Category: Japanese Society/Culture

They were selling Dr. Pepper at FamilyMart today! We have been waiting for this moment since… well, since the end of the war, I guess. This is truly a milestone in Japanese-American relations, especially since the majority of Japanese think Dr. Pepper tastes like Chinese herbal medicine.
Just in case you were wondering:
Yes, there is a cheesy Flash site to commemorate this great event.
UPDATE: TODAY’S MOMENT OF ZEN

Peppy, ex-Harajuku girl/Dr. Pepper “freak”

Ambulance rides in Japan have always been free, but I just heard from a paramedic that hospitals will start charging 40,000 yen per ride in the near future.
Attention all hypochondriacs: Get your free rides while the getting’s still good!

Mechanical input of Japanese is a subject that has always fascinated me, so I was happy to find this history of wapro (word processors) in English:
http://www.honco.net/japanese/05/
When I first came to this country, one of the first indicators of how hard the Japanese language would be to learn was an old lady at city hall operating an old school Japanese typewriter. The device itself was closer to a printing press than any typewriter I had ever seen… I remember my second cousin pointing her out and saying, “before your very eyes, old technology fades away.”
(He’s a minister. Ministers say some really deep stuff sometimes, it makes me wonder if they know something I don’t.)

^*Not to be confused with Japanese Fish Cake (“kamaboko“)
Early attempts at manufacturing sausages from fish meat (employing cellophane or sheep innards as the outer wrapper/skin) have been traced back to the Taisho period (1912 – 1926). It is not clear why these early experiments failed but one might suspect the very concept of a “fish sausage” sounded pretty weird, even to the inventor’s own family. After all, fish was delicious even without encasing it in animal entrails and could be preserved, to an extent, with traditional methods such as salting and drying. In addition, the formula for creating fish sausages were not perfected before the idea was shelved.
In the years following the war, huge demand was seen for canned and preserved foodstuffs that could be easily manufactured, stored, and distributed, and a new development effort was started in the industry to revive the fish sausage project. By borrowing a technology used in the aforementioned kamaboko industry at the time – using rubber hydrochloride (!) to make transparent skins for the sausage – and fine-tuning the recipe, a feasible product was achieved and mass production of fish sausages began in 1951. The following year it was brought to market, and the rest, as they say, is history. The product was a huge hit and demand increased every year to the point where entire generations of Japanese were brought up eating fish sausages in their school lunch, at home, and everywhere in between.
The industry is definitely not at its peak these days, but there are still many companies producing varied and successful fish sausage products. Here is one site with good photos linked to an online store that will deliver to your door (in Japan). There was even a Japan Fish Sausage Association until a few years ago. It disbanded and joined up with the Japan Canners Association where they became – you guessed it – the Japan Fish Sausage Committee. The legacy lives on.
……
All the information used in this post was gleaned from various Japanese web sites. I can’t possibly be the ONLY PERSON in the ENTIRE ENGLISH-SPEAKING WORLD interested in the WONDERFUL HISTORY OF FISH SAUSAGE, right?… Actually, judging by the absence of research materials available on it, maybe I am. Which is strange, because I don’t like eating the stuff – it just seems wrong to stress my mouth, which is used to pork, beef, and other normal ingredients for sausage (I may have gotten used to corn on pizza, but fishy-tasting sausage? NEVER!)
Other fun stuff unearthed in my search for the elusive fish sausage:
– This is processed fish products nirvana: GYONIKUKAN (JP-only, go look anyway)
– In regard to sausage filling, some sausage academics use the term “farinaceous filler” instead of, simply, “starch”
– According to one account, the fish used in the first mass-produced fish sausages was Alaska Haddock. Over the years the industry preference changed to tuna (shockingly, these were called Tuna Sausages), then to whale (now I see why the fish sausage trend never caught on in the west), then to, well – everything with scales.
– Somehow, it’s easier for me to accept that the waste parts of fish (as Mandy said here, “lips and peckers,” are most probably used to make these sausages. Easier than thinking about “hooves and assholes” in an “all-beef” hot dog, that is. If you know what I mean.
– The Japan Canners Association has an inspirational theme song on its site. Scroll down to the bottom of the page for the music files.
– The now-defunct Japan Fish Sausage Association was once located at:
Japan Fish Sausage Assn
Nihon Gyoniku Soseji Kyokai
Kusumoto 6 Bldg
1-3-9 Higashi Shimbashi
Minatoku Tokyo 105-0021
Tel 03 35735586 Fax 03 35735587

