (oo-NAH-gi), or Japanese eel, which is broiled over an open flame and served on rice with teriyaki sauce. It's considered "stamina food" here in Japan, and many restaurants offer the dish to their customers in August to help them beat the heat. Unagi-don (Eel Rice Bowl) actually looks delicious, but I just can't get past the "eel-ness" of it all.

Ever since the coming of the Sony Walkman the Japanese have been known for their gadgets, which is a good thing for all of us, as the world would be less interesting if it weren't for all those fun electronic devices. From massage chairs that take the stress out of your muscles and squeeze your body from several directions at once to cell phones that let you pay for train tickets and convenience store purchases by waving the phone at a sensor, it's always fun to see what new inventions lie over the horizon. One of the most famous of all Japanese gadgets are those toilets which wash your butt when you're done, which are known as "washlets" (wash + toilet, get it?). Based on the European bidet, Japanese washlets were first introduced by ubiquitous toilet maker Toto in 1980, and have grown in popularity ever since. Most of these washing toilets share the same basic features, including a selector for which er, part or the body you want to wash, a warm air dryer, and a control to set the desired temperature of the toilet seat. Some of the more advanced models freshen the air with negatively charged ions, contain sensors that check your blood sugar as you pee, and (great families with boys) raise and lower the seat as needed hydraulically. The other day I found a washlet with a fully functional remote control that allowed you to control the cleaning functions or flush the toilet from a remote location. This seemed useless to me, as the only possible use for a remote controlled toilet would to play practical jokes on people you didn't like, turning the functions on and off at random while they did their business.

I talked recently about the current scandal over missing national pension payments and how having a few thousand more lawyers might help the situation. It may be odd to hear someone wish for more lawyers, but in the case of Japan it might not be a bad idea. Japan is quite different from the U.S., and some services that we take for granted in America are not provided to people who need them because the legal system seems so distant from the average person. In Japan lawyers are quite rare -- I have yet to meet one in my sixteen years of living here, and have no idea where a courthouse might be located in my city. Part of the reason for this is that the test to become a lawyer is about as difficult as the entrance exam for Tokyo University, but the way Japanese society is sewn together is quite different as well. In Japan, for example, no one needs a will because how their estate will be passed on to survivors in the family is governed according to the rules of "common sense" (joshiki), and you do most paperwork filing that might normally require a lawyer for free at your your City Hall. In Japan, lawyers are extremely respected, being among the professions addressed with the honorific word "sensei." Some other professions that receive this polite term are doctors, teachers, politicians, artists and -- I am not kidding -- Certified Public Accountants.

We've got a great announcement for fans of our popular Japanese T-shirts today: by massive customer request, we're making youth sizes of our most popular shirts! Now you can get kids' sizes of our cool Domo-kun (Three Circle and Black Outline) and Totoro (both blue and grey) in standard youth sizes S, M and L, which is great news to the many younger fans of Totoro and Domo-kun who couldn't wear our standard-sized offerings before. Whether you're buying for the Back to School season or looking beyond, our new kids-size T-shirts are great!

About Japan's most famous (only?) charity, all about the word "genki," and my kids re-adjusting to life in Japan

This past weekend saw the broadcast of "24 Hour TV," an annual charity drive broadcast by the Nippon TV network each year. Like the big "Kohaku Red and White Song Battle" held on December 31st it's quite a media event, and all the biggest names in entertainment lend their star power to help raise money from viewers for various good causes. Over the course of the broadcast the hosts put on many events, including a marathon and various other sports-related segments. The theme of this year's show was "An Event That Changed Your Life," and former baseball star Shinjo (who played in the U.S. for three years) went on a "Darts Trip," throwing a dart at a map of Japan then traveling to that prefecture to interview people while the cameras watched. In one segment I caught, Shinjo visited a rural part of Okinawa to interview people about what events had changed their lives. One mango farmer told him it was when he tasted mangos for the first time thirty years ago; he knew people would come to love the exotic fruit, although at the time Japanese were used much blander fare. Considering that they now sell for up to $100 apiece (in special packages, for giving as traditional gifts in the summer), I'm sure he's not regretting his decision to take a chance on growing mangos.

One of the first words learners of Japanese come across is the word genki, so I thought I'd revisit this fun term. The word is quite flexible, and can mean anything from healthy to energetic to "fine thanks, and you?" The first greeting you usually learn in Japanese is often Ogenki desu ka? （お元気ですか？） which corresponds to "How are you?" (although it can be more accurately translated as "Are you fine?"). The reply is Hai, genki desu (Yes, I am fine). Some other situations where the word might be used include to describe a child with lots of energy, running around a room; to describe an elderly person who is still active and healthy; and when trying to cheer someone up, asking them to "show their genki." (In another context, a man becoming genki can refer to the common phenomenon that happens in the morning.) Whenever you learn a foreign language, you're confronted with words that don't quite "match up" with words you use in your native language, such as the two words for "cold" in Japanese (samui and tsumetai), which refer to coldness in the air and something that's cold to the touch, respectively.

The kids are safely back from their long stay in the U.S. They had a lot of fun doing lots of "American kid" things and are now groaning about returning to Japan, with its cramped spaces and harsh August humidity. As usual, it's fun to observe the changes as they get used to Japan again after a month in an English environment. For example, my daughter Rina was trying to talk about a comb she'd bought in the U.S, but her brain temporarily forgot the word for "comb" in Japanese (kushi), so she substituted the English term although her grandparents didn't know what she was talking about. When she's in the U.S. she goes to the local branch of Score! to study her English reading and spelling, and when her grandmother asked her how that went, she found herself unable to discuss the subject in Japanese, and had to switch to English -- the "wiring" for thinking about an English-related subject like spelling in Japanese had not been created in her brain yet. When you think of summer vacation, you probably don't think about doing lots of homework, but that's just what my kids have to do now with their last week before school starts. To keep kids from totally forgetting everything they learned during school, teachers give them 20+ hours of homework from all subjects, and my kids are quite busy getting it all done.

