Big No-nos
I only mention these two because so many people seem to think that they sound like a word in English – they don’t. Please don’t use them or I’ll write a crappy piece of Jacobian literature about you.

スーパー玉出 (Super Tamade)

The lesser known power ranger combination consisting of just red and yellow.
Fights justice with questionable meats.

No matter where you go, supermarkets tend to be very region specific and Japan is no different in that regard. However, there isn’t any other supermarkets that I’ve been to that is quite like Super Tamade. When you go to a store that specializes in groceries you usually don’t have a very exciting experience, they’re all created quite similar even if you might prefer one place’s wares more than another. Before you even enter a Super Tamade you are visually assaulted with its presence (some more than others); not only does it have a color scheme that’s been turned up to 12 (when 11 is just not enough) but it also makes you wonder if you’re actually going to enter a grocery store or just a pachinko parlor conveniently modeled to look like a supermarket. Someone seems to think that attaching a couple thousand flashing lights and some neon will get people to buy broccoli. I doubt it works but just the act of a place like this existing is almost enough of a reason to buy a ticket to come see it in person.

And there’s more inside. They’ve managed to do things that physicists have classified as impossible, taking the seediness of Osaka and Yakuza and combining it with a supermarket; there are insane bargains on food in the middle of a huge city, 1 yen items when you buy a certain yen amount of goods, and making sure the customers don’t forget that the outside of the store is probably taken from a run down gambling joint (i.e. neon lights inside as well). These things don’t always come as easy as you might (not?) think; they show their seediness mostly by their seemingly non-existant return policy and the higher chance of getting iffy meats. But this doesn’t mean that it’s somewhere you should avoid at all costs; (for those living in Osaka) you can save a lot of money by shopping at the big yellow and red sign of hot dog topping justice, just be careful.

I like my women like I like my specials, exploding.

Jankara (or Jumbo Karaoke)
While it’s quite tame compared to Super Tamade and not very different from other large-scale karaoke joints, it’s surprising how quickly you can go from a place with a cubic crapton of these karaoke boxes to a place without one in a 100 km radius. If you happen to be living in any of the main cities in Kansai (Osaka, Kyoto, Kobe, Nara) you’d most likely guess that this chain is national, from Sapporo down to Nagasaki, and you’d be extremely wrong. I don’t know why they haven’t made their way to any other large close city (Nagoya). Maybe they feel the market is saturated?

Cheap Izakayas (like Torikizoku)
An Izakaya (居酒屋) is basically a Japanese pub. There’s probably no place in Japan that doesn’t have a couple izakayas but none seem to be as cheap as some of the regional places around Osaka. A normal izakaya will have basically the same things as these places but at regular prices, 350 yen and up for food and 450+ for drinks. At the cheaper places in Osaka they’ll give you slightly smaller portions but they make literally everything on the menu 280 yen. This sounds both ridiculous and awesome at the same time – it is. I wish they had some here so I wouldn’t feel like I was getting ripped off with the usual chain izakaya prices.

I recieved my health insurance card last year. When you get your card they also give you a list of payment deadlines that will always finish before April. I have been making payments since that time but I did not know that I was feeding the socialist beast; Japan looks like a first world nation so I thought, just like all other first world nations, that Japan’s healthcare system was 100% private so that informed individuals could make rational decisions without being bullied by a dangerous and ravenous governmental entity. How horrifyingly wrong I was. But what was I supposed to believe? The monthly price I was paying was so low what else could have I suspected? I assumed it was low because it was following in the footsteps of it’s big brother, America.

Would you believe me if I said that this is my payment (approx. $200) for the whole year?

I went to the dentist a while ago, this is when I first knew that something was wrong. Everything was going fine (or so I thought) until I realized that she wasn’t asking me if I wanted Hyperwhite XL47 incisors to replace my boring regular incisors and she kept mentioning things that would be cheap and useful (note: I looked up the definition of what she was doing and it was a word like “do prazzical” or something like that). I tried to bring them up in our conversation but she would just not listen and asked be about my brushing habits. I left as quickly as I could, after paying of course, and I went straight to the nearest electronics shop so that I could drown myself in the sound of teeth-gnashingly brutal commerce; I managed to not go on long rants when talking to those around me, but this was only stopped by a sale on a laptop with only 6 units in stock.

