I have a rather strange problem: I don’t know my own kids. Or rather, I know the half that speaks Japanese, that works diligently on homework and reads books or plays video games in Japanese.
The English-speaking side of my children is something I’m less familiar with, for the main reason that my kids are unable to function naturally in English when my Japanese wife or I am around. One thing I’ve learned from becoming bilingual is that once you have a certain “language relationship” with someone, it’s almost impossible to change later on.
I speak Japanese to my wife but English to my kids, however everyone speaks Japanese back to me, and no amount of pretending to not understand will get my kids to switch to English — kind of like Han Solo and Chewbacca, conversing in two different languages at once. That’s why we send our kids to the U.S. every summer, so they can get a good dose of fun American culture and speak lots of English.
I hear reports from my family about how open and outgoing my kids are, using English just as naturally as if they’d been born in the States, but I never get to see it for myself since if I am around, everything reverts to Japanese.
Since a person’s personality in one language can be quite different in another, I feel as if there’s a big part of my own children I’m unable to know.
Here’s a trilogy of videos on Japanese beer - one on beer vending machines in Kyoto, another one on a draft beer vending machine in Tokyo, and a final one on historical beers - beers with labels of famous people in Japanese history with short bios.
This first video is from BusanKevin in Kyoto talking about the wonders of outdoor beer vending machines in Kyoto on a hot day:
In response, I did a video on a draft beer vending machine I discovered in a pool hall in Tokyo a few nights ago.
Taste was not too bad but it gave me a huge head of foam which is quite common anyway even with live servers:
Later that same night I came across some “Historalicious” Japanese beer which were beer bottles with labels depicting famous people from Japanese history. Get your drink on while learning some Japanese history with Historalicious Japanese Beer - if you can read the bloody small cursive writing on the label:
Crack open a cold one and enjoy the Japanese Beer Trilogy!
Just thought we would warn all your Japundits and Japundettes that Sanrio, creator of Hello Kitty, is launching more characters that are so cloyingly cute, they are guaranteed to set your teeth on edge in no time at all.
First are the two ballerina bunny sisters named Sugarminuet.
The older of the two is Ballet Usa (usa is short of usagi, or “rabbit” in Japanese), a make-up loving ballerina with a swan’s grace and pink fur. The younger is Prima Usa, a dreamy and romantic white bunny; both sport sparkly tiaras.
Debuting on August 8th, the pair have already established a line of goods that includes plush toys, stationary, and bags—all in a ballerina-esque blend of white and sugar pink and trimmed with ruffles, ribbons, and roses.
Still not gagging yet? Well how about Sanrio’s Cherinacherine, two little bears who live in a cherry forest?
Makes me want to go out and find something cute. . . so I can stomp on it.
Caught the Japan-U.S. women’s soccer game yesterday, which the U.S. won 4-2.
The game was pretty good and both teams should be congratulated for giving their all and fighting it out right up until the final whistle.
Less than stellar, however, was the Japanese coverage both during the game and in the aftermath. As very often happens when Japan is beaten in an international sporting event, commentators spent most of their time serving up the same old tired litany of excuses of why the Japanese side fell to defeat.
Here are the ones I can remember off hand.
The other team was physically bigger and stronger.
The bad condition of the pitch.
The heat and humidity.
A schedule that had the Japanese team play two games with little rest.
What they always seem to forget is that, except for the first point, both teams are playing under the same conditions.
One particularly humorous remark I heard during the game was by one of the color commentators on the broadcast after the Japanese side went off side for about the fourth time in a row, “The fact that they keep jumping offside is testimony to the speed and agility of the Japanese team.”
Humor is a very cultural thing, and it’s fun to analyze the things people from different countries consider amusing — jokes about the lack of education or hygiene among people in a certain region, visual or slapstick forms of humor, orifice-related jokes and so on.
Often, we can’t comprehend the things that people in one culture find funny — Canadian stand-up comedians telling jokes about Nova Scotians go way over my head, for example. Then again, there are times when the cultural difference can make something all that much more hilarious, which I believe is why Monty Python and the Holy Grail is such a cult favorite in the U.S. — the gap between the two countries magnifies all the jokes, and our unfamiliarity with British understatement (”There are some who call me…Tim?”) make it a ridiculously funny film.
Humor in Japan often seems to be situationally-based, putting a character in an impossibly bizarre position and drawing laughter from his embarrassment, for example.
One important category of humor in Japan comes from manzai, two-person stand-up comedy that involves a dumb comedian (boke) who makes erroneous observations and his sharp-tongued partner (tsukkomi), who berates him at every turn. The interplay of R2-D2 and C-3P0 in the Star Wars films is largely a reflection of this comic tradition, of course filtered through the films of Akira Kurosawa.
