Job Interviews in Japan

Running a business in Japan naturally means I have to interview Japanese job applicants who want to work for J-List, and I often wonder if they're not freaked out by having a foreigner sit down across from them at the interview. Job interviews work somewhat differently in Japan compared to the rest of the world. Here, in lieu of a western resume or C.V. applicants write out a form called a 履歴書 rirekisho or "personal history form" which shows all school, work and other related information in a standardized format. They're handwritten, too, which helps us determine something about the neatness (or lack thereof) of applicants. While in the U.S. it's expected you'll exaggerate your skills a little, perhaps appearing more outgoing than you really are and padding your resume a bit, in Japan things couldn't be more different. A reserved, humble attitude is what you need during a Japanese-style job interview, too, and successful applicants will actually talk down their own past work achievements in ways that would be incomprehensible in the U.S. in an effort to show how harmoniously they will fit in with the organization.

An artist's concept of a job interview in Japan. May not reflect actual reality.

Admiral Perry is Popular in Japan, For Some Reason

This Saturday is the 160th anniversary of the arrival of Admiral Perry's famous "Black Ships" to Japan, an event that's almost without parallel in the history of the world. After the Tokugawa clan won the title of Shogun (supreme military ruler) at the beginning of the Edo Period (1603-1868), Japan grew fearful that it would eventually be colonized by the Western powers of the day, and took the extreme step of closing the country off to the outside world entirely, except for a trading post with the Dutch in Nagasaki. For 200 years no foreign influence was allowed in, and many aspects of Japan's culture that we appreciate today exist because of this unique period of history when Japan's culture could grow like plants in a greenhouse. In 1853 everything changed, when Admiral Perry sailed his ships into Yokosuka harbor and demanded that Japan open to trade with the United States. It was a deep shock to the Japanese, who slowly realized they had to deal with the West and begin the process of becoming a modern industrialized nation. Today Admiral Perry is a household name, and (this being Japan), you can buy cookies with his face on the box in port cities like Yokohama and Hakodate, Hokkaido.

160 years ago Admiral Perry sailed into Japan's hearts.

Meme Update from Japan: Attack on Titan

Ever since that dancing CG baby and "All Your Base Are Belong to Us," the Internet has run on memes, which are units of culture created and shared by people. (The term was originally coined by Richard Dawkins to describe how ideas spread and evolve through populations of humans in the same way that genes evolve biologically.) Of course, the memes that are popular in the West aren't going to be the same as the ones currently bouncing around in Japan. Japanese websites are not making Game of Thrones "Wedding Planning for Dummies" jokes, and American fan artists aren't generally aware of the "Gununu" anime face meme or that bizarre "Cicada Block" running gag. There are a few exceptions of course -- anything related to Vladimir Putin and horse masks is equally liable to become popular no matter which country you're in. Japan can be especially fickle when it comes to what is deemed worthy of meme-hood. One year it might be art involving the "gaijin 4-koma" joke, then famous Tokyo icons like the Shibuya 109 department store or the TAITO STATION game centers start showing up in the backgrounds of anime and games. The latest boom to take off in Japan is an homage to the popular anime Shingeki no Kyojin (English title: Attack on Titan) in which people recreate their favorite poses of humans attacking or being eaten by giants, through the miracle of forced perspective.

The newest meme from Japan, Titan Attacking!.

We Love Artbooks

We love all forms of 2D artbooks and stock hundreds of them on the site, including artbooks that will give you a nosebleed and books that will lift your soul. You can always find the most famous artists, from Nishieda to Kantoku to Shirow Masamune, and discover some great ones you didn't know about already. Browse the newest 2D artbooks now, or view them sorted by "awesomeness ranking" (as sorted by our customers).

