animerevue

No consideration of Nihon is complete without the often-quoted-by-gaijin- who-are-experts-on-Nihon phrase deru kui wa utareru (DE-ru KOO-ee wa oo-TAH-reh-ru), which translates as "the nail that sticks up will be hammered down." It describes the tendency of Nihon, especially the educational system here, to "hammer down" individuals that don't fit in so that they're brought in line with everyone else. While a classroom full of similar students would probably be easy for a teacher to manage, the idea that students with special talents -- a child gifted in music or math -- might be forced to "conform" to the larger group offends my American idealism. My first employer in Nihon had a daughter who was born in the U.S. and grew up speaking mostly English before returning to Nihon, but by the time she'd finished three years of Nihonese high school, various social pressures (as well as some issues unique to the girl, no doubt) made her actively pretend to not understand English, even though I knew better. The Nihonese are quite aware that their country isn't very good at handling special cases, and in some instances a family with an exceptional child will emigrate to a country where the differences can be appreciated and encouraged. The great irony is that many of the most successful people in Nihon have violated this rule and stood up as proud as any nail ever did, such as Softbank president Masatoshi Son, cybermall Rakuten founder Hiroshi Mikitani, and flamboyant former professional centerfielder Shinjo. The man who founded Honda stood out, too: as a boy, he wanted to learn how to swim, so he got the idea of swallowing small fish whole and jumping in the water while it was still flapping around inside his stomach.

The Nihonese are very good at taking an idea and improving on it, and the entire history of modern Nihon involves observing the nations of Europe and the U.S. and seeing what they could adopt and make better. This is known as wakon yosai or "Nihonese Spirit, Western Know-How," a phrase that was coined after the Meiji Restoration, meaning that Nihon should combine the technology of the West with that "extra something" (which the Nihonese insist on calling "plus alpha") that only Nihon can provide. My first introduction with Nihonese innovation upon arriving here was in one of the most uninteresting places imaginable, the toilet. Most Nihonese toilets in homes have a little sink on the top that lets you wash your hands with clean water as it flows into the tank after you flush -- very logical in a country that's both starved for elbow room and very conscious about cleanliness. One of the fun things of living in Nihon is keeping mental count of the little innovations there are around me, from vertical parking "elevators" for your car to single-serving drip coffee that sits over your cup to cola vending machines that are only a few centimeters thicker than the length of a can so that they can be placed along the narrow roads in Tokyo. Oh, and those dreamy massage chairs.

There's a wacky thing that Nihonese do to money: fold a 1000 yen bill so that 19th century novelist Souseki Natsume (or whoever -- it works with just about any bill) makes sad or happy faces, depending on which way you look at it. I'll teach you how it's done so you can amaze your friends with this great Nihonese trick. First, take a bill and make an outward fold where each of his eyes are. Make an inward fold through the middle of his face, so that his eyes are higher than his nose (like little mountains). If you look at the bill from above, the face will look sad; from below, and he'll look happy. Virtually all Nihonese known this silly trick, and would probably be surprised if any non-Nihonese knew it. Here is the result:

Remember that our newest PC dating-sim game, YUME MIRU KUSURI :: A Drug That Makes You Dream, has gone "Golden Master" and will be on its way to the duplicators soon. We've got some other happy announcements for H-game fans, too. First, we've lowered the price of Yin-Yang! X-Change Alternate by $10, so if you haven't picked up this extremely popular title yet, you have a great excuse to do so now. Then, two of our popular game releases are now available in a new Internet Download Edition: the gorgeous Legend of Fairies and Fairy Nights, fully translated into English and compatible with Window as well as Mac (OS 9/X).

The summer conventions are not too far off. Have you ordered your Matsukameya high school uniform yet? We're starting our convention lineup earlier than normal this year by attending the Star Wars Celebration IV convention in Los Angeles May 24-28. This is only the fourth official Star Wars convention ever held, and my first. It'll be great to rub elbows with Star Wars fans from all over, and we'll have lots of fun and interesting products from Nihon for you. So if you can make it to the show, be sure and look for us! See this page for info on the show.

