Japan Organ Transplant Law Update

I saw a news report about a new Japanese law governing the harvesting of living organs from brain-dead donors which had just gone into effect. You might be thinking that I'd accidentally picked up a newspaper from 25 years ago, but no -- Japan is only just catching up to the rest of the world in this important area. Previously organs from individuals who had signed a donor card could be harvested for transplants, but there was a catch -- only persons aged 15 or older were eligible to sign the donor cards, which was essentially a death sentences to anyone under that age who needed a new heart or liver but lacked the resources to travel outside of Japan to obtain one. One of the themes of Japan as a nation is that it is "behind" the U.S. and Europe in terms of its social structures, who are generally seen as as more "advanced" by the Japanese in general. It's nice to see this aspect of Japanese society being updated.

Why am I not surprised that Japan's donor cards are kawaii??

Would You Like Some 'Nutsmeg' Spice?

You know you've been in Japan too long when your mother sends you a bottle of nutmeg spice for Christmas, and a Japanese person asks what it is, upon which you immediately answer, without having ever heard what the spice is called in Japanese, "This is nutsmeg, which is great in warm milk." For some inexplicable reason of phonetics, some English words are imported into Japanese in their plural forms. Words like shirt, suit, swimsuit, peanut, and sport always appear with the 's' sound on the end, even if you're discussing the word in its singular form. 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 watching the Fruits Basket anime. There seem to be three reasons for some English words being mapped to their plural versions in Japanese. First is the rather convenient lack of singular/plural in Japanese grammar -- saying hana ga kirei means either "the flower is pretty" or "the flowers are pretty" depending on how many flowers you happen to discussing. Also, 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 writing system used for expressing foreign loan words, the musical instrument became furu-to and the edible stuff became furu-tsu.

There's nothing like fresh nutsmeg in warm milk, mmm.

25 Years after JAL Flight 123

Yesterday marked the 25th anniversary of the tragic crash of Japan Airlines Flight 123, which occurred in my home prefecture of Gunma, as fate would have it. I learned of the crash one day when I suddenly decided to ride my bicycle 40 km to check out some caverns I'd heard about. (I had lots of free time for random stuff before I started J-List.) My wife shuddered when I told her where I was headed, and she said, "I could never go out there, that's where that plane went down in 1985." JAL flight 123 took off from Haneda airport headed for Osaka, but suffered a massive failure of its hydraulic system, which made it impossible to control the plane. After an agonizing 32 minutes in the air, it crashed. Adding to the tragedy, an American military unit arrived on the scene to aid the survivors of the crash but was ordered to stand down by the Japanese military, who then didn't arrive until the next morning. The disaster was the largest loss of life in a single aircraft crash ever, and it's even more legendary because of one very famous passenger: Kyu Sakamoto, who sang the Sukiyaki Song, the first Japanese language song to hit #1 in the U.S. Here's a link with many different versions of this epic song: http://www.jbox.com/sukiyaki. The man also sang another epic song from the 20th century, Ashita ga Aru (There Will Be a Tomorrow), the unofficial theme song of recession-ripped Japan.

Kyu Sakamoto was one of the victims of JAL Flight 123.

Filial Piety in Japan, and University

Last time I talked about the concept of filial piety, or oya koko, which is the respect you pay to your parents because without them you wouldn't be here. This formalized tradition of respecting your parents is part of Confucian teachings which exerted influence on Japan during the Edo Period (1603-1868). In the U.S. the top universities are private schools like Harvard, Princeton and MIT, while inexpensive state-funded schools (like mine, SDSU) are lower in the rankings, but in Japan this is reversed: the public universities are where everyone wants to go, in large part because they're much cheaper than their private counterparts like Waseda or Keio. One way kids show oya koko to their parents is by studying extra-hard so they can get a cheap education at Tokyo or Kyoto University, which are around $6000 per year. As a father with two kids who will be starting university in a few years, this is one kind of parental respect I am very much in favor of.

If you can pass the test to get into Tokyo University, your parents will be happy.

