Money in Japan

You've been in Japan too long when, on a visit home, it takes you three tries to write a check. It's funny but true. Japan is a very cash-based society, and there are no such things as using personal checks to pay for goods. On payday, employees at many Japanese companies in Japan get a fat envelope of 10,000 yen notes as their monthly salary, which would be unthinkable in the U.S. A couple of years ago we bought some land in order to expand the J-List facilities, and I remember going to the owner's house to pay them for the land in cash, which was certainly an interesting experience. As a result of this lack of personal checks, foreigners who live in Japan for a long time completely forget how to write them and have to re-learn it every time they go home. When you need to pay for something in Japan, you usually do a direct transfer to their bank account, called furikomi in Japanese. It's inconvenient and the bank fees are high (around $6 to send $200 for some hard drives I bought recently), but that's the system that's used most commonly in Japan.

Do the Japanese Say "I Love You"?

Do the Japanese say "I love you"? It's an interesting question that touches on cultural issues as well as linguistic. There are several ways to express the concept of love in Japanese, with the most casual being suki desu ("I like you") or dai-suki desu ("I 'big-like' you"), both of which imply romantic love when used with a person as the object; or the phrase ai shiteru, which specifically means "I love you." As a general rule, Japanese couples verbally express love for each other a lot less than is done in the West. Part of this is just the culture here -- strong feelings like love are not displayed openly since (I've been told) saying a thing over and over again can rob it of its real meaning. Instead, Japanese couples in love rely on a concept baffling to foreigners called mugon ryokai, or "wordless communication," a kind of telepathic text-messaging that enables an idea to be perfectly understood by both parties even though it's never stated overtly. The concept of love can seem quite abstract in Japanese, and there are multiple Japanese words for the term. The word koi usually describes romantic love, while ai is a higher kind of love that is used for family or anyone who's very dear to you, or the steady, slow-burning love of marriage. These two words are combined into a compound word to make a general word for love that marries both sides, which is ren'ai.

On Being Unique: Japan's First Black Enka Singer

If you're thinking of breaking into Japan's tarento (talent) world, here's a bit of advice: you gotta be original. Japan's entertainment world is filled with singers, comedians and other famous people who often occupy mind-share with fans based on their originality, like the interesting twist that small-bodied cute girl Gal Sone brings to the TV screen as she shoves twelve plates of sushi down her throat. The foreigners who have found fame in Japan also depend on being unique, such as Bobby from Nigeria, who can really spice up a variety show about cooking, or the most famous Japanese-bilingual Italian in Japan, Girolamo Panzetta, who happens to be the only Japanese-bilingual Italian in Japan. The general rule is, if there's already a foreigner who can make jokes in the dialect of rural Yamagata prefecture, there's no need for a second one, so it's important to have a Unique Selling Proposition if you want to make it big. Now the world of enka, the eerily beautiful traditional music of Japan, is getting an injection of soul with the debut of the first black enka singer this week. His name is JERO, short for Jerome, and the quarter-Japanese, three-quarter African American singer has been nicknamed Kurobune by the Japanese press, after Admiral Perry's Black Ships. He grew up listening to his Japanese grandmother's enka records, and he came to Japan after graduating from the University of Pittsburgh with the specific goal of becoming a singer in mind. His first single is Umiyuki, a song that captures the loneliness of the Sea of Japan in the winter, and it's available on the Japan iTunes Store along with lots of other great Japanese songs from every genre.

Who Are the Role Models of Japanese Women?

It's interesting to watch the evolution of the various female role models in Japan over the years. Everyone has actors, singers, writers or others that they look up to for one reason or another, and in Japan these famous faces provide inspiration to millions of females throughout the country. Often the current female role models can be tracked by watching how many TV commercials they're in, and you can tell right away that a lot of young Japanese girls really love model and actress Yuri Ebihara (Ebi-chan), who always looks genki in her commercials. Angelina Aki is another popular role model who is half-Japanese and half-American and who grew up in rural Japan. She's made a great career for herself by letting her American side show while she sings, which of course makes her seem quite exotic to fans. Then there's the enigmatic Ataru Nakamura, a popular singer who was born male but suffered from Gender Identity Disorder, which drove her to finally receive reassignment surgery and become female. The unique story of Ataru's decision coupled with her one-of-a-kind singing voice has won her many fans throughout Japan.

