Gunma Red String Project: a "Marriage Encouragement Initiative."

The Japanese government continues to wrestle with the country's falling birthrate, among the lowest in the industrialized world, and one area they're trying to focus on is the trend of people waiting longer to get married and start having children. Recently 52 single men and women gathered for a singles' party that was put on by our prefectural government as part of its "mariage encouragement initiative" that brings people together so they can meet and socialize. The program is called the Gunma Red String Project, evoking the image of the "red string of destiny," a Japanese belief that two people who are destined to fall in love are tied together with an invisible red string that connects their pinkies. The goal is simple: to help salarymen and women who are too busy to engage in normal dating to get out and meet people they might be compatible with, and hopefully help them fall in love. Since the Japanese already have a tradition of omiai, often thought of as "arranged marriage" but really more like a formal meeting between two single people to see if they think they'd be compatible, the idea of a party organized for singles to meet each other was probably less strange in practice than it seems at first. Let's hope Cupid Gunma-chan finds some targets!

Our prefectural mascot Gunma-chan is engaging in some match-making.

Filial Piety and the Japanese

The other day I was listening to the audio book of Children of Men and I heard a word I'd known of for a long time but had never encountered in my native language. The word was "filial piety," meaning the love and restpect you should show to your mother and father, and the only reason I know the word at all is because its Japanese version, oya koko (oh-ya koh-koh), comes up quite often in daily life here. While most of the James Clavell-derived images of Japanese people are completely false -- I have yet to meet anyone who was ready to commit ritual disembowelment to defend the honor of their ancestors -- one area where the classic image of nihonjin is dead on is their custom of showing special respect for their parents, both while they're alive and after they've gone on. This phenomenon is complex and takes many forms, from a son who studies extra hard so he can get into one of the cheaper national universities to save his parents money to children who alter their own lives because of the needs of their parents. For example, my mother-in-law spent some years in Tokyo in her younger days, and there was a special someone she wanted to marry, but when her parents called her back to Gunma to take over the family liquor store, she had to leave Tokyo forever. My wife, too, would have been more than happy to live in the U.S., but since she's an only child and needed to take over the family home she returned, which was good for me since I was waiting for her. So go give your mom and dad a call and show them some filial piety!

The ultimate expression of filial piety, carrying your aged mother up the stairs to bed.

All About Japanese Health Masks

I've managed to catch the cold that's been going around the J-List office, so I've got one of those Japanese health masks on right now. I remember my first few days after arriving in Japan, wowing at everything from the vending machines that were less than a few inches in depth to allow them to be placed along narrow streets to highly urbanized areas which nevertheless had rice paddies in the middle of them. Every time I'd head out to explore my city, I'd encounter a person wearing what appeared to me to be a surgical mask, as if they'd just ducked out of the operating room to get some air. These masks are worn by anyone experiencing cold or hayfever symptoms, done to avoid infecting others with your germs and to also to give them a visible warning that you're sick and they might want to keep their distance. In a country where one of the most important virtues is gambaru -- that is, do your best, give your all, work hard, always show your effort -- the image of an employee working hard at his or her desk with a gauze mask on, perhaps enduring a slight fever, is in some ways a classic cultural image.

You see many people wearing gauze masks in Japan.

Desserts in Japan -- Coffee Jelly, anyone?

Desserts in Japan can be a little different from what you might find back home. One popular dish in Japan is coffee jelly, coffee flavored gelatin that's really good with whipped cream on top -- Starbucks even sells a Coffee Jelly Frappe in the summer which I love. Another popular dessert in Japan is purin, egg custard flan pudding with caramel sauce on top which was unknown to me before I got here. Nata de Coco is a well-known dessert in the Philippines with firm, chewy squares made from coconuts, and it's popular in Japan -- it's really good in yogurt. Cake is big here too, and most cake shops are small, highly professional outfits who bake fabulous delicacies and sell them for $5 per piece (you almost never buy a whole cake in Japan, it'd be too expensive). Finally, there are many kinds of ice cream in Japan, from matcha (green tea) and azuki (sweet Japanese beans) to variations on Italian gelatin and "soft cream" (what soft-serve ice cream is called here), although my favorite is vanilla with a little matcha powder sprinkled on top.

