By and large, an American expat living in Japan has two choices when it comes to celebrating Thanksgiving: completely forget about it, or get a bucket of “Kentucky” for the family and pretend it’s delicious oven-roasted turkey. Thanksgiving is, of course, an event that’s quite unique to the U.S., and since Japanese stores generally lack stuffing, gravy, pumpkin pie filling and all those other good things, it can be awfully hard to get into the spirit of the season. Just the same, you can give thanks for all the good things you have no matter where you live in the world, and this year my family and I are going to take on the challenge of having a real American Thanksgiving in Japan, with a turkey (imported from Australia), cranberry sauce (sent by my mother), sushi (brought over by a friend of ours) and other good things to eat. It won’t be completely traditional, but we’ll make do somehow. We hope everyone in the U.S. has a wonderful holiday!
When you live in a country as different from your home as Japan is from the U.S., the potential for culture shock is everywhere, even in video games. I ordered Lumines II from the States since I’d enjoyed first version so much, but when I slapped the U.S. release game into my PSP and started playing, something felt strange to me — for some odd reason, I was having trouble navigating the menus, and kept jumping back to the title screen instead of starting the game. It turns out that, due to differences in how Japanese perceive the symbols X and O compared with the West, Sony had switched the button functions around. While X probably corresponds pretty easily with the idea of “execute” to most Americans, in Japan it’s known as batsu and it means “bad” or “no” (as an esoteric aside, a person who’s been divorced once is batsu ichi, if twice then batsu ni, and so on). Meanwhile, the circle (maru in Japanese) is the universal symbol for “correct” or “yes” or “good” in Japan, and is the natural choice to mean “accept this menu selection.” When a teacher marks answers on a test, she draws circles over the correct answers, and if the student got a good grade, she draws a hana maru or a big flower with a circle inside, the highest praise a teacher can give. Maru sounds lucky, and ships are usually christened with the word as part of their names (although it wasn’t all that lucky for the Kobayashi Maru). But perceptions are fleeting things. When a finance company called Maru-Fuku opened near our house, I commented that the name gave me a bad feeling, since mal means “evil” in Spanish, and fuku (good fortune) sounded like “hook” to me. My wife had exactly the opposite impression of the company, telling me that the name sounded to her like it would bring “happiness and good luck to every corner of your home.”
Would you like a dorink with that cheeseburger? How about a pair of Edowin jeans? Last weekend I took my kids for a dorive. One of the unique features of Japanese is that it’s a syllable-based language, which means that you can express syllables like ka, ki, ku, ke and ko but not a “k” sound by itself. This is part of the reason that the Japanese often have thick accents when speaking foreign languages, since everything must be filtered through this limited phonetic system. The syllable-based pronunciation also has an effect on how some words are used in Japanese, for example, causing the “d” consonant to be expressed as a separate sound, do (doh, as in a deer, a female deer, or what Homer Simpson says), which alters the sound of word like “drink” “Edwin” and “drive” (above) ever so slightly. Just as Japanese anime has been accepted all over the world, there are many fans of Japanese TV dramas, which are invariably called “doramas” by fans due to this slight quirk of phonetics in Japanese.
J-List’s “reserve subscription” system is a great way to get the current issues of dozens of popular anime, manga, toy & hobby, fashion and other magazines sent to you each month. Whether you’re thrilling at the amazing number of pull-out posters in each issue of Megami Magazine, feeling the pulse of Japan’s gothic cosplay or Harajuku street fashion culture, or just checking out the latest in J-Rock, our subscriptions really make it easy to stay in touch with Japan. By customer request, we’re giving you a choice now: in addition to the month-to-month revolving subscription we’ve always offered, you can choose our new annual option, pre-paying a discounted flat fee for one year worth of issues, with SAL shipping included in the price. We originally put the annual subscription in place for libraries and other institutions that prefer to pay once per year (and we’re happy to serve these customers), but decided to extend the option to everyone to make it easier than ever to get great magazines from Japan.
