One of the more unexpected aspects of living in Japan as an American is the presence of political posters for candidates in the Japan Communist Party.

I’m pretty sure most people don’t think of the words “Japanese” and “Communist” together very often, but the surprising fact is that the JCP is Japan’s second largest minority party, with 400,000 members. Because the Parliamentary system in Japan makes it possible for small political parties to win some representation, there are currently 16 national Diet members who are affiliated with the JCP, something that wouldn’t be possible in the U.S. with our two-party system.

The Japan Communist Party isn’t pushing for the kind of Soviet-era ideas Americans usually associate with Communism — the Japanese are far too conservative politically for that — but they do oppose the special military relationship Japan has with the U.S., as well as any cooperation by Japan’s military with foreign wars, even in a support capacity, as going against Japan’s Constitution.

Supposedly a 1929 novel called Kanikousen (Crab-Canning Ship), which portrays the hard life of workers on a ship at sea, is experiencing a boom among younger readers, which is causing conjecture that larger numbers of young people will consider joining the JCP. On the other hand, this could just be the summer’s short-lived “My Boom,” as something that’s popular with an individual for a short time is called.

You can pick almost any area to compare Japan with the U.S.: history, culture, sports — or if you like, convenience stores. The modern combini came to Japan in 1974 with the opening of the first Seven-Eleven here, a project which got its start when Japanese businessman Hideo Shimizu took a bus trip across the U.S. looking for the “next big thing” and fell in love with the idea of stores that offered items customers might need to buy on short notice, sold in a uniform way. Now there are dozens of convenience store chains here, including Lawson (”your town’s hot station”), Sunkus (the name is a bizarre merging of “sun” and “thanks”), FamilyMart, MiniStop, Heart-In, and Yamazaki Daily Store.

While most of the foods sold at U.S. convenience stores are pre-packaged and highly processed, many of the offerings in their Japanese counterparts are downright wholesome, with traditional Japanese-style food (bento and onigiri), Western favorites like cucumber and strawberry sandwiches, bread products including sliced bread as well as specialty items like Curry Pan, a good selection of salads, dozens of types of bottled Asian and Western teas, aloe-flavored yogurt, and so on.

Convenience stores are the salvation of the single male since there are enough healthy choices that you can usually eat pretty well there without resorting to that most famous of bachelor foods, instant ramen, although they sell that, too.

You won’t find the iconic Slurpee or Big Gulp at Seven-Elevens in Japan, but I’d give them up any day in exchange for niku-man, a steamed Chinese bun filled with meat that’s great in the winter.

Combini offer other forms of convenience, too, like a full color copier and digital photograph printer, the ability to pay your electric and phone bills at the cash register, shipping services for sending packages, and increasingly, real banking services, including making cash withdrawals and deposits using the smart ATM.

That first pilot store back in 1974 has really paid off: Seven-Eleven’s parent company Seven&i Holdings purchased its parent company in 2005 and now owns the brand worldwide.

One interesting concept I learned about soon after coming to Japan was jiko shokai, which just means “self introduction” but which seems to have a special cultural significance here.

In almost any situation where people will be interacting, be it a classroom, a part-time job or the local PTA board, a new member will always stand and make a formal self introduction, telling the others their name (including how to write it in kanji), where they’re from, what their hobbies are, and so on.

Giving this information to the other members of the group allows everyone to categorize the newcomer properly, and afterwards the others will do their own jiko shokai in turn.

These self introductions are also heavily used in ESL teaching, too, since formal self introductions are seen as the “most basic” form of human communication in Japan. Back when I was an ESL teacher, I taught children a lot, and I made sure to spend a lot of time teaching self-introductions, since I knew that the parents of my students expected that their kids have this ability before anything else and would complain if their kids couldn’t recite basic information about themselves to others.

Most Western nations are facing the problem of aging populations, but Japan is really leading the pack, with its combination of a very low birth rate, healthier diet and a good medical system.

Japanese older people are just like elderly from any other part of the world, sometimes friendly and interesting to talk to, and other times unwilling to take crap from anyone as they dive for the last pair of shoes at a department store bargain sale. As an American living in Japan, it’s can be interesting to strike up conversations with older Japanese, who will often talk about what the war years were like for them, or the time they saw General MacArthur, and there’s an unspoken acknowledgment of all that’s changed in the past 60 years.

Since it’s generally expected that the oldest son or daughter will take over the family house and care for the parents in their silver years, elderly folks generally have the benefit of lots of family around them, at least in the semi-rural prefecture where I live. Partially because of this system, and also (I’ve been told) because Japanese rarely leave the area where their family grave is located, you don’t see people migrating to a different part of the country when they retire as is the case with Florida.