Beautiful Japanese Dolls

As a person from a relatively young nation, at least compared to Japan's long history, I'm often floored by how old some of the traditions here are. March 3 is a special day for families with girl children, called Hina Matsuri or Doll's Festival, which seems tailor-made to be fascinating to Japan-obsessed gaijin. A few weeks before, families will set up an extensive arrangement of beautiful dolls called hina ningyo, which are meant to represent the Japanese Emperor, his wife and the imperial court. On March 3rd, the family will have a special dinner, eating colorful rice crackers called hina-arare (yes, Dr. Slump fans, that's where Arale-chan's name comes from) and one of my all-time favorite foods, chirashi-zushi, essentially a "tossed salad" of fish mixed with sushi rice. It's important to take the dolls down right away, it's said, or your daughters will get married late in life. Amazingly, the custom of families celebrating their daughters with beautiful dolls dates back to the Heian Period (795-1185), which is six times longer than my hometown of San Diego has existed as a city. Note that J-List has some interesting Hina Matsuri items on the site -- click to view!

Beautiful Hina Ningyo dolls on display.

Interesting Japanese Culture in Anime

Being an anime fan means more than just enjoying pretty moe [mo-EH] girls and watching robots battle each other: it's a journey of discovery in which you often find yourself grappling with cultural concepts that go well beyond what your Japanese dictionary tells you. Like the idea of senpai and kohai, senior and junior members in a school or organization, labels which carry nuances of responsibility and respect that aren't easily translated into English. Another potentially difficult concept is osana-najimi (oh-sah-nah nah-jii-mee), or childhood friend, which describes a special kind of close friendship between people who grew up together, very common in anime, manga and games. Yet another word that has a larger cultural footprint to it than it appears at first is tenkosei, meaning a student who has transferred from another school in the middle of the school year. Life in Japan is a lot more stable than it was for me in the States, and while I thought nothing of changing schools 5-6 times between the first and eighth grades, this would be quite rare here. Imagine moving to a new city and attending a school filled with people who have known each other all their lives, and you're the only one who's different -- it might make fitting in quite difficult. The drama of this kind of human interaction is apparently interesting to anime creators, and there are plenty of tenkosei characters around, such as Koizumi, the "mysterious transfer student" that Haruhi is so happy to have found in The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya.

Our game YUME MIRU KUSURI has an arc where you must save transfer student Aeka from being teased by her classmates.

A Proud Time for a Parent in Japan

It's a proud time for J-List's Yasu, the guy in charge of stocking cool artbooks and Japanese study items on the site: the oldest of his three daughters is starting first grade this April. He recently took her to a furniture store and had her choose a study desk so she can get into the proper habit of studying for several hours a day, since education is taken so seriously here. The desks themselves are well designed, made of higher quality wood than the desk I have at J-List, with many features like built-in lights for reading and many small drawers for kids to organize their study materials in. Another important choice for a new first-grader is what kind of school backpack to buy. School backpacks are called randoseru, from the Dutch word ranzel, and they're extremely well made hard leather backpacks designed to hold everything the student needs over six years of elementary school. What's amazing to me is how little this ceremony of putting one's child on the road to being an industrious student changes from year to year, and when we bought the desks and backpacks for our own kids it was exactly the same as when my wife had entered the first grade so many decades before that.

It's a rite of passage to buy a study desk and school backpack for your child in Japan.

Laughing at my Students

All things considered, laughter only belongs in a foreign language classroom if it helps build confidence in language skills, and it's really not a good idea to throw your head back and laugh at the mistakes your students make. Although I've tried to hold to this goal, there have been times during my career as an ESL teacher when it was very difficult to keep the giggles away. One older student was describing a scene about skyscrapers in New York, but she kept saying "skycrapper" instead, which had me twisting this way and that picturing some kind of divine lavatory in the sky. Another time a student told me how he fixed his car radio over the weekend, only he didn't say "fixed," but another word entirely which starts with the same letter, and I struggled to keep from laughing out loud at this. We were talking about careers once, and one student who planned to take the test to enter the National Postal Service told me his dream was to become a "post officer," which struck me as amusing, even though it's a logical mistake when you stop and think about it. Then there are those bits of insight that only a learner of a foreign language can have, like my student who observed, "We cannot go to Antarctica because it is under penguin rule." I feel bad about laughing at my students from time to time, although I know that I've given as good as I got, providing the Japanese with many hours of amusement thanks to my own language slip-ups over the years. Like the time I tried to order some mango juice in a restaurant, and substituted a "k" for the "g," resulting in pretty much the rudest word that exists in Japanese (which is "manko" and is a word referring to the female genitals).

