How Japan and America are different from each other, and Japanese government employees

My mother and nephew have gone back to San Diego after a nice visit. It was fun having them here, although difficult because our life in Japan is so different from what they were used to back home. Although there were a lot of challenges -- Japanese homes don't have central heating so they were always cold, for example, and food they could eat was not always easy to find -- they had fun, I think. Gunma Prefecture is the home of the creator of Initial D, a manga and anime about high-speed mountain racing, and the day before he was to go back, I took my nephew for a run up Mt. Haruna, on which the fictional mountain in Initial D is based on. It was fun to zoom over the real mountain roads in my Miata (sold under the name of Roadster here), and now he has some serious bragging rights with his friends back home.

America and Japan are very different from each other, a fact that I was reminded of all the more during my travels last week. While the Japanese not usually that proficient at English, except for exceptional individuals (like the Japanese staff at J-List) who make a special effort to master the language, a foreign visitor in Japan can still be reasonably sure that someone will come to his rescue if he has a problem of some kind. When Japanese go to the U.S., however, they're taught to speak up and ask for what they want in specific terms, since no one will help a person who is shyly sitting in a corner not saying anything. My son learned this to his cost one day last summer, while attending a week-long science day-camp in San Diego. His lunch had been left with the receptionist, but he didn't know this, and he was too shy to speak up loudly and ask where his lunch was. Because he didn't make an effort to communicate what he needed, he went hungry all afternoon, but I think he learned a lesson.

Japanese government employees, called komuin (KOH-mu-in), are an interesting part of society here. A huge caste of ultra-conservative individuals who work at Japan's city and prefectural offices, they are a massive non-political bureaucracy that are responsible for administering Japanese laws, collecting taxes, granting permits for various activities, and generally making Japan run smoothly. Unlike the private sector, where companies must work hard and show results, Japan's public employees enjoy incredible stability, and theirs is the last segment of society with de facto lifetime employment in Japan. Young people who want the comfort of the stablest possible job and a long, steady climb up the social ladder aspire to pass the difficult national test that allows you to work as a public employee, although of course, if your parents are friends with your local city councilman he may be able to get you a job even if you haven't passed the test -- Japan can be very flexible that way. More so than in the U.S., government employees here are defined as a single group, and some professions that you don't normally think of as a lifetime government job are described with the komuin term, such as police, firemen and teachers. While Japan's public employees provide a solid white-collar backbone of stability for the country, there are a lot of complaints about lack of fiscal restraint in Japan's public sector. For example, despite the decade-long recession in Japan, our prefecture found the money to build a 32-story skyscraper-style prefectural office that cost hundreds of millions to erect yet does nothing but provide government employees with a beautiful view.

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." To see all the J-List products, check out J-List or the JBOX.com updated products link.

	Fujiya Banana Milky Candy. One of the oldest candy companies in Japan is Fujiya, who also operate a chain of family restaurants that sell delicious cake. These are "Milky Candies" which are kind of like milk-flavored caramels -- sounds weird, but they will grow on you. This particular item is a banana flavored version, very hard to find.
	Godzilla vs King Ghidora Kigurumi Microman Series -- KM-SP01. The Japanese toy company made the original Microman toys, which were sold in the U.S. under the name Micronauts by Mego. Now Micronaut/Microman melds with Godzilla in a cool new concept: monster suits that the figures can actually wear, for an extra layer of coolness. This is a fantastic item for collectors.
	Movable Wireless Mouse. This is another item I am glad we can get for people: a really well designed wireless mouse by Elecom. The USB antenna dongle fits inside the mouse irself when not in use, a really cool concept. Although it's expensive, it's almost the best mouse that movile users will ever be able to find.
	Maffy 02 -- Orange Chocolate ~ Soft Marshmallow Kubrick. The Maffy toys are a new direction for Medicom Toy, creators of Kubrick figures, which created the boom in block figures (they were making esoteric figures of Planet of the Apes back in 1997, remember). These new toys are really cute, good for people who appreciate the "so cute that it mocks the very concept of cute" ethic at work here.
	Frog Style Alarm Clock. Frog Style came out of nowhere and really took the Japanese character world by storm. Basically really well designed frog products from keychains to figures and more, the quality of these figures has really won over fans. This is a line of alarm clocks in the same series. Considering how cool they are, the price is really cheap.
	Unrequited Love -- Emiru Momose. There are two sub-genres to the adult video world in Japan. One are the well-known bikini idols that are sexy, yet never take their clothes off, with famous names who often go on to become mainstream actresses. This is a DVD in which the model gets nude yet never has sex or touches herself in a sexual way. It's an elegant way to appreciate the beauty of the female form. Mai Hagiwara and Mihiro both used to appear in "pure nude" titles like this but eventually went on to do normal hardcore (something that is oddly saddening for me).
	Japanese Calligraphy T-shirt - "Sake-bito" (I Love Alcohol). Here are three new shirts we've been cooking up for you: they feature simple designs in kanji or katakana, and look like they were drawn with a Japanese calligraphy brush. The designs say gaijin (foreigner), ecchi (the letter H, which refers to someone who thinks about sex too much), and sake-bito (which could be translated as "I love alcohol!").