Here are today's "really awesome products" that I thought were especially noteworthy. Note: the J-List links below may be for adult products and should probably be considered "NWS" (a yes/no verification screen will be displayed to filter products from our mature site). To see all the J-List products, check out J-List or the JBOX.com updated products link.

Last time I mentioned the magic words that may be responsible for much of the wa or harmony that Nihon is famous for. The phrase is shikata ga nai (sh-kah-tah ga NAH-ee), or in its more common form sho ga nai, which both translate as "it can't be helped" or "I can't do anything about that," and its used in a wide variety of situations. Whether it's the government quietly hinting that a European-style VAT may be in Nihon's future or Section Chief Tanaka's flat rejection of your latest suggestion at work, the phrase allows Nihonese to accept what they cannot change and shrug off stress that would otherwise build up inside them. The phrase can also be seen on our wacky T-shirt and hat for girls, "I like what I like, so get off my back!" which sums up a lot of my own life. From my idealistic American point of view, it seems that the phrase is trotted out a little too quickly when there's some social injustice or other wrong that needs righting, be it racism or sexism or many other ism's out there, but of course there are things that we can't change in the world and it's very practical of the Nihonese to be open about this fact. The phrase is also used to cheer someone up after sickness, heartbreak or other sadness. We had a sho ga nai event this morning when our family cat, Mi-chan (short for "mix" since her fur is black and white), was hit by a car and killed. My daughter's going to be devastated when she gets back from Malaysia, and I'm sure my (very Buddhist) wife will bring up the idea of migawari, or an animal dying to take bad luck away from the family.

A friend of mine is taking a big step in his life, buying a plot of land and hiring a builder to build a house on it for him. Unlike in the U.S., where you usually buy an existing house through a realtor, it's much more common in Nihon to buy land and plan your own home from scratch. The Nihonese are not fans of "used" homes that someone else has already lived in, though, so if the land you're buying happens to have an older home already on it, it's a given that it will be torn down and replaced. Home construction is a huge business here, and when my friend was looking for a company to build his home he had many options, from large firms like Sekisui that uses baseball star Ichiro for their TV commercials to Habel House, famous for steel-framed homes that are so strong you could keep a pet elephant on the second floor. Nihonese companies tend to engage in businesses that might seem a little off-target to some, and my friend could have chosen homes built by Panasonic (PanaHome), Toyota Home (they build your house in parts on the same manufacturing lines as their cars then truck the pieces in), or TBS Home, the house-building arm of the Tokyo Broadcasting Station, I kid you not. He could also have done what many Nihonese families are doing and get an "import home," basically a pre-designed kit that's assembled in Canada or Sweden and shipped over, then put together by a local contracting company. In the end he went with a company with the charming name of Wish Home that specializes in building homes of brick. Of course, buildings made of brick are not allowed in earthquake-prone Nihon, so the house itself is built so that the structure is actually supported by the internal 2x4 frame, for safety.

Although Nihon is a capitalist country with a strong market economy cast in the mold of the U.S. and England, there are plenty of differences. One of the major themes of economics in Nihon is that it tends to be a "supplier heaven" for companies that manufacture products and provide services, with so much power accumulated into the hands of large companies that it seems a wonder that things can function at all. In general, sellers of products benefit from stricter pricing structures and are able to capture a greater percent of the final purchase price than in any other country. At the rural liquor store my wife's parents run, our markup for beer and tobacco is a piddling 5%, barely enough to pay the electricity in the shop, but this doesn't matter since a shop without beer and cigarettes wouldn't get many customers, so my parents treat them as loss leaders. Price fixing is illegal here, but there's a whole slew of product categories such as books and CDs that are allowed to be sold at manufacturer-specified prices, which is a boon for producers wanting to create stable markets with none of that pesky competition. If you own an apartment building in Nihon you've got it made thanks to the "key money" system that usually requires a tenant to pre-pay six months of rent when they move in, which includes "thank you money" and a deposit to the owner as well as to the agent that found the apartment for you, which by the way must be paid every two years. The funny thing about top-heavy supplier-centric economies is that they're always changing, and just as the open field of ideas called the Internet has brought a lot of good in the U.S. and Europe, the fact that change will come to Nihon too is, well, sho ga nai.