"We cannot go to Antarctica because it is under penguin rule."

Handicapped in Japan

I've often gotten the impression that Japan has a reputation for not matching the standards set by the U.S. and Europe when it comes to helping its handicapped enjoy more normal lives, perhaps due to the many places that can only be accessed by climbing stairs in Japanese cities. While more could certainly be done to make the country "barrier free" (a made-in-Japan English word that describes environments that can be used without limitation by elderly or handicapped), overall it's been my experience that Japan works quite hard for its citizens with physical challenges. There are many concrete examples, such as daily broadcasts of news programs for the deaf on NHK and Japanese schools extending that "one big happy in-group" mind-set to the special-needs classes in public schools, allowing kids with, say, Down Syndrome to participate in the annual Sports Day events along with everyone else. There are 350,000 legally blind individuals living in Japan, and they can get around town with the use of crosswalks which play different songs depending on the direction so people know which way to cross -- one of the songs is "When a Body Meet a Body Coming Through the Rye" by the way. Guide dogs that help the blind get around are also quite common. As an interesting aside, Japanese guide dogs are trained to follow commands in English rather than in Japanese, for example "right side!" or "wait!" rather than Japanese versions of these commands. This is because there's quite a lot of difference between the way men and women speak in Japanese, with men tending to use the rougher command form of a word like "sit!" (suware! soo-wah-reh) while women would use the softer-sounding request form of the same verb (suwatte! su-wa-tte), potentially confusing the animal. It's an interesting example of Japan's language being too multi-layered and nuance-filled for its own good.

A box soliciting donations for training of seeing-eye dogs.

Here's the train crosswalk music, both songs.

The Queen of Subtitles

The other day I saw my wife watching an American movie that was being shown with Japanese subtitles, although I had no idea what it was because she had the volume turned too low to hear anything. When I commented on this, she said, "Oh, I didn't notice the volume was turned down. I was reading the subtitles." The Japanese consume a lot of TV and movies from the outside world and are quite at home with reading subtitles, a big difference from in the U.S. where subtitled films historically are not popular. When a Hollywood movie studio wants to make sure their film will do well in the Japanese market, they go out of their way to hire Natsuko Toda, known as the Queen of Movie Subtitles, who is so in demand that her personal schedule often determines what movies Japanese people see and when. Just about every famous film from Star Wars to Apocalypse Now to Harry Potter movies have begun with the "Subtitled by Natsuko Toda" title, letting moviegoers know they won't be confused with the flow of the story as they watch. One interesting side-effect of being so comfortable with subtitles is that the latest Will Smith film might be grouped together with, say, a French art film, since Japanese viewers are getting information through the subtitles and are not understanding the spoken lines in the film. Thus, films that might not get attention in the U.S. because they are "foreign" might have greater success in Japan.

Ms. Toda loves her Hollywood stars, and is always on hand whenever they visit Japan.

Japan Crime Bizarre, or the Lens of the Internet?

In 2007 a sad event occurred in the town of Aizu-Wakamatsu, which is incidentally famous for being the site of a mass suicide of samurai who chose to commit Seppuku rather than become part of a modern, Western-style Japan during the Meiji Restoration. A 17-year-old boy walked into a police station with a shoulder bag containing the severed head of his mother, who the disturbed boy had just killed. Perhaps it's due to the relative rareness of violent crime in Japanese society, but some of the tragedies that do occur seem especially horrific and at times even creative. Like the man who kidnapped his neighbor at knifepoint then, afraid the police would catch him, killed her and flushed her body down the toilet to dispose of it. (He was sentenced to life in prison without chance of parole this week.) It would be easy, judging from news reports of these sad and bizarre cases, to get a distorted view of Japan, especially when seen through the lens of the Internet. It's not unlike the perception that the Japanese are always eating bizarre desserts just because some parts of the country sell wasabi or squid ink-flavored ice cream as a novelty. Although it's not very exotic, the boring reality is that the most popular flavor of ice cream here is vanilla. While any loss of life is tragic, Japan happily remains a reasonably safe country, with a national murder rate lower than that of New York City.

