animerevue

One question I've been asked by my ESL students in Japan is, just where is "standard" American English located geographically? Most countries define a given region as the "official" dialect of their language, which is then used in textbooks nationally. In China the standard language is the Beijing dialect of Mandarin, in Italy its based on the regions of Florence and Tuscany, and in Britain it emanates from the twin pillars of "Queen's English" and the BBC. The "official" English used in the U.S. is a bit harder to pin down, and it's sometimes referred to as Standard Midwestern, since it tends to flow from that part of the country. In 1868, Japan's capital was officially moved from Kyoto to Edo, which was renamed Tokyo meaning "east capital," in imitation of China's cities of Beijing and Nanjing, the "north" and "south" capitals. This meant that the "standard" Japanese language changed from the colorful, intoned speech of the Kansai region to flatter, more robotic-sounding dialect of the Kanto Plain, something that Osaka hasn't quite forgiven Tokyo for yet. Like the U.S. and Great Britain, Japan does not have an "official' body to define its language is like the Acadmie franaise, and it's generally up to the publishers of the Kojien, Japan's answer to Oxford and Webster as the most prestigious dictionary, to bless new words by including them in its pages.

My son is back from New Zealand, and he had a great time there, doing homestay with a local family and getting to use his English a lot. New Zealand is a beautiful country, very similar to Japan if you take away 96% of the people, concrete and asphalt and add a lot of rolling hills and sheep, and the students loved it there. It's funny how social barriers can be laid low through the power of shared popular culture. For example, the kids Kazuki was staying with were into Yu-Gi-Oh battle cards, and since he had remembered to bring his collection with him, everyone immediately became fast friends, doing battle and comparing the English and Japanese cards. The students at my son's school generally learn North American English, and several of the kids in New Zealand commented on their "American" accents, something that no one from the U.S. would ever perceive. The kids at the school were interested to hear that Kazuki's father had gotten to meet Temura Morrison, the Kiwi actor who played Jango Fett and all the Clone Troopers in Star Wars episodes 2 and 3, at the Star Wars Celebration IV convention this year, and had in fact sung the New Zealand National Anthem to him. Sometimes I think that I might not be the most representative American my son could have had for a father...

Although Japanese kitchens are well stocked with spoons, forks and knives, most meals in Japan are eaten with chopsticks. Children usually learn to use chopsticks around the age of 4, when they start attending preschool, and this is quite possibly the first of many adjustments to the larger Japanese group that children have in their school lives. Every foreigner living in Japan knows the embarrassment of being told by a Japanese person hashi ga jozu ("you use chopsticks very well"). While one popular response is to compliment the speaker on their use of a knife and fork, I've found you can have more fun telling them okagesama de (oh-KA-ge sah-mah deh). This is a complex phrase which literally means "Yes, thanks to you," almost as if you had leaned how to use chopsticks from the person, even though you've never met them before. The phrase is a useful way of showing Japanese-style humility whenever someone compliments you on something, and since few would expect a gaijin to know it, it's fun to see their surprised expressions when you whip this phrase out. (If you're trying to learn to eat with chopsticks, we recommend the training chopsticks we have on the site.)

J-List is the best place to find Domo-kun related items, from plush toys to wacky T-shirts and warm hoodies to our great 2008 Domo-kun calendar that's in stock right now. Today we're happy to announce a line of cool Domo-kun hats, professionally embroidered with cool images of the official mascot of NHK, Japan's public broadcasting channel. We've got not one, not two but three new Domo-kun hats, the "Domo face," our popular "outlined Domo" design and a new one featuring Domo saluting you as he greets you. All hats are made of stone- washed cotton denim by American Apparel and are extremely well made, and are also fully size adjustable. Browse our new items now!

