Four Kana Japanese Words

There's a category of four-syllable (or four kana) words used here that are so loaded with meaning they boggle the mind, and I found they were quite fun to study and use. First is せっかくsekkaku (seh-KAH-koo), which carries the implication of having gone to great trouble to do something for someone only to have them not appreciate your efforts. Another fun word is やっぱり yappari (yah-PAH-ree), which means "just as I thought" or "as I expected" or "Aha! I knew you'd be trying to peek into the girl's bath!" When you learn something that surprises you, you might use the phrase なるほど naruhodo, which can be translated as "wow, I didn't know that" or "I see your point," and in a TV drama, a police inspector might mutter this to themselves as a signal to viewers that he'd found another piece of a puzzle. Finally there's とにかく tonikaku (toh-nee-kah-koo), which just means "at any rate" "regardless of that fact" or just "anyway." When my bilingual son was growing up, he got confused and accidentally combined English and Japanese stems to create the hybrid word toni-way (tonikaku + anyway), which has been a running joke in our family ever since.

Here are some random Japanese phrases for you.

My Favorite Japanese Foods

I've heard that it's impossible to live in a country unless you truly enjoy the food there, and it's certainly true in my case -- I couldn't be happy in Japan if I didn't love eating here. Although some might imagine that the Japanese eat sashimi and sushi every day, in reality the diet here is quite varied, and many common foods aren't Japanese at all. One example is the honorary national food of Japan, curry rice, a thick curry stew eaten over steamed rice that was introduced by the British around 1860. Many foods that we consider "Chinese," like chow mein or fried rice, have intertwined with Japanese dishes for so long that the two are almost impossible to separate, but some foods do maintain a distinct Chinese feel to them, such as gyoza dumplings (aka "pot stickers"). One popular category of food in Japan is donburi, which is any food served over a large bowl of white rice, like 牛丼 gyudon (beef bowl) or 親子丼 oyakodon ("Parent-and-Child Bowl," or chicken and scrambled egg served over rice). One of my favorite dishes is Katsudon, a fried pork cutlet (katsu) served over a bowl of rice (don). Because katsu also means "to win" in Japanese, it's common for parents to serve this to their kids before a big test or sporting event to show their support.

Some of my favorite Japanese foods.

Stock Market Crash In the Sky, Laputa

Tonight one of my favorite films is going to be shown on Japanese TV: Hayao Miyazaki's classic Castle in the Sky Laputa, usually known in the West without the final word since la puta has an unflattering meaning in Spanish. My son and I will be watching, and will join the rest of Japan in tweeting the Spell of Destruction spoken by Sheeta and Pazu at the end of the film -- "Barus!" -- which set a record of 25,088 tweets sent in the space of one second when the film was shown two years ago. As a result, today has been named the Barus Matsuri or Festival of Barus, the day Japan's otakus band together and crash Twitter. Unfortunately for those who play in the stock market, the film's broadcast might just trigger another kind of crash. In a bizarre effect known as The Ghibli Principle, the broadcasting of any film by Studio Ghibli in Japan is supposedly followed by instability in the New York Stock Exchange which often continues for 1-2 weeks. It's nothing more than an urban legend, of course, helped along by the fact that Ghibli films are always shown at 9 pm on Fridays, which happens to correspond to the Friday opening of the market in New York. Fridays, of course, are when the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank announces employment and other statistics about the economy, so it's not unreasonable that the market will tend to be more active around this time, up or down. Of course you should not take investment advice from anime phenomenon ^_^

If you're a fan of Laputa, we've got the film on Blu-ray with full subtitles/dubbed tracks, plus other great products.

Laputa is one of the best animated films from Japan.

Today is "Pantsu Day"

One thing the Japanese love to do is assign random meanings to days based on their pronunciation. Yesterday (August 1st) has been designated as "Yaoi Day" since the date 8/01 can be pronounced as "Ya-oh-ee" in Japanese. Today (August 2nd) has the distinction of being known as パンツの日 Pantsu no Hi, a special day to celebrate all forms of underwear, from shimapan to underwear for your smartphone to the traditional undergarments the samurai used to wear.

J-List 100,000 Likes Facebook Celebration

In addition to posting these site updates three times per week, J-List runs a popular Twitter feed and Facebook page in which I share lots of images and product information. This week our Facebook page crossed 100,000 likes, so we're going to have a celebration and give you $10 off any order of $50 or more. To use the coupon, visit either J-List or JBOX.com and enter code FB100K at the cart page. Expires on Oct 11.