It gives us great pleasure to announce that our upcoming game, YUME MIRU KUSURI :: A Drug That Makes You Dream, has gone "golden master" and will soon be on its way to the duplicators. This is a really outstanding game set in a totally modern version of Nihon in which you play a Nihonese student struggling with many of the same problems that real students deal with every day. Your life is about to be turned upside down by three beautiful girls: the grown-up Mizuki who's terrified of her own weakness, the poor transfer student Aeka, and the bizarre cat girl Nekoko. As you interact with these characters and affect each others' lives you can find love, purpose and much more. A super game with dramatic themes, dreamy art and fascinating characters. We hope you're preorder your copy now!

Remember that J-List carries a great for fans of JPOP, the iTunes Nihon Music Cards, which are the only way to buy music from the iTMS unless you happen to have a credit card registered inside Nihon. Looking for the Doraemon theme song? Want to browse the latest singles by Every Little Thing? Or browse the Nihon Hip Hop scene for songs you like the sound of? It's all very easy to do from any Mac or PC running iTunes. The cards come in 1500 and 5000 yen denominations, and are super-easy to use: just log out of your current iTunes account, select the Nihon store, click the link to enter an iTMS card number, and you can set up a new account for your Nihonese music. You don't even have to muck with Nihonese characters in the iTunes application, since it will work

Here are today's "really awesome products" that I thought were especially noteworthy. Note: the J-List links below may be for adult products and should probably be considered "NWS" (a yes/no verification screen will be displayed to filter products from our mature site). To see all the J-List products, check out J-List or the JBOX.com updated products link.

I'm feeling sad about Mi-chan so I'll show you some pictures. This is our cat, taken a few days before she ran got hit by a car.

Animals totally have personalities, and even though it looks like she hated being put in this doll house by my daughter, she was always happy to "gaman" (put up with) anything my daughter wanted to do. A real kid's cat.

This is Mi-chan's brother, Ku-chan (from kuro, black). This dumb cat loved to climb inside people's cars and hid inside a moving can that brought some furniture to us, then got carted off. We *hope* he's alive somewhere but aren't sure.

Mi-chan as a baby, back when we could play Kitten Stick-Ons©.

I joke when I post about things like my wife saying "I'm glad we have pets around, they die in place of family members" but living in the context of a very Buddhist place like Nihon, I start to believe it. And if believing it makes it actually work, I'd certainly give up a beloved pet over a family member. So if you died to save one of us from some bad fate, Mi-chan, you have our eternal thanks.

I got a reminder that Nihon is very much a part of the Pacific Ring of Fire yesterday when a 6.9 quake woke me up and gave me a good shake. At the time I was staying at our "mansion" (apartment) at the foot of Mt. Asama, one of the most potentially active volcanoes in Nihon, and I quickly looked out the window to make sure the mountain hadn't decided to go all Mordor on us. Aside from jittery nerves, there was no damage where I was, although plenty of older homes collapsed close to the epicenter, and one poor woman was killed by a falling stone lantern, a very "zen" way to go, I guess. Learning to not jump at every little earthquake is all part of living in a place like Nihon, and it goes hand-in-hand with developing a taste for seafood and tofu, learning to never pour your own beer, getting used to wearing slippers that are three sizes too small, and being at peace with confined spaces that would make a Space Shuttle astronaut claustrophobic.

