Greetings from Anime Expo 2013!

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Abe-san's Erection Success

Japan's upper house election concluded safely last week, and it resulted in a strong win for prime minister Shinzo Abe and his pro-business, conservative and ironically-named Liberal Democrat Party (LDP), an outcome that was being hailed as a good move for for political stability and the continuation of the LDP's "Abenomics" reforms. While Japan is a modern democracy that functions well in general, there are certain challenges that seem unique to the country. One big problem is the plethora of political parties, a total of 12 large and small parties which must by law be granted equal time for debating national issues. Most positions are widely duplicated among the various minor parties, like the Social Democratic Party or the People's Life Party of parties like Green Wind, yet they almost never combine forces to try to push a policy through. Another problem is that there are actually too many elections in Japan, and it seems that 2-3 times a year everyone is stopping what they're doing to campaign, which means driving around in an annoying loudspeaker car asking for everyone's support. Hopefully the strong win by Mr. Abe means he has a free hand to bring real reforms to Japan.

Abe's mentor is Taro Aso, the former otaku Prime Minister. Which makes us happy.

Japanese People I Have Met

I went to Japan in 1991, happy to finally put all the Japanese I'd studied at SDSU to some use and sure I'd be there "about a year or so" (ha-ha). While running J-List since 1996 has been an amazing experience, I also enjoyed the years before that when I was a simple ESL teacher. One good thing about teaching English is, you tend to meet a lot of different people each year, and I taught everyone, from children who were learning how to introduce themselves in English (and moreover, how to not fear the language) to a few outstanding high school age students who I was able to steer to more serious study in university, and even some interesting elderly students, like the wife of the former president of the Sapporo Ramen Company, who lived in a house nicer than a temple in Kyoto. Then there was this cool old barber who used to cut my hair. He was 85 years old, and liked to tell me stories of the "old days" during the Allied Occupation of Japan, when kids would run up to GIs and ask for chocolate and chewing gum. He loved talking to me, no doubt because no one else wanted to hear about life back then.

I had a cool old guy as my barber who told me about the old days.

Buddhist Altars and Grave Sales in Japan

Last time I talked about some of the more famous superstitions one encounters in Japan. Quite a few of these are related to funerals, for example, don't sleep with your head pointed north (called 北枕 kita-makura or "north pillow") as this is done with bodies the night before cremation, don't pass food from chopstick to chopstick (known as 渡り箸 watari-bashi), as the final stage of a funeral is when family members remove the bones of their loved ones and pass them to each other with large chopstick-like tongs, and so on. It's not uncommon for the first impression of foreigners who have just arrived in Japan to be about "death," and this is reinforced when you go for a drive through any Japanese city and come across a 仏壇屋 butsudan-ya or a shop selling Buddhist altars and gravestones. (One toy store I used to frequent went out of business and was taken over by a grave-and-Buddhist-altar store, which seemed quite ominous to me.) One of the most ironic things about living in Japan, from my point of view as an outside observer, is opening the newspaper and finding a large glossy insert advertising a big sale on these products. "It's the Buddhist altar and gravestone sales event of the season this weekend -- everything must go!"

One of the most bizarre sights, a "sale" on gravestones.

Yumina the Ethereal has Golden Master!

J-List has been involved with licensing and translated great eroge and visual novels as well as full RPGs. One game we've been hard at work on for several years is Yumina the Ethereal, one of the most involved and fantastic RPGs ever released in English. Created by the staff that created Aselia the Eternal, the quality is incredibly high. We're happy to report that the game has gone "Master Up" (e.g. Golden Master), and should be shipping within a few weeks. Preorder now if you haven't yet!

New Anime Glasses from J-List!

Then we've got more great news: new J-List Anime Glasses designs for 2013, which are free with any purchase! When we brought out the first set of fun cardboard glasses two years ago, our customers loved them, and now we've got a whole new set of glasses for you with awesome new designs. You'll receive one random set of anime glasses with each order (either shipping from the U.S. or Japan), while supplies last of course. (We'll also give you a free pair with any purchase at Anime Expo.)

* Do not pilot giant robots while wearing J-List anime glasses.

J-List is Going to Anime Expo!!

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Japanese Superstitions and "Youkai" Magical Creatures

One thing you learn about the Japanese people pretty quickly is that they can be quite superstitious, believing that if you cut your fingernails at night you won't be able to be with your parents when they die, or that if you sneeze twice, it means someone is gossiping about you, or that you should never write a person's name in red ink or they'll die, etc. Even after 20+ years in Japan, I still run into this in my daily life: if I should happen to whistle in the evening my wife will plead with me to stop, lest I summon snakes into the house. While sprinkling salt over your body when returning from a funeral, lest the spirits of the dead enter your home and dwell there, is all very harmless, there are a few "really big" Japanese superstitions. One is yakudoshi, the "unlucky year" that's said to be the age of 33 for women and 42 for men, and nearly all Japanese will avoid doing things like getting married or starting construction on a house during these years lest disaster strike. Another big one is Hinoeuma, an odd belief that girls born in the Year of the Fire Horse (the last one was in 1966, and the next one is 2026) will be headstrong and unable to find husbands, and the Japanese birth rate always takes a big dive during these years.

