Peter Payne's Friendly Japanese Fact Updates

[Sean @ NDF]

UPDATE

You've been in Japan too long when you pay over $70 for a Captain Santa T-shirt
and realize a few days later how much you really spent. It's true: despite the
"deflation" you might have heard about -- which was mainly companies increasing
their efficiency during the recession years and passing the savings on to
consumers -- Japan can be an expensive place. Virtually everything, from
construction materials to gasoline (which is the equivalent of $4.50 a gallon
now), is priceier here then in other parts of the world, and food costs consume
a quarter of the average household budget. One problem is that the ways goods
are sold in Japan is still too structured, with products coming into the hands
of consumers through established routes and multiple levels of distribution,
which adds to the prices. But there's something about living in Japan that
compels a person to want to own things he wouldn't otherwise bother with, like
the above-mentioned T-shirt I bought in 1992 featuring Captain Santa, a line of
high-end clothing with images of Santa at the beach. It was the best
T-shirt I've ever owned in my life, but at $70, I probably should have had my
head examined. From toilet seats that wash your butt to the 20+ varieties of
massage chairs they sell here, there sure are a lot of ways to spend your money
in Japan.

Part of raising kids in Japan means attending "sankanbi," or parent's day, a day
when mothers and fathers can come see their kids in class. Today was the first
parent's day at my son's new school, so I took half a day off to go see what his
classes were like. The experimental school, which is taught 70% in English and
30% in Japanese, is a completely new concept in Japan, and there's been a lot of
anxiety over whether the city could pull it off. My biggest concern was, how can
you make a roomful of Japanese kids learning from an American teacher who
understands Japanese actually use English? The answer was the "Japanese mat." If
a child wants to say something in his native language, he has to ask "May I
speak Japanese?" then after getting permission, go stand on the Japanese mat and
say what they need to say. I was very impressed. Like all such school events,
most parents were armed with the latest video camera for recording their child
for all eternity. Most Japanese parents really go overboard when it comes to
their kids -- which is called oya-baka or "parent-fool" if you want to know --
but I am exactly the same way myself.

We've got some happy news: we're finally ready to announce the Friends of J-List
Affiliate Program! We receive many requests from J-List fans who want to help
evangelize our brand of wacky Japanese pop culture, and after many months, we're
finally able to launch the program officially. If you've got an established
website and want to help people find J-List, you can receive cash commissions or
store credit for every order. We've taken an extra-long time to launch the
program because we wanted to make sure everything was done right, and we're very
happy with the robust affiliate system we've got in place now. To read more
about the Friends of J-List Program or sign up, see
http://www.jlist.com/affiliates.html


I suggest that thejdm do the jlist friends program, might help pay for serving costs and what not...check it out at the link

[Sean @ NDF]

UPDATE

There are big problems in China as demonstrators in several cities engage in
protests against Japan, calling for boycotts of Japanese products and even
making threats of violence -- one protestor brandished a gun at some Japanese
journalists, although it turned out to be a replica. In Beijing, thousands of
protestors have been destroying Japanese businesses, wrecking Japanese cars and
throwing rocks at the embassy. A big part of the issue are Japanese history
textbooks which China and South Korea say gloss over the crimes of the Japanese
military during World War II. I watched an interesting news report on the
textbook issues which compared the eight history texts approved for use by the
Ministry of Education, and explained the problem areas of each -- in general,
only 2-3 pages were devoted to the issue of war crimes in each book. Chinese
textbooks go to the other extreme, with half the content of one book shown
devoted to the Sino-Japanese war, illustrated with many inflammatory pictures of
corpses and emotional statements that have no place in the study of history. The
Japanese textbook that caused the most anger is used in only 18 schools here and
has been denounced by many Japanese educators, but this hasn't swayed the
demonstrators. One theory about the current crisis put forth on Japanese TV is
that after the Tiananmen Square uprisings, China increased "loyalty education"
for children in schools, much of which focused on Japan as a national enemy. The
generation that was in school in 1989 are now in their 20s, and they're the ones
who are out demonstrating now.

