I like exploring the sources of various memes that exist in Japan, like the time I researched the origin or the imouto (younger sister) fascination in pop culture, which turned out to be a 1983 anime called Miyuki about a love triangle between a boy, his girlfriend and his not-related-by-blood younger sister, who both happened to be named Miyuki. The other day I was wondering about the history behind Japan’s rather unique school swimsuits, called sukuuru mizugi. or just sukumizu in the trades. Starting around 1955, Japan was modernizing its educational system and requiring that pools be installed to teach swimming as a required course, with officially designated school swimsuits made from the newly-available material nylon. Schools soon standardized on “skirt type” swimsuits, with a separating line across the abdomen looking somewhat like a skirt, but around 1985 these started being replaced by the current “competition” style, which created less resistance when swimming. Riding the coat-tails of maid uniforms and shimapan, school swimsuits became an icon of Japanese moe culture thanks in part to Humikane Shimada, creator of Strike Witches as well as its less-famous predecessors Sky Girls and Mecha Musume, which introduced the the sukumiku-as-military-uniform concept. If you’re interested in obtaining one of these school swimsuits for cosplay or other uses, we just happen to have them in stock, in female and otokonoko sizes.
There are certain features of the Japanese language you encounter when you start studying it. One is that it’s a syllable based language defined by hiragana and katakana, so you can express the sounds ka, ki, ku, ke and ko, but not ‘k’ by itself, and it takes some time to train your mouth and brain to use this somewhat strict phonetic system, as you can see in this YouTube video showing how Japanese pronounce car company names. There are some welcome surprises for students of nihongo, however, including the lack of future and conditional tense for verbs, meaning there’s less grammar for us to bother learning, and the (near) lack of intonation based pronunciation common in Mandarin or Thai. I say “near” lack, but there are a few words that need to be pronounced a certain way to avoid confusion, the same way English words like “export” “conflict” or “reject” take different stress depending on whether they’re being used as verbs or nouns. (Bet you’d never noticed that.) One of the most famous words of Japanese is –san, the suffix for people’s names, but san also means “mountain,” e.g. 富士山 Fuji-san. When my wife and I flew out of Alaska we could see beautiful Mt. McKinley through our airplane window, and I told her, “Look, I can see McKinley-san,” in Japanese. But something in the way I pronounced the word -san made her think I was talking about a person named Mr. McKinley who I could somehow see through the airplane window.
J-List sells tons of import games from Japan, including “ecchi” visual novels as well as awesome all-ages games like the official Touhou shooting games for Windows. We also carry all the best anime games for Sony’s gaming platforms, PSVita, PS3, PSP and PS4, which are all region free and lots of fun to play…and often surprisingly ecchi too. We’re announcing a big price drop on all these import games today, so why not pick up a few titles?