Crime is always sad, and sometimes some really bizarre stuff seems to happen in Japan.

Haikyo: Modern Ruins

One of the more interesting things about Japan is haikyo, or exploring the ruins of our modern civilization, and whether it's spelunking through run-down factories or exploring abandoned love hotels, it can be quite interesting to see a side of the country that doesn't make it into the travel books very often. I've done my share of this, going with some of my students to check out ruins of an old prison that had been abandoned for decades, and near our city we can see the remains of an amusement park I used to take my kids to, which seem to be watched over by a giant statue of a Buddhist Kannon deity nearby. The grand-daddy of modern ruins in Japan is Hashima Island near Nagasaki, nicknamed Gunkan-jima or Battleship Island because of the way it looks like a ship floating in the water. When rich coal deposits were discovered at the end of the 1800's a colony was set up to house the miners, and during the heyday of the island in the 1950s there were nearly 5000 people living in close quarters there, complete with high-rise apartments, a pachinko parlor and even a movie theatre. It all came to a screeching halt when the mine was closed in 1974 and everyone left, in some cases with cups of undrunk tea still sitting on the table. Now the most famous ghost town in Japan has been proposed as a UNESCO World Heritage site. Let's hope they get it open to the public soon!

All About J-List's Home Prefecture of Gunma

J-List is based in Gunma Prefecture, a crane-shaped piece of land that's located right in the center of Japan -- the heso (belly button) of the country, as the locals like to say. Situated on the edge of the Kanto Plain, where Tokyo and Yokohama are, Gunma appears regularly in crime dramas after someone commits a murder needs a conveniently rural, mountainous place to dispose of the body. Because the name of Gunma is written with characters that mean "a herd of horses," people in other parts of the country think there are lots of horses here, but it's completely untrue -- we don't even have a horse racing track anymore. The primary cities in Gunma are Maebashi, the Prefectural capital, famous for wooden kokeshi dolls; Takasaki, a vibrant commercial city, although because it was never bombed during World War II the roads are noticeably narrower and more difficult to drive in; Ota, home of the Subaru corporation, and the old Nakajima Air Works, where Japanese Zeros were built; and our own Isesaki, famous (?) for J-List and for the photographer of Russian model Yulia Nova, who happens to live about 2 km from us. Virtually all the cities in Gunma are former castle towns, and almost without exception the City Offices are built on the grounds of the former castle ruins, which fulfills some kind of continuity with the past that I as an American can't quite fathom, although it's rather cool. In keeping with Japanese regional tradition, Gunma is famous for many things, including konnyaku, a gelatinous food made from yams that's so firm that several elderly people a year choke on it and die, kara-kaze, the biting wind that blows over the mountains in the winter, and kakaa-denka, extremely strong-willed women (like my wife). Now you know a little bit more about Japan!

Our home prefecture of Gunma at a glance. Hot springs, vibrant nature, Daruma dolls: we've got it all.

Hillary in Japan

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is making her international debut right now, having chosen Japan for her first official visit. She's been incredibly busy meeting with a wide range of different groups since arriving here, but while everyone is smiling for the cameras, her visit is shaping up to be a rather strange one. First, she was received by the Empress Michiko rather than Crown Princess Masako, who is still suffering from depression and avoids nearly all public appearances. She asked to meet with Ichiro Ozawa, the leader of Japan's main opposition party, apparently hedging bets that the current ruling coalition might not be in power for much longer. She also met the parents of Megumi Yokota, the poor girl who was kidnapped and spirited away to North Korea, as a gesture of support. Ms. Clinton's visit came at an especially embarrassing time for current Prime Minister Taro Aso. First, an opinion poll was released showing public support for his administration to be around 9%, the timing of which was no doubt helped along by reporters with whom Aso-san is famous for quarreling. Then in Italy, Japanese Finance Minister Nakagawa announced he would step down after apparently giving a press conference while drunk as the proverbial skunk. I'm sure it was a real Nyoro~n moment for Akihabara's famous politician.

