One of the most popular series this season is Himouto! Umaru-chan, the story of a smart and attractive high school student who’s admired by everyone around her while at school…but when she gets safely home, she transforms into a tiny girl who does nothing but play games on the Internet while eating junk food and wearing her trademark hamster hood and ears. Umaru’s character is a celebration of a lifestyle known as ぐーたら guutara, which means to act as lazy as you can, doing only fun things like reading manga and playing games all day rather than doing what society asks of you. (The Sanrio character Gudetama and lazy idol Anza Futaba from Idolmaster Cinderella Girls are also part of this trope.) Besides being the cutest show ever, Himouto! Umaru-chan can teach us something about one of the most powerful forces in Japanese society, 人の目 hito no me or “the eyes of others,” and how they cause us to act differently than we might if people weren’t always watching us, judging us. While the idea of someone transforming the minute they get home might be hard to believe, I see it every day in my own house, when my wife switches from being the hard-edged president of J-List into a normal Japanese housewife, wearing one of my T-shirts while snoring on the sofa with her Korean dramas playing on the TV.
Last time I talked about some random obsessions I have, including always re-watching any half-way decent anime series at least once in order to get a deeper appreciation for the work as a whole. Another obsession I seem to have acquired is an affinity for collecting different versions of the Sukiyaki Song, the legendary Japanese pop song by Sakamoto Kyu that reached the #1 spot in the Billboard Hot 100 in 1963. It’s not called that in Japan, of course: here the title is 上を見て歩こう ue o mite aruko, meaning “I Look Up As I Walk,” and although it’s got an addictive toe-tapping beat, it’s actually a sad song about a man whose just lost his love and is walking with his face upturned so his tears won’t fall. It’s sad for another reason: 30 years ago this Wednesday singer Sakamoto was killed along with 519 others when Japan Airlines Flight 123 suffered a hydraulic failure and crashed into a mountain in my adopted home of Gunma. I learned of the crash one day when I suddenly decided to ride my bicycle 40 km to check out some caverns I’d heard about. (I had lots of free time for random stuff before I started J-List.) My wife shuddered when I told her where I was headed, and she said, “I could never go out there, that’s where that plane went down in 1985.” To this day the disaster represents the single worst single-aircraft air disaster in history.
What will happen when J-List’s new site launches? We’re preparing a completely new website that we’ve been hard at work on for a year, which will offer tons of new features including great performance on mobile phones, as well as tablets and desktop computers. As part of the changeover, which will happen around August 17th-18th, all accounts will be moved…though wishlists will be reset
