Bowing Level: Japanese

Bowing is an important form of social communication in Japan. Whether it's a short sumimasen accompanied by a brief lowering of the head at someone for bringing you a cup of coffee (which essentially means "sorry for inconveniencing you"), or a gomen nasai said with a deeper bow for communicating a more serious apology, Japan's culture of bowing is interesting to observe. Japanese people bow to each other while talking on the phone or to thank other drivers for letting them go ahead of them in traffic, and naturally foreigners pick up on this, too, though it can be embarrassing. The ultimate form of a bowing is dogeza, known in English as kowtow or in Internet visual parlance, orz, which is when a person places their body on the lowest level possible, literally touching their head to the ground. This is done to ask for forgiveness for a serious breach or to make a very important request of someone. When my Japanese wife's mother met my mother for the first time, she did this, prostrating herself on the floor in a gesture that meant, "I humbly ask you to look after our daughter from now on," which freaked my mother out more than a little. Today we have some interesting Japanese plush toys featuring Japanese salrymen making this deeply Japanese gesture.

An example of dogeza ("Please, give us a role in the series, too!")

Hatsune Miku 5th Anniversary

Today is the "birthday" of Hatsune Miku, the popular Vocaloid singer that has come to represent Japan in the eyes of the world in the same way that Astro Boy and Akira did in previous eras. Miku-chan is a character designed by Crypton Future Media in Sapporo, Hokkaido to promote the Vocaloid voice synthesis software developed by Yamaha, and when the software was released five years ago today it was an instant hit in part thanks to her. While the virtual idol herself was created by popular Japanese artist Kei, Hatsune Miku was warmly embraced by Japan's fan artists, who create breathtakingly beautiful original images which I like to seek out and post to J-List's Facebook and Twitter feeds. Miku has passed through several phases over the years, including her "leek period" (a crossover meme from Bleach) that featured her singing the Finnish folk song "levan Polkka" and the oh-so-gorgeous "Love is War" period, and she's always evolving for us. Recently birthdays of popular anime and other characters have become quite a big event for online otaku culture, with fans baking cakes and planning romantic candlelight dinners with their favorite waifus characters, and I'm sure Japan's 2ch BBS will be inundated with creepygusta images of private birthday celebrations with Miku tomorrow. If you love Miku-chan as we do, J-List has some great Hatsune Miku products to show you, including the just-released PS Vita Hatsune Miku game that has a great "augmented reality" feature that lets Miku dance on your desk (wow).

Happy 5th birthday to Hatsune Miku!

First Impressions of Japan, and the U.S.

It's interesting to look at first impressions of a new country. When I came to Japan in 1991, I was surprised to see vending machines everywhere, and I couldn't stop thinking the yellow "in" signs placed in front of Japanese restaurants were In-n-Out signs, beckoning me to come in and have a Double Double. (In-n-Out is the best hamburger chain in the American Southwest, trust me.) Going into restaurants and having the employees shout Irasshaimase! ("Welcome to our shop!") took some getting used to, as did using coins for the equivalent of $1 and $5 bills (I prefer them now though). Going the other way, Japanese people are surprised by various aspects of life in the U.S. when they go there, starting with the sizes of everything from American roads to houses to "medium" Cokes that are three times a large as they need to be. If they go to a part of the U.S. other than Southern California, they're amazed to see that there are four distinct seasons, which they usually believe is a unique feature of Japan. They're also surprised at the amazing number of breakfast cereals available in our supermarkets. One of my ESL students once wrote, "In SAFEWAY, many kinds of corn flakes about one hundred have overpowered me. I felt a difference of the staple foods." Japanese stores usually have about 8-10 varieties including Kellogg's "Corn Frosty" or "Genmai Flake."

Japanese are surprised at the selection of cereal in the U.S.