Anime Exposes People to New Ideas

One reason I'm thankful to the rise of anime and Japanese pop culture is that it's exposed so many people around the world to new concepts, from the "vertical" nature of Japanese senpai/kohai (senior/junior in a school or organization) relations to some interesting gender-related surprises, thanks to the extensive Japanese tradition of stories involving males assuming female roles or vice-versa (traps and reverse traps). Appreciating the comedy and/or drama of mixed-up gender roles goes back very far, to the kabuki plays of the Edo Period in which extremely talented male actors would fill female roles, or the Takarazuka Revue, the all-female troupe that's put on a variety of shows with women expertly playing male roles since 1913. Anime is rife with stories that break gender rules, from the classic Rose of Versailles, which follows Lady Oscar, raised as a boy, throughout the events of the French Revolution, or the Rumiko Takahashi classic Ranma 1/2, about a boy cursed to change into a girl whenever he gets wet, usually with hilarious results. Even the dating-sim games we've been involved with have been known to bend a gender or two, such as the X-Change and Yin-Yang series.

Anime opens people to a lot of new ideas.

Raising Bilingual Kids

Even before my wife and I became parents, we knew we wanted to give our children the gift of bilingualism. I've always been fascinated with how the brain adapts to thinking in two languages, and I've enjoyed watching the process in my kids as they grew up. Learning a language through immersion is the best way to attain a language, of course: my kids would start speaking English within hours of interacting with my American family or with kids they played with in the U.S. back when they were young. However, learning a new language in this unstructured way can lead to a kind of "raw" bilingualism in which children can function in both languages but lack the synaptic links between words, so eventually they had to study both languages properly just like the rest of us. How a person learns a language is heavily dependent on their personality, and my son and daughter went about the process in very different ways, with my son "pre-thinking" what he was going to say to avoid making mistakes and my daughter just opening her mouth to speak, nevermind what errors she might make. Sometimes my kids would have "English wars" which were amusing to watch. My daughter (who was great at natural pronunciation) would tease her brother by asking if he could pronounce difficult words like "perfect" "girl" "jewelry" and "it's the rich aroma and full body of Excella that wakes the morning all around the world" (from a Meg Ryan Nescafé commercial) without a katakana accent, which was harder for him. He would counter by asking if she knew what "condensation" meant (a word he picked up in his science class), and of course she had no idea.

As parents, we've helped our kids grow up bilingually.

Exploring Asian Culture Through San Diego

Every large city has its Asian district, and in San Diego it's located along Convoy Avenue in the Kearny Mesa region of the city. I like to drive through this area and take in the incredible mix of Asian businesses that assault my vision from all sides: foot massage parlors, noodle shops, more Korean BBQ restaurants than you can shake a stick at plus plenty of sushi restaurants run by Koreans, Chinese and, on extremely rare occasions, an actual Japanese person. I've even got a favorite frozen yogurt shop run by a Vietnamese lady where they play the latest Cantonese pop hits, which is quite random and enjoyable. It's funny to observe the way all aspects of Asian culture become blended together, until no one is exactly sure whether the food they're eating is a Korean take on Japanese cuisine or a Taiwanese variation of "American" Chinese, which is completely different from anything you'll find in China, of course. While we in the West tend to think of our own national cultures as being unique and distinct from each other -- British culture is different from the U.S., Italy is completely unlike Germany -- seen from an Asian country, our respective languages and cultures blend together into one unrecognizable mass just like the local Asian culture does in San Diego.

I like exploring Asian culture in San Diego.

J-List's Figure Sale Continues

Remember: this month we're giving 2x points off all awesome anime figures, including prepainted figures, the amazing super-posable Figma and Revoltech action figures, the super-kawaii Nendoroid line, plus "cast off" (naughty) figures. Click to browse all anime figures, ranked in order of awesomeness by our intelligent, attractive customers!