The facade finally went away to reveal the true form of the Japanese health care system when I received my new set of payment stubs today. Now I know the truth. I’ve learned that I’m not just paying for my own healthcare but the healthcare of deadbeats and old people (ewwwww). I know that although I only have to pay at most 30% for pretty much anything related to healthcare I am supporting a system that will purposefully try to (personally!) murder me through a committee of samey-looking Japanese suits. Why couldn’t they have emulated the best healthcare system in the world? When I need medical help the government doesn’t know exactly what I need, my doctor and I do. They’re just wasting taxpayer dollars like all the other crazy socialist countries. And if I don’t have any money to pay my doctor then that tells me that I don’t need care, do I? Why would it be good for be to take money from someone who would use it on something much better, like the new iPhone.

This, my largest monthly bill ($40) would be a good down payment on a new laptop. Alas.

I am stuck here for now in this socialist hellhole, but I will try to get out somehow. If I have to shove my dog down my pants and swim to China I’ll do so. Until then I just have to hope that they don’t come for me, if that ever happens I’ll end up as a statistic. This ends my communique.

There is a syndrome that goes around and affects many foreigners that live in Japan for at least a year. Symptoms include, negativity, crankiness, irrational hatred towards most/all things Japanese, and whininess. Why does this happen? Is this a sign that Japan sucks? What’s the cure? Let’s try and find out.

While I don’t want to come off as fanboy-ish it’s slightly hard to not sound that way when you talk differently or argue with someone who does something like what Tim did; while there are some good points somewhere in the muck and mire they’re almost lost because of all of the nitpicking and cherry picking. He starts off his complaint list with Anime. He only wrote one paragraph about why it sucks, but it’s hard to take it seriously since he gives one (and a half) example(s) in his favor and then mentions Dragon Ball Z as a show that was “graphically iconic, with a story more coherent than it probably needed to be”. Akira Toriyama has his own iconic style, but I would not pick DBZ as an example of good anime (the updated DBZ Kai is much better though).

He goes on to complain about people smoking and the lack of vegetarian dishes. These things are true, many people smoke and it’s not always possible to get a vegetarian meal in a restaurant. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t non-smoking train cars on the express trains (can’t smoke at all on regular trains), non-smoking areas (usually bigger than smoking), smoking rooms that stop others from having to deal with the smoke, and supermarkets. However, besides asking at restaurants for them to take out meat you’ll have to make your own dishes or go be a monk. It’s unfortunate for those that have made a decision to not eat meat, but should you really be pissy about it when other people don’t cater to your personal decision? Yes, they’re not making it easier for you but you have no right to force them to have to serve dishes you like; this also doesn’t take into consideration those restaurants that actually do have vegetarian food (few, but they’re there).

PETA, annoying everywhere

After some things that I can’t comment on he spends most of the rest of the post talking about small things. As with relationships, sometimes it’s all the little things that cause the breakup to occur. For Tim his are yelling to get customers, language quirks, hostess clubs, niches, Japanese comedy, Japanese music, Japanese movies (and how they copy manga), cost, drink tickets at bars/clubs/concerts, putting tape on purchases at convenience stores, stereotyping, pachinko, and some other things that I didn’t mention. Some of these things are definitely things that he just doesn’t like but aren’t/shouldn’t be deal-breakers by themselves. However some of them (comedy, music, movies) are, while true on the surface, not what he makes them up to be. For these few I guess that he’s exaggerating to make a point, but I really can’t be sure since I don’t know him.

One thing I found that was hugely exaggerated was the cost argument. While he makes many true points about things that are actually more expensive he then goes and brings up game prices. He says

“games tend to pretty much always cost $100 on their release dates here. It’s getting fairly ridiculous. Game rental generally doesn’t happen. So most people who buy new games race through them lovelessly so they can sell them back to the local used shop before the buyback price drops. I’m sure the publishers have crunched the numbers a thousand times, and come up with some reason to justify not lowering the initial price of a typical game.”