Fun Anime & Kanji T-Shirts @ J-List

For years J-List has been making fun anime and kanji T-shirts, and we've got some great designs for you, from our Haruhi "No Normal Humans" design to our K-On! x Beatles tribute shirt and fun shirts for fans of tsundere or yandere anime characters. We also have hoodies, great for the coming cooler months. Click here to browse our most popular Japanese T-shirt designs!

Japan, Taxes and Pensions

After several years of intense negotiations, the ruling Democratic Party of Japan was able to push through a bill that will raise the Japanese consumption tax from its current level of 5% to 8% in 2014, with a further increase to 10% a couple of years later. While I'm no fan of paying more taxes, I believe that something needs to be done to improve Japan's financial situation, already in bad straights and now needing to pay for the recovery of Tohoku after last year's earthquakes and tsunamis. The other day I caught an interesting show in which Japanese director Beat Takeshi lead a round-table discussion featuring politicians, writers and other smart people as they debated the financial issues Japan faced going forward, including the crisis of people not making their National Pension payments. Japan has two pension systems, "Social Insurance" (shakai hoken) for employees at larger companies, and National Pension (kokumin nenkin) for workers at smaller companies and self-employed. In one of the biggest blunders by a modern government ever, employees covered under the National Pension system are "required" to make their pension payments...but since the money is not deducted by employers like Social Security is in the U.S. and there's no actual enforcement for non-payment, a full 41% of Japanese who should be making their pension payments are not. This is a crisis not only for the individuals in question but also for Japan at large. I hope they can come up with some good solutions.

Japan is trying to fix its National Pension system with attractive graphics like this.

Japan and the Disabled

Today is the start of the 2012 Summer Paralympics, where thousands of athletes will show off their athletic skills and try to win the gold. I'm often asked about how Japan fares when it comes to people with disabilities, so I thought I'd write about the 3.5 million people with physical handicaps in Japan (2.5% of the population). It's often said by Japanese that they are "behind" the U.S. and Europe socially, and the relatively high number of areas that aren't currently wheelchair-accessible in Japan are thought to reflect this...though as Japan is a nation that must cram half the population of the U.S. into a land area the size of Montana, it's sometimes considered shikata ga nai ("it can't be helped") that the country isn't as friendly to people with special needs as the U.S. Still, over the past decade things certainly have gotten more "barrier free" -- a made-in-Japan English term used to describe places free of obstacles for elderly or disabled people -- and these days most every train station I visit has elevators and accessible bathrooms. Japan does a lot for its disabled citizens, including assistance with education and employment and covering most of the costs for special vehicles and guide dogs for the blind. Near J-List there's a sports-and-rehabilitation facility that's free for people with disabilities (the rest of us pay $3 to use it). I used to teach English to wheelchair racing and basketball players there, and I hope that some of my former students are representing Japan in London!

Japanese athletes aim for gold at the Paralympics. Good luck!

In Stock Now: Necomimi Brain-Powered Cat Ears

We love to find fun cosplay products from Japan, and one of the most popular products we've ever carried has been the Necomimi Nuerowear cat ears, which work by picking up your brain waves, moving just like a cat's. The unit work great, sensing changes in your brain waves as well as circulation. At the summer's anime conventions we sold them, and whenever someone would approach the ecchi side of our booth we'd laugh as the ears shot straight up, just like a real cat. We recently restocked the U.S. version of the Necomimi Cat Ears, and today we got in the alternate cat ear coverings, which allow you customize your cat ears so they're special. So cute!

Switching Bodies in Kokoro Connect

One unique aspect of the Japanese language is the great difference between male and female speech, including gender-specific pronouns, e.g. the word for "I" is ore (oh-reh) for boys trying to appear more manly than they are, and atashi for feminine girls. It's a (minor) issue for foreigners studying the language, since it can be all too easy for a male to pick up the speech patterns of a girlfriend or female teacher, which can be embarrassing. The gap between female and male speech is explored in the new anime Kokoro Connect, about a school Cultural Research Club where the members inexplicably start to switch bodies, with male club members suddenly finding themselves in the bodies of female members and vice-versa. This leads to interesting scenes in which a female character speaks with the voice of the male character whose body she has switched with, using female inflection and pronouns despite the voice itself being male, as well as female characters using masculine speech when boys have swapped bodies with them. It's quite an interesting exploration of what makes us who we are...it's also more than a little sexy.