I am too respectful to post a pic, but believe me, I have surreptitiously photographed several. Yes, Concerned Reader, it is true: The Humpbacked Obachan is on the verge of becoming an endangered species. On my island, at least. And seeing how Awajishima is basically a giant, floating retirement community for aoriika longliners and graying mobsters alike, I am an eminent expert on, for lack of a better term, old people.
The subject in question, humpticulous spinstrisis, or, “Humpy” for short, is, simply, an ancient, stooped-over (sometimes more than 90 degrees!) lady (some of who sport humps on their backs – duh!). And I say “lady” in the female sense of the word, because some of them, quite frankly, are not nice people at all:
My first encounter with a Humpy was at the giant ishibutai tomb in Asuka Mura, where I first lived in Japan, at my second cousin’s church (long story). I thought this old woman was stooped over looking for dropped coins or something, so I went over to help her. After a few minutes, an ancient croak emitted from her direction, “just what in the hell are you doing?” I suddenly realized my mistake and was greatly embarassed, but intrigued by this person who was spending her declining years staring down at the dirt, and decided to do more research.
My research method was simple: Go to where old people gather, and observe. This explains my numerous visits to gateball tournaments, Nodoka-mura, and inner-city public housing complexes on “big trash” day. Some of my findings over the years:
– As can be inferred from the above, almost all humpies are female.
– Humpies are generally highly regarded in Japanese society, although this just might be the age factor. In Japan, as elsewhere, age = respect.
– I suspect advanced Humptosity is at least partially caused by osteoporosis, although it wouldn’t surprise me to see similar posture in, say, game company employees.
– In speaking with several Humpies, I found out that the condition itself does not cause a lot of pain, but it’s hard not to be able to sleep on your back (They all tend to sleep in chairs or propped up on cusions.).
– Humpies hibernate in winter.
– More humpies are spotted taking out the trash than in any other situation.
In the course of four years of observation of the Humpy colony on my island, I have been able to distinguish 1,796 (!) individuals (population has since declined to a current approximated level of 1,450). Most have been unresponsive to my questions, and several brooms have been raised in defensive positions. A radio tagging effort has been unsuccessful. Still, my research continues, because the fact of the matter is that Humpy population should be growing, not rapidly declining as they are now. Also, Humpies don’t really have a voice in the blogosphere for some reason.
SPEAK UP, HUMPIES! THIS IS YOUR FORUM!

(Be warned, I just stubbed my toe REALLY HARD on an old printer someone left in the hallway for pickup tomorrow. The following passage was brought to you by the school of ?Ignore the Pain and It Will Go Away,? and the Foundation for People Who Woke Up on the Wrong Side of Humanity This Morning.)
Note to self: Write future rant about the simplicity and nuance of the Japanese language being too often cloaked in stiff politeness. Wait. On second thought, I guess there?s not much to expand on there? Don?t think anyone would disagree with that. More precisely, anyone who would disagree probably has a pathetic social life, and I would feel really bad about pointing that out – even if we got in a heated debate that resulted in insults in the comments, hate mail, prank calls, false credit card charges, escalation in the form of physical stalking and placement of beheaded pet maguro in rival?s bed while he?s sleeping, and someone?s eventual deportation.
Besides, I kind of covered this in the post last week about the proper Japanese business e-mail format. So I won?t delve into the linguistic equivalent of why if you buy a box of chocolate chip cookies at a Japanese 7-11, you often must take the box out of the grocery bag and figure out how the box itself is opened, after which you must also open the sealed tray or pouch that?s inside the box, and, finally, remove each individually packaged cookie from its foil wrapper before eating it; there always seems to be an unnecessary layer or two.
No, I definitely should not get into that one today; it would cramp my freestyle impersonation of a mudslide, and besides, it?s so fucking wroooong to make sweeping generalizations about anything these days it seems. That said? The different levels of politeness in Japanese are daunting and complex, but I?ll leave the boring stuff to linguists and others who most likely did not take Wood Shop as an elective in high school, and write instead about how they can provide amusement. (Note: I may use this opportunity to insult random, stupid types of people who irritate me in some way or another as well, so be prepared if you know me and suspect I intensely dislike you.)
Sometimes it?s fun being unnecessarily polite in Japanese, verbally skating the line between being respectfully polite and sarcastically polite. Of course, if you are a gaijin, a lot of people won?t believe you capable of intentionally doing such a thing, but hey, fuck them. People like that are often ignorant in a sickeningly innocent kind of way; even if they are pleasant enough, they are the type who, for instance, might find your proficiency with chopsticks comment-worthy. However, many of us give the natives good cause to doubt our conversation skills on a daily basis.
For instance, one of the most irritating things I see on a regular basis is foreigners who get carried away with the politeness thing, specifically when expressing apology or thanks. You know, the kind of person who, after unintentionally causing relatively minor trouble for someone (like bumping into a stranger who ends up spilling his coffee on the sidewalk, or being helped by a passerby while fixing a flat tire) repeats the word sumimasen, gomennasai, and some form of arigato so many times in succession that the person he’s talking to starts getting really uncomfortable and eventually has to convey, forcefully, “IT’S OK ? REALLY.” It?s especially unnerving when bowing is included in this performance because many gaijin obviously learned how to bow from kung-fu movies, kowtowing in a deep nodding motion with hands held in front and pressed/clasped together like a coolie begging for master to at least spare the children, if you know what I mean.
To be fair, going overboard with the thanks/apologies is perfectly normal in some situations, so it shouldn?t bother me that foreigners try to emulate it, except for the fact that I find it annoying when Japanese people do this as well. All the time. In fact, apologizing too profusely is an effective tactic for pissing people off as well? I realize that at this point, you may very well be asking yourself, ?what the fuck is homeboy trying to say??, and I have no reasonable answer. This is ranting for the sake of ranting, and fairly incomprehensible ranting at that? Imagine a nihonbunka (JP culture) major that comes over from [insert country] on an exchange program, and, who, by poring over ancient manuscripts in the university library day in and day out, gradually becomes one of the world’s leading authorities on the taxation system in Japan?s feudal era. Having determined the three distinct grades of rice at the time: Daimyo’s White (husked and hulled), Merchant’s Brown (partially husked), and Peasant’s Millet Blend (with New Tiny Pebbles!), he can decipher more kanji than a Beijing newspaper editor, and can in fact read completely through a Japanese auto insurance explanation booklet, yet still hasn’t figured out how to, say, order a meal at a noisy noodle shop counter without sounding like a complete FAG (“futsu no tonkotsu wo hitotsu kudasai”). Everybody knows a guy like this, right? Just wanted to point out I really hate guys like that, even if they do us all a favor by marrying the ugly chicks ?from Tokyo? (97% of ugly chicks claiming to be ?from Tokyo? are actually from Gunma or areas outlying. Blame this phenomenon on Narita Airport, which people in places other than Kanto loosely ? and incorrectly – refer to as ?Tokyo Airport?. Uh-uh.).
There?s also the fact that most gaijin probably begin learning polite forms of Japanese that they fall back on like a security blanket when they are uncomfortable, as if politeness were a substitute for comprehension??
(At this point, my toe is feeling much better, and I need a nap.)

