The Otaku Standardized Test and origin of the word, Japan's hot summer, and aloe flavored yogurt

Hello again from Japan, and a special weekend update to J-List!

I've written before about how the Japanese like to take tests, and there are national qualification exams for just about everything, from English to kanji to using an abacus to preparing sashimi, and even a test for people who like to memorize train schedules. Getting these qualifications is one way to get ahead in Japan, and having a lot of them under your belt can help you get a better job. Now several companies in Akihabara have gotten together to create the first Otaku Standardized Test, which allows fans of anime and manga to test their knowledge and see if they make the grade as uber-fans. The test is hard -- with questions like, of the following anime shows of the 1960s and 1970s, which was not directed by Tetsuo Imazawa? -- and is of course only in Japanese. The official page of the Otaken can be found at http://www.otaken.jp. The word otaku originally is a polite term for "you" or "your family" but has come to stand for anyone with a strong interest in anime, manga, model trains, or any other aspect of Japan's popular sub-culture. There are several theories about how this everyday Japanese word attained this unique alternate meaning. According to one, the fact that "otaku" was spoken frequently by characters in the original Macross series caused fans to start using it, creating the beginnings of the otaku movement. Alternately, many of the employees of General Products, the model company that would go on to become the mighty Gainax, hail from Tottori Prefecture (the only part of Japan to sport its own mini-desert), and in the local dialect, "otaku" is the most commonly used second-person pronoun.

Japan's oh-so-hot summer continues, with temperatures hovering around 35 degrees (95 Farenheit, although I had to look that up, since I've lived in Japan so long). It's so hot that the plastic in my Star Wars figures starts to get soft, which makes them fall over easily. As bad as it is out here in Gunma (about 100 km northwest of Tokyo), it's much worse in Japan's capital, thanks to the "heat island" effect. With all those people running their air conditioners, and all that black asphalt and reflective glass, Tokyo is often 3-4 degrees Celsius hotter than other parts of the country. It's hotter at night, too, since the heat is stored in the concrete and can't be radiated away because of all the other buildings. The average temperature in the capital has gone up a full 3 degrees Celsius over the past century, a pace far higher than global warming, mainly due to the heat island effect. Which is just one more reason why I'm glad I don't live in Tokyo.

Our English-translated PC dating-sim games are a fun way to interact with Japan on a new level. Several of our games are backordered right now while we reprint them, but we've gotten two titles back in stock today, Chain and Tsuki - Possession. Also, we've posted our popular "Special Set" of G-Collections games (DOR plus any 2 or 3 games) to the site, by customer request. We did have a problem with two titles recently reprinted titles, Come See Me Tonight and Crescendo. If you bought these games but had issues installing them, please contact us and we'll make arrangements for replacement discs to be sent to you right away.

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.

	Golden Age ~ Ougonki. This is a rare item -- a photobook w/ DVD featuring JAV idols from a bygone era, the late 1990s, when J-List was just getting started. Aika Miura, Ramu Nagase, many more.
	Totoro Family *Acorn Set* for Baby. This is so cute you might just due of kawaii overdose: a plush acorn that unzips to reveal cute little Totoro plush toys inside. Great for babies, or keep 'em for yourself.
	Lucky Cat Key Chain for Safety Driving. "Safety driving" is a word that sounds a little odd, but come live in Japan for ten years or more and you'll be quite at peace with it. This is a keychain with a Lucky Cat on it, which also has an omamori (good luck charm) for safety while driving.
	Hentai Aspiration -- Shoko Goto. Once again I have to say, damn, when I look at Shoko Goto (go-TOH, not "go to") and her amazing body. She's spreading like wildfire and will probably be the top selling girl at J-List this month.
	Cosplay Lesbian -- Mitsu Amai. Mitsu Amai is also having a great month, and here's a new offering for fans of cosplay, the Japanese fetish of dressing up in anime costumes.
	Boy's Lips vol. 6. J-List also sells a lot of yaoi manga, for fans of Japan's "bl" comics. This is a popular anthology series.
	Marikouji Honoka PVC Figure -- Auction. Wow, another amazing PVC figure, this one so sexy that we can't sell it on the PG page. How they can make these things so perfect is really beyond me, but seeing anime characters like this in three dimentions is just too cool.
	Genpi-Cha (Dietary Tea) ~ 20 Packs. We strive to bring you all manner of cool products from Japan, and since there are so many types of Asian teas sold here, this is something we'd like to bring you more of in the future. This is Genpi tea, which is supposed to help weight loss.
	Egg September 2005 Issue #107. Egg is one of our most popular fashion magazines. It tracks "kogal" culture, the outrageous fashion of Tokyo urbanites in the Shibuya area, and is filled with tons of photos of great Tokyo gals.
	Cosmin!! -- Kasumi Nakamura. A very nice hardcover photobook from Japan, this is Kasumi Nakamura, a relatively new gravure idol in Japan. We love items like this becuase the quality is so high and the girls are so beautiful, it's like something from another world.
	The Debutant! ~ Shinjin -- Chinatsu Abe. A fun word to know in Japanese is sokkuri (so-KOO-ree), which means looking exactly the same as someone else. This is a sokkuri-san (look-alike) of a popular Morning Musume star, which is a rather odd practice in Japan. Do they have porn stars in the U.S. that are styled to look like Britney spears?