Advice for Finding Accommodations Inside Japan

One of my Twitter followers asked me if I had any recommendations for his upcoming trip to Hokkaido, Japan's northernmost island. While I don't have any specific knowledge about the best places to stay up there, I do have some general advice for finding accommodations inside Japan. The first time I went to Kyoto I took my trusty Lonely Planet travel guide with me, which was loaded with information on places to stay. But one thing was odd: in every ryokan inn or youth hostel I stayed in, nearly all the guests were gaijin (foreigners) like me, with nary a nihonjin (Japanese) in sight. I eventually realized the other gusts were all using the same travel book I was, and since then I've made it a point to use Japanese-language travel information sources when I can. Another tip: considering exploring Japan through minshuku, which are awesome budget versions of Japanese inns, rather than full-service hotels. The down-to-earth feel of these family-owned lodgings is great, and the people you'll meet there are fascinating, too. For a slightly more Western feel, search out pension inns, a kind of Japanese/European bed & breakfast that's also fun to stay in.

Is summer vacation too long?; I've had some great times staying at inexpensive minshuku inns.

Is Summer Vacation Too Long?

I caught an article in Time the other day which presented the case against the long three-month summer vacation in the U.S., which (the article argued) was an unnecessary holdover from our agrarian past that harms America's competitiveness in the world today. While the question of whether summer vacation is too long or not may depend on how old you are -- a kid will say it's it's too short while a parent with four loud children might lean the other way -- I'm generally of the opinion that summer vacation in the U.S. is longer than necessary, allowing students to forget most of what they learned the previous year. In contrast to the U.S., Japan's summer break is much shorter, from mid-July through the end of August. Teachers work to ensure the nation's children won't become baka (stupid) by giving them homework to do, which helps them stay at least a little focused on school even while they get sand-between-the-toes at the beach. This summer homework is a common plot device in anime, including the infamous "Endless Eight" episodes of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, in which Haruhi (who is a God) wanted summer to go on forever, so it repeated 15,532 times, until Kyon finally made her finish her summer homework assignments.

Is summer vacation too long? Or is that the frazzled parent in me talking?

Filial Piety and the Japanese

When a person comes to live in a country as different from the U.S. as Japan is, it stands to reason that they'll be exposed to some new ways of thinking. One new paradigm I encountered was the idea of "filial piety" (in Japanese, oya koko, pronounced oh-yah koh-koh), or the respect and honor you pay your parents just because of who they are. I had a friend who'd just become a teacher, and like most Japanese young people she lived with her parents. "But I'm not making much money yet," my friend told me, "so I'm only able to give my parents $300 each month for the household." I don't know about you, but when I was 22 I was still figuring out what I was going to do with my life, not kicking money to my mother to help her with her household finances, and I was impressed that my friend was able to think so selflessly of her parents like that.

Sadly, my friend was not as hot as Yomako.

Taxis in Japan

I happened to see a news report that said that taxis in London had been ranked the world's best, with Tokyo's taxis coming in 5th overall. While I've not had the opportunity to ride in a taxi in London, I was surprised by Tokyo's low ranking, since I've always found taxi drivers in Japan to be the most polite and professional in the world. Not only are Japanese taxis spotless, with their drivers diligently polishing every surface whenever the driver waits for a fare, they make visitors feel welcome thanks to the passenger door that opens automatically for you. Of course not every taxi ride in Tokyo is going to be a smooth one for foreign visitors. There may be language problems since drivers' English skills may vary, or confusion about what is near what in sprawling Tokyo, which is not actually a city but a prefecture with 23 cities inside it. There are also plenty of potential problems due to the chaotic way Japanese city blocks are laid out, and unless you have a map to where you're trying to go, it's possible even your driver won't be able to find your destination.

I've always found taxi drivers in Japan to be outstanding.