Reading this article about a study that found early English education in Japan to be useless (link found on Nippon Goro Goro) reminded me of the story of a Japanese kid named Ringo. “Ringo” is Japanese for “apple,” so right away you know that A. this kid’s parents were some really sadistic fuckers (Ringo was his real given name, and in Japan there are no middle names to fall back on) and B. this kid’s probably gonna end up on the news someday for disembowling schoolyard bullies and scrawling “I’m a BAAAD APPLE” in blood on the walls.
Anyhow, Ringo’s parents hired an English teaching acquaintance of mine to teach him English twice a week, 90 minutes per session, which seems all well and good and perfectly normal in a Japanese cram school-mentality sort of way until you hear that Ringo-kun was exactly ONE (1) FUCKING YEAR OLD! Obviously, his parents were on really good drugs or something, because they paid 50 bucks per session for this early education. It apparently is not easy teaching an infant English for a full hour and a half. The teacher said that at first, he made googling noises at the baby but that got boring real fast, so he switched to reading it stories, and later, at the mother’s insistence (she sat in on the classes to change diapers and offer tit, I guess) singing and dancing to please it (I guess you could say that he was Ringo-kun’s little bitch, but that sounds rather unflattering.). I think this points to a certain phenomenon called “smothering with love,” and there were other seriously disturbing signs of this as well.
Ringo-kun was dressed in different clothes every session, with one recurring theme: Ringo. Every piece of clothing had prints or photos of apples on it, and the baby even had a little red apple costume that he was wrapped in before leaving class. Ringo’s mother videotaped every single session, and took an average of one photo every twelve seconds. My favorite story is the time when Ringo’s parents were called in for a parent-teacher meeting and the mother kept pestering the director of the school about her son’s progress (“he can now properly pronounce, ‘WAAAAAAAAAA,’ in English). Apparently, the director managed to keep a straight face the entire time, and even tried to offer “advanced classes” for the baby.
As for the teacher, the last time I saw this guy I asked if he was still teaching Ringo-kun, but apparently his parents had started courses at another school. He didn’t seem too disappointed.

