Hello all. It’s a cold Monday today, and we’re all very busy at J-List, counting stock. Today is our inventory day, the last day of our fiscal year, so we had to count…everything. That means counting every gumball, every pack of Black Black, every bukkake DVD. It’s quite a lot of work, although I had the update to take myself away from it.
Today’s J-List post is below. You can also read it on the J-List website or the JBOX.com site.
February is almost upon us, and that means one thing to retailers in Japan: time to push chocolate molds, cake decorations and other Valentines Day products. Valentines Day in Japan is a little different from what you might be used to: here, women give chocolate to men, and February 14th is a day when a girl who has a crush on a boy can confess her feelings while giving him some home-made chocolates, a popular plot in anime. It’s also a kind of day of giving thanks, when daughters and wives give something special to fathers and husbands as a way of saying otsukare-sama (oh-TSKA-rei-sah-mah, “thanks for working so hard for us”). In companies, women often feel the pressure to give chocolate to the males in the office, which is called giri choco (obligation chocolate). Starbucks jumps on the chocolate wagon, too, this year offering a limited Marshmallow Mocha Latte, with fluffy white marshmallows shaped like hearts. Men who receive chocolate must give a gift in return on March 14, dubbed White Day. J-List stocks a large variety of delicious things to eat, including many varieties of chocolate. Check out what we’ve got in stock!
February is also test-taking time in Japan, when millions of Japanese take juken, the dreaded entrance exams for high schools and universities. Because high school isn’t part of compulsory education, students must apply there just like universities, with competition for the better schools very fierce. For the past year, students in their third years of junior high school and high school, respectively, have been cramming information into their heads as quickly as possible, usually attending juku (night schools) to help their studies. The juken tests are a big part of the reason why Japanese are often seen as intelligent but not always able to express themselves abstractly, since memorizing raw facts is what’s important on entrance exams, not how they’re linked together. My wife, for example, can tell you the date the Kamakura shoganate was founded (1192), but she can’t explain what its overall importance in Japanese history (it was the first time Japan was unified under a feudal military society, which planted the seeds for the structure of the Edo Period later). On the other hand, I know first hand the motivational power of having a fixed goal can have, and got a lot out of passing each level of the Japanese Ability Test, even if it was a Japanese-style test.
Although most Japanese aren’t fluent in English, the English language does play a big part in daily life, a source of new vocabulary, slang, and cute names for products like “Melty Kiss.” When Japanese import words from English, they often simplify them so they’re easier for them to digest. An athlete in Japan is a “sportsman,” and a photographer is a “cameraman,” even if he’s using a still camera — very logical if you think about it. Want to enjoy driving with the wind in your hair? Buy an “open car” like the Mazda Miata, called Roadster in Japan, although 100% of Japanese think the car is called Road-Star from the way it’s pronounced. In 1999, Japan passed its first automobile child seat law, requiring that all parents put their child in a “baby chair” while driving a car. Cellular phones are everywhere in Japan now, but not so long ago most people carried “pocket bells” or pagers. And in the summer, I like to eat “soft cream” (soft-serve ice cream) and enjoy a trip with the kids in a “camp car” (RV). These words are dangerous for foreigners because we get too used to using them and then go home and embarrass ourselves by pulling them out in mixed conversation.
