Japan Suicide Update

The number of suicides in Japan has topped the 30,000 mark for the eleventh year in a row, with the official tally of of people who opted to go to that karaoke bar in the sky hitting 32,000 in 2008. This number is slightly higher than the actual number of suicides in the U.S., despite the fact that America has more than double the population here. As usual, the prefecture with the highest suicide rate was Yamanashi, near Mt. Fuji, home to a morbid forest called Aokigahara Jukai ("the Aokigahara Sea of Trees"), famous as a suicide spot ever since it appeared as the setting in a novel in the 1960s. Last month our rural city was shocked at the news that a mother who'd become disillusioned with life jumped under a train with her seven-year-old son, a terrible and needless waste. While Japan has made some strides in recent years, including logging 700,000 calls from troubled persons at suicide hotlines last year, clearly more needs to be done. While fixing problems with medicine isn't always the best solution, I can't help but think that part of Japan's suicide problem might be related to the cultural aversion to taking medicines -- many of the drugs used to treat serious depression in the rest of the world just aren't available here.

(By the way, do not google Akigaoka with safe search off. Just trust me on this, you will not like what you see.)

The eerie calm of Aokigaoka Jukai, second only to the Golden Gate in annual suicides.

Dialects in Japanese: Osaka-ben and Beyond

Every language has dialects, and Japanese is no different. I've heard that since Japanese people are more likely to stay in the same place all their lives, or move to Tokyo for work or education then do a "U-turn" back to their home prefecture a few years later, the country's dialects are more pronounced than in North American English. The most famous alternate dialect is Osaka-ben, where they say maido (mai-DOH) instead of konnichiwa for a greeting, reflecting the region's mercantile background (it's short for maido ari or "Thanks for giving me your business every day"). Often dialects are used to add a new dimension to a character in anime, and if you have a group of females in a given show, you can bet there'll be one whose "charm point" is speaking some cute but odd-sounding variant of Japanese. Beyond the major dialects -- rough and comical Osaka-ben, eerily polite Kyoto-ben, Gaelic-sounding Tohoku-ben from Northern Japan -- it's funny to observe the "artificial" dialect of gaijin-ben, the over-inflected Japanese that foreigners are known to speak, which is often used by radio DJs and announcers on TV shows to add a "chic" flavor to their speech.

Ogiue from Genshiken speaks a cute-sounding northern dialect.

Living in Japan: Plusses and Minuses

All in all, Japan is a fairly easy country for an expat to live in: people are friendly and interested in English, the country has low crime and it seems like there's always an interesting experience to be had somewhere. You have access to entertainment -- theatres show Western movies in English with Japanese subtitles, not dubbed over as in most foreign countries -- and having the best Internet in the world means you never feel that far from friends and family members back home. Another nice thing about Japan is public transportation, and if you live near a reasonably large city you can probably get by without the expense of a car. But there are some challenges to living here, as well. Japanese homes are not up to the quality standards of the U.S. (I'm cold all the time in mine), and moving into any rented home or apartment requires 5-6 months rent up front, what with the "thank you money" paid to the landlord and other charges that are customary. Another challenge for newcomers to Japan who haven't already studied the language is not being able to read. Although you can find signs written in English near train stations or on major roads, it's quite easy to find yourself in a place where everything around you is in Japanese. The good news is, nothing helps you learn like necessity!

All-in-all, Japan is an easy country for gaijin to live in.

How Japan Changes You

When you live in a place like Japan for long enough, it inevitably starts to change you. First it's the little things, like the inability to eat a meal without first saying "Itadakimasu!" (literally meaning "I am about to receive the gift of this food"), or politely turning your headlights down to "park" at intersections to keep from blinding the driver across from you. Before you know it you're bowing to people while talking on the phone, you can't remember your weight or shoe size as measured back home and you find yourself taking a long time to get to the point while talking to anyone. The other day my son asked me how they measure the area of rooms in America, and I vaguely recalled there being a something called "square feet" or "square meters" that I'd known about once. Japan, of course, uses that oh-so-traditional unit of measurement known as the tatami mat, and the size of a room is always expressed in how many tatami would fit inside, even if it's a traditional Western room with wooden flooring. A 6-jo (6-mat) room is a good sized space for one or two people to sleep in, while a 4 1/2 mat room (called yojo-han) is what the cramped rooms poor college students live in are called. After being here for so long I can perceive spaces in Japanese mats pretty accurately, but I have no idea how much 1200 square feet would be.

Tatami mats are used to specify room sizes in Japan.

Leadership Fail in Japan

Japan's political world was shocked at the arrest of the top aide to Democratic Party of Japan head Ichiro Ozawa over improper political contributions. At a press conference this morning Ozawa defended his aide, calling the contributions in line with the limits set by campaign law and vowing to beat the allegations. While he talked a good fight, it's likely the news will affect the DPJ's chances of winning a majority in both houses in the upcoming election, which will no doubt lead to more deadlock and other problems for the nation. Politically Japan is quite a basket case, currently on its 11th Prime Minister since I came here in 1991, compared with just three in the U.K. in the same span. While I often hear people complain about two-party political systems which lock out smaller groups, I can't say that Japan's system of one large disfunctional party and a collection of universally ineffectual smaller parties is any better.