Thoughts on Learning Japanese

One reason I like studying a foreign language like Japanese is the way it teaches you about your own brain, and whenever I'd undertake the (always difficult) process of internalizing some new bit of vocabulary or grammar -- which all too often requires that I "trick" my own brain in devious ways -- I could feel the synapses stretching to accept the new information. One thing I learned is that the brain doesn't want to process what it isn't already familiar with, and sometimes a Japanese person would ask me a question but my brain refused to react, treating the strange words as static rather than as something that required a response. During college I had a Japanese girlfriend (these come in rather handy, let me tell you), and once she told me to wait for her by the 自動販売機 jido hanbai-ki, the "automatic selling machine" e.g. a vending machine. I didn't know this word, so my brain substituted the nearest thing it was familiar with, 自転車 jitensha or bicycle, which is why I found myself waiting in vain for her by the bicycle racks instead.

Ami is waiting for me by the vending machine.

We Love Japanese Snacks

One fun aspect of living in Japan is visiting convenience stores and seeing what new snacks have been released. While some American products like Wrigley's gum, Coca-Cola and Dr. Pepper and have been around for a century or more, Japanese consumers generally favor new products when they shop, forcing manufacturers to come up with fresh ideas at a faster pace. There are some old standbys that never change, of course -- Kompeito, Peko-chan Milk Candy, or that bizarrely-named homogenized fish sausage -- but in general you can be sure you'll see something new every time you go into a store. Like tasty Okonomiyaki Pretz stick snacks, Japanese Cheetos in bizarre flavors, and a whole line of Popin' Cookin' gummy treats you make yourself. Of course J-List has a huge selection of Japanese snacks, if you're curious to browse. You might start by checking our most popular Japanese snacks by sales ranking, or else sort by "wishlist" popularity ranking. Warning, browsing J-List's snack page might make you hungry.

It's fun to surf Japan's "snack culture" in conveience stores.

Late Night TV In Japan

It's always fun to turn on late night TV in Japan and see what interesting shows I can find, like one called Woman on the Planet in which they drop a young Japanese woman into cities like New York or Barcelona for a month and film what challenges she faces while there. Another show is Mania Manual, in which famed cosplayer and otaku queen Shoko Nakagawa introduces people who have some kind of interesting "mania." (This word means "personal obsession" as the Japanese use it, and is essentially a polite way to call someone an otaku without raising negative connotations.) The episode I saw introduced a woman who loved the incredibly detailed food replicas which are displayed in the windows of restaurants so you can see the quality of the food before you go in. She'd spent her life collecting these food replicas, filling a room of her house with them and making trips to Tokyo's Kappa-bashi shopping district to buy more every week. The camera followed her as she made her weekly shopping trip and explained her rationale behind each purchase, which was not so different from the complex system I use to decide whether to add new a Star Wars figure to my collection or not.

A late-night show that introduces people's obsessions.

Cool Products Wednesday, July 31, 2013

We're big fans of Oreimo, aka I Can't Believe My Sister Is This Cute and we carry dozens of products for fans. We have figures, like awesome Kirino and Kuroneko offerings, magazines loaded with free stuff for otakus, Bull-dog Sauce (Kirino's favorite, we assume) plus that great new 2-in-1 Oreimo game for PSP. Click to view the most popular Oreimo products, as ranked by our customers.

Imperfect English Teachers in Japan

One of the main ways for foreigners to come work in Japan is as teachers of English as a Second Language (ESL), which I did for several years before founding J-List. While speaking your native language for a job sounds easy, in practice it was quite challenging. I graduated from SDSU with a minor in linguistics and a "theory and practice of teaching ESL certificate," and even I ran into trouble when a particularly motivated student wanted to know "why" a certain sentence could work with an infinitive verb while others required a gerund instead. While Japanese like learning from native English speakers, they're often shocked when they learn their sensei often has less conscious knowledge of English grammar than they do, or when he can't spell a word correctly, or (gasp!) when he makes a there-their-they're error on the blackboard only to be corrected by a student. I was terrified of letting my students down, and spent many hours studying English grammar as the Japanese do -- more or less like a mathematic framework built into English rather than part of a living, evolving system -- and hopefully did okay by them.

Japanese can't believe that we don't know everything about English.

A New Miyazaki Anime!

There's a new Hayao Miyazaki film in theaters right now, and since it's arguably my job to watch anime, I decided to go see it last night. It's called 風立ちぬ Kaze Tachinu (English title "The Wind Rises") and is the story of Jiro Horikoshi, a young boy who wants to become a pilot but he can't because of his bad eyesight, so he decides to design airplanes instead. As Jiro travels to Tokyo to attend engineering school, the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 hits, and he helps a young girl named Naoko and her mother get home safely. When he encounters Naoko again a few years later, an extremely moving love story begins. When famed animator and director Hideki Anno of Evangelion and Nausicaa fame asked to be allowed to work on the film, Mr. Miyazaki surprised him by offering him the lead role instead, because he had become fascinated with Mr. Anno's unique voice. I thought The Wind Rises was a great film, and I hope it gets a lot of attention around the world.