iTunes Music Store comes to Japan, on Japanese drinking culture, and some happy news at J-List

After a long wait, Apple's iTunes Japan music store has finally opened, allowing customers here to download Japanese and international music for around $1.75 per song. Despite the large number of digital-savvy users in Japan, it's not at all surprising to me that it took so long for Apple to get the iTunes store up and running. Japan can be a very conservative place, and to big companies with established businesses, nothing is more terrifying than change, any change at all. Apple has had to navigate between greedy record companies who have kept the prices of CDs at the artificially high price of $30 for decades, and industry groups like the Japanese Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers (JASRAC) and the Recording Industry of Japan (RIAJ), who have closed ranks against any kind of digital distribution of music that doesn't guarantee more profits for them than conventional CDs. A big problem was JASRAC's insistence that Apple follow "Japan's rules" when it came to selling music online, which apparently meant that the industry group was to receive 7.7% of every song sold in addition to what the actual copyright holders receive. It's all very silly when you think about the fact that in Japan, you can go into any one of thousands of CD rental shops and rent a whole album for $3 or less. Sadly, Japan's copyright-happy record industry lacked the vision to allow Apple to sell Japanese music to customers outside of Japan, so worldwide fans of JPOP are shut out from participating in the Japan iTMS. Apple isn't the first company that's had to endure pressure from the establishment in Japan: Amazon was blocked from selling products below list price on their site here, since price fixing is still allowed for some products, like books and CDs. If there's one good thing that's come from the past decade of recession in Japan, it's that many of Japan's closed economic doors have been forced open, letting the light of competition and common sense flood in. If you want to see a hilarious commercial that marries the iPod with Sazae-san, one the most popular anime in Japan's history, check this out (Quicktime required).

The Japanese do drink a lot, from beer to sake to harder stuff. Letting alcohol act as a lubricant in human relationships is a time-honored social practice in Japan, and one of the first words I learned when I came here in 1991 was nomunication, a word that combines nomu (to drink) with the English word communication. Japanese drinking establishments differ somewhat from those in the U.S., of course, with different mixes of atmosphere and menu. One of the most popular places to throw some back with friends at are izakaya (ee-ZA-ka-ka, roughly meaning "a place to sit and drink in"), comfortable Japanese-style restaurants that serve beer in large glasses along with various Japanese meals, from sashimi to squid pizza to yakitori. Back in the old days I used to frequent small bars called "snacks" (an odd word which came from the fact that they sell light meals along with alcohol), where you can sing karaoke and get a "bottle keep" (i.e. your own private bottle) for drinking with friends. There are also places that pattern themselves after American and European models, which use English words like "bar" or "pub" to describe themselves. Last week I was in Tokyo with friends, and we found the cutest Irish pub in Shibuya that served a good range of beers we can't usually find in Japan. Japanese usually learn to drink in college, where in the past they would be cheered on by friends while they chugged a huge class of beer. This practice, called ikki nomi (beer chugging) became a problem when a college freshman drank too much too fast and died. Now saying ikki! ikki! ikki! while someone drinks is quite taboo.

Congratulations to J-List's own Daisuke, who's baby boy was born yesterday. We're having quite a population explosion around here -- Yasu's wife is pregnant with their second daughter and is ready to pop any day now, Jun's wife has their first bun in the oven, and Dawn in San Diego (whose important job it is to cut the paychecks) also has a little bundle of joy coming too. If you want to see what we look like, check the About J-List page.