Although some games are more expensive than others when they come out (e.g. FF13) the usual price is around 7,000円. Is this more expensive than a normal game at time of launch? Yes, but this doesn’t even take into consideration other factors in the game market that exist here but are either stifled or missing in some other countries, supply and demand; I recently picked up a used copy of FF13 for 2800円 and a new copy of Halo 3: ODST for 2000円, it’s still at least $40 new in the US. Also, when a game is extremely popular, Persona 3/4 or Smash Brothers (Both old and still 5000円), the price stays high until interest wanes. I could go on about each of his points, but I’ve already gone on longer than I expected.

Doesn’t it suck to wait a month or two for games to drop in price? Why can’t I buy all my games at Gamestop?!?

Mr. Tim has spent at least five years in Japan. He obviously didn’t feel the way he does now for all five of those years, what happened?

Japanese society, being the way it is in its current form, can be grating. There are many, many people in other countries who spend some of their time listening and watching exported Japanese culture (i.e. Jpop and anime). A lot of these people say that they want to live in Japan and some of them actually get off their ass and go do it. They definitely have an incorrect assumption of what Japan is like, but they still like many Japanese things. Nonetheless, it can be a tough experience that ends up with them going back to where they came from and settling on enjoying what they like about Japan without having to deal with Japanese society. I’m not saying that Tim is an otaku, I’m just saying that many people would think that someone who seemingly loves Japan (or what little they know from anime) would acclimate themselves to the society quicker than someone with less knowledge of Japan.

For everyone, (again, like a relationship) when they get to Japan they have their rose-tinted glasses. These glasses seem to stay on longer than they would if Japan was your boy/girlfriend but they wear off nonetheless; what you (probably didn’t) read was not that. Many foreigners in Japan seem to go straight from rose-tinted glasses to shit-tinted glasses (or maybe concrete-tinted?). It could be because expectations were too high, they can’t take all the concrete, have trouble with the language and/or the way people act with complaints and problems, or even the little annoyances that have finally got to them. Whatever it’s caused from it affects not only the infected individual but also those he associates with. Given the side-effects, this syndrome can be quite annoying.

Luckily there are remedies, even if they don’t work permanently on everyone. Some of the most prominent cures are fun, going to the countryside, changing locales within Japan, and leaving. Each works in their own way, but they generally get the job done, even if some are much more expensive than others. For an unlucky few, the syndrome comes in monthly or yearly cycles; a cure is not known for these individuals. What is known is that the best way to protect yourself from (re)catching this sickness is to stay away from message boards that expats seem to spent time on. If you know an individual who is going on one of these message boards, take them away from their computer and make them go have fun, there are a bunch of places where this can be accomplished, even if the affected might be a pain in the ass for a while.

In the next three or four big posts I’m going to talk about different parts of this very complex subject. Here’s part one.

It can’t be tentacles all the way down, there had to be a first tentacle.

Since the inception of Youtube, the videos and details regarding “Japanese Only” signs have spread farther than they did back in the Netscape/IE4 days (the video is just a slideshow of this page). As most of you have probably guessed, this video shows the signs of places where foreigners are not allowed. Given that this video just takes the pictures of the page from Arudo Debito’s website and doesn’t give any text or dialogue, you’re not going to get the full story by just watching the video. When people see videos like this or hear comments from others that Japan is racist, even if they happen to go on a trip to Japan they’re not going to have enough knowledge to know if what they’ve been told is true or not. This alone is not (or at least it shouldn’t be) sufficient for a regular person to think that Japan, and not one old and cranky Japanese guy, is racist.