The Grammar Behind "Fruits Basket"

A few weeks ago I went with my son to an onsen hot spring, which is a rarity these days since he's getting too old to do boring stuff with his dad. While we were in the bath area, he asked me to get him a "buckets," using the plural form of the English word, and so I brought him two of the little buckets used for splashing water on yourself, knowing of course that he only wanted one. For phonetic reasons, some English words are imported into Japanese in their plural forms, including words like shirt, suit, swimsuit, peanut, fruit and sport. These words are always used with the 's' sound on the end (e.g. shirts, suits, swimsuits, peanuts, etc.), even if you're talking about just one of the item. In Japanese, one refers to a suitcase as a "suitscase," and it takes the brain a few months to get over the weirdness of this. Learning to ask for a "peanuts butter sandwich" or some "Minutes Maid Orange Juice" are similar, as is the English word "bucket," which always appears as "buckets" in Japanese. There seem to be three reasons for some English words being mapped to their plural forms like this. First is the rather convenient lack of singular/plural in Japanese grammar: saying 花が奇麗 hana ga kirei could mean either "the flower is pretty" or "the flowers are pretty" depending on how many flowers you happen to discussing, and as a result, the Japanese don't sweat the plural/singular state of a word any more Americans consider the gender of nouns in Spanish when they speak English. Another reason is that the softer tsu ending on the plural forms is easier for Japanese to pronounce than a hard 't' consonant sound. Finally, converting some words to their plural forms also avoids the dreaded L/R confusion that can be a problem in the language. Because "fruit" and "flute" would have the exact same pronunciation when rendered in katakana, the musical instrument became フルート furuuto and the stuff you eat became フリーツ furuutsu. So now you know where Fruits Basket gets its rather unique name from.

I had a friend who would put his hands over his ears every time he heard Fruits Basket.

Changes in Japan for Gaijin

I saw on online discussion board that asked ex-pats living in Japan whether life there has changed for the better since they arrived, and my answer is a resounding yes. The current age of smartphones and the Internet aside, there have been many serious improvements for gaijin living in Japan since I arrived back in 1991, from the ability to travel around Tokyo without being exposed to endless cigarette smoke to the general flow of useful innovations from the outside world that have improved the lives of people in various ways. Japan has a normal capitalist economy in which companies compete to bring the best products to market, but many industries from books to music CDs had special rules allowing manufacturers to set prices artificially, resulting in higher profits in the short term but companies that were slow to change when the Internet came knocking a few years later. One area that has improved a lot has been banking: back in the day ATMs used to close at 7 pm Monday through Saturday and were closed all day Sunday...and all holidays, meaning if you forget to get cash out before Golden Week you had to starve. Attitudes inside Japan have improved, too: twenty years ago, it would have been highly irregular for company with a female president and an American vice president to exist, but nowadays it's not surprising at all.

Japan has changed much in 20 years.

Use of Alternate History in Anime: Samurai Girls

Like other forms of media, there are many types of stories to be found in anime, including love comedy, various kinds of romance story (love triangles, yuri, yaoi), and of course plenty of hard-core sci-fi action. There's also a healthy traditional of "alternate history" to be found in anime, such as The Ambition of Oda Nobuna, classical Japanese history remixed with cute moe girls; Koihime Musou, a reworking of the Chinese novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms in eroge form; Strike Witches, World War II-era magical girls (?) fighting aliens with the power of pantsu; and Muv-Luv, in which humans reach the moon in 1967 only to find a murderous race of aliens who then invade Earth over several decades. I recently started watching Hyakka Ryouran: Samurai Bride, the sequel to the fan service-laden Samurai Girls. The story is set in a steam-punk -- or more accurately, "Edo-punk" -- world in which the ruling Tokugawa Shogunate never relinquished power and the era of Bushido never ended. The show itself can be summed up as Queen's Blade with samurai swords and lots of ecchi jokes, but the stylized world they create is surprisingly deep and interesting. Our upcoming Nitroplus eroge Hanachirasu is another example of alternate history, set in a world in which the atomic bomb was not completed in time to force Japan to surrender, resulting in Kyushu and Hokkaido being occupied by the U.S. and the Soviet Union permanently. When guns are banned from Tokyo, mega-corporations are forced to hire sword-wielding mercenaries to protect their interests.