Here are today's "really cool products" that I thought were especially noteworthy. Note: the J-List links below may be for adult products and should probably be considered "not safe for work" (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. We also recommend watching our "new products" RSS feed

Recently we took our daughter to a resort hotel in Kusatsu, a hot springs town in the mountains with more than 1000 years of history. When we checked in, the hotel employee handed us a standard old-fashioned metal key for our room, which made me realize another difference between my home country and Japan. Most hotels in the States employ a computer-control card-key system, which allows the hotel to assign a unique code for each card then change it the next day. While these convenient hi-tech devices give the hotel a more modern appeal with guests, the main driving force behind their adoption has been litigation, with hotels often liable for theft or other crimes that occurred inside their rooms. With the ability to prove exactly when an individual (including hotel staff) entered a given room, hotels in the U.S. can better control their liability for such things. Since Japan is for all intents and purposes a country in which no one sues anyone else -- remember, I've never met a single lawyer in my 16 years living in Japan, they're so rare -- it's not a problem for hotels to keep using the old metal key systems.

I'll teach you a word of Japanese that can be quite useful. The word is -kei, part of the word kankei, meaning "relationship." Basically, you take a word and put -kei on the end and you've essentially widened its scope, for example cha-kei would mean any kind of tea-like beverage, from Western iced tea to green tea and so on. The suffix is often used to create slang words related to fashion and popular culture, and new words are created almost daily to describe the ever-changing world we live in. One buzzword you hear a lot these days is Akiba-kei ("related to Akihabara"), describing anything that can be found in this popular area of Tokyo, from anime to manga to electronics and maid cafes. More specific otaku-related slang words might include moé-kei, i.e. related to moé (mo-EH) or "the warm, happy feeling you get when you look at your favorite anime character," or otome-kei (oh-toh-meh-kei), used to refer to anything related to yaoi or BL. The -kei suffix is used in music as well, for example the visual-kei rock bands pioneered by X Japan and now represented by the likes of Gackt or Malice Mizer, or the currently popular genre of club music known as Shibuya-kei. One slang word for the hip-hop culture that Japanese young people often like to imitate is B-kei, for black, while the type of man most Japanese females would like to date would probably be Johnny's-kei, men who are attractive in the way that Japanese male idols like SMAP or KAT-TUN are. Japanese magazine publisher Recruit publishes Gaten, a job magazine for workers in physically-demanding fields like road construction or moving, and a popular slang term for strong men who can work in these jobs is Gaten-kei, similar in meaning to the word "blue collar."


One aspect about living in Japan I like very much is the custom of a family's finances being handled by the woman of the household, a good thing since Japanese females generally tend to be very organized and level-headed, a lot more than me anyway. In past decades, Japanese households have been famous for their high savings rate, with the average family keeping around US$120,000 in standard cash savings accounts. Now that Japan finally seems to be permanently past the terrible period of recession that followed the bursting of the Tokyo land bubble in 1991, known officially as the Great Heisei Recession and unofficially as the "Lost Ten Years," some are seeing signs that this era of high savings may be coming to an end. In 1973 the average Japanese household managed to put away a whopping 23% of their annual salary, but this number has fallen to around 2.7% today. A lot of changes are afoot in Japan these days, with many households remodeling their homes to make them "barrier free" so that elderly parents can live at home safely, and of course those aging Japanese workers are retiring, reducing the income available to save. Lifestyles are changing too, with people getting married later and later, living at home into their thirties and forties. Some Japanese households are no doubt fed up with the miniscule interest paid on savings here in Japan -- the rate paid by a major bank in our area is just 0.2%, if you can believe that -- and are looking for other vehicles than straight savings. Unlike the old days when Japan had many barriers to entry for foreign firms, many investment companies are active in Japan, offering a range of more interesting alternatives for families wanting to save for the future.