Japan, along with many other Asian countries, still connect nationality with race. This practice allowed (mostly) Brazilians with a Japanese relative to easily enter and work in Japan. While this practice might make sense for some countries, many people see it as a way of saying that those with “Japanese blood” are better than others. Furthermore, Japan did some horrific, unconscionable things 70 years ago that many people might see as racist. When you put all of these things together you end up with a lot of people saying/wondering about Japan and it’s supposed racism.

Hatsune Miku would love to make a song for you as long as you’re not a stupid smelly foreigner.

You mean the tubes can tell fibs?

Getting back to the “Japanese Only” video, check out the webpage and you’ll learn more of the story; many of these places are in Northern Japan, on the side of Japan that faces the Japan Sea, or near a military base. If you set up shop in one of these places there’s a chance that many of your customers will be Russian or, for the latter, American. When you keep having trouble with a certain set of clientele you have to decide whether or not you have to decide whether or not to exclude them. The places shown in the pictures all decided to restrict their customers to a certain subset.

Not only are most of the places listed in the areas mentioned, but most of them are a certain type of establishment, hostess clubs. Hostess clubs are something that are foreign to most people outside of Japan, this means (in almost all instances) that if someone doesn’t look Japanese that they most likely don’t know how things go down in a hostess club. To make things go smoothly they only want those customers who know what they’re getting into and not a tourist who’ll get pissed because the girl he’s been flirting with for the past two hours just freaked out and called security because he got touchy-feely. Oh, there’s also the language barrier, most clubs don’t require their girls to be able to speak a foreign language.

I hope a pure-blooded Japanese male stabs the owner in the fucking throat.

You might be wondering why I wouldn’t think that this policy (in both situations), while useful, is not as discriminatory as it sounds. The answer to this is that, these signs don’t mean what they say. Check out that webpage one more time and read the updates for each case, you’ll see that many of them have taken down the signs at the request of just one foreigner that can speak Japanese well enough. These places weren’t being racist against non-Japanese, they were trying to deal with people who didn’t follow rules, couldn’t understand the process, and/or didn’t know the language which caused some kind of issue.

Just because there is a general policy against allowing foreigners into certain places (i.e. soaplands, etc) does not mean that the locale is strictly for Japanese people. If you hint to the staff (in Japanese) that you know the rules they’ll get the drift and let you have your soapy fun. How the hell do I know this? Did I start going to hostess clubs and soaplands without telling you? No, but I know someone who has done just this and this has worked for him very consistently. You might have thought that since it’s on a sign (and thus a rule) that the Japanese would follow it unthinkingly, but I’m here to tell you that, on many occasions, Japanese people can be pragmatic even if they’re shitty at making signs.

(Click here to read Part 2)

How did she copy herself like that?

She’s 37. I bet you didn’t expect that, huh? If you go on her site it has some details about herself in her profile. Ai Haruna isn’t her real name, (no biggie, that happens a lot), but if you know anything about Japanese names you know that Kenji isn’t a name that is unisex; this name is only for boys. What you’re looking at is someone that was born looking quite different than they do now. I bet you weren’t expecting that; don’t worry, no one here would know if it wasn’t for the fact that they tell you. What they call it here is ニューハーフ (New Half, Japanese for “I hate my body so I got a new one”).

Einhorn is a man

(If you want to see what she looked like when she was younger there’s two videos that can enlighten you: a performance she did in 1989 and a timeline from birth to age 20.)

I didn’t really know the meaning of ニューハーフ until recently since it’s not something that one searches for. So last Friday during class one of my students were talking in Japanese and they said ニューハーフ. I asked them what that meant and they really couldn’t tell me in English so they gave me an example, Ai Haruna.
I actually had no idea that she originally didn’t look like she does now (I didn’t see the shows I’ve linked to) so it was quite a surprise when the student gave her as an example.

So she’s gone from a strange looking guy into this. To me this looks like a change for the better but, since Japanese are still cut from the same cloth as everyone else, there are always the dumb and the assholish. At least here they don’t have any religion to hide their ignorance behind so they look like even larger assholes; and if you’ve been browsing the internet for some time you probably know how big assholes can be. Luckily, those people aren’t the majority and they will die at some point (maybe even Superman!).