Hillary Clinton and Foreign Minister Nakasone; Former Japanese Finance Minister "Shochu" Nakagawa.

The First Japanese-English Dictionary

I write a lot about Japanese history because it's an interesting way to get a feel for how unique the country is. I'm particularly interested in the "firsts," like my recent post about the first beer brewed in Japan, which formed the foundation for the Kirin Brewery Company. The other day I wrote about how Japan had enjoyed a special relationship with The Netherlands throughout the Edo Period, and in fact referred to the study of all Western language, medicine and technology as Rangaku, literally meaning Dutch Studies. But fifty years before Admiral Perry would force Japan to open its doors to trade with the rest of the world, a Dutch translator in Nagasaki named Shosaemon borrowed a Dutch-English dictionary from a trader and created the first Japanese-English dictionary, which was completed in 1810. It was called the Angelia Gorin Taisei, or Great English Vocabulary Book, and it was used by Yukichi Fukuzawa, one of the fore-fathers of modern day Japan and the guy on the 10,000 yen note, when he made his historic fact-finding missions to America and Europe to explore how Japan should approach modernization.

A really, really old dictionary. It blows the mind.

Functional Japan, Dysfunctional Japan

In a lot of ways Japan is quite a well-run country. For example, when Vice Defense Minister Takamasa Moriya was found to have accepted bribes from defense contractors in violation of the law, prosecutors did what they'd do in any similar situation, invading the Ministry of Defense with an army of men in suits to probe for evidence to support the indictments. That this was the equivalent of the U.S. Justice Department serving warrants on the Pentagon to search for evidence of wrongdoing impressed me, since I can't see something like that happening under America's less transparent system. Also, the Japanese Finance Ministry rightly foresaw the problems with U.S. mortgage-backed securities and ordered all Japanese banks to steer clear of them, resulting in far less damage to the banking industry on this side of the pond. Still, Japan does have their share of problems, and one of the most famous is the practice of amakudari, which means "descent from heaven." It's essentially the practice of high-ranking government officials taking cushy jobs in industries they used to oversee when they retire, which creates a lot of you-scratch-my-back cooperation that really shouldn't exist between the private and public sectors. It's analogous to the practice of former members of Congress becoming lobbyists after they retire, and it can create a lot of potential for improper exchanging of a lucrative career for influence that I think we'd be better off without. Amakudari has been a fixture of the postware era for so long it'd be difficult to imagine a Japan without it, and even American companies like Aflac and Coca-Cola owe their current position in the Japanese marketplace today to smart decisions to hire former high-ranking beauracrats to steer their companies through the complex regulatory system here. Still, embattled Prime Minister Taro Aso has declared his intention to end the practice of Amakudari by the end of the year, and I certainly wish him good luck on that. Of course, it's likely that Mr. Aso won't be Prime Minister for too much longer at the rate things are going for him. Maybe he can get himself a primo job at a government contractor before the ban kicks in.

The original meaning of the term, relating to Shinto gods journeying from heaven to visit the Earth.

Hand Written Kanji Messages

The other day we went out for one of my favorite Japanese foods, katsu, or fried cutlet of pork or chicken, which is of course made so much better by that heavenly Bull-Dog sauce they have here. As we were paying at the cash register, I noticed a framed piece of cardboard displayed on the wall with a handwritten message by the president of the company, declaring in flowing characters his company's dedication to quality ingredients and to greeting customers in a genki (cheerful, energetic) manner when they come in the door. The practice of putting a hand-penned message where customers can see it is quite common in Japan, and I think it helps communicate the passion of the business owners while providing a source of motivation for the employees. In the classic baseball anime Touch, there's a similar handwritten sign hung on the wall in which Minami declares her support for Kazuya's dream of taking his team to Koshien, the national high school baseball championship near Osaka. When Kazuya is killed in an accident, his twin brother Tatsuya must take Kat-chan's place, and the sign on the wall becomes a focal point for this goal. Japanese brush calligraphy, called shodo or "the way of writing," is quite a popular art form in Japan, and the ability to write beautifully formed characters is considered an important trait for a person to have. Incidentally, we stock plenty of cool Japanese calligraphy items on the site, and we're also happy to announce the return of our Custom Kanji Board service, where we'll write any character, phrase or other message, including your name in kanji, and send it to you.

