As everyone probably knows by now, American-born Japanese heartthrob Leah Dizon recently announced that she is both married and pregnant.

Instructive in this announcement is the childishness with which dating, male-female relationships, marriage, and pregnancy is treated in Japan.

Here is a video of Leah’s announcement at a recent concert. Note the screams of shock and disbelief that a young 22-year-old woman would do such things. At the end of her announcement, Dizon says she will take some time off to have the baby, after which she plans to start performing again. She ends with a plea to her fans not to “toss her aside.”

With attitudes like this, it is no surprise that young people in Japan are shying away from marriage and that the population of the country is declining.

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.

It recently struck me, while standing in the candy aisle at my local super market, that living in a foreign country is a lot like being a kid again. It reminded me of standing in the candy aisle at my local Thrifty Drugs in Foster City, California. I must have been 7 or 8, and I wanted to taste it all. I wanted to work my way through every candy bar, every bag of caramels and M&Ms, every package of gum.

That’s what living in Japan is like, accept instead of just the candy, it’s everything. It’s entire stores of untasted foods, street upon street of unvisited restaurants, entire maps’ worth of untraveled lands. I want to see it all. Like a child, everything is new.

And also like a child, I am outside the culture. For kids, the world of adults is unknowable, a strange, distant place. It’s like that for me. I exist in the same space as the people I see around me and yet I am apart. Language plays a large part in this division. The more I can speak Japanese, the more I can participate. I can go from just buying that candy bar, to talking to the clerk about it and asking for recommendations.

And, like a child, I am becoming literate. Every day I increase my ability to read the world around me. The gulf of unknown kanji grows ever smaller. That sign that perplexed me last week now reveals itself to be an advertisement for an apartment rental agency. The place across the street from the grocery store? They cut hair, I can now read.

But mostly, like a child I am full of endless enthusiasm. There is so much new to experience, so much to do and see and taste. It is a wonderful position to be in, wonderful all the more so for the wisdom I have to know that this state will not last forever.

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.

Cyndi Lauper is in Japan right now doing a series of concerts. I saw her on the TV the other day as she did Time After Time, much like the following performance she did on TV in 2005.

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.

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.

Hey, JAPUNDITs, here’s a change to get your big break in modeling. Graphic designer Yukie Kaneko is looking for gaijin men to model her new fundoshi collection. Fundoshi are traditional Japanese undergarments that are similar to a loin cloth.

The shoots will be in Tokyo, both indoors and out. No compensation, but heck, how often is it that you can get your picture taken in the near buff.

Send e-mail here for more info: web@ichizen-jp.com

Via Jean Snow

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.

Video highlights from the 2008 Asakusa Samba Carnival in Tokyo.

The event started off hot and sweaty then the clouds opened up and the rain poured down. The samba performers kept going though they were soaked to the bone. The Samba girls looked none the worse for it though.

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.

Found this interesting letter to the editor on the Japan Times website.

‘Gaijin’ to Japanese eyes

By REIMI DAVIDSON
Honolulu

Regarding the Sept. 2 article “The ‘gaijin’ debate: Arudou responds”: Debito Arudou’s claim that the word “gaijin” is racist not only borders on whining but also smacks of something that could only be brought up by a white person. I’m part Japanese and part black, and I’ll tell you right now that I would rather be called a “gaijin” over “nigger” any day.

Arudou sounds like someone whose whiteness got him special treatment in the United States. He sounds as if he must have been shocked when he went to another country and realized that being white there wasn’t the same as it was in the U.S. All of a sudden, he was in the marginalized category normally reserved for nonwhite minorities.

I have news: “Citizenship” does NOT make one part of the Japanese race, no matter how much one wishes it. In the eyes of the Japanese, Arudou is a gaijin. Japan is not where he is from. Arudou appears to be going through a major identity crisis. To think that one can walk into another country, change citizenship and then expect the whole country to accept one not as a foreigner but as a fellow Japanese is something ripped out of the pages of Western colonialism.

In case anyone is interested, gaijin-turned-Japanese gadabout Debito Arudou has published another piece in the Japan Times about the word “gaijin.”

Debito also recently did an online survey, which he reports on here.

I’ve written a series of articles about the time I spent in Japan. I hope you enjoy both these and my further contributions to JAPUNDIT.

• How I Got there
• Culture Shock
• Exploration as Recreation
• A Cross-Country Drive
• Combini and Vending Machines
• Bicycling and Injury
• Shopping Blind
• The Elusive Asian Girlfriend
• Nonverbal Communication
• So You Want to be an Expatriate
• All Good Things

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.