The issue is a very difficult one to resolve. Although Japan has officially
apologized to China seventeen times since 1974, it has mostly failed to show
real reflection about the terrible things it did in the 1930s. Japanese are
sometimes willing to say "that was a long time ago" about China and Korea, but
never about Hiroshima. On the other hand, I've had American friends who
dismissed American atrocities in Vietnam with the same argument, so maybe all of
us are capable of a similar reaction under the right circumstances. Another
problem that comes up often is the role of Yasukuni, a shrine for the
remembrance of Japanese soldiers killed during the war, which wouldn't be a
problem except that the Japanese military leaders most responsible for the war
are also interred in graves on the shrine's grounds. In Washington D.C. there
are many places where Americans can go and reflect on their own country's past,
like Arlington National Cemetery or the Iwo Jima monument, but Japan has only
Yasukuni to fill all of these roles. Maybe one solution would be the creation of
a "secular" monument to honor Japan's soldiers without bruising the feelings of
neighboring countries?

[Sean @ NDF]

UPDATE

It's time once again for Golden Week, a series of Japanese holidays that happens
to fall more or less within the same week. Japanese use the long holiday period
to travel, and millions of city-dwellers make a mass exodus away from their
homes, visiting family or taking a vacation in other parts of the country.
Unfortunately, anyplace that we'd like to take the kids during Golden Week --
the mountains, hot springs, Tokyo Disneyland -- is packed with refugees from
Tokyo, making it virtually impossible to go anywhere fun.

It's said in Japan that the U.S. is a "horizontal" society (yoko no shakai)
while Japan is "vertical" (tate no shakai), supposedly due to the fact that life
in the U.S. is merit-based whereas progression up the social ladder in Japan is
founded on age and seniority. While I don't believe that this statement is
accurate anymore -- Japan has become a lot more meritorious over the past decade
-- it's certainly true that relationships here are very up-down, with a clear
idea that the older you are (or the longer you've been in an organization), the
more erai (eh-RAI, meaning high-ranking) you are compared to others. This
concept of established rank in human relationships is all around you when you're
in Japan, you can't get away from it -- it's even built into the language. When
a younger person speaks to an older person, even if he's just one year older, he
must use keigo, or polite Japanese, which effectively organizes everyone in the
room according to level in a way that is impossible to conceive of in English.
To not use the "right" language for your level (say, speaking informally to your
boss) is disconcerting to others, especially in business or school settings, and
makes you sound cheeky. The whole system of vertical relationships may sound
odd, but it actually makes interaction work more smoothly, because everyone
knows what to expect from everyone else -- it's almost like TCP/IP for humans.

A lot of these "vertical" concepts are encountered by anime fans. Take the idea
of a senpai (also written sempai), an upperclassman in a school or senior
employee in an organization, and in anime, often the label used by a girl who
has a crush on an older boy. Being senpai brings respect from kouhai
(underclassmen, younger members of the organization), but it also comes with a
requirement that you play the part, helping and guiding those underneath you and
doing things like paying for their meals at restaurants. Virtually every kind of
group in Japan follows these senpai/kouhai rules, even sumo wrestlers -- I once
went to see a daily sumo practice at a stable and was surprised to see how
roughly the older wrestlers handled their underlings, slapping them around as a
way of reinforcing the up-down relationship. There's a third grouping, too,
doukyusei, which are people who are on the same level as you, i.e. classmates at
school. Doukyusei relationationships are basically neutral in terms of rank or
level.

[Sean @ NDF]

UPDATE

Before I moved to Japan, I had a lot of preconceptions about what life would be
like here, based on watching Japanese animation and dramas. But when I arrived
here back in 1991, I was actually surprised at some of the things I didn't find,
starting with the near total lack of anything bearing the name teriyaki -- the
flavoring is used but is never referred to with that name, except the McDonald's
Teriyaki McBurger. I'd read a few James Clavell novels, and subliminally
expected the Asian idea of "face" to be at least a small part of Japanese life
-- yet the concept is so rarely mentioned here, it took me several years to
learn how to express it in Japanese. I thought of Japan as being an ultra-modern
country, yet when I got here, my life resembled the year I spent in New Zealand
back in the 1970s -- things that most Americans take for granted like
dishwashers and electric dryers were extremely rare in Japan. There were plenty
of things I didn't expect to see, too, like Jehovah's Witnesses (yes, they have
them here), grown-up women who act "kawaii" (cute) like silly anime characters,
whole city grids without a single named street, Japanese translations of
Harlequin Romance novels, and more vending machines within walking distance of
my house than on the entire SDSU campus.