Japanese High school baseball update, things I've learned from teaching ESL, and the next "boom" to hit Japan -- Vinegar Beer?

You never know where the next interesting "boom" will come from in Japan. Maybe it'll be a strange new fashion trend, like the Bob Marley craze a few summers ago when young Japanese thought they should dress in Jamaican colors, or the more recent Brit-Punk fashion trend inspired by the popularity of the manga Nana. (I'm hoping for the return of the heso-dashi summer, when all the cute girls wore half-shirts that showed their belly buttons.) Or maybe it'll be a food-related explosion in popularity, like when everyone was lining up to buy Belgian Waffles, or this summer's boom in mango-flavored foods of every type. With our house being renovated, I've been hitting the local onsen (hot spring public baths) pretty hard, and in one I happened across a poster advertising what might just be the next big thing: a cocktail of beer and delicious vinegar. There were two flavors for you to try, made with apple and grape vinegar, and both looked like they might actually be reasonably tasty, as far as those things go. Vinegar is considered quite healthy in Japan, and most mornings my wife presents me with a glass of diluted "black vinegar" (kurozu) made from unpolished rice, to reduce the acid content in my body, or something. Next to the Vinegar Beer was a poster advertising another new item: Ramune flavored "soft cream" (soft-serve ice cream), with the taste of that famous Japanese marble-in-a-bottle soft drink. Sounds delicious!

It's August, and that means it's time for another report on the High School Baseball Championship going on right now at Koshien (koh-she-en) Stadium near Osaka. High school baseball is really big in Japan, and teams from each of Japan's 47 prefectures try all season long to win the right to go to the championships. To go to Koshien is the dream of every young ball player, and it has a positive effect on the future careers of thousands of young men every year, whether they go on to play professional baseball or not. The high school baseball championships are followed closely on TV and in Japan's many sports-only newspapers (my father-in-law manages to read three of them every day), and fills a similar role as college sports in the U.S. The drama of a Koshien race is captured in manga and anime such as the classic Touch, a comic I used to study Japanese with while at SDSU. Thanks to one of the many bizarre coincendences that seem to happen only in Japan, the city I came to live in just happens to be the birthplace of Touch creator Mitsuru Adachi, and my wife has the same birthday as him -- go figure. This year our prefecture is once again represented at Koshien by Maebashi Commercial High School (abbreviated "Maesho"), Adachi-sensei's old alma mater (and also the school that our own Yasu graduated from). They're doing well, too -- if they win today's game they'll be in the top 8. Go, Maesho!

Before I started J-List, I did what many English-speaking foreigners before me have done, working as a teacher of English as a Second Language (ESL) and imparting my native language to students of all ages. Once thing I've noticed, at least when dealing with junior high and high school age students, is that they view English has having two sections that are only casually related. "English" is an important scholarly study, consisting of grammar, vocabulary and reading comprehension, and it's needed to succeed in school and pass university entrance exams. This English is rather similar to mathematics, and there's only way "correct" answer to any given question, one "right" way of translating a given paragraph. The touchy-feely "English conversation," on the other hand, is optional, and only needed by Japanese who plan to live overseas or do a lot of traveling. Since the Japanese are so precise about their English, they take it for granted that all native speakers know every single English word ever, including complex medical terminology. They're also mistrustful of native English-speaking teachers who can't answer the question "why?" Why does this sentence need a gerund instead of an infinitive verb? Why do you say 'on a ship' when you're actually inside it? Being a teacher in Japan really led me to come to understand my own language on a new level.

Large and small forms of taste-related culture shock, why do the Japanese live so long, and how you can come live in Japan

There are naturally many large and small forms of culture shock a person experiences when they go go live in a foreign country, and I've had my share in Japan. One was getting used to the new tastes that were waiting for me. Right off the bat, Japanese milk tastes...different when you're used to American milk, at least at first. It's not bad or anything, but something about the Japanese cows or how the milk is processed took me time to get used to. Some other familiar products, such as Oreos, also taste slightly different (not as much sugar in them), although humans can adapt to anything. Then there were familiar products that came in "odd" taste variations, like milk flavored bread, salt flavored ramen (which is really chicken flavored), or -- it's really delicious, trust me -- "coffee jelly," coffee-flavored gelatin, excellent on a hot summer's day. Unlike America, where companies tend to think in terms of their next big national product roll-out, Japanese companies are more comfortable releasing short-run products on a more limited scale, which sometimes leads to some really interesting taste experiments, like Cucumber Ice Pepsi. Readers of J-List's snack pages know that you can always find something interesting in the taste department, from sukiyaki-flavored furikake to sprinkle on rice to rose-flavored gum and candy to the delicious Green Tea Butterscotch from Chealsea, we've got lots of fun stuff for you to try.

