Japanese homes are quite different from homes in the West. For example, there’s always a low area by the front door called a 玄関 genkan where you remove your shoes before entering, a Buddhist Altar for letting family members who have passed away know they’ve not been forgotten by the family, and those dreamy tatami mats that I love sitting on, although they’re honestly not the best thing for people with dust allergies. Another fun feature of Japanese homes are 障子 shoji, the famous paper doors – more accurately, wooden sliding doors with Japanese paper glued to the frames – which are found in houses with traditional Japanese rooms. There are a few problems with shoji, however: they have a tendency to turn yellow when they get old, so every couple of years you need to spend a few hours re-papering your doors, which is usually done as part of the year-end “big cleaning” that everyone does in the final days of December. There’s another problem with paper partitions: cats, who love playing with the paper and poking holes in it so they can pass through. If you’ve got cats in an older Japanese house, it’s likely you have lots of holes in your shoji doors.
Before I started J-List, I taught English as a Second Language (ESL) to a wide range of Japanese students, including kids, OLs (“office ladies,” e.g. female company employees) and even some elderly learners. Because I spoke Japanese, my services were quite in demand, since Japanese prefer to have grammar explained to them in their native language. For a while I had a weekly class teaching some retired women, and we had a lot of fun, with them telling me all the things that Americans seem to be interested in when they come to Japan, like what part of the city was bombed back during World War II, what it was like during the Allied Occupation and so on. During one lesson one of the ladies was telling me about the various charities she was involved in, including the local Rotary Club and UNESCO. “I’m also a Soroptimist,” she proudly added. This word was unfamiliar to me, so I asked her what it meant, and I’ll never forget the look of shock on her face. How could I, a native speaker of English, not know this word? Didn’t every speaker of English know every word in the language by default? Getting over her surprise, she explained about the Soroptimist Society, an international organization that works to improve the lives of women around the world, which is also active in Japan. This tendency of Japanese to assume that every English speaker knows every word in the language happens with doctors, too, who spend years amassing knowledge of medical conditions in English then want to try them out on foreigners they encounter.
J-List has a popular monthly magazine subscription service, allowing you to get the latest issues of the top anime, manga, hobby, idol and ecchi magazines sent to you every month, automatically. Since so many people love fun and unique snacks from Japan, we decided to start a new Japanese snack subscription service that does the same thing, but for Japanese snacks. Every month we’ll assemble a selection of awesome snacks for that season and ship them out to all customers who have preordered. Why not sign up now?
