I’m taking another brief vacation, this time journeying to the sunny state of Florida, USA, with my daughter. In addition to verifying if CSI Miami’s premise — that there are no old, overweight or Spanish-speaking people in the state — is correct or not, we’re here to check out the Florida Keys, Miami and Disney World. I’ll occasionally be posting on Twitter and Facebook, so please follow if you’d like…
Whenever I visit a new part of the U.S., I like to observe the people I see there, including how they speak. As is often the case, I expected to encounter some sort of cool “Florida accent” but haven’t found much of anything so far. The same thing happened when I went to New York and Boston a couple years ago: there was very little of the expected accents to be found, though New Jersey and Rhode Island did come through with flying colors. Japan, of course, has a complex network of regional dialects, which go far beyond the standard Osaka and Kyoto dialects seen in anime. Some are different from standard Japanese that Tokyo-ites visit, say, the Tsugaru Peninsula at the top of Japan’s main island of Honshu. The dialect so strong that the average person can’t communicate with people from there at all. One reason Japan seems to have much more pronounced dialects is that they’ve been less mobile than Americans, historically, and even today rarely pulling up stakes to move from their hometown the way Americans might relocate from Oregon to Atlanta for a new job. There are various reasons for this, but one is that the family grave is quite important in Japan’s Buddhist society, and to be far from one’s ancestral grave would be unthinkable to many Japanese.
The word for “foreigner” in Japanese is 外人 gaijin, written with kanji meaning outside + person, making it essentially equal to the word “outsider.” All countries have foreigners, of course, but Japan’s status as one of the most homogeneous countries in the world has a special meaning for Westerners living here, forcing most of us to be at peace with sticking out in a crowd. A person from Sweden or France could walk down the street in New York without anyone noticing that they came from another part of the world, but in Japan, the “other-ness” of a non-Japanese face can’t be hidden. In my home prefecture of Gunma, it’s quite common for me to go somewhere — my son’s high school graduation, an event at my daughter’s school — and suddenly realize that I’m the only non-Japanese present, often out of hundreds of people. While I’m okay with this — I’ve had foreign friends I’ve had weren’t able to handle the stress of “living in a fishbowl,” as one friend put it.
For years J-List has offered the most popular anime, manga, fashion, hobby and ecchi Japanese magazines via a revolving monthly subscription system, which our customers really love. Recently we decided to try this idea with our most popular product category, Japanese snacks, and it’s been a huge hit with our customers ever since. Here’s how it works: you can order a box of fun random snacks from Japan, choosing one, three, six or twelve months, and each month you’ll receive a great selection of snacks from Japan, along with a card explaining them all. You can also choose airmail or EMS, so your snacks will arrive quickly and within the freshness dates. The subscriptions are great for giving to others too. We look forward to selecting awesome Japanese snacks for our customers every month!