 

On the Alien Registration Card for Gaijin

All registered foreigners living in Japan carry one of these, a Gaikokijin Toroku Shomeisho, aka the Alien Registration Card, which you get from the City Office in your local town when you first come to Japan to live. It lists the name, current address, employment status and photograph of the person in question, and generally provides whatever information authorities might need access to. It's quite an analog system, actually -- when information needs to be updated, the changes are hand-written on the back of the card by a City Office employee, along with a special stamp that proves that an authorized official has made the change. Theoretically, any policeman can ask to see the registration card of any foreigner, but I've never been asked to show mine and have always found Japanese policemen to be very courteous and nice.

Japan as a Communist Country?

I've often wondered at how Japan was able to become such a successful Communist country despite being free-market at the same time. Although it's a surprising statement, there are quite a few areas in which Japan seems to have the trappings of a Soviet-style state, right down to those drab public university buildings which always seem to make me think of Chernobyl. Japan's economy has always been famous for government intervention, such as the old MITI, a government ministry that set industrial policy for the nation during the postwar decades and guided the decisions of Japan's corporations. Many markets still seem to operate in this "command economy" model, for example all rice and wheat is bought and sold exclusively by the government to keep prices stable. Japan has a health care system that's pretty good, covering 70% of health costs to everyone who doesn't have existing insurance and forcing health care costs to grow slowly by nature of the caps its puts on various services. Yet despite this, taxes here are generally in line with the U.S. rather than the higher rates paid in Europe. Instead of the Soviet Union or China, it's Japan that ended up with the "classless" society, at least judging from the 80+% of people who consider themselves to be "middle class" (despite the BMW 5-series sedan sitting in the driveway). It's as if Japan was somehow able to take the best parts from both Capitalism and Communism for itself.

Japanese Word Abbreviations

The other day I was taking my 11 year old daughter out to lunch when she said to me, "Oh, can we go by Toys R Us? I'm looking for a new 'Dizu-puri' toy." Being a parent, I fully expect to not understand what my kids are talking about, but I figured I had a few years to go yet. Seeing my confusion, she told me that "Dizu-puri" was an abbreviation for "Disney Princess," and suddenly things were much clearer to me. Just as we come up with lots of acronyms in English, the Japanese make words easier to work with by abbreviating them, often by taking the first two katakana sounds of each word ("Famicom" and "Pokemon" are examples of this). This tendency to abbreviate words seems to be especially common among fans of video games and anime, and there are many titles that have been shortened by fans, for example the popular game and anime The Eternity that you Wish For is nearly always shortened to Kimi-Nozo, and Gainax's clunky This Ugly But Beautiful World is much easier to say as Kono-Mini.

On the Lack of Home-Grown National Organizations in Japan

Last time I talked about how Japan functioned pretty well as a modern democracy, despite some irksome problems. One area that's always struck me as odd is the lack of large-scale domestic organizations in Japan. Groups like Greenpeace, AARP, the NRA or the ACLU work to further the various political or social goals they've set for themselves, but when I try to find a similar large-scale national organization that tries to increase the visibility of a particular cause in Japan, I frankly come up short. I can only think of a few national-level groups, such as Japan Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, the Japan Lions Club, or the Japan Rotary Association, and all of them are imported from other countries. It seems counter-intuitive to say that the group-oriented Japanese aren't good at making groups, but it does seem that "organic" groups conceived in Japan tend to not grow beyond a certain size. I'm not sure why this is, although the general "top-down" nature of ideas in Japan, with change always emanating out of Tokyo rather than from the outside in, probably plays a big role.

