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?
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.”
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.
As a follow up to the questions about plagiarism that we raised in our post here, I received a reply from James, who runs Japan Probe.
James is currently on vacation and he tells us that he wrote the article in question on August 9th, and put it into an auto post queue to go up while he was gone. He tells us he had never heard of Otaku International before, and that he plans to contact them “about the content they stole” when he gets back from his trip.
Ran across some strange happenings in webdom the other day, something that really has us scratching our heads over here at the International JAPUNDIT Media Complex.
The first foreign featured is Ivan Orkin, an American chef who owns and operates Ivan Ramen, a noodle restaurant in Tokyo. In addition to making great ramen. Ivan takes time every day to travel around his neighborhood greeting local shopkeepers, a polite gesture that makes him “more Japanese” to others.
The second foreigner is Jenya, a Russian girl that is a minor celebrity in Akihabara, where she apparently does some tour guide stuff. The reporter is very impressed with her Japanese, noting that she even writes mobile phone mails in Japanese instead of English. She says that she has passed level 2 of the Japanese language proficiency test. The report then contains some information about the JLPT.
The next part of the report focuses on a Brazilian man who is very knowledgeable about kanji and traditional Japanese sayings. Having lived in Japan for just 9 years, he is able to answer questions that many Japanese cannot answer after having lived their entire lives here. And at the end of the segment, Ivan and the Brazilian guy comment on things they like about Japan. The Brazilian guy is fond of the kindness and consideration Japanese people show towards others. Ivan particularly likes the phrase otsukaresama, which is used to recognize the hard work of others.
The first foreign featured is Ivan Orkin, an American chef who owns and operates Ivan Ramen, a noodle restaurant in Tokyo. In addition to making great ramen, Ivan takes time every day to travel around his neighborhood greeting local shopkeepers - a polite gesture that makes him “more Japanese” than the average young person in Japan these days. For more info on Ivan, check out this Wall Street Journal article.
The second foreigner is Jenya, a Russian girl that is a minor celebrity in Akihabara, where she apparently does some tour guide stuff. The reporter is very impressed with her Japanese, noting that she even writes mobile phone mails in Japanese instead of English. She says that she has passed level 2 of the Japanese language proficiency test. The report then contains some information about the JLPT, demonstrating some of the difficult questions that are found on the test.
The next part of the report focuses on a Brazilian man who is very knowledgeable about kanji and traditional Japanese sayings. Having lived in Japan for just 9 years, he is able to answer questions that many Japanese cannot answer after having lived their entire lives here.
At the end of the segment, Ivan and the Brazilian guy comment on things they like about Japan. The Brazilian guy is fond of the kindness and consideration Japanese people show towards others. Ivan particularly likes the phrase otsukaresama, which is used to recognize the hard work of others.
Now I wrote directly to Japan Probe and to Otaku International yesterday asking about the obvious similarities between the two posts (even the typos are duplicated), but neither has responded. The Otaku International post is dated earlier, but that really does not mean anything since dates can be specified as desired.
So I guess we are all left with the unanswered question: Who exactly is ripping off whom?
Though I never have run across this myself, I definitely would be willing to give it a try and find out exactly what a chocolate covered salty dog tastes like. . .
Nippon Television Network Corp. (NTV) has gotten into hot water for inflating the number of plates of food downed by “a celebrity known for her enormous appetite” during an NTV program.
According to NTV, the woman devoured “only” 39 plates of food, though it was reported on the program that she had eaten 48.
“We failed to accurately count the number of plates, and partially used an inappropriate method to make the segment,” the TV station said in an apology during the program on Friday.
NTV’s general public relations department explained, “We were vague about how we counted the plates and dishes, for instance, counting one plate with four pieces of the same dish as four dishes.”
On Monday, NTV gave severe warnings to Hisao Adachi, head of the news bureau, and other program staff, and terminated a contract with a production company in charge of shooting and making the problem segment.
Celebrity gluttons are really popular in Japan, which is why I guess something like this is being treated so seriously.
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.
What’s your favourite ice cream flavour? A quick poll I took of Japanese kids revealed banira (vanilla) to be the undisputed champion. Which surprised me. In English slang, after all, vanilla-flavoured has come to mean boring. Anyway, what do kids know. Chocolate is obviously the best flavour.
I didn’t find out about it until it was already over, so alas could not attend, but July and August saw the Ice Cream Expo in Yokohama.