Here are today's "really cool products" that I thought were especially noteworthy. Note: the J-List links below may be for adult products and should probably be considered "not safe for work" (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. We also recommend watching our "new products" RSS feed

Happy Halloween from J-List. Halloween is one of those "American" holidays (although originally Irish and Scottish) that has a way of working its way around the world, and although Japan doesn't exactly need an excuse to engage in cosplay, what with their strong tradition of dressing in anime costumes and all, awareness of October 31st grows here year by year. Raising kids who are part of two countries has always been a challenge for my wife and I since we want them to really be a part of both, which means (on the American side, at least) having a cultural awareness of things like trick-or-treating and Scooby Doo and being able to sing the School House Rock songs (they can). So we've gone out of our way to make trips to the U.S. for Halloween and Thanksgiving, not on our regular travel schedule, although it was a lot easier to do when the kids were small and didn't have the pressure of school to deal with. This year we decided to be traditional, and carved a (fairly ugly-looking) Jack-o'-lantern. We had a bit of culture shock when I asked my mother-in-law for a candle to put inside the pumpkin: the only ones she had in the house were the long candles for lighting at the family's Buddhist altar in remembrance of the dead...which is actually closer to Halloween's original meaning, if you think about it.

Ramen is one of the most famous "Japanese" foods around, although its history in Japan isn't very long, having been imported from China in the Meiji Era. While instant ramen has proven to be a revolutionary product, allowing the cost of a meal to brought way down in price, readers who have never enjoyed "real" ramen in a good restaurant are missing out. The basic type of ramen familiar to most people is shoyu, made with a soy sauce-based soup, although there are other varieties, including "salt" (a clear soup sold under the tastier-sounding "chicken" moniker in the West) , "tonkotsu" (white "pork bone" broth), and sura-tanmen (think "sweet n' sour ramen"). Another popular type of ramen is miso, the delicious soy bean curd that my mother thought was peanut butter when she saw it, which is one of the "meibutsu (famous things) of Sapporo in Hokkaido. Right now, the Sapporo Ramen Company is running a commercial featuring a beauty pageant in which different brands of ramen compete in for the title of "Miso Universe," a great tribute to the current Japanese Miss Universe.

One constant source of fascination and confusion for me since coming to Japan has been trying to understand Japanese women. Like the country itself, they're incredibly complex, and can just as easily delight you as leave you scratching his head in confusion. First, Japanese females generally tend to be calm, cool and good at planning ahead. Sometimes (from the standpoint of my over-exuberant American self) they can seem rather emotionless, and the thought has occurred to me that I know what it's like to be married to a Vulcan from Star Trek. "Lack of spontaneity" is another label you could apply to most Japanese females I've known: when I went to Europe I brought a backpack, a Lonely Planet book and a credit card and played everything else by ear, which shocked my wife, who so loves to plan every minute detail of a vacation ahead of time. I've mentioned before that Japanese females often seem to have problems with constipation, which no doubt arises from eating rice three meals a day. Japanese females also seem to be subject to chills, and the Totoro Lap Blankets made by Sun Arrow are no doubt used by more than a few OLs ("office ladies," i.e. female company employees) trying to stay warm with the air conditioning on around them. Japanese females often seem to have some rather strange and inexplicable fetishes. For example, several women I've known have loved pulling my chin hairs out by the roots, and have begged me to not shave for a few days so that they could rip my hairs out with tweezers -- totally bizarre. Although they can be confusing to men, learning a little about the care and feeding of Japanese females can certainly have its rewards.

Here are today's "really cool products" that I thought were especially noteworthy. Note: the J-List links below may be for adult products and should probably be considered "not safe for work" (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. We also recommend watching our "new products" RSS feed

