Japanese Culture and Language

Memo: English Teachers in Japan

2009-08-21T19:58:00.000-07:00

Here is my cultural memo to those folks teaching English in Japan...I know, I know, you are really hip to the history and culture of Japan, and you don't need some guy named Mr. Kato to tell you what to do, but just please listen up for a second.

Until you've read the novel "Silence" by the Japanese Catholic novelist Shusaku Endo, then you don't know much about Japan. To understand Japan, you should understand what happened when Christianity began to get a foot hold in feudal Japan.

Now I know, you're a free-spirited, Zen-loving, (maybe even an athiest too) who doesn't judge the world or do an imposing - and becasue of your progressive outlook, you might even think that anything Christian or Catholic is simply some theological manifestation of "The Man" that always cut into your fun....but you'd be wrong to think so.

Japan in the Summer

2009-08-08T18:03:00.000-07:00

How is the weather in Japan? Hot and humid I imagine. I, Mr. Kato (now referring to myself in the third person), am really happy that I'm away from the humidity and the cicadas of summertime Japan.

How's everybody doing as we enter the dog days of August?

Japanese Government to Send English Teachers Home

2009-04-04T08:23:00.000-07:00

In a dramatic move yesterday, Japanese secretary of Labor Kaz Saito said that the Japanese government will pay to send English teachers of Ango-Saxon descent back to their country of origin. The initiative comes as Japan is paying unemployed Brazilians to go back to South America instead of going on welfare.

Details are sketchy, but English teachers who are at least 34% Anglo-Saxon or have an O positive blood type, will receive $3,000 for a plane ticket home. While English teachers haven't lost jobs in the way that Brazilian automotive workers have, the Japanese government is anticipating the eventual abandonment of the whole "learn English project in Japan."

English teachers from Canada, the U.S., Britain and Australia gathered in the streets of Roppongi for a short time, but quickly dispersed and passively retreated to izakayas to have drinking parties and "work off the stress" in an appropriate way.

"I'm in a state of shock," said Bill Jones, 28, from Milltown, Ohio. "In Japan I'm a pretty cool guy and everything, but back home I'm just an unemployed guy who knows nothing about football."

Prime Minister Aso ducked the issue at a press conference, but an anonymous government source said, "It's been admitted that English is a western force that we are sometimes uncomfortable with. Some in the world say we don't speak English very well. This, however, will prove to the world we don't speak English at all!"

Prof. Akihiro from Tokyo University saw the measure as a kind of long-overdue reform in Japanese culture. "In some ways it's a reversal of the whole Commodore Perry phase of Japanese history," he said. "Japan needs to learn more about itself by looking carefully at the Tokugawa period. " He emphasized that the constant fuss about English made the Japanese people feel somewhat inadequate, even nervous.

It's expected that those handful of Japanese people who are still interested in learning English, will have to fly to South Korea or China to find native English speakers and English schools. In contrast to the Japanese, Koreans and Chinese have embraced the idea of learning a lingua franca that gives them a powerful tool for interacting with the world.

"I think you'll find that when the dust settles," said Prof. Akihiro, "Japan will survive without English. You may recall that French was the language of the 18th century, but nobody in Japan knew a word of French then. We were okay just keeping to ourselves, perhaps the world will leave us alone once more."

(The above piece, of course, is satire.)

Spring Snow in Japan's Ishikawa Prefecture

2009-04-02T16:50:00.000-07:00

Here is the evidence of a late-spring snowstorm about ten days ago in the village of Kashima in the Noto Peninsula area of Japan's Ishikawa prefecture. Needless to say there were no Sakura (cherry blossom) sightings that day.

Japanese Pay to Send Brazilian Immigrants Home

2009-04-02T16:09:00.000-07:00

Of all the countries in the world, Japan is the last country that should be paying anyone to leave their soil. With a declining Japanese population and an increasingly insecure financial future, Japan should be finding a way to keep Brazilians and other South American immigrants in the country, even if they have to have them "on the doll" for a bit.

Japan is now paying to send recently unemployed South Americans of Japanese ancestry back to their country of origin, because they don't want to pay for their social welfare, and its very important to the Japanese that these contract or "temporary" workers get the ax long before any full-time salaried Japanese worker does. Fair enough...Yet this goes right to the heart of Japan's long-term resistance to a racially-integrated society, along with its attempts to maintain a rigid social stability no mater what.

Michael Zielenziger argues in his excellent book Shutting out the Sun that Japan will face a slow and inevitable economic, political and cultural decline if it doesn't take action on the following three items:

Open its borders to skilled immigrants who can help increase the sagging population, fill valuable employment vacancies and contribute to the tax base
Allow foreigners to invest in Japanese companies
Begin to teach English like you mean it (the way English in Japan is taught is a joke and everybody knows it); Fresh from a recent visit to Japan it seems that the country's English ability is actually in decline right now

I don't know if these goals are even remotely possible while the main players in Japanese culture refuse to engage in any reflection, openness or even to admit mistakes. I believe that Mr. Zielenziger is right in his recommendations - yet so what? Neither he nor I are Japanese, and its the Japanese themselves who will have to change.

Japan's Communists on Piracy in Somalia

2009-03-18T06:20:00.000-07:00

Japan has agreed to send navy ships to the coast of Somalia to help combat pirates who are attacking cargo ships. This is good. Japan needs to do more of this. If you are a first-world nation that benefits from international trade, you need to help keep shipping lanes safe. Yet Japan's communist party doesn't see it that way.

A statement from our Japanese comrades:

"Japanese Communist Party Chair Shii Kazuo at a news conference on January 8 expressed opposition to the move to establish a new law to send a Self-Defense Force unit to waters off Somalia ostensibly to take part in anti-piracy operations to protect Japanese ships. "

"Ostensibly" to take part in piracy options? So this is all a ruse? I suppose Japan is really planning on colonizing east Africa. I see.

Our friends in red continue:

"The government has never attempted to dispatch a military vessel overseas for policing activity under the Self-Defense Forces Law. Shii said, 'Piracy is a criminal act that should be solved through police activity. It is wrong to call for Japanese warships to be deployed abroad.'"

Yes, piracy is a criminal act. Correct. So what's your point? This should be handled by Somalian policemen? Should we send Tokyo street cops in fishing vessels to handle things? If you thought that mainstream Japanese politicians were lost, you can take heart that the communists are really confused. Japan is trying to act like a responsible global citizen here, and forces within the country want Japan to stick its head back in the sand. Not good.

North Korea to Launch Rocket Over Japan

2009-03-14T07:15:00.000-07:00

Here's one important consequence of the constant political instability of Japan - other nations stop taking you seriously. Case in point: North Korea has announced it will launch a satellite-carrying rocket that will cross Japanese air space, and then land in the Pacific.

This is a provocative move by the North Koreans, and we learn that Prime Minister Aso's reaction was:

"The prime minister stopped short of demanding further U.N. sanctions if North Korea goes ahead with the launch."

All he can do is say: "If you do this, I might think about telling the UN." We know from experience with Iraq and Iran, that the UN means nothing to a country like North Korea. The sad reality is that Japan can't do anything. It doesn't have the military, economic or political muscle to do a single thing.

China, now that's a different story. If China wanted North Korea to back down, they could do it.

Another sign that Japan is fading into Geo-political irrelevancy.

Is Japan Closed Again?

2009-03-13T11:47:00.000-07:00

After 150 years, is Japan closed for a second time? The fundamental tension in Japanese culture has always been between isolation on one hand and an undiscriminating love of all things foreign on the other.

(Photo courtesy of Toby Forage)

According to writer Gavin Blair, isolationism and an inward, domestic focus is now winning out in Japan. He writes about a new Japanese isolation in an article titled “More Japanese Shunning the Outside World” in Japan Today.

He begins:

“Today, it appears that Japan is increasingly looking inward and walling itself off from outside influences — a trend that’s showing up in everything from movies to music to learning languages.”

Okay, let’s see how he proves this thesis:

“‘When I was a university student, courses like English literature, German literature, French literature and foreign languages were difficult to get into, they were so popular,’ said Takashi Koyama, a professor at Akita International University. ‘Nowadays, those courses are struggling to get students.’”

Interesting. I know a Japanese woman in her 40s; she is quite literary and artistic. She knows the great books of western literature and, of course, plays the violin and loves western classic music. I wonder if she is a dying breed…It makes me think of Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami, who has been largely influenced by American writers, but of course was born in 1949 to a very different generation.

Mr. Gavin then reminds the reader that it was only 150 years ago that Japan opened its borders to the outside world after being literally closed for 300 years. And then, of course, by the 1930s the problem with Japan was that it was all too interested in foreign countries, more specifically in invading them, and making them puppet states.

Gavin then focuses on the recent Oscar victory of “Okuribito” (Departures) in the foreign language film and what this might tell us. He mentions that Japanese films are doing better domestically, while Hollywood films are declining in popularity. He quotes a film distributor:

“‘Younger Japanese audiences don’t connect so strongly with Hollywood films recently,’ said Yusuke Horiuchi of Toho-Towa, which distributes overseas films in Japan.”

I’m not sure that proves much. I’m a 30-something American guy and I don’t connect with Hollywood films either. Maybe the Japanese can detect fluff and stupidity when the see it.

The writer then contrasts the strength of Japanese films, with the sad state of J-Pop, while still noting that Japanese pop music is outselling international pop music…That’s interesting, but not terribly shocking news.

He then jumps into some weightier matters regarding Japan cultural issues:

“The causes of this increase in parochialism are somewhat hard to identify. A sense of cultural pride, particularly among young people, has certainly developed regarding the popularity of Japanese manga, music and fashion.”

Okay, but can we logically conclude that “cultural pride” is what has lead to this inward, navel gazing now underway in Japanese culture? The French people, for example, are quite proud of French culture, but they are not easily described as parochial.

Continuing on:

“The 'hungry spirit' that drove Japan’s development from post-war decimation to economic superpower, has inevitably faded, and with it, the notion that interaction with the outside world is a necessity rather than a wish.”

The first part of this idea is spot on. Rebuilding Japan after World War II gave the Japanese people a real purpose for sure; and we should marvel at what Japan was able to achieve by the ‘60s and ‘70s. But I’d argue that this in and of itself, was all about Japan and not about being some engaged global citizen. I’m not sure that we can describe exporting Toyotas as a dramatic “interaction” with the outside word. It’s trade. The U.S. trades with China, but it’s hard to argue that China is having a great cultural influence on the U.S.

I think the next sentence is where Mr. Gavin is actually going with this:

“But whatever its roots, some are worried a rise in nationalist sentiment is mirroring this loss of interest in foreign languages and foreign affairs.”

And then he ends with…“Some observers in Japan however, no longer see creeping isolationism in a globalized 21st century as a laughing matter.”

Among many politicians in Japan, as well as foreigners with a progressive bent in Japan, there is the fear that any hint of Japanese cultural pride is a prelude to nationalism. This is irrational. There is a big difference between nationalism and Japanese patriotism, which must be fostered in young people.

Young Japanese people are taught to be weary of flags and national anthems and there is no way to justify this in the year 2009. A healthy Japanese national identity will not develop unless Japanese young people are first taught the truth about Japanese aggression in WW II, but then Japanese society was seriously reformed after the war. You don't think so? Look at the Emperor today - instead of being a god - he is treated more like the assistant deputy of agriculture, a nobody really.

I think the real danger for Japan, is not that it will once more become a global military bully (for it does not have the human capital or the natural resources to do so), but that it becomes a country forgotten by the 21st century economy, or perhaps even a victim of Chinese or Russian aggression.

Anyone who loves Japanese culture wants to see Japan have a role in Asian geo-politics, global economics and the cultural give-and-take of the great nations, but it seems instead that Japan is setting itself up for a slow, cranky retirement from the first order of nations.

Complaining Foreigners in Japan

2009-03-12T11:43:00.000-07:00

I just ran across a great blog entry on complaining foreigners in Japan. Many of you who live (or have lived in) Japan have met just such people. They certainly aren't bad people, but they do make you wonder why they decided to live in Japan of all places. The entry is titled "The Profile of a Gaijin Whiner."

The writer describes this breed of gaijin (foreigner) in Japan:

"As I have established, the Gaijin Whiner is always looking to feel slighted by Japanese people. It fuels their self-centered world with quiet assurances that they are special and are being treated unfairly. So even when some unsuspecting Japanese person tries to help them out, in any fashion, but usually by speaking to the Gaijin Whiner in English, they have to turn it into a negative and complain."

This point is similar in some ways to observations I made about western feminism and Japanese women, where you have gaijin who want to "reform" Japan so that it is more western. Or more accurately we can say they want to decide what is "nice" about Japan, and also what is sexist, old-fashioned, boring, dull, annoying, etc.

Which begs the question, are these gaijin in love with Japan warts and all, or are they reformers and revolutionaries?...Maybe they are a bit of both...or maybe they are simply lost souls as many expaitriates truly are.

Japan Suicide Rate at Crisis Levels

2009-03-12T08:33:00.000-07:00

The world has a basket full of problems right now; yet when 30,000 people take their own lives each year - as they do in Japan - you have to wonder what's going on in Japanese culture. The Japanese suicide rate now has seen 10 straight years (97-2007) of 30,000 suicides a year. So what's up with this tragic reality?

You want to be sensitive with a subject like this, but there are times when silence is itself a form of malice...Is anyone in Japan paying attention to Japanese suicide! Your neighbors, co-workers, grandfathers and nieces are killing themselves, do you wonder why?

And part of the problem in Japanese culture is a kind of overly-bureaucratic, sociological view of Japanese suicide. I cite a recent editorial in the Japan Times Online as a perfect example a certain view of suicide in Japan:

"It is likely that poor business conditions, overwork, unemployment, debts and depression lead people to contemplate suicide. Government and non-government organizations should work together to establish an efficient network in which unemployed workers can easily obtain counseling and advice."

Oh, gee thanks for this sensitive, empathetic analysis! Are we talking about municipal budget shortfalls here, or are we talking about human beings deciding it's better to be dead than alive? It's precisely this kind of dull, press-release sounding response which typifies the Japanese approach to Japan suicides.

And then, of course, the solution is that more "government and non-government organizations" should help out. What does that mean? How can a government give people hope? Is the UN supposed to come in and distribute self-help books and schedule counseling visits? I don't want to be glib, but the point must be made that we're not talking about tax issues here, but real spiritual and moral problems in Japanese culture.

I'm not a mental health professional, but I suspect that a bad economy, unemployment and debts don't generally cause people to kill themselves - these are 'final straw' issues if you will - but it is a long embedded despair which is the real culprit. A bad economy and severe unemployment describes the daily life of millions of people in Africa, Latin America and India, but we don't see the despair that we do in Japan.

