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.

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.

Do you know the Japanese Pinky Promise?

It’s a similar to the “Make a promise/Hope to die/Stick a needle in your eye” song I learned while growing up. Hook your pinky with someone else’s and chant the song, which goes, “Pinky Promise, if you lie, I will make you swallow 1000 needles.” (If you want it in Japanese, it’s Yubikiri genman, uso tsuitara hari senbon nomasu.) You then say Yubi kitta! (I break the pinky connection!) as you pull your fingers apart, and you’ve made the most excellent promise you can make in Japan, at least if you’re in elementary school.

The Pinky Promise shows up quite a lot in anime, often to show a promise made between characters while they were younger, although the origin of the custom is somewhat less innocent.

Supposedly, the Pinky Promise began back in the Edo Period as a gesture of devotion that prostitutes would make with their favorite customers. The “cutting” of the pinky signified the women severing her own finger as a sign of eternal affection for her partner, essentially saying that she loves him enough to commit shinju, or ritual lovers’ suicide with him.

Kind of adds a new dimension to watching your favorite cute anime series, doesn’t it?

It’s funny how how tenuous the meanings of seemingly basic words can be. In English, the word “friend” is pretty straightforward, meaning someone you are somewhat well acquainted or friendly with.

Most of my English-speaking “friends” are close in age to me, but I certainly could have a friend who was 25, or 45, or 75 if I wanted to. It’s not uncommon for someone who is only a passing acquaintance to be labeled “friend,” too, for the sake of convenience or to avoid being rude.

In Japanese, however, the word tomodachi (which literally means “those who you go with”) and it has a more “close” feel to it than the English word friend. Tomodachi in school years are almost always the same age; otherwise you’d use the term senpai (for upperclassman) or kouhai (for underclassman), which are quite different concepts in Japan’s vertically-oriented society.

Once, my son was playing dodgeball with a boy he’d known since preschool — they’ve played together for years. I talked about the boy with my wife, using the word tomodachi to refer to my son’s friend. My wife corrected me, saying the boys weren’t friends in that sense, but were instead osana-najimi, translatable as “childhood friend,” a concept that comes up in anime and bishoujo games quite a lot, referring to someone you’ve been very close to since childhood, and it seems to be both more and less than the English word friend. “An osana-najimi is different from tomodachi,” my wife explained to me. “They’re always there, and you don’t even notice them after a while. You get so used to being with each other, it’s like air.”

Before you left for work today, did you hang your bed out of the window to dry in the sun? That’s what millions of Japanese do each morning, if they sleep on futon, the traditional fold-away bedding that’s been used since, well, forever.

A Japanese futon is basically a soft sleeping mat, a separate foam mat that goes below that, and a thick blanket on top. Futons are enormously convenient for living in small spaces because they can be folded up and put away in a closet during the day, which allows a room to fulfill two separate roles.

Because the sleeping maps absorb sweat, they can become damp, which is why they’re hung from the balcony to dry and kill germs; there’s almost nothing nicer to sleep on than a Japanese futon that’s been hung and beaten to get any dust out of it. While traditional futons are nice, it can be a chore to put them away each morning and lay them out again at night, and over the past couple of decades, there’s been a tendency for Japanese to switch to Western-style beds instead, something that my wife’s parents recently did when they “reformed” (remodeled) their bedroom last year.

Even if they opt for conventional beds for themselves, most every household in Japan has a “guest” futon for use when unexpected visitors need to sleep over, which is great because it takes up almost no space when not in use.

Companies often sell wooden-frame futons in the U.S, but these are very different from traditional sleeping futons in Japan, and they’re not sold here at all.

Osaka is Japan’s second largest city, with 17 million people living in the greater metropolitan Osaka-Kyoto-Kobe area. The city is a sprawling concrete jungle, with tall buildings, deep subways, and lots of bustling people.

In general, Osaka seems to be the New York of Japan, while Tokyo is more like Los Angeles, with a much shorter history and a culture that can feel more bland and standardized at times. Osaka is a funny place, and it’s almost a given that successful comedians will speak Osaka-ben (Osaka dialect), which is much more entertaining to listen to than standard Japanese, in a somewhat Eddie Murphy/Jerry Seinfeld kind of way.

Like Tokyo, Osaka is so big it has to be governed like a prefecture, with 24 districts (ku) that function like individual cities.