History lesson: Japan's First English Teacher

It's interesting, looking at Japan through some of the "firsts" in its history. Like John Kendrick, the ship's captain who participated in the Boston Tea Party and fought in the Revolutionary War then went on to be an explorer, eventually becoming the first American to visit Japan. Or Horace Wilson, a teacher at the predecessor of Tokyo University, who thought it'd be fun to teach his students to play baseball back in 1873, which was the beginning of the long history of the sport here. The first English teacher in Japan, if you're curious, was a half-Chinook, half-Scottish man with the unlikely name of Ranald MacDonald. After hearing of the plight of three fishermen who washed ashore in Washington State but were unable to return to Japan because of their country's sakoku (closed country) policy, he started to feel a strange kinship with the Japanese people, which is interesting since we now know that American Indian and Japanese are indeed connected by blood. He decided to go to Japan, despite the fact that it was death for foreigners to enter the country, and booked passage on a whaling vessel that would take him close. Pretending to be a survivor from a shipwreck, he was rescued by the aboriginal Ainu and handed over to the local Samurai lord, who shipped him off to Nagasaki. The Japanese had a long relationship with Dutch traders, but none of them could speak English, despite the recent rise in power of England and the United States, so the officials got the idea of having MacDonald teach English to a class of fourteen students. The studies paid off, and when Admiral Perry showed up in 1853, students trained by MacDonald were able to communicate. Today there's a commemorative statue in Nagasaki thanking Mr. MacDonald for his contribution, and if I know Japan, I'm pretty sure they sell little cakes or rice crackers with his face on them, too.

Japan as a Functional Western Democracy

On the whole, Japan is pretty functional as a Western-style democracy. Politicians make laws which are executed by the nation's army of komuin, public employees who function as a British-style bureaucracy that provides the actual "body" of the government. There is corruption, of course, but it's limited to comparatively rare cases involving high-ranking politicians, never on an individual level, and it's taken for granted that every person you interact with during the course of the day will be honest. This is quite different from countries like India, where (I'm told) the speed that the phone company installs your phone line is proportional to the size of the bribe you paid the clerk. Still, not everything is perfect in Japan. Although the number of (largely wasteful) public works projects was reduced significantly during the era of Prime Minister Koizumi, Japan still spends $71 billion a year on roads, bridges, dams, etc. Another problem are the constant streams of hakomono, essentially "pork barrel project in a box," conceived by politicians so their friends who own construction companies can make money. A textbook example of this was the plan by our city's mayor (who lives next door to us, by a really strange coincidence) to build a second Ferris Wheel in our city, despite the fact that we already have a perfect good one. Happily, that wasteful project got national media attention and the project was withdrawn

How Japan has Changed for Foreigners

Japan has really changed for the better over the past decade and a half in terms of how easy it is for a gaijin to live here. When I arrived in Heisei 3, the third year of the reign of Emperor Akihito (i.e. 1991), it was quite difficult to find a bit of "home" -- when I'd get homesick, I'd go and eat Egg McMuffins at McDonald's, just about the only thing that was exactly the same as it was back in the States. Slowly, Japan opened up and let just about any product in, and now consumers have a lot more choice, from Doritos to Subway sandwich shops to AM/PM Mini Marts. The Internet has obviously helped improve the lives of foreigners living here, allowing expats like me to do things they could never do before, like buy books from Amazon or log into a SlingBox and catch the Superbowl live. There's been one setback for Americans living outside their home country, however: last year the United States Post Office stopped offering surface mail service for packages going out of the U.S., meaning that my mother can't throw some Thanksgiving goodies into a seamail box and send them to me. It's been quite an inconvenience -- now she has to send the items by airmail or else call shipping companies like Yamato for container shipping quotes. (Note that seamail shipping into the U.S. is still going strong, and you can choose it as an option when purchasing from J-List as long as you're not in a hurry for the items.)

Being Sign in Japan, and How to Make Tamago-Zake

It's funny how being sick makes you revert to what you know best. I've got the flu that's been going around the J-List office, so yesterday I headed home early, took some of the various U.S. cold medicines I stock, and laid down to rest. For dinner I wanted noting other than good old Campbell's Chicken Noodle Soup, which we'd brought back with us from our last trip. (The Japanese don't know what Chicken Noodle Soup is, the only soups they eat here being miso and corn potage.) When Japanese get sick, they naturally turn to their own cultural remedies. Supposedly, it's common to broil a leek (which they insist on calling a "long onion") until its soft, folding it inside a tenugui (a traditional hand towel), then they wrap that around their neck and go to bed. Then there's shoga-yu, which is hot water with grated fresh ginger in it and a little honey to improve the taste. The most famous folk remedy is probably tamago-zake, or egg and sake. To prepare it, put one cup of sake in a pan with a beaten egg, and heat it until just before boiling. Stir in some sugar if you like, the drink it back, and you'll be feeling better in no time. Or so they tell me anyway.