Despair is the absence of hope. And hope is something that buffers people during hard times. When you have hope, you naturally look toward the future. One byproduct of hope is choosing to have children. Is it any surprise that the population in Japan is plunging, because Japanese people have stopped having babies?

I believe that this Japanese despair has much to do with its profoundly material and secular view of life. All of this makes sense coming out of the wreckage of WW II, but once people achieved great materiel wealth by the '70s and '80s, it was like, now what? Then came the bursting of the Japanese financial bubble in the '90s, and now the global recession that is starting to hit Japan. Money comes and goes, but hope, virtue and faith is something no economy can steal from you.

Though personally not a huge proponent of psychology as it's practiced these days, there certainly needs to be more acceptance of this tool in Japanese society. People should be able to say, "You know, I need some help here," and be able to get counseling without all the cultural taboos. But the larger survival of Japanese civilization involves having faith in something beyond themselves and material prosperity.

Let's hope and pray that the Japanese suicide rate starts plunging downward faster than the Japanese birth rate. And who knows, perhaps tough economic times may bring back an appreciation of family life, children and more simple pleasures; for only with family changes, can you expect significant changes to the society as a whole.

Japanese Business Culture and the Applogy

2009-03-09T18:14:00.000-07:00

We’ve written about the Japanese apology culture in the past, and a recent article by Tomoko Otake in Japan Times Online beautifully chronicles how this plays out in Japanese business culture when a corporation gets into trouble.

The article on Japanese business etiquette describes a tragic incident involving a faulty elevator that led to the death of a young Japanese boy. The parent elevator company was Swiss, while the manufacturer was Japanese.

Ms. Otake correctly notes:

“A closer look at the company's handling of the event provides a cautionary tale for businesses operating in Japan, where a swift public apology after being linked to a scandal — regardless of who's chiefly to blame — is generally expected and taken for granted.”

Now this is part Japanese business etiquette and part Japanese culture. Apologizing in Japanese culture isn’t generally about guilt, but more about protocol.

In the west, with its Christian heritage, there is a close link between doing something wrong (sin) and personally repenting for it (confession); And this important aspect of western civilization is still practiced today in the Roman Catholic Church, which has never been a major cultural influence in Japan.

She quotes the executive of the Swiss elevator firm on his experience:

“‘I would say that our reaction was typically Western, especially an Anglo-Saxon type of reaction,' said Schindler… ‘When you are educated in, let's say, a multicultural environment as I was, and mainly in the United States, apologizing is always the admission of guilt. So not only by training as a lawyer, but genetically we are preprogrammed never to apologize until it is clear you are guilty."

Yes. I’d say that’s spot on – although I’m not sure what the U.S. being multicultural has to do with anything – and as far as saying it’s an ‘Anglo-Saxon’ reaction, I’d say that’s too narrow a perspective. I believe, as I've stated, that it’s the Christian underpinnings of western morality: admitting your sins before God is a serious act with eternal implications. It’s not strictly a sociological act as it is in Japan.

Ms. Otake continues:

“Indeed, in Japan, every time bad news breaks executives wearing uniformly dark-colored business suits meet the media, bow deeply and apologize profusely 'for causing a clamor' — though they are not always forthcoming about the details of the problem...Some even go as far as openly crying in front of television cameras to express remorse."

So true! And so Japanese! Can you imagine the c.e.o. of Enron, for example, crying and apologizing to the American people? No way! American executives are more likely to be found at a Jimmy Buffet concert in San Diego than prostrating in front of a camera crew.

I Like this writer very much! She doesn’t seem to be pro-Japanese or anti-Japanese in all the predictable ways – she’s interested in the truth of Japanese modern society. She then writes:

“Not that Japanese companies across the board are genuinely remorseful or have perfected the art of apology, either. Tatsumi Tanaka, in his 2004 book Sonna Shazai de wa Kaisha ga Abunai (Such Apologies Would Ruin Your Company), offers a long list of scandal-management flops by Japanese executives, who, despite apologizing, reinforced through their manner or response to subsequent questions their image as unrepentant, evasive or even antisocial.”

There is much about Japanese culture that is revealed in this paragraph! To make a great effort to publicly apologize, yet to not be particularly contrite. How human, of course, yet also how Japanese in particular ways.

And this kind of Japanese behavior can't be dismissed off-hand as phony or superficial - things are never that simple in Japanese society. Life in Japan - as wild as this will seem to westerners - isn't fueled by people's personal feelings. There are customs, traditions, expectations, taboos and other people to think of. This is a broad generalization, but how other people think of you, still matters in Japan. There is indeed something to all the fuss about Japanese group behavior and its affect on Japanese people.

Navigating Japanese society for the Japanese is no easy affair (we foreigners are exempt from this dance); by way of comparison, we might say that navigating all the expectations in Japan is akin to playing Chess while being blindfolded. While in contrast, making your way in American society is more like a rough and tumble game of dodge ball.

Travel to Japan Tips

2009-03-07T11:22:00.000-08:00

If you plan to travel to Japan, here are a few tips to help your Japanese travel experience; the tips are highly personal and particular to my traveling in Japan experiences. But you may find them useful to ponder before taking your Japan trip:

(photo courtesy of bernardoh)

Food: Japanese food is something of an art in Japanese culture; learn some Japanese adjectives to describe your food. Why? Whereas food is fuel in America, food is central to Japanese society and interpersonal relations. After each bite of food make sure you say oishii, which means "delicious"

Shinkansen Bento: When you're on the Japanese bullet train (shinkansen), make sure you buy a bento lunch (box lunch) on the train platform; like in an airplane, there is a pull down tray on the seat back in front of you. It's great experience to munch on rice and beef while watching the countryside fly by
Book Store: If you go to a Japanese bookstore - and you don't speak Japanese - be prepared that the you'll be asked a question at some point by the cashier; don't worry, she is simply asking if you want a cover on the book; just nod yes
Courtesy: During your Tokyo trip, you might see a mother with a child in a stroller down in the subway; often there is no escalator, so she'll have to lug the stroller up the stairs. If men want to be real gentlemen - help her! You'll shock everybody, because people rarely do those kind of things in public in Japanese culture (the blinders are real thick in Japanese cities)
Japanese Ramen: You must have Japanese ramen, and ramen is like pizza or BBQ in America: the more local, greasy and obscure the ramen place, the higher the probability that the ramen is good.
Chopsticks: If you don't know how to use chopsticks, practice before you arrive. Even if you are terrible at using them, the Japanese will be amazed that you're even trying
Canned Coffee: There are tons of Japanese vending machines that sell everything from beer to coffee. I recommend getting canned Japanese coffee - preferably hot - it's already got sugar and milk in it, so it's good to go!
Mister Donut: (You can tell I love coffee) Dunkin' Donuts and Starbucks have nothing on Mister Donut in Japan; it's an old fashioned New England coffee and donuts chain that somehow ended up in Japan. It's the best! Great coffee and simple, sugary donuts. While you're traveling in Japan - and have some time to kill in a big train station - look for it!
J-Rail Pass: Buy a Japan Rail Pass before you arrive in Japan; it gives you unlimited travel on Japanese trains for set amount of time - a great value

Japanese National Identity

2009-03-05T16:13:00.000-08:00

Japan exists in a geo-political bubble. Part of this is the reality of its geography – an island nation – and part of this is a result of having the U.S. military taking care of its defense for the last 60 years. One writer suggests it's time for Japan to have a more "flexible" Japanese national identity.

Author John Haffner, who just wrote a book on the Japanese global reality called Japan's Open Future: An Agenda for Global Citizenship recently wrote an essay for the Huffington Post. He sets the stage for us:

“Japan's population is dropping, but the country is not so keen on immigrants to counter the decline.”

Quite true. Japan is apparently keen on being a very empty country in the future. He continues:

“Looking beyond its borders, some of Japan's leaders have felt nostalgic for the simple rules of the Cold War.”

Yep. How nice it was! The U.S. worried about defeating the Soviet Union and communist China, while the Japan self defense force did push ups, and Japanese businesses focused on making the most efficient compact car in the world. We resume:

"Japan's political leadership, meanwhile -- already long seen as mediocre or incompetent by the Japanese public - has lost all credibility, both at home and abroad. In a recent article describing Japan's (now resigned) trade minister Shoichi Nakagawa at a G7 press conference as 'incoherent, floundering, sleepy and confused.'"

Yes indeed. Think what happens when you give your adolescent son too much money, too little responsibility and then, you suddenly ask him to grow up. What happens? He becomes "incoherent, floundering, sleepy and confused." You might call it a Japan United States codependency issue (which the U.S. has been happy to nourish, for sure).

“So where should Japan go from here?...And when it comes to Japan's triangulations with the United States and China, should Japan simply hope to 'hug the US closer,'or should it cultivate a stance neither too hot nor too cold towards the United States and China, like Goldilocks?”

I don’t have a clue really, though somehow will need to check Chinese power in Asia. Can the Japanese help the U.S. with such a project? In twenty years will Japan have enough young men to form a Japanese defense force of any merit? Japan’s plunging birth rate keeps getting in the way of future plans.

For the author, the solution to Japanese cultural and political problems is to become a lot less like Japan, and more like England.

“If Japan wishes to escape a future of decline and irrelevance, and if it wants to take meaningful steps towards a more secure, contented and prosperous future, it needs to think big. Japan really has only one sustainable option: to become a more open, dynamic, conscientious, engaged, globally integrated country.”

Okay…but this doesn’t sound like anything Japan has ever been. I have a great fondness for Japan and Japanese culture, but this sounds more like America than Japan. The author proposes how Japan can move forward (or at least beyond Japanese history):

“Moving beyond a rigid and inflexible conception of its national identity, by opening up to trade and immigration, by learning to communicate more effectively, including with the English language as the global lingua franca, and by undertaking a much more spirited commitment to global development and security.”

It’s idealistic, I’ll say that. Let’s go point by point on this critique of Japanese culture:

An inflexible national identity: Huh? This is fine progressive talk for a pluralistic society, but in Japan? How are the Japanese supposed to become less Japanese? No one seems to be asking the Chinese to become more flexible in their Chinese national identity?
Immigration: I think Japan would benefit from measured immigration (more doctors and other heath care folks, for instance), but it’s not an easy question. Japan is Japan because it’s homogeneous. In England, for example, immigration from Muslim countries is profoundly changing that culture. Now you can argue whether that’s good or bad, but that’s a big step.
English: I suspect that many readers of this blog are English teachers in Japan and have a lot of ideas about the state of English in Japan. What do you all think?
Global Security: I think if Japan wants to have a “spirited commitment” to the world, they better send combat soldiers to Afghanistan and start fighting terrorists with NATO. And if China ever invades Taiwan, Japanese Chinese relations should sour and a Japanese United States alliance may have to combat China. I wonder if that’s what the author means, or is he talking about a resurgence in Japanese patriotism?

Our Author concludes:

“To pursue this path, however, Japan must think beyond isolationism and the US security alliance. Japan must begin to see itself as a global citizen and as an Asian country, and it must walk the walk on both counts.”

On this last point I’m in total agreement with the author. Japan will actually have to do more than send tourists out into the world if it wants to be a leading world citizen.

You can purchase Mr. Haffner's book at Amazon.com:

Japanese and Christian?

2009-03-05T09:20:00.000-08:00

Is it possible to be Japanese and Christian?

Of course the answer is yes, but statistics show that only around 1% of the Japanese are Christian. And while no one thinks of Japan and Japanese culture as even remotely Christian, there is a substantial Christian presence in Japanese history.

It's been observed that there really is no Japanese religion to speak of right now. If you're in a cynical mood you might even suggest that materialism is the Japanese religion of choice, but certainly there is much more to the Japanese spirit.

To speak of Japanese religions that have impacted Japanese culture, you would have to note the native Shinto religion, Japanese Zen Buddhism (Chan Buddhism in China), ancestor worship, the Confucian ethical code and Christianity.

It's interesting to note that Japanese Prime Minister Aso is Catholic, which makes him a minority of a minority in Japanese culture, for Catholics in Japan are only a small sliver of the Christian population. Most Japanese Christians represent various Protestant denominations. And while there was almost nothing said about his being a Catholic in the Japanese media, it was noted in many American media outlets that he was the "first Catholic Prime Minister in Japanese history."

Christians in Japanese history go back to the Japanese arrival of Catholic priest St. Francis Xavier in 1549. He seems to have had a fair amount of success preaching about Jesus Christ and making converts. St. Xavier paved the way for a Japanese Catholic saint named St. Paul Miki, who met his death when political actors in Japan started worrying about the loyalty of Japanese Catholic people. From Catholic online:

"(St. Paul Miki) was crucified on February 5 with twenty-five other Catholics during the persecution of Christians under the Taiko, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, ruler of Japan in the name of the emperor."

Despite many persecutions, the disciples of St. Xavier and St. Paul Miki, continued in their practice of the Catholic faith - even without priests - most notably in and around Hiroshima.

There is an excellent blog on what Japanese Catholic people are doing today, written by a "twenty-something ex-pat", who uncovers fascinating items about Japanese worship and Catholics practicing their faith in Japan.

Yet the question remains, why has Christianity failed to find fertile soil in Japanese culture?

I think part of the issue is that the Japanese see Christianity as a foreign religion. And though Christianity began in the Middle East and is today vibrant in Asia - most intensely in the Philippines, South Korea and now China - it's still seen by Japanese people as a European religion.

I think the main development to watch regarding Japan and Christianity is China and its experience with Christianity.

Right now Christianity is spreading rapidly in China, and is the spiritual force behind Chinese efforts to oppose the Communist government's human rights abuses. Much of Japanese history and Japanese tradition has been influenced by Chinese religion, art and philosophy....So stay tuned.

'Haafu' and Japanese Culture

2009-03-02T17:52:00.000-08:00

If you ever been to Los Angeles or Vancouver, you'd have a hard time deciding who is an American or a Canadian and who isn’t. In Japan it's easy. If your ethnically 100% Japanese, you are Japanese. If you're not, you’re something else. In the West this is racism; in Japan it’s called reality. So where do “half-Japanese” people or “haafu” fit in Japanese culture?

Haafu is a Japanese japlish word that meas a person who is half Japanese and half non-Japanese. Normally the child of an international marriage.

Corey Gaskins wrote about his life and this issue in Metropolis Magazine. He begins:

“I am Japanese. In fact, I had been Japanese for 21 years before coming to Tokyo to live for the first time in 2006. You might not consider that very Japanese, but I think I’ve passed all the tests.”

I can tell him one thing: nobody in Tokyo, Japan will think he's Japanese. Just as I don’t think that people in Uganda think that a black man from Florida is really African.

“For instance, when I was 10 and living in Portugal, I endured hordes of people shouting ‘Hey Chinese boy! What are you doing?’”