Over the weekend a friend and I went on the ultimate geeked-out road trip, traveling to Lake Kizaki in Nagano Prefecture, the setting for the two moe (mo-EH) japanese animation series Please, Teacher! and Please, Twins! The first series is about a beautiful Pocky-eating alien who secretly marries one of the students at the local school, and the sequel is a dramatic love triangle between a boy and two girls that's complicated by the fact that one of the girls is the boy's long-lost twin sister, but none of them is sure which it is. (Twins is the better series if you have to pick just one -- besides being a really good story, it's got the best fan service ever seen. Wow, looks like it's all up on YouTube if you're curious and can stand the English dubbing.) Just about everything seen in the two shows is based on real places in the Lake Kizaki area, and otaku from all around Nihon and the world make pilgrimages there, visiting their favorite landmarks and eating Pocky and Pretz, the two signature snacks from the shows. My wife snorted when she heard what we had planned, but no self-respecting Nihonese female planning a trip to Europe would miss the chance to visit the Palace of Versailles to see the grandeur first introduced to them in the famous Rose of Versailles japanese animation, or re-enact their favorite scenes from Roman Holiday in beautiful Rome, and my wife's been to both several times.

One aspect of running a business in Nihon is developing language skills that I might otherwise never pick up. In addition to needing to be able to read "legalese" for signing licensing contracts and what not, I've had to learn the basic mechanics of accounting in Nihonese, which is difficult since I don't understand it in English. As a general rule, legal institutions that work in the U.S. are also present in Nihon, and if you have a concept in one country it will probably translate into something similar on the other end. Part of this comes from countries following the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles so that their laws can interoperate, but a lot of Nihon's lock-step movement with the U.S. comes from a deeper tradition of generally following behind us in all things -- for example, Nihon's version of our 401(k) is ingeniously named the "Nihon 401(k)." I recently found one concept that exists in Nihon which is quite different from the States. It's called gensen choshu and it means withholding income at the source, which is what happens when you get your paycheck with tax already taken out, but in Nihon, taxes are pre- deducted in a wider range of situations. If we were to hire a programmer to do some work for us, we're required by law to pre-deduct his taxes when we pay him, hence for a $1000 job we'd pay him $850 and send the rest to the Tax Ministry in his name, presumably to keep the payment from going unreported. This is a minor inconvenience, but I was surprised to learn that investment income is also pre-deducted in the same way. So when my wife puts money in a CD at 1% interest (still considered a fairly good return in the bizarro world that is Nihon), she actually only gets .85% from it, which means she's potentially losing up to a year of earnable interest on other investments she might make that year. I'm sure taxpayers would rise up and revolt over something like this in most countries, but sadly the Nihonese mantra of sho ga nai ("it can't be helped") keeps people from demanding change.

J-List is proud to carry the Canon Wordtank, the electronic dictionary for serious students which I used myself for many years. Nihon is a country that takes studying seriously, and the Wordtank is loaded with useful features to make learning a foreign language easy. Unlike virtually every other manufacturer, Canon's Wordtank line goes out of its way to be friendly to gaijin, with features like an English menu mode, the ability to look up single or groups of kanji on the screen (useful because it's common for a word you look up to be written with kanji students can't yet read), an English manual, and of course the ability to save words and kanji for later study. I also like the feature that shows you how to write kanji by animating the stroke order -- very handy. Just because the Wordtank is small doesn't mean it lacks brains -- inside its memory you can find 11 complete dictionaries. We've restocked the popular Wordtank G55 on the site now, ready for your immediate order!

My Neighbor Totoro is one of the most famous animated films of the past two decades, which fans all around the world have embraced. J-List sells more than a hundred fun Totoro related products for you, from soft plush toys to ceramic music boxes to keychains and fun things to stick on your car windows. Want to wear Totoro proudly on your chest? We've got a line of Totoro T-shirts and hoodies for guys and girls, and embroidered hats, too. Like rare collectables? We recommend the Totoro Tin Toy series, which recreates the toys of the past, or our outstanding stock of Totoro rubber stamps, or the last of our stock of Totoro blankets for the season. Browse our great selection of products now!