The old adage that if you have to explain it, it isn’t funny holds up pretty well in my experience, and back when I was a teacher I tried using American humor as teaching tool, bringing in Far Side comics or funny song lyrics for my students to discuss. I remember once trying to explain the concepts of irony, sarcasm and cynicism, all three of which are represented by the exact same word in Japanese (hiniku). It was, ahem, not my most inspired of lessons, and I think my students were more confused when I was finished.
When is a graveyard likely to be filled with tourists snapping pictures?
When it’s a gaijin bochi, or “foreigners’ graveyard,” which you can see in several old Japanese cities that have had Westerners living there for a long time, like Yokohama, Kobe and Hakodate.
Japanese burial rites involve cremation and placing the bones and ashes of the deceased inside a family grave, customs which are very different from the West, and these special foreigners’ graveyards are places where Europeans and Americans can be interred according to their own traditions.
The oldest can be found in Nagasaki, the only city where trade was allowed during the Edo Period, and you can see the gravestone of a Dutch trader that dates from 1778.
By far the most famous gaijin bochi in Japan is the Foreign General Cemetery in Yokohama, in the Naka Ward region that’s been popular with foreign residents for more than 150 years, and it’s up there with Chinatown and the Marine Tower on my list of attractions to hit when I’m visiting the city. The cemetery was commissioned by Admiral Perry himself, who requested a place for Westerners to be buried when one of his sailors died during his second visit to the country in his fleet of “Black Ships” in 1854.
Whenever I’m there I like to walk through the headstones and wonder what these early sojourners to Japan experienced here, and how things compare to today.
After a bit of a rough start thanks to a hack not long after it was launched, Japan News Junkie finally reached its one-month anniversary yesterday. Despite the down time due to the hack, we had more than 13,000 visitors during our first month, which is not bad at all for a new blog. I would like to send out my sincere thanks to everyone who has been contributing and helping to make it a success.
Japan News Junkie is a social bookmarking site, which means that the registered members are in control of the site’s content through the submission of stories and by voting for stories. A submitted story first goes into an Upcoming News queue where it stays until it gets four votes, which sends it into the main Published News page. If it does not get four votes within five days after it is posted, the story is deleted from the queue automatically. Of course, you also can comment on stories, just as you do here.
To submit news stories, vote, and comment, you must first register. We already have more than 80 registered members, but there is plenty of room for more. In particular, we need more members who are interested in taking an active part in keeping the site fresh and interesting by submitting stories, and who take the time to vote.
If you have not done so yet, please check out Japan News Junkie and give it a try.
Take a dip into the surreal and the avant-garde with the Taiwanese performance group - the Eyeball Love Globe group.
The Eyeball Love Globe performed at the Tokyo Design Festa this past May and have done so a few other times before being one of the popular re-occuring performances at the exhibition.
The creative and innovating abilities of Japanese scientists and product developers are apparently unbounded—as is the variety of areas and things that attract their attention.
Among the recent and more far-out of their innovations are lines of men’s wear that “eat” body odors.
Now if that doesn’t strike you as being worthy of serious attention and effort by developers and researchers, you may have to spend some time reconsidering the power of modern-day advertising that is designed to program the minds of viewers and listeners to buy their products.
And if that doesn’t do the trick, you may have to resort to considering the modern-day sensibilities of women who because of advertising find the smell of sweat—their own but especially that of men—unpleasant and unacceptable.
There is more. It is a given that as men age their natural body odor changes…taking on a fetid smell to varying degrees. The older the man the stronger this smell becomes, and if not controlled by bathing and other means the smell can be a real turn-off for people with a keen sense of smell.
As it happens, most men of whatever age are either not conscious of their own smell or it doesn’t bother them. Basically, it’s kind of like working in a sausage factory. After a while you don’t notice the smell.
Women in Japan and other “advanced countries” are especially sensitive to male sweat because they have been programmed to consider it both unsightly and unpleasant. And this especially applies to both outer and under garments worn by men.
Now, Japanese apparel manufacturers have mounted an all-out war against sweat-soaked shorts and suits by creating fabrics that deodorized themselves. Talk about advancing the human condition!
But what the makers, buyers and sniffers (meaning women) are forgetting—if they ever knew—is that male sweat is loaded with sex-related chemicals called pheromones that are designed to attract females and turn them on.
If the odor of male sweat is eliminated altogether—and that is obviously the direction humanity is going in—and men no longer have this invisible sexual attraction going for them, what will happen to male-female relations?
Men are already becoming feminized to an amazing degree that flies in the face of nature…a portent of the time when females will be the dominate half of the species.