Discriminating against an odiferous goatfucking porch monkey penis-eating gaijin shithead isn’t illegal in Japan… But you should sue the fuckers for doing it to you anyway! So sez Debito:
Get on their case
For those that don’t have the million yen or two to spare on litigation, I offer a more cost-effective solution (all major credit cards accepted):
NINJA FOR HIRE
(Link via NichiNichi)

One of the curious things you may find as you venture deeper into the rural areas of Japan is the surprising number of Mormon missionaries. Of all the missionaries – including Rastafarians (on Ikoma mountain), Wiccans (in Okayama), and Jehovah’s Witnesses (all over the damn place) – the Mormons are the easiest to spot because they fit a specific profile. Whether it be in front of the local department store where they cause expectant mothers to run away in (sometimes unfeigned) terror, or out on the streets late at night cruising in pairs on mountain bikes (and for some reason, always donning aerodynamic racing helmets wrapped with white reflective tape), they are invariably young white males in black suits, usually straight from – you guessed it – Salt Lake City.
Disclaimer: I hope you aren’t offended by this rant. It happens to be about Mormons, specifically the branch of mormons I will dub the “Sumoto Mormons.” When I was a kid we lived across the street from a Mormon family with 10 kids (which I’m told is like a royal flush in terms of Mormonic karma) who were hella fuckin’ cool around the block because they had not one but TWO AND A HALF Ataris to play with in their home (the 1/2 figure was due to a buggy machine that only displayed the bottom half of the screen – useable for Centipede but not much else if I remember correctly). Therefore I do not hate Mormons, because they had the 2 1/2 times the toy I wanted throughout my formative years but could never convince my parents to buy – it turns out that I’m secretly jealous of them (whew, good to get that one off my chest!).
I am in a somewhat weird situation with the Sumoto Mormons right now. They assume I’m Japanese (I do look Japanese, but I’m AMERICAN AS HELL – somewhere in Yamanashi Prefecture, my Aussie pal John is rolling his bloodshot eyes and murmuring “bloody Yank!” – eat me, dood.), and I have used this assumption to create a new form of entertainment, “Sumormo baiting.” A couple of months ago these guys approached me when I was returning home from a long walk, asking if I had a couple minutes to spare (in Japanese). Call me a devil, but my immediate response was to stop in my tracks, give them the once over with the trademark Japanese “gaijin gawk” (usually reserved for observing lewdly-costumed Russian dancers on Tokyo subways), say loudly, in English, “NO,” and walk away. Fish on. After that, they waited for me on my street a couple other times at night, eagerly fingering paperback copies of the Book of Mormon, but I spotted them before they saw me and I ducked down the back street.
This morning they stopped next to me on their mountain bikes as I waited in my car at a red light. I was zoning out in pre-work zombie mode with my arm draped out the window, blasting track #2 on the Grey Album. The younger guy recognized me right away. “Hey! We’d like to speak to you sometime,” he said, in English.
I tried to brush him off with a sarcastic, “Eigo wakarimasen” (I don’t understand English), and noticed “JAMES” was wearing a plastic name tag with “Church of the Latter Day Saints” printed on it.
“But Elder Thomas said you were American” he replied.
Ah, shit. Got me there. Elder Thomas was the Mormon guy who was in Sumoto before these guys replaced him. I invited him in for a beer once and we had a nice long talk about things. I served him and his trainee dude green tea and felt curiously like a total fucking sinner for drinking beer in front of them. When they left, they gave me a copy of the Book (I ended up wondering if they were going to ask me to pay for it, which I also feel curiously guilty about. They said it was truly a gift and never asked for money, but did use the book as a reason to come by the house every month. Once, as a joke, I offered it as payment to the NHK guy who came around asking for money, but he made the sign of the cross and said, “devil, be gone.”). So Elder Thomas had apparently told James about me and they had caught on to who I was from the street I lived on, apparently. Which does not explain why they never just came to my door (I must have successfully defeated the surveillance devices on the Book of Mormon by wrapping it in tinfoil, sealing it in a Ziploc bag, and sinking it in a bucket of water), but I digress. “Aight, you got me – I was just messing with you,” I admitted.
“As I was saying, we would like to see you sometime…” he continued.
Well, that’s that I guess. No way to wriggle out of this one – now that we have established that we are fellow Americans in a remote and desolate setting, an invite to the house is a virtual necessity. I invited them over at five this evening. Five this evening, as in, in approximately 5 minutes after I post this entry. From work. As in, I don’t imagine I’ll be going home for a few hours, at least. As in, I sure am glad my little bro will be at home to greet my new Mormon friends.
As in, Adam, I am finally getting you back for some rat bastard thing you did to me in the past that I can’t specifically remember right now, but let’s not let that get in the way of entertainment. Mine, specifically. This should be funny as hell. Will update later.