Magibon is an internet personality on the video-sharing website YouTube.
As of August 8, 2008, Magibon leads YouTube Japan’s All time top list. Magibon is also a member of the Youtube Partner Program.
Magibon has been invited and flown to Japan by a Japanese Internet TV Station GYAO for a media appearance. She has been interviewed twice by the Japanese Weekly Playboy magazine.
Languages are interesting because each one has its own unique features.
For example, double negatives like “I didn’t see nothing” are considered incorrect in English, although they’re perfectly permissible in Spanish. If you’ve watched some anime in Japanese or had dinner with a Japanese family, you may have noticed the word that’s spoken before eating, itadakimasu. Essentially meaning “I humbly receive the gift of this food” or less obsessively “let’s eat,” it’s a polite way to thank the person who made the food for you, and the word is interesting because it illustrates some of the “back end” of Japanese grammar.
There are two verbs for “to receive” in Japanese, morau and itadaku; the former is a neutral word, which you’d use when telling your wife about the movie tickets you got from a co-worker, but the latter is a polite word that basically means to receive something from someone socially higher than you, like your boss or a guest.
Since subjects are often left off of Japanese sentences, it’s conceivable that you might find yourself in a linguistic situation that called for you to understand the overall context of a sentence based on what verb someone chose to use.
For example, my mother-in-law might say to me, Itadakimashita yo, which essentially means “[we] received [something from someone].” It would be up to me to figure out the larger context, namely that we’d received some gift from someone that my mother-in-law wants to be polite to who’s standing nearby, and I should come and say thank you to that person for the gift.
Japanese can be a confusing language, but with practice, some of these situations start to make sense.
This might be more Japanese than you wanted to know. And if so, I apologize ^_^
Yesterday I lost my wallet (which contained cash, two credit cards, two bank ATM cards, an electronic highway toll card, my gaijin card, my driver’s license, my health insurance card, and more) while on the way to Tokyo by train. Except for a prepaid train pass, all I had to my name when I got to Shinjuku was about 700 yen.
After doing my in-town business, I filed reports with the Shinjuku Station lost-and-found office and the police at the Shinjuku Station West Exit Koban (who were professional, kind, and courteous). Then I met Mr. Pink, who kindly took me to dinner and lent me a bit of cash to get me home.
As I rode home on the train, I was thinking of all the trouble it was going to be to replace the documents that I had lost. When I got home, however, Mrs. JP was waiting for me at the door with the news that my wallet had been found on the train and turned in at Yokohama Station with all of cash and documents intact. The Shinjuku Station lost-and-found office took the trouble to give us a call at 10:00 p.m. to inform us of the good news.
Yes, Japan is changing. Yes, there are some bad people here just as there are anywhere. But I really felt that yesterday was one of those days that I experienced some of the very best of Japan and its people.
My wife is hooked on Kandora, short for Kankoku dorama or South Korean soap operas, and it seems every time I walk through the living room she’s got another one on the TV.
When I ask her what’s so interesting about the shows, she gets very animated. “Oh, they’re nothing like Japanese dramas,” she says. “They’re more intense, and the stories are much more involved and interesting. The characters really change and grow.”
It struck me that she sounded like me back in the 80s, describing why Japanese animation was so superior to whatever else was on TV back then for people to watch (I actually can’t remember at this point).
It seems to me that the human brain is wired to appreciate things that are fresh and new, and when a concept comes along that is totally unique, people are drawn to it irresistibly, which goes a long way towards explaining the revolution that Japanese animation has brought to the world over the past 20 years. My wife is finding that Korean series like Time Between Dog and Wolf, Spring Waltz and Something Happened in Bali are offering her a higher level of drama and depth, sometimes moving her to tears with their (often sad) stories.
The Japanese soaps, with their lighter and more formulaic stories that you can usually guess ahead of time, don’t seem to be doing it for her.
It’s funny how so many of the foods eaten by the Japanese on a daily basis aren’t very Japanese at all.
Sure, people here eat plenty of things that are associated closely with Japan, like soba and udon noodles, sushi and sashimi, or donburi (”big bowl”) dishes like gyudon (beef bowl) or oyakodon, the “parent and child” rice bowl consisting of chicken and egg cooked together and put over rice, but there are many non-Japanese foods consumed here, too.
Of course, there are many dishes that have been imported from China, like gyoza (pot stickers) or ramen, although the Japanese don’t consider the stir-fried yakisoba noodles to be Chinese in origin, much as they look like chow mein to me.
The Japanese have internalized foods from many other countries, including Italian spaghetti, French croquettes (which go so well with that Japanese tonkatsu sauce) or American “hamburg steak” (steak made from ground beef).
The single most popular food in Japan might just be that ubiquitous curry rice, the thick curry sauce served over steaming rice, which was imported from India via Britain during the Meiji Era. We probably eat it 4-5 times a week at our house.
If you have ever wondered what the notorious American-turned-Japanese (but still very much ugly gaijin) Debito Arudo actually looks like and sounds like, wonder no more for here he is, doing what he does best. . . bitching about Japan.