I noticed that the world's oldest woman passed away at the tender age of 114 the other day, and I wasn't surprised at all to see that she was Japanese. Mrs. Yone Minagawa was born in Fukushima Prefecture in 1893 when Grover Cleveland was in office, and was already in her 50s at the end of World War II -- wow. Thanks to healthy diets, social networks of lifelong friends and a generally competent national medical system, Japanese females are the longest lived people on the planet, with an average life expectancy of 85.8 years. Although it probably didn't get much mention in Michael Moore's "SICKO" documentary -- I've long stopped expecting the government and media in America to look at the various systems at work in Japan -- I think the country's medical system could be studied as a model that obviously works (since people are living a long time). It can best be described as a "blend" of private hospitals, clinics and related companies and a publically-guided insurance system, which imposes a framework that companies must work within. When you go to the doctor or dentist you bring your insurance card, and in general 70% of the costs will be covered. There are trade-offs, of course. Because of the cost caps instituted by the two health insurance systems -- Social Insurance for employees of medium-to-large companies, and Citizen's Insurance for everyone else -- not all types of care are available, so if you want to get the really good ceramic caps on your teeth as opposed to the ugly silver ones, you may need to pay for that yourself. Also, expect to go to the dentist 8 times to fix those two fillings, since they're not allowed to charge you more than a certain amount per day. Since there are more limitations on the Japanese medical system, some companies don't see the same amount of profit as in the U.S., and as a result, there's less investment in technology here (although I've never known of a hospital that needed an MRI scanner and didn't have one).

I receive a lot of questions from people interested in living in Japan someday, so I thought I'd address some of these issues in case it's helpful to anyone. While it certainly is difficult to come to a country as different from the U.S. or Europe as Japan is, it's certainly doable if you are determined. Many foreigners come to Japan on a tourist visa (3 months) and use that time to look for a job. When you find one, you have to leave the country once to process your working visa then re-enter on that visa -- most gaijin travel to nearby South Korea and do some sightseeing while they wait for their paperwork to come through. Alternately, citizens of some lucky nations like Canada, Australia and New Zealand can come on "working holiday" visas instead. Westerners are usually shocked by the difficult system of "key money" you must pay when renting an apartment. Between a security deposit (2 months), a finders-fee (paid to the company that got the apartment for you), first months' rent and "thank you money" (a move-in bonus for your landlord), it can cost $2000-4000 just to move into a small apartment. Of course, any discussion of how to work in Japan is precluded by the fact that to get a working visa at all, you must have a degree from a four-year university. So whenever young people interested in Japan ask me how they can come work in Japan, I invariably advise them to find a good, well-rounded university and get a degree -- do that, and you'll be surprised how easily the rest can fall into place.

Thoughts on e-books and other "revolutions," the worst-run government program in history, and why you don't want to be in a car in Japan now

Imagine what would happen if a quarter of all Americans lived in the Washington D.C. area instead of spread out around the country from sea to shining sea. That's essentially the case in Japan, where 27% of the nation's population lives in the Greater Tokyo Area, including Tokyo, Kawasaki, Yokohama and neighboring cities. When a long holiday like the current Obon break rolls around, everyone naturally tries to get out of Dodge at the same time, which can cause frightful congestion. This morning the snaking traffic jam out of the Tokyo area was 55 km (34 miles) long, as people tried to get back to their inaka (ee-NAH-KAH, home town), or anywhere out of the concrete jungle. One of the most popular destinations for Tokyo-ites is Karuizawa (ka-roo-ee-za-wa), the charming little town in the mountains that was discovered by a Canadian Priest in 1886 as a getaway spot for foreigners and which has enjoyed a special appeal ever since. Unless you like sitting in your car for 12 hours, however, I don't advise going there right now. The rush back into Tokyo Wednesday will be even worse, as hundreds of thousands hurry home so they can get back to work on Thursday.

One smart rule of thumb is that whenever a new product is pushed as "revolutionary," it probably won't be -- true revolutions, like TCP/IP, open email standards and Salad-in-a-Bag sort of sneak in through the back door when no one is looking. On my last flight back from the U.S. I happened to be seated next to a medium-level Sony executive, who seemed to be on a mission to show everyone on the plane his cool Sony e-book reader, which let him flip through pages of "virtual" books. If its e-books you're looking for, they may be here in Japan right now, available on the phones that people are already using. Just point your keitai (cell phone) browser to websites like EZ Book Land or Gokko and you can buy thousands of books from "light novels" aimed at the anime-and-manga crowd to steamy Harlequin Romances (yes, they have those here). There's even a whole category of novels actually written by authors using cell phones, due to a quirk of the syllabically-structured Japanese language that makes it as fast or faster to input text using a 10-key pad than on a computer keyboard. (Using a phone keypad, "arigatou" (ありがとう) would be 1992*44444111, which looks confusing but it's quite easy once you know how hiragana works.) Even major companies like Yahoo Japan are getting into the electronic novel business, adding services top help readers find this week's top-selling titles.

If there was an award for poorest administration of a government program ever, I'd like to nominate the Japanese National Pension System. The equivalent of Social Security in the U.S., the program is designed to guarantee Japanese a minimum income after requirement, but it's got a lot wrong with it. First of all, workers are "required" to make their premium payments, but since there's no mechanism to force employees of smaller companies and the self-employed to do this, millions never bother -- including some well-known politicians, a scandal which brought down a few careers when it came to light in 2004. Then there were the many wasteful projects built with pension money to "foster economic activity," like a government-built resort that no one ever uses called Green Pier. Finally, there are the estimated 50 million payments that were mishandled by the National Pension System during the computerization of the records in the 1980s, which has resulted in a huge number of people losing credit for real money they parted with years ago. The government is trying to fix the problem, but with the old records thrown away, many citizens are reciting that famous Japanese phrase, shikata ga nai (it can't be helped). This is one of those rare times when having more lawyers would really help, since Japan lacks the basic legal framework to force the government to take action and fix things before, say, pensioners start dying of old age. Taxpay- ers have found one effective way to vent their anger at the situation, at the voting box, and the election last month saw the ruling Liberal (not) Democratic (not) Party go from 64 to 37 seats. I still have to check and make sure the 4+ years I paid into the system as a salaryman teacher were counted or not.