Are you in or near Louisiana and looking for an anime convention to go to? If so, then we recommend Mechacon, held on Aug 26-28. We won't be at the show, but some friends of our will, so please go and say hello to them.

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.

	NAS-O illustration works. This is a nice art book featuring the characters of NAS-O, a penname that appears to mean "King of Eggplants" although I can't be sure since it's not written in kanji. His art is fabulous, with vibrant colors and very original cute characters. Oddly, there are about ten nude pictures, with all the rest being non-nude. I wished he would have done a non-nude book so we could sell it on the PG side of J-List as well. Oh well...
	Gekkan -- Aki Hoshino. Aki Hoshino is one of the top names in Japan's pantheon of gravure idols. Gravure, if you aren't familiar with the term, is short for "photogravure." Oh, you aren't familiar with that term either? It's a photo printing process developed in the 19th century, which, through odd chance of fate, has come to mean "sexy busty idol" in Japanese usage.
	Dengeki Layers vol. 6/. Another issue of Layers, a very nice new cosplay magazine that's taking J-List by storm. Similar to Cosmode.
	Love Love -- Sola Aoi (region 2). We've been having a bit of a "softcore boom" at J-List over the past few weeks, with many of the softcore DVDs by Sora Aoi, Anna Ohura, Mai Hagiwara, and Mihiro, selling very nicely, in most cases more than the hardcore titles by these girls. In an odd way, that makes me happy, since there's more wabi and sabi (words that describe the Japanese aesthetic of beauty in simplicity) in these DVDs, to my mind.
	Would you like to produce Kaho Kasumi? Since we have a good relationship with SOD, we do our best to give them ideas, and to pass on suggestions from customers. This title seems to be the result of some comments from our customers that we sent them, a request for a title in which you could choose the costume, sex style, and personality of an actress with the DVD controller. Way to listen to your customers, SOD!
	G.C.U vol. 5 ~ Good Choice Ume-Tarou. I was not familiar with this is a great work with a bizarre FLCL-style art that I like a lot. This art reminds me of one of my goals, should I ever become immortal: to learn to draw.
	Futanari Shojo -- Mitsu Amai. One of the most popular themes at J-List is futanari, meaning "being two at the same time" (also known as chicks with dicks). Here's a great treatment of the subject by Mitsu Amai, who plays a shy girl with some unexpected plumbing.
	Ran Juku -- Mariko Kawana. Japan is the land of the fetish, and one established category of adult video is the jukujo, or "ripened woman." Often they use the term for girls over the age of 25, which seems ridiculous to me. Mariko Kawana is a very sensual woman, and very erotic. Still, it says she's 35 on the cover of this photobook, which I refuse to believe -- my wife and I are 37, and we look much younger than she is, IMHO!
	Soryu Asuka Langley *Gothic & Lolita Ver* Figure -- Evangelion. A fantasy come true for Eva fans, this is a PVC figure of Asuka that's really beautiful, featuring her sitting on marbled stone steps wearing a Gothic Lolita outfit. So cool!
	Tomy Star Wars Diorama Best -- Full Set *Set of 7*. Over the years, Tomy has put out some really cool Japan-only toys for Star Wars fans, including candy toy (so named becuase you get some candy in the box) figures and dioramas from the films. This is a "best of" series, featuring the most popular items from all the movies.

Interview with me about bishoujo games

If any readers are so inclined, there's an interview with me in IF Magazine about hentai games.

Interview with Peter Payne

Lightning strikes, space-faring Japanese astronauts, and interesting tips on learning kanji

Lightning strikes! Twice before the J-List office has had the bad luck of being struck by lightning, frying our main air conditioning unit and causing us to spend a week or so sweltering in the heat and humidity of Japan's high summer. Well, it's happened again, and currently the J-List staff is trying to work in near-sauna conditions. Fortunately the lightning also knocked out the ice cream freezer at my parents' liquor shop, so we had an excuse to eat all the ice cream before it melted.

