Hello again from J-List, your friend in Japan!
Everyone knows that the Japanese use Chinese characters, or kanji, as part of their writing system. While Chinese people can need up to 3-4,000 characters to read books and newspapers, in Japanese you can get by with the 1,945 “general use kanji” that the Ministry of Education has designated as the official characters that people need to be able to read to be considered literate. Although learning to write kanji is the biggest barrier for “white boy” gaijin like me (Chinese people have it easy, being able to read and write Japanese more or less right out of the box), kanji is a surprisingly logical system that’s fun to learn. Many kanji have “radicals,” parts of the character that give hints about the overall meaning. For example, the character for “to say” (which happens to look like a stack of books on a shelf) forms the left half of characters for “to read” “to speak” and “to translate.” Similarly, kanji that have to do with water or the sea contain the radical that represents water, making it easier for you to link the concepts cognitively. Here’s an example of some kanji characters for you: http://www.jlist.com/d1/kanjiexample.jpg
Kanji are also used for names, and just as there are alternate spellings for Western names, there is often a wide variety of ways to write a person’s name. The other day I was searching for information on Jyo (Joe) Hisaishi, the composer who creates all the music for Hayao Miyazaki’s films, but there were so many kanji with the reading “Jyo,” I couldn’t find the information I was looking for until one of the J-List Japanese staff told me the correct kanji for the musician’s name. There’s an approved list of “name kanji” that parents can choose from, and every few years there are problems when parents try to choose a name for their child that isn’t on the list. Ten years ago a family tried to name their son “Akuma” (Demon) but were forced by the local government to change it to something less shocking.
Living in rural Japan means being at peace with standing out in a crowd. Wherever I go in my city, I am reasonably sure I’m going to be the only gaijin I run into all day. Last year my daughter, who is in Japan Girl Scouts, participated in a festival which also included all the local Boy Scout and Cub Scout troops in our city. As usual when I’m around Japanese kids, I instantly occupy center stage, and everyone wants to talk to me, or show me something, or pull at the hair on my arms. (I have lots of blonde hair on my arms, which fascinates Japanese kids no end.) Being the focus of so much attention is not always easy, and I’ve had foreigner friends who couldn’t take being stared at all the time and went home. They said it was like living in a fishbowl. I never felt that way about it — standing out is just something you have to get used to, or even use to your advantage if you can. It can be unnerving sometimes though: when we went to the Japanese resort town of Karuizawa last weekend, I went into my favorite toy shop, which I hadn’t been to in a year or so. The owner recognized me and even remembered my name, all because I was one of the few foreigners that came into his shop.
J-List carries thousands of cool products from Japan for you, including hundreds of import DVDs. Most of the discs we carry are zoned for “all regions,” meaning you can view them on any DVD player, but most imported anime (Totoro, Spirited Away, etc.) and high-end indies discs are zoned for region 2 (Japan and Europe). We’ve added two new great region-free players to the site, to give more choice to our customers who want to enjoy DVDs from all over the world. Now you can choose from the low-priced DVD-7890, the compact and well-designed DVD-800, and the fully-functional DVB-7880K, which adds a karaoke function and progressive scan for the best video quality. The new players will be in stock in a week or so, but we wanted to post them for ordering now.
For the new update, we’ve got lots of great products for you, from incredible toys you’ve never seen to fresh stock of your favorite DVDs, photobooks, manga, snacks and more. Please check out all the products we have for you on the site now!
We’ll be updating the J-List shopping cart soon, which will add functionality and greatly improve checkout through the site. The new cart will be much easier and faster to use. As always, we believe everything will go smoothly on this end, but if you have problems with the new system, please let us about them right away. Also, you can make secure emails via the secure email form (link in the upper left hand corner of every page).
