One of the things that make my job at J-List easy is that pretty much everyone in the world is in love with at least some aspects of Japan, whether it’s the country’s popular culture, history, and architecture, traditional martial arts, or whatever. But no matter what route we took to learn about Japan, there are some aspects of the country that we might have encountered. So let’s explore some random Japan facts in today’s post!
Ten Random Japan Facts You Might Not Know
Parents Take Baths With Their Children
You might have encountered a trope in anime about a character who’s teased by his friends because he took baths with his mother up until entering junior high school, but this is probably not that uncommon. In our family putting the kids in the bath was my job as Dad, and I have many fond memories of talking over the day’s events with my kids as we all got clean together. The Japanese call parents and children bathing together “kinship.”
There Are No Pickup Trucks in Japan
While the classic pickup truck is the meat-and-potatoes of the U.S. auto industry, actually outselling passenger cars, this iconic type of vehicle is a rarity in Japan…enough so that whenever I see a badass Toyota Hilux in Japan, it’s such a rarity that I’ll likely get my phone out and snap a picture. Instead of the kakko ii (cool, stylish) pickups that are statements of male virility in the U.S., the Japanese tend to think of trucks as something you use for work, so they’re likely to be bare-bones utilitarian vehicles.
Japan is Not a Small Country
Whenever there’s an earthquake anywhere in Japan, I know I’ll get Facebook messages from concerned family members asking if I’m okay, as if every place in Japan were near every other place. Japan is actually quite a large country, stretching from Quebec to Florida or Denmark to Barcelona if placed over a map of the U.S. or Europe, even though it’s actual land mass area is about the same as Germany or Norway.
Japan Loves Vending Machines
According to the Japan Soft Drink Association, Japan has a total of 25 million vending machines in operation or about 5 vending machines for every person. Beer vending machines even exist (they ask you to insert your driver’s license for age verification). Vending machines usually accept ¥10,000 notes (the equivalent of a US$100 bill) and give change, and also work with newfangled contactless payment systems like Suica and Apple Pay.
Japanese People Will Forgive You If You Do Something Dumb While Drunk
Japan is the only country I know of where you can say something embarrassing after drinking too much and people will not hassle you about it the next day. They just use that magic mantra shikata ga nai — it can’t be helped — and forget about it. It’s a great social rule to have in place.
Fax Machines Are Still a Thing in Japan
Every morning J-List’s figure buyer comes into work, gets a cup of coffee, then checks the fax machine to see what new figures are about to be released. Yes, life in Japan can be surprisingly low-tech.
Gambling is Legal in Japan…and Run By the Government?
If you caught the Uma Musume Pretty Derby anime, which featured actual famous horses from Japan’s horse racing world transformed into cute moe girls, you might assume the sport is quite popular in Japan…and you’d be right. Millions of people follow horse racing and gamble at race tracks or through their cell phones. The system is run by the Japanese government and overseen by the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries.
The other big form of gambling in Japan is the semi-legal pachinko, a game in which you shoot metal balls into a pinball-style machine and try to accumulate more balls than you started out with. You then trade the balls for “valuable prizes” which you can sell for money at a building next door, to keep it all legal. Increasingly, the anime industry is dependent on the pachinko world for funding, and often awesome new anime is often created just to advertise an anime-themed pachinko machine some company is promoting.
In Japan, You Apologize When You Give a Gift
Gift-giving in Japan is quite formal, and it’s common to exchange gifts between companies who do business with each other in July and December. Even bosses and employees exchange these gifts. When you give someone something, you usually say something like tsumaranai mono desu ga (“sorry for giving you this boring gift”) because humility is very important in Japan.
Tommy Lee Jones is the Second Most Famous Westerner in Japan
More random Japanese facts! Some Japanese companies love to market their products using famous Hollywood faces, and one actor who’s had a brisk career in Japan is Tommy Lee Jones, who’s appeared as an alien named Jones visiting Earth to observe human society in a long-running series of commercials for Suntory Boss Coffee. He supposedly receives $750,000 per commercial, which is good work if you can get it. The most famous Westerner in Japan on a daily basis is Colonel Sanders, whose statues can be found outside every KFC.
Thanks for reading this list of ten random facts about Japan. How many of these did you know?
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