Our trip to Hiroshima and the wrong places to bring electronics

It's good to be back home! We were only gone four nights, but traveling around Japan with your 65-year-old mother and two kids can be a lot of work. After seeing the sights in Kyoto, we rode the train to a town called Uji (OO-gee), famous for its green tea and for the beautiful Byodoin Temple, the 900 year old building which appears on the back of the Japanese ten yen coin. We then went on to Nara, a small city that was the capital of Japan hundreds of years ago, and took in the quiet beauty of Nara Park while feeding the deer that overrun the place.

In preparation for our trip, I had made sure to pack all the various electronic devices I'm accustomed to carrying with me: Powerbook, digital camera, cell phone, iPod, Canon Wordtank, PSP, and all associated chargers, of course. I have to admit, I felt a little odd, carrying electronic gadgets while going to see such beautiful and ancient places, such as Miyajima, a shrine established in A.D. 593, built above the beach so that it seems to float when the tide comes in. I wish I could have left all my electronic gadgets at home and gone on my trip with nothing to detract from the ancient beauty of what we were seeing, but I'm just too much a slave to electronics, I guess.

The last day we visited Hiroshima, something that's always a solemn experience for any visitor to Japan. Hiroshima was a bustling commercial port and wartime center when the first atomic bomb used against humans exploded over it at 8:15 on August 6, 1945. The destruction was devastating, killing at least 50,000 people instantly, including factory workers, soldiers, children, and Koreans and Chinese who were made to work in factories in the city. The Peace Park, located at ground zero, is a beautiful place to walk and reflect on what happened, and see the famous symbol of the city, the A-Bomb Dome, a former commercial building that managed to partially survive the bombing. It was important for me to show my children the site, as well as the sobering exhibits in the Peace Museum, which include before-and-after models of the city, glass bottles that had melted in the heat, and a wristwatch that had stopped forever at 8:15. My son asked me many probing questions about what he saw -- why did America and Japan start fighting? What happened to people like him, who were both Japanese and American, living in Japan at the time? I was glad that my mother and children were able to visit this important place with me.

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." To see all the J-List products, check out J-List or the JBOX.com updated products link.

	Shitsujun -- Sumire Ogawa All I can say is, wow. Something about this girl caught my eye when her calendar came out last year. Her face is pretty, sure, but also playful in a sexual way that makes you want to sit there and fantasize about her. Or am I going overboard?
	Japanese Keychain -- Nozomi *Type300* ~ Shinkansen. Ha! I just rode this train almost to the other end of Japan, so it's funny that it would appear on a keychain on the Monday when I get back. Japan's Shinkansen (bullet trains) are really fun to travel on, although trying to entertain two kids for a long trip is always a challenge.
	M ~ Katsura Masakazu. One of the best manga I've ever read was Denei Shojo, aka Video Girl Ai, by Katsura Masakazu. It combined a saucy girl-comes-out-of-the-TV sci-fi plot with real edge-of-your-seat love triangles between interesting characters. But through it all, the characters never really did the nasty, which was always kind of frustrating. Now the artist has done his first really erotic work, and I have to say, I approve. This may be based on I's, I'm not sure -- if it is I'll have to hunt it down and read it.
	Glico Shall We? -- Chocolate Chips & Maccadamian Nuts. Glico's latest snack from Japan is titled "Shall we?" no doubt a reference to Shall We Dance?, a hugely popular Japanese film that was remade by Hollywood (blech). I thought this packag title was worth posting,.
	Japanese Sake Brand Cap ~ Otokoyama. This is such a good idea -- take cool-looking logos from famous sake makers in Japan, and put said logos on hats, "scissors pouches" and so on. I am totally in favor of it, since I love the look of kanji, the way they are both a picture and a descriptive word.
	SIX NINE - Special Love Toy for Adult. There are some darned innovative sex toys in Japan, among them this little ditty, a long snake-like thing filled with soft beads, with a mouth at one end and another type of oriface at the other end. God bless those wacky Japanese!
	Decamelon vol. 10. In the past, Dekamelon (which means "big melon") was an exclusively Race Queen oriented adult mag, with girls dressed as F-1 circuit gals. Now they've done an all-OL issue, which may or may not represent a total change for them. OL means "office lady" and refers to female office workers, who can be pretty sexy when they want to be.