If you would like to know more about why and how this is happening, go to the book category of amazon.com and check out The Myth of Intelligent Life on Planet Earth!
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Boyé Lafayette De Mente has been involved with Japan and East Asia since the late 1940s as a member of a U.S. intelligence agency, student, business journalist, and editor. He is the author of more than 50 books on Japan, Korea and China. For synopses of his titles go to: www.cultural-guide-books-on-china-japan-korea-mexico.com. His most recent book: Etiquette Guide to China: Know the Rules that Make the Difference!
Norimitsu Onishi of the New York Times is back with another interesting article, this time on foreign workers in Japan. One thing I have noticed in my time in Japan is the consternation many Japanese feel towards foreigners. My wife trains foreign workers (largely in Japanese language and culture) who are employed by Japanese companies both here and abroad and it opens a window for me into these attitudes. Soon her organization will be training a large group (50 +/-) of Indonesian nurses and the hand wringing continues…
With one of the world’s most rapidly aging populations and lowest birthrates, Japan is facing acute labor shortages not only in farming towns but also in fishing villages, factories, restaurants and nursing homes, and on construction sites. Closed to immigration, Japan has admitted foreign workers through various loopholes, including employing growing numbers of foreign students as part-timers and temporary workers, like the Chinese here, as so-called foreign trainees.
The labor shortage has grown serious enough that a group of influential politicians in the long-governing Liberal Democratic Party recently released a report calling for the admission of 10 million immigrants in the next 50 years.
The foreign work force in Japan rose to more than one million in 2006 from fewer than 700,000 in 1996. But experts say that it will have to increase by significantly more to make up for the expected decline in the Japanese population. The government projects that Japan’s population, 127 million, will fall to between 82 million and 99 million by 2055. Moreover, because the population is graying, the share that is of working age is expected to shrink even faster.
The large presence of the Chinese workers has unsettled some Japanese here even as they have become increasingly dependent on them. Some vaguely mentioned the fear of crime, though they acknowledged that crime rates had not risen. No Japanese interviewed welcomed the idea of immigrants here or elsewhere in Japan.
“I feel a strange sense of oppression,” Toshimitsu Ide, 28, a lettuce farmer who had not hired any Chinese workers, said of seeing large groups of Chinese hanging around town. “They seem hard to approach.”
Perhaps because of the Japanese unease, the Chinese workers were given directives apparently aimed at curbing their movements, even before they arrived. They said they were told to go home by 8 p.m. and not to ride bicycles except for work. Some even said they had been instructed not to talk to young Japanese women.
“Though I’m in Japan,” said Toshimitsu Yui, 57, who works in construction, “I feel this is not Japan anymore.”
I was invited to a barbecue earlier in O-bon week. But not at my friend’s own house, at a relative’s place. And having never been there before, it took some finding.
If you’ve never been to Japan before, it may surprise you to know that roads have no names, and houses have no street numbers.
OK, major roads have numbers. (Though this is not necessarily helpful. Two different roads where I live have the same number.) And in city centres, some major avenues have names. But in residential areas, forget it.
So how do you find anyone’s house, you’re thinking? Well, usually it involves heading in the right vague direction and phoning your friend when you arrive at some particular landmark, where your friend can come and meet you, or is already waiting.
That’s not to say that Japanese houses don’t have addresses. Of course they do. But they’re a convaluted and complicated code understood only by the geniuses at the Post Office. The idea of any convenience to the general public has been entirely left out.
Each city and town is divided into smaller, named areas. This can be difficult for a new arrival. You won’t know most of the names, and this will inexplicably amaze most locals, who will name some place you will assume to be a faraway town, but what in fact turns out to mean “just down there, and round that corner”.
And each of these areas is divided into numbered areas. And depending on whether we’re talking about a village or a city, we keep paring down with more numbers until we get to an individual building. There is usually no geographical basis to these numbers (it’s more likely based on the order the buildings were built), so give up any idea of finding a place simply because you have the address.
So basically, the entire reason for this post is that by the time we arrived at this barbecue, all the best bits had been eaten or burnt, and everyone else was drunk and beyond caring.
It seems that Dunkin Donuts in Korea is running a publicity campaign in which they are offereing Dokdo t-shirts to customers.
The publicity campaign was right in front of the store and could not be missed. If the store is trying to reach a western audience with these Dokdo shirts they are going to fail miserably in my opinion because these shirts are just plain dumb.
I think Koreans agree with this assessment because I sat in the shop for about 30 minutes and did not see one person pick up one of these shirts. I have yet to see anyone in Korea even wearing one of the shirts. Has anyone else seen anyone wearing these shirts?
To me it seems like a pretty dumb move for an international chain like Dunkin Donut to take a position on such a sensitive issue.
