In ancient times in Tokyo [meaning in the 1950s] I wrote a weekly column entitled “Only in Japan” that covered events, ideas and products that were unique to the country.

     Many of these things appeared humorous or childish to the average Westerner, but some of them, particularly unusual products and odd brand names, went on to become huge commercial successes.

      Among these early things was the name “Walkman” that Sony chose for its new portable radio, and a variety of children’s products introduced by Sanrio Company under the brand name “Hello Kitty.”

     The Walkman brand name took a little while to catch on overseas, but in Japan it made perfect sense…you could listen to the tiny radio while walking around.  Hello Kitty products were an instant hit in Japan because they were terminally cute – and the Japanese have an obsessive addiction to cuteness.

     It turned out that most Westerners are also turned on by cuteness if it doesn’t go to extremes, and Hello Kitty products are now bestsellers world-wide.

     Despite all of the fundamental changes that have occurred in Japan in the last 50-plus years there are still many “only in Japan” things that add to the ambiance of life.

    A new and intriguing “only in Japan” phenomenon is printing popular comic and animation characters, as well as the profiles of famous comedians, on toilet paper.

     “Character toilet paper” has, in fact, become one of the country’s hottest souvenir and gift items among younger Japanese and foreign tourists alike.  And by toilet paper standards, the rolls are not cheap – going for more than twice the amount of plain paper.

    Animation studios, entertainment companies and others have boarded the character toilet paper bandwagon, opening their own retail shops.

     The owner of Tokyo Atom Shop in Tokyo Central Station says that some of his customers – both local commuters and travelers – buy up to 50 rolls at a time to give as gifts.

     The shop at the National Museum for Emerging Science and Innovation sells a line of character toilet paper called Astronomical Toilet Paper. I don’t know what “astronomical” refers to, but it apparently appeals to young women, said to be the main buyers.

     Toilet paper sold at a shop called Yoshimoto TV Street in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district, owned by media giant Yoshimoto Kogyo, features profiles of comedians that the company represents.

     The comedians obviously don’t object to their descriptions being printed on paper that is used to wipe indiscriminate derrieres.  One, in fact, is quoted as saying he finds this new form of publicity quite amusing.

     Without intending to resort to ribaldry, the most amusing toilet incident I ever witnessed occurred at a bar that used to be across the street from Shimbashi Station just south of the famed Ginza shopping mecca. 

     One evening in the mid-1950s I took an American friend and his wife to the bar for a few drinks. After a while the wife, who happened to be quite tall, noted that she had to go to the toilet. I pointed to a narrow hallway, and said: “First door on the right.”

     The toilet was about the size of a telephone booth and squat-style, with an elongated ceramic “bowl” over an aperture in the floor.  My friend’s wife had a bit of difficulty getting into the toilet, but she did it.

    Once inside the toilet she was able to squat down easy enough but when done she could not stand up or pull up her panties.  Finally, in desperation, she opened the door and waddled out into the hallway in full view of the bar patrons. There, she stood up, nonchalantly pulling her undies up at the same time.

     As she approached our booth, her husband and I were nearly choking in an effort to avoid laughing but she was smiling broadly. “Go ahead and laugh before you bust a gut!” she said.

     Toilets in present-day Japan include the most high-tech commodes and urinals in the world. They take your temperature, check your blood pressure, analyze your leftovers, and if you want, transmit the results to your doctor.  How times have changed!

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To see a list and synopses of books by Boyé Lafayette De Mente, go to www.cultural-guide-books-on-china-japan-korea-mexico.com. One of his latest titles: The Myth of Intelligent Life on Planet Earth!

Slate.com alerted me to a new movie which may be of interest to many Japundit readers. Sukiyaki Western Djando sounds bizzare to me but RottenTomatoes.com, my movie website of choice, attributes an impressive 68% positive reviews and the Slate.com review is positive as well.

Rotten Tomatoes’ synopsis is as follows:

Two connoisseurs of violence–prolific Japanese director Takashi Miike and American icon Quention Tarantino–team up for this genre mash-up. SUKIYAKI WESTERN DJANGO follows two clashing clans in Japan as they both try to lure a talented shooter to their side. Tarantino makes a brief appearance in this film that pays homage to both the spaghetti western and classic Japanese cinema.

Highlights from Slate.com’s review:

Welcome to Sukiyaki Western Django (First Look), the English-language Western by Japanese director Takashi Miike. The all-Japanese cast, augmented by Quentin Tarantino in two cameo roles, learned their English dialogue phonetically and attack their lines as if the words were small furry animals that need to be beaten into submission. The dialogue is crammed with weird, Christopher Walken-esque line readings and bizarre placement of emphases—phrases like “You old biddy,” “Dang!” and “You reckon?” become hilariously divorced from meaning. But, like an alcoholic reduced to drinking sterno, the more you drink, the more brain cells you fry, and the better it tastes. Before long you not only start to understand Miike’s “through the looking glass” English but also to appreciate the cadences. It’s something like the dialogue in Deadwood or Cormac McCarthy’s writing: stiff, alien, occasionally silly but not without a hypnotic elegance all its own.