The main social activity of Japanese retired people seems to be going to the doctor’s office every day to sit and chat with friends while they wait to be seen by the doctor for some (usually imagined) pain, and if you ever get sick in Japan you’d better have a strategy for getting to the doctor’s office early.

While most of the older people living in my neighborhood are very genki (healthy, full of energy), there’s one poor woman whose back is stuck at a 90 degree angle, making her unable to stand up at all. I’d always assumed this problem came a lifetime of planting rice by hand, but supposedly it’s caused by a chronic vitamin B1 deficiency that was a problem in the first few decades of the 20th century.

Autumn is upon us, and in Japan that means one thing: School Sports Festival, a special event held at all elementary schools where kids run relays, do tug-of war, have egg toss competitions, perform dances that they’ve been practicing for months, and so on.

Known as undo-kai in Japanese, the Japanese tradition of a special day when kids can show off their athletic abilities to their parents began in 1874 when an English teacher named Frederick William Strange organized the first “outdoor games” as a way for Japanese to learn about Western sports.

Today, Sports Festivals are held across Japan, which turns out to be quite profitable for companies like Panasonic and Sony, who are all too happy to sell this year’s hot new video cameras to all the oya-baka (”parent-fool”), the word for parents who go ga-ga filming their own kids.

The other day my daughter’s elementary school had her last Sports Festival, and we dutifully gathered to cheer her on during the various events she was in.

It’s an annual tradition at the school that the sixth graders treat everyone to a brass band performance of the theme to Space Battleship Yamato, aka Star Blazers, and everyone did a great job.

I remember my first payday after coming to work as a teacher in Japan, being handed an envelope containing my entire month’s salary in cash, which was quite a surprise to me.

Japan has always been a very cash-oriented society, with no equivalent to personal checks or money orders, and when making purchases most people will pay in 10,000 yen bills. Credit cards exist here of course, but they’re much less common than in the U.S., and to get one you need to pass a strict credit check and have been employed at the same company for at least a year — a far cry from the pre-approved credit cards I’d get in my mailbox back in college.

A few years ago, we bought the plot of land behind our home, I remember going to pay for it in cash, counting out the bills for the previous owner as we finalized the contract.

Of course, the only thing constant in the world is change, and Japanese are slowly adopting alternate ways of paying for products, such as Suica, a rechargeable contactless smart card that can be used to pay for train tickets, food purchases and so on.

One of the most innovative ideas I’ve seen in a long time are the cell phone with Suica cards built into them, so all you need is your phone and you can pay for just about anything.

Each year the organization that publishes the Standardized Kanji Test announces the “kanji of the year,” the character that best sums up the events of the past twelve months.

Previous characters have included inochi (life) in 2005 to mark the terrible young lives lost in suicides that year, tora (tiger) due to the historic Hanshin Tigers’ victory in the Japan pennant, and ikusa (war) in 2001, when the U.S. invaded Iraq.

The kanji of the year for 2007 was nise, meaning “fake” or “fraud,” due to the large number of food-related scandals that became news, including a famous restaurant caught labeling normal meat as high-grade Kobe beef and serving leftovers to customers, a confectionery company that sprayed water on stale slices of cake so they’d look fresh enough to sell, and Hokkaido-based “Meat Hope,” which despite its awesome name got in trouble for intentionally mis-labeling its products.

So far, 2008 has been more of the same as food scandals continue. The most egregious one so far has been a company called Mikasa Foods, which bought inedible rice that had been contaminated with pesticides and seawater (it said) for use in glue production. In reality, it relabeled the rice and sold it to more than 370 companies, which used it to manufacture everything from food to sake to beer and more — bleah.

I went to Tokyo to meet a friend the other day. He’s working for the prestigious Tokyo University, the top ranked school in Japan, and it was interesting to take in a part of the city I’d not seen much of before.

The hotel we stayed at was called Eminasu, and I was surprised to see a large sign stating proudly that the hotel had been built with money from the National Pension System, the equivalent to Social Security in Japan. Yes, there’s so much money sloshing around in funds like the pension system and Japan Post deposit accounts that legislators are quite unable to keep their paws off it, and regularly launch grand construction projects to foster economic development, provide services for citizens and (of course) secure lucrative employment for the former government employees who were directly involved with said projects when they retire.

Sometimes the system works okay, as in the case of the hotel we stayed at, providing a good room at a slightly subsidized rate since the government-operated hotel didn’t need to generate a profit. But there are plenty of horror stories of massively wasteful construction projects made with taxpayer funds, like a sprawling resort hotel at the top of a mountain that no one ever stayed at and a now-bankrupt theme park designed as a replica of a Turkish village, complete with a full-sized Trojan horse. How fitting.

