Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, and all throughout Japan men are looking forward to receiving the gift of chocolate from females around them, in keeping with the custom here. There are two kinds of chocolate a man can receive, the first of which is giri choco or “obligation chocolate.” which female coworkers might give to males they work with because they feel it’s expected of them. Then there’s the stuff that we all really want to get, honmei choco or “true heart chocolate,” hand-made chocolates, cakes or other treats from our wives, daughters or girlfriends which show their love and appreciation for us. Of course, when you are given a gift in Japan you always have to give something back (this is called o-kaeshi), and so Japan’s marketers have created White Day on March 14, a day when men who received chocolate must give something back (often white chocolate or, if she’s okay with it, sexy underwear).
There are many ways to approach an understanding of Japan — through its anime, or JPOP music, or perhaps through Japanese television dramas, which are quite interesting. Another way you might enter into an exploration of Japan’s pop culture is through the Super Sentai TV show series, the “fighting five team” shows in which color-coded heroes do battle with evil minions, invariably combining into a giant robot to finish off the giant monster-of- the-week in a big explosion at the end. Ever since creating Secret Sentai Goranger three decades ago, Toei has created a new series every year, making adjustments to the stories and characters along the way — changing them to ninja or galactic police officers, for example. Since most every Japanese person watched these shows when they were small, you can ask them which “sentai generation” they belonged to. J-List’s Daisuke and Tomo loved Electronic Team Denjiman (1980), while my wife was there for the original Goranger series (1975). I got to experience these shows alongside my son as he was growing up, too. He loved Emergency Rescue Team GoGo-V (1999) more than anything else, and it was a real eye-opening experience for him when we got a tape of Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue (the U.S. version of the same series) and got to see the fire engine that transformed into a robot to do that corny “ladder punch” in English. I’ll never forget the last episode of Time Ranger, when the characters took their Time Robo back in “time” to visit all the past five-team shows. The Super Sentai series has links to other shows, of course, such as the venerable Kamen Rider (Masked Rider) and anime classics like Science Ninja Team Gatchaman and Voltron.
One of the curses of the Japanese is their unique kana-based phonetic system that breaks every sound down into consonant+vowel or vowel-only syllables, which leads to Japanese being very phonetically impoverished and is the reason why Japanese often have thick accents when speaking English. One of the simplest words to you or I is probably the word the, yet the closest you can come to this pronunciation in the katakana writing system is za — the dental fricative sound is quite alien to the Japanese vocal system. The Japanese Ministry of Education has recently started teaching English in elementary schools, but since there aren’t enough native English teachers in Japan, the special classes are being taught by my daughter’s normal homeroom teacher. The kids had to learn to sing Puff the Magic Dragon by writing katakana characters over the English lyrics, which came out as Pafu, za majikku doragon, livedo by za shee… Fortunately, my bilingual daughter was there to help them with the pronunciation, and she was a big hit.
J-List carries the amazing DVDs of Yulia Nova, an amazing Russian model who was discovered by Japanese photographer Satoshi Kizu and became a huge success here in Japan, as well as across the Internet, where her amazing body and matching charm made her a hit on the Internet. J-List carries all of Yulia Nova’s DVD releases, and just for you, we’ve lowered the price of the first three DVDs to just $19.95 each, making this a great chance for you to pick up her first three discs and experience her loveliness.
