Educational Variety TV in Japan

Japanese TV never fails to entertain, or to provide me with good neta, a word which means the fish part of a piece of sushi, though in this case it refers to ideas for these little updates that I write. One aspect of Japanese TV I've been generally impressed with us the large number of popular shows that manage to offer educational value. The other day I was watching "Time Shock!," a Japanese quiz show in which teams of actors, commedians and other television personalities took turns sitting in a special chair while they were asked ten questions on subjects like geography, English or history. If they failed to answer at least six questions right, the chair would spin them around and upside-down at a very fast rate, emitting noise and steam. On the surface it may seem like another crazy Japanese "game show" (not really an accurate term, since no prizes are awarded and the participants are all professional entertainers), but I like the show because the questions are fascinating, and quite useful to my high school-age kids. A lot of these educational TV variety shows started appearing 6-7 years ago when Japan's policy of yutori kyoiku (lit. "Take it Easy" Education) failed miserably, leaving Japan dead last in academic competitions with other countries in Asia. Considering the percent of American television that apparently seeks to rot the brains of viewers (*cough* American Idol *cough*), a fun show that actually teaches something is a breath of fresh air.

If players can't answer the questions, their chair spins then around and around!

Kawaii or Beautiful?

You probably know that the Japanese word for "cute" is kawaii, an adjective that's been in use since the Heian Period (794-1185) to describe endearing features in women, babies and cats, assuming they had cats in Japan back then. The Japanese certainly are fans of all things cute, from panda-themed coffee cups to surprisingly adorable Rilakkuma personal products, and have a tradition of employing kawaii models and idols to deliver important public notices, like fire awareness campaigns ("Did you extinguish all flames and turn of all heaters before sleeping? These are the words that can save your family.") It's interesting to observe that while kawaii-ness is in the eye of the beholder -- for example, many Japanese find crooked teeth charming while others don't, and there's a slang word busu-kawaii that means "homely, but in a cute way" -- the more refined concept of "beauty" (bi in Japanese, pronounced "bee") is more universally defined. For a man or woman to achieve true beauty, the Japanese say, they must be tall, with a body "eight heads high" (that is, their head should take up 1/8th of their total frame). They should have a "high nose" (not flat like most Japanese), and larger eyes with two creases in the eyelid (futae), not the narrow single-creased eyes of most Japanese (hitoe).

Former Morning Musume member Erina Mano reminds you to turn off all flames before bed.

Autumn in Japan 2012

Saturday marks the official start of autumn, which is a holiday in Japan, though it'll be observed two days later as part of the "Happy Monday" holiday initiative by the Japanese government (yes, it's really called that). Autumn is hands-down my favorite time of year here, thanks to the pleasant weather that makes going for a drive up Mt. Haruna so nice. Just as sakura (cherry blossoms) are the symbol of springtime, the beautiful leaves of the momiji (Japanese maple) represent autumn, and the crimson colors are really special to see as they change. Autumn is filled with unique cultural imagery, including viewing the full moon while eating a steaming sweet potato baked over hot stones and sipping sake. I'm not the only one who loves autumn: Japanese advertisers have a ball targeting consumers with advertisements reminding them to buy Kirin's season-limited Aki-Aji beer or consider a visit to Kyoto in its most beautiful season.

It's time for my annual "Damn, I wish I were in Kyoto now" post.

Cosplay Products from J-List!

Halloween is coming, and J-List just happens to have hundreds of fun anime cosplay and related products to help you have a great time this year. From Japanese eye patches and "socks glue" to the new Hatsune Miku face mask and brain-powered cat ears (which comes in U.S. and International versions), we've got some great items for you to browse. We also have authentic "Keep Out" tape which could come in handy for Persona 4 or Durarara cosplay. Click to see all our cosplay products, ranked by popularity!

Demonstrations in China: the View from Japan

This has certainly been a harrying week for violent protests. The Japanese government's purchase of the Senkaku Islands from their private owners, a move aimed at reducing extremist activity from both China and Japan, had the opposite effect as Chinese demonstrators ran amok, burning Japanese cars and smashing the windows of Japanese businesses in more than 100 cities. Although the destruction of property was very sad, it hasn't been without comedy, like the protester who defaced a Mercedes-Benz car thinking it was Mitsubishi, the mistaken attacks on "Japanese" businesses like McDonald's and Rolex, plus the "Japanese" Samsung factory that got burned down. (South Korea's Samsung encourages Chinese consumers to believe it's a Japanese company, advertising itself with images of Mt. Fuji to promote an image of quality, something it probably regrets now.) While the protesters were expressing anger at Japan's 1895 annexing of Senkaku/Diaoyu, China claims has been its territory since 1534, they were mostly harming their own countrymen, destroying Japanese cars owned by Chinese citizens and damaging businesses owned by Chinese shareholders. They were also doing a great deal of damage to relations with their neighbors (China has territorial disputes with most of its neighbors, who must be watching this week's developments nervously) as well as untold economic harm, just as its domestic economy is slowing down.

