One Japanese TV show that never fails to please is TV Champion, which pits exceptional people against each other in contests that are always fascinating to watch. Past episodes have featured home remodelers who must transform dilapidated houses into things of beauty with a budget of just $300, chefs who bake bread in the shape of St. Peter’s Basilica, children who memorize classical Japanese history just for fun, and “UFO Catcher” collectors who are very good at picking plush toys out of crane game machines. Last night’s episode was a battle between gaijin otaku from around the world to see who could be the foreign “Akiba-oh” (King of Akihabara). The questions were taken from a wide range of otaku culture, from guessing the name of an anime theme song to identifying which maid outfit went with which maid cafe to completing a famous line of dialogue from Mobile Suit Gundam (while wearing Char Aznable’s famous Red Comet uniform, of course). In the end, the battle came down to Cheng from Hong Kong and Jenya from Russia. The final championship questions were tough, but Cheng correctly identified an electronics shop that’s been in business since 1927 to win the gold.
I’ll never forget the time when, back in college, I was copying some documents on a Ricoh copier and suddenly realized that the name of the company meant “clever” in Japanese. It was like a secret code embedded in the universe, and I wondered what other hidden gems I might be able to find by analyzing Japanese company names. Many corporations are named after their founders, like the automobile company Souichiro Honda launched, or the chocolate company Tachiro Morinaga created after studying confectionary-making in the U.S. The founder of Pocky maker Glico’s son died at a young age of malnutrition, so he named his new company after the nutrient “glycogen,” now found in all the company’s products. Camera maker Nikon’s name is a merging of the words for “Japan Optical” and the “Zeiss Ikon” line of lenses from Carl Zeiss, which the company hoped to duplicate. Subaru is the Japanese name for the Pleadies, and Daihatsu is a contraction of “Osaka Engineering Works.” The image of the rising sun is imporant to the Japanese, and this is employed by companies like Asahi (“morning sun”), Hitachi (“rising sun”) and Sunrise Animation. When the Toyoda Automatic Loom company decided to branch out into automobiles, they decided that “Toyota” had a better ring to it, and they wrote their name in hard-edged katakana characters rather than kanji to set themselves apart. They did so well that the town they were based in eventually changed its name to Toyota City. They still make automatic looms, however.
I’m sure that everyone has said at one time or another, “I know that life’s not fair, but why isn’t it ever fair in my favor?” All in all, Japan is a place where a gaijin can actually enjoy things going their way every once in a while. The “Universal Mystique of Foreign-ness Principle” helps make even a vanilla white boy like me seem interesting to my Japanese hosts, which has earned me invitations to karaoke and drink parties and an occasional girl’s phone number scrawled on a chopstick wrapper over the years. When I came to Japan, my favorite band was a Japanese group called Psy-s (pronounced “size”), known for singing a few anime theme songs and releasing many other albums (City Hunter opening credits, To-y, and a few others, although that really dates me), and when I saw they were giving a concert in Tokyo, I made sure to be there. Afterwards I wrote a letter to the lead vocalist Chaka (no relation to the Pakuni from Land of the Lost) to see if she happened to notice a big gaijin in the crowd. She wrote back to me that she had, and we became friends. Of course, things can work in favor of foreign visitors to the U.S. too. J-List’s Yasu was a rap DJ before he joined our company, and when he was studying in Philadelphia he went to a club where rapper Nas was going to perform. On a lark, he told the organizers that he was a rapper from Japan, and they immediately put him on stage to sing in Japanese.