These people were clearly ignorant, but their ignorance doesn’t make him Japanese. Being Japanese means that you’re part of a tribe of "mind and blood.” That’s the best way I can put it. You may have Japanese blood, but if you weren’t raised in Japan – and learned the way to be and think like Japanese people – you aren’t Japanese. Again, one can label this Japanese racism, but I think this would be a mistake. The writer continues:

"I expected that when I moved to Tokyo, I would finally be able to blend into Japanese society. How naïve I was!”

Yes. It’s true. Many Japanese-Americans who thought of themselves as “Japanese,” have received a great shock when they went to Japan to work or live. I have sympathy for the disappointment he must have felt in Japan, he goes on:

“Some people, namely celebrities, do capitalize on their biracial origins, wearing the ‘We’re different’ sash proudly. But that’s not me. I don’t get paid for how I look or how much I stick out in a crowd. When I moved to Japan, I was simply a recent college graduate struggling to fit in.”

The first problem, again, was trying to “fit in.” This can’t be done. Japan is not an open, pluralistic society; traditional Japanese culture has never been pluralistic, and modern Japan has no intentions to go that route. And if we’re honest, we as foreigners in Japan must admit the attraction of Japan is precisely its “closed” homogeneous quality.

The second mistake was thinking that “being different” in Japanese culture was an admirable quality. In the West, with the notion of free will, human rights and individual liberty, “being different” is often respected. Not in Japanese culture! (unless you’re a wacky Japanese comedian, of course, but then being wacky is actually what’s expected of you).

The writer then talks about how in the West he felt like he couldn’t share his Asian roots with people. He writes:

“Just once in a while, I wished I knew somebody else who could understand how great it is to drink warm green tea after eating the undulated sweetness of azuki-filled mochi.”

The Japanese will drink Japanese green tea with you and eat Japanese mochi, but they’ll still will be amazed that you – a foreigner – like to drink green tea and eat mochi. You won’t be amazed, but they will. It’s reality.

Maybe the Japanese people should welcome the writer home as a “long lost brother,” but that would be fake. We in the West often accuse the Japanese of hiding their true feelings, but when they treated this man like a foreigner, they were being sincere.

“After the 1,000th time I was asked “Are you haafu?” and after repeating the same set of answers three or four times a day, I’d had enough. Not only that, I started feeling pangs of indignation when the locals seemed eager to point out how much I didn’t belong here — the very country I’d identified as my homeland since birth! I wondered how other haafu coped.”

In this disappointment, we must feel great empathy for the writer. Yet I don’t think it’s the fault of the Japanese. I believe the real fault are those in the West who make so much of the ethnic backgrounds of so-called “minorities.”

We go on and on (particularly in America) about how so and so is the “first Chinese-American elected to the so and so school board” and so on. Instead of letting Americans be Americans, we make them “special.” I suspect it was this endless multicultural dialogue in the West (along with real instances of racism as he suggests) that got this writer so convinced he was Japanese.

In the end, the writer found a kind of “haafu” community in Japan, which seems rather nice, yet aslo a little sad:

“Hanging out with half-Chinese, -Peruvians, -Greeks or -Palestinians, my race never became an issue — none of my new friends made a fuss when I was able to belt out a popular B’z song at karaoke. By befriending other haafu, I was able to be who I truly was, and not what my race was.”

The writer is fine man, who is sincere in his feelings and experiences. And in his honest telling of this experience as a haafu in Japan, we can learn quite a bit if we're listening.

Japanese Stereotypes - American Stereotypes

2009-02-28T07:52:00.000-08:00

I’m convinced that people teaching English in Japan are now the de-facto western “cultural commentators” on all things Japanese. It’s interesting that we never hear about Japanese culture from an American businessman or a Christian missionary, for example, who may also understand Japan quite well…English teacher Amy Chavez writes about Japanese stereotypes in The Japan Times Online:

“Japanese people tend to think every Western-looking person is American (or if they don't, they tend to think foreigners are distinguishable by nationality — imagine over 50 identifiable nationalities!”

Okay. Very true statement. But is seems to imply some Japanese cultural backwardness. Are we to assume that Amy can tell the difference between white Americans, Germans, Canadians or South Africans? Maybe Amy’s point is that Japanese people should simply see white people and say “white people.”

I’d also have to assume that Amy has trouble distinguishing between Koreans, Japanese and Chinese based on appearance alone. We in the west solve this by saying, “Asian people”, Japanese people solve their issue by saying “American people.”

This alone, is not a Japanese issue. While traveling in South America, this writer learned that all white people were also “Americans.” So we must understand some universality to this issue. While being seen as an American in Japan can be an advantage (foreigners in Japan get away with a lot), this is decidedly not an advantage in Latin America. One Scandinavian chap wrote on his backpack, “I am not an American. I’m Norwegian.” So goes the cause of a common humanity!

“Japanese people still say to me: ‘What do you eat for breakfast, bread?’ As if we sat down every morning to a large pile of bread on a plate.”

On the surface, this is a simpleton question. Yet it the question must also be understood in the negative, as in: “So you don’t eat Japanese rice and miso soup every morning?” Which, by and large, is the norm for Japanese people.

It must also be understood that when you don’t speak a language well, you tend to stick to safe, easy questions. There are also some Japan etiquette and Japanese behavior customs here; the Japanese often ask about safe topics to create a pleasant, surface-level conversation. This is being polite in Japan.

Yet the writer appears to be searching for some Utopian civilization where everyone thinks of human persons in the particular, and never succumbs to the temptation to talk about humanity in generalities. Japanese people, like their counterparts in America, Uganda and Bolivia, all rely on stereotypes to a certain extent.

Amy writes:

“The fact is, that although ‘stereo types’ should be limited to Panasonic and Sony, they are still very much alive, even in the Japanese classroom. And I was shocked to find myself teaching them!”

Shocked! Ah, don’t be. You’re human and so are the Japanese people…As a teacher if you have fun with your Japanese students, they’ll have fun with you. This may be a teaching English in Japan stereotype, but I’m sticking to it.

Japanese Women in Western Women’s Minds

2009-02-26T10:03:00.000-08:00

Anyone who has spent much time around Japanese women will agree they are on the whole practical, bright, curious and open-minded. Despite these realities, however, many western feminists continue to project a sense of victim hood on Japanese women.

A recent blog entry entitled “Women in Japan: Conversation Remembered” on the site feministing.com is a classic example of the tendency among women in the west to insist that Japanese women are victims, because Japanese feminism doesn't seek the ends that western feminism does.

The writer tells us about Ayuko, who she worked with at an English school in Japan; we can presume she teaches English in Japan. She writes:

“I couldn't help doing a bit of western-tradition feminist indoctrination from time to time, which I now somewhat regret.”

And poor Ayuko thought she was just chatting with an English teacher! But then the writer continues:

“The more time I spend in this country, the more I see that whenever Japan gets around to having a major feminist revolution it's going to have to happen Japanese-style.”

I suppose this will be a disappointment to Gloria Steinem, but then again as long as the end in Japan is western feminism, the means can be Japanese.

Yet our western feminist was dedicated to bringing enlightenment to young Ayuko and she saw her progress:

“Still, there were a few fun lightbulb moments when Ayuko noticed close-to-home examples of things I liked ranting about.”

Our hero understands that Japanese culture is full of sexist, and patriarchal families who see it as their duty to turn Japanese women into obedient wall flowers. She was onto this error in Japanese cultural thinking and was determined to correct it:

“(Ayuko) was always saying, "We are told that..." … Well look here...it would seem that, contrary to the common wisdom, humans want to want what they want after all. I don't think she had even noticed the gap between what "we are told" and her own experience.”

The lesson is clear. What we are told (i.e. Japanese tradition, education, Japanese history) is false, while what we experience (our feelings) are always an infallible guide.

But our feminist hero soon discovered the real tragedy that afflicted Ayoku – she wanted to get married:

“Ayuko herself…was husband-hunting. When I asked her why she felt the need to go get married if she had a nice boyfriend she enjoyed spending time with, she said, "Actually, I don't like working!"

Marriage, oh no! I recently blogged about a British female Buddhist priest in Japan, which addressed some of the issues of marriage from a western feminist point-of-view.

Now if our young Japanese women simply wanted to get married to quit her job, this is certainly problematic. Yet here is where we must deal with a fact that western women (since about 1968) have found unacceptable, and that is that most women in the world believe that their main vocation is to get married and have children! It’s important to stress that Ayuko and Japanese women like her are normal – they are not oppressed or victims.

Now, having said that, there is real discrimination against Japanese women in the Japanese workplace that needs to be remedied; but the answer is not to convince Japanese women that their authentic desire for motherhood and marriage is problematic. In the area of Japanese women and jobs in Japan, our feminist writer captures the situation quite well:

“I couldn't blame Ayuko for the way she felt about work, though, as her full-time salary provided only spending money (she lived with her parents, at age 28-nothing unusual in Japan, but had she wanted to move out her salary wouldn't have supported it). Upon graduating college, she had gotten a good salaried position that looked to be a lifetime job, but when the company started doing badly she had to leave, and now she was fatalistically certain that as a female nearing 30, it was impossible for her to land a second good job.”

She is quite right. Japanese companies view women over 30 as women who will soon get pregnant and "leave" the company. This is foolish. Japanese women who wish to return to their companies, should be allowed to do so.

Japanese culture and Japanese society is out of whack, not doubt; and Japanese men need to step up to the plate and become better husbands and fathers. Yet it is rather condescending to think that western-style feminism is the answer to a complex Japanese cultural problem. We now see that American women in the west are finding that the choice between careers and motherhood/marriage is a false one.

Japanese women, I suspect, reject this choice.

While Japanese business should allow “older” women to work and Japanese mothers to return to work after pregnancy if they choose, I still believe that careers are not primarily what Japanese women (or Asian, Indian, African, Middle Eastern or Latin American women) want – they want respect and support to be wives and mothers first and foremost. And right now Japanese women can't even find proper OB/GYN care in Japan, which is a real hardship.

In this area Japan and Japanese culture have a long way to go. Let's see if a Japanese solution to a Japanese problem arises.

British Woman is Japanese Buddhist Priest

2009-02-21T08:12:00.000-08:00

We often hear about Japanese racism. The Japanese, because of their homogeneous culture, are both fascinating and repulsive to the west. Many westerns are drawn to Japanese traditional culture in the abstract, but in reality they want to impose a strictly western view of life on the Japanese cultural tradition, with certain feminist, multicultural overtones. And so we come to the tale of a British woman who became a Japanese Buddhist priest.

A recent article in The Japan Times Online describes her journey:

“Victoria Yoshimura, 38, from Peterborough, England, started her life in Japan like many foreigners. Twenty-two years old, two weeks out of university, she came over on the JET language program.”

The JET Japan program, if you didn’t know, is a Japanese government program that recruits recent college grads to teach English in Japan at the jr. high level. It’s a pretty cushy gig to teach English abroad with government help, decent pay and not many teaching hours. If you want to teach English overseas, JET Japan is a nice deal.

She wanted to teach English and probably learn Japanese. I respect that. Yoshimura then began dating a Japanese man, which is somewhat unusual. In Japan, Japanese dating usually means western men with Japanese women. The feeling among western women is that Japanese men are unromantic, unfaithful and somewhat intimidated by western women. She says of her now husband:

"Junsho was the first Japanese guy to talk to me normally, and not treat me like a freak; he taught me all the saucy, rude words I know in Japanese."

Her comment reveals something quite true about the Japanese cultural attitudes and their dealings with foreigners. Many Japanese do think of foreigners as freaks, meaning people who are vastly different from the social norm, and the norm in Japan is the Japanese way of doing things.

They dated, and it turned out that her boyfriend was “the 17th generation in the family of priests for Shonenji, the 430-year-old temple nestled in this rural town of Miyazaki Prefecture.” It turns out for the two or three people who actually care about Japanese Buddhism in the area – Japan religion these days is about as healthy as the world economy – were against the marriage. Despite what may be common in Southern California and London, Japanese Buddhism and Zen is not seen as something white people do.

I’m assuming that she wasn’t Buddhist at the time. You’d think if Buddhism means something to her boyfriend, he’d strive to find a Japanese Buddhist wife, but love is love, of course. Yet it’s predictable that her western feminist consciousness would be aroused by this opposition:

"Sometimes I wonder whether all the opposition to our marriage actually pushed me into it further. I wanted to prove them all wrong."

Feminism in Japan is not typically about pushing for equality in the sense that “I want to do everything that men do.” That’s not the goal (this is foreign to Asian culture in general). Japanese women simply want emotional and financial support for being wives and mothers and the ability to work after giving birth. Japanese women, on the whole, understand that they are smarter, more practical, more open and stronger than Japanese men.

She married her Japanese boyfriend and eventually had children, which brought up the issue of “interracial children” in Japan. While the Japanese have a great admiration for western people, they are a bit squeamish about Japanese children who have a mixed racial background. "Some of the community even warned that our children would be deformed," she said, which is a pretty accurate sentiment.

But then the writer of this article, Kris Kosaka, who is probably a Japanese American writer, gets back to the mission of the article, which is to conduct a western feminist critique of Japanese cultural life:

“She was expected to settle down to life as a mother and temple accessory, fading to the background in demure contentment in this happily ever-after.”

Of course! Nothing could be more oppressive than to be a wife, mother and behind-the-scenes supporter of her Japanese Buddhist husband. The article goes on:

“Only that fairy tale did not fit Yoshimura. ‘I'm the kind of personality type who sees a 'Wet Paint. Don't Touch' sign, and I have to go up and touch it, just to make sure for myself.’ Yoshimura again challenged expectations.”

Ah, yes, we have a rebel. A British woman comes into the den of Japanese traditional culture and “challenges” a culture thousands of years old. In its on way, this is a subtle form of western racism that presumes that the Japanese way of doing things is a real drag for women.

From my understanding, being the wife of a Japanese Buddhist temple priest in Japan is kind of like being the First Lady in the U.S. It is a challenging, busy life with many social and religious obligations, requiring social acumen, tact and intelligence. There are many Japanese women who would hesitate to marry a Japanese Buddhist priest precisely because of these challenges. But I digress.

Yoshimura the says: "Motherhood is great, but I was losing myself, and my brain cells were rusting." Ah yes, “The Sex and the City” view of life. As much as our British hero wants to explore the exotic far-east and traditional Japanese culture, it must in the end bow to western feminist realities.

And then, in what can only be understood as a repudiation (or at least a misunderstanding) of marriage, she says: “I realized it was important to make my own roots, separate to those of my husband. I needed to be happy here because I like it here, not because I like him."

My understanding is that marriage is not about “doing my own thing,” but about sacrificing for my spouse. I wonder if that’s why half of marriages fail in the west, and divorce in Japan is still rare.