One fun aspect of Japan's tradition of superstition are 妖怪 youkai (yoh-kai), a pantheon of traditional Japanese "folk spirits," some of which have existed since the Edo Period. I say "spirits," though ghosts, demons, monsters and fairies might be just as accurate a translation, as the term is rather fluid. Here are some of the more famous youkai creatures:

• テケテケ Teke Teke, the horrific upper torso of a girl whose body was cut in two, who roams the Japanese countryside cutting people in half to get revenge.
• 雪女 Yuki Onna, a female ghost who appears in snowstorms to freeze travelers as she searches for her lover.
• トイレの花子さん Toire no Hanako-san or Hanako of the Toilet, said to be the ghost of a girl who died because she didn't hear the air raid sirens during a bombing in WWII. If you knock three times on the farthest door of the girl's bathroom on the third floor of any school and ask, "Hanako-san, are you there?" she will answer you.
• 口避け女 Kuchi-sake Onna, the monstrous spirit of a woman whose mouth was cut from ear-to-ear. Also the universal nickname of Julia Roberts in Japan.

Many of these spirits clearly came about from parents wanting to scare children into being good, like 亜要 Akaname, a foul monster who comes to lick bathtubs that haven't been scrubbed properly, or 九十九神 Tsukumogami, good spirits which reside in any object that has been used for 100 years, which teaches children to value their possessions. These youkai folk spirits are popular in Japanese pop culture and crop up all the time in anime and games, including Touhou, Inu x Boku and GeGeGe no Kitaro.

(If you want to learn more about these magical Japanese creatures, we've got the Youkai Encyclopedias in stock now.)

Youkai, the magical "folk spirits" of ancient Japan.

Toshiba "Gaijin" Commercial

Well, my trip to the middle of America and back is finally done. I managed to put 3200 miles (5150 km) on my 2002 Miata, the distance from San Diego to Maine, and I got to see some of the most beautiful parts of the U.S. Now that I've rested, I'm fully ready for all the fun we're going to have at Anime Expo this week!

Toshiba got some unwanted buzz this weekend when a commercial for its SuiPanDa, a home bakery machine that can bake both traditional bread from flour as well as "rice bread" using white rice, caught the eye of bloggers. The commercial was interesting because it featured a Japanese woman in a blonde wig with a fake nose (the Japanese perceive the noses of foreigners to be especially large, even when they're not) speaking outrageously accented Japanese. While some are calling the commercial racist (and Toshiba has removed the video from its website and YouTube), occasional TV commercials poking harmless fun at Westerners are just another aspect of living in Japan, and I rather like them because of what they teach us about the Japanese. In this commercial, the cultural connection of "foreigners = bread" is an interesting concept, and many Japanese do imagine that Westerners eat a big basket of bread with every meal, as the Japanese do with white rice. The girl speaks in a hilarious "gaijin" accent, essentially using the overly-emotional inflection of English while speaking Japanese, and saying phrases like "Oh no!" which foreigners are famous for. While people who want to be offended by this will be, it's also true that the performance was spot-on -- we really do talk like that. So, what do you think about Japan's stereotypes of foreigners?

An amusing look at Westerners through the Japanese.

The Mechanics of Humility in Japan

Last time I talked about how 謙遜 (ken-sohn, with a long vowel on the end), meaning humility, is considered an important quality for people to have, and group dynamics depend on it, whether members in a university circle (club) or co-workers in a company. Essentially, this just means people will generally be self-effacing and avoid boasting in social situations. One thing about humility: in keeping with the uchi/soto (in-group/out-group) system that pervades Japanese thinking, humility extends to members of your own group (your family, company etc.) when you're talking with others (members of another group). A good example of this is Japanese middle-aged women who will praise the studiousness of their neighbor's children when talking with other mothers while pointing out how baka (stupid) their own children or grandchildren are, reading manga all day instead of studying. I once heard my mother-in-law doing this, talking negatively about my son to other ladies in the neighborhood for reasons of self-effacing politeness, and I took her to task over it. We don't need that kind of negativity in our house.

I looked for an image of a grandmother to put here. I found this.