My American Hamburg Steak

I'm having fun spending time in my American house with my Japanese daughter, although we both tend to get homesick for familiar foods from Japan. The other day she announced she was going to make "Hamburg" steak for me, which is a hugely popular dish from Japan, essentially a Salsbury steak made with ground beef and topped with various sauces. (To the Japanese, a "Hamburg" is a hamburger steak without bread, while a "hamburger" is the same thing with the bun part included; similarly, a "Frankfurt" is a frankfurter by itself, with no bun around it.) She got all the ingredients together -- ground beef, bread crumbs, browned onions and an egg -- and cooked me some good "Hamburg" steaks, complete with a demi-glace sauce made from that amazing Bull-Dog Sauce mixed with ketchup, and we ate it all over steamed white rice. It was delicious, though it wasn't quite the same as we'd had back in Japan so many times. Eventually we realized what was wrong: the ground beef in America is 100% beef, but most of the time when you buy it in Japan you're getting a 50% beef and 50% pork blend called aibiki, which is why the taste was slightly different.

"Hamburg steak" is one of the most popular dishes in Japan (partially because it's cheap).

Tierrasanta, where Santa Claus wears a Tiara

It's funny how perceptions work differently in different languages. If you're below a certain age, the most famous Chinese name after Mao Zedong (or Mao Tse-Tung if you're even older) is probably Chun Li, the cute fighting vixen from Street Fighter II who shouts "Yatta!" ("I did it!") after she wins a fight. While the brains of English speakers labor over properly memorizing a strange-sounding name like Chun Li, which has no mental hooks for us to attach it with, Japanese have the benefit of being able to internalize the name using kanji characters. Because kanji names have meaning, Japanese might get the impression that Chun Li was a beautiful baby born in the spring, since the characters mean "Spring Beauty." We have a house in the Tierrasanta area of San Diego, and just for fun I asked my Japanese daughter what she thought the name might mean. Her answer was really cute: "It means Santa Claus wearing a tiara crown."

"Tierrasanta" made my daughter think of Santa-san wearing a tiara.

Mid-Summer Greetings Cards

Hello again from Japan, where the zipper in your pants is known as the "window of society" (shakai no mado), one of my favorite random euphemisms.

This has been a difficult summer for Japan. First, the heat has been incredible, contributing to more than 100 deaths and sending thousands to the hospital, including comedian George Tokoro, who plays the voice of Ponyo's father. Japan has also started finding that some of its oldest citizens are in fact dead or missing. It all started when municipal authorities decided to check up on an 111 year old man, only to find a mummified corpse that had been there for thirty years. This may have been part of the man's personal choice to self-mumify himself in a Buddhist custom of purification, but his family is going to have some 'splaining to do about why they kept his pension money for themselves all these years. Another 50 centenarians are said to be missing, including a 113-year-old woman born in 1897, Tokyo's oldest citizen.

Yes, this summer has been a hot one, with temperatures as high as 38 degrees Celsius (100 degrees Fahrenheit), of course with very high humidity. It's the perfect weather for enjoying some Japanese mugi cha or refreshing barley tea, which is the most popular drink in Japan when it's hot out. In Japan there's a nice custom called shochuu omimai or a mid-summer greeting card. Individuals and businesses exchange these cards in July and August, and the various companies J-List works with such as Soft on Demand and dating-sim game companies Will and Nitroplus send us these cards to see how we're handling the hot summer.

Midsummer greetings cards are a nice tradition in Japan.

Keeping Up with the Gaijins

History is in all of us, and each nation has its own unique quirks or features that come about as a result of its own past. For the Japanese, the arrival of Perry's black ships in 1853 brought them face-to-face with the fact that Japan couldn't stand against nations like the United States and Great Britain. After the "respect the Emperor and expel the foreign barbarians" revolution that ejected the last Tokugawa Shogun in favor of a government formed around the Emperor (which theoretically "restored" the Emperor to power, hence the term Meiji Restoration), the country underwent an unprecedented program of modernization, retiring the old system of feudal domains (han) for a modern prefectural system based on that of France and introducing education to the people. One of the forces driving this was Japan's desire to be seen in a positive light by foreigners from the powerful countries of the West, and today, the Japanese are still very concerned about how they appear to gaijin. Many large-scale public works, such as the first Shinkansen line launched in 1964, coincide with international events like the Olympics, when foreigners would visit Japan in large numbers and "oo and ah" over their technical achievements. It's like Japan is still trying to prove to the West that they've left the backwards feudal nation they were 150 years ago behind.