She eventually becomes a Japanese Buddhist priest – just like her husband. She said, "Suddenly everything became clearer once I started to learn why things were so, instead of following like a lemming."

Again, to simply be a mother, wife and English teacher in Japan wasn’t enough, one had to be equal to her Japanese husband. What we see is that, instead of living in Japanese culture and accommodating its differences, she had to “change it” as if she was some agitator.

Go here to read the full article on the British Japanese Buddhist priest.

You can also go to Amazon.com to check out a classic book on Zen and Japanese Buddhist culture in Japan: Zen and Japanese Culture

How to Buy a Japan Rail Pass

2009-02-19T10:02:00.000-08:00

So you want to travel to Japan? Okay then, you better get ready to give up the idea of a rental car and settle instead for public transportation. Just like in Europe, trains are the only way to travel in Japan, and the Japan Rail Pass is “the way” to get the best travel value during your stay.

Japan Rail operates the Japan rail system and they offer a discount pass that can only be purchased outside of Japan. Japanese citizens living in Japan are not allowed to buy the Japan railway pass. The only ones who can purchases the JR Pass are people who:

• are entering Japan on a non-Japanese passport with "Temporary Visitor" entry status or Japanese citizens who live abroad, and are either permanent residents of another country or have a foreign spouse.

The Japan Rail Pass, or JR Pass is a discounted ticket that allows visitors “unlimited rail travel throughout Japan over a 7, 14 or 21 consecutive day period.” And the best way to take advantage of the pass is to make the most of your Japan travel time.

Once you’ve got your fourteen day Japan railway pass, for example, it doesn’t matter whether you visit 10 cities or two – the price remains the same. So the best way to use the Japan Rail pass is to travel like crazy! Make as many trips to as many places as possible: Kyoto, Kobe, Hiroshima, Yokohama, Osaka – see them all!

The JR Pass also means that you can travel on Japan’s bullet trains, which are know in Japan as shinkansen; this will save you many hours and provide you with a few kicks.

The key to the buying the Japan Rail Pass is to purchase the exchange voucher from a distributor in your home country. Don’t wait until you get to Japan to buy a JR Pass, because they won’t let you. Go to the Japan Rail Pass website to find a distributor in your area.

When you arrive in Japan – most likely Narita Airport, you can exchange your JR Pass voucher for a rail pass at a Japan Rail Pass exchange office. Good luck!

Tokyo, Japan Travel Facts

2009-02-19T08:17:00.000-08:00

Tell someone you're going to Tokyo, Japan and they always say, "Oh, I want to go to go there someday!" It's strange. Even people who've never been outside of Michigan, have dreams of visiting Japan for some reason. And while there are other cities that are more interesting than Tokyo - like Kyoto - you've got to deal with Tokyo if you want to understand Japan.

Here's a few facts about enjoying your stay in Tokyo. And remember that Japan Tokyo travel is best undertaken in the Spring and the Fall when you avoid Japan's extreme weather. Here's some facts to ponder when you go on your Japanese adventures in Tokyo:

Remember as you walk through Tokyo that nearly the entire city was destroyed during World War II; then imagine that up until 1940, most of Tokyo was made of wood!
Hotels in Tokyo, Japan are expensive - no surprise there - but they are also small, clean and orderly
If you get lost in Tokyo, asking someone a question in English to Japanese people might not always work - try some Japanese from a phrasebook first, then Japanese people might feel comfortable to try their grammar school English with you
Tokyo Japan attractions include the Tokyo tower, Tokyo Dome (baseball) Imperial palace and Shinkjuku
Don't strain yourself looking for a girl in a kimono - it's a rare occurrence to spot one - except when a Japanese women is going to a wedding or some other super-formal occasion
Flights to Tokyo, Japan arrive at Narita Airport; from there you can catch a one-hour train ride into Tokyo. One great tip is to buy a Japan Rail pass before you come to Japan; the pass allows you to ride the Tokyo subways and all of Japan's trains for a discounted price. It's definitely worth it, and this discount is only available to foreigners or Japanese citizens who have an American green card, for example.
Remember to be adventurous: the Japanese love to go abroad, so they understand what it's like to be a tourist. Don't worry about appearing foolish in Tokyo, Japan, just try to have fun

Japanese Cherry Blossom Time

2009-02-17T13:23:00.000-08:00

As winter fades and spring looms, the Japanese people prepare for the japanese cherry blossom season and all the joy and hope that it brings to the Japanese soul.

It's hard to do justice to the deep feelings that the cherry blossom trees in japan engender in the people who live there. In may ways, it's an interior reminder to the Japanese people of how important nature and Japanese traditional culture is to them and their children. And because you could argue there are no Japanese religions practiced anymore, the appreciation of nature is a kind of neo-pagan spiritual practice for the Japanese.

On a purely visible level, the pink blossoms of the japan cherry blossom are stunning, particularly when the japanese cherry blossom trees are lined up along a river as they so often are in Japan. To look down a row of such elegant colorful trees is enough to stir anyone's heart; yet for the Japanese people, this annual display is more about interior appreciation than the stimulation of the senses.

The cherry blossom in japan reminds people that though the country is now a very urban, technological place, the heart of Japan remains very much in tune with nature, much like the Haiku poets of old - like Basho - who wrote so beautifully of nature.

And while you'll see Japanese people setting up their tarps under the japan cherry blossom to sit with friends and drink, don't forget that it is not simply a sensual activity for the Japanese people, but also a profoundly culture act that is deeply embedded in the Japanese spirit and nation.

Drugs in Japanese Culture

2009-02-16T11:38:00.000-08:00

Until recently there wasn't much talk about drugs in Japanese culture, because there weren't any drugs in Japan to talk about. Recently, however, there's been a spat of news stories involving Japanese college students getting caught with marijuana. Now this would be laughable as a news story in London or Los Angeles, but in Japan it's a worthy news subject.

In Japan, unlike most of the west, there are no distinctions made between heroin and marijuana, for example. In Japan, both of these drugs are illegal and therefore taboo. In many ways this is a far saner attitude than in America where marijuana is illegal, but is seen as benign by most of the culture and some in government - and so people ignore the law.

I can only speculate why pot is now making an appearance in Japanese culture. My guess is that Japanese students who go abroad to Australia, America and Europe are exposed to it and pick up the message that it is a "cool" and harmless thing to do.

Being an island nation, Japan has historically been able to control much of what comes in an out of Japan. We see this when it comes to immigration, narcotics and even guns. This is not to ignore the fact that the Japanese mafia (yakuza) has been dealing with drugs and guns for years, but most Japanese aren't touched by the underworld.

Japanese culture generally condones sloppiness and excess when it comes to alcohol use. Even the most mild-mannered Japanese businessman (salaryman) is allowed to get crazy and make a fool of himself when he is drinking. I can only image the absolute tawdriness of Japanese people who are under the influence of illegal drugs.

I wonder if drug use in Japaneses society will produce a generational split along the lines of the 1960s in America, when the college kids of that generation decided that illegal drug use was a private affair and no state or Church was going to tell them anything different.

Ten Reasons it's Great to be a Foreigner in Japan

2009-02-14T07:54:00.000-08:00

I don’t care what anyone says, but being a foreigner in Japan is a real kick. It’s not always easy being the object of attention – at least in small Japanese towns – but it’s better than being anonymous in Pennsylvania! So here’s my list of the top ten reasons it’s great to be a foreigner in Japan.

In no particular order, here we go:

Low Expectations. No matter what you do, the Japanese will be impressed. Call it the benefit of low expectations. The Japanese people are tough on themselves, but forgiving with foreigners. If you can use chopsticks and eat miso soup, they’ll be impressed!
Different, but First World. Let’s be honest, you can get quite a thrill from being in some far-flung third-world country like Mongolia, but at the end of the day you’re still in Mongolia! In Japan you get all the thrill of being in a very different place, but with lots of clean bathrooms.
Japanese Food. Enough said.
Same, Same. Japan is culturally homogeneous. You can go from one end to the other and people all kind of “think Japanese,” which means that once you get things figured out, you’re good to go anywhere.
Smoking. If you’re a smoker, Japan is still a free country.
Women and Drinking. If you’re a woman, and you like to have a few drinks, the Japanese will think nothing of it. There is no such idea of a women being a “lush.”

Lonely Planet's Japan Guide is a sound resource for people preparing for a trip to Japan:
Bamboo. This is a personal preference, but I think bamboo groves are the best. To fly by endless groves of bamboo in a bullet train is a perfect merger of technology and nature.
Hot Springs. Public baths, either outside or inside, which the Japanese call onsen. This is one of the genteel and civilized customs of Japanese culture.
Ego Boost. If you happen to be a western man who is reasonably attractive, you will find that both Japanese men and women will give you a lot of attention and compliments. I once had a male Japanese taxi driver (all of them are male actually) tell my wife how handsome I was.
Beer Vending Machines. I actually don’t drink, but I think the idea that an adult can buy a beer from a vending machine at 2 a.m. or even 11 a.m., is another sign of a mature civilization

Panasonic Workers to Buy Company Products

2009-02-13T14:14:00.000-08:00

So do you think the global recession is affecting Japan yet? Well, Panasonic of Japan has announced that it will "ask" 10,000 of its Japanese employees to buy Panasonic products.

Let's make one thing clear, when a Japanese company asks its employees to do something, it's an order. So you can expect quite a boost in Panasonic flat-screens for a while, yet is this really the way to make the company profitable?

Panasonic is an old-line Japanese place where company loyalty is not questioned. What must be said, however, is that this is most likely being done in place of massive layoffs. For if there is one thing that the Japanese absolutely despise, it's layoffs. I think they'd rater give up their salary than be told they have to clean off their desk and go home.

This aversion to layoffs is certainly an admirable part of Japanese culture; there is a kind of paternal care that Japanese companies exercise in Japan. Many people in America, for example, have learned that your employer will dump you the minute the profits start dropping.

Japan's Cities Don’t Explain Low Birth Rate

2009-02-13T11:11:00.000-08:00

Several times on this blog we’ve looked at the unprecedented low birth rate in Japan. The reality of a future where Japanese people may be as rare as spotted owls is beginning to make some news, and writer Rowan Hopper recently had his go at the problem in The Japan Times Online.

The article is titled “City Ecology Explains Japan's Low Birthrate,” and Hopper’s main point is that the Japanese habitation in large cities is the main reason for this decline.

Apparently Mr. Hopper has never heard of places like Mexico City, Bombay or the growing Muslim metropolises in the Middle East. Even in a tiny urban slice of chaotic land like Gaza, the Palestinian people have no problem producing plenty of children.

Hopper, like the Japanese people, puts his faith entirely in science. Science, he reasons, must be able to tell us everything. So he puts on his biological wonder suit and explains:

“This difference is explained by what is called the metabolic theory of ecology. Bigger animals have a bigger network of blood vessels that are used to deliver resources to their cells. So the efficiency of resource delivery is less in big animals. But it's not just in big animals.”

Huh? He then compares cities to big organisms that consume lots of energy, are inefficient and, as a result, produce less “products,” i.e., children.

Okay then, so how are we supposed to convince Japanese women to have more babies and solve this problem? Hopper writes:

“If we and our cities become more efficient in terms of energy use, the scientists predict, we'll have more children. That might be the only way that Japan can survive in anything like the form we know and love.”

Oh, I see! If we have lots of hybrid cars in Tokyo and we do a better job of retrofitting Japanese municipal buildings with solar panels, Japanese women will suddenly rethink the whole baby game. Got it!

Hopper’s idea is puzzling at best. What he fails to understand is that the number one factor for declining populations in the world is religion and traditional values. Declining birth rates are occurring in secular, first-world places like Europe, Canada and Japan (the U.S.’s birth rate is helped by Latin American immigrants).

Muslims, whether they live in the Arabian Desert or London, are having lots of babies. The Arab world, where religion is part of the fabric of society, has no problem with birth rates. In Africa and India where traditional morality and beliefs survive, you don’t see any population decline.

We also see that devout Christians, wherever they live, tend to have more children than their secular neighbors.

This global reality of demographics and religion is chronicled in the recent book by Mark Steyn called America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It.

Amazon.com Widgets

In Japan, where there is absolutely no evidence of any belief, faith or religion in Japanese culture any more, we shouldn’t be surprised that the Japanese have decided to live for today only - and let’s face it - children are a lot of hard work and a drain on “resources,” to use the language of scientists.

Regardless of whether one sees religion as a force of good in the world, its believers generally have a sense of hope (in an afterlife) and this sense of optimism for the future generally manifests itself in the form of children and the investment in their future success.

The Japanese people need more hope and less of a reliance on silliness like “the metabolic theory of ecology.”

Japanese Women and Feminism

2009-02-11T17:35:00.000-08:00

When one thinks of Japan, feminism isn’t the first thing that normally pops into your mind, but if Japanese state minister has her way, Japanese women will soon resemble the girls of Sex and the City…She recently published her thoughts on Japan and feminism in The Japanese Times Online.

While Noda makes important points about the difficulty that Japanese women have returning to the workplace after giving birth - and is courageous to talk about her experiences with infertility and miscarriage (not usually discussed in Japan) - she is wrong to look to western feminism as a model for Japanese women.

Noda writes:

“Family diversity should be the norm everywhere. Every person has the right to create the family he or she would like. I am single but hope to have a child in the future. If I find a partner, wonderful; and if not, I would still want to have a child. According to Japanese law, though, I would have difficulty adopting, and surrogate motherhood is also outside the legal framework.”

Statistics in the United States prove that children who are raised by one parent have a tougher go of it in life. This is a fact. Japanese women, for the most part, understand that if they desire children, they must first find a husband. The idea that you can have a child without a husband is selfishness, not authentic feminism.

As things stand when it comes to procreation, Japanese women are on strike – and for good reason. Reproductive health in Japan is terrible, with very few OB/GYNs, very little day care support and Japanese husbands who believe they have no responsibility to be in their children’s lives (they spend all their time at work, and then attend after-work drinking parties with co-workers). The result has been a frightening drop in Japanese births; right now the Japanese are having children well below the replacement rate.

Japanese women – unlike many western women – are not postponing marriage and children because they want to pursue professional careers, have “freedom” or participate in sexual relationships out of marriage. Many Japanese women postpone marriage and children because their know their husbands will be absent, there is lousy female medical care and they will never be able to return to work.

Noda is right to criticize this, but the answer is not Japanese women taking matters into their own hands with IVF treatments, surrogate mothers and casual sexual relations with men. The answer is to demand that Japanese men embrace their manhood – to challenge them to be men and to put their wives and children before their careers and social status. In addition, the Japanese government must make it easier for Japanese couples to have children; they can do this by giving tax breaks to companies who allow their employees to have more family time at home.