View of Mt. Asama, the really big volcano.

My breakfast was less than traditional, being comprised of Miso Soup and Count Chocola that I'd brought back from the States.

Time to head back. We always try to buy somethiing from the old couple who runs this little shop (really, they fill the vending machine out front), since they look like they could use the business.

Always nice to have a "Navi" when taking a road trip.

This is my favorite drink in the world, essentially a carbonated health drink by Coca-Cola that tastes like vitamins, but I like it for some reason anyway.

The end of an era in driving convenience, Japan's Obon Buddhist holidays, and everything you wanted to know about what a kimono is

The end of an era for this particular gaijin has come. In the past, foreigners were permitted to drive in Japan with an International Drivers' License as long as they physically returned home at least once a year to get it renewed. Then a few years ago, the Japanese government started requiring that every resident change over to a Japanese license -- a very reasonable requirement, and I'm going through that process now. No one likes making a trip to their local DMV, but doing driving-related paperwork in a foreign language is a real drag. To make matters worse, I have to take the driving test because the U.S. isn't on the list of "blessed" countries whose residents can change from a foreign license automatically (too many differing standards for driving in the 50 states). Because the foreign population of my prefecture is a hodge-podge of people from around the world, I found myself taking the test alongside gaijin from Brazil, Peru, Vietnam, and a really big guy from Bangladesh. By the time we were done with the drivers' test we were all good friends, babbling to each other in various accents of Japanese about how hard it was while we waited for the results to be announced. Japan is a very rule-oriented country, and there's exactly "one" correct way to do most things, including driving a car -- one correct order of adjusting your seat, mirrors and fastening your seat belt, one correct way to hold your hands on the wheel while you make turns. Predictably, I failed the driving portion of the test this time around -- rats. (This little guy is Traffic Safety Horse, proof that even boring government offices can be "kawaii" in Japan.)

Next week starts Japan's Obon ("oh, bone!") break, which is a three-day Buddhist holiday to remember the souls of one's ancestors. Much of Japan shuts down on August 13, 14 and 15th as people journey to their "jikka" (real home, i.e. their parents' home or wherever their family's Buddhist altar is located) to spend time with family members and pay a visit the family grave, or maybe attend a festival and do the Bon-Odori ("bone odor-ey") traditional dance. Living in Japan for the past 15 years has taught me a lot about what the Japanese are all about spiritually. While I have to admit that I don't know much about Buddhism itself, not being able to tell a Bodhisattva from a Bodhi tree or Amida from Queen Amidala, I have known the Japanese to really care about their ancestors, aka family members who have gone on ahead, to use a less cliched phrase. My wife regularly looks to her dead grandmother for guidance and protection, and every morning my wife or my daughter will burn a stick of incense at the family altar to let the dead known they haven't been forgotten. Just as Christmas has grown into a big part of the culture of the West beyond its original meaning, many of these Buddhist traditions are practiced by all Japanese, even if they may of other religions. The Obon holidays are also a popular time to travel, and the rush of people headed for Narita International Airport officially started this morning. If you live in a place that receives many Japanese visitors like Hawaii, prepare to see a lot more of them over the next few days.

As you might imagine, what we call a kimono in the West has many variations here, such as yukata, a cotton kimono worn in the summer; happi, the short kimonos worn at summer festivals, often marketed to foreigners as "happy" coats; "hakama," a formal kimono that's similar to a tuxedo; or juunihitoe, the 12-layer kimonos worn in the Heian Period 1300 years ago. The word kimono is written with the characters ki (to wear, 着) and mono (thing、物), so it just means "something you wear," and there are many similar words in Japanese, like tabemono (something to eat, e.g. food), nomimono (something to drink, e.g. a beverage), and so on. Only Japanese-style clothes are called with the name kimono; dresses, shirts and other Western imports are always called yofuku, or "Western clothes." There's a Japanese grammatical rule that makes unvoiced sounds (like ki) change to voiced (gi) when they are on the end of a compound word, which can be seen in words like karate-gi or judo-gi, what you wear when doing Japanese martial arts (often just called gi in English, which is a little weird sounding if you must know). One of my favorite flavors of kimono is the jinbei (JIN-bei), essentially a short- sleeved cotton kimono that's equally good for use as Japanese-style pajamas (how I wear mine) as for wearing to your favorite festival or anime convention. J-List stocks several of these cool kimono varieties for our gaijin customers, including a great jinbei we got in stock today.

Here's the world famous gaijin, studying for his test...

Don't ask me why they're trying to make you avoid driving your car off the top of a building. It can't happen that often, even here.

I'm probably breaking some law by showing you the written part of the test. Oo, I'm a rebel.

This is the course we had to memorize. It never changes so it's just a matter of learning to do what they expect, but what a frustrating thing to have to take the actual driving test at my age.

I failed the first attempt, possibly because I went to fast, or maybe it was them trying to bring me down a peg, cocksure American that I was. The Vietnamese girl who was nearly in tears who went before me passed, even though she kept stopping in the middle of the road for no reason. Oh well...

