I wrote last time about Japan’s use of uniforms for many professions, which can sometimes look odd when seen through the eyes of a foreigner. Japan actually goes a step further but making sure many aspects of the country are equally uniform, so that public works like roads and schools nearly always look exactly the same from one end of the country to the other. Japan’s highly centralized government sets many guidelines that prefectures and cities must follow, with the end result being that a telephone pole in Tokyo will look exactly the same in Kyushu. There are some regional differences, of course — stoplights are horizontally oriented in most of the country, except for northern Honshu and Hokkaido, where they’re hung vertically to avoid damage from the weight of heavy snow. Also, the massive population density of Tokyo requires that roads and other spaces that would be too cramped for the rest of Japan be permitted. Other aspects of Japanese life, from education to the rest stops throughout the nations freeways, are largely directed by the central government and are virtually the same throughout Japan.
Despite this tendency for top-down conformity throughout the various regions of the country, Japanese cities do manage to preserve a unique charm of their own. Virtually all of the cities in our prefecture are former castle towns, and usually go out of their way to build parks that incorporate old ruins, which is very nice. Whether or not a city was bombed in World War II can play a part in determining what kind of place it is today: Maebashi, the prefectural capital, was mostly destroyed ten days before the end of the war, but this has the hidden benefit of allowing the residents to rebuild the city into a more modern, beautiful city. One place I like a lot is nearby Kiryu, a small city that was an early center of silk production when Japan began to modernize in the 1870s. There are many historic buildings still standing in the city which give it a lot of Meiji-era charm. Last weekend, we went to a jazz performance held in an 100-year-old warehouse that had been converted into a “live house” (a small space for concerts). The mixture of old Japanese and modern jazz was pretty cool!
Japan has plenty of fast food, from U.S. chains like McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken to home-grown outfits like Freshness Burger, First Kitchen and MOS Burger. But the original fast food of Japan is gyudon, or beef bowl, basically a bowl of rice with steamed beef and onions on top (it’s really good with raw egg, too). For the past two years, Japan’s beef bowl industry has been struggling with a ban on U.S.-imported beef due to the mad cow scare. While many restaurants switched to selling similar dishes like buta-kimu bowl (pork and kim-chee on rice), Yokohama-based Sukiya has kept on selling gyudon using stock from Australia, which some say doesn’t taste the same as beef from America (although I can’t tell the difference). In the past, beef bowl restaurants were the sole territory of salarymen and male “freeters” (young people who work part-time jobs rather than finding full-time employment), but some chains have been redesiging their stores to be more family-friendly.
At J-List, we love to promote an interesting kind of software from Japan: English-translated dating-sim games, which allow you to interact with beautiful anime girls and try to win their hearts. We’ve posted our latest game to the site for preordering: Yin-Yang! -Another X-Change-, a totally new game of accidental sex change by Crowd, which we’re translating now. A great all-new story that takes poor Kaoru, an average Japanese youth, and changes him into a girl, to the great shock of his circle of friends.