Foreign Loan Words in Japanese

One interesting aspect of Japan is the many ways its language has changed since the 1868 Meiji Restoration, which abolished 265 years of rule by the Tokugawa Shoguns and "restored" power to the Emperor, allowing Japan to become a Western-style Constitutional Monarchy. During the Meiji Period foreign loan words like 珈琲 ko-hi (coffee) were introduced, archaic enough to have kanji assigned to them; then came the Allied Occupation, when words like ドンマイ don'mai and オーライ oh-rai, Japanese approximations of "don't mind" (nevermind) and "all right," entered the lexicon; and today, hundreds of English words related to computers, politics, fashion and more are imported every year. Because of this, virtually any Japanese over the age of 50 feels stress at encountering English words they aren't familiar with, and there are actually katakana dictionaries to help these people learn what "manifesto" or "innovation" or "nothing venture, nothing win!" mean. Now a disgruntled viewer has sued NHK, Japan's clone of the BBC and presumably the last bastion of "proper" Japanese. The individual, who is 71 years old, got tired of hearing words like "compliance" and "initiative" and "globalization" in katakana English in news broadcasts, and is suing for $14,000 dollars in damages.

Japanese get stressed when encountering too many foreign words.

Peter's Trip 2013 Update

I'm on the final leg of my pre-Anime Expo trip around the U.S., and finally headed towards home. After visiting Mt. Rushmore (or "Rushmore" as the locals call it) and the old west town of Deadwood, I stayed in a place called Hot Springs, South Dakota, no doubt drawn there by my long time in Japan. (The hot springs turned out to be a river made slightly warm by underground springs, but I was warned, "Be careful if you go in, there are leeches.") Now I'm in Colorado, drawn to the state's image of cool, frosty mountains...so naturally they're having the worst heat wave in 100 years or something. I'm staying at the 104-year-old Stanley Hotel, the original inspiration for The Shining, and when I'm done with this update I'll be exploring the place to see if I can find any of the ghosts that are supposed to be hanging around the hotel.

My trip around the U.S. continues. Now in Colorado!

Cool Products Thursday, June 27, 2013

Great news: the new all-ages visual novel If My Heart Had Wings (Japanese title この大空に翼を広げて Kono Oozora ni Tsubasa o Hirogete) is shipping Friday! It's a great story about youth, love, and dreams of flying in the wide blue sky, with absolutely stunning artwork with higher resultion than ever seen before in a similar game!

Humble Hokkaido

One thing textbooks don't tell you about becoming bilingual in a language is the way you'll naturally come to internalize the values of the language group over time. This is why I'll tend to take Japan's side when blogging about, say, the historical background of the island disputes with South Korea and China, though I always do my best to research the issue and present the other side's viewpoint as well. Two things that are important to the Japanese are 謙遜 ken-son or personal humility, and 調和 cho-wa, which means getting along harmoniously with others, and I learned a hard lesson related to these concepts back when I was in university at SDSU. The city of Hakodate, at the southernmost tip of Hokkaido, wanted to hire eight native speakers to teach English and act as goodwill ambassadors during city events for two months, and I jumped at the chance to go to Japan for free. I'd studied Japanese for two years at that point, and thanks to learning with manga and translating Japanese songs I could speak the language pretty well...although I had not yet internalized the important concepts above. When it came time to select who would go, the interviewer was impressed with my language skills, but he sensed my pride and headstrong nature, and I wasn't one of the candidates chosen. Not being picked for the program was a bitter pill for me back then, but it introduced me to the concepts of ken-son and cho-wa, as well as 反省 hansei, which means to reflect on your own shortcomings rather than blame others when something goes wrong. Looking back, I'm really glad I was able to learn that lesson.

I lost the chance to go to Hokkaido.

Japan Loves Awards

I happened to see that popular actress Ayame Gouriki, famous for her energetic nature and boyish short-cut hair, was awarded this year's "E-Line Beautiful" award by the Japan Association of Adult Orthodontics, which essentially means she got an award for having an extremely beautiful face when viewed in profile. If you think this is a pretty silly thing to give an award for, you're right: it's just one of dozens of awards given in Japan for purely PR purposes. There's the Nail Queen Award for the woman with the most beautiful fingernails, one for models with beautiful legs, the Nice Couple Award for the most congenial married couple, plus the Japan Megane Best Dresser Award, given to the most fashionable female who wears glasses. There are hundreds of literary awards, too, so many in fact that only a few of them are worth receiving. Virtually every publishing company has established a line of "prestigious" awards to dole out to writers each year, though the really important award for Japanese literature is the Akutagawa Award, or the Tezuka Award for manga. There's even a local version of the Academy Awards called...the Japan Academy Awards, where Japanese actors and directors win awards for Japanese films made during the year.

Ayame-chan won an award for having a beautiful profile.