One unique aspect of the Japanese language is the high number of foreign-loan
words used in daily life. The Japanese even have a writing system that's used
exclusively for writing foreign words, katakana. Like its sister hiragana,
katakana lets you express sounds as syllables, like ka-ki-ku-ke-ko, but never
the consonant "k" by itself. Modern written Japanese is a constantly churning
mix of kanji (for core meaning), hiragana (for grammatical particles) and
katakana (for expressing words from other languages). Certain categories of
words tend to be borrowed from English -- anything having to do with cars or
technology, and many occupation titles (engineer, illustrator, programmer).
Often foreign words are imported with slightly altered meanings -- for example,
the Japanese use a Japanese word for a street address ("juusho"), but use the
English word "adoresu" for referring to an email address. The problem is that
more and more words are written in katakana these days, which creates a
"comprehension gap" between young and old Japanese, with people over 40
understanding less and less. The problem is so bad that there are actually
"katakana dictionaries" you can buy in stores, which help explain what these
strange foreign words mean. (The Wordtank electronic dictionaries that J-List
sells also include katakana dictionaries.) Just as some English speakers throw a
dash of French into their writing to show off their intelligence, Japanese
businessmen and news commentators love to pepper their speech with English words
like "consensus" and "manifesto" and "initiative" which can cause plenty of
confusion.

[Sean @ NDF]

UPDATE - do people still read these?

One of the preconceptions I had before coming to Japan was that there were no
guns here at all, so I was quite surprised when I went up into the mountains in
my prefecture and noticed a NO HUNTING sign. It turns out that hunting of
pheasant, wild boar and other animals is legal in many parts of Japan, although
there's an intense licensing requirement that tests for both knowledge of gun
safety and mental stability of the owner (members of radical political
parties need not apply). I have a Japanese friend who builds custom frames for
racing bicycles, and he once showed me his prized collection of Remington
rifles, which he never gets to fire because he had a weak heart, he told me
dejectedly. Outside of hunting circles, guns are very rare in Japan, only
possessed by police and criminals. Gun crimes are also almost nonexistent -- in
2000, 8493 Americans were killed by firearms, vs. 22 in Japan, with most of
those being violence between yakuza gangsters. The fact that guns are hard to
get doesn't deter "gun otaku" who love all things military: instead of buying
real guns, they collect the realistic toy replicas that shoot 6 mm plastic
pellets. Back when I was teaching English, by far the most common question from
my students was "Did you own a gun back in the USA?"

Most foreigners I've known have a bit of a fixation with tatami mats when they
first come to Japan. A unique symbol of minimalist interior design, tatami are
rectangular mats made of igusa straw, which are pleasant to sit or lie on, and
smell nice. While older Japanese houses used to feature the mats in every room,
tatami have become less and less common in modern homes. In most houses, such as
ours, there's a single washitsu (Japanese-style room) with tatami mats and shoji
paper doors, but the rest of the house is done in Western style. The decline in
tatami mats is partially because of changes in Japanese tastes -- people prefer
the convenience of chairs and beds to living on the floor -- but tatami are also
very hard to keep clean, and they can become a haven for dust mites. Because
tatami are always the same size, roughly the space one man needs to sleep, it's
useful to think of a room in terms of how many mats it holds, or would hold if
there were mats laid down. An average-sized room is 6-jo (jo is the Chinese
pronunciation for the tatami character), and a small room for a poor college
student would likely be a 4.5-jo. After living in Japan for 14 years, I am
incapable of perceiving the size of a room in square feet, but I can picture how
big a room is in tatami mats very easily.