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:
Background music by Super Girl Juice.
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!
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.
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.
Soma Nomaoi is a samurai festival in the northern Japan area of Fukushima. It’s a 3-day festival with parades, horse races, mock battles, and wild horse catching.
This is a vlog account of the festival. I plan to get around and making a more in-depth one sometime in the future.
The cicadas are freaking loud in the background so they might drown me out at times.
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.”
I had planned to use the following photo for a story the other day that I eventually had to spike, but this thing is just to good not to share.
From Quirky Japan Photos.
A recent exchange about the meat content of processed food products reminded me of my first encounter with a Japanese hot dog back around 1969.
This was a time when imported food products were basically unavailable, and prohibitively expensive when they were. So imagine my surprise when one day shopping I came across a pack of moderately priced hot dogs!
They looked just like the red hots we had in Chicago, so I bought a pack, took them home, popped them into pot of boiling water for a few minutes, slipped one onto a slice of bread, hit it with a little mustard, bit into it and. . . As soon as the frank hit my tongue, the trusty old gag reflex took over, and before I knew it the vile thing that had been in my mouth was flying through the air and headed for the floor.
The Japanese person I was with (who kept saying things like “Are you sure you want to do that?” as she watched me prepare my tube steak) at that point kindly informed me that Japanese hot dogs were indeed made of 100% meat. . . fish meat, whale meat, shark meat, and all sorts of other dregs of the seas.
I think she was right.
Thanks to Mr. T for the photo.
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.
If you are planning to visit Japan during the summer season, something I actually do not recommend, I advise you to visit some of the many matsuri (祭). These festivals are celebrated with drinking, a lot of different foods, sometimes games and many of these Japanese festivals have a big fireworks show.
One of these festivals is Osaka’s ‘Yodogawa festival’. Yodogawa is Osaka’s biggest river, and as the name of the matsuri already gives away, the festival takes place on the Yodogawa riverbanks. Especially with this summerheat a splendid location. The Yodogawa fireworks show is probably one of the most popular fireworks show in Japan and definitely draws one of the largest crowds. I’m talking thousands of people, the place gets really packed. If you are not into large crowds I suggest you watch the fireworks from the Umeda Skyline building, but you’ll really miss the great atmosphere.
Since the fireworks are on the river, you’ll have a good chance to view the spectacle from both sides of the river, I do advise you to come in early for a good spot.
The result:
Just some small advice from me if you intend to visit the next Yodogawa matsuri:
- Come in early, I don’t mean 10 minutes before the start, but at least 5 hours. This will guarantee you a great spot for the show. (If you decide to watch the show from the riverbank that is).
- Bring a large plastic or cloth sheet to sit on.
- Bring food and drinks. Even though you can buy lots of oishii food and drinks at the festival, be prepared to wait in line for 10 to 20 minutes before getting served.
- Bring umbrella’s in case of rain. (This unfortunately can happen and has happened last night. We shared 1 umbrella with 4 people, didn’t ruin the show though)
- Go to the toilet beforehand. (Same as the foodstands, the waiting line for a toilet is around 10 minutes, if you have to do the big one expect to wait in line for over 20 minutes.
Of course, even without these preparations you can still enjoy though.
Don’t get me wrong, the English like to apologise more often than necessary too. If you step on someone’s foot in a crowd, chances are that they‘ll apologise to you. If you get in someone’s way, and do the side-stepping dance, you’ll probably end up both apologising to each other. The English do say sorry rather a lot.
But endless Japanese apologies, like the one still going on at the Mainichi, get on my nerves.
Apologies are invariably very formal. Always with bowing. Perhaps even, in extreme cases, with face to the ground. For company executives to appear in a row in front of TV cameras and apologise for some heinous wrongdoing committed by someone even tenuously connected to their company, and bow deeply as the flashbulbs go off, they are debasing themselves and this is seen as enough.
Bit of a clash of cultures then, because I don’t and can’t judge a person on how he apologises, but on how he goes about trying to make amends. Essentially, I don’t care what you say or how you say it, I care what you do next. Not for me, then, the tatemae of the ritual apology, and then all forgiven. Nope.
Which is why the endless kerfuffle over the Mainichi’s WaiWai meltdown is starting to get a little tiresome.
For readers who aren’t aware, the Mainichi newspaper used to run a section called the WaiWai in which it ran, in English translation, saucy stories from the more sordid end of the weekly magazines. Most purported to be titillating in some way, and you can bet on the majority being entirely made up. But the point is that the Mainichi didn’t even write them. They just ran translations of them.
Well it all blew up on them, and mounting complaints (about how they were portraying Japan to the English-speaking world) forced the Mainichi into a humiliating apology, and they pulled the WaiWai. They then went into full grovelling apology mode.
And some weeks later, the front page of the Mainichi still diverts to a page-long apology, and a list of promises about how the Mainichi will do better, and then some bowing, a bit more scraping. Get over it already!
Seeing the whole scenario as formulaic, I wonder how anyone can see any genuine value in it whatsoever. And it’s not because I’m a foreigner. At least some of the natives are aware of the silliness of it all too.