A new film by Hayao Miyazaki, The Wind Rises.

My Son Goes to Kyoto

If you happen to be in Kyoto right now and see a tall, lanky boy who kind of looks like Keima from The World God Only Knows, that's my son. He went down to Kyoto with some friends to do some sightseeing and make some memories of his last summer in high school, and will be exploring Japan's ancient capital for a few days. They're all going down on the "Youth 18 Ticket," a discount ticket sold by Japan Rail that lets you travel anywhere you want on slow but charming local trains for around $24 per day, which is great if you have more time than money and/or want to see the countryside in a way that's not possible when traveling by air or bullet train. My son asked me what sights he should see in Kyoto, and I listed some of my favorites: the Gold and Silver Pavilions, the Hall of 33 Bays with its 1000 carved Buddha statues, and Ryoanji, the ancient zen temple with the "sea of rocks" that you can spend hours contemplating. I gave him another piece of advice: search for sightseeing information in English rather than Japanese. There's an odd tendency for Japanese people to take their own country for granted, to think that amazing places like Kyoto are "kind of okay," whereas we foreigners can really appreciate them with the passion they deserve. As a result, searching for tourism information in English could yield very different results compared with searching in Japanese.

My son is in Kyoto now, and I'm jealous.

Sword Art Online Products In Stock

Sword Art Online has started showing on Toonami in the U.S., and if you love the show you'll be happy to see that we've got dozens of products for SAO fans, from the import PSP game to gorgeous figures and even SAO apparel for keepin' it real while at work. Click to browse the top SAO products now!

The Mechanics of Kanji

Kanji is one of three writing systems used to write Japanese, used to express advanced cognitive concepts in sentences. (The other two are hiragana, generally used for grammatical particles and simpler elements of sentences, and katakana, for writing foreign words and names.) Since I'm interested in the mechanics of how languages work, I'll talk about the kanji 定, which is one of my favorites (in part because it's fun to write), and how it can be used to express some advanced vocabulary words. The character itself means specified, fixed, definite or ordered, and by itself it's usually pronounced 定め sadame, a poetic way to say fate or destiny. Hook the character up with other Chinese characters and you can express more advanced concepts, like 予定 yotei (in advance + specified = a person's schedule), 決定 kettei (to decide + specified = something that has been officially established or decided), or 設定 settei (to set + specified = settings, as in the settings in a software program). It all looks hopelessly complex at first, but when you have a base of 300-500 kanji or so, it's not that difficult to puzzle out the meanings of new compound words based on the individual characters. Once you've studied enough Japanese, you can go to countries like Hong Kong, Taiwan or Malysia and read 25-40% of the characters on signs and in menus, which can be surprisingly helpful.

The first rule is kanji is, you have to embrace its difficulty.

Japan Population + 1

A lot of people talk about the falling Japanese population, but the staff of J-List is doing something about it. While the world coos over the Royal Baby, J-List has had our own addition, with the birth of a healthy son named Liam to our French web designer and his Japanese wife. Japan, of course, has one of the lowest birthrates of the industrialized world, with just 1.39 children born per woman, and the government has been very proactive about trying to reverse this trend. Our own city gives a bonus of $4200 to any woman who becomes pregnant to help offset medical costs, and all parents receive $150 per child under the age of 15 each month to help encourage more babies. There's no better place to have a baby than Japan, too: the facilities at maternity hospitals are top-notch, and my wife got to spend five days eating French cuisine (a specialty of the hospital she'd picked to give birth at) while she recuperated and nurses provided training and guidance regarding the newly delivered bundle of joy. Still, the high costs of raising a child through university coupled with the stress of life in crowded Japanese cities keep most couples from having more than one or maybe two children.

J-List is doing our part to raise Japan's birth rate.

Do They Have McDonald's in America?

I'm safely back in Japan, the land where everything is extremely clean and well-ordered. Now I'm trying to get used to the incredible heat and humidity that was waiting to greet me, and keep my jet lag at bay long enough to finish this update...

