Hello again from San Diego. I head back to Japan tomorrow, but I’m outside in my backyard, enjoying the warm weather, able to work remotely courtesy of Apple’s Airport.
If you spend any time in Japan, you’re likely to notice that the Japanese really love florescent lights. Because they’re very bright, and because they use less power than normal lights, the Japanese use florescent lights for almost any kind of lighting, even in residential homes — quite different from how lights are used in the U.S. When you build a home in Japan (you almost always build a new home rather than buying a “used” house that someone else has lived in), a lot of the fun is going through the National/Panasonic lighting catalog and choosing what kind of lighting to install in each room. When the Japanese put their minds to designing something beautifully, they really go all out, and the quality and variety of lighting you can choose from is great. The long-life florescent bulbs for normal lamps, which have been getting popular in the States, have been around in Japan for 15 years or more.
It’s quite interesting to analyze how Japanese name their cars. First of all, names given to Japanese cars must sound “kakko ii” (cool), and since nothing sounds cooler to the Japanese ear than English, most cars here get their names from English words — like Honda Life and Legend, or Nissan’s Bluebird and Sunny, or Mazda’s Roadster (aka the Miyata, although all Japanese think it means “road star” just as they think Pizza Hut is really “Pizza Hat”). But many other names come from slightly altered English, so that they cause the same emotional response while being original. Words like Carolla or Tercel or Soarer or Sylphy or Premacy sound like English, but car companies can still “own” the original names.
Japanese cars must never, ever have Japanese names, since that would be “kakko warui” (un-cool) — Japanese are always amused to learn that the Suzuki Jiminy was sold as Suzuki Samurai in the U.S. However, there are some cars whose names started out as Japanese words before being “English-ified.” Toyota Camry, for example, gets its name from “kammuri,” which means crown in Japanese — which is funny, since Toyota sells a higher-priced sedan in Japan called Toyota Crown. (Incidentally, the Camry is not popular at all in Japan — too boring.) Other names that have a “Japanese” feel to them are Daihatsu’s Mira (sort of sounds like “mirai” which means “future”) and Mitsubishi’s Minica (which sound like what it is — a very small “mini car”).
For the new update, the J-List team has added another large volley of new products to the J-List website. We have many new products for our adult customers (18 and up). We’ve also got cool new “traditional” Japanese items including stylish chopsticks and dishes, new Japanese snack items including delicious soft, shreaded ika, new Morning Musume cards, Hello Kitty and Hamutaro items, fresh stock of Godzilla items, more Buddhist Prayer Beads, and a restock of the positively beautiful extra-large cold cast “completed figure” of Urd from Ah My Goddess and Love Hina SkyLuv Project toys.
At J-List, we have a great selection of DVDs from Japan. Nearly all our DVDs are “region free,” meaning you can play them on any DVD player in the world, but an increasing number of “Indies” DVDs, as well as all anime and “hentai” DVDs released in Japan, are encoded for region 2 (Japan and Europe). The simplest way to view region 2 DVDs is to buy a region free DVD player, and we recommend the Sampo DVE-611 (which can be made region free via a simple hack). And we found a source for these players for just $109 — we’ve bought two ourselves. Since you need a region-free player to view many of the recent Indies DVD releases, and all anime DVDs from Japan (including the Miyazaki films, which will all be released in 2002), it’s our sincere hope that everyone will get one of these players and oppose the anti-globalists who thought of the DVD regions in the first place. The link to the $109 Sampo players is here.
Are you interested in learning Japanese? Our friends over at YesJapan (http://www.yesjapan.com) have such a good online course, allowing at-your-pace study, thousands of audio files, and an “ask-a-teacher” service, that we wanted to plug them on the list. We think this is a great way to learn Japanese and we hope you’ll give them a try.
