animerevue

Learning a foreign language is good for reasons beyond the obvious benefit of being able to communicate and share ideas with people from other parts of the world. It can also give you unexpected insights, including the etymology of words you might miss otherwise. The name China uses for itself literally means the Kingdom at the Center of the World, which seemed overly ethnocentric to me when I heard it for the first time. Of course, the Mediterranean Sea means the exact same thing, the Sea at the Center of the Earth, something I never would have picked up on if I hadn't seen the name in kanji characters. Similarly, I'd never consciously realized the days of the week were named after the ancient gods, although it's very clear when you write the Japanese days of the week in kanji, which correspond to Moon Day, Mars Day, Mercury Day, Jupiter Day, Venus Day, etc. (The names in English have been filtered through the Germanic/Norse pantheon, for example Thursday comes from silly-sounding Thor's Day, although the system is the same.) Sometimes words can get lost in translation when they move from one language to another. Despite Japan being a pretty non-religeous country, the name for the Statue of Liberty in Japanese is jiyu no megami, or Goddess of Freedom, and the official word for the Olympic Torch translated as the Holy Fire of the Five Rings. Sounds like a magic item from a video game.

If you've ever visited Japan, you've probably answered the call of nature at some point, and seen the famous TOTO logo featured on most every toilet here. If you're a wise-cracking gaijin like me, you might have been compelled to say, "Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore." Or like my son says, 等々トイレを見つけた tohtoh toire o mitsuketa, "I finally found a toilet," since tohtoh also means "finally" or "after a long time." Toto is the largest toilet maker in Japan, and the fourth largest in the world, and if you've ever enjoyed the warm feeling of having your butt carefully washed and dried by your toilet, you have these people to thank, since the "Washlet" is their invention. The company was launched in 1916 in response to the need for Western-style sanitation as Japan grew more modern, and it experienced rapid growth during the rebuilding after the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923. Like many Japanese company names such as Kyocera ("Kyoto Ceramics"), its name is an abbreviation, in this case Toyo Toki, or Oriental Porcelain. In addition to high-tech toilets, they invented the "unit bath," an easily constructed one-piece bath, sink and toilet room common in Japanese apartments. They also had a successful line of porcelain tableware, although I for one wouldn't want to eat off porcelain plates with that TOTO logo on it.

Apparently Toto is pushing hard to get Washlets accepted in the U.S., although sales are slow so far, with 1000 or so moving each month. By comparison, they're selling a million units a year in China. Click the image below to go to their site and see a pretty amazing website that will probably get you thinking about "that happy Washlet feeling." Clean is happy!

If you've ever visited Japan, you've probably answered the call of nature at some point, and seen the famous TOTO logo featured on most every toilet here. If you're a wise-cracking gaijin like me, you might have been compelled to say, "Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore." Or like my son says, 等々トイレを見つけた tohtoh toire o mitsuketa, "I finally found a toilet," since tohtoh also means "finally" or "after a long time." Toto is the largest toilet maker in Japan, and the fourth largest in the world, and if you've ever enjoyed the warm feeling of having your butt carefully washed and dried by your toilet, you have these people to thank, since the "Washlet" is their invention. The company was launched in 1916 in response to the need for Western-style sanitation as Japan grew more modern, and it experienced rapid growth during the rebuilding after the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923. Like many Japanese company names such as Kyocera ("Kyoto Ceramics"), its name is an abbreviation, in this case Toyo Toki, or Oriental Porcelain. In addition to high-tech toilets, they invented the "unit bath," an easily constructed one-piece bath, sink and toilet room common in Japanese apartments. They also had a successful line of porcelain tableware, although I for one wouldn't want to eat off porcelain plates with that TOTO logo on it.

Apparently Toto is pushing hard to get Washlets accepted in the U.S., although sales are slow so far, with 1000 or so moving each month. By comparison, they're selling a million units a year in China. Click the image below to go to their site and see a pretty amazing website that will probably get you thinking about "that happy Washlet feeling." Clean is happy!

7 Day's 7 Colors -- Yoko Kumada

Yoko Kumada's Fans are going to be really happy with this new entry in J-List's Yoko Kumada photobook collection. The queen of gravure idols shows here in various cosplay situations along with some stunning and always elegant bikini pictures. Dressed up as a sexy nurse, office lady, bride, cute schoolgirl, wearing a China dress or acting as a maid, Yoko is always wearing a nice bikini as underwear and shows her porcelain skin to the camera for awesome captures shots of which you'll never get...