But why? The answer is simple: It’s a Takashi Miike film. The hardest-working man in showbiz, he’s made close to 80 movies, ranging from the good to the bad to the ugly, and if he’s going to make a Western, then it’s going to pay tribute to the truth that Westerns have never been solely an American undertaking—they’re an international language. With a title that’s one part Japanese (sukiyaki: the everything-in-a-bowl beef dish) and one part Italian (Django: the title character of Sergio Corbucci’s 1966 spaghetti-Western classic), Miike offers up an explosion of influences that mocks the idea of a monoculture that’s immune to foreign influence. Sukiyaki Western Django is a blend of Buddhist philosophy, film noir fatalism, Shakespeare’s Henry VI, and Japan’s very own 12^th-century Genpei War. It’s a Wild West pageant of American history seen through Japanese eyes, reducing our entire frontier mythology to an ultraviolent grab for gold.

Miike’s Sukiyaki Western is a way of paying homage to this cross-cultural melting pot, and he shuffles and reshuffles iconic images like cards in a magician’s deck: a victim of a lynching hung from a torii gate; cowboys wearing six shooters and wielding samurai swords; a saloon keeper slinging edamame. It may not make literal sense, but emotionally it feels right. Comic-book writer Alan Moore once said that if we could really view the past it would look more like science fiction than history, and the distancing effect produced by Miike’s style blows the cobwebs off the genre with a burst of machine gun fire.

Blaine Harden of the Washington Post penned a thought-provoking article about modern Japanese women that touches on many topics which have been raised here on Japundit. It asks why women are postponing or even eschewing marriage and children; a trend which I, too, have seen. Off the top of my head, I can name about 10 single Japanese women friends in their mid-to-late thirties; far fewer than the number who are married.

Takako Katayama has not closed the door on marriage and children. When she meets girlfriends for dinner, they ask each other, “Where are the good guys?” But she refuses to settle for a man who works long hours, declines to share in child-rearing and sees marriage mainly as a way to acquire lifetime live-in help.

“I want a mature, equal-partner kind of marriage,” she said. “Anyway, there are complete lives without a baby.”

Therein lies a dismal prognosis for Japan and for many of the other prosperous nations of East Asia. In numbers that alarm their governments, Asian women are delaying marriage and postponing childbirth. In Japan, the percentage of women who remain single into their 30s has more than doubled since 1980.

“We need to organize our society so that women and families will be able to raise children while working,” Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda said in an interview in May. “I think we still lack adequate efforts on that front.”

This year, Fukuda’s government is pushing a “work-life balance” program that addresses the country’s famously punishing work ethic. It pressures companies to shoo workers (primarily men) out of the office at night. The intent is to improve the quality of family life and, in the process, make more babies.

The stakes are high here in the world’s second-largest economy, which now has the world’s highest proportion of people over 65 and lowest proportion of children under 15. According to a recent forecast, population loss will strip Japan of 70 percent of its workforce by 2050.

Here is the open thread for this weekend.

Please feel free to discuss or comment on anything you like.

Normal commenting rules do not apply.

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Are you a maniac or an otaku? No, this has nothing to do with stalking or hikikomori. It has to do with levels of interest in a hobby.

I’ve been accused of being a maniac numerous times by Japanese speakers. The first time I heard the word, I thought, excuse me? It took me a second but I realized that I was not being accused of being some kind of ax-wielding killer but merely an enthusiast. Maniakku (マニアック) essentially means enthusiast, as in a sports maniac. In that case, I am undeniably a maniakku. I avidly collect movies and music, and when listing off favorite obscure movies or albums I am often laughingly called maniakku by the listener, who has not heard of any of them.

Where I draw the line, though, is being called otaku. Lately the word has become kind of cool, particularly in the West where it is equated with Japanese culture fandom, but the original meaning of the word (pertaining to fandom, not the original original meaning of “your honorable house”) contains an element of social awkwardness, of an unwillingness or inability to function normally in society. I may have spent one too many Saturday afternoons digging through dusty crates of vinyl while my less-obsessed friends went to the park or the beach, but it’s not like I prefer the company of my records.

I guess it comes down to semantics. Do you ally yourself with the current crop of otaku 2.0 who dance in the streets of Akiba and spend large portions of your paycheck on anime figurines, or do you spend large portions of your paycheck on vinyl and overseas DVDs, or re-enacting Civil War battles or playing Fantasy Football or building WWII models or… Hmm, I guess there’s not much of a difference after all.

What does everyone else think?

I caught this amazingly talented guy on an NHK special yesterday and was totally blown away. Get ready to hear the ukelele as you probably have never heard it before.

For a bit of balance, and following on from our article on blue bees the other day, let’s take a look at the other end of apiological scale.

If those gentle, quiet blue bees were old ladies on trundling mamachari, then vespa mandarinia would be helicopter gunships.

For vespa mandarinia is the giant asian hornet, and if you’ve yet to meet one, believe me, that name is no exaggeration…

(if you’re in any way phobic, leave now)

Magibon

Magibon is an internet personality on the video-sharing website YouTube.

As of August 8, 2008, Magibon leads YouTube Japan’s All time top list. Magibon is also a member of the Youtube Partner Program.

Magibon has been invited and flown to Japan by a Japanese Internet TV Station GYAO for a media appearance. She has been interviewed twice by the Japanese Weekly Playboy magazine.

Magigon on YouTube

As reported over on Japan News Junkie the video below has been causing quite an uproar on the Japanese Internet.

It features two female Nagasaki University students who perform a dance (and flash a little upskirt) to a tune from the erotic game TimeLeap in front of the Atomic Dome in Hiroshima

Some are saying it it is insulting to the souls of the people who died in the A-bombing of the city. Others are saying it is no big deal.

What say you Japundits?

Via Kotaku