Peter Returns to Japan...

Well, my long sojourn in the U.S. is finally at an end, and I’m returning to Japan with my son today. I certainly am a lucky gaijin, able to live in my favorite country in the world (Japan) yet come to the U.S. for 1-2 months every summer, attending cool anime and comic book conventions and greeting our customers. My bags are filled with various omiyage (souvenirs) for the J-List staff who worked so hard in the hot Japanese summer while I was in the U.S. I’m also bringing back various foods that are difficult to obtain in Japan, including tortillas and taco shells, since (to paraphrase Luke Skywalker), if there’s a bright center to the Mexican food universe, Japan is the country that it’s farthest from.

My son has had a fun time this summer, hanging out in the U.S. and going various places with me, like Death Valley, Area 51 and various ghost towns in Arizona. He enjoyed being in the U.S. for a long time and observing the things he saw. When we went to Las Vegas he saw a sign for a “VIP room” and asked me what it meant — to him, a VIP (pronounced as a normal word, e.g. “vip,” and also known as a “vipper”) is what the most hardcore users of the 2ch Japanese BBS are called, something the /b/tards on 4chan. We also observed a driver honking his horn loudly at another driver who had cut him off, and he was surprised at this aggressive behavior. In Japan, drivers are generally quite polite, and a car’s horn is nearly always used for its intended function, to alert other cars of a dangerous situation, or else a short beep to serve as a polite greeting when saying goodbye.

One day he was reading a book in Japanese, and I asked him what the title was. He said something that sounded to me like “corazón,” and I asked him if he knew that this was the Spanish word for “heart.” “No, not corazón, I said kore-zon. You know, with zombies.“ I then realized he was talking about the light novel Kore wa Zombie Desu ka? (“Is This a Zombie?” officially romanized as KOREHA ZOMBIE DESUKA?) Japanese can be a rather unwieldy language, and it’s almost a given that any popular book, manga, movie or game will received shortened nickname by fans, since no one wants to go around saying Ano hi Mita Hana no Namae wo Bokutachi wa Mada Shiranai (“We still don’t know the name of the flower we saw on that day”) all the time — much easier to use call it AnoHana instead. Some other shortened anime titles include Baka-Tesu (Baka to Test to Shokanju), Shuta-ge (Stein’s;Gate), Mado-Magi (Madoka Magika) and good old Ore-Imo (Ore no Imouto ga Konna ni Kawaii Wake ga Nai).