In her piece, Noda made one other point – entirely unrelated to Japanese women – which is worth commenting on. On the Japanese nation she wrote:

“A nation's strength is not measured in its military capabilities but in its environmental power. That's Japan's strength: We are the world leader in environmentally sound energy sources, from hybrid cars to solar power. Our nuclear power plant development is the most advanced in the world, because we have been constantly developing new technologies.”

This is a common Japanese view point, which ignores the fact they have been under the military umbrella of the United States military for 60 years. Instead of having to prepare for a North Korean attack on their own, they have been able to focus exclusively on their domestic economy.

Like a spoiled adolescent who lives at home and doesn’t realize the sacrifices his father makes to pay the rent, many Japanese people have rather naïve ideas about the reality of geo-politics. My guess is that a parking lot of hybrid Toyotas won’t be much help against North Korean ballistic missiles.

Noda’s comment also reflects the Japanese attitude concerning war, which comes from a half-reading of Japanese history. Because Japanese people were the victims of two atomic bombs, they see themselves as eternal martyrs for peace. Yet they conveniently ignore the decades of Japanese war and aggression that lead to the U.S. assault on Japan.

Japanese Continue to Teach English Wrong Way

2009-02-10T12:57:00.000-08:00

In this blog we’ve documented the strange reality of the English language in Japan, whereby the Japanese study English for years, but don’t know how to actually use it or speak it. It seems to be part of a disconnect in Japanese culture, which is as much about procedures as it is about philosophy.

Gregory Clark, vice president, Akita International University in Japan recently had some interesting thoughts on the failure of Japanese schools to properly teach English.

He mentions the fact that although Japanese children get about six years of English instruction in the public schools, they lag well behind countries like Korea, which do a better job of preparing their students.

The real problem - and Mr. Clark nails it - is that the people teaching English in Japanese high schools are Japanese teachers who can’t speak a lick of English. They might be able to diagram a sentence, but they can’t order a beer in New York City to save their life. Mr. Clark comments:

“Japan seems not to want to realize the harm caused by having young students spend six years listening to bad English. Some say that if the world is happy with Indian or Singapore English then it should accept Japanese English. But these other varieties of English are standarized and fluent. Listening to them is no harder (sometimes easier even) than listening to the accents and dialects of British English.”

He writes that Japanese English (Japlish):

“is a hodgepodge of accents and pronunciations thrown together and spoken haltingly. It is hard on both the ear and the patience. More importantly, most Japlish speakers find it very hard to process English spoken at normal speed. Normal conversation is almost impossible.”

He also believes that Japanese students aren’t as motivated as their Chinese and Korean peers, because English isn’t as necessary to get ahead in Japan.

Yet I think he is really onto something when he critiques the manner in which Japanese people understand knowledge and learning. The Japanese people have a long history, and they learn it exclusively as a list of dates and facts. Many Japanese people know when a certain Japanese battle happened in 1656, but they have no idea how it fits into the political, social and philosophical whole of Japanese culture and history.

Mr. Clark states:

“Language learning is not like math or history — the mere accumulation of facts and data. With language the memory operates at two levels. One is what I call conscious memorization — mastering enough of the grammar, vocabulary, etc., to be able to translate and put sentences together. But at some stage the language has to be moved to the subconscious and that can only happen with strong motivation and good learning techniques — repetition, realistic conversation, good listening materials and so on. Only at this subconscious level can you retain vocabulary and speak the language naturally.”

He believes that learning English should be moved to the university level; interesting idea, but then again you will run into the resort atmosphere of most Japanese universities, where everyone is taking a break from crazy Japanese school entrance exams .

Mr. Clark has a real understanding of the problems of English and learning in Japanese culture. Undoubtedly it will take much more than bureaucratic reforms to convince a rather isolated and coddled Japanese generation that real life require sacrifices, and that Japan’s wealth today has little to do with its future place in the world.

Mr. Clark’s complete article on Japan and English learning is well worth a read.

Japan and School Exams

2009-02-07T10:45:00.000-08:00

You think the American SAT's are stressful? Think again. In Japan, where you go to jr. high school, high school and college makes all the difference for your future, and the school exams are your ticket into these institutions.

In America, going to prestigious Andover Academy and then Yale, for example, can boost your career prospects without a doubt; but going to Average Joe High School and then some random state college will not prevent you for being successful, as long as you're smart and hard working. The Japanese, on the other hand, don't put much trust in the meritocracy; it's all about the brand in Japanese culture.

February is the month of school entrance exams in Japan and Japanese mothers are doing their best to completely flip out and make sure everyone is appropriately stressed out. Japan Today quoted a Japanese mother who said:

“I have told my child not to attend PE class since January. I can’t believe the school lets kids wear T-shirts and shorts for PE in winter. My child has been studying at prep school six days a week and for 10 hours a day in weekend. I don’t want him to catch a cold on the day of the exam.”

Kids wearing shorts during PE class? What outrage!!...But seriously when you believe that the brand - i.e. the school - is all that matters, then you'll get a little crazy about that sort of thing.

The pressure that's put on Japanese children must also be understood in the light of Japan's declining birth rate. Most Japanese families have one, or two kids at the most. So all the pressure to succeed is draped on one child in Japanese culture. This is also seen in China as a consequence of the shameful "one child policy" of the Chinese communist government.

This concern of form over matter reaches its apotheosis with Japanese universities, which are amazingly hard to get into (another killer Japanese school exam), but almost impossible to fail out of, because they expect nothing from university students (the thinking has been, "Why not relax in college? You'll soon become a salaryman and have to work 90 hours a week for the rest of your life").

The Japanese mother, in the above quote, mentioned "prep school" which is also known as a juku school, which can be translated as "cram school." While the public schools at least pretend to educate children, the cram schools get right to the heart of the matter; they understand that in Japanese culture the school test is everything.

Nobuyasu Morigami from the Japanese Morigami Education Institute, had some kind words for the parents and children who fail the Japanese school exams, but you'd have to think this is not how Japanese families take the news:

“Even if their children fail the exams, parents should not show their disappointment. What is important is to encourage children to go on to any school positively by telling them they can change their lives by themselves, even though they might not be able to go to their first choice school. Failing an exam is not the end of their lives.”

One of the sad effects of this testing pressure is Japanese teenage suicides, which Mr. Morigami may be alluding to in his comment. In my humble opinion, the absence of any kind of faith or religious conviction in Japan (particularly the personal God of the Christian Jewish tradition) is a big factor in the despair and disappointment of Japanese youth.

Mr. Morigami says, "They can change their lives by themselves." In the absence of a "higher power" for the Japanese, so much of the burden of life falls squarely on the Japanese people to solve things "by themselves." During the 20th century we saw what happens when nations eschew faith and rely dogmatically on atheistic forms of philosophy that see "the self" as the only resource one can count on.

Japanese Business Culture and Etiquette

2009-02-04T11:18:00.000-08:00

Japanese business culture is a complex world for a western businessman to navigate on his own. While each business culture has its own etiquette, business in Japan can prove quite frustrating for your average American business man.

It should first be noted that the idea of a meritocracy (the best and brightest get promoted) has not been a big winner in Japanese business culture. The reason is that seniority still determines who runs the show. Now while there is much to be said for the value of experience, there is also the potential that a Japanese Bill Gates is toiling in the mail room when he should be heading the board room.

Here is a reference book at Amazon.com on Japanese business culture: Japanese Business Culture and Practices: A Guide to Twenty-First Century Japanese Business

There's been much written about the Japanese businessmen who don't like to give the American c.e.o. a clear 'yes' or 'no' answer, causing all kinds of cross-cultural problems, but the bigger issue revolves around an old Japanese proverb: "The Nail that Sticks up Gets Shot Down."

The above proverb is the key to understanding both Japanese culture as a whole, and Japanese business culture in particular. There's no question the Japanese are hard working, yet they work within their allotted, approved and institutionally-grounded work spheres. While this has helped the Japanese make excellent cars, it hasn't allowed them to foster the kind of business culture that produced a Microsoft or a Google.

One of worst things a Japanese junior executive can do at a business meeting is to draw attention to himself and his personal opinions. This is a quick way to end up in the dog house.

English teachers in Japan have experienced the same thing: ask a question to Japanese class and even though a few might know the answer, they don't raise their hands for fear of being seen as a show off or for fear of being wrong; mistakes in Japanese culture are not easily forgiven.

While it's difficult to speak in generalities (although I often do this on the blog), the Japanese business culture is about everyone on the team being on the same page, and the proper channels being respected. This characterization, of course, is much like the business culture of other countries, yet the Japanese live with a great fear of being "different" and being on the wrong side of the group consensus.

Because Japan is so homogeneous and Japanese culture is rather uniform in its broad strokes, the Japanese often can "read each other" to such an extent that they often don't need a drawn out discussion to know where the major players stand. This makes it very easy for the group to appreciate that the V.P. of Sales, for example, wants to ink the deal with the American distributor now. And despite misgivings that the junior sales people might feel, they downplay them because they understand - almost without any discussion - that this is the decision that must be made.

Before signing that same distribution deal, a group of American salesmen will have to hash things out together, and there may be individuals who are "on record" for opposing the deal. The V.P. will note the opposition, appreciate the frankness of his staff, yet decide that the deal will go forward. There was no real consensus, but the American V.P. made an executive decision and there's no hard feelings.

This is not how things normally go down in Japanese business culture; before a meeting takes place, it's likely that the participants know the outcome before any "discussion" takes place.

If you lived on one of four small islands in very crowded cities like the Japanese do, accommodation and "harmony" might begin to look far more attractive than self assertiveness and independence.

Whaling and the Japanese

2009-02-02T10:44:00.000-08:00

The Japanese continue to get into trouble with environmentalists over whaling. Recently there have been more conflicts in the Antarctica between Japanese whaling ships and environmentalist activists who the Japanese consider to be eco-terrorists.

The Japanese have been catching whales under an international law that allows for the taking of whales for research. Now while the Japanese claim this is for research, it's obvious they are catching whales only for food. Eating whale meat in Japan is a venerable tradition; it is an element of Japanese cuisine that is bound up with Japanese culture and highly prized by the Japanese people.

These environmentalists, much like extreme activists the world over, have long since abandoned reason and logic in favor of law breaking, vandalism and terror. Japanese fisherman, having the temerity to kill large sea animals without the permission of Green Peace, are now the targets of "green pirates."

Extreme environmentalists now pursue Japanese whalers as if they were Somali pirates: ramming ships, climbing on board and in the recent attacks, tossing rancid butter and cans of paint at the Japanese whalers. Some one might ask: is this really something that the world needs to worry about right now? Is Japan whaling this important?

It's a sure bet that many of the environmentalists who are attacking Japan for whaling, are the very same folks who are real vocal about protecting native rights, traditions and cultural practices of non-white persons. Well how about Japanese cultural rights? The Japanese have been on those islands for thousands of years and whaling is part of their native tradition.

It seems that western environmentalists only support "diverse" "cultural" practices that they approve of; which doesn't seem to be an honest effort at authentic diversity. And typical of totalitarian impulses the world over, the environmentalists use violence and force to get what they want.

For the Japanese part, they should not claim they are doing research when they are not; if the Japanese want to catch a number of whales for food, they should make the case on cultural and traditional grounds. This would help them retain the moral high ground, because their opposition understands this as some kind of "whale genocide," and they are prepared to get real violent.

As one environmentalist extremist said regarding the Japanese whaling ships:
“I will not allow them to kill a whale while we’re here, and they know that,” he said. “I’ll literally rip their harpoon off their deck if I have to.”

It seems that Captain Ahab has jumped ship and now is clicking his peg leg around the stern of a Green Peace clipper.

Emperor Hirohito and Japanese Culture

2009-01-30T10:29:00.000-08:00

At the end of the Word War II, the occupying American forces made the practical decision that if they wanted the cooperation of the conquered Japanese population, they needed the help of Emperor Hirohito to manage Japanese culture peacefully.While many military officials realized that Emperor Hirohito was involved in the planning and execution of Japanese aggression during World War II; they appreciated that trying him as a war criminal

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would have alienated the Japanese population. Instead, the myth that Hirohito had been simply a "figurehead" who was manipulated and lied to by Japanese military officers, was carefully disseminated. Historian Herbert P. Bix has documented this in the book "Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan," which is an excellent read on the real role that Hirohito played during World War II.

Zen and Japanese Buddhist Culture

2009-01-30T09:40:00.000-08:00

If you want to discover thriving communities of Japanese Buddhism and Zen these days, your best bet is probably a trip to Los Angeles, New York City or Berlin, but most certainly not to Japan. While people in the West have embraced "all things Zen," Japanese culture has moved on to more modern pastures.

One of the quickest ways for a westerner to sound like a real wacko to your average Japanese person is to explain that you practice Japanese Buddhism and Zen meditation. To the Japanese ear, the earnest daily practice of Japanese Zen Buddhism is something akin to being involved in Civil War reenactments in America - it's odd, historical and makes one seem rather "out of touch."

The disinterest in the role that Japanese Buddhist beliefs have played in Japanese history is related, on the whole, to the lowly place that Japan religion now holds. And while Japanese Buddhism isn't strictly speaking a religion, it's a spiritual outlook all the same, which contrasts strongly with the affirmative materialism that now dominates Japanese culture.

In much the same manner that school children in New England are herded onto buses and driven to Plymouth Plantation each fall to learn how the pilgrims made cornbread, Japanese high school students are brought to the local Japanese Buddhist temple and are made to sit zazen (sitting meditation on a cushion) and learn what a stark and disciplined life that Japanese Buddhist monks have (no cell phones or computer games!).

Much of the interest in Zen Japanese Buddhism in the West is not directly related to the work of Japanese Buddhists (an exception would be the U.S. lectures of Japanese Zen master D.T. Suzuki), but largely the result of American Beat writers like Gary Synder (who studied Zen in Japan in the 1950s) and others like Jake Kerouac and Alan Ginsberg who discovered in Buddhism a "religion" of sorts that made very few moral demands on them in the way that the Judeo-Christian tradition does.

To check out a classic book by D.T. Suziki, follow this link to Amazon.com: Zen and Japanese Culture

It was the writings of the Beat writers on Japanese Buddhism in particular that the bohemians and hippies of the 1960s latched onto as they rejected much of the traditions, religions and beliefs of Western culture.

In some ways the decline of Zen Japanese Buddhism is also occurring in neighboring South Korea, but in the case of Korea this is due to nearly half the population converting to Christianity since the end of World War II. The Japanese, in contrast, have shown a stubborn resistance to embracing the Christian faith.

While it's true that Japan is not, strictly speaking, a Buddhist country - it has been shaped as well by the native Shinto religion, ancestor worship and Confucian ethical teachings - one can declare that the Japanese people now live, in the words of Catholic Pope John Paul II, as practical atheists.