So if you really hate being a man maybe you too can get a sex change and do stuff like this.

I can see your failure from here

A typical course looks like the one above, four rectangles with winding roads traversing the interior of each one. When you go to take the test you will make a couple of turns and weave through one of the rectangles. The roads in the rectangles are much narrower than the main road since they are meant to mimic some of the crazy strips of concrete that are somehow still considered roads.

When it’s your turn to drive, you have to make sure that your first move is not to the driver door (on the right), but to the front of the car. You have to check under the front of the car, not because it’s something you’ll ever do again until you run over an old woman, to make sure that there aren’t any obstructions. Remember all the times you’ve done this? Yep. After this you can get in the car. From here you adjust everything (seat, mirrors) so that you can use them all correctly before you start on your 5 minutes of fun.

So what are they looking for? A small part of this is checking whether or not you can keep a vehicle and the road, but they’re not really looking for this; what they really want you do to is follow a rigid set of rules that, for the most part, you’re never going to follow again. When you are driving you, obviously, have to check mirrors. They don’t want you to just check the mirrors, they want you to show they that you are doing it. This means that you need to do more than just move your eyes, you must move your head enough (more than you might expect) so that it’s easily noticeable to the examiner. Don’t do this (even if you’re checking your mirrors) and you’ll likely fail, even if you do everything else very well. Stop at a light or a stop sign and the car is even slightly in the plane of the big white stop strip and you’re losing points. Touch, not cross, any other line and you’re losing points (e.g. switch to a turning lane and graze the line in between the two lanes). They think you didn’t have your turn signal on long enough (3 seconds before turning) you’re losing points.

This is quite well known for anyone living in Japan and pretty much expected. From drivinglikeass.com:

But the skills test is the killer. Taking the skills test at the official center means being prepared to fail at least three or four times: almost no one passes the first time.

Besides the usual “major” violations, which result in immediate cessation of the skills test (hitting a pole while parking, not stopping for at least three seconds at stop signs), there are all manner of “minor” violations that, in the aggregate, will result in failure, including:

Not checking under and behind your car for animals or small children prior to getting in
Not adjusting your seat, seatbelt, and mirrors before starting the car
Not putting the emergency break on when you finish the course
Not leaving enough room on the side of the road for bikes to pass you
Touching the curb when parking
…not to mention all manner of less common sense things such as:

Failing to check mirrors in the “correct” order
Not responding with a polite “hai” (“yes” or “OK”) after the officer gives you instructions

If you don’t know the system then you’re going to run into a lot of issues; you could be an excellent driver, but if you’re not performing for them then you’ll probably end up with a big fail and the examiner will be quickly asking you if you can come the same time tomorrow, like you have nothing better to do than endlessly take a driving test.

You have a license? All that means is that you can drive in a closed course free of octopi.

This is another point that needs to be considered; they can (and do) fail you over small slights, which means that you need to take the test again and pay the center, again. Do they purposely fail people so that they can help the center receive more money? I can’t, and won’t, say since there isn’t really any way to prove that. With that said, however, they are a little quick to ask you when you can come back. This also goes to show that they’re not really worried about public safety nor your inability to control a large pile of metal.

“Sorry, but you failed. You did this and this wrong. So are you free tomorrow?”

There are many other reasons why they might fail you (mad, feel like it, don’t like you, feeling power-hungry), but these come with any job that gives any amount of power over another person; these reasons are applicable to a wide variety of jobs and locations and they’re probably a non-zero percentage of reasons for failing a test taker.

It can be a pain in the ass to take a driving test in Japan, but once you realize that what you’re doing is not testing potential, but your ability to perform and follow formalities. Once you understand this you’re already most of the way finished with the test.

Even if you only know a little about Japan, chances are good that you know the Japanese flag. Well, if you go to Japan it’s possible that you may never see an actual Japanese flag (or miss seeing the one or two that were actually up). What a completely different situation it is when you come to the US. The number of flags that some people display is staggering. And on the off chance that you don’t see someone with a flag, there’s a chance that they have something (or many things) that are red white and blue. Flags are displayed prominently on cars, in front of houses, on bikinis, as window stickers, and probably many other places.

