It recently struck me, while standing in the candy aisle at my local super market, that living in a foreign country is a lot like being a kid again. It reminded me of standing in the candy aisle at my local Thrifty Drugs in Foster City, California. I must have been 7 or 8, and I wanted to taste it all. I wanted to work my way through every candy bar, every bag of caramels and M&Ms, every package of gum.

That’s what living in Japan is like, accept instead of just the candy, it’s everything. It’s entire stores of untasted foods, street upon street of unvisited restaurants, entire maps’ worth of untraveled lands. I want to see it all. Like a child, everything is new.

And also like a child, I am outside the culture. For kids, the world of adults is unknowable, a strange, distant place. It’s like that for me. I exist in the same space as the people I see around me and yet I am apart. Language plays a large part in this division. The more I can speak Japanese, the more I can participate. I can go from just buying that candy bar, to talking to the clerk about it and asking for recommendations.

And, like a child, I am becoming literate. Every day I increase my ability to read the world around me. The gulf of unknown kanji grows ever smaller. That sign that perplexed me last week now reveals itself to be an advertisement for an apartment rental agency. The place across the street from the grocery store? They cut hair, I can now read.

But mostly, like a child I am full of endless enthusiasm. There is so much new to experience, so much to do and see and taste. It is a wonderful position to be in, wonderful all the more so for the wisdom I have to know that this state will not last forever.

Taste and freshness, sure, but I’m not sure how confident I want my sandwich to be. It may convince me not to eat it.

Japan calls it Takeshima. Wikipedia lists it as the Liancourt Rocks. To the South Koreans, it’s Dokdo. I had never heard of these little boulders sticking out of the Sea of Japan/East Sea until recently, when Japan decided to claim sovereignty over it.

This has the South Koreans pretty pissed. Everywhere I went during my recent trip to South Korea I saw posters about Dokdo (in Korean so I couldn’t read it, but the picture of the “island” was always the same). I even saw a seafood restaurant called Dokdo. OK, so the restaurant predates the recent fracas but that only goes to show how the Koreans feel about the rocks.

I even spotted this shirt:

I probably would have bought it but the store was closed.

I just got back from two weeks in South Korea (not actually Japan-related, I know, but it’s close). While in Korea I made a number of field recordings with my portable audio recorder. It’s a nice way to remember the trip, an additional sense memory to complement pictures.

I made an “album” of them, and have uploaded it here:

Download korea_in_sound.zip (38.5 MB)

It’s about 30 minutes long. I put it together like a continuous mix, arranged chronologically as I went through the country, but broke up the tracks so you don’t always have to listen to the whole thing.

For those of you interested in such things, I recorded it with an Edirol R-09 recorder at 24 bits. I assembled it in Logic and added just a touch of normalization and EQ, where necessary, and bounced it down to 16 bits. The final editing I did in Peak. I then converted the files to MP3 at 160 kbps for Web distribution. (If you’d like the full, CD-quality tracks, let me know. kemekthedopecomputer[at]hotmail[dot]com)

Enjoy!

It makes sense but it’s an unfortunate choice of words to borrow from English. “Catch” might be better.

(Spotted on a local train outside Kitakyushu.)

On a recent trip to Tokyo, I was drinking in Golden Gai with a friend of a friend. The tiny bar played great song after great song, and all of it vintage Japanese rock. I mentioned how much I was enjoying learning about all the great bands from back in the day that never got any exposure in the US, but lamented that—Juain Cope’s book Japrocksampler not withstanding—finding a good English-language source for information on these bands was tough.

That’s when my friend told me about Jrawk. Run by an obviously knowledgeable and dedicated fan, the site intends to be nothing less than a repository (or database if you will) for Japanese rock music. It has interviews, album reviews, live show reports, and more, and all of the music covered is at least worth a listen. If bands like Flower Travellin’ Band, Nagisa Ni Te, or Seagull Screaming Kiss Her Kiss Her is your thing, or if all you know about Japanese rock is Cornelius or Boris, you should really check it out.

(The site is pretty new, but it’s filling fast with content, so don’t let the sparseness deter you.)

Are you a maniac or an otaku? No, this has nothing to do with stalking or hikikomori. It has to do with levels of interest in a hobby.

I’ve been accused of being a maniac numerous times by Japanese speakers. The first time I heard the word, I thought, excuse me? It took me a second but I realized that I was not being accused of being some kind of ax-wielding killer but merely an enthusiast. Maniakku (マニアック) essentially means enthusiast, as in a sports maniac. In that case, I am undeniably a maniakku. I avidly collect movies and music, and when listing off favorite obscure movies or albums I am often laughingly called maniakku by the listener, who has not heard of any of them.

Where I draw the line, though, is being called otaku. Lately the word has become kind of cool, particularly in the West where it is equated with Japanese culture fandom, but the original meaning of the word (pertaining to fandom, not the original original meaning of “your honorable house”) contains an element of social awkwardness, of an unwillingness or inability to function normally in society. I may have spent one too many Saturday afternoons digging through dusty crates of vinyl while my less-obsessed friends went to the park or the beach, but it’s not like I prefer the company of my records.

I guess it comes down to semantics. Do you ally yourself with the current crop of otaku 2.0 who dance in the streets of Akiba and spend large portions of your paycheck on anime figurines, or do you spend large portions of your paycheck on vinyl and overseas DVDs, or re-enacting Civil War battles or playing Fantasy Football or building WWII models or… Hmm, I guess there’s not much of a difference after all.

What does everyone else think?

The Mainichi Daily News recently reported that Kirin will soon start selling a beer with 7% alcohol called, appropriately enough, Strong Seven.

This is both good news and bad news for Japan’s beer drinkers. Good because it’s strong, bad because, well, it’s going to suck. Granted, I haven’t actually tried Strong Seven yet (it hits stores October 22) but I can bet you it’ll taste like crap. Why? Because every Japanese beer priced below the top tier varieties (Asahi Super Dry, Yebisu, etc.—essentially the stuff you can get overseas) is undrinkable.

Strong Seven is classified as a third-category beer. According to Wikipedia, Japanese beer has three categories, largely based on the amount of malt used. The first, which is called simply “beer,” is the good stuff. What you would probably drink if you weren’t homeless or had no taste buds. Drinks in the second category, called happoshu, contain less than 67% malt. The remaining ingredients are made up of things like corn, rice, sorghum, and potato. Really. Lastly, there’s the third category, which is where our Strong Seven falls. Wikipedia says,

Since 2004, Japanese breweries have produced even lower taxed, non-malt brews made from soybeans and other ingredients which do not fit the classifications for beer or happoshu.

Soybeans? Mmm, yummy. The price of 141 yen per 350ml can and 197 yen for a 500ml can reflects this. (To compare, a 350ml can of Asahi Super Dry is more like 200 yen.)

Mainichi says that Kirin is bypassing the younger people that have been buying diet and light drinks lately and going straight for male beer drinkers aged 30-50. Get the job done without a lot of money drinkers. First beer at 7am on the morning train drinkers. Passed out in the park at noon drinkers. Alcoholics.

I’ll stick with Yebisu, thanks.