It's certainly been interesting to watch the drama unfold. While the Japanese news has covered the demonstrations, with various political commentators giving their opinions on the complex issues at play, most of the interesting news has only been available online. (Japan's free press is very quick to censor itself on various topics, leading many Japanese to turn to foreign news sources or the Internet to learn the whole story.) While Japanese are deeply concerned about the images they've been seeing, most expect things to return to some form of normalcy soon. ("It's just a festival they hold every few years," said one J-List staffer.) Always looking for an excuse to create new moe art, artists on Japan's 2ch BBS took riben guizi, a derogatory Chinese word meaning "Japanese devil" and made a cute character named Hinomoto Oniko (the Japanese reading of the same kanji characters). She's quite cute, and has become a popular Internet meme.

Severe anti-Japan protests in China; a protestor boasts online about the "Mitsubishi" logo he stole.

Japan's Post Office Adding Business Loans?

One theme I cover a lot is that capitalism in Japan doesn't work the way it does in other countries. For example, the free market here is rather "polite," with companies taking care to avoid targeting their competitors with cutthroat business practices. Panasonic's new line of televisions doesn't aim at knocking Sony's offerings out of the marketplace, and new Internet startups don't seek to destabilize existing businesses and benefit from the chaos that emerges. Another aspect of capitalism here is that the government -- national, prefectural and local -- involves itself with a lot of areas you'd expect the private sector to handle. Perhaps the best example of this is Japan Post, Japan's sprawling post office, which also operates as the world largest bank (they have $2.4 trillion in deposits) as well as a major seller of life insurance. These side businesses naturally bring it into competition with private banks and insurance companies, who loudly question why the government needs to be undercutting the private sector and taking away their business. Now Japan Post is planning on expanding to include business and housing loans, which has caused a new outcry from Japan's financial sector.

Japan Post draws fire for its expanding...services.

Anime Magazine Subscriptions from J-List

J-List has a popular revolving magazine subscription service which makes it easy for you to get the most popular anime, manga, fashion, racing and ecchi magazines sent to you each month. Japan's magazines are great, often giving readers rare omake (oh-mah-kay), which is Japanese for "free swag," like free posters, phone straps, figures and so on. Best of all, the subscriptions are month-to-month so you can cancel or change subscriptions at any time. Click to see our most popular Japanese magazine subscriptions now!

I Wish I Were in Kamakura Right Now

I get a lot of requests from people planning trips to Japan asking for places they should visit. For visits to the Kanto (Tokyo and Yokohama) area, one spot I always recommend is Kamakura, a charming city that's a 90 minute train ride away from Yokohama, great for taking a day trip. A picturesque city by the sea with a very long history, it hosts many temples and shrines, the most famous being the Tsurugaoka Hachimangu Shrine founded in 1063. Old stuff like this always floors me as an American, since nothing in the U.S. built by Europeans is half that old. Kamakura is most famous for the giant bronze statue of Buddha, the second largest in Japan, and this alone would make the city worth a trip even if it weren't one of the prettiest places in the country to visit. Kamakura is also home to one of the most famous train lines in Japan, the Enoshima Electric Railway (nicknamed "Enoden"), which has been in operation since 1900 and which is beloved by Japan's many train otaku, who come from miles away ride on it. (Watch the yuri anime Aoi Hana to see more of the beautiful Kamakura area and Enoden train line.)

The Great Buddha of Kamakura, the 2nd largest in Japan.

Sarcasm in Japanese

The concept of humor is a complex one, and it's not uncommon for something that's funny in one language to fall flat in another. I remember watching Monty Python and the Holy Grail with my wife, trying to explain the concept of "British understatement" to her, and why it's amusing for a powerful mage who can throw fireballs to have a run-of-the-mill name like Tim instead of something more extravagant. As an American, I'll occasionally take a statement I might make in English -- perhaps channeling Homer Simpson's classic "Look at me! I'm making people happy! I'm the Magical Man from Happy-Land, in a gumdrop house on Lollipop Lane!" -- and say it in Japanese, invariably receiving blank stares in return. It's no surprise my jokes don't always go over in Japanese, as the concepts of sarcasm (a sharp verbal mocking), irony (expressing humor with unexpected words, usually meaning the opposite of what you really want to communicate), and cynicism (a bitter and pessimistic view of life) all generally translate to the same word in Japanese (hiniku).

Concepts like sarcasm work differently in Japanese.