Here are today's "really awesome products" that I thought were especially noteworthy. Note: the J-List links below may be for adult products and should probably be considered "NWS" (a yes/no verification screen will be displayed to filter products from our mature site). To see all the J-List products, check out J-List or the JBOX.com updated products link.

The weather wasn't that good for a road trip, especially in a convertible, but we didn't care.

We drove quite far -- the trip was 500 km round trip, taking us through many beautiful rural mountains and highways.

After only getting lost a little, we eventually arrived at the lake.

It was easy to find all the landmarks thanks to the various otaku sites that document where everything is.

This is the Lawson from episode 1 where Miina talks with Maiku for the first time. The premise of the show is that Maiku (Mike), Miina and Karen are half Nihonese since they've got blue eyes. Yet only two are related...

The fumikiri (train crossing) from the opening credits was the next stop in our wacky little journey.

Umino Kuchi Station is the veeeery rural train station that services the place, and the final scene of the series.

Here's the inside. It was eerie being here, since everything in the show was done with perfect accuracy. Kind of like how awesome it would be to be allowed to walk around in the Bag End set that they built for Lord of the Rings, but a lot less so.

There was a mini-shrine put there by fans and a notebook where people wrote messages to each other at having come to this spot. Pictures, poems, people's emotions were all recorded.

Then we went to the Daily Yamazaki Store, which was the model for Herikawa Shoten, where the twins worked.

This is the nice lady who owned the place. Basically, after Please Teacher was such a success, a representative from Bandai came by one day and asked her if they could have permission to "shoot pictures of" her shop. She thought it was for a documentary and said okay. A year later, suddenly her shop has been transformed into Otaku Central, but she didn't seem to mind. She was happy to have an American she could talk with, since I guess most of the ones who venture by don't speak the language.

She had a map where people can write where they're from, write messages and everything.

There was only one thing left -- to located the house where the three lived. It turned out to be pathetically easy since there are only about 30 houses in this village.

I wanted to go talk with them and ask how they felt about being the most famous inaka house in all otakudom, but I didn't have the nerve.

Finally, we swung back to the playground, where I shot a picture of the sliding board. Then it was time to go home, back to reality, at least for a little while.

"What is your hobby?" This is one of the first phrases of English conversation that Nihonese students learn, along with "What is your name?" "Where are you from?" and "What is your blood type?" My students at the time were aged 18-20, that period when you're sure you've had all of life's major experiences and don't need to form any new opinions, and some regular responses included Mayumi's stated love of doraibu (going driving with friends), Misako's constant talk about baito (working a part-time job, from the German word arbeit), or good old Kiyoko, who always replied "going shopping with my mother." Because I'm an emotional, idealistic American, I always did my best to get the students to give more information to the class about what really excited them, to get them to do more with their precious youth than they were doing. But except for a few students who had a particular commitment for something they could share with the class -- the Beatles, American pro wrestlers, traveling around Nihon taking pictures of trains -- getting my Nihonese students to be excited about anything was always a challenge.

Speaking of hobbies, one of mine is comparing the cultures of Nihon and the U.S., in case you haven't guessed, and sometimes you don't need to look any farther than the people who make us laugh, comedians. While most famous comedians in the U.S. come from the stand-up circuit or through the hallowed gates of Saturday Night Live, comedy in Nihon is a little different. One form of traditional Nihonese comedy that's been around for centuries is rakugo, literally "fallen words," which involves a lone comedian sitting Nihonese- style on a zabuton cushion located very near the audience. The interesting thing about this style of performance is that, rather than using new comedy material, the monologue that the comedian tells is one of an already established library of a hundred or so such humorous stories, although a good rakugo-ka will add his own unique touches. There's a TV show where rakugo comedians do battle to see who is the funniest, and when they get a laugh they get another cushion, so that by the end the winner is sitting on a tower of them. (And in fact, a way of saying "that was funny" is Zabuton, ichi mai, or "I'll give you one zabuton cushion for that.") Another pillar of Nihon's comedy world is manzai, humor involving a two-man team that includes a dim-witted boke (boh-KAY, meaning fool) and his sharp-tongued tsukkomi (tsu-KOH-mi, meaning straight foil) sidekick, who act out complex comic sketches together. Manzai has been popular throughout the 20th century and has had a great influence on many areas -- for example, the characters of C-3P0 and R2-D2 indirectly owe their existence to this humorous tradition, via the films of Kurosawa. The most popular manzai team in Nihon today is Bakusho Mondai, who are regular guests on news programs where they bring their witty commentary to bear on the events of the past week. If you've happened to see the Nihonese version of Apple's "Get a Mac" ads, the duo playing the Mac and PC are two halves of a manzai comedy pair. (We have an English book of rakugo monologues on the site today if you're interested.)

