First of all, we had a problem with our mail server, which caused Monday’s emails to show up a day late for some readers. Very sorry about that.
I remember we bought a talking car back in 1984, a Chrysler that told us things like “a door is ajar” or “your headlights are on” — and that was about it. Our Mazda MPV is much cooler, greeting me every morning and informing me of today’s date, and also what “special day” it is. These interesting commemorative days include, for example “UFO Day” (June 24, from a major UFO sighting in Washington State in 1947), “Ice Cream Day” (May 9, after the founding of the first ice cream factory in Japan in 1869), “Natto Day” (July 10, because the numbers 7 and 10 sound like the name of Japan’s famous fermented soybeans), “Arigato no Hi” (March 9, since “3 9” can be read “san kyu” or “thank you”), “Toilet Day” (Nov. 10, a day for thinking of how much benefit we gain from our, er, toilets), and “Married Couples’ Day” (the 22nd of every month, since the numbers sound like the word for “married couple”). My car also tells me to drive carefully as I pull out of the driveway.
One of the great mysteries of learning Japanese was the physical mechanism of reading. The act of bringing written information into the brain is something we all take for granted, but when you live in a country like Japan where road signs are labeled in English only occasionally, just getting around can be a challenge. The first step in reading Japanese is mastering hiragana, a syllable-based writing system that uses simple characters to express sounds, for example three characters to express a word like maguro (まぐろ、tuna). Learning a language that wasn’t based on the Roman alphabet was a big hump for me to get over, but after a week or so of quizzing myself with flashcards I got the hang of it. After learning katakana (a “mirror” of hiragana that’s used for writing foreign words and names) comes the long, slow march of kanji, the characters that provide actual meaning in Japanese sentences. You could theoretically write Japanese in hiragana only, although it would be all but unreadable, since the eye has nothing to focus on (try reading The Hobbit in Japanese and you’ll see what I mean). As you learn to read more, it’s really a thrill when your brain gets used to ingesting the chunks of written Japanese just as it does for any other language.
One of the time-honored approaches to business in Japan is, look what crops up in the U.S. and Europe then adapt the business idea locally as quickly as you can. In the U.S., eBay may be the #1 auction site, but they were slow to move into foreign markets, allowing Yahoo to steal the top slot here. Dominoes brought the concept of home-delivered pizza to everyone, but Pizza Hut was able to build the largest network in Japan before Domino’s could get established over here, and now they are the market share leaders. Recently I’ve been seeing companies trying to copy Netflix’s DVD-by-mail business concept, allowing Japanese consumers to select DVDs online and then have them sent to them automatically in the mails. I guess there’s a lot of success to be found in copycat businesses.
It’s our pleasure today to announce today that X-Change 3, the long-awaited third anf final part of Peach Princess’s top-selling PC dating-sim game, is in stock and shipping! The game features the further adventures of Takuya, the unfortunate university student who’d been changed into a girl twice before through bizarre chemistry accidents. This time, it’s the fault of Kouji, who’s been in love with Takuya’s female half for years and has finally gotten his hands on a potion to change him into a girl again. Takuya has to change back in one week or less, or the transformation in his cells will become permanent. Will he turn to the capable Asami-senpai to help him change back, or gamble on the school’s mad scientist Chisato? Will he be able to save his love with Asuka, or will she study abroad in America and leave him forever? An extremely rich and exciting adventure, this is our first title published on DVD-ROM (due to the immense size of the game). Features game soundtrack and voice files for you to use freely, too.