Japanese Women Can't Find OB/GYNs

2009-01-28T09:55:00.000-08:00

In one of the world's richest countries, which boats of "universal health care," you'd think that Japanese women would get first-class OB/GYN care, but the reality is quite different.

A new survey from Japan shows that Japanese women with uterine cancers have a terrible time finding doctors who specialize in female medicine. The lack of OB/GYN services has also made having a baby in Japan a real imposition, leading to what some have called "pregnancy refugees:" those women who have to travel far and wide to get OB/GYN care.

The problem is a result of too few Japanese medical students going into the OB/GYN field, not enough women becoming doctors and a reluctance to allow foreign doctors to emigrate to Japan.

In the face of this reality, Japanese women have essentially said "no" to having children, which is creating a population implosion in Japan like none seen before.

It's no exaggeration to say that the Japanese people have abandoned procreation, and the declining Japanese birth rate is a demographic nightmare that will have unforetold economic, cultural and political repercussions in Japan.

Japanese Companies and Layoffs

2009-01-26T10:26:00.000-08:00

Layoffs are no fun for anyone, but in Japan layoffs are a cultural taboo that Japanese companies do everything they can to avoid.

As the global economic crisis hits Japan, Japanese companies are cutting temporary and contract workers, stopping production and asking employees to take pay cuts, all in an effort to avoid layoffs, which still rattle the Japanese to the bone.

Until recently, lifetime employment was one of those things - like death and taxes - that the Japanese people could count on, yet global competition has forced Japanese companies to stay competitive by shedding workers and cutting costs.

'Working hard' for a Japanese company has an almost religious importance to it, and a layoff is tantamount to being ostracized from one's faith community. One hears tales of laid off Japanese salarymen (business men) who can't bear to tell their wife they've been laid off, so instead, they get up each morning, put on their dark business suit and go to the local manga (comic book) shop to read manga and sip coffee all day.

Japanese group identity can't be underestimated; and for most men in Japan, their corporate affiliation is something akin to their "tribe," which is often more important than the individual job or role they perform at the company.

When you lay a man off in the west you take away his salary and much of his social life - when you lay a man off in Japan, you take away his salary and you bring shame upon him and his family.

It's serious stuff in Japan and we hope that Japanese culture and society can accommodate the many men who may be losing their jobs in the months to come.

Patriotism in Japan

2009-01-26T09:40:00.000-08:00

Patriotism is a complicated business in Japan.

Japanese aggression in WWII brought destruction and American occupation to Japan by 1945, and a feeling among the Japanese that to be defeated and humiliated in such a complete way indicated some fatal "flaw" in the culture.

While the 1950s were a time of optimism, prosperity and burgeoning international power in America - that same decade was a time of food shortages, humiliation, confusion and mourning in Japan.

Over the last 60 years the Japanese have opted for a break with their past, instead of the painful and difficult task of sorting out what is great and honorable in Japanese traditional culture, and what had to be left behind.

It's been said that Patriotism is "love they neighbor" on a large-scale. It's right that we feel proud of our country, traditions and the flag. Intelligent people understand how this differs from nationalism, which seeks to dominate other nations. Yet, despite this distinction, expression of patriotism in Japan is often stifled and labeled as militaristic or dangerous.

Japanese actress Youki Kudoh wrote a great article several years ago for Time.com entitled "Who Killed Our Culture? We Did," which tries to reawaken a sense of pride in Japanese young people. She notes:

"Most of today's young people grew up in the absence of some important values. They aren't positive about being Japanese, nor about their own identity. They are losing their integrity because they always pretend to be like someone else."

While Ms. Kudoh is right to caution against the elevation of American culture over Japanese culture, she does stray a bit into some typical anti-Americanism at times; yet it can be forgiven because of the larger point she is making:

"We are negative about our culture: traditional things are seen as old-fashioned, and everything new is good. Social order and moral standards have disappeared. Some people are even obsessed with denying their Japaneseness."

And when Ms. Kudoh urges young Japanese people to look at their history for that which is good, honorable and useful, she is far too modest in calling these things "hidden" in Japanese history. She notes:

"We need the confidence with which to see the good qualities hidden in our history and tell the world about them. We need a flexible mind with which we can learn about mistakes in our history and turn them into positive lessons."

The war crimes and political oppression of the first half of the 20th century in Japan must be forever denounced, but Japanese culture is so rich in cultural treasures that one must work hard to ignore them.

10 Random Facts about Japanese Culture

2009-01-24T10:13:00.000-08:00

Trying to pick out 10 facts about Japan and Japanese culture is like trying to choose among sand pebbles at the beach, but here are a few choose nuggets about Japan.

In no particular order, here are 10 facts about Japan:

The school year begins in April, not September
Adults read comic books (manga) as much as children do
The Japanese drive on the left side of the road, just like the British
The word for "rice" and "food" is the same in the Japanese language
Nippon 'Ham Fighters' is the actual name of a Japanese professional baseball team
In Japan it's harder to graduate from high school, than it is to graduate from college
Some Japanese refer to the younger generation of Japanese as the "new human beings"
Most Japanese don't have home computers - they use their cell phones instead
Despite cold winters, many Japanese homes still do not have central heating
Job resumes in Japan include a photo and a person's age

Here's a resource to check out:
A Taste of Japan: Food Fact and Fable What the People Eat Customs and Etiquette

The Japanese Tourist

2009-01-23T11:02:00.000-08:00

The Japanese tourist with the 35 mm camera slung around his neck is a popular stereotype; yet the stereotype is built upon the reality that Japanese tourists really get around!

The Japanese love to travel because of three important facts:

The Japanese live on tiny rocks known as islands
Everyone around them has the same background as they do (it can get boring!)
It's cheaper to fly to L.A. than to take a domestic flight in Japan

Americans can think of it this way: just imagine that everybody looked like your Uncle Charlie, the U.S. was as big as California (yet chopped up into islands) and it was more expensive to fly from San Diego to San Francisco, than it was to fly from L.A. to Paris - you get the idea!

One also can't discount the hipness factor, that cosmopolitan stamp of having been abroad that means a lot to the Japanese. Most Americans don't care much whether their neighbor has been to London or Paris: some people like to travel, others don't.

One seems a bit more "worldly" and interesting in Japan if they've been abroad. If the Lost Generation of the '20s had Paris as their bohemian playground, the hip young Japanese have Las Vegas and Los Angeles as their post-modern shopping mecca. They happily inhabit the fine restaurants of Santa Monica and the buffet lines of the Vegas strip taking snapshots of their dinners (the portion size is always a crowd pleaser) and nodding in wonder at the excesses of America.

Japanese tourists come in all shapes and sizes, of course, but living in a country where everybody looks pretty much like you do, tends to stoke the fires of curiosity about the world.

And one must always keep in mind the contradiction that lies at the heart of Japanese culture since the end of World War II: the Japanese consider Japanese culture to be special, unique and rather wonderful, yet they are somewhat ashamed and self conscious at how "different" they and their culture are in relation to foreigners. You don't believe me? If you can successfully use chopsticks in Japan, the Japanese will treat as if you'd just rattled off 39 Haiku from memory.

It's worth emphasizing as well that Japanese tourists are brave, adventurous and curious about the word (particularly Japanese women, who speak English and other foreign languages much better than the men) in a rather refreshing way.

Attend the running of the bulls in Spain, go to the KFC museum in Kentucky, trek in South America or go surfing in Hawaii and it's a sure bet that you'll run into Japanese tourists, who may or may not cameras slung from their neck.

Japanese Companies Hiring Fewer Graduates

2009-01-22T19:30:00.000-08:00

In Japan April is the big month of renewal and change; it's when students start a new school year and workers begin their new jobs with Japanese companies. As both Japanese companies and job candidates gear up for the hiring season, it appears that it is now a seller's market in Japan.

Tough economic times in Japan have meant that Japanese companies are making less job offers to candidates, who are typically high school and college graduates. In the past a school graduate would interview with a company, get a job offer and then work for the company for life. While this is no longer the case, the job hiring season is still very much a big deal and working hard in Japan is an important tradition.

Yet many hiring representatives have begun complaining that the new crop of Japanese graduates are clueless and without much common sense...with Japan's declining birth rate it seems that Japanese companies will eventually have to scoop up every last Japanese worker they can, clueless or not.

English Teachers in Japan

2009-01-22T10:44:00.000-08:00

There's nothing like an English teacher in Japan! They hail from the U.S. and the U.K., Australia and Ireland, conveying the impression to their Japanese students that western civilization is composed exclusively of back-packers, bohemians and Zen enthusiasts!

There's nothing quite as western as an English teacher in Japan doing everything he can to distance himself from the West. Which is ironic, because the majority of Japanese students are completely enamored of all things western, and are learning English so they can get their feet on the pavement of Los Angeles, Vancouver or New York City as fast as possible.

English teachers in Japan are perfectly in love with Japanese culture and they demonstrate this by dating Japanese women and criticizing the United States as much as possible. They are entirely open-minded and judge nothing about Japan except the crowded trains, tiny apartments, humid summers, stubborn people, lazy students, materialist youth and silly Japanese government.

They make it clear to their Japanese students that they intensely dislike George Bush, armies, big corporations and people who insist there is right and wrong in the world. In this way they are very open-minded ambassadors, except when it comes to George Bush, armies and big corporations.

This, of course, is a satirical generalization of men and women teaching English in Japan, yet anyone who has met English teachers in Japan and other foreign countries might recognize the breed. It must be admitted that most English teachers don't head to Japan because of a passion for conditional verbs, nor out of a duty to serve society and mankind as teachers.

Many of them are in limbo between college and the "real world," which makes them perfect role models for teaching young Japanese English students, who wish to get exposure to English before they spend a year in California or Canada killing time before they're drafted into the real world of Japanese corporate culture to become salarymen and OLs (office ladies).

Some of the English teachers understand themselves as descendants of Jack Kerouac: 21st century bohemians out to re-foment Mr. Kerouac's "ruck-sack" revolution. Many of them, however, wouldn't know Kerouac from K.C and the Sunshine Band, but they feel called to wander.

And then there are certainly hard working English teachers in Japan who help their students, represent their countries well, truly appreciate Japanese culture and perhaps have one (just one) nice say thing to say about former President George Bush.

Japanese People and Apologizing

2009-01-21T15:07:00.001-08:00

It's important to say you're sorry in most countries, but in Japan apologizing is a cultural must that is non-negotiable for Japanese.

The interesting aspect of Japan's "apology first" culture is that it doesn't necessarily mean you have some interior sense of sorrow when you apologize - quite often it is simply a way of smoothing over social situations in Japan.

Even if a person didn't do anything wrong, saying "I'm sorry," is a way to maintain harmony and avoid needless embarrassment or awkwardness at work or in some other Japanese social situation.

The apology culture of Japan is also on display in a unique way in corporate leadership. If, for example, two factory workers die on the job because of company negligence , the c.e.o. is expected to go to the home of deceased family and apologize profusely by bowing and appearing very contrite; and the event will be covered on TV and done in a very public way.

This aspect of Japanese culture exploded on the shores of America a few years back when a U.S. Navy ship mistakenly rammed into a Japanese ship with several school children on board. It was a tragic situation and several people died.

Justice ran its course during a court martial in Hawaii, but for the Japanese a court decision wasn't enough. There was a clamor for the American Navy Captain to fly to Japan and personally apologize to the family of the people he accidentaly killed.

Yet the irony of this is that in much of Asia (mostly among the political class), there is still anger toward Japan and the Japanese government for not apologizing for Japan's Word War II aggression.

There are a few lessons from this that foreigners, and ESL teachers in Japan can take from this apology culture. Toshiya Enomoto writes about the Japanese language and apologizing:

"Japan's 'apology first' culture makes it possible for gaijins (foreigners) to get out of most jams with sumimasen. Sumimasen...is equivalent to 'excuse me.' It is, however, just as useful for apologies and some Japanese prefer to say sumimasen as they think it is a more refined apology 'for grown ups' than gomen 'nasai. Saying sumimasen is also a clever way for gaijins to hide their limited vocabulary."

Japan's Obama City Gears Up for Celebrity President

2009-01-19T18:09:00.000-08:00

Most Japanese people are staunchly apolitical, and the Japanese people who live in Japan's Obama City are no exception. That's right - there is a city named Obama in Japan's Fukui Prefecture - and the city's residents partied like rock stars last November when President-elect Barack Obama won the election.

The residents of Obama City may not be able to tell you Mr. Obama's stance on North Korea, Taiwan or U.S. military bases in Okinawa, but they recognize the power of celebrity when they see it. And in today's rough and tumble economy, rural Japanese villages need every advantage they can - so why not manufacture some Obama masks and watch the tourists flood in like a tsunami?

Change? Why Japanese culture knows how to change!

Japanese Women and "Being Cute"

2009-01-19T11:24:00.000-08:00

There is a "cuteness factor" in Japanese culture that can't be missed: from Hello Kitty to the miniature beauty of Bansai trees, cuteness is valued. Nothing dramatizes this more than how some Japanese middle-aged women and moms adopt a "cute" look as they age.

Women in America, in contrast, hold onto their youth by trying to retain a "sexy" image. They wear clothing that emphasizes curves, in what appears to be an overt attempt to compete with younger women. American women have access to plastic surgeons as well, with the explicit aim of looking as sexy and attractive as a 23-year old.

While issues like prostitution, pornography and "hostess girls" are real problems in Japan, both Japanese teenagers and adult Japanese women in their dress and overall attitude have a far less "sexualized" manner than American women.

And while Japanese women feel no less pressure (and perhaps even more) than American women to "remain young," Japanese women return, in appearance, to an almost early adolescent look.

It's not uncommon to see a late-thirtysomething Mom in Japan wearing barretts, colorful trendy sneakers, short girl-like hair, a pink cell phone and jeans with the cuffs rolled up. And if you ask a Japanese women why this is, they might tell you they don't have the curves and physique of western women, so "cute" is all they've got.

Japanese Culture and the Myth of Safety

2009-01-17T14:26:00.000-08:00

There is something broken in Japanese culture. Now this dark spot has always been there, but it has recently seeped out in a wave of violent, heinous crimes that is turning the dogma of Japanese safety into a myth.

Just recently a Chuo University professor was stabbed over 60 times on the Tokyo campus. The killer is unknown, and once more Japan has another gruesome "unexplainable" murder on its hands.

This tragic incident can be grouped into a long line of murders over the last 10 years. And these crimes, while few in number compared to America, exhibit a strange and peculiar touch of evil. The tales of students killing their teachers and children killing their parents are an indication that either the Japanese family or Japanese culture is failing young people.

It's time that Japanese parents, teachers, religious leaders and government officials admit that their is a rage and hopelessness in many Japanese youth that smacks of nihilism or at least garden-variety hopelessness.