Japan as a "Matrix of Strange English," on the strong-willed (and unattractive?) women of our prefecture, and language error "best hits"

Japan is, of course, the home of funny English. It's everywhere, like a bizarre Matrix of Strangeness that pervades the very air around a foreigner living in the country, despite the inability of Japanese people to perceive it. You can see funny English when you look out your window and there's a big truck with DUCK! printed on the side, or when you go to shave and notice that your shaving cream says "shake a can well," or when you visit the public bath and notice that the air conditioner is called "Clean Poo." You can feel it when you address a letter to a friend who lives in an apartment building called "Maison Cream Soda"... when you go to a coffee shop that advertises "flavorous and delicious communication"... when you crack open a beer and notice that it contains "esteemed quality with fine barley, malt, aroma hop and natural water." Often funny English comes from marketing products to people, like the Paradise Hair Resort I happened across the other day, or the famous Pocari Sweat, designed to elicit the image of light clouds on a hot day (pokkari is a Japanese word that describes floating on air). Sometimes the funny English in question isn't even made up of words, as in the case of a shirt I saw the other day that featured the famous "I (heart) NY" design, with the heart replaced by the GOP Elephant for no reason that we could comprehend. The Japanese are unique in that they generally learn a lot of English grammar and vocabulary -- important for passing college entrance exams -- but since it's such an isolated country, there's no real need for the language in day-to-day life. I guess is what leads to Japanese wanting to display English in so many odd ways.

Women from J-List's home prefecture of Gunma have received a slap in the face from an article in the weekly magazine Shinkan Shincho which asked readers to rank females from Japan's 47 prefectures according to beauty -- and they came in last. Each part of Japan is famous for something, whether it's soba noodles from Nagano or white rice and sake from Niigata or "Akita Bijin," the beautiful girls from frigid Akita Prefecture, whose skin is so white because it's too cold to go outside most of the time there. Gunma is famous for several things too, including yaki-manju, bread-like cake that's coated with sweet miso sauce and cooked on a stick; daruma, those red round little things that bring good luck to your home or business; and really strong winds in the winter called kara-kaze (empty winds). Rather than being renowned for their beauty, Gunma's females are famed for being extremely strong-willed, usually able to make their husbands do what they tell them to. These bossy Japanese females are known as kakaa-denka (kah-kah-ah DEN-kah), and this concept is such a staple of life in Gunma that there is -- I am not kidding -- a shopping street in our city called Kakaa Town where all the strong-willed housewives supposedly do their shopping. There are some theories about how Gunma women got to be so forceful, including the lack of a fishing industry in land-locked Gunma and the early growth of a silkworm cultivation which placed women in the role of primary breadwinner of the house. Or according to another theory, the strong winds caused women have to yell really loud to be heard, which made them lose their feminine characteristics.

Making errors when speaking a foreign language comes with the territory, and smart language learners will do what they can to embrace their own screw-ups as a positive way of moving forward with their language studies. At the very least, it's important to avoid being so scared of making an error that you never open your mouth, which is a problem a lot of Japanese learners of English have. Wanting to avoid linguistic slip-ups, they prefer to pre-load their "brain cache" before speaking rather than just opening their mouth and letting the words fall out naturally. I've made plenty of large and small errors over the years, for example there was the time I confused the word hinan (to evacuate) with hinin (to use a contraceptive) in mixed company, and the standard problems of the word "mango" and a similar term that refers to the female reproductive parts, but everyone can make errors. Before I married my wife, we were planning what photographs we wanted taken at the wedding, and she kept asking us to take pictures of her standing on "the glass." I couldn't understand what she was saying -- did she want a picture of herself standing on a reflective surface while wearing her dress? -- but it turned out she was talking about the grass lawn in front of the chapel in San Diego. Poor Jun, J-List's toy-and-snack buyer, had an embarrassing experience, too, while in Chicago ordering espresso from a Starbucks. The coffee was very bitter, so he shouted niga! (nii-GA), which means bitter in Japanese. All in all, this wasn't the best thing to shout in the middle of a coffee shop in Chicago, considering the potential for misunderstanding. (A more standard word for bitter is nigai, "nii-GA-ee"; niga is a slang form of this word.)

Since J-List is physically located in Japan, we're able to bring many amazing products to fans all over the world, and our revolving monthly magazine subscriptions are among our most popular items. Today we're posting two new "Reserve Subscription" magazines for our otaku brethern, the popular Dengeki Maoh super-thick monthly manga magazine, and Dengeki Hime, a great mag about Japan's oh-so-cute anime characters with just a little bit of "H." Both are loaded with free stuff in each issue, from posters to mousepads and more. As with our other magazines, you can always get them on a month-to-month revolving basis, which means you can quit or switch from one magazine to another at any time, and there's never any obligation. (You can also pre-pay for a year's worth of issues and get one month free.) Why not give Japan's most famous anime, fashion, toy, hobby or men's magazines a try today?

All about Saiou and his horse, update on our summer school trip decision, and enjoying Japan's seasons through bug noises

The Japanese have a saying that they got from the Chinese that I mention from time to time: ningen banji, saiou-ga-uma (nin-gen BAHN-gee, sai-OH ga OO-mah), which literally means "all things in human affairs are like Saiou's horse." Saiou was a guy whose horse ran away one day, and when everyone said what a bad thing that was, he asked "How do you know for sure?" The next day, the horse returned with another one, so it was good luck, right? Then Saiou's son falls off the new horse and breaks his leg, which was a bad thing. But because of his injury, he didn't have to ride off to war the next day and be killed. It just goes to show that you can't tell if something will turn out to be good or bad in the end. If, for example, you're injured in a car accident, it might really have been a good thing, since a more serious accident or worse was avoided -- which can really change how you view events over the course of your life.