Birthrate Blues

Japan's birthrate is among the lowest in the industrialized world, with around 1.27 babies born per female compared with 1.39, 1.59, 1.82 and 2.1 for Germany, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States. As the number of children decline, causing schools to be closed and repurposed into more general community centers, more and more Japanese seem to be turning to something furrier: dogs. The number of dogs kept as pets has really shot up over the past decade, and every time I go shopping on the weekends I see a dozen or so animals in carts going shopping with their owners, usually being treated with a ridiculous amount of love and pampering. Pet ownership is rising so fast that that as of 2007 the country's dog population officially surpassed the number of human children. While dogs are the preferred pet, with dachshunds, chihuahuas and shiba dogs among the most popular breeds, Japanese families love their cats, too. (We could never choose between the two, so we have both.) By the way, if you're a fan of kawaii dogs or cute cats, J-List has some cute products you might want to check out.

With fewer children, Japan turns to puppies.

New 2013 Calendars Up!

We can tell Christmas is getting nearer because we are getting in more new products than we can easily fit into each update -- but we'll find a way somehow! In addition to today's new anime and manga magazine, figure, bento and other products we've got another volley of gorgeous 2013 calendars, like the new Accel World calendar, cute calendars for fans of animals like The Dog, The Cat, The Rabbit and so on, plus kanji calendars for anyone interested in learning about the beautiful characters, and a healthy serving of Japan's most beautiful AV stars.

Non-English Foreign Words Used in Japan

One of the first things you learn as a foreigner in Japan is that people here will assume you're intimately familiar with every word written in katakana, the writing system used for expressing foreign words, just by being a native speaker of English. Although the majority of foreign-loan words do come from English, many are taken from other languages, like arubaito (part time job, from the German arbeit) and ankeeto (questionnaire, from the French enquete) and the blocks of concentrated curry powder called roux (also French). This assumption that every Western foreigner knows everything associated with America and Europe goes beyond words, too. I was asked by the PTA of the special English school my son used to attend if I thought the International Baccalaureate program would be a good base for students wishing to attend university in the U.S., but I'd never heard of this system as it's generally found in Europe, which scandalized them. What kind of foreigner was I? Then there was the time I was teaching English to a student, and she informed me that she was a "Soroptimist," a word I was totally unfamiliar with at the time. (I now know it's an international volunteer organization for women and girls in 125 countries.)

The German word arubaito describes any part-time employment.

Ritualized Suicide in Japan

Japan is a very different place from the West for several reasons. It's an island nation with a strong culture that was never colonized by outside forces, the only other country in the region besides Thailand able to achieve this, and the 220 year period when the country was completely closed off from the outside world (the Sakoku or "Chained Country" Period) helped its culture grow like plants in a greenhouse. One unique aspect of Japan has always been its somewhat romantic views on suicide, like shinju (ritualized lovers' suicide) or the ceremony of seppuku (aka harakiri), the ritual self-disembowelment that was an important part of Japan's strict code of Bushido. The most famous example of this in Japanese history is the story of the 47 Ronin, when 47 masterless samurai plotted for two years to kill the lord who had been responsible for the death of their master. Their plan finally succeeded, after which time they turned themselves into the shogunate for punishment, and were ordered to commit seppuku themselves. Their bones and ashes are interred at Senkakuji Temple in Tokyo, and are quite a tourist attraction.

The grave of the 47 Ronin at Senkakuji Temple, the most famous suppuku story in Japanese history.

Learning About Japanese Politeness, And Pizza

I often write about how Japanese people are the most polite in the world, which can be understood pretty well using three Japanese terms. First is the "golden rule" that you should never cause meiwaku (inconvenience, annoyance) to others, followed by the idea of enryo ("social hesitation," which I discussed last time), which is why Japanese people will usually not eat the last piece of pizza, insisting that they're full and that someone else should eat it. Finally there's gaman, meaning to stoically endure an unpleasant situation rather than confront it openly, which the Japanese consider to be a positive personality trait. Not everyone subscribes to the idea that unpleasantness should be silently tolerated, for example my Japanese wife. The other day I was having lunch with her, when we noticed that the air conditioning in the restaurant we were in was too cold. While everyone around us shivered but said nothing, she charged off to find a member of the restaurant staff -- but finding no one, she located the air conditioning controller and changed the setting herself.

Pizza and politeness go together in Japan.

Even More 2013 Calendars @ J-List

The weekend is finally here, and we've got a huge number of quality anime and manga-related products, plus...even more 2013 calendars posted for preorder. The new calendars are great, with new anime releases (IdolMaster, Pretty Cute), incredibly cute Japanese idols and actresses (Ai Shinozaki, Aya Ueto), calendars that let you see Japan in new ways (I love this year's Japanese Tea Garden calendar), and more. Click here to browse all the currently available 2013 calendars from Japan!