For years now Japanese people have proudly touted how "safe" their country is compared to cities in the West, yet if one is no longer safe in the family home or at school, there is nothing safe about Japan any more.

Prime Minister Aso and Rural Japan

2009-01-16T08:41:00.000-08:00

It's no exaggeration to say that Japanese rural towns are turning in municipal nursing homes. If you happen to spot someone below the age of 70 in the country, you can be sure they're just in from Tokyo to visit grandma. That's why Japan's Prime Minister Taro Aso has decided to promote the joys of the country to unemployed urbanites.

As part of Aso's emergency economic package, the Japanese government will pick up the tab to send 80 Japanese unemployed folks on a 10-day visit to the country to investigate the prospects of working in agriculture.

The dwindling population in rural Japan is a symptom of the demographic problems facing Japan as a whole. The Japanese birth rate is one of the lowest in the world and it seems that it's a chore to convince Japanese women to even have one baby.

Japanese young people in the countryside often ditch their small towns as soon as they can, heading off to the bright lights of Tokyo, Osaka and Kyoto. It remains to be seen whether the decrease in auto exports will mean more unemployment and a reverse migration of workers back to the small towns of their ancestors.

Although Aso's plan is novel, it's hard to image the "new human beings" (as these modern young Japanese are known), turning in their cell phones and Ipods for rice fields and fishing boats.

The English Language in Japan

2009-01-15T12:27:00.000-08:00

Ah, the Japanese and English...Japan is probably the only place in the world where the people can accurately write an English sentence in the present perfect tense, but cannot understand an American when he asks in English: "Which train goes to Kyoto?"

And no one is more aware of this irony than the Japanese people themselves, because they slavishly studied the English language for years in school; when push comes to shove, they really can't speak or understand English in any practical way.

Some of this may be the fault of the written Japanese language itself, which is composed of Chinese characters (kanji) along with two kinds of Japanese characters to accommodate foreign words, concepts, etc. The way that Japanese young children learn to read and write Japanese is by methodically memorizing large groups of characters until they have a working vocabulary.

In many ways it's this method of learning the Japanese language that has informed the way that the Japanese people learn English.

Japanese people (who do not speak English) are largely responsible for teaching young Japanese English. And they do this by emphasizing grammar almost to the complete exclusion of speaking. For as one wise man once said, "you can't pass on what you don't have. "

Exposure to "spoken English" might be from JET program teachers, who are largely American ESL teachers employed by the state to swoop into junior high classes and have fun with the students using English. It's all fun and games, but Japanese young people are mostly concerned with passing their high school and university entrance exams, which require an expertise grammar knowledge.

All and all, the Japanese people are slightly uncomfortable in situations where they might be expected to use English with a foreigner. Perhaps they feel they were short changed when it came to their adolescent English lessons, or perhaps it's more about Japanese "shame culture," where losing face is a dreaded prospect.

In the end, the best bet when you're lost somewhere in Japan is to bumble through using your travel book Japanese, and hope that a sympathetic Japanese person realizes that their unused English is positively Shakespearean compared to your mangled Japanese.

Recession Hits Japan's PingMag

2009-01-15T10:22:00.000-08:00

PingMag, an important online voice on Japanese cultural issues (as seen through the eyes of Westerners), has stopped updating its website and will go on an "extended hiatus," as a result of the global and now Japanese recession.

The website on Japanese art and culture had a real "feel" for the nuances, beauty and contradictions of Japanese culture. The editors wrote:

"PingMag has been running for 3 and a half years now, and over that time literally millions of you, from every single corner of the planet, have visited, read our articles, left comments, linked to us on your blogs, sent us letters of support - some of you have even flown to Tokyo to join us!"

Foreigners, Racism and Japanese Culture

2009-01-15T08:07:00.000-08:00

Japanese culture and racism is nothing new. In a country where 98% of the people are ethnically Japanese, you're bound to have a bit of "us" and "them" when it comes to foreigners (gaijin) and their strange ways. Yet Japan also has a real love afar with all things foreign, particularly those from the West, but also recently with Korean cultural imports, like Korean soap operas and pop idols.

One must also take into account the fact that Japan is an island nation with a history of closing the doors to foreigners when their influence was deemed "unwelcome." And then, of course, no discussion of racism in Japan is complete without mentioning Japan's military aggression against its Asian neighbors in WW II, which was driven in part by a feeling of racial and cultural superiority.

To read more about this aspect of Japanese history, read: Japan's Minorities: The Illusion of Homogeneity (Sheffield Centre for Japanese Studies/Routledge Series)

An excellent article on Japanese culture and racism appeared recently in The Japan Times. An American college vice president in Japan argues that westerns living in Japan exaggerate the extent of Japanese racism toward foreigners.

Japan's Toyota Now Feeling Pain of U.S. Recession

2008-12-22T10:57:00.000-08:00

For the first time in 70 years, Japanese auto giant Toyota will report a loss, confirming in many people's minds that the current American recession is global and has now arrived in Japan.

Toyota's success has long been a point of pride to many Japanese, particularly in a culture where corporations are almost like feudal clans that people in Japanese culture strong identify with.

Until recently in Japan, it was still possible for many ordinary Japanese to ignore the pain that was happening across the Pacific in the United States; but Toyota's loss, coupled with the reality than many Japanese won't be getting their coveted year-end bonus this year, has made this crisis real to people in Japan.

Japan, however, is no stranger to economic slumps, having experienced the collapse of its so-called "bubble economy" in the late 1980s.

Japanese Automakers Feel the Economic Pain

2008-12-18T10:12:00.000-08:00

Japanese auto profits - long the envy of Detroit - are now starting to feel the pain of the falling dollar and the global recession. Japanese automaker Honda recently announced that it will slash its profit forecast by 60%.

Here is an article on the pain felt by this big Japanese automaker.

'Santa Claus is Coming to Town' in Japanese!

2008-12-15T09:09:00.000-08:00

Okay, get ready for another Japanese interpretation of a Christmas classic. Here is a Japanese star singing 'Santa Claus is Coming to Town.' No matter where are you - Tokyo or Toledo - have a Merry Christmas and enjoy!

Japanese Persimmon Time Has Arrived

2008-12-15T08:18:00.000-08:00

I just received my precious box of dried Japanese persimmon direct from Japan. If you are a lover of dried apricots or cherries, then dried Japanese persimmons will bowl you over!

Persimmons in the Japanese language are called hoshigaki: "hoshi" means "dry" and "kaki" means persimmon. And these sugary Japanese fruit are a traditional gift item sent to friends and family around the New Year.

Many American are unfamiliar with Japanese persimmons, which grow on a tree much like an apple, but have the curious appearance of a tomato.

You eat a fresh Japanese persimmon by cutting off the skin and then slicing it into quarters like an apple, with care taken not to eat the core. Fresh persimmons are best when they are hard and crisp. One variety that is popular is fuyu persimmon.

The dried Japanese persimmon shown to the left is from the west of Japan in Ishikawa prefecture, which is on the Sea of Japan. Driving through the Noto peninsula area of Japan you will notice what appear to be small greenhouses scattered about the countryside; they are actually Japanese persimmon drying "barns," where the fresh round fruit is transformed into a shrunken, narrow slipper of sugar.

Many Japanese houses in the countryside have their own persimmon trees complete with a drying rod attached to the house where they have hung persimmons out to dry; from a distance it looks like a row of beautiful Christmas ornaments.

When the persimmons dry, a wonderful glaze of white crusty sugar crystallizes on the surface of the persimmon; in ancient Japan this natural sugar was scraped off and added to traditional Japanese sweets.

American Japanese culture is linked to this japanese fruit because Japanese-Americans introduced fuyu persimmons and others to California in the last century, and there are now American persimmon orchards throughout the United States.

Eating hoshigaki is a great way to experience an edible part of Japanese culture - enjoy!

Hard Work in Japanese Culture

2008-12-12T16:44:00.000-08:00

There are two nations in the industrialized world whose people work the longest hours: America and Japan. While hard work is certainly a virtue, the Japanese have their own particular brand of hard work in Japanese culture known as gambaru.

In the Japanese language gambaru means "trying one's best," but might be better understood as "working like crazy." And this doesn't necessarily mean that you worked well, were successful or that you arrived at some breakthrough - it simply means that in Japanese business culture you threw yourself into the task like a fire man confronting a burning home.

Japanese group behavior certainly influences how people behave socially, and in the world of Japanese salarymen (business men), nothing is more valued than gambaru. Toshiya Enomoto writes on Japan and work:

"Even if they fail to get results, Japanese find much comfort in the act of trying. So much so that they see it as a virtue in and of itself. Some put so much effort into 'trying ' that they have little energy left for the task at hand."

The image of the overworked, bone-tired Japanese salaryman is not a myth; I stayed at a home in Kobe, Japan where the husband routinely came home from work at midnight! And it was up and out the door at the crack of dawn the next day! (It's worth noting that he sleeps all day on Sundays).

It would be very difficult in Japanese business etiquette for a man to look at his watch, see that's it 6 pm and say to his colleagues: "Okay, I'm done. Time to see the wife and family." It's probably fair to say that workers and work in Japanese culture might be more efficient if they knew they could work like crazy for eight hours, and then go home.

This gambaru culture so dominates Japanese business culture, that some companies are forcing employees to leave the office at 7 pm so that they can go home, be with their wife and family and perhaps help the declining Japanese population.

Japanese Geisha in Japanese Society

2008-12-11T15:17:00.000-08:00

When you talk to people in the West about Japan, the subject of Japanese geisha comes up sooner of later. These women and their mystique are a perennial favorite for many; yet the first thing foreigners must know is that Japanese geisha is not synonymous for "prostitute" in Japanese traditional society.

Many people outside of Japan believe that geisha are high-class call girls who sleep with old Japanese men for big money. There is also the book "Memoirs of a Geisha" which has influences many people's attitudes.

To understood geisha properly, you must understand them first as artists and preservers of Japanese traditional culture, and pretty girls with expert social skills second.

Japanese women enter Japanese geisha houses (now almost exclusively in the city of Kyoto) when they are young, and undergo rigorous training in dance, music, Japanese etiquette and the Japanese tea ceremony all under the supervision of strict teachers. Think of the young women who train to be Olympic gold medalists and you get the idea of the kind of life they lead - glamorous by no means!

Geisha (or maiko as they're known in the early stages of training) in their expensive Japanese kimono are primarily entertainers hired by groups of men who are, for example, meeting at a fine hotel or restaurant for business. During the course of the night, geisha will play the shamisen or koto (traditional stringed instruments) perform a highly stylized traditional dance in traditional Japanese makeup and then socialize by serving the men drinks, discussing the issues of the day with them and generally paying them lots of attention.

And when it comes to chit-chat, Japanese geisha are expected to be excellent conversationalists on a whole range of topics, everything from politics to travel. They are indeed not just pretty faces, but accomplished women who can hold their own with some of the most successful and distinguished men in Japanese society.

It's fair to say that they men who hire geisha enjoy both the Japanese traditional arts, as well as the company of attractive ladies wearing beautiful kimono.

And if you think the mystique and allure of the geisha has disappeared in Japan - think again. When a fully-clad geisha with Japanese makeup steps from a taxi at dusk to be whisked into an expensive Kyoto restaurant for a performance: you'll see modern-day Japanese yelp, scream and take pictures as if Marilyn Monroe herself had just strolled across the street.

Here is a fine site on Japanese geisha.

'Silent Night' in Japanese

2008-12-10T15:13:00.000-08:00

This is simply beautiful. This is the Christmas classic "Silent Night," listen for yourself how beautiful it sounds in Japanese.

The spirit of Christmas is able to enter and become one with any culture. Enjoy!

Japanese Culture is all About Japanese Rice

2008-12-09T16:00:00.000-08:00

There's no equivalent to Japanese rice in the American diet. Certainly Americans eat a lot of bread, pasta and beef each day: but can you name one food that 300 million Americans eat two to three times a day, every day? Rice is more than food for the Japanese, it is culture. And Japanese rice cookers are TVs for the Japanese - non-negotiable items for daily life.

In the Japanese language "gohan" means both cooked rice and food. So you can see that Japanese rice is as fundamental to the lives of the Japanese as food itself. If you don't have rice, it is almost like you don't have anything to eat. Rice in Japanese culture is used for everything from Japanese rice balls to a sushi rice recipe.

Historically Japanese rice was so important that it served as currency in feudal Japan. One could exchange bags of rice for goods and services. And in Japan during WW II, many civilians had to eat millet and oats instead of rice so the Imperial Soldiers throughout the Pacific would have enough rice to nourish them when they went into battle.

And in Japan it's not uncommon for someone to have Japanese rice with each meal - even breakfast! Most Japanese cook their rice in a Japanese rice cooker and prefer it to be sticky.

And unlike many Americans who are tempted to view plain, white rice as bland, the Japanese are horrified when they see Americans dump soy sauce onto rice. It's not uncommon for the Japanese to take a bite of Japanese rice and comment extensively on the flavor and quality of the rice.

Rice is often taken as a portable snack as well, almost like a granola or energy bar. Many Japanese love these " Japanese rice balls," which are shaped into a ball and then covered in Saran wrap; often they feature seaweed or even pickled plum. This is a Japanese tradition that goes back centuries.

In contrast to Thai or Chinese rice, Japanese rice is dryer, fluffier and easier for the uninitiated to eat with chopsticks.

Christmas in Japan: Christmas Cake and a Romantic Date

2008-12-08T15:34:00.000-08:00

Although the Japanese love Christmas trees, traditional songs like "silent night" and much of the decorative aspects of Christmas, don't expect anyone to gather with family, go to Church or sing carols. It's all about Christmas cake and a romantic date.

So what do the Japanese do on Christmas? Why they eat Christmas cake on Christmas Eve and single people go out to a romantic dinner, much the way young couples in the West do on Valentines Day.

Nobody really seems to know how this all became a part of modern Japanese culture, but one website claims that there were western style bakeries which catered to Americans after the war, and one popular choice (and perhaps understood by the Japanese as being uniquely "western") was sponge cake. This may have been the origin of this uniquely Japanese tradition of eating Christmas cake on Christmas Eve.

One down side is that many young, single Japanese women without a steady boyfriend feel terribly alone and forgotten on Dec. 24.

One wished that the true spirit of Christmas prevailed, instead of this odd, cultural simulacrum with all its intense social pressure. The women should know that - date or no date - this is a real day of joy; the day when their savior was born in Bethlehem. These women are loved and not alone! Merry Christmas everyone!

Get Your Japanese New Year Cards Ready!

2008-12-06T12:12:00.000-08:00

While people in the West scramble to get their Christmas cards ready for Dec. 25, the Japanese have their own busyness as they prepare to send out a cadre of New Year cards.