The new body-switching anime Kokoro Connect.

Japanese Memory Tricks

Quick, what's the square root of five? I have no idea, but my wife knows: it's 2.2360679. How about the Periodic Table of Elements? My wife can recite the first dozen or so. Do you know what year the Kamakura Bakufu, the first military government in Japan, was established? She tells me that it was the year 1192. This isn't because she's especially smart -- like all Japanese she has a tendency to be self-effacing and regularly calls herself baka, or stupid. No, the reason she knows these tidbits of knowledge is because of the way Japanese memorize some forms of information, by converting it into easily learned phrases, which is called goro-awase. Through a mechanism few gaijin can really understand, numbers are easily mapped to syllables in Japanese, for example the ee sound can stand for ichi (one), and yo or shi for the number four, and o for zero. To conjure up the square root of five in the example above, my wife needs only to remember a phrase that translates as, "at the base of Mt. Fuji, a parrot cries" (Fuji-sanroku ni ohmu naku). Back in the late 1980s, the U.S. was going through a period of serious Japan envy, when just about everything from the country seemed to be perfect, especially the much-vaunted education system, and at least a small reason the Japanese were beating us on international standardized tests was because of these little mnemonic tricks. Of course, breaking information down into easy-to-digest chunks or memorizing by association are great ways to study more effectively. If you're looking for some innovative ways to learn Japanese, be sure to view our study pages for some good ideas.

It's easy to memorize information when you do it in Japanese.

Japan [Hearts] France

Perceptions are always fun to explore. The other day I made a lunch date with Mrs. J-List at a nice French restaurant we like to go to occasionally. The Japanese are big fans of French-style formal dining, and every Japanese city is well served by several French restaurants with price points ranging from expensive to very expensive. As we ate, I amused myself by wondering how different Japan's stylized image of French dining differed from what French people actually eat. Japan's fascination with all things French might trace back to the popularity of The Rose of Versailles, the anime and manga about the French Revolution from the 1970s. In addition to Tokyo Tower, a 1:1 scale homage to the Eiffel Tower, Tokyo is filled with boulangeries offering all manner of French-style baked goods, restaurants with trained sommeliers for recommending the perfect wine, and pâtissiers who have apprenticed under master pastry chefs in Paris. A famous symbol of Japan's love of France is their embracing of a thick brown sauce called demi-glace, which is as popular in Japan as teriyaki is in the U.S. But when I asked some of my Twitter followers in France about it, several had never heard of the sauce and needed to use Wikipedia to find out what it was.

The Japanese have a slightly idealized image of France.

Buying a New Car in Japan

Over the weekend we got a new car, a Mazda CX-5. It's a fun and sporty small SUV that seemed to suit our needs better now that the kids are getting old enough to not want to do "family stuff" with us that much. Buying a car in Japan is naturally a little different than in the U.S. First of all, rather than buying from a third-party dealer, you nearly always go to an official car dealership operated by Toyota, Nissan, Mazda etc. (This direct-from-manufacturer model was emulated by GM's Saturn brand.) You never drive off with a car that day, but instead order it and wait three weeks while they make it in the factory...or in our case, three months, since the model we got was backlogged due to its popularity. (Fun fact: Mazda cars are made in Hiroshima, Japan.) While having to wait for your new car can be a bummer, I've come to appreciate the slow taste of anticipation quite a lot. One reason people buy new cars in Japan is a tax-and-car-inspection called sha-ken, which is required every two years and which costs around $600-1500 (this fee includes a road tax and two years of required auto insurance). It's unpleasant to pay this fee, so many Japanese use it as an excuse to look at new cars when the two year date rolls around, which helps keep the domestic Japanese economy humming.