Valentine's Day in Japan 2008

Tomorrow is Valentine's Day, and all throughout Japan men are looking forward to receiving the gift of chocolate from females around them, in keeping with the local custom of women giving chocolate to men. There are two kinds of chocolate a man can receive, the most common being giri choco or "obligation chocolate," which females might give to males they work with or to teachers or male relatives because they feel it's expected of them. A lot of this is the result of good marketing, since virtually every convenience store in the country is decked out with decorations reminding shoppers that February 14th is around the corner. The best kind of chocolate is honmei choco, "true heart chocolate" that's given to a loved one, and all across Japan men will be looking forward to eating hand-made chocolates, cakes or other treats from our wives, daughters or girlfriends who want to show their love and appreciation.

Incidentally, since there's giri choco I thought I'd be cute and ask if they made ninjo choco as well. You've never seen such anime-like expressions of confusion on the J-List staff...

Tricks You Can Do with a Lemon and Chopsticks

The Japanese, of course, use chopsticks at almost every meal, whether they're eating rice, noodles, fish or meat. (Certain foods like curry rice or steak, of course, call for Western cutlery). Chopsticks are very easy to use: you just hold one stick between your middle finger and thumb, then hold the second with your forefinger and thumb so that you can create a "scissor" action that allows you to pick up food. With practice, it's very easy to pluck the last grain of rice from the bottom of your bowl when eating. The use of chopsticks is taught to children at around the age of three, and it's common for parents to want to make sure their kids learn to use them properly before they start preschool, making chopstick use one of the first forms of pressure children are subjected to in Japanese society. In Japan there's exactly "one" correct way to do things, a concept that extends to the holding of chopsticks as well, and it's common for conversations over beers at an izakaya restaurant to turn to how strangely one of the people at the table is holding their chopsticks. To me, the ultimate test of how good you are at using chopsticks is being able to wring the juice from a slice of lemon without getting any on your hands. Just slide the chopsticks into either end of the lemon slice and twist in opposite directions, extracting the lemon juice. Incidentally, J-List stocks many kinds of chopsticks from Japan, including ones with rough patches at the ends (to make them easier to eat with), and we even have a great line of "training chopsticks" for beginners.

All About Factories and Other Cool Things

You never know what will become the next interesting mini-boom in a place like Japan. Over the past few years, many Japanese have decided that the coolest thing is...factories? Amazingly, the strange industrial beauty of factories and other dark places like electric power plants does have a certain charm, and there have been a string of popular photobooks dedicated to capturing these eerie places. There's a variety show on TV that features objects being made in factories while famous TV personalities try to guess what's being manufactured, writing their answers on digital screens that are later revealed so the audience can laugh at all the wrong answers. It's quite fascinating to watch nylon fibers being spun and coated in plastic that turns out to be a fire house, or watch as long rods of steel are fed into a machine which clips pieces off and stamps them into pachinko balls. I was also fascinated to see how Mitsubishi makes pencils -- I couldn't take my eyes off the bizarre stream of wood as it was shaped and wrapped around the graphite leads.

Signs that Japan is Getting Older

Japan is getting older, and it's interesting to see the way society evolves and changes. Even during the 16 years I've been in Japan, I've noticed quite a change in way products are marketed, with a lot of companies embracing the coming market for services for the elderly. It seems every third TV commercial on daytime television is for companies selling products to older Japanese, including ways to remodel your house and make it "barrier free," a term the Japanese have coined meaning a living space that's free of stairs and other obstacles that make it hard for mobility-challenged people to live. Diapers for adults are also advertised openly on TV, as are hair-loss products aimed not just at men, but women. Insurance companies like Zurich and AFLAC have found a profitable business in Japan selling supplemental insurance to elderly Japanese who worry about being hospitalized and not having enough insurance to cover the costs. Then there's the I-Pot service that home electronics maker Zojirushi operates, which is essentially an electric pot for boiling water that's linked wirelessly to the Internet, which can be configured to send you an email every time your elderly mother makes a pot of green tea, to reassure you that she's okay. Aww, that's nice.