They have these hotels all over. You can stay at this one in Kyoto if you like.My hotel room was $80 per night, so I presume the ones in Kyoto will likely be the same.

Don’t tell anyone, but I’m on a diet. You could call it the “iPhone diet” because I’m using one of the many applications (iTunes link) for my iPhone to track daily calorie intake.

My plan is to eat whatever I want while accurately recording everything, which will help me identify the stuff I’ve been eating that’s the most harmful. To help me out, my wife bought some bad-tasting medicine, saying, “Now, this is kampo, so it will definitely work.”

A word that literally means “Chinese way,” kampo refers to the traditional herbal medicine of China, and it occupies an almost mythical place in the minds of the Japanese, in effect being a complete class of medical science that’s separate from Western medicine.

Many products, from energy drinks to various “enhancers” to Yomeshu (a kind of medicinal sake loaded with Chinese herbs) advertise themselves as making use of the magical power of kampo to relieve symptoms. Many kampo medicines have the full backing of the medical community here, and health insurance even covers them.

In the U.S., however, traditional Chinese medicines are completely ignored by almost every major company.

It’d be interesting if there were some really effective drugs sitting right under our noses that have been in use in China for thousands of years.

There’s a sad statistic that’s on the rise in Japan these days: divorce.

The combination of the country’s rapidly aging society, high stress levels and a new law that enables a woman to claim up to half of her husband’s company pension is causing the number of older couples getting a “vintage year divorce” to rise.

When I was an English teacher, I taught a wide range of students, including a fair number of housewives, and I remember being surprised by the venom some of the women were capable of spitting when discussing their husbands. I didn’t understand at the time that at least some of this husband-bashing was part of a Japanese social custom you might call “out-humbling each other,” as women try to show that they have the most worthless, lazy husband in the room. (Japanese mothers and grandmothers will do the same thing when discussing their own children with others, having competitions to see whose kids were the most baka, and I’ve had to expressly forbid this kind of talk in my own home.)

The divorce rate in Japan is still comparatively low — currently around 2.2 per 1000 people per year, compared with 4 in the U.S. and 2.6 in the U.K. — but finding someone who is batsu-ichi (lit. “one strike out”) is a lot more common than it has been in the past. Coupled with the trend of women either marrying much later or not at all, it Japan has some tough issues to face as the 21st century progresses.

I write often about how Japanese consider themselves to be a decade or so “behind” the U.S. and Europe, and almost take it for granted that their country is less advanced than the West.

For example, I’ve heard people here remark that no one from Japan could have created a company like YouTube, capable of serving videos to every point on the globe, because no one here could think on such a nakedly large scale.

Although it’s all too easy to judge Japan from my American point of view, there are some core areas that could be improved, starting with thinking about the web. Yahoo Japan’s video site would like to be #1 here, but it not only requires Windows 2000/XP/Vista to work, but you have to be using Internet Explorer, which is a real bummer for Linux, Mac and all Firefox users.

Japanese web companies don’t seem terribly interested in the outside world, either: Mixi.jp, the leading Facebook-like site in Japan, requires an email address with a Japanese ending (yahoo.co.jp as opposed to yahoo.com) to sign up.

Banks can be frustrating, too. Back in my single days, I went hitchhiking up to Hokkaido, being sure to bring my bank card so I could get money from the “cash corner” (ATM) when I needed it. Unfortunately, banks and their ATMs were closed for the Golden Week holidays back then, so I wasn’t able to get any cash out all week. (Banks have gotten better, but are still frustrating — it still costs $6 to send $50 to someone’s bank account, as there are no personal checks in Japan.)

In the past, many of the most innovative ideas flowed from Japan, like the Sony Walkman or the idea of putting a camera in a cell phone, but I don’t think something like Skype could ever have been invented here.

I remember back in the 1980s, when Japan’s educational system was held up as a success story for other nations to follow.

While there certainly are some good elements the country’s approach to education — like the idea of using competition to get students to become goal-oriented and apply themselves in ways I could never have dreamed of when I was that age — not every aspect of schools here would be appreciated in other countries.

The primary goal of education in Japan seems to be to help create happy members of society through inclusion in groups, and there are several mechanisms for promoting this appreciation of your own place as a member of the larger group, for example the complex system of sports and other character-building clubs that students are compelled to join in Junior High School.