Flags. There’s no place you can’t put them.

There are at least a half dozen flags (of varying sizes) in front of my parents’ house. Now this is all a little showy, but you wouldn’t really know it unless if you go somewhere else so that you have some kind of frame of reference. It can be quite surprising to find how infrequent a flag sighting can be in some countries. That is not to say that the US is alone in this regard or that you can’t find another country where a large number of home and businesses fly the country’s flag; what is different is the fervor put into the waving. This definitely isn’t something that is solely an American thing. For most countries it’s usually something that a small minority of their citizens do, but a few countries lead the pack in this area. The top dogs seem to be USA and China and given what’s happened this summer it looks like China might actually be #1; yet this is not a competition that many would like to win.

I rule. You suck. La la la.

Patriotism is fine, but it’s gone a little overboard when you get the “my country right or wrong” jingoist attitude that is often celebrated by many of the citizens of those two countries. In fact, since I had nothing else to go by I thought that this was standard fare. Little did I know that what many people consider patriotism is nothing like what I used to.

Patriotism in most places is a love of the country where you live and the feeling that, while there are nice places the world over, you have reasons for preferring this country over others. However, for many people in America patriotism is that the US is always right, always blessed by god, the best (healthcare, prosperity, etc) , but also that, in a sense, it’s a beacon of democracy in a world of shit. While I can in some sense understand where the first three come from I never really got how or why people can believe, to whatever degree, the final point, but I’ve seen it enough to know that it’s not a freak occurrence. I would find it sad if it wasn’t something ridiculously frightening in so many ways: the logical disconnect, the lack of a good grasp on the actual facts, the blind acceptance.

Don’t confuse this with nationalism (seen often in France, Japan, etc) which, for the most part, isn’t nearly as bad.

I’d never work with monkeys if it wasn’t for the fact that I’m surrounded by them.

Ruling out New York City, Chicago, Boston, Seattle, Portland, DC (to some degree) and maybe San Francisco, you immediately realize that to do anything that requires you to leave your residence will likely require you to use a vehicle, if you have one. Grocery store? Drive. Visit a friend? Drive. Go shopping? Drive. Work? There’s that car thing again. Yes, there are circumstances where one of these things might be possible for someone, but, just as the level 3 Wizard of Anecdotes always loses to the level 47 Demon of Obvious Truth, if you’re outside of the handful of exceptions you have little choice.

However, it’s not just the fact that you will most likely need to ride in a car, but that everything is so far away from everything else. It might seem like I’m repeating myself here, but there is a slight difference in the two points; the former relates to the lack of available or decent mass transportation and the latter is that the distance between building/places makes walking untenable in most places. Those living across one of the ponds that flank us on either side, even if they have one, probably don’t have to use a car if they feel like they want to leave their house.

There are a few of reasons why things are like this over here, cheap dinosaur juice, Mamie‘s baby’s daddy, and the American wet dream. I think the first one is self explanatory enough and in and of itself doesn’t produce a transportation system like the one found in the US. Eisenhower’s plan did have a huge effect on the development of not only the transportation system of “the city on the hill” but also led to an increase of the development of suburbs, which is also related to the third point. Lots of people in the US need to have lots of land, but I don’t know why they want it. I think that a lot of people must get some kind of orgasmic feeling from cutting the grass since you hardly see anyone do anything else with their yards. I’m not so sure about the orgasmic feeling though, I’ve never felt it and I think it’s because of some defect on my part. Nonetheless, we’ve had this hunger to have lots of land and be far away from each other for a long time. Maybe we’re land zombies?

Drink it up, that’s real dino tendon.

And seeing that this is the land of the comb over eagle, we can’t really have a good mass transportation system as that’s socialist (but the government using taxes to makes roads somehow isn’t) and anti-American so we all must drive 30 minutes to go to the mall and over an hour to get to work, for freedom.