One Way of Understanding Japan's Culture: Kata (Form)

One way of approaching an understanding of Japan is through the word kata, which means "form" and describes the many aspects of life in Japan that follow a specific, pre-determined structure which society at large has agreed on ahead of time. Without a doubt, the Japanese are a people who like to follow fixed forms in many aspects of their lives, and it can be amazing how naturally people fall in step in these situations. I was reminded of this a week ago when the brass band that my son performs in at his school participated in a recital along with ten other elementary schools, an event that required everyone to be completely in sync with each other. First, there is a "greeting" speech by the chairman of the organization that put on the event, followed by comments from other high-ranking members. Then the performances came, perfectly executed by each school's band, as the audience clapped. Finally, the nice lady who was most responsible for making the whole recital come together received the largest bouquet of flowers I've seen in my life from her students, which seemed spontaneous but was also part of the overall form of the event. You see this tendency to closely adhere to pre-approved forms in many different settings, from weddings and funerals to the way the average Japanese person interacts with teachers, doctors and anyone else they want to show respect to. Incidentally, Nintendo sells a trivia game for the DS platform here in Japan to help players learn the "common sense" associated with these events and avoid embarrassment -- that's pretty smart.

(You can see my son way in the back with his Bass Clarinet that's as big as he us)

Reflections on Beef Bowl and Japanese Culture

Over the weekend I took my son out for a bowl of gyudon, steamed beef over rice, the most popular form of fast food in Japan. The restaurant was crowded, so I added my name to the list, writing "Peter" in the katakana writing system that's generally used for foreign names and loan words, and sat down to wait. "Everyone else wrote their last name," my son observed. "Why did you write your first name?" This was an interesting question, and I didn't have an answer for him right away. Ostensibly, names in Japan are written in family name, given name order, so someone named Taro Yamada in English would be Yamada Taro in Japanese. But by unwritten rule, Westerners nearly always continue to use their name in the same order as they do back home. When I was a teacher, I was universally known as "Peter-sensei" by my students, never "Payne-sensei" as you'd expect. I'm pretty sure this is done unconsciously -- the Japanese staff at J-List, who are used to me asking them difficult questions when I'm posting an update, all said they'd never noticed this phenomenon -- and probably because English teachers are supposed to be as "fun" as possible. Having my students use my first name certainly did seem to bring them a little closer to me, so it was never a problem. While Japanese never use English name order for themselves while in Japan, it's not uncommon for TV "talents" (comedians, actors etc.) to choose stage names that sound more like English. When the Los Angeles-born son of legendary martial arts film star Sho Kosugi started his own career on TV here, he debuted using the name of "Kane Kosugi" (in English word order) which underscored his American-ness and the fact that he could speak English fluently, and added a bit of spice to his appeal with fans.

Site Improvement Announcement

We're happy to announce some new features on the site. In the upper left hand corner of the J-List and JBOX.com websites you can see the new Account button which takes you do a series of screens that lets update any aspect of your account information, including changing your password or email address. You can review your order history over the past six months, too, a feature that we've wanted to bring you for a long time. In addition, we're launching a new service that let you know what the current status of your order right in the order history screen. For example, when our staff process your order and starts the packing process, the status will be reflected on the order history for that order, and when, say, a shipping label is printed, that will be posted too. The system is still "beta" but we think it will provide a lot of useful feedback for you, making it easy to see what the current state of your order is. Enjoy the new features, and as always, your feedback is very welcome!

Fun with Japanese Numbers

"You've been in Japan too long when you're speaking English with your gaijin friends, but all references to money are in Japanese." This is a funny phenomenon, but true: even when speaking English, foreigners living in Japan will tend to use Japanese for numbers and yen money amounts. The reason is that the Sino-Japanese numeric system, which came from China, is clunky when converting to the Arabic numeric system. The number system revolves around the unit 10,000 (man, pronounced mahn), rather than 1,000; thus, the number 10,000 is 1 man (ichi mahn、一万), 20,000 yen is 2 man (ni mahn、二万), 100,000 is 10 man (juu mahn、十万) and so on. The conversion from one numeric system to the other is just frustrating enough that most foreigners will be happy to leave their numbers in Japanese, if the person they're talking with understands the words. If you think it's difficult learning to think in units of 10,000, you should try doing math with the kanji-based numbers that come after man, which are oku (億、equal to 100 million), cho (兆、1 trillion) and kei (10 quadrillion, which is so high that I never bothered to learn the kanji for it).