This is all a clever segue to talk about the trip my daughter was supposed to take with her fifth grade class this summer, which I mentioned here a few months ago. All kids in the fifth grade take a trip in the summer called Seaside School where they learn about the sea and have fun with their friends (they have it in high school, and it's also a common plot device in anime and dating-sim games). Because my daughter spends most of the summer in the U.S. doing "American kid" things like horseback riding at Girl Scout Camp, she wasn't going to be able to attend Seaside School, and we got some pressure from the school to "get with the group" even if it meant changing our plans for the summer. (The trip was smack dab in the middle of Japan's six-week long summer break, making tweaking our schedule a little difficult.) We debated the issue back and forth and got a lot of useful advice from readers (thanks!), but in the end we decided that we had to choose the U.S. since my little girl gets so little time to practice her English otherwise, and we're especially concerned about keeping her reading up to speed. It turned out to be the best decision we could have made, since the place where the fifth graders were to have gone was Kashiwazaki, Niigata Prefecture, on the Sea of Japan side of the country. Which just happens to be the location of the nuclear power plant that spilled radioactive material during the offshore earthquake two weeks ago, causing Seaside School to be cancelled, nuclear waste one of those things parents aren't too keen on. All in all, we're quite happy with the decision we made, even though it was hard to choose between Japan and the U.S.

For the record, it's hot, hot, hot in Japan right now, with the kind of humidity I think of as "East Coast summer weather" from my days living in Maryland and Virginia. Japan has just about the best air conditioning technology in the world, enabling the J-List staff to stay cool enough for the most part while we work, although this doesn't help us at home, where walls and ceilings are still torn up from the remodeling work we're doing -- no air conditioning, except for one cramped room of our house. One of the most memorable sounds of summer in Japan are cicadas, called semi in Japanese (although I joke that they're so loud, they're "auto" -- sorry), happily singing their semi song while they bask in the heat, which they're doing right outside my window right now -- if you want to hear what they sound like, view the movie on the J-List main page. Japan is a country that really values its four seasons, and a whole class of poems have been composed about enjoying the little differences between this season and that. The Japanese love to celebrate the imagery of each season...cicadas and eating shave ice in the summer, the beautiful colors of the leaves in the autumn, eating piping hot baked sweet potato in the winter, and getting drunk with friends with the cherry blossoms falling around you in the spring. Ah, living in Japan is fun.

Okay, got a few more pics from Comicon to throw at ya before I forget. A shojo manga version of Labyrinth? Great idea!

Maybe it comes from hanging out with the 4chan people too much, but one of my "you know, this is something new" moments for this year are that Americans seem to be less scandalized at the subject on this person's T-shirt. There was a lot more general discussion of "fapping" by both girls and guys, which you wouldn't have seen in the past. Remind me to tell you all about the time I had a deep discussion with a Japanese person drinking next to me about which was better, being with a woman or, er, lightsaber practice with captain solo. It was one of those strange discussions that was nevertheless interesting...

The interesting T-shirts just keep coming, don't they?

These were the Darth Vader helmet art series. I loved this one...

But this had to be the coolest thing in the lineup.

Goth-Loli Bible coming out in English? Interesting.

Challenges Apple's iPhone will face in other language markets, like Japan

When I was in the U.S. I played with Apple's new iPhone in an Apple Store and immediately knew I had to have one. (It's funny how my business trips to the U.S. just happen to coincide with Star Wars movie releases, major U.S. product launches, and so on -- please don't tell my wife.) The iPhone is great, and even in Japan, where its phone functions don't work, it's quite useful as a WiFi device that allows me to do my mail, check websites, and enjoy music and videos. One of the big benefits of Apple's OS X operating system is that there's only one worldwide version, with everything international users need included on the install DVD -- this is a huge improvement over the days when the Japanese version of the latest OS would take a year to show up. (The "everything on one disc" concept is yet another one that Microsoft's Vista stole from OS X, although I don't know if that was noticed by many people.) While the iPhone 1.0 does support many non-English languages, including the ability to display (but not input) Japanese and Chinese as well as all European languages, it seems to me that Apple will have some challenges making the device work as well as it does for English-speakers in the U.S. as it does for users around the world.

I remember a trip I made to a MacWorld Expo in Tokyo back in the 1990s. Apple was working on a Japanese version of the venerable Newton, and asked me if I'd write some kanji characters with the software they were testing. If you've ever thought that the Newton was hard to use with the standard Roman alphabet, it was even more difficult getting it to recognize my handwriting in Japanese, and the device was eventually "Steved" (cancelled, to use the terminology of the day) not too long after. Happily, the iPhone has an on-screen keyboard for you to type on, which works in tandem with an internal dictionary that corrects errors you make while typing, and it learns too, so that it eventually stops trying to tell me that my website is "joist.com." Getting this dictionary just right for users in other countries will be extremely important for Apple, since no one would want their phone suggesting incorrect spellings to them as they type, and even the minor differences in the language that the device supports -- supporting Canadian English as opposed to U.S. English, say -- will be quite important for the iPhone's success overall.