Peter's USA Trip, Part 2

My pre-convention season trip across the U.S. continues, having taken me from Utah to the other side of Wyoming, where I visited the beautiful Devil's Tower National Monument, which has been on my bucket list since seeing Close Encounters of the third Kind (Japanese title: 未知との遭遇 michi to no souguu or "Encounter With the Unknown") as a child. It was a breathtaking sight, though I couldn't find any aliens no matter how hard I looked. My Japanese wife and I are quite strange: she's always been more fascinated by the U.S. than her home country of Japan, while I've been more focused on Japan. As a result, I've been all over Japan but my wife has only been to a few places like Kyoto and Osaka, and on the flipside, she's visited several parts of the U.S. (Florida, Wisconsin, New England, Mt. Rushmore) that I'd never been to. So I'm happy to be catching up with her just a little on this trip.

There were no aliens. Apparently Haruhi hasn't summoned them yet.

J-List Anime Figure Sale Almost Ended

Just a note, our 2x points sale on all anime figures will be ending soon. The sale covers all prepainted figures, the amazing super-posable Figma and Revoltech action figures, the super-kawaii Nendoroid line, plus "cast off" (naughty) figures. Preorder figures are also included, so preorder the figures you want now! Click to browse all anime figures, ranked in order of awesomeness by our intelligent, attractive customers!

Japanese Tourists Abroad

I once saw an interesting thread on Japan's ubiquitous BBS 2ch entitled, "Things Japanese people do abroad that mark them as Japanese," and I thought I'd talk about this topic. The list included things like, being extremely detailed about giving exact change or stressing about leaving an accurate 15% tip, or waiting quietly for the rear door of a taxi to open automatically for you. (Taxis in Japan have a hydraulic lever that allows the door to open automatically.) Back in my university days you could go assume that a person wearing highly evolved fashions with Engrish phrases like "I feel happiness when I eat a potato" was Japanese, but the fashion landscape has changed a lot since the 80s, and most really strange English comes from China these days. Of course the body language of Japanese people is somewhat unique, from indicating "me?" by pointing at the nose instead of the chest, or making that ubiquitous "peace" sign (though that's become quite accepted all around Asia by now). Another way to tell Japanese people from other Asians is to listen to their speech. Japanese is (thankfully) not a tonal language language at all, unlike Mandarin or Cantonese (which have 4-9 different ways to pitch a given syllable). If the speech sounds "flat" to your ear then it might be Japanese.

There are some interesting things Japanese tourists do when travelling.

Abenomics and Japan's Women

One of the stated goals of Prime Minister Abe's "Abenomics" is to make sweeping changes that empower Japan's women to help revitalize the economy, though this isn't going to be an easy job. Japan ranks 101 out of 135 countries on the Global Gender Gap Report, which compares the economic and political participation, education attainment and health and longevity. This is a number I've taken issue with before because it places Japan only slightly ahead of Cambodia (103), India (105), and the UAE (107) and implies that Japanese women are unable to live their lives as they choose, which couldn't be farther from the truth. The situation of women in Japan is a complex one, and frankly not one easily understood by self-important Scandinavians coming up with rankings that they can put themselves at the head of. While the list of problems that need to be addressed is long -- waiting lists for daycare, a lack of understanding in company environments when a female employee has to take a day off because of a sick child, a troublesome law that gives married women a tax incentive to earn less then $10,000 per year, which obviously limits the potential she can achieve -- the idea that Japan's women are being actively repressed just because 50.0% of them aren't running for political office is not an accurate view of "life on the ground." One aspect of the country that was hard for me to comprehend was the way many Japanese women (more out in Gunma where J-List is located, fewer in Tokyo) actively want to be housewives and raise their children at home, often quitting careers they prepared for for many years before returning to work when the kids are older. While there is still plenty to fix in male-dominated Japan, the fact that women usually have this option available to them is a huge social achievement in my book.

Some thoughts on Japanese women and "Abenomics."

Utah, the Harem State

Since I've got another couple weeks before I get busy with the anime conventions, I decided to throw a suitcase into my 2002 Miata convertible and head out for a part of the U.S. I've not been to yet, starting with Utah. I've had a great time so far, spending the weekend hiking and riding horses through Zion Canyon National Park and taking pictures of breathtakingly beautiful mountains. I'm not used to experiencing culture shock in my own country, but I've encountered some in this somewhat unique U.S. state: last night I was in a pizza restaurant, mildly disappointed that the restaurant didn't serve beer...while a family sitting next to me was miffed that the restaurant offered no caffeine-free drinks other than water. When I brought this up with my Twitter followers, a Utah-born Japanese person pointed out that she experienced a similar kind of culture shock while visiting Japan, so I guess it goes both ways. Utah residents seem to have a good sense of humor about things, such as the locally brewed beer called Polygamy Porter (motto: "Why have just one?") or a restaurant that sold an ice cream treat called Never On a Sundae.

I'm having lots of fun in Utah.