Oopsie — once again I see I’ve forgotten to post my after doing the J-List update. Sorry!
Today’s J-List post is below. You can also read it on the J-List website or the JBOX.com site.
One type of business that’s sprung up over the past decade is the manga kissa, or manga cafe, a place where you can get coffee and kill a few hours leisurely reading through all the comics on the shelves, for a per-hour fee. Manga cafes have adopted to the age of the net, offering the functionality of an Internet Cafe too, with computers and wireless LAN. I went to an interesting place the other day that offered just about all the leisure you could want: each customer was assigned a private cubicle with a comfortable chair, which contained a computer with broadband connection and Playstation in addition to a desk. There were manga to browse, DVDs to watch, and online games to play, all within my personal leisure space. It felt like something out of a William Gibson novel, come to life.
The U.S. is divided up into various sections, which reflect the industries that are strongest in those areas. Idaho is potato country, and the midwest is the grain belt that feeds most of the nation, for example. This exists in Japan, too. First of all, the northernmost island of Hokkaido (ho-KAI-doh) is the breadbasket of Japan, providing corn, potatoes, and delicious dairy products, many of which use the shape of the island to sell themselves. Niigata is famous for rice, and companies advertise the fact that they use rice from the prefecture to get customers to buy. Shizuoka Prefecture, next to Mt. Fuji, is the Green Tea capital of Japan, but there are also factories and industry there. If there’s a Bible Belt in Japan, it’d have to be the westernmost island of Kyushu, which was the first to be Christianized back in the 16th century, and is home to some of the oldest churches in the country. And I’ve always though that the Tohoku region of Japan, the prefectures north of Tokyo on the main island of Honshu, was sort of parallel to the American South — it’s strongly identified with enka, the “country music” of Japan.
Whenever you learn a language, one of the first things you generally learn are the “bad” words — that’s just plain human nature. Most students of Japanese are surprised to find that there are almost no really bad words in the language, if you define bad as in, words that kids aren’t allowed to use. Kuso (the “s” word) is used regularly on children’s anime in Japan, and most kids use it normally while playing with nary a word from their parents. Baka (stupid) is the catch-all insult, used in almost any situation (Japanese from the Kansai region say aho instead). Variations on the above two words include baka-jijii (stupid old man) and kuso-babaa (sh–ty old woman). The various applications of the “f” word don’t translate into Japanese at all — the word doesn’t exist in Japanese, although virtually all Japanese know the English word, along with the English word “sekkusu.” The only really “bad” word in Japanese is manko (referring to a woman’s reproductive organ) — embarrassingly close to “mango,” not unlike the word election for Japanese speakers of English. This word is so bad, it’s usually written with a circle or “X” or a circle in place of the middle letter. As always, exercise caution when using these words so that you don’t offend any Japanese around you. For more information on Japanese terms, see the glossary (link on the left side of the J-List site).
At J-List, we love to promote interest in Japan with everything we do, including the study of the language. We have a new “reserve subscription” magazine for those who want to try their hand at reading Japanese, as well as anyone who wants to read news and topics on life in Japan: Hiragana Times. As with all our revolving magazine subscriptions, we’ll send each issue to you automatically until you tell us to stop. We carry more than 30 popular anime, manga, fashion, toy and other magazines.