Whereas American Junior High and High School kids will each have random schedules, Japanese classes are fixed, with all 40 students of class 3-A staying in the same classroom for every hour of every day, as different teachers come and go depending on what the next subject is. One side effect of this is that all classes in Elementary and Junior High learn the exact same material, no matter what their individual level might be.

My daughter was taking some lessons with a private tutor in the U.S. over the summer, and I was discussing the possibility that she might be borderline dyslexic with her teacher, since I am myself. The tutor asked me, “Well, if that’s the case, they must have some kind of special class for her in Japan, right?” The answer is no — unless a child is so different they’re not able to go to their normal school, everyone will be treated exactly the same no matter what, the better for the harmony of the group.

One of the cardinal rules for gaijin coming to Japan is, try your best to make it over here as a university student.

College life in Japan is a kind of magical time between childhood and adulthood, mercifully free of the stress that normally comes with studying at university, where you can make lifelong friends and see Japan from a viewpoint you won’t ever get to enjoy again.

I was too poor to come to Japan when I was in college, so I had to come here as a shakai-jin, a “society person” or full-time worker, which colored my experiences in a different way, but I’d have given anything to be able to visit Japan during school.

Many universities offer study abroad programs that allow students to spend a semester or a year living in Japan, so if you or a Japan-focused young person you know would like to come to Japan for a year, start looking into what’s available.

Remember my theory that every young American should be made to live for a year outside their home country, which would do wonders for the way we view our own country and the rest of the world.

Next time you’re in Osaka, consider visiting the Monofuku Ando Memorial Ramen Museum, a sprawling facility commemorating the achievements of the Taiwan-born Japanese inventor of instant ramen.

In the postwar years, Japanese were eating bread made with wheat flower brought in by the occupying U.S. military, and Momofuku (then operating a small business extracting salt from seawater) wondered why they didn’t eat noodles instead, which were more familiar to the Japanese people.

In 1957, a bank he was director of went under, taking his personal finances down along with it. In order to get out of debt, he returned to his idea about noodles, trying to find a more convenient way to prepare them. The result was Chikin [sic] Ramen, a delicious chicken flavored raman that’s still being sold after fifty years. (I had some for lunch today.)

At the museum, you can see different varieties of Cup Ramen from around the world, like broccoli ramen from Germany or curry flavored noodles from India, which are made without the soup base so that the noodles can be eaten with the hands, as is the custom in that country. Cup Ramen in all Western countries have noodles that are shorter than in Japan, to make them easier to eat with a fork.

The museum sports a virtual reality room showing what happens as ramen is made, from the viewpoint of the raman itself, and afterwards you can mosey up to the Instant Ramen Bar and order some ramen with custom toppings that you can specify. (One of the most popular flavors is Seafood Milk, ugh…)

Japan has a new Prince of Tennis, by the name of Kei Nishikori, who is kicking butt in the U.S. open right now after his big win against David Ferrer over the weekend, making him the first Japanese tennis player to advance to the 4th round since 1937.

Born in in rural Shimane Prefecture in 1989, he took up a racket at the age of five and would hit balls against the side of his house for many hours, showing a remarkable aptitude for the sport.

He took the incredible step of leaving Japan behind, crossing over to the U.S. at the age of 13 to be trained at the IMG Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy, which caused quite a lot of buzz at the time. As usual, Japanese who compete in the world stage and raise the image of Japan in the eyes of foreigners become overnight sensations in here, and suddenly his name is on everyone’s lips.

I certainly hope that Nishikori-kun can follow stars like Ichiro, Hideki Matsui and soccer player Hidetoshi Nakata in redefining the international image of Japan through sports.

Note: Nishikori finally was defeated and did not make it to the best 8.

Languages are interesting because each one has its own unique features.

For example, double negatives like “I didn’t see nothing” are considered incorrect in English, although they’re perfectly permissible in Spanish. If you’ve watched some anime in Japanese or had dinner with a Japanese family, you may have noticed the word that’s spoken before eating, itadakimasu. Essentially meaning “I humbly receive the gift of this food” or less obsessively “let’s eat,” it’s a polite way to thank the person who made the food for you, and the word is interesting because it illustrates some of the “back end” of Japanese grammar.

There are two verbs for “to receive” in Japanese, morau and itadaku; the former is a neutral word, which you’d use when telling your wife about the movie tickets you got from a co-worker, but the latter is a polite word that basically means to receive something from someone socially higher than you, like your boss or a guest.

Since subjects are often left off of Japanese sentences, it’s conceivable that you might find yourself in a linguistic situation that called for you to understand the overall context of a sentence based on what verb someone chose to use.

