The Japanese are big fans of designating certain days as special. May 4th is Ramune Day, commemorating the launch of the now-famous Japanese soft drink back in 1872, and October 10th has been designated as 萌えの日 moe no hi or “moe day,” because the date written in kanji (十月十日) looks like the kanji for moe (萌) when read in vertical writing order. This Saturday (August 2nd) marks パンツの日 pantsu no hi or “pantsu day,” a day for celebrating everything that’s wonderful about shimapan and other kinds of underwear, which was chosen because the number 8 can be read as pa and the number 2 is pronounced tsu in Japanese. So let’s all enjoy pantsu this Saturday! (Image source.)
I enjoyed having my Japanese daughter here in the U.S. with me this summer, as we did fun “American” things like visiting my favorite 50s diner in San Diego and exploring Disney World in Florida. One afternoon we were sitting around watching TV and I decided to show her the new Cosmos series, to get her excited about cool stuff like science. In one episode, Neil deGrasse Tyson uses Carl Sagan’s famous “billions and billions” phrase to refer to the number of stars in our galaxy. My daughter said, “Wait, how many is
that?” and I had to pause the video to work out the English concept of 1 billion for her, which took a couple minutes that included both of us counting invisible numbers in the air with our fingers. This highlights a common problem when working with numbers across English and Japanese, due to what’s known as the Sino-Japanese number system, which is how you write (and conceive of) numbers in Japan, and presumably
China. Basically, instead of the base numeric unit being 1,000 as in Western number systems, the main unit is 10,000, which is 万, pronounced mahn. If you buy a camera for 20,000 yen you express this as ２万円 ni mahn en, which is basically “two units of 10,000.” The number 100,000 translates as 十万 juu mahn (ten units of 10,000) and a million becomes 百万 hyaku man (100 units of 10,000). The difficulty of converting these numbers on
the fly between languages, or of working with numbers higher than 10 million (when exotic new kanji kick in) is one of the minor difficulties of using Japanese on a daily basis.
One thing I love about Japan is that it’s generally a very safe place free from crime and violence. Perhaps it’s because of this fact that when murders that do happen, they often seem especially cruel and senseless. In 2007 a woman who killed her (allegedly abusive) husband by hitting him a wine bottle, then tried to dispose of his body by cutting it up and hiding the parts in different corners of Tokyo. In 2012 Japan’s gaming community was rocked by news that Minamino Shingo, the Nitroplus producer responsible for the music in such games as Demonbane and Steins;Gate, had been stabbed to death by a random passer-by with a knife, who said he committed the crime because he wanted to receive the death penalty from the government but was too cowardly to take his own life. The most recent sad news comes from Sasebo near Nagasaki, where a 16-year-old girl murdered and decapitated her 15-year-old classmate in a crime everyone is struggling to make sense of.
J-List stocks a lot of high quality cosplay products from Japan, from gothic maid uniforms to amazing “Absolute Zone” socks and products for otokonoko aficionados. We’re also somewhat famous for our shimapan, the wonderful striped panties that started to become a thing in the early 2000′s and are still going strong today. Since this Saturday is “pantsu day,” we made sure to have some great varieties of Japanese panties in stock for you to browse on the site!