I've talked before about Japan's tendency to give in to the "tyranny of the
masses" -- for example, skim milk is impossible to find in Japan because most
Japanese like thick, creamy milk with 4.7 per cent milkfat, so only the majority
gets what it wants. Similarly, there are virtually no vegetarians here, so
vegans visiting from overseas are often unhappy to find meat or animal products
in almost every kind of food prepared in Japan. In a similar show of
over-uniformity, Japanese parents sometimes "fix" children who show signs of
left-handedness, and force them to use their right hands. The rationale used to
be that kids need to learn how to do math using an abacus, which can only be
used with the right hand. Supposedly they don't fix lefties anymore, but I
distinctly remember my wife gently "correcting" our son when he was a baby and
tried to do something with his left hand. Incidentally, my wife has the
equivalent of a brown belt in abacus calculation, and can sit there and add up
complex numbers even by moving her hand over an imagery abacus -- she doesn't
need a real one.

[Sean @ NDF]

UPDATE

Japan's tendency to rank individuals in groups as senpai (sem-PAI, a senior
member of a group, or upperclassman) and kouhai (koh-HAI, a junior member, or
underclassman) can be puzzling to outsiders. Although it's endured for
centuries, the Japanese vertical social system is often put under pressure due
to recent social changes. In the old days of Japan's high period of economic
growth, nearly everyone enjoyed lifetime employment: you joined a company at age
23 and slowly rose up the ladder as you got older, so senpai/kouhai
relationships nearly always progressed parallel to the age of employees. In
Japan today, however, it is quite possible for a 35 year old to experience
"risutora" (Japanese for being laid off from a job, from the English word
"restructure") and find himself working under a 25 year old at a new company.
This creates a new problem: which has seniority? In the context of the
workplace, it's the employee who joined the company first that is considered to
be the senpai, even though he may be younger in age.

You can learn a lot about Japanese social relationships by reading manga comics,
and one of my personal favorites was Maison Ikkoku, the Rumiko Takahashi classic
that tells the story of a Japanese man, Godai, and his attempts to woo the
manager of the apartment he lives in, the recently widowed Kyoko. During the
rocky courtship of Godai and Kyoko, he always speaks to her with polite
Japanese, attaching the formal -san to her name (e.g. Kyoko-san) because she's
two years older than him. Only at their wedding reception, after he's become her
husband and thus on the same level as her, can be bring himself to drop the
formal -san ending and call her by her name, Kyoko. While many of the invisible
social rules at work in Japan may seem odd, they do exist in English, too. I'm
currently reading the Harry Potter novels to my son, and last night there was a
scene in which Professor Dumbledore called Professor Snape by his first name,
Severus. Why did he do that? my son wanted to know, since he could never
conceive of calling his teachers by their first names. So we talked about the
differences between how names are used in Japanese and English.

A person's environment really shapes how they perceive the world. Once we took
my daughter to an eye doctor in the U.S., who showed her some pictures and asked
her to identify them so he could check her vision. The pictures included basic
objects like a telephone, a shoe and so on, but some of the pictures looked so
odd to her Japanese eyes that she couldn't identify the objects correctly, even
though she could see them fine. The other day she found a toy airplane I'd had
sitting around the house, a model of an experimental weapon made by Germany
during World War II. "This airplane looks upset," she said to me. She had seen
the iron cross on the German plane as the anime mark for being angry or upset.
(See the website for an example.)

[Sean @ NDF]

UPDATE

There are many ways to approach an understanding of Japan, through the
classical aspects of the country, through its music, or else by immersing
yourself in the joyful confusion of modern pop culture. If you are so
inclined, you can also try to understand Japan through its "cult of
cuteness," expressed in the endless stream of "kawaii" original characters
that exist here. When Shintaro Tsuji started the Yamanashi Silk Center Co.
to make cute greeting cards -- actively copying the business model of the
Hallmark corporation, which he had great respect for -- he probably had no
idea what a huge effect the company he'd later rename Sanrio was going to
have on the world. Since the introduction of Hello Kitty in 1974, Japan has
seen a near-constant stream of characters for every taste, including
creations with "calculated cuteness" by Sanrio (Merry Melody, Bad Batz
Maru), bizarre characters that are almost self-parodies (Afro-ken, the dog
with a rainbow-colored 'fro and Kogepan, a character based on a burned roll
at the bakery that no one wants to buy), anti-characters (the suicidally
depressed Gloomy Bear), and characters that represent every day objects
(Ochaken and Occhan, which capitalize on the popularity of green tea here).
Characters are even made of objects you couldn't possibly consider cute:
today we're posting a pen featuring a cute little pink "unchi" (poop)
character. Kawaii!

