Hello and Happy Saturday from all of us in Japan.
We’re often asked, when coming to Japan, what kinds of items are good to bring as gifts? In the past we’ve recommended cigarettes, Starbucks coffee or just about anything from your unique home town, be it St. Louis or San Diego. Since the Japanese really like the United States, any of the gazillion items with the Stars and Stripes is a good suggestion. If your intended recipients have been to America before, they may know about American’s unchallenged lead in the world of breakfast cereal, and a box of some cereal might be an amusing but appreciated gift. Finally, my bother in Lake Tahoe sent us some graham crackers, chocolate and marshmallows so we could make that all-so-American treat, S’Mores. They were such a big hit with our staff here, that we have to add graham crackers to the list of things to bring to Japan when visiting.
Everyone knows that the Japanese take their shoes off when they go into a house. To the Japanese, shoes, and anything to do with the feet, are inherently “dirty.” When you enter your own home, you take your shoes off at the lowered foyer, called “genkan” in Japanese, and leave them there. If you have a lot of shoes on the floor of the genkan, you can store them in the handy and stylish shoes holder (geta-bako), which stores your shoes for you. (This is a good thing. Like American women, Japanese women love to accumulate shoes, my wife included.) Leaving your dirty shoes near the front door means that the house is much cleaner, and much easier to keep clean. For inside the house, Japanese always wear slippers, and if a gaijin goes to a Japanese person’s house, the Japanese person will give him slippers to wear, even if they’re much too small for his feet. It’s always sort of “funny” to see people in American TV and movies wearing shoes indoors (kind of like seeing Pocari Sweat for the first time). Although we try to “live like Americans” when we go to the U.S., most of my Japanese family (including myself) quietly leave our shoes near the front door when back home.
I fondly remember my days at SDSU, studying Japanese with the text my professor, Higurashi-sensei, had written. It was third year Japanese, and quite difficult — we were expected to master 100 kanji per month, which was difficult, although I had an advantage over most of the other students because I actively read manga to improve my reading skills. In the text, the American John Smith comes to a Tokyo university to study architecture, and meets his homestay family, including his homestay brother and sister, Taro and Hanako Yamada (Taro and Hanako Yamada are the Japanese versions of John and Mary Smith, i.e., the “most vanilla” names you can think of). Each chapter features John or his friend Mary getting into some misunderstanding that needs to be resolved. In one chapter, Mary got her sneakers dirty, so she washed them in the washing machine. Well, since shoes are seen as incredibly dirty things here in Japan, Mary’s host mother got really angry, and had to buy a new washing machine. I thought that was an exaggeration, but my wife told me no, she would do the same thing if I tried to wash shoes in our washing machine.
We’ve got a bunch of nice items for you this weekend on the J-List site, with fresh stock of magazines, manga, DVD and other items, including a special treat for hentai doujinshi fans, the very cool busty doujinshi by Blue Eyes creator Tohru Nishimaki. Please check out the new and restocked items.
We’re glad to see sales of the new English-language adult manga magazine, AG, taking off. We think this is a great concept, and we’re going to support AG with articles on Japan and more. We offer this magazine as an automatic subscription (we’ll send you each new issue as it comes in from our warehouse in San Diego). We’ll also carry individual issues on the J-List website, too.
Want to take a VR tour of the “real” Tokyo? We found a really cool virtual reality site that lets you enjoy many interesting parts of Tokyo from the comfort of your computer room. Check out http://homepage.mac.com/dancy/vr/ (Quicktime required).