You probably know that the Japanese take their shoes off when they enter a house. Shoes are considered to be extremely dirty objects which must never be brought inside unless they're thoroughly cleaned first, and my wife keeps our old washing machine outside our house specifically for shoes, since washing them in our normal machine would be unthinkable. I once had the gaul to stand on a bench with my shoes on and got yelled at by my students for causing inconvenience to the next person who wanted to sit there, something that had never entered my mine before that point. Shoes are always left in the "genkan," a recessed area by the front door which is officially considered part of the outside of the house (in the old days, the genkan was much larger and animals were kept there). One staple of TV dramas and boy-meets-girl anime involves a girl who comes to her boyfriend's apartment only to see another female pair of shoes already there, an interesting dramatic twist that would be difficult to translate culturally to the West. The other day, my daughter came out to carry some bags from the car without putting her shoes on, which caused me to realize what a gaijin my little girl was. Because the soto (outside) of a house is so much dirtier than the uchi (inside), it's all but unheard of for Japanese children to walk around outdoors barefoot.

You can view the world in many ways, from the standpoint of history, politics, the arts, or if you're like me, comparative popular culture. Or if you like, you could focus on taxi cabs. Although we all take taxis for granted, they're often an interesting symbol of each respective country, from the iconic Black Taxis of London to the multi-cultural mish-mash that are taxis in New York City. When my son went to Malaysia he was fascinated to see that all the taxis there were vehicles made in that country, apparently required by law, which caused us to start paying attention to taxis whenever we went somewhere new. If you ever come to Japan, be sure and take a lot of taxi rides, as it's a real treat. Just as taxis in Germany are usually well-apportioned Mercedes Benz vehicles, 90% of Japanese taxis are the Toyota Comfort, made by Japan's most famous automobile company specifically for the industry. Japanese taxis are extremely clean, and when they're not driving someone to a new location, taxi drivers are usually lavishing care on their vehicles to keep them spotless. The most interesting aspect of Japanese taxis for foreigners are the passenger side doors that open and close automatically, using a hydraulic mechanism the driver can control. It's the ultimate in convenience.

One issue of living in Japan and running an international company like J-List is dealing with the time difference between here and the rest of the world. Japan is 16 hours ahead of California, which means that when people on the West Coast of the U.S. are sitting down to dinner, we're all just starting our morning the next day. Being ahead of everyone else has several benefits, including the ability to forget birthdays or Mother's Day without penalty, since you can be a day late but still be in the zone. It's a benefit for Mac users, too: I got to get Leopard, Apple's new OS, 16 hours ahead of most of the world. Although people grumble about having to remember to set their clocks for Daylight Savings Time, it's not a problem here since Japan never adopted the system. While not having to spring forward or fall back is nice, having it get dark at around 4 pm then going to bed while the morning sun peers through my window is kind of lame.

J-List customers know that we always have a huge selection of products for fans of Studio Ghibli, the animation company of Hayao Miyazaki responsible for all his most celebrated films. From Totoro music boxes to plush toys and bento and the super warm blankets we posted last time, the quality of every Studio Ghibli product is without peer. Today we've got a real treat for you: a line of fabulous umbrellas featuring art and characters from My Neighbor Totoro and Kiki's Delivery Service. As you might guess, these umbrellas are extremely well made, with sturdy construction and thick, high quality materials throughout. You can feel this quality when you look at the all-wood handle and shaft, which combine to form an organic creation that was approved by Mr. Miyazaki himself. We're overjoyed to have these great Totoro and Jiji the Cat anime umbrellas for you!

Here are today's "really cool products" that I thought were especially noteworthy. Note: the J-List links below may be for adult products and should probably be considered "not safe for work" (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. We also recommend watching our "new products" RSS feed

Is teen heart-throb Zac Efron, the so-called "next Brad Pitt," an otaku? That's the question asked in a Japanese magazine I happened to come across the other day. Zac is getting a lot of press in Japan because of the popularity of the High School Musical films which made quite a splash here, and he's accumulated a sizeable base of screaming female fans. The article was especially interested in whether or not Zac's love of anime like Dragonball Z, Death Note and Evangelion qualified him as a bona fide otaku or not. Zac is quite taken with Japan, and whenever he's here he reportedly heads to Akihabara for some serious shopping. In a way I guess it's no mystery that Zac's name goes