When you learn a language that's as different from English as Japanese is,
there are bound to be a lot of rough patches where the meanings of words
don't fit together perfectly. In English we only need one word to express
concepts like brother or cold, but in Japanese there are separate terms for
older and younger brother (oniisan/ototo) and for the concepts of cold to
the touch vs. coldness in the air (tsumetai/samui). Some basic household
words like ojisan and obasan, meaning uncle and aunt, pull double duty as
generic terms for any middle-aged man or woman you meet on the street, too.
After you assign dual meanings to linguistic concepts long enough, your
brain gets used to it and starts recognizing patterns, making it easier.
Thankfully, there are times when two concepts in English will boil down to
just one word in Japanese, such as the words shy and embarrassed, which can
both be expressed as "hazukashii" in Japanese even though the nuances are
slightly different in English. I remember back as an English teacher,
trying to help my students grapple with the differences between the words
ironic, sarcastic and cynical, all of which can be expressed with a single
concept in Japanese ("iyami").

[Sean @ NDF]

UPDATE

Hello from Japan where a corn dog is known as an "American dog" and coffee
brewed weakly is called "American coffee."

Each country is unique and has its own style of government. One big
difference between Japan and other Western nations has been the near-total
lack of a role played by the courts in Japanese society. In the U.S.,
decisions by the Supreme Court have guided our history in many ways through
many eras, but in Japan the courts do practically nothing -- they make few
major decisions, don't fill a check & balance role for lawmakers, and don't
shape any aspect of contemporary Japanese life. Lawsuits do occur here, of
course, but they're so rare their effect on Japanese life is practically
nil. The only major court decision I can think of over the last 14 years
was the decision that held the government responsible for
unconstitutionally keeping people with Hansen's Disease (Leprosy) in
colonies. Big changes are potentially coming for Japan's legal system
however: a decision to raise the number of lawyers in the country is
creating a steady flow of young legal blood in society, and Japan also
plans to enact a "lay judge" (i.e. jury) system by 2009.

As I mentioned last time, the Japanese can be very season-oriented, highly
attuned to what they should be doing in each particular part of the year.
For example, summer is when you go to the pool, which is open from July 15
to August 31st only. The very idea of going swimming on, say, September
1st, is all but unthinkable, even though it's still plenty warm outside --
there's a cultural divide between the last day of August and the first day
of September that my gaijin brain just can't fathom. Perhaps its related to
the phenomenon of koromo-gae (koh-roh-mo GA-eh, lit. "changing clothes"),
which refers to putting away your winter clothes and bringing out the
summer clothes you've got in storage. For Japanese school students,
koromo-gae means the day you change from your winter uniform to the cooler
summer uniform, or vice-versa in the autumn, and for virtually every
student in the country, the changeover takes place on June 1 and November 1
-- on those days and only those days, regardless of the actual weather or
what part of Japan you live in. The prospect of millions of students
changing from warm-weather to cooler-weather clothing on the exact same
morning of the same day is vaguely unsettling to me. Most foreigners tend
to wear short-sleeve shirts fairly deep into autumn, and it's common for
Japanese to ask "Aren't you cold?" to us even though it might still be a
balmy October day outside.

[Sean @ NDF]

UPDATE

Just as almost all aspects of modern European culture have their basis in
Rome and Greece, much of Japan's culture was based on Chinese elements,
either imported directly or filtered through the Korean Peninsula. Many
areas of Japanese life, from the architecture to the writing system to the
structure of early government, originally hail from China. The Japanese pay
a lot of attention to the principles of feng shui, and try to design homes
and cities so that the layout will promote the flow of positive energy --
the choice of Edo (Tokyo) as the national capital was made in part because
it's exactly northeast of Kyoto, which has a special meaning according to
feng shui. The Japanese also follow "eto," the Chinese sexagenary cycle,
the complex system of twelve animals that cycle through each year -- my
wife and I were both born in the Year of the Monkey. Although the Japanese
adopted the Western calendar in the Meiji Era, they still remember the
Chinese New Year with Setsubun, on February 5, a day when Japanese kids
throw beans at imaginary devils to chase them out of the house.