Japan seems to suffer from a chronic leadership problem.

Re-Learning English Pronunciation

I've heard it said that when French people learn English, they need to work hard at re-learning how to pronounce their own language since so many words used in English originally came from French. Similarly, Japanese use many English words in their daily lives, but the pronunciation is far from what most of us might expect, making it necessary for foreigners to get comfortable with katakana English. The simple English word "weekend" becomes a bizarre-sounding oo-EE-ku-EHN-doh in Japanese, and if you want people to understand you you have to get used to saying it this way. Another word that's quite hard to get down is "wind orchestra" (oo-EEN-doh OH-keh-su-to-ra). Often when English words are imported into Japanese they're changed slightly, which can sound weird in English speakers for a while. The word "Google" comes through in Japanese as "goggle" (as in what you swim with), and Japanese web users universally perceive the double "o" in Google as a pair of eyes looking through goggles.

It can be odd to get used to English pronunciation that feels "wrong" at first.

Moe-teki Employment for Japan's Otaku

The word moe (mo-eh) is written with a kanji that means "sprout," but it's meaning is a bit difficult to pin down, essentially being translatable as "the warm feeling you get looking at your favorite super-cute anime character." As the moe anime genre takes over Japan completely it's appearing in some surprising places, like the Moe Diet Book, the Moe Guide to Investing in Stocks, and my personal favorite, Moe Particle Physics, in which a cute cat-girl explains electrons, neutrons and quarks in easy-to-understand language. Now a "Hello Work" (municipal employment office) located near Nagoya has gotten into the act, creating an "image character" called Miruku (Milk) Chita aimed at inspiring Japan's otaku and NEETs (Not involved in Education, Employment or Training) to get out and find jobs. While you could say that the government is being smart by shaping its message so that it will reach the young people of today, it's possible to look at things in a more cynical light: that they desperately want to get the country's anime-obsessed youths into jobs that generate taxable income to help support the ever-graying population.

Milk-chan is going to help Japan's NEETs get a job.

Japan's Vertical "Senpai" Culture

I write a lot about how Japan's society is considered "vertical," with concepts like senpai, a senior in a school, company or other organization, a role that comes with a degree of respect but also responsibility, such as the unwritten rule that you'll pick up the tab at restaurants when eating with your kohai (junior) from time to time. While it's common for a person's "social level" to be tied to their age -- an 18-year-old student in high school will be senpai to students who are younger than him -- there are times when this neat social system is upset. For example, what happens if a student is held back a year, and he suddenly becomes kohai to his former classmates? (Incidentlaly, the idea of a gifted student skipping grades is totally alien in Japan.) As early as a decade ago many workers could expect to stay at the same company all their lives, but now almost no one does, which means that at some point a 35-year-old is going to change jobs and find himself working under a new senpai who's ten years younger than he is. It's common in anime for age-based relationships to be turned on their ears as a vehicle for more interesting characterization. For example, when Haruhi forces Mikuru to join the SOS Brigade, part of Kyon's surprise is that Mikuru is a year older than the rest of them: so powerful is Haruhi's personality that she bends even an older student to her will. Other examples of this tendency for age-based relationships to be skewed in anime include Tomoyo from Clannad, who speaks in a brisk, rude manner to everyone including students older than her, and Taiga from Toradora, who clashes violently with her school's class president.

For the record, this kind of thing of thing happens in anime but not the real world very often. ^_^

It's common in anime for characters to disregard proper age relationships.

Teenage Girl Clothing Shock

There's no place quite like Japan for that paradigm-shifting-without-a-clutch experience. My daughter starts Junior High School next month, and she's been happily getting her school supplies together. The other day I saw her picking a new wardrobe at an online retailer that carried all the brands girls are wearing these days, like Beverly Hills Polo Club, School Scene, and of course, Playboy. Say what? It turns out that in Japan, the famous bunny logo is extremely popular with fashionable girls, who think it looks oshare (oh-SHA-reh), or stylish and chic. Hiding my surprise, I asked her what "Playboy" was, and she replied, "It's a famous maker of girls' clothes. Don't you know anything, Dad?" I shrugged -- if the symbol was removed from its special meaning in the U.S., I guess it didn't matter if some 13-year-olds had little bunnies sewn into their socks. It's similar to the way the perception of cursing changes in Japan, a country that has no "foul" language or anatomically-based swear words to speak of, with the most common insult being baka (stupid). If my son were to use the "F" word around me I'd likely not bat an eye, since it has no power in a country where no one would be shocked by it.

A surprising clothing brand for girls in Japan.

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.