We’ve finished the first day at Anime Expo, and we’re all incredibly tired after selling so many awesome products from Japan to our fans. If you’ll be at the show this weekend, J-List is in booth #1011 at the Los Angeles Convention Center, well stocked with epic T-shirts, plush toys, figures, English visual novels and more. The JAST USA visual novel panel — we have lots of new announcements this year! — will be held on Friday at 10 pm, in room 501. Note that this is a smaller room than in the last two years, so fans should line up earlier, since we likely won’t be able to accommodate everyone. Follow our Facebook and Twitter feeds for more info! (By the way, if you’re not able to attend Anime Expo with us, we’ve got a special offer for you this week only: get $10 off $60 or more, or $25 off $125 or more, when you make an order from now through the end of Sunday! The credit will be sent as a separate email after your order is purchased and can be used any time on either JLIST.com or JBOX.com websites. Happy shopping!) Last time I talked about how Japan can be quite death-oriented, and at times it can seem like death is everywhere. Don’t give gifts in multiples of four because the number four (四) is read shi in Japanese, which also means death (死). Don’t put you chopsticks straight up in your rice, since that’s only done as part of a ceremony for the dead, and so on. Which is why it was surprising for me to learn that, considering how many death-related customs Japan has in its society, they have almost no concept of Western-style estate planning. As far as I can tell, virtually all the things we do in U.S. to prepare for the event of one’s death, from writing wills to making living trusts to investigating how to avoid estate taxes, are not practiced in Japan at all. Since my in-laws have some land that will be transferred to my wife’s name at the time of their death, I brought the topic up with them once, asking if there were anything we should consider doing, perhaps transferring ownership ahead of time…but I got only an awkward silence, since one doesn’t talk about such things in Japan. Likewise, I asked our accountant to recommend some estate planning options we might want to keep in mind, but he said no one really did anything to prepare for death estate-wise. Even the concept of drafting a will is not really practiced in Japan. Because all Japanese have strong “common sense” built into them, a natural sense for the “way things should be,” wills are general not necessary. If I were to die, common sense dictates that my wife and children would receive my property, and this logic is rarely contested.
We’re having fun at Anime Expo. Hope to see you here! 国際結婚 kokusai kekkon or international marriage, is more popular than ever, as both Japanese men and women become open to the idea of marrying someone from another country. Amazingly, around 10% of marriages in Japanese cities are international, amazing considering the fact that the gaijin population of Japan is only around 1.5%. While most of the statistics come from Japanese men marrying women from places like China, South Korea and Thailand, there are plenty of Japanese women marrying foreign men from the West, too. Japanese females often have a rose-colored view of what it must be like to be married to an American, and my wife’s friends often speak enviously of her. “I’ll bet your husband does the dishes every night,” they’ll say (in reality, my wife won’t let me in the kitchen, since I mess up her organization). I’m assumed to hold doors and chairs, cook an occasional romantic meal, and say “I love you” as I head out the door to work every morning. Children produced by such a marriage must surely be kawaii just like having your own living Licca-chan doll (Licca is a popular fashion doll who is half-Japanese, half-French). While I do my best, my wife would be the first to admit that I’m just a regular guy who happens to live in Japan and who is relatively bad at writing kanji, who happens to get along well with her chemistry-wise.
One interesting aspect of learning a foreign language like Japanese is that it allows you to enjoy a “second childhood.” It’s true — learning a foreign language as an adult is not so different from a child acquiring his first language, and there are many similarities between the two. For example, there’s word play, joining this word and that to see what happens as you explore the boundaries of grammar and vocabulary in your new language. While native speakers of a given language are shackled by social rules and expectations, new learners are free to be creative since they don’t yet know what can’t be said. This is where we get phrases like “happiness blows on me” (a shampoo marketing tag line) and “Happy Ice Cream!” (what a kid says when they accidentally say the same thing as their friend) and sports drink named Pocari Sweat. The famous watch brand Swatch basically came about becuase the founders of the company didn’t know English well enough to realize that the name was kind of dorky-sounding. So if you want to feel young again, why not study a foreign language?