Samurai Bride is an alternate world of sword-wielding girls.

New Sale at J-List! 2x J-List Points on All Figures!

It's a new month, and a new sale from J-List! This month we're giving 2x points off all awesome anime figures, including prepainted figures, the amazing super-posable Figma and Revoltech action figures, the super-kawaii Nendoroid line, plus "cast off" (naughty) figures. Click to browse all anime figures, ranked in order of awesomeness by our intelligent, attractive customers!

The Japanese Passenger on the Titanic

It's fun to delve into history and see what interesting people you can find, like Nakahama "John" Manjiro, the first Japanese to visit the U.S. back in 1841, or six Christian samurai who decided to settle permanently in Spain in 1617, which has blossomed to 700 descendants today. Then there's the lone Japanese passenger on the Titanic. Masabumi Hosono was an employee of the Japanese Transportation Ministry sent to Russia to study railroads, and after finishing his assignment, he prepared to cross the Atlantic on the Titanic. When the ship had its fateful collision with an iceberg at 11:40 pm on April 14, Mr. Hosono was asleep, and didn't wake until someone knocked on the door of his second-class cabin to tell him to put his life-vest on. He eventually made his way to the lifeboats and, hearing an announcement that there was room in lifeboat no. 10, he jumped in. His life was saved, but he might have wished it hadn't been: he was attacked in the Japanese press for living when so many others had died, and fired from his job at the ministry, and some even called for him to commit suicide to atone for his dishonorable act. If he'd died, the world of music would have been less bright: he was the grandfather of Haruomi Hosono, one of the founding members of the influential band YMO, which helped bring Ryuichi Sakamoto to the world stage in the 80s.

His failure to die on the Titanic caused his family decades of dishonor.

Foreigners Asking "Why?" About Japan

When a foreigner goes to Japan, especially for an extended period of time rather than a brief visit as a tourist, they usually start to ask why? about everything they see. Why do the Japanese love aloe flavored yogurt so much? Why do Hello Kitty melons sometimes cost thousands of dollars? Why is it bad luck to sleep with one's head pointed north, and how is it that the Japanese are the cleanest people on the planet yet when you go into a public restroom there's usually an old, gross cup by the sink, inviting you to take a drink of water? When confronted with these questions, Japanese often don't have a good answer, perhaps because these things have always been around them all their lives and are thus taken for granted, or perhaps (as I've been told by a Japanese friend), they don't think all that deeply about their own society. The confused feeling when a foreigner asks "why?" about some aspect of Japan is one the Japanese staff of J-List knows all too well, I'm afraid, since I often bounce the strangest questions off them when I'm researching these little updates I write.

Foreigners often ask "why?" about what they see in Japan.

When The Higurashi Cry, It's Hot

There are many powerful images of summer in Japan, including visiting the Tanabata festival while wearing a yukata, lightning fireworks with friends, enjoying かき氷 kaki-gohri (shave ice) or a bottle of ramune, or taking in the pleasant aroma of mosquito coils burning inside ceramic pig. But for me, nothing represents Japan's hot, humid summers like the endless drone of cicadas, which make their min-min-miiiiin sound outside my window all summer long. In Japanese the insects are known as semi, though they've got an alternate name which will be more familiar to anime fans: 日暮し higurashi, a somewhat romanticized name written with kanji that also mean "sunset." Unlike in the U.S., which faces a massive swarm of 17-year cicadas this summer, the Japanese versions of the bugs are there every year, happily providing background noise for summer.

Higurashi are a symbol of summer in Japan.

Cute Cats for your Phone

J-List loves to find cute products from Japan, like the awesome cute cats for your phone that have won our customers' hearts. The cats sit in your earphone jack and...do nothing at all, but he does it in such a cute way it's extremely charming. We posted some new cute cat toys for your phone today, cats that play with a ball of string (attached to a chain). Browse the newest iPhone and Android phone accessories from Japan now!