Some areas foreigners might like to visit include the electronics region named Den Den Town and a nightlife/drinking district called Doutonburi, where you can see Japan’s most famous neon sign, the Glico Man.

Osaka has always been a commercial city where business comes first, and a popular greeting among people above a certain age is moukarimakka?, literally meaning, “Are you making a lot of profit lately?” (The standard reply is bochi bochi den-NAH, “Yes, a little.”)

An interesting tidbit about the city: when using escalators, Tokyo-ites who want to ride up keep to the left, leaving the right side for people in a hurry to walk up, but in Osaka this is reversed. Thus, whenever Tokyo-ites visit Osaka they stand on the wrong side, causing confusion and exposing themselves to embarrassment. Something to keep in mind on your next visit to Osaka.

Between studying Japanese for four years at SDSU and living here for 17, I’ve pretty much got the Japanese language down. I’ve actually forgotten a large part of what I studied over the years, especially written kanji, since the great convenience of computers that let you select the right character by hitting the space bar means that almost no one writes kanji as well as they used to, including both Japanese and foreigners like me.

Although I’m functionally fluent in the language, I’ve learned something odd — it’s often better to speak English in some situations.

The other day I was at the public bath with my son (it’s called Yura no Sato, which translates as “Village of Hot Water Relaxation”) when one of the other bathers struck up a conversation with me, asking me where I was from. He’d just finished an interesting trip around the world, visiting China, the Middle East and Europe, and was planning on going to the U.S. next.

While my long years of studying tempted me to speak Japanese with him, instead I spoke only English, since I knew that getting to practice his language skills would really make the man’s day. Speaking English instead of Japanese can open doors that might not otherwise open for you.

Once I was speaking with a Japanese female airline employee at a ticket counter about about the possibility of an upgrade to business class, and I received a somewhat cold reaction to my suggestion when I spoke in Japanese to her. I decided to ask at another counter run by the same airline, this time speaking polite English and batting my “gaijin Bambi eyes” as best I could, and darned if I didn’t get that upgrade.

My wife tells me that if I want to yell at someone for something, it’s much more effective to do it in English — it seems that angry words just carry more impact in English than in Japanese.

One interesting aspect of education in Japan is how students face competition in many forms which helps make them better students.

Starting with junior high school, many students are ranked according to their test scores, with a board hung outside the class that lists each student’s rank is in relation to everyone else. If you’re the #1 student in your class, you can bet your classmates will be gunning for your slot, so you’d better study hard.

The system of having to take an entrance exam to get into high school also provides a reason for students to be more serious about their own education, since you have to hit the books if you want to get into one of the best high schools. (My 13-year-old son is already preparing for a high school that’s known for its engineering and robotics courses.)

Although I often wonder if it’s really a good idea to put pressure on kids to study at such a young age, I can see benefits from creating a more vigorous study environment for teenagers. Growing up in the public school system in Maryland and California, I can honestly say I don’t have a single memory of studying hard or being challenged until I got to college, and getting kids to apply themselves at a younger age can’t be a bad thing.

So what do you think? There is the obvious question of sad outcomes that can happen when young people have more pressure than they can handle, but on the other hand, there is no gang violence or drug problems or other terrors that prey on kids in the U.S. I wonder which approach is better.

There have been a lot of changes in Japanese society since we started J-List in 1996.

First, the old concept of lifetime employment, that Japanese workers will generally stay at a firm their entire lives without ever changing jobs, fell by the wayside when iconic companies like Sony started eliminating jobs and laying off employees, something that had never been done in the past (although companies would often force layoffs in their subsidiaries when times got tough).

Another big change was the idea that Japanese companies could be headed by (gasp!) foreigners, a trend which probably started when Brazil-born Lebonese-French Carlos Ghosn assumed leadership of Nissan in June of 2000, turning the company around by eliminating jobs that the company’s core business couldn’t support.

Now it seems that many of the most visionary Japanese companies are headed by foreigners, for example Shinsei Bank, a popular Internet-based bank that’s breaking rules and taking names in the extremely conservative Japanese banking world, introducing concepts like not charging a $6 fee to transfer $20 to someone’s account, letting Japanese use ATMs without fees when traveling in other countries, and having bank branches that stay open past 3 pm. My theory is that banks in Japan close so early in Japan to encourage young men to get married, so they’ll have wives who can do their banking for them.

Foreigners have taken the lead in sports, too, for example Coach Bobby Valentine, who made a name for himself as the talented coach of the Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters.