Artist's concept of a car showroom in Japan (not really).

Kawaii Nendoroid Figures at J-List!

We love finding kawaii anime figures to post to the site, and none are cuter than the Nendoroid series by Good Smile Company. Featuring incredibly "Super Deformed" versions of your favorite characters, Nendoroid figures come with many extra parts allowing you to create awesome new poses and complete dioramas with your other figures. Click here to see the most popular Nendoroid figures on the site!

Taboo Subjects and the Japanese

J-List has a popular Facebook page as well as a Twitter feed, and I sometimes like to throw out questions to my readers and get their feedback. One user asked, "Do Japanese avoid topics like religion or politics when talking with friends?" which I thought I'd write about here. Naturally, there is an unwritten list of "taboo" topics that Japanese will avoid in social situations. Politics is one, and it's rare that a discussion about a person's affiliation with one political party or another will take place, though in the weeks before an election these rules are relaxed somewhat. The Japanese nearly never discuss a person's religion, considering it to be a violation of privacy, and the you generally have to know someone very well before you discover if there's a Christian or a member of such-and-such sect of Buddhism. (An exception might be members of Soka Gakkai, a modern group formerly affiliate with the Nichiren Buddhist School that can be considered an "evangelical" Buddhist religion, always eager to recruit new members.) Asking whether a person is of mixed ethnicity is also rarely done, unless the person is obviously haafu (half-Japanese, half-Western, like my kids). While commenting on a person's weight gain is a pretty major taboo in the U.S., the Japanese don't share this view, and will often make good-natured but indelicate statements about my weight when I see them.

It's rare for politics or religeon to be openly discussed in Japan.

The Japanese People and the English Language

The relationship between Japan and the English language is a long and complex one. Everyone studies the language for six years in junior high and high school, or up to ten if they take the language in university, but not everyone has the same level of real mastery. Some Japanese -- doctors, lawyers or politicians -- will often show off their higher education by peppering their speech with more English phrases, in the same way English speakers might throw in a French phrase here and there to spice things up, but these terms are far from universally understood. In the popular anime Sword Art Online, an (awesome) show about a virtual online fantasy game in which players become trapped in the game world, forced to play or die. In one scene, Asuna tells Kirito, "When to players get married inside the game, their inventory space is joined. It's a very platonic idea, but also romantic, too." Kirito has no idea what the word "platonic" means, so she has to explain it to him. This happens to my wife: after years of being married to me, her Japanese is filled with so many English words that others sometimes can't understand her easily.

There's a lot to like about Sword Art Online.

Traditional Stuff from Japan

J-List loves all aspects of Japan, from anime to manga to the traditional imagery of Kyoto, and we carry a lot of fun traditional products for you. We've got a lot of interesting Japanese footwear, to wooden geta sandals and the popular waraji woven grass sandals worn by samurai in the Edo Period, and even authentic tabi, the split-toed boots worn by ninjas, carpenters, and Mythbusters' Adam Savage when he wears his famous No Face costume. We also stock authentic kimonos, yukatas plus my favorite jinbei kimonos, great for summer festivals or using as pajamas. Click to see all our traditional clothing and footwear from Japan.

Gaishi-kei: Foreign Companies in Japan

One interesting word of Japanese is gaishi-kei, a word that means "foreign capital company" and which describes firms from America and Europe doing business in Japan, like Coca-Cola, P&G, Nestle, Michelin, Apple and AFLAC. Since these companies come from outside Japan, they represent a way of doing business that's uniquely un-Japanese, which often leads to interesting results in the marketplace, as the unifying Japanese concept of joshiki (lit. "common sense") don't apply to them. Gaishi-kei companies also offer opportunities to Japanese employees that are likely not available at their more straight-laced domestic counterparts, and Japanese who have an aptitude for foreign languages, who are good at thinking "out of the box" and/or who have the ambition to do interesting things with their careers are often attracted to these unique companies. When my wife and I went to Tokyo a couple weeks ago, we decided to stay in the Park Hyatt, the foreign-operated hotel featured in the film Lost in Translation. I was impressed with the hotel on several levels, including the level of service they provided and the linguistic ability of their staff. The hotel gets a large number of guests who are foreigners, and knowing that we generally love everything about Japan, they'd decorated the hotel with fascinating books on Japanese history, art and culture that we were free to pick up and read at any time. I was very impressed, and wanted to read everything. I don't think a Japanese-run hotel would have thought of doing something like that.