Japanese and Mexican Beans

Yesterday I took my wife out to my favorite Mexican restaurant in San Diego. While she scarfed down the refried beans she said, "This is delicious. I guess I'm not Japanese anymore." She was referring to the fact that virtually every Japanese detests Mexican style beans, and the mark of a Japanese person who's lived in the U.S. for some time is that they can eat all types of Mexican beans. I've got a theory that both beans and pickles are at the heart of each culture, and it always takes time to learn to appreciate the differences in one place if you come from another. And sure enough, I love nothing more than a crunchy Vlassic dill spear, while Japanese usually hate American pickles, much happier to eat traditional Japanese versions like pickled eggplant, daikon radish, or -- I swear I am not making this up -- fish intestines, all of which I can't stand. Incidentally, you can try Kyoto-style Japanese pickles with our popular Traditional Food Drops candies.

It's usual for Japanese people to hate Mexican style beans.

The Only Gaijin in the Room

Because I live in a smaller rural city in Japan, there are fewer foreigners around me, and it's not uncommon for me to find myself the only non-Japanese person around. When I take my family to the Shinto shrine to pray for good luck in the new year on January 1st, for example, I'm likely to find myself in a huge crowd of Japanese faces with nary a Westerner in sight. This is less due to the paltry number of foreigners in our part of the country and more to cultural differences, e.g. most of the Brazilians or Peruvians or Canadians living in Japan are at home doing their own thing rather than standing in the freezing cold trying to experience Japanese New Year's Day culture. Sometimes being the only foreigner around can take real courage. Once I went to a concert by a minor group called Personz, which wasn't the sort of band to attract gaijin fans. Not only was I the only non-Japanese in the entire concert hall, but most of the other attendees were short Japanese females, which meant I stood a head or more above everyone, the better for every pair of eyes in the room to lock onto the strange barbarian in row 23.

Being the only gaijin can be a challenge.

Random Japanese Concepts and the "Saemoe" Tournament

Each language is structured in different ways, and it's fun to learn a little bit about how they work. In English, we have four demonstrative pronouns -- this, that, these and those -- but in Japanese there are three, kore (koh-ray) meaning "this" associated with something close to me, the speaker, sore (soh-ray) or "that" for something near you, the person I'm speaking to, and are (ah-ray), "that over there" for something far from both of us. (You nearly always ignore plurals in Japanese.) Often meanings are imported wholesale from Chinese, like a group of kanji-based words that use the character sai, meaning "most," which is how you can express ideas like biggest (saidai ), smallest (saishou), highest (saikou, which also carries the slang meaning of "awesome" if you ever wanted to know how to say this in Japanese), or lowest (saitei, which is also a pretty potent insult). The Japanese interwebs are about to start buzzing with the new Saimoe ("most moe") Tournament, in which otaku vote on who the cutest anime characters are. Last year Taiga from Toradora! took the prize -- I wonder who will win this year?

"Beat" Takeshi and the Cycle of Death and Rebirth in Buddhism

Japan is a Buddhist country, and this manifests itself in some interesting ways. Several national holidays are Buddhist for example, such as Obon in August when the entire country shuts down for three days so everyone can return to their parents' homes to greet the spirits of dead family members who return home for a visit. One concept I've encountered quite often is rin-ne (REEN-neh), the endless cycle of death and rebirth, which basically says that a person's children will lead pretty much the same life as their parents, a pattern that can be hard to break out of. One good example of the cycle of rin-ne being broken is acclaimed comedian/director "Beat" Takeshi Kitano. His father was Kikujiro, a poor house painter who drank all the time, and it was expected that Takeshi would follow in his father's footsteps. Takeshi's mother Saki, however, was adamant that her son would break away from their family's cycle of poverty, so she did part-time jobs secretly to save money to buy study books so her son could attend university one day. I'd say it worked out pretty well.

Takeshi Kitano's mother was determined to break the rin-ne cycle.

