animerevue

(Note: we had a bit of an outage which caused the J-List and JBOX.com product images to stop loading for a couple of hours on Sunday. The problem was corrected and all is well with the servers -- very sorry if you were inconvenienced while trying to view the site.)

Like most countries, Japan is struggling with the desire to be more "green" in order to reduce pollution and the urge to escape rising energy costs. While embracing concepts like cool biz -- which means allowing politicians and businessmen to dress more casually so they'll be more comfortable with the air conditioning set at a higher temperature -- are one possible answer, the extreme heat and humidity of Japan makes this less than a perfect solution. One answer the Japanese have evolved is called midori no kaaten, or a "Green Curtain" of plants that grows on the outside of buildings, providing cooling shade as well as more oxygen for the air and the general feeling of well-being that comes from having living plants around you. The way it works is this: you take a pre-made wire frame and plant vines that will crawl up the frame until you have a wall of greenery shading your windows from the sun. They're popping up all over Japan this summer, and it sounds like a great idea to me.

If you've listened to spoken Japanese at all you've probably heard the word desu, often pronounced with the last syllable reduced so that it sounds like "dess." Linguistically speaking, this word is known as the copula, because it makes the noun and the verb in a sentence, er, want to have a romantic evening together or something; in more useful terms, it fulfills the role of "to be." It's really simple to use: if you want to say "I am John" just say John desu; if you want to state your nationality, just say America-jin desu or Canada-jin desu or whatever. The subjects of sentences are usually left off if the meaning is clear from the context, but if you wanted to clarify that you're talking about yourself and not, say, Michelangelo, you could say watashi wa John desu (As for me, I'm John). If someone pointed to an apple on a table and asked you what it was, you could say ringo desu, which would also be an appropriate answer if someone asked you who your favorite Beatle was and the answer was Ringo Starr. The desu sentence ending is a formal word, useful for making a good impression on Japanese you might try talking to; every Japanese verb comes in formal and informal versions, and the informal of desu is da, allowing you to say Eigo no sensei da "I'm an English teacher" if you were talking to a person below your station, like a teacher addressing his students or to a child or a dog. (As always, stay formal until you understand the nuances of informal Japanese, lest you offend your in-laws as Luicille Ball did to Ricky's parents all those times.) 

Since the word "death" sounds very close to desu when rendered into katakana (actually it's usually written デッス instead of デス), there is a world of puns that can be made about Japanese sentences ending in death. In Dragonball, there's a reace of Chinese space aliens (if memory services) who speak in kanji, and the kanji for です they use is 死 (death). Er, maybe you had to be there.

If you want to see something really different, here's a bizarre movie someone made on Youtube mixing Sazae-san (the longest running show on Japanese TV, going something like 42 years now) with Death Note and Yu-Gi-Oh. The story is that the smallest kid, Tara-chan, gets a copy of the Death Note and kills his family, and then, oh, nevermind, it's too silly. My kids happen to watch it several times a day, is why I am bothering showing y'all. Note that at no time did I imply this was interesting. 

 

I mentioned last time that Japan has very few lawyers. It's true -- there's just one lawyer for every 7325 people in Japan, compared with one per 288 individuals in the United States and, for comparison, one for every 1634 in France. For various reasons, likely related to Japan becoming a modern Westernized nation only 130 years ago or so ago, the country has evolved a legal structure that's largely based on common sense, or at least that's how it appears to my unfamiliar gaijin eyes. There's almost no tradition of litigatating civil disputes in Japan, a phenomenon which is assisted by the Japanese tendency to prefer being harmonious rather than confrontational, and I can't think of a single instance where a Japanese person I knew was involved in any kind of lawsuit. Another contributing factor to this might be the fact that lawyers seem to earn only $50 per hour -- I wonder how that would fly in the U.S.? When my wife was here in San Diego, one of the things on our list to do was meet with my lawyer and go over my will and living trust, which covers what should happen to the house I own in the event of my demise. American ideas of "Death planning" are totally alien in Japan, since when a man dies, his possessions naturally should go to his wife and kids with no questions asked, and it's actually quite taboo to bring the subject up, as I've discovered to my cost. Because these concepts are so different from Japan, I thought my wife was going to be confused during our meeting with the lawyer, but fortunately she'd seen enough episodes of Sex and the City and Desperate Housewives to grasp the issues right away.

This image is from a show that put four lawyers on a game show (well, a variety show) and various legal issues would be put to the four who would give their opinions. One example I remember was, a woman bought a mansion (an apartment that's owned) in which the previous owner had committed suicide, so was there a duty for the real estate agent who sold the property to pay damages for failing to make this clear ahead of time. One of the four lawyers on the show, the handsome Hashimoto-bengoshi (kind of the Brad Pitt of the law world in Japan) got so popular that he won the election for Mayor of Osaka. 

Here are today's "really cool products" that I've picked out for you, out of the 30+ new items we've added to the J-List and JBOX.com sites today. Note that some products may be "not safe for work" but that all links will allow you to redirect yourself either to the J-List or JBOX.com websites. To see all the J-List products, check out J-List or the JBOX.com updated products link.