Foreign companies in Japan are interesting.

A Song of Ice, Fire and Nihongo

When learning Japanese, there are various yardsticks students will use to measure their progress. Are you able to converse normally with Japanese on everyday subjects? Can you "think" in Japanese without translating things to your native language first? Can you describe to the pizza delivery man how to get to your house without him realizing you're a foreigner? (That's not easy, trust me.) It's common for Japanese people to compliment gaijin on their Japanese ability, but serious students know that the real goal is to get to the point where they don't tell you nihongo ga jozu ("your Japanese is very good") but just shut and talk to you normally. The official measure of fluency is, of course, the Japanese Language Proficiency Test, the 5-level test that helps you increase your language skill year-by-year, with the highest level (N1) being required for entering a Japanese university. I recently discovered a level that's even higher than that, when I was watching the Game of Thrones series with my wife and she asked me to explain all the relationships in the series to her in Japanese...Baratheon, Lannister, Stark and Targaryen. I was ready to die just then.

Want a challenge? Try explaining Game of Thrones to someone in Japanese.

Coincidences and Japan

Today's interesting word of Japanese is guuzen (goo-zen), which means "coincidence." I don't know why, but there seems to be something about Japan that brings out the most unlikely coincidences, at least for me. On several occasions I've bumped into people I studied Japanese with at SDSU in Tokyo and Yokohama -- quite a feat, considering that I live far from these places myself. Before coming to Japan, I taught myself the language using the classic baseball manga Touch, and by an incredible coincidence the city I came to live in (Isesaki, Gunma) just happens to be the birthplace of the artist, Adachi Mitsuru...who also shares a birthday with my wife. Yulia Nova is a beautiful Russian model, and the photographer who publishes her works just happens to be in the same city as J-List, about 3 km away, again totally by chance. Yesterday I learned that the company that makes those incredibly cute cat "phone jack mascot" iPhone figures our customers love just happens to be based in our city...and actually within walking distance from J-List. So instead of being made in China, they're made in our little corner of Japan, something we thought was pretty cool.

The company that makes these is very near J-List, despite us living in a small rural city.

Cat Cafes

Speaking of cats, I've written before about how much the Japanese love them, regularly turning the furry felines into "Internet pet idols" and traveling for miles to visit famous cats like Tama the Stationmaster or the residents of the Cat Temple in Fukui Prefecture. If you really love cats, why not come to Japan and go to a "cat cafe"? It's a variation on the basic Internet cafe model where patrons with too much time on their hands pay a fee to relax in a pleasant space where they can drink coffee, access computers and read manga, but these establishments add lots of adorable cats to the mix. Visitors spend hours playing with the cats, which is a soothing experience the Japanese call "neko therapy." It's quite a popular concept, and there are almost 150 of these cat cafes in Japan now, with names like Neko Cafe Calm, Cat's Time and (my favorite) Curl Up Cafe.

Tthe Japanese really love cats. You have no idea.

Super Awesome Thing: Aselia the Eternal

J-List is heavily involved with licensing and translating Japanese visual novels, eroge and other rare and fun games from Japan for our customers all over the world. One game we love a lot is the Aselia the Eternal, a popular all-ages RPG with a fun gameplay system that features maps, real combat, and 40-50 hours of total gameplay to enjoy. For more information on this outstanding title, visit the Aselia the Eternal Official Site or click here to see the game's product page.