Back when I was learning Japanese, I distinctly remember thinking to myself that the Speedo swimsuit company had to be Japanese.

The reason for this was the way all Japanese sounds are based on syllables — for example, you can have sa, shi, su, se and so but never s by itself — which plays some tricks with English names when rendered into Japanese.

Since all syllables end in vowel sounds (except for n, the only consonant that can come at the end of words), English words get a bit of unwanted vowel at the end, which changes a word like “meet” into something like “meet-oh” and the word “friend” into “friend-oh.” The English word “speed” similarly becomes “speed-oh,” which is where my confusion came from.

The Japanese know that they often have thick accents when speaking English, and sometimes try to snip this final vowel sound in order to sound more natural. Sometimes they clip too much, though. Once a student of mine asked me for a “tish,” and it took me several minutes to realize he was trying to get me to give him a tissue.

Have you had Tuna Spaghetti recently?

I did for lunch the other day, and it was really good, a fresh marinara sauce with chunks of white tuna and several stalks of asparagus on top.

I don’t remember seeing much in the way of seafood pasta dishes in the States, but they’re among my favorites here in Japan, and many restaurants offer good spaghetti alla pescatora, even your basic family restaurants like Denny’s and Coco’s.

Living in Japan certainly makes you appreciate seafood, and I eat all kinds of things I would never have otherwise, from sushi and sashimi to miso-stewed mackerel, although I do draw the line at shio-kara, which is pickled squid intestines — that’s just going too far.

There’s one problem: I tend to know the names of fish in Japanese, and can even write them in kanji in some cases, but I often have no idea what the name of the fish I’m eating is in English.

Japan is a great country, with a lot to offer both short-term visitors and tourists as well as people like me, who like the place so much we put down permanent roots. But still, Japan is far from perfect, and there are various sources of stress for gaijin living here, for example (if your language skills are still improving) not being able to talk freely to people or even to read what’s written on some signs, not being able to understand local customs that might be taken for granted by everyone but you, or (if you live in a rural city like I do) having kids occasionally stare at you because you’re different. (I just say hello to them in English.)

I’ve lived in Japan for 17 years and have traveled quite extensively throughout most of the country, meeting a lot of people along the way. It has happened, so infrequently it’s almost statistically insignificant, that not every experience I had here was a good one, and not every person I met was 100% happy to be dealing with an overly-exuberant American like myself.

Like an old farmer who, when in his cups, asked me why “big America” had to beat up on “little Japan” during the war, or the scary yakuza gangsters I found myself surrounded by when I stupidly stayed at a 24-hour sauna in Kyoto, or the one time I tried to enter a bar in Roppongi and was told politely that they didn’t accept foreign customers. (I should have worn our “No Gaijin” T-shirt.)

Whenever I encounter some minor inconvenience I shrug and move on, reciting that useful Japanese mantra shikata ga nai (or more colloquially, sho ga nai), which means “it can’t be helped,” the main way the Japanese maintain their happy, largely confrontation-free society.

I know that everyone is human, and for every minor negative experience I may encounter here in Japan, there are a few hundred positive ones.

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.

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. 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.)

Like most countries, the keitai (mobile phone) has become a huge part of life in Japan, and for the younger generation, cell phones seem to be supplanting the personal computer as the primary Internet device of choice.

The newest trend is young people using their phones to access sites called purofu ( “prof,” from the English word profile, which looks very similar to “blog” when rendered in katakana), centralized services that allow people to create profiles for themselves showing their pictures, specifying their age and location, and listing their favorite music, movies or food.

These purofu services are sort of like guestbooks optimized to display on cell phones, where people can search for keywords then leave comments or links and have random, meandering discussions, creating a way for lonely Japanese young people to make friends.

No one knows exactly how many users of these services there are in Japan, but conservative estimates start at 1 million or more.

The new Internet services aren’t without problems, however, some of which came to light last week when a 17-year-old student attacked a 14-year-old in Chiba Prefecture with a metal baseball bat for writing insults on his profile page.

The other day I ate soba noodles for lunch, and I was amused at a sign I saw above my head, which said narubeku kin’en, translatable as “No Smoking As Possible, Please.”

I found it quite amusing for the restaurant owners to ask customers not to smoke “if they can possibly avoid it.” Although smoking rates have been falling in recent years, the Japanese do smoke quite a lot, with 41% of males and 12% of females currently lighting up, which compares to 27% and 24% in the U.K. and 24% and 18% in the U.S., respectively.