Normally when you think of a subject like sexual discrimination you think of women not being offered the chance to do what they want on an equal footing with males, but I had a little lesson in reverse discrimination last night. My wife, mother-in-law and our two kids were heading to Malaysia for a week to visit a family friend, leaving me home alone -- the Holy Grail for any married man, since I can walk around the house in my underwear, put my feet on the table, and drink out of the milk carton with impunity. Before she could leave, though, my wife was compelled to prepare a week's worth of meals for me, as if my male-ness made me totally unable to fend for myself in for seven days, like some comedy version of a husband from the 1950s. And that, I realized, is one aspect of the relationships between men and women in Nihon, a kind of yin-yang (to bring a sufficiently Asian image to my theory) in which the man is responsible being the "great black pillar" (daikoku-bashira) that holds up the household, while the woman does her part to ensure the happiness of the family from the inside. Sounds overly simplified to put it like that, I know, but from within the context of living in Nihon, it really works well.

Today we've not one, not two but three wacky new Nihonese T-shirts for you on the site. The Nihonese are an incredibly expressive people, and they can take something as bland as ASCII letters or generic hiragana and katakana characters and turn them into incredibly expressive images. We've got three new limited-run T-shirts featuring popular emoji ("emotional characters") that capture the heart and soul of the Nihonese BBS 2ch and look really awesome at the same time. See them on the site now!

J-List carries region-free DVD players that make it child's play to enjoy region-encoded DVDs from Nihon, Europe and other countries. Our players are specially manufactured to ignore the pesky region codes that try to keep you from watching the discs you want to enjoy, and are fully compatible with DVDs from all regions, including PAL and RCE discs. Even better, they're loaded with features, like the ability to play DIVX/AVI files burned onto DVD-R media. We've lowered the price on our popular RJ-200 progressive scan/surround sound DVD player, making it even easier to snap up one of these half-height demons and watch any DVD you like.

Here are today's "really awesome products" that I thought were especially noteworthy. Note: the J-List links below may be for adult products and should probably be considered "NWS" (a yes/no verification screen will be displayed to filter products from our mature site). To see all the J-List products, check out J-List or the JBOX.com updated products link.

I see I forgot to post pictures of the hidden micro brewery in the mountains of Gunma. Well, here you go. Here are the taps.

Good roaring Dwarven fires, too.

In general, any time I get the chance to eat wood-fired pizza, I take it.

Like all Nihonese breweries, there were three types, very blonde, medium and very fruity, and very dark/stout. I found the middle path to be the most delicious.

This is what the Nihonese call a "Margherita" Pizza.

I just love the construction of this place, all wood, with huge pillars of wood visible inside. It was so unexpected to find such a good place in a town with a winter population of a few hundred.