One thing I've learned about the Japanese: nothing makes them more pleased than when one of their own attains international recognition, and writers like Yukio Mishima and Yasunari Kawabata, directors like Akira Kurosawa and Hayao Miyazaki, and athletes like Hideki Matsui and Ichiro Suzuki all occupy a special place in the hearts of their fans at home for this reason. So you can imagine that Japan is pretty proud of its latest hero, astronaut Soichi Noguchi, who went up in the U.S. Space Shuttle Discovery. Every time I turn on the television I see footage of Noguchi-san, making jokes while floating in zero-g or talking to his fans on the ground. As a former English teacher, I'm happy to see men like him become the new heroes to kids in Japan, and I hope it encourages more young Japanese to try harder to master English. Yesterday morning the crew of the shuttle was awakened with a broadcast of Japanese children singing the theme song to My Neighbor Totoro ("Let's Take a Walk") because it was the day of his first spacewalk outside the ship. Urayamashii! (OO-ra-ya-ma-SHE, which means "[I am] so envious [of him]!")

There's no doubt about it: the most complex part of learning Japanese is kanji, unless you're fortunate enough to already be fluent in Chinese. An educated Japanese person generally uses around 2000 kanji, compared with 3500-5000 for the same person in China. Because the Chinese writing system was basically grafted onto the existing Japanese language in the 5th century, there are fundamentally two ways to read any character, the on (rhymes with bone) or Chinese reading, and the kun (rhymes with spoon) or Japanese reading, the latter being an existing Japanese word that's been assigned to a kanji based on the character's meaning. As a general rule, you use the Chinese reading for compound words made up of two kanji (for example, the word for hibernation, toumin, written with the characters for winter + sleep), and there are quite a few Chinese and Korean words that are the same in Japanese for this reason. The Japanese reading is usually used for kanji words that appear by themselves (e.g. the character for winter written all by itself, fuyu), or in special cases like names of people or places. It's hard to believe, but it's easier to memorize Japanese vocabulary words through kanji than, say, learning from a book which prints Japanese in romaji (the Roman alphabet) For example, the kanji for "most" can be combined with a variety of other kanji to describe ideas like tallest, shortest, etc. Examples above are, from left, saikou (most + high = highest, also meaning the best), saitei (most + bottom = the lowest, meaning a real jerk when applied to a person), saisho (most + begin = the first), saigo (most + after = the last), and saishin (most + new = the newest). The rightmost example is the above mentioned kanji for hibernation. Memorizing these words in kanji only takes two "bytes" of your brain's memory once you've gotten used to the characters themselves, but memorizing the words in the Roman alphabet would be harder since they're just a jumble of letters.

J-List loves DVDs, and we sell hundreds of unique DVDs from Japan. While most of our titles are region free, so you can play them on any standard DVD player, Japanese anime, specialized "indies" and some other discs are published as region 2, meaning you need a special player to play them. We've got two great region-free DVD players from Lasonic, the karaoke-enabled DVD7880K and the amazing DVD7050, which plays DIVX movies burned onto DVD-R, DVD-RW, you name it. We've lowered our prices on these players to just $78 and $98, so why not pick one up today?

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.

	A Bilingual Handbook on Japanese Culture. This is another of those really amazing items that we come across that make me think, wow, what visionary companies are publishing things like this? It's a great book of articles on things from Japanese funerals to history to language and government, both in English and Japanese.
	Kimono Hime 5 ~ Natsu Asatabi ver. Here's another issue of Kimono Hime, a gerat magazine that gives you loads of information about kimono culture in Japan. I especially liked the photos of older style kimonos from the 1940s and 50s, that was cool.
	Passion -- Amika Hattan. Japan's hardcover photobooks are the most beautiful in the world, with big glossy pages and the best printing we've ever seen. This is a new offering from a very special model, Amika Hattan, an amazingly elegant collection of artistically beautiful pictures.
	Chu Totoro Plush Doll -- M ~ Blue. The Totoro plush toys by Sun Arrow are among the coolest things we sell. Very well made, they are soft to the touch and very huggable. This is the "Chu" (middle) Totoro, the blue one.
	The Theory of Big Bust Evolution -- Shoko Goto. You can see why Shoko Goto is getting a lot of attention these days -- her amazing J cup bust is 110 cm in circumference, and have no doubt that it's totally natural. She puts even Anna Ohura to shame.
	Cowboy Bebop Illustrations ~ The Wind. This is something that's very cool -- a deluxe art book full of pictures, sketches, character info and more for fans of Cowboy Bebop, the amazing anime designed by Toshihiro Kawamoto.
	Tsukamoto Tenma 1/8 Scale Figure -- School Rumble. Japan's famous anime characters come out in three dimensions with great figures like these. This is an excellent figure of Tenma Tsukamoto from School Rumble, very beautifully crafted with every detail you could want.
	Adult Fairy Tale -- Mihiro. Mihiro is one of the top adult stars in Japan today, This is her newest release by Alice Japan, fittingly, a parody of Alice in Wonderland with erotic themes.
	AG Super Erotic Anthology Comic vol. 16. A new issue of AG, the magazine of "art, sex and CG culture." Published by a dedicated company who really loves Japan's erotic comics. His dedication really shows in every issue of AG, which keep managing to get better than the last ones. If you're a fan of Japanese H manga, we hope you'll cast your "dollar votes" for AG by considering a subscription through us.
	Hello Kitty Face Rubber Bands (24 Pieces). Another item that floored me -- rubber bands in the shape of Hello Kitty and her rabbit and bear friends. Kawaii!!
	DX Navy Dragon Setta. A very nice pair of traditional Japanese setta sandals, these are extra large shoes that are great for men who want to wear something special on their feet. The soles are real leather, very nice!