"Kazuya, aim for Koshien! by Minami Asakura" from Touch.

Have some Fruits by Minutes Made while wearing your Suits and a new Shirts!

I went with my son to a public bath the other day, always a fun way to relax and wash away the day's cares. My son asked me to get him a "buckets," using the plural form of the English word, and so I brought him two of the little buckets used for splashing water on yourself, knowing of course that he only wanted one. For phonetic reasons, some English words are imported into Japanese in their plural forms, including words like shirt, suit, swimsuit, peanut, fruit and sport, which always appear with the 's' sound on the end (shirts, suits, etc.), even if you're talking about just one of the item. In Japanese, one refers to a suitcase as a "suitscase," and it takes the brain a few months to get over the weirdness of this -- ditto for learning to ask for "peanuts butter" or "Minutes Maid Orange Juice," and of course the English word "bucket," which always appears as "buckets" in Japanese. There seem to be three reasons for some English words being mapped to their plural forms like this. First is the rather convenient lack of singular/plural in Japanese grammar: saying hana ga kirei could mean either "the flower is pretty" or "the flowers are pretty" depending on how many flowers you happen to discussing, and as a result, the Japanese don't sweat the plural/singular state of a word any more Americans consider the gender of nouns in Spanish when they speak English. Another reason is that the softer tsu ending on the plural forms is easier for Japanese to pronounce than a hard 't' consonant sound. Finally, converting some words to their plural forms also avoids the dreaded L/R confusion that can be a problem in the language. Because "fruit" and "flute" would have the exact same pronunciation when rendered in katakana, the musical instrument became furu-to and the stuff you eat became furu-tsu.

Have some fruits by Minutes Made while wearing your suits and a new shirts!

Happy Friday the 13th

I've talked before about how the Japanese can be quite superstitious at times, and since today is Friday the 13th, I thought I'd revisit some of the more interesting folk beliefs here. Such as, don't urinate on a worm, or he'll get revenge by making your private parts swell up. Don't whistle at night or a snake will come, and don't play with fire or you'll wet the bed. When you sneeze twice, it means someone is gossiping about you, a joke that pops up in anime quite a lot. If you see a spider in the morning, it's good luck, so don't kill it. If you want to check the weather tomorrow, throw your shoe as far as you can; if it lands sole down, it will be sunny, but if upside down, it will rain. Being such a death-oriented place, there are a lot of related superstitions. When you attend a funeral you'll be given a packet of salt by the funeral home, and you must throw the salt over your body to cleanse it before crossing the threshold into your house or the spirits of the dead will move in. Don't cut your fingernails at night, or you won't be able to be with your parents on their deathbed. Don't write someone's name in red ink, or you'll shorten their life. Finally, if you see a hearse, you should hide your thumbs inside your fists, or one of your parents will die (this is due to the fact that the word for thumb in Japanese means "parent finger").

Oh, they know about Friday the 13th, but mainly associate it with the classic horror film only.

Japan has many interesting superstitions.

Japan's History of "Dutch Studies"

I like digging around in Japanese history to find interesting little tidbits. In 1853, Admiral Matthew Perry sailed his "black ships" into the harbor at Edo (modern day Tokyo) on a mission to force Japan to ends its "closed country" policy and trade with the U.S. (Interesting aside: his main goal was to get Japan to open its ports to American whaling vessels, which were killing whales by the hundreds throughout the Pacific, quite a turnaround from today.) Prior to Perry's visit, all foreign contact with Japan had been limited to the fan-shaped artificial island of Dejima in Nagasaki, and it was death for any foreigner to land in Japan or for any Japanese to leave. The idea was to lock out all external influence, probably a good idea considering the penchant the world powers of the day had shown for colonizing countries and adding them to their empires, and the policy certainly was successful in preserving Japan's unique culture. Only the Dutch were allowed any contact with the Japanese, and they enjoyed such a close relationship with Japan for two centuries that the general word for studying Western technology and medicine during the Edo Period was Rangaku (lit. "Dutch studies"). When Napoleon annexed the Netherlands from 1810 to 1813, making the country a province of France, Dejima was the only place in the world where the Dutch flag flew.

The old word for the study of Western medicine and technology was Rangaku, lit. "Dutch studies"