I brought some of these back for my father in law, although I know he won't like them. I'll just have to help him drink them ^_^

I've written before about how the meinichi (命日), the anniversary of a person's death, is very important in a Buddhist country like Nihon, and once a person has passed on those left behind will remember him or her on this day. Today happens to be the meinichi of Hiroshi Miyagawa, a person who's had no small impact on Nihon's animation industry, as well as myself. He was the composer who wrote the music for Space Cruiser Yamato, shown in the U.S. as Star Blazers, essentially the first japanese animation series associated with the now-familiar concepts of dramatic, sequential stories with problems that are resolved and multi-faceted characters who die, fall in love and generally act like real people. Several years before John Williams gave us the music for Star Wars, Maestro Miyagawa showed the world what could be achieved with extremely melodramatic and high-quality music even in something as mundane as an animated series. His single most famous creation was the Yamato theme song, which he composed after being asked by Producer Nishizaki to envision "an iron ballad," and the song is regularly performed by marching bands from the Maritime Self-Defense Forces to my daughter's 4th grade class. The Yamato franchise, with its Gamilon-planet-bombs-as-allegory-to-World-War-II themes, was incredibly campy, but for many it was a first wonderful bridge to Nihon.

If you love "corn potage," then get to Nihon as fast as you can, since people here just can't get enough of creamed corn soup. Right now I'm sitting in Steak House Miya, a Nihonese restaurant that serves both regular and "hamburg" steak, famous for a tangy daikon sauce that the server pours over your sizzling plate, then a napkin is draped over the whole thing to keep it from burning you as the sauce cooks into the meat. Beside my steak and plate of rice is a bowl of corn soup with corn flakes sprinkled on top, which tastes good enough, I guess. As an American, when I think of soup I think of the Campbell's classics like chicken noodle, tomato, and vegetable beef, but these are as alien here in Nihon as Green Tea Butterscotch and Rose Flavored Gum are in most parts of the world. Types of soup that the Nihonese prefer instead include creamed pumpkin or carrot soups, healthy wakame (seaweed) or miso soup, or if at an Italian restaurant, perhaps some minestrone. When you get sick in the U.S., most people think of eating chicken soup, but in Nihon the most common remedies are drinking a tea with ginger in it or swallowing down a raw egg in sake -- yum.

I wrote last time about the traditional Nihonese card game karuta, which gets its name from the Portuguese but is based on games played in the Imperial Court in ancient Kyoto. Karuta consists of two decks of cards, one featuring hiragana characters and another with poems or phrases that correspond to cards in the first deck. Two players scatter the hiragana cards on the floor randomly and assume a position that allows them to grab cards easily, then a third person starts reading the poems one by one. The most famous karuta game is the Hyakunin Isshu, which features poetry about one hundred historical figures in short tanka form. As kids hear one of the 1300-year-old poems -- perhaps the one about the poet Ki no Tomonori, which goes "In the peaceful light/Of the ever-shining sun/In the days of spring/Why do the cherry's new-blown blooms/Scatter like restless thoughts?" -- they grab the card that corresponds with that phrase before their opponent can find it, and whoever gets the most cards wins. Another popular variation played in our prefecture is Jomo Karuta, which substitutes poems about the beauty of Gunma, from the fiery Mt. Asama to the bustling hot springs resort at Ikaho. Playing karuta is good on many levels, since it teaches children to read, is competitive and fun to play, and it also instills them with a link to the past that I think Americans can't easily comprehend. It can be used to teach many things, too. For example, my daughter is learning the flute, and her teacher cleverly makes the kids play a version of karuta that teaches them musical terms, like da capo and staccato.

J-List has been involved with licensing and translating Nihon's amazing PC dating-sim games for years, and we've built a great lineup of really amazing story- and character-centric games for bishoujo gaming fans that allow you to take your relationship with Nihon to a whole new place. Our games are available in shrink-wrapped CD-ROM packages as well as Internet Download Editions, and there are titles for every taste, from cat girls to maids and highly evolved dramatic stories and more. We're happy to announce that we've completed our initial testing with Microsoft's new Windows Vista operating system (32-bit), and are happy to announce that all our games are compatible with the new platform. So whether you're using Vista now or plan to in the future, our great dating-sim games will be compatible.

Remember that J-List carries the extremely high-end school uniforms for guys and girls made by Matsukameya of Nagoya, a company with an outstanding reputation in Nihon. Our sailor uniforms are all custom made to your exact size specifications and available in many styles, making it easy for you to have the awesomeest costume for the summer japanese animation conventions. We also carry a really awesome item: authentic Nihonese school bags, the kind high school girls carry to school, made of high quality materials and loaded with pockets to hold all your stuff.