Inputting complex languages like Japanese will be a bit more difficult, and it will call for a "front end" input manager as seen in the built-in Kotoeri for Mac and Japanese IME for Windows. The way it works is, you select Japanese as the current input method, then type a word like "nihongo" (にほんご) and press the space bar. The front end program then guesses what kanji it thinks you want, and you keep typing or choose another character if it guessed wrong. This is usually fairly straightforward, but there are some words that have many possible kanji, like kousei (koh-SEI, in hiragana こうせい) which could mean structure (構成), justice (公正), public health (厚生), or fixed star (恒星), depending on which characters you choose. One issue that might miff would-be iPhone buyers in Japan is, there are several third-party front-end kanji input programs on the market, like EGBridge and ATOK, which offer more accurate guesses about what kanji you're entering. If Apple requires Japanese users to use, say, the default Kotoeri input method, some will pass on the phone for that reason alone. Hopefully fear at not doing well in their second-most important language market will help Apple understand how important opening the iPhone up to developers ("...developers! developers!") will be -- Japanese iPhone users will need to be able to pick a kanji input tool that they're comfortable with.

My thoughts on the iPhone and challenges at using it in Japanese, hitchhiking, and the true "country" music of Japan

When I was in the U.S. I played with Apple's new iPhone in an Apple Store and immediately knew I had to have one. (It's funny how my business trips to the U.S. just happen to coincide with Star Wars movie releases, major U.S. product launches, and so on -- please don't tell my wife.) The iPhone is great, and even in Japan, where its phone functions don't work, it's quite useful as a WiFi device that allows me to do my mail, check websites, and enjoy music and videos. One of the big benefits of Apple's OS X operating system is that there's only one worldwide version, with everything international users need included on the install DVD -- this is a huge improvement over the days when the Japanese version of the latest OS would take a year to show up. While the iPhone does support many non-English languages, including the ability to display (but not input) Japanese and Chinese, it seems to me that Apple will have some challenges making the device work for users around the world.

I remember a trip I made to a MacWorld Expo back in the 1990s. Apple was working on a Japanese version of the venerable Newton, and asked me if I'd write some kanji characters with the software they were testing. If you've ever thought that the Newton was hard to use with the standard Roman alphabet, it was even more difficult getting it to recognize my handwriting in Japanese, and the device was eventually "Steved" (cancelled, to use the terminology of the day) not too long after. Happily, the iPhone has an on-screen keyboard for you to type on, which works in tandem with an internal dictionary that corrects errors you make while typing, and it learns too, so that it eventually stops trying to tell me that my website is "joist.com." Getting this dictionary just right for users in other countries will be extremely important for Apple, since no one would want their phone suggesting incorrect spellings to them as they type. Inputting complex languages like Japanese will be a bit more difficult, and it will call for a "front end" input manager as seen in the built-in Kotoeri for Mac and Japanese IME for Windows. The way it works is, you select Japanese as the current input method, then type a word like "nihongo" and press the space bar. The front end program then guesses what kanji it thinks you want, and you keep typing or choose another character if it guessed wrong. This is usually fairly straightforward, but there are some words that have many possible kanji, like kousei (koh-SEI) which could mean structure (構成), justice (公正), public health (厚生), or fixed star (恒星), depending on which characters you choose. One issue that might miff would-be iPhone buyers in Japan is, there are several front-end kanji input programs on the market, like EGBridge and ATOK, which offer more accurate guesses about what kanji you want to enter. If Apple requires Japanese users to use, say, the default Kotoeri input method, some of them will pass on the phone for that reason alone.

Back when I was single, I did a fair bit of traveling around Japan, including hitchhiking, which wasn't always easy since the Japanese don't have a custom of giving rides to strangers at all (let alone big hairy barbarian gaijin). I had my best success by dressing nicely and putting on a tie then going to the freeway I.C. ("interchange," i.e. the on-ramp) and standing with a clearly written sign featuring where I wanted to go. I also brought some kind of gift for people who gave me a ride, like cigarettes from the U.S., since gift giving really oils those squeaky wheels here. Once I was trapped at a truck stop at midnight in cold part of northern Japan, and a man appeared offering to let me come stay at his house for the night. Normally I wouldn't consider going off with a stranger, but one of the really good things about Japan is how helpful people are to okyakusan (visitors, guests), and the man was just happy to be able to show a foreigner some hospitality. I've always like enka, the sad traditional music of Japan that's roughly equivalent to American country music and which got its start from fishermen trawling the lonely seas. Just as the "soul" of country music is more or less based on Nashville, Tennessee, the eerie sounds of enka eminate from northern Japan, especially chilly Aomori Prefecture, at the top of the main Japanese island. I have fond memories of hitchhiking all around that lonely part of Japan, smelling the salty air of the Straits of Tsugaru, which bridge Honshu and Hokkaido and of which many enka songs are sung. Ah, those days were a lot of fun...

Thoughts on flying to Japan, comparing sports and sexy waitresses, and more oddities of written Japanese

Well, I've completed my return journey, and am safely back in Japan. Whenever people hear I'm flying across the Pacific they usually assume it's a really horrible experience, however I'd say it can actually border on pleasant. With the amount of entertainment choices available to me as a modern traveler, from the new Harry Potter book to my MacBook loaded with games and movies to the shiny new iPhone I couldn't resist buying (I'm very happy for that "prepaid" hack that lets you use the phone without signing up for the two year contract), I was doing just fine. Since there are no connections involved, it's a lot more convenient flying to Japan than the three planes I had to take when traveling to Baltimore, for example.

It's funny how some of the differences between Japan and the U.S. turn out not to be all that different at all. For example, when I first got to Japan it seemed odd to me that sports teams were usually named after companies instead of cities, e.g. the Yomiuri Giants, named for the giant Yomiuri newspaper company, or the Hanshin Tigers, owned by the Hanshin (which means "Kobe and Osaka" in case you were curious) railroad line. But after proper reflection, is this custom really any different from the trend of American stadiums being branded with corporate names, like Qualcomm Stadium and Petco Park in San Diego? Not really. Japan is certainly a country that has a different dynamic at work when it come to sex, and I've met gaijin in Japan who were less than happy about restaurants like the famous Anne Miller's that have built a name for themselves around extremely attractive waitresses dressed in sexy "push-up" waitress uniforms. And yet, this really isn't any different than what you can see at any Hooters or similar places in the U.S. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the core idea for the Anne Miller's uniforms (roughly equivelent to the Playboy Bunny in terms of general cult status here) were directly "inspired" from the classic St. Pauli's Girl from the beer ads, since they look very similar.