For example, my mother-in-law might say to me, Itadakimashita yo, which essentially means “[we] received [something from someone].” It would be up to me to figure out the larger context, namely that we’d received some gift from someone that my mother-in-law wants to be polite to who’s standing nearby, and I should come and say thank you to that person for the gift.

Japanese can be a confusing language, but with practice, some of these situations start to make sense.

This might be more Japanese than you wanted to know. And if so, I apologize ^_^

My wife is hooked on Kandora, short for Kankoku dorama or South Korean soap operas, and it seems every time I walk through the living room she’s got another one on the TV.

When I ask her what’s so interesting about the shows, she gets very animated. “Oh, they’re nothing like Japanese dramas,” she says. “They’re more intense, and the stories are much more involved and interesting. The characters really change and grow.”

It struck me that she sounded like me back in the 80s, describing why Japanese animation was so superior to whatever else was on TV back then for people to watch (I actually can’t remember at this point).

It seems to me that the human brain is wired to appreciate things that are fresh and new, and when a concept comes along that is totally unique, people are drawn to it irresistibly, which goes a long way towards explaining the revolution that Japanese animation has brought to the world over the past 20 years. My wife is finding that Korean series like Time Between Dog and Wolf, Spring Waltz and Something Happened in Bali are offering her a higher level of drama and depth, sometimes moving her to tears with their (often sad) stories.

The Japanese soaps, with their lighter and more formulaic stories that you can usually guess ahead of time, don’t seem to be doing it for her.

There are three kinds of employees in Japan: full time, part time, and arubaito.

The last type, the name for which comes from the german word for “work” (arbeit), refers to contract-less employees who are paid by the hour and work irregular or semi-temporary schedules, as differentiated from full company employees, who have benefits like twice-annual bonuses and vacation time, and semi-official part-timers, who also have some formal benefits.

One of the biggest trends in post-bubble Japanese society is the tendency of younger workers to shun traditional full-time employment, instead being content to work informal jobs staffing video rental stores and gas stations, tutoring at evening cram schools, and so on. According to a new government report, an amazing 35% of the workforce now occupies these “non-regular” employment positions, exchanging freedom to change jobs at will and less on-the-job stress for lower job security.

Why so many would choose to work as freeters (as these part-time and temporary workers are called) puzzles older Japanese, who of course benefited greatly from the stable economic growth of the postwar period. The reasons ‘baito is so popular are many, but one big one is that many Japanese have come to value their own leisure time over work.

This is a good thing of course, although I personally consider the industriousness of the Japanese people as a whole to be no less than a National Treasure for the country, and something that I hope will continue into the future.

It’s funny how so many of the foods eaten by the Japanese on a daily basis aren’t very Japanese at all.

Sure, people here eat plenty of things that are associated closely with Japan, like soba and udon noodles, sushi and sashimi, or donburi (”big bowl”) dishes like gyudon (beef bowl) or oyakodon, the “parent and child” rice bowl consisting of chicken and egg cooked together and put over rice, but there are many non-Japanese foods consumed here, too.

Of course, there are many dishes that have been imported from China, like gyoza (pot stickers) or ramen, although the Japanese don’t consider the stir-fried yakisoba noodles to be Chinese in origin, much as they look like chow mein to me.

The Japanese have internalized foods from many other countries, including Italian spaghetti, French croquettes (which go so well with that Japanese tonkatsu sauce) or American “hamburg steak” (steak made from ground beef).

The single most popular food in Japan might just be that ubiquitous curry rice, the thick curry sauce served over steaming rice, which was imported from India via Britain during the Meiji Era. We probably eat it 4-5 times a week at our house.

I have a rather strange problem: I don’t know my own kids. Or rather, I know the half that speaks Japanese, that works diligently on homework and reads books or plays video games in Japanese.

The English-speaking side of my children is something I’m less familiar with, for the main reason that my kids are unable to function naturally in English when my Japanese wife or I am around. One thing I’ve learned from becoming bilingual is that once you have a certain “language relationship” with someone, it’s almost impossible to change later on.

I speak Japanese to my wife but English to my kids, however everyone speaks Japanese back to me, and no amount of pretending to not understand will get my kids to switch to English — kind of like Han Solo and Chewbacca, conversing in two different languages at once. That’s why we send our kids to the U.S. every summer, so they can get a good dose of fun American culture and speak lots of English.

I hear reports from my family about how open and outgoing my kids are, using English just as naturally as if they’d been born in the States, but I never get to see it for myself since if I am around, everything reverts to Japanese.

Since a person’s personality in one language can be quite different in another, I feel as if there’s a big part of my own children I’m unable to know.