Japanese and Tipping

Over the weekend I took a day off to spend some quality time with Mrs. J-List, visiting a nice hotel in downtown San Diego where we could relax after this year's hard anime convention season. We had fun walking through the historical Gaslamp District, which is so hard to enjoy properly during the chaos that is the San Diego Comi-con, and had a nice dinner together. While we were there, my wife did what Japanese people always do when visiting the U.S., stressing out about every tip we paid to servers at restaurants, the hotel staff that brought our bags up, and so on. There is no tipping in Japan, of course, and so Japanese who go abroad read travel books about this exotic custom to make sure they're doing it just right. While I'm usually happy to toss a few bills on the table and leave it at that, my wife meticulously calculates the proper 15% tip amount each time, and always makes sure she has a pocketful of $1 bills ready in case we need to leave unexpected gratuities.

Japanese obsess about leaving tips in the U.S.

WTF, Japan?

No matter how long a person lives in Japan, there are always things that can bring on what expats call a "Japan moment," the feeling of utter amazement at something bizarre you've just encountered. Maybe it's something cute, like a big truck playing the Main Street Electrical Street Parade song as it backs up instead of a boring beep-beep-beep sound, or that first time seeing the plastic Colonel Sanders in front of KFC wearing his "Santa Wear" (Santa Claus Suit). Maybe it's a food item, like strawberry and whipped cream sandwiches, or the ham and cheese on French Toast complete with syrup pre-applied to the bread I saw once. You never know what will bring on that sense of "only-in-Japan" next -- driving through an extremely rural town and coming across a replica of the American Statue of Liberty? Seeing a nondescript building with "Oh!" carefully painted on it? Meeting someone who has taught English for 30 years yet has never been outside of Japan, and who asks you "Where is your domicile?" instead of something simple like "Where do you live?"

Great placement on that door, guys.

Sushi in the U.S. vs. Japan

Normally when I come to the U.S. the last thing I want to do is eat Japanese food, since there there are so many other choices here, like Mexican and Thai and Chinese. (Chinese food does exist in Japan, but in a very different form from what you'd find at Panda Express, often melded so closely with everyday Japanese dishes that no one can tell the two apart.) This trip, however, I've been in the U.S. for so long doing stuff with my American family that I started really craving nihonshoku (Japanese cuisine), so last night I took the family out for the best sushi I know of in San Diego. Sushi in California and Japan are naturally a little different. First of all, the most common way to eat sushi in Japan is kaiten-zushi or conveyor belt sushi, which is cheap and convenient, although traditional places are common, too (though they are pricier). We laughed out loud at some of the menu items with names that would never fly in Japan, like Kabuki, Last Samurai, Yakuza and Gaijin Rolls. As is often the case when eating "Japanese" food in the U.S., the Master (the owner of the shop) was Korean. Which was okay with me -- the fish was fresh and good, and he gave us kimchee (Korean pickled cabbage) to eat for free.

Sushi in the U.S. is a little different from Japan. Not bad, just different.

Big Problems in Sumo Land

Sumo wrestling is the official sport of Japan, enjoying special status and support by the Japanese government. It's more than a sport, really, since it's closely tied to Shinto religious ceremonies going back centuries, and legendary figures from Japan's history like Hideyoshi and Nobunaga were sumo aficionados, although contestants fought to the death back in those days. Recently the sport hasn't been able to catch a break due to a series of scandals that have rocked the Japan Sumo Association and its fans. It started with a marijuana scandal which resulted in several wrestlers being ejected from the sport for trafficking in illegal substances, and things got worse when a teenage wrestler in training died as a result of bullying by other members of his sumo stable. (Not sure why, but a house where a team of sumo wrestlers lives and practices is always called a 'stable' in English.) Maverick Mongolian wrestler Asashoryu was forced to quit in shame after he smashed in the face of a patron in a bar, which wasn't exactly in keeping with the hinkaku (dignity) required of Grand Sumo Champions. Now the existence of gambling ties to yakuza gangsters has come to light, which has enraged fans and caused NHK to boycott broadcasting the Nagoya tournament. I've always loved the uniquely Japanese character of sumo wrestling, and hope the sport can clean its house and get things back to normal soon.

The sumo world is facing some big problems.