I talked last time about words like meganekko (眼鏡っ子）, a word which means "girls with glasses" and which is pronounced "meh-ga-neh-KKO," with a short pause where the double "k" goes. When properly written in hiragana, the "basic" writing system of Japanese, this short pause is called a "small tsu," essentially the kana character read "tsu" written at half size (i.e., っ as opposed to つ). Linguistically it's called a glottal stop, and while many languages have them, it's odd to find a language that has a written character for the sound. Usually expressed in the Roman alphabet with double consonants, some words that have this brief pause include gakkou (gah-[small pause]-KOH, school), nattou(nah-[small pause]-TOH, fermented soybeans) and matcha (mat-[small pause]-CHA, green tea). For anyone interested in learning to read Japanese, one reason I recommend textbooks or flashcards that only feature hiragana, katakana and kanji as opposed to romanized Japanese is, forcing yourself to learn the actual characters that the Japanese use not only helps you learn to read better, it also helps your Japanese pronunciation, since the rules of English (like silent 'e' and all that) will only trip you up when trying to pronounce words correctly.

150,000 fans later, learning about Japan through the kanji for "child," and comparing movies between Japan and the U.S.

Well, one weekend and a staggering 150,000 people later, the 2007 San Diego Comic-Con is past. It was a wild show, and we handed out an estimated 12,000 J-List tissues to people who came by to say hi. If you were one of them, thank you! Now I'm headed back to Japan, and it will certainly be good to be home, although our "reform" (remodeling) work is still proceeding, which means the house is likely to be a bit torn up. I'm leaving the kids behind to get their annual concentrated dose of English, as they attend various summer camps -- Girl Scout and Skating Camp for my daughter, Chess Camp and a fun camp where they explore various parts of San Diego for my son. They'll probably come back speaking better English than they speak Japanese again this year...

It was a real rush, having so much going on during the convention. I was extra-busy because in the evenings I was trying to see all the great movies playing in theatres here in the U.S. with my kids before it was time for me to jaunt back to Japan. We went to late showings of Harry Potter on Friday and the Simpsons Movie on Saturday, and both were great. As usual, I can't go out the door without seeing something to compare between Japan and the U.S., and the trips to the theatre were no different. My kids were surprised to see that, in both films, the audience was very active, laughing at jokes and applauding at every turn, barely able to sit still. Compared to the silent, passive way that Japanese audiences take in movies, it was like a night at the Rocky Horror Picture Show. They were also amazed that there'd be anyone else in the theatre past 7 pm. In Japan, movies are usually watched in the afternoons, and almost no one goes to the movie theatre late at night.

Everyone remembers firsts, like that first time on a bicycle, or the first time you kissed a girl or boy. I remember the first kanji character I became aware of from trying to puzzle out written Japanese. The character was ko (子）which means "child" (an alternate reading is shi), and it's most commonly found in names of Japanese girls, like Keiko, Ayako or Sachiko. It's quite a flexible word, being found in scientific words like denshi (電子, child of electricity, i.e. an electron), or genshi (原子, child of origin, or an atom). Most "baby" names of animals can be made by putting ko in front of the name, like koinu (koh-EE-noo) for puppy, and if you're an astute fan of the classic anime series Macross, you might have noticed that the Zentraedi alien Miriya has a baby they call Komiriya -- a great little joke. there. The "ko" word is often used to delineate a group of people, for example Edokko (江戸っ子, eh-doh-KKO, with a small pause at the double consonant), a label worn proudly by families who have lived in the Tokyo area since the days when it was named Edo, or kagikko (key child, 鍵っ子), the Japanese term for latchkey kid. My wife was a misekko (店っ子) or "shop child," a child whose parents ran a shop and were thus too busy to play with her or take her places, which is why she watches so much television, she tells me. You can see the kko ending in the labels of many otaku-related concepts, like meganekko (meh-gah-neh-KKO, again with the pause), meaning cute girls with glasses, or burikko (boo-REE-kko), the annoyingly cute way that Japanese girls act like helpless children as a way of charming men into doing their bidding.

It's time for a con! Amazingly, I worked three major anime cons this month, which were AX, Otakon and Comicon in San Diego. I am officially tired and would like to rest now.

Catbus, check. Anbu masks, check. Setup was terribly delayed on Wednesday, and we were feeling very rushed on premier night. We'll do better next time.

Roses are #FF0000, Violets are #0000FF, All my Base are Belong to You. Do you get that? If so, you're really 1337!

If you haven't been to Comicon yet, you haven't been to a really huge convention. Basically, they have everything imaginable there, from comics to Star Wars to anime to Asian film and even oddly cool stuff like the covers of romance novels from decades past.

On Thursday I took the kids to see a live performance of Star Wars music. It was pretty fun, especially the Yoda Ventriloquist Dummy guy.

Cool "Battle Damaged" Storm Trooper here.

Costumers were everywhere, although in truth, the cosplay is nothing compared to Anime Expo, mainly because of the high number of "normals" at this show.

Domo, Domo-kun. More updates and pics when I get back to Japan-land...