There are always interesting ways to gain an understanding of a society through its language. One word that speaks to Japan’s rule-oriented approach to behavior are the words chanto (“properly”) and chanto shita (“proper”), which are used to grant a higher status to “the way things should be done.” Once, when I went to pick up my daughter from school, I watched the teacher showing the kids a kami-shibai (a story told to kids using sheets of cardboard with pictures on them) about the proper way to brush your teeth, the proper way to greet others, and so on. The word chanto was thrown around a lot. Of course teaching kids is one thing, but it’s interesting to note that the concept of there being “one” correct way to do things comes up in a variety of situations. Almost without fail, those who don’t do what’s expected of them — young people who drop out of school and play guitar in front of the train station, couples who live together without getting married, even crazy gaijin like me who quite their English teaching jobs to start companies selling interesting things from Japan to people around the world — are seen in a negative light by society at large. Some examples of the word chanto in Japanese sentences are, Chanto benkyo shite kudasai (Please study properly) or, Kare wa chanto shita sarariiman desu (He is a respectable company employee).
Another word that comes up a lot is futsuu, which just means normal or average. Most Americans I know might be mildly insulted if you implied that they were the same as everyone else, but in Japan being futsuu is not a bad thing for most people. When I was in college, I strove to be as different from everyone else as I could be, reading manga and learning as much as I could about Japan, but most of my Japanese friends were actually offended if I said they were a little “kawatteru,” a word which means “different” or “odd” — they wanted others to see them as average and normal, or at least that’s the face they showed to me. At one of the Japanese bishoujo game companies we work with, there’s a slightly odd programmer who has legally changed his name to Reije Abe, or in Japanese name order, Abe Reiji (ah-BEH REI-ji), because he wanted his name to have the same pronunciation as the English word “average” in Japanese. As an “individual” American, sometimes I am hard pressed to understand Japan, even though I’ve lived here for 14 years.
J-List is happy to be able to bring you hundreds of import calendars from Japan, unique poster-sized calendars that are printed for the Japanese market but available to you through us. Every year, it’s fun to see which calendars prove to be the most popular with our customers. As usual, anime calendars are leading the pack, with the beautiful Studio Ghibli in the top spot, followed closely by the Totoro desktop calendar for this year. Other popular anime shows like Inuyasha and Naruto have also done very well, with Full Metal Alchemist a close third. Calendars by famous artists like Vampire Hunter D creator Yoshitaka Amano and Haruyo Morita have done well this year, as have traditional art and photography calendars. Sexy calendars like Mai Hagiwara and Yoko Matsugane have also done very well, too. Every year some calendar manages to totally surprise us by beating all our sales estimated — this year’s surprise has been the Hokusai art calendar, featuring illustrations of the famous ukiyoe artist who also coined the term manga, meaning “whimsical pictures”.
We’re excited to officially announce X-Change 3, now posted to the site for preorder. The X-Change series is a popular dating-sim game trilogy in which you play Takuya Aihara, a normal Japanese boy who gets changed into a girl through bizarre chemistry accidents. Each time, he has many interesting adventures in his female body, as he desperately looks for a way to return to normal before the changes becomes permanent. Preorder this great new game for free shipping when it’s ready. (X-Change 1 and 2 are in stock on the site.)
Remember that J-List carries photobooks, DVDs and currently, 2005 calendars, featuring Japanese ultra-cute bikini idols, who represent an interesting sub-culture in Japan as a whole. These cute-as-a-button girls generally fall into two camps: cute girl “sister you always wish you had” girls like Yuko Ogura, and the gorgeous girls like Yoko Matsugane, who are called “gravure idols” in Japan (from the French photogravure, an old kind of plate-based photography, although I never did understand the connection). Feel free to browse the excellent selection of beautiful Japanese women we have for you.
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