Just as there are veins of alternate cultures in "white bread" America, from Japanese anime to cajun cooking to Thai, exploring Korean culture in Japan is always interesting. Despite various difficulties and hard-headedness on both sides, Japan and Korea are very close, and the histories of the two countries are forever linked. A favorite dish in Japan is yakiniku, aka Korean BBQ, and here are pictures from our trip to a Korean BBQ place in San Diego.

Korea House on Convoy (San Diego's Asian district is the best Korean BBQ place I've found, out of four or so that I've sampled. Here is the address if you need it. As you can see, they have cute English in Korea as well as Japan.

Basically, Korean BBQ is a big grill where meat is cooked by you or your server, depending on the establishment. There are many kinds of meat you can order, including a few that perhaps should not be contemplated. I recommend the first two items on the BBQ menu, basically the normal beef and chicken -- nothing too scary there. In addition to whatever you order, you'll also get lots of vegetables as well as a dozen or so small plates of appetizers -- make sure to try all types of kimchi (pickled, spicy cabbage), which is the source of the Jedi-like calm you may have noticed in most Korean people. Also, all Korean nori (seaweed) is to die for. I recommend you also order steamed rice, because eating Asian food without rice is weird. Also, the best way to eat the meat is to wrap it in lettuce leaves, along with spicy miso and maybe some rice, but you have to ask for lettuce or they won't bring it.

One of the basics of Korean food is kimchi soup (kimchi chi-gae), guaranteed to put a fire in your belly. I had to argue with the lady for a while to bring me the spiciest kimchi chi-gae they had, and it was very spicy, but not so spicy that I couldn't eat it. I think to see a gaijin (how do you say gaijin in Korean?) insisting on being brought the spiciest thing on the menu freaked the waitress out a little. If you're brave (braver than me), order yukke, which is raw cow meat. Yasu loved it but it wasn't to my taste.

Korean BBQ eaten in the U.S. is somewhat different from what you find in Japan. In Japan, you go to a chosen hanten, or Korean restaurant, and order your meat and vegetables, which you always cook yourself. There are no free appetizers in most places, which is bad because there are some things people wouldn't ever try otherwise. You never get the lettuce leaves in Japan, but on the plus side they have this amazing tangy sauce that you can dip the meat in to cool it, then sit that on the rice, allowing the sauce to drop down into the rice until it's fabulously delicious. I would like someone at the U.N. to make a motion to require Japanese Korean restaurants to give you lettuce and the little dishes, and American (and presumably Korean) Korean restaurants to give you that sauce. Then there will be peace.

This is O.B., the most famous (?) beer of South Korea, or at least the one you see all the time. I've *just* realized that it means Oriental Brewery, and not Old Boy, as it would in Japanese. It's quite good, a light and drinkable pilsner that's got a lot more flavor than it look like it would have. When I took my employees out to Korean food in Vegas, we saw a beer poster for O.B. featuring none other than Aoi Sora, the famous adult film star from Japan. We were quite floored by this. Unfortuantely I didn't have a camera with me at the time, so that image was lost to the ages.

Oo! I found a review for this restaurant here, if you want a second opinion.