And while all the ordinary fare was on offer, there wouldn’t be much point in an expo if all that was on offer was what you could find down at the supermarket.
But in terms of innovative (weird) flavours, it went far beyond the passé basashi (raw horse meat) and wasabi .
Otaku International has a report with a focus on the more outlandish - octopus, squid, caviar, chicken wings, the foul and dreadful natto, mamushi (the deadly pit viper) (I’ll just repeat that - the deadly pit viper), and the star of the show, ox tongue.
‘Chuwy’ visited the expo and tried a good number of the ice creams on offer, and wrote up his thoughts at the entertaining Chuwy Thoughts.
There are some more photos available in a Mainichi gallery.
Recent technological advances by Japanese scientists in robotics brings to mind the movie “The Rise of the Machines”—one of the Terminator classics starring now California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger—advances that pose a serious question.
Will the new robots now coming online—and the incredible ones that are on the immediate horizon—be a boon to mankind (as the scientists claim) or will they evolve into a new order of intelligence that becomes self-aware (as in the movie “I, Robot”) and themselves decide on what the human-robot relationship should be?
Japanese scientists, who continue to make one break-through after the other in programming robots to feel, hear, see and think like human beings, maintain that their goals are to create robots that will be able to act as assistants, caretakers and nurses for Japan’s rapidly aging population.
That sounds both benign and worthy of pursuing, especially since the elderly are expected to make up 40 percent of Japan’s population by 2055—with similar demographic changes in other countries as higher living standards and better education results in a decline in births and longer life-spans.
Scientists in Japan are now engaged in creating the technology for a range of robots that includes caretakers, general servants, technicians and engineers. Technology already developed and being used includes most of the eye, hear, arm and leg functions that distinguish human beings.
The latest advances in robotics involves placing incredibly sensitive sensors all over the bodies of robots that emulate the tactile response of human skin—a development that has far-reaching and profound implications. The fingers of this new order of robots are just as sensitive as human fingers.
This growing effort to humanize robots is being spearheaded by a combination of government and private industry sponsorship under the heading of an organization called the Information and Robot Technology Research Initiative (IRT), which is aimed at fusing information technology and robot technology. In other words, the goal is to provide robots with human-like skills and brains.
Project teams are well into applying new control systems developed by such companies as Toyota and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. To avoid making the robots look like humans, and therefore a possible threat, these teams are coming up with forms based on the work the robots are designed to perform.
Their public rationale is that a robot designed to do mechanical repairs on a washing machine, for example, does not have to look like “Mr. Maytag;” a robot that prepares and serves meals would not necessarily have to look like a chef.
But people would surely be more comfortable if it did, and it is this human emotion that will no doubt determine the appearance of most future “domestic” and “service” robots!
The efforts of the IRT are being directed by Isao Shimoyama, a professor at the University of Tokyo, who says his goal is to create a class of robots that will be integrated into human society on the level that machines, electrical appliances and electronic devices now play.
The several million people who visited the Expo of 2005 in Japan’s Aichi Prefecture got a glimpse of the robotic world of the future, but the walking and talking robots that were introduced at that exhibition pale when it comes to the generation of robots that will go into the first stages of production in 2009.
The time has come when the Laws of Robots devised by science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in 1940 should be dusted off and turned into non-fiction laws worldwide.
These laws would at least set standards that scientists should follow.Asimov’s First Law says: A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm; his Second Law says: A robot must obey orders given it by human beings, except when such orders would conflict with the First Law; and his Third Law says: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
What about one of the oldest laws of all: Laws are made to be broken!___________________________
Boyé Lafayette De Mente has been involved with Japan and East Asia since the late 1940s as a member of a U.S. intelligence agency, student, business journalist, and editor. He is the author of more than 50 books on Japan, Korea and China. For synopses of his titles go to: www.cultural-guide-books-on-china-japan-korea-mexico.com. His book, Bachelor’s Japan, originally published in 1960 and the first inside look at the mizu shobai in English, became a hot television and weekly magazine topic, and subsequently an international bestseller.
Heard this on an oldies program this evening, and it reminded me just how great Ozaki Kiyohiko’s music sounds, even though this super hit (Mata Au Hi Made) is already 30 years old.
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.
But in terms of innovative (weird) flavours, it went far beyond the passé basashi (raw horse meat) and wasabi .