Understanding the Japanese Through Potato Chips

The Japanese, as I've often written, are a group-oriented people, and it's interesting to observe the subtle body language that goes back and forth when people get together. If you have a bag of potato chips that you want to offer to friends, the correct way to do it is to open it "party-biraki" style, placing the bag with the seal facing upwards then ripping the entire bag open so that the contents sit on the opened wrapping. This makes it convenient for everyone to grab some chips, but it also helps your guests knock down social barriers that keep them from relaxing and having fun. The Japanese have a tendency to avoid taking something that's offered to them due to enryo, translatable as restraint, reserve, or as a verb, to refrain from doing something, and it can be difficult to get people at a party to lighten up at first. By opening the bag so that the contents will go to waste if your guests don't eat, you give them an excuse to dig in.

Some people don't need help eating potato chips.

Understand Kanji Through "Moe" Anime

One thing about the Japanese written language is that there's a strange "duality" present, with many words having two valid ways to read them, which usually results in us poor gaijin embarrassing ourselves by using the wrong one. One reason for this is that kanji usually have two pronunciations, a Chinese reading (imported from China two thousand years ago) and a Japanese one. Fundamentally, the Japanese reading is used for simpler words written with single characters like 水 mizu (water), 空 sora (sky), or 人 hito (person), while the Chinese reading is used for more complex compound words like 水圧 suiatsu (water pressure), 空間 kuukan (a vacuum) and 人権 jinken (human rights). While this part is frankly not hard to master, the names of people are more complex, and family names like Miyagi or Yanai could be read as Miyashiro or Yauchi just as well -- the only way to know for sure is ask the person how their name is pronounced. I'm watching the currently-running anime Love, Elections and Chocolate, about love, elections and chocolate, and it features a main character named Ojima who's angry because everyone thinks his last name is Oshima, a perfectly valid alternate way to read the name.

Love, Elections, Chocolate and kanji.

My Time Travel Story

Yesterday I went with Ai, the J-List employee who keeps our site well stocked with bento boxes, traditional products from Kyoto and fun Japanese pens, to a product exhibition in Takasaki, a commercial city near J-List. It's put on twice a year by Eiwa, one of the distributors J-List buys from, to highlight the new products manufacturers are bringing out. I like going to these events because it's fun to browse the tables and see what interesting stuff we want to carry on J-List, like cute character goods involving cats or a pen that unfolds to become a handy pair of scissors, but I also like going because I feel like I'm riding a time machine back into the early Heisei period (1989~), when things were much simpler for Japan. The products on display at the exhibition are very "analog" and mostly untouched by the many changes brought about by the Internet, and they're distributed in a centralized Japanese model that's been in place for a century or more. None of the manufacturers creating the products sold by Eiwa are involved in social media like Facebook or Twitter, and it's fun to wander through the booths pretending I've "timeslipped" into the past. The best thing about the visiting the trade show is, they give us gifts as we leave, including delicious dorayaki (essentially a round "castella" cake with sweet anko beans inside) to bring back to the J-List staff.

I went browsing for Japanese pens for J-List and traveled through time.

Even More 2013 Calendars @ J-List

We're fully into 2013 calendar season right now, and guess what? We've got another huge volley of gorgeous calendars that you're sure to want on your wall all year long. We've got everything from the new Index calendar to Tiger & Bunny and Hatsune Miku, plus a Sword Art Online desktop calendar, plus fun characters and more. Click here to see all the new 2013 Japanese calendars you can preorder from Japan!

Emotional and Tragic Anime Series

One thing I love about anime is its ability to affect viewers emotionally, often with characters so tragic they're almost Shakespearean. In Madoka Magika, the dark and "grown up" magical girl anime, we can sense that forces closing in on poor Miki Sayaka which result in her eventual downfall, and in the AnoHana anime (aka "We Still Don't Know the Name of the Flower We Saw on That Day") the character of Menma is very moving indeed. One series I like a lot is She, The Ultimate Weapon (Saikano), about a girl who's asked to use her esper powers to defend Japan in a great war...but she keeps growing more and more powerful, until she's able to crack the Earth in two, though all she wants to do is be with her boyfriend Shuuji. If you like your anime happy and cheerful, be wary of Sword Art Online, which has some amazing (and sad) plot twists, as does the outstanding Steins;Gate, which features some very emotional scenes as Okabe timeslips again and again in an effort to save his childhood friend Mayuri, fated to die no matter what he does. The list of highly emotional anime series goes on -- I could add Clannad After Story and Air, but I'd need to get out a tissue box. So, who are your favorite tragic anime characters?

One of the most emotional series I've seen is Air, the story of... *sob*