Tobacco was introduced to Japan by the Portuguese during the 16th Century, and it took hold quickly, with a traditional pipe called a kiseru very popular throughout the Edo Period.

Today cigarettes enjoy a rather unique status, since the Japanese Ministry of Finance is the majority stockholder in the country’s largest tobacco company, and regional economies get 50% of the taxes collected on cigarettes by law.

One area where the industry here has shown vision has been preempting some of the negative feelings about cigarettes by promoting good smoking manners, as with the “Ah! Delight” and “Smokin’ Clean” campaigns that show smokers being considerate of others.

Japan often seems custom-built to confound Westerners, and it’s interesting that a country that smokes as much as it does still manages to enjoy long life spans, something that generally goes against expectations in the West.

Well, the International Day of the iPhone is here, when Apple’s new 3G iPhone launches around the world.

In Japan, the line outside Softbank’s flagship store in Omotesando, Tokyo reached 1500 people and over a kilometer in length, as Japanese fans lined up to get their hands on the device for the first time. Masayoshi Son, the enigmatic president of Softbank and the mind behind the success of Google-trouncing Yahoo Japan, was beaming as he watched the lines of iPhone buyers, most of whom were switching from competing cellphone companies au/KDDI and NTT Docomo.

Being a maverick has helped make the UC Berkeley-educated Son, a third-generation Japanese of Korean descent, the richest man in Japan, and his ability to “think different” probably helped him win the contract for the iPhone from Steve Jobs.

While I’m still not sure if the iPhone will bowl over Japanese keitai users, who are extremely hidebound and love their flip-fones with the fancy styling and easy-to-type (for them) numeric keypads, I do love the coming havoc the iPhone will wreak in the Japanese cellphone marketplace as users realize they don’t have to give cellular providers power to dictate everything about their phone, from what music formats they can listen to to what applications they can run — they can just stick anything in iTunes and sync it over.

Today I updated my (first-gen) iPhone to the updated 2.0 firmware and downloaded the app I’ve always wanted, a light saber sound simulator (iTunes link). Any phone platform that can bring that kind of awesomeness to its users will certainly find a niche in Japan.

One of the most important concepts in daily life in Japan is shinyo, which means “trust,” and when Japanese have dealings with individuals or businesses, choosing someone they can trust is extremely important.

Of course, everyone wants to deal with people and companies they believe will do right by them, but in Japanese society the idea of only working with trustworthy entities is elevated to a much higher cultural level. One way to make sure you’re working with people you can trust is the concept of shokai, a kind of introduction whereby someone who is already trusted by a third party will formally introduce you to them, in effect sharing the goodwill they’ve already established with both you and the third party. Because both parties have a trust relationship involved, they have an obligation to make sure everything goes smoothly to avoid “stepping on the face” (to use the Japanese phrase) of the person that brought you together.

There isn’t a single aspect of Japan that isn’t improved by this trust-based relationship system, and time and time again I’ve found myself depending on people who had been formally introduced to me by someone else I trusted.

My wife recently sold her car through a used car dealer, and I happened to remark that it was odd that cars are seldom sold between individuals in Japan — there’s no local version of the Auto Trader or eBay Motors. The reason, I was told, was that no one would ever be able to trust a stranger enough to buy a car, since they might be lied to about important details or otherwise taken advantage of, so they instead rely on professional companies whose reputations they can verify, of course paying more for the privilege.

If you ever want to appreciate your local Denny’s, I advise you to go live in Japan for a few years.

It’s not that Denny’s Japan is all that bad — it’s actually one of my top picks for late-night “family restaurant” coffee and dining — but something about it just doesn’t satisfy the American in me like the ones in the U.S.

Denny’s Japan is owned by the company that also owns Seven-Eleven, the top chain of convenience stores in Japan, and for some reason the company thought it would be a great idea to remind everyone of this fact by sticking big Seven-Eleven signs on all Denny’s, showing the parent company’s new name, 7&i Holdings. After all, nothing makes you hunger for good restaurant dining like a convenience store logo, and nothing builds customer loyalty like branding yourself as a holding company.

During Anime Expo in Los Angeles recently, I was quite happy to be able to enjoy breakfast in the nearby Denny’s, since I associate a Grand Slam Breakfast with the restaurant chain far more than the menu items they offer in Japan, which include lots of traditional Japanese foods like fried pork cutlet and miso soup.