7 Day's 7 Colors -- Yoko Kumada

Yoko Kumada's Fans are going to be really happy with this new entry in J-List's Yoko Kumada photobook collection. The queen of gravure idols shows here in various cosplay situations along with some stunning and always elegant bikini pictures. Dressed up as a sexy nurse, office lady, bride, cute schoolgirl, wearing a China dress or acting as a maid, Yoko is always wearing a nice bikini as underwear and shows her porcelain skin to the camera for awesome captures shots of which you'll never get...

You probably don't think of soybeans as being vital to culture, but in Japan, the lowly soybean is the most important national crop after rice. Soybeans began being cultivated in China 4000 years ago and found their way to Japan through Siberia soon after. Today many of the traditional foods of Japan are made from soybeans, including tofu, or soybean curd, which tastes a lot better than its English name sounds; miso soup, how I start my morning every day; and natto, the fermented soybeans that foreigners usually shun because of the way it smells. Soybeans are the base for soy sauce, a flavoring used more often than salt in Japanese kitchens, and they're also used to cast out "devils" (actually fathers wearing cardboard devil masks) on a special day in February called Setsubun. Another popular way to eat soybeans is as edamame, lit. "twig bean," which are boiled soybeans in their pods that are great for munching on over a beer, and healthier than anything else you could choose, too. The way the soybeans pop out of their pods when you give them a squeeze is especially fun, and there are compulsive people here who love nothing more than to order an extra large bowl of edamame and pop all the seeds out. If this sounds appealing to you, check out the Endless Edamame Keychains we've gotten in stock today -- they're great fun to play with all day long!

The name of Japan in its own language is nihon or nippon, alternate readings of kanji characters that mean "origin of the sun," a name given it by China, written 日本. The two names are interchangeable, with nihon being used in everyday speech and nippon used in more formal situations, for example by lawmakers or the straight-laced newscasters on NHK, Japan's version of the BBC. The first Westerners heard of Japan was through Marco Polo, who wrote about a strange country 1500 miles to the East of China called Cipangu, a place of great wealth where both temples and average homes were made of gold, and where the people were very polite, although they had a strange custom of eating human flesh. The modern name of Japan has been filtered through many other languages, including traders in Malaysia   (who called it Jepang), Manchuria (Zeppen), and the Portuguese (Iapan), and first appearing in English as Giapan. For some reason, the Japanese have focused on the version Zipang as a cool, retro early word for their country, and this name is commonly found in books, video games, an anime and manga series, and computer CPU cooler.

(The anime Zipang is really good, by the way, a kind of Final Countdown in which a present-day Japanese ship is sent back to World War II...I recommend it a lot.)

Japan has been undergoing a "Miyazaki Prefecture Boom," lately, thanks to its governor, former TV comedian Sonomanma Higashi, a discovery of director/comedian Takeshi Kitano, who appeared on Takeshi's Castle for years. The TV comic gave up his career as a "talent" to run for governor of this rural prefecture last year, winning despite having no backing from any political party. Since taking office, he's shaken things up quite a bit, using his celebrity status to shed light on the wasteful construction projects that plague rural Japan and trading in his official governor's vehicle for a hybrid. Now, his face adorns dozens of products that contain ingredients from the prefecture, and it seems you can't go into a shop without seeing his face smiling up at you. Miyazaki is located in the southeast corner of the southernmost island of Kyushu, one of the early centers of Japanese civilization due to its proximity to China and the Korean Peninsula, and it's famous for mangoes, the off-season training camp for the Tokyo Giants, and a sprawling resort called SEAGAIA, which recreated a tropical beach under an 85 acre dome, although it was closed last year due to the inability of the operators to make a profit.

When Japanese think of foreigners, they think of overly tall, blonde Americans or Europeans with huge feet, trying to find their way to the right subway line. Even though some of us aren't that tall (I'm only 5'9"), they apologize for having such small cars when you sit in the passenger seat, and likewise apologize for living in such a tiny hovel when you visit them at home, whether or not their house is really that small. It's also assumed that every foreigner will speak English, and it's not uncommon to be told "sorry, I can't understand!" by a Japanese person even though you're speaking to them in their native language. In actuality, the vast majority of foreigners living in Japan are not Westerners, but are from both Koreas, Brazil, Peru, and China. Officially, 1.5% of Japan's population are resident foreigners, although that number doesn't take into account people who are here illegally, so the number is probably higher. Isesaki, the city we live in, has a much higher foreign population (3%) than average due to a lot of factories based here, which means a lot more choices when you want to eat ethnic. One of our favorite restaurants is a Peruvian place that serves the most heavenly pollo a la brasa.

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.