"Do they have McDonald's in America?" This is a question an adult student of mine asked me once, and it was a strange one, since what could be more American than Big Macs and Happy Meals? Yet somehow the student had been sure McDonald's was a Japanese chain. It can be surprisingly easy to get the wrong idea about famous companies. A Japanese friend I knew decided to become an engineer so he could work for "the famous American company, Sony" (as a child he'd assumed that since Sony wrote its name in English, they must be American), and I myself spent several years certain that Motorola was a Japanese company for some reason. Sometimes this brand confusion is due to the companies themselves. You may think of Häagen-Dazs as a purveyor of delicious ice cream from Denmark, but the brand actually came from The Bronx, New York, and the name is just clever marking. When anti-Japan riots seized China last year, a mob burned down a "Japanese" Samsung factory, convinced thanks to the company's advertising that it was a Japanese brand. Have you ever gotten confused about what country a certain company is from?

"Do they have McDonald's in America?"

Hatsune Miku x Sony PSP, PS3 and PS Vita = Pantsu

If you've got a Sony PSP, PS3 or PSVita and like Hatsune Miku, you should browse the Hatsune Miku Project Diva titles we restocked today. They're awesome rhythm games with great costumes and music and sometimes, pantsu. And all Sony game platforms are region free, so you can play them no matter where in the world you're located.

Funny-Sounding Words of Japanese

While there are many innovative ways of studying Japanese, including self-study programs with flashcards and textbooks, online study programs and so on, I usually recommend the method I used, a formal language program in a university (in my case, SDSU). When you study Japanese in a classroom setting, there are several stages you go through, including massive shock when you first encounter the hiragana writing system, relief when you realize it's not that hard to get down after all, then amazement as your brain starts "reading" written Japanese without your conscious involvement, just as it does for English. You also learn that some Japanese words sound extremely funny to us, and the first time you encounter the word 時々 toki-doki (meaning "sometimes"), there'll always be some giggles since this sounds similar to "okie-dokie" in English. Other words that can cause sniggering include 母 haha, which means "my mother" but sounds like laughing, 父 chichi, which means "my father" but sound like something soft and warm in Spanish, and たこ tako, a delicious Mexican treat to most of us but meaning "octopus" in Japanese. It's easy to remember the Japanese word for "apple," which is 林檎 ringo, as in Ringo Starr, and then there's the word 貧乏 binbou, which means "poor" (as in lacking money) but is pronounced exactly like the English word "bimbo."

Okay, that's all for now. It's off to Japan for me!

Yayoi (right) is the binbou character in Idolmaster. She's also kind of a bimbo.

Japan Election Update

While I was busy meeting customers here in San Diego, Japan was having yet another election, this time for the upper legislative house. Japan has a British-style Parliamentary system which is terribly confusing to my American brain, but it seems to involve separate elections for both houses of the national legislature as well as for prefectural and city representatives...all of which translates into burst eardrums for me, thanks to Japanese politicians' penchant for driving around shouting from speakercars the week before the election. Sunday's election resulted in a big win for Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his Liberal Democratic Party, clearing the way for serious economic reform and deflation-busting, or at least that's the idea. One big change lying in store for the Japanese economy is a consumption tax (sales tax/VAT) hike from its current 5% to 8%, then to 10% a few years down the road. This is causing causing an economic boom right now as people rush to make big-ticket purchases before the rate goes up, but there's concern that things will crash whenever the tax hike finally goes into effect.

A big win for Prime Minister Abe and "Abenomics."

Advertising Tissues From Japan

It's the end of another San Diego Comic-Con, and as usual it was a blast. We sold tons of J-List T-shirts, kawaii plush toys and bottles of Tentacle Grape, and talked with many avid fans. I've been attending the show since the mid 80s, back when it was small enough to fit in the tiny San Diego Civic Center. I laugh as I look back at how "big" I thought the show was back then, at around 12,000 attendees, less than 1/10 the current number.

If you visited the convention and walked by our booth, one of our staff probably handed you some Japanese pocket tissue with our website information on it. Advertising businesses with printed pocket tissue has been popular in Japan ever since 1969, when a paper manufacturing company in Kochi Prefecture hit on the idea of using inexpensive packets of tissue to advertise products. Just about anywhere you go in Japanese cities, you'll see people standing on street-corners, handing tissues to passers-by and thanking them for considering the business that's being promoted -- usually a bank advertising this week's rates, or in Akihabara, the newest cat girl maid cafe. J-List has been printing these tissues and shipping them with orders for more than 15 years, and also brings them to conventions to hand out to people, sometimes getting ironic laughs for some reason. Of course you don't have to attend a convention to get free J-List tissues: just make an order from our site, and you'll get a packet included with your order, along with our super-cool "anime eye glasses." (Note that J-List tissues aren't included with orders that would be damaged by their inclusion, such as a thin doujinshi comic, and are subject to availability.)

You'll never be without tissue in Japan.