One thing about Japan: it's a very seasonal place. Spring is beautiful with
its short-lived cherry blossoms, summer is hot and humid with many
festivals, fall is filled with crisp brown leaves, and winter is cold and
frosty. I've met Japanese who tell me with great pride that, unlike
America, Japan has four distinct seasons, and they enjoy every one of them
-- apparently these people haven't ventured outside of Southern California.
Japanese people tend to avoid being "kisetsu-hazure" (ki-SET-tsu
ha-ZOO-ray), doing the wrong things for the wrong season. In an ESL
textbook once there was a picture of a boy flying a kite in summer. But in
Japan, flying traditional kites (tako) is nearly always done around New
Year's Day, so my students were amazed at the picture.

Japan's tendency to be very seasonal extends to other aspects of daily
life. Swimsuits are sold in the summer months, and calendars sold at the
end of the year -- don't even bother trying to find something that's out of
season, it won't be available. When fruits are in season, they're ripe and
delicious, but since Japan doesn't import much fruit from other parts of
the world like America does, when something is out of season it's not
available for love or money. Strawberries are in season in Japan now, but
they won't be for long, so last weekend we took the kids to a place in the
mountains where you can eat as many strawberries off the vine as you want
for $8 per person. They were delicious.

[Sean @ NDF]

UPDIZZLE - haha this is making the banner ad for anime and shit

The Japanese flag, with its red circle against a white background, has got
to be one of the most recognizable images in the world. Called the Hinomaru
(which means "circle of the sun"), this symbol of Japan has been around
since the 12th century. Although it obviously represents the sun in the
sky, since the name given to Japan by China (Nihon or Nippon) means "origin
of the sun," the colors represent the ancient clans of Heike and Genji, who
fought for control of of the country during the Genpei war (1180-1185).
Eventually the Genji, who identified with the white star Rigel, defeated
the Heike, who took red Betelgeuse as their symbol, which was expressed by
larger area of white with the red center on the flag. The Hinomaru has
another meaning in modern life: women draw little Japanese flags in their
schedule notebooks to remember when their time of the month will be, and
the word hatabi ("flag day") is a euphemism for this.

Japan may be famous for its ultra-cute teenage stars like Aya Ueto and
Morning Musume, but marine animals sometimes make popular idols, too. When
a 7.9-meter long grey whale swam into Tokyo Bay on April 28th, he became an
instant celebrity, with parents making use of the Golden Week holidays to
take their kids to the bay so they could see the natural wonder for
themselves. Sadly, the whale, who was named Sora-chan, got trapped in some
fishing nets and couldn't escape, and was found dead this morning. In 2002,
a seal swam up Tokyo's Tamagawa river to find himself a media star, with
daily news reports on the comings and goings of "Tama-chan."

Like other developed countries, Japanese like to go to theme parks to relax
and have fun, and sometimes these parks can be quite, ah, original. In the
mountains above our house there's a replica of a rural Bavarian town called
Kronenberg, also known as Doitsu-mura, which means German Village. There
you can find good beer, delicious sausages, and lots of embarrassed-looking
Germans in traditional dress. If Hello Kitty is your thing, you should
check out Sanrio World in Tokyo, which features the entire pantheon of
Sanrio characters in life-sized versions. If you ever visit Nikko, a nice
city north of Tokyo, there are several interesting attractions to check
out, including Edo-mura, a replica of a samurai village; the slightly silly
Western-mura, an Old West town complete with real gaijin cowboys; and Tobu
World Square, where you can see famous sights from around the world
recreated in 1/25 scale. In addition to these uniquely Japanese places, you
can also take in Japanese versions of U.S. theme parks, such as Tokyo
Disneyland and University Studios Japan in Osaka.