I was flittering around on Twitter today and noticed a question posted by someone who had just been in Japan (Dr. Beth Meyer), asking why buffets over here are called baiking (viking).

I replied it was because of: buffet > smorgasbord > From Sweden > Land of the Vikings

Dr. Beth then told me she had found a longer (and much more interesting but unsubstantiated) story of the origins of the term here.

Would any of the Japundits like to chime in on this?

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.

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.

The Japanese government is banking on the overwhelming power exerted by nicotine over spineless smokers in its search for new tax revenues.

A report by the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare says that the government can expect to earn an additional 9 trillion yen in tax revenue over the next 10 years by raising the price of cigarettes to 1,000 yen a pack.

“Many people won’t be able to give up, even if they want to, so raising the price will lead to an increase in tax income,” said a representative of the ministry’s research team.

The ministry carried out a survey of over 20,000 smokers on the Internet, with results showing that if prices were increased from 300 to 1,000 yen a pack, 96 percent would try and give up smoking. However, a previous survey by the Central Social Insurance and Medical Council revealed that even with the best medical treatment, the success rate of giving up smoking for a year is only 33 percent. So even accounting for those who can cut down, and demand dropping to 36 percent of the previous year, the research team still predicts a net tax revenue increase of 560 billion yen in the first year. In the next year, when many ex-smokers take up the habit again, demand would bounce back by 40-49 percent, with an extra 1.27 trillion yen a year going into government coffers.

The currently-planned price increase to 500 yen is predicted to make an extra 4 trillion yen in tax over the next 10 years.