The More Japanese You Learn, the Less Girls will Like You

There are certain paradoxes you encounter when dealing with Japan. For example, we often think of the country as a streamlined high-tech land of the future, but in reality things are quite low-tech, like the NHK employee who comes around to manually pick up people's TV-watching fee each month rather than automating the process somehow. Japan is the most polite country in the world, where society's "golden rule" is to never cause 迷惑 meiwaku (inconvenience, trouble) to others...and yet, politicians and pro-Emperor nationalists regularly drive around with speaker cars shouting their loud slogans and annoying everyone. Another paradox I've noticed is the inverse relationship between how much Japanese a foreigner studies and how popular he is with a given member of the opposite sex. For various reasons, Japanese perceive foreigners to be a lot of "fun" and rarely expect us to be able to speak Japanese properly, let alone be capable of appreciating the Tale of Genji in its original 11th century manuscript form. When we do these things, they nod and smile and compliment us, but on some level they probably wish we could be more like the other gaijin are, perhaps belting out an Earth, Wind and Fire number at the karaoke machine while everyone claps instead of singing a sad enka song about the windswept Tsugaru Strait between Aomori and Hokkaido. A male who speaks a little Japanese might find he's more popular with some Japanese females than he might be back at home...but if he goes overboard and studies "too much" Japanese, well, some of those girls might be less attracted to him. On the other hand, my wife took an interest in me specifically because I was able to write the kanji for "rose" (薔薇 bara) on a napkin, which not even Japanese people can write. I'm sure she thought, a foreigner who can write a kanji like this must surely be someone worth getting to know better.

My theory certain explains this guy.

Phoenix Comicon Final Report

Well the Phoenix Comicon is over, and I'm back in San Diego. The show was a blast, and we had tons of fun. We learned that fans in Phoenix are very awesome and dedicated, and also that they're starved for shimapan, horse head masks, BL games and brain-powered Necomimi ears. Though we're old hands at doing these conventions by now, the Phoenix Comicon offered more surprises than most shows we've been to, such as the fire alarm that forced a temporary evacuation of the entire convention center, or the freak electrical problem we had with our trailer while driving back, which we had to patch with -- I swear I am not making this up -- some Tentacle Grape labels we happened to have with us. It was definitely a fun event, and we're happy to add it to our lineup of shows we regularly attend, the others being Anime Expo and the San Diego Comic-Con of course. (Sorry we can't get out to more conventions!)

More fun memories from Phoenix.

The Most Popular Products on J-List Today

I often like browsing all J-List products by product popularity ranking, to see which products our customers think are most awesome at the present moment in time. Usually there are sexy anime figures at the top of the list, or the latest English eroge release, or the newest bizarre Japanese snack treats -- usually random Japanese versions of products they are familiar with like Green Tea Oreos or Cheeseburger flavored Cheetos. Why not browse these products and see what we have in stock for you?

Fun Ways of Memorizing Japanese

That Steven Spielberg, he's really good at making movies -- you could even say he's "Jaws." In Japanese, the word for being skillful at something is 上手 joh-zu, which happens to be how the English movie title Jaws is pronounced, hence making a fun (?) little pun. Making word connections like this is one of the ways I helped myself learn the language -- I still remember doodling a little shark coming out of the water in my textbook next to this word -- and it's one way to help "trick" your brain into remembering new information. There are many other ways to learn with these mnemonic games. For example, you might memorize the word りんご ringo (apple) by picturing famous Beatle Ringo Starr eating an apple, and to learn the word 死ぬ shinu (to die), just memorize the sentence "She knew he was going to die." Having trouble remembering the word 揺らす yurasu (to shake)? Well, get out on the dance floor and shake yurasu! You can use these mind games to memorize kanji too, since 肉 niku ("meat") actually looks like a pair or ribs, and the kanji 古 furui ("old") looks like a little gravestone. You can even learn hiragana and katakana using these kinds of mind tricks.

Some unique ways of memorizing Japanese.