Here are today's "really awesome products" that I thought were especially noteworthy. Note: the J-List links below may be for adult products and should probably be considered "NWS" (a yes/no verification screen will be displayed to filter products from our mature site). To see all the J-List products, check out J-List or the JBOX.com updated products link.

Yesterday was St. Patrick's Day, a celebration of all things Irish in the U.S. and, presumeably, Ireland. As you might imagine, there isn't a lot of awareness of this day in a place like Nihon, which knows nothing of shamrocks or leprechauns or pots of gold buried at the end of the rainbow. However, we managed to have our own little Irish Experience nevertheless. While taking our customary weekend drive up the mountains around the resort town of Karuizawa, we came across an interesting-looking restaurant that served wood-fired pizza and home-brewed beer, a rarity in a country that favors large, easily-taxable industries. Among the beers they offered was an authentic Irish Stout, and I was so shocked at the concept of drinking a rare and delicious brew on a mountain in an extremely rural corner of Nihon that I had to have three of them. One thing you can say about Nihon is, you never know what it's got in store for you next.

The subject of Nihon's compulsory educational system is a complex and interesting one. Officially begun as part of the modernization program of the 1870s, Nihon's schools are responsible for teaching young people everything they need to function in life, from reading and writing of kanji to math and science to social skills suitable for Nihon's group-oriented culture and being able to say "Fine thanks, and you?" when you ask them how they are in English (a very important skill, to be sure). Public schools are extremely conservative and resistant to change, and it's amazing how much is the same at my daughter's elementary school compared with when her mother went there 25 years ago...or her grandmother, who attended the same school 50 years ago. This is good on the one hand because it creates a continuum of experiences that crosses generations, such as playing the Nihonese educational game "Karuta" that teaches respect for local culture -- even something like Nihonese school lunches have cultural threads that we foreigners can never comprehend. On the other hand, Nihonese public schools seem trapped in a time-warp without any significant plan for the changes students will face this century, including fierce competition from every country in Asia. I sometimes wonder if Nihon's educational system can go on changing so little.

Nihon can be a very style-oriented place at times, and it seems that everyone is concerned about looking good. The universal word for "awesome" in Nihonese is kakko ii (KAH-koe ee, lit. "good style"), while the opposite is kakko warui (KAH-koe wa-roo-EE, "bad style," e.g. dorky). Another word that describes an absence of awesomeness is dasai (dah-SAI, out of fashion, unawesome, n00b), which supposedly started out as a derogatory word for people from half-rural, half-urban Saitama Prefecture, just north of Tokyo, essentially to Nihon's capital what Orange County is to Los Angeles. Many Nihonese also have a great appreciation for what's known as dasa-kakko ii, or something that's both lame and awesome at the same time, or perhaps awesome specifically because it's out of sync with current mores. Some examples of dasa-kakko ii might include the hair styles or fashions from the 1970s, that scene from Mobile Suit Gundam when Amuro sits in the cockpit desperately reading through the manual as he trying to find the mecha's weapons, the movie Willow, anything featuring Vin Diesel, and the artist formerly and currently known as Prince.

Remember that J-List carries awesome computer peripheral and iPod products by Nihon's leading company, Elecom. From stylin' USB computer mice to their trademark katakana mouse pads and keyboards to stylish speakers for your iPod, Mac or PC, Elecom has great stuff for you. We also carry the bizarre-but-cute Mogmo Kun, a push little monster that "eats" your USB flash drive or similar shaped device in order to protect it. So cute! All products are fully compatible with computers and iPod products around the world.

Here are today's "really awesome products" that I thought were especially noteworthy. Note: the J-List links below may be for adult products and should probably be considered "NWS" (a yes/no verification screen will be displayed to filter products from our mature site). To see all the J-List products, check out J-List or the JBOX.com updated products link.