Although it's true that many Japanese have adopted western habits such as sending Christmas cards, many still focus on the New Year as the central family holiday of Japan. The cards often depict traditional scenes and symbols from Japanese culture: sumo wrestlers or geisha. The beauty and delicacy of these cards is undeniable.

Politeness and Courtesy Declining in Japanese Society

2008-12-06T11:56:00.000-08:00

A recent article in the Britain's Telegraph draws attention to fact that politeness and courtesy in Japanese society is gradually on the decline, particularly on the subways where thousands of Japanese interact with each other each day.

Japanese etiquette and courtesy, of course, is what many westerns associate with the Japanese and their culture. The subject of japanese business etiquette is very much on the mind of western businessmen who have to work with Japanese companies. Yet the Telegraph hints that the future of japanese etiquette might look quite different.

"I would have to say that levels of inconsideration have accelerated in the last five years or so," said Toshiko Marks, a professor of multicultural understanding at Shumei University. "I first saw a young woman applying her make-up on a train about five years ago but now it is an everyday sight," she said. "I even see people on trains eating food that has a strong smell, such as noodles, which means everyone has to put up with it."

Read the full article about the decline of manners in Japanese society.

Group Japanese Behavior and Shame

2008-12-05T14:39:00.000-08:00

It's not a stereotype to say that group Japanese behavior has a tremendous influence the people of Japan. The roots of this reality are in Japanese traditional culture and the notion of the "the house."

In the Japanese language, ie translates as "house," but broadly speaking it refers to the clan or institution that binds you to japanese society: the family, school or company, for example. Since the end of the second world war and end of Japanese traditional culture, the company has become the clan that most Japanese identify with.

Ask a young man or women in Tokyo, "What do you do?" and many are apt to say: "I work for Honda," instead of saying they're a secretary or the director of marketing.

One reason for this is that modern Japan and Japanese behavior grew from the feudal history of the Japanese where your station in life was determined by your family, caste or clan. There are even stories of Japanese history where entire families were killed because of the crimes of a single member of that family. At the very least, it's safe to say that throughout the history of Japan, shameful acts by one member of a family have often led to entire families being marked with dishonor.

And it is this very notion of shame and dishonor that still permeates Japanese . There is still a common Japanese proverb that states: "The nail that sticks up gets knocked down." In many situations, Japanese people tend to keep their individual ideas and inclinations private, preferring to understand the group "consensus" and then to safely go with that.

This process is so internalized that many Japanese do it without even thinking about it.

Many westerns, of course, hold the individual and his desires to be supreme. For the Japanese, however, this disturbs the harmony of society; and if we can speak of "group virtues," than harmony is certainly one in Japanese culture and it explains much about japanese behavior and the history of the japanese.

Japan's Population Declining with Birth Rate

2008-12-04T16:52:00.000-08:00

There's something strange going on in modern Japanese culture - and it has got everything to do with babies, or should I say the lack of Japanese babies? For years now the Japanese population has been declining because of a low birth rate, and suddenly the economic implications are starting to alarm Japanese political leaders.

Put it this way: for a married couple to at least replace themselves when they die - they need to have at least 2 kids. Right now in Japan, the Japan birth rate is just 1.29, which means that Japan will shortly go from a very crowded country, to one that seems quite empty. If things continue this way, the current Japanese population of 128 million people might be whittled down to only 100 million by 2050.

Observers of Japanese culture cite a variety of reasons for the population of Japan decline, including:

Japanese men work long hours at the office, so they're never home
Japanese moms don't want more than one kid, because their overworked husbands are never home to pitch in and support them
Many Japanese women can now support themselves without marrying, and as a result find that shopping for Italian handbags and taking vacations in Hawaii is easier than marriage
Japanese men aren't big on Western notions of love and romance, and many Japanese women have had it
Abortion accounts for thousands of innocent Japanese babies killed each year
There is no system of day care, which prevents Japanese moms from working if they choose to

In the end, modern Japanese culture has developed with whopping social security benefits for retirees along with a tight rein on immigration. If the Japanese population refuses to have more babies in the future, Japan may have to look more closely at cutting retirement benefits and/or increasing immigration to help raise tax revenues.

For a historical perspective on Japan's population and Japanese tradition, you can go to Amazon.com and check out this book:

Japan's Medieval Population: Famine, Fertility, And Warfare in a Transformative Age

Nabe! Japanese Culture Readies for Winter

2008-12-03T10:10:00.000-08:00

Winter is almost here! And in Japan where space heaters are more common than central heating - it gets cold in the house! That's why the Japanese love eating hot nabe, which is one way Japanese culture readies itself for winter.

Nabe, which means "one pot" in the Japanese language, is a broad term that applies to a variety of "soups" where all kinds of vegetables, meat and fish are thrown into a pot of boiling water, fished out with chopsticks and then dunked in sauce to be eaten with joy. Winter, it seems brings out some of the best Japanese food.

What makes nabe different from beef stew or chicken noodle soup, however, is the manner in which it is cooked and ultimately eaten, which draws nicely upon Japanese traditional food culture.

Nabe is cooked in a special nabe pot that helps distribute the heat evenly and it is often cooked in the middle of the table on a portable gas range (don't forget to open a window for safety!),

Preparation for cooking means cutting up Nappa cabbage, green onions, Japanese-style mushrooms and tofu. Raw slices of pork or beef - no thicker than an apple peal - are then placed by nabe pot along with the vegetables. All of this is strictly according to "the book" of traditional Japanese food.

A portion of the vegetables and meat are dumped into the pot while everyone sits around the table drinking beer and socializing. When the food is ready, the lid comes off the nabe pot and everyone is free to dig in. And when you're talking about the Japanese and food - get ready for long night of drinking.

Nabe wouldn't be complete without an array of dipping sauces for the goods you scoop from the pot: ponzu sauce and sesame sauce are nabe favorites.

And once the nabe pot gets low, you simply dump in more raw vegetables and meat, put the lid back on, crank up the heat and get ready for the next round of eating not-so fast Japanese food. .

In Japan, when it comes to good friends, a cold night and smooth Japanese beer, there's no telling how many rounds of nabe you may conquer. Enjoy

Manga Comics in Japn

2008-12-01T14:24:00.000-08:00

One of the latest and most popular imports from the world of Japanese comics known as manga, which are serialized "comic books" that are read by nearly every age group in Japan, from schoolboys to business men.

While the popularity of manga in America is confined to the demographic you might expect: teenage boys with an interest in computer games and fantasy, manga in Japan is huge, with new manga comics coming out all the time.

Its not uncommon to see a salaryman (business man) on the subway in Japan reading his manga comics in a three-piece suit as he commutes to work. And don't think for a second he is reading about Superman! The subject matter for japanese manga is as diverse as the American film industry: action, suspense, comedy, history, religion, adult-themed, soaps operas - there are no limits.

One of the most popular manga is Yakitate, japan manga that has a huge international following and follows a young man who has decided to become a bread maker! There are also popular japanese manga download sites where people go to find manga japan comics for free.

And its precisely because of this broad range of subject matter that Japanese adults read manga in Japanese the way Americans read novels by Tom Clancy or Sidney Sheldon. Animation in Japan culture - unlike America - never got pigeon-holed as the expression of a juvenile or low brow culture.

Japanese director Hayao Miyazaki, whose animated film "Spirited Away" did fairly well in America, deals with complex sociological issues one doesn't normally see in Disney movies. In Japanese culture, Miyazaki is treated with the kind of respect one sees in America for Martin Scorsese or Francis Ford Coppola.

There is even a well-respected manga Japan series on the Bible, both the Old and New Testaments, which tell you this isn't your father's comic books!

Japanese Curry vs. Indian Curry

2008-11-28T15:12:00.000-08:00

The Japanese have a love affair with all things foreign: movies, fashion, sports and most especially food. And just as the Japanese took baseball and made it uniquely their own, they similarly took the Indian staple of curry and transformed into an instant classic know as Japanese curry.

The first thing you'll notice is how different Japanese curry looks from Indian curry; instead of the yellow or red curry sauce at an Indian restaurant, Japanese curry is thick and brown, resembling beef stew more than anything and is made from a curry paste. The second thing you'll notice is that Japanese curry isn't hot and spicy - it's about as mild as a plate of catchup.

And this smooth and mild flavor probably explains why it's a real kid's favorite in Japan, on par with grilled cheese and pizza for American children. And it is a truism of Japanese culture that you can go to ten japanese homes and be sure to experience ten unique variations on this classic dish. And, of course, every Japanese child grows up preferring the way his mother made it!

Your average Japanese mom buys little brown blocks of curry powder that resemble bullion cubes, which she adds to boiled water to create a curry paste. Japanese curry is always served with sticky white rice (of course) and then depending on who is the chef, the curry will contain either beef or pork, and then usually potatoes, carrots and/or onions. Each Japanese mom will have her own private Japanese curry recipe.

The meal is so popular that one can easily find Japanese restaurants called "Curry Houses" that specialize in this dish for the common man (or child), all over Japan and even in Japanese communities of Southern California.

Religion of Japan

2008-11-26T16:49:00.000-08:00

Ask a Japanese person what there religion is and you'll certainly get a puzzled look - Since the end of Word War II, Japanese culture has embraced all things Western (at least outwardly) and there is really no more religion of Japan.

One of the chief victims of this social revolution has been the religious life of the Japanese. And certainly if there is to be a future for Japanese culture, there must be a reconciliation with its rich and colorful past.

Prior to the second World War Japan had two major japanese religions/philosophies: Buddhism, which was an import to Japanese Culture from China and Korea, and then the native Shinto religion, which is a pagan religion not unlike the kind of seen in Classical Rome and Greece with multiple Gods.

Many in the west think of Japanese Buddhism and Zen, but there the number of people in Japan who practice japanese Buddhism is quite small.

During the War, the Japanese military establishment co-opted many of the Shinto leaders and shrines, turning them into vehicles for nationalism. These efforts, followed by the catastrophic end to the war, left many Japanese disillusioned with formal religion, and made a the religion of Japan a kind of "cafeteria" religion.

Today Japan is arguable one of the most secular (non-religious) countries in the world. And while the Japanese love all things Western, religious imports from the west - namely Christianity - has not fared so well. It's estimated that Christians make up just 1-5% of the population.

Yet buried in this reality is a tale of religious bravery from the first Christians in Japan - Catholics baptized by the efforts of the great St. Francis Xavier in the 1500s; many of these early Catholics were martyred for refusing to denounce their faith.

On Nov. 24 at a ceremony in Japan, the Roman Catholic Church declared 188 of these men and women "blessed" which is step on the way to sainthood. Here is an article on the martyrs and early Japanese Catholics: The Samurai with the Cross. From the Acts of the Martyrs of Japan.

These days only the outer forms of Japanese religion seem to have survived in Japanese culture. There is a famous saying in Japan that one is born Shinto, married Christian (i.e. a wedding in a chapel) and buried Buddhist.

Japanese Culture and the School Uniform

2008-11-25T10:37:00.000-08:00

Many people know that Japanese public schools require children to wear a school uniform. If you have ever been on a train in Japan when school lets out, you've experienced the throngs of uniformed adolescents that trudge in, giving you a distinct experience of Japanese group behavior.

Many westerners notice that the girl's uniforms resemble sailor uniforms; while less obvious is that many of the boy's school uniforms are military tunics reminiscent of 19th Prussia. The uniforms are different from school to school, and it's not an exaggeration to say that some kids choose their high school based on how fashionable the school's uniform is.

Here is an excellent article on the the development of the Japanese school uniforms.

'Japlish' and the Japanese Language

2008-11-25T06:24:00.000-08:00

What happens when the Japanese language, developed in isolation over the centuries, meets globalization and satellite TV? You get Japlish, which is not so much a hybrid of English and Japanese language, but a shortening and strange combining of English words.

Now Japlish is not something you can study at a Japanese language school; and learning Japlish is not the surest way to learn Japanese, but it is increasingly part of the Japanese language.

Sprinkling their lives with English is a way for the Japanese to signal that they're cosmopolitan and well traveled; which is important in a country that consists of four small islands where almost everyone shares the same ethnic Japanese background. English is plastered on advertisements, store fronts and T-Shirts giving the ordinary a touch of international sophistication.

A recent Japanese TV show titled "Around 40" explored the difficulty Japanese women over 35 have in finding husbands. One of the characters used the word ara-four to describe this unfortunate group of women in Japanese culture, and it has since entered the language as a new Japlish word.

While most people who travel to Japan are not interested in attending a Japanese school or learning Japanese, a basic familiary with japlish certainly makes things fun. Other examples of this new form of the Japanese language include:

Seku-hara - Sexual harassment
Para-Single -This word in itself comes from the Japlish phrase parasite single, which is an adult (usually in their 20s) who lives at home without paying rent, and therefore can use their salary on fun things like trips to Hawaii, brand name clothing and trips to hot springs
OL - Office lady; a young women who works in a corporate office setting as a kind of secretary/hostess who serves tea to executives and greets visiting businessmen; the societal understanding is that she is waiting to meet a man, get married, quit her job and have a baby

And like slang among teenagers in the U.S., Japlish is constantly renewing itself and adding new "words" to the Japanese language and the Japanese culture.

Japanese Food Culture - The Dinner Snapshot

2008-11-24T13:24:00.000-08:00

If you're with a Japanese woman traveling outside of Japan and you go out to eat, it's almost certain that she'll snap a photo of the food before she digs in. Now this does not mean that she finds her plate of ribs more noteworthy than the Grand Canyon or the Empire State Building, but simply that the portion size is so unbelievable that a photo will be a great conversation piece back home - this is Japanese food culture at its best.

The Japanese, unlike Americans, view eating and food as an integral part of Japanese culture. In this respect, they have much in common with the French. Now this doesn't mean that the Japanese are snobbish about the quality of American food - they are content to let hamburgers be hamburgers and steak be steak - but the absolute over-the-top, heaping mounds of food one receives at an American restaurant is legendary in Japan, and only a good snapshot will suffice as proof of this reality.

It's also worth mentioning that the Japanese view modern Japanese food and even traditional japanese food as being unequaled the world over. It's not arrogance exactly, but more like acknowledging that the sky is blue.

In addition to capturing the portion size, a good snapshot will also reveal the close-up textures, colors and culinary nuances of the food. It's not uncommon for Japanese women to browse endless blogs and websites filled with nothing more than closeups of japanese foods: desserts, soups and entrees. Western cookbooks with paragraphs of texts, illustrations and then perhaps a color photo every two or three pages, are incomprehensible to Japanese women.

The next time you are in an American restaurant and an Asian lady pulls out a camera phone and snaps a shot of her lamb chops, you may want to ask: "Excuse me, are you from Japan by any chance?"