Culture

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25
Feb 11

Properly Greeting Your Japanese Host

If you spend a length of time in Japan–or even if you’re just there for vacation–you may be asked to join a Japanese family for dinner at their home. Knowing ahead of time what’s expected of you as a guest can help you leave your Japanese hosts with a favorable impression. Although most Japanese are more lenient with foreigners and won’t be terribly offended if you don’t act like a proper Japanese guest, they’re sure to appreciate the gesture if you take the time to learn basic manners for guests in Japan.

When joining your Japanese hosts for dinner, you’re not expected to bring a food dish to be eaten during the dinner. You are, however, expected to bring a wrapped gift for your hosts, if you’re following Japanese etiquette. Ideally, you will choose a gift that represents the country you’re from, or even more specifically, the state, province, or city you’re from. Gifts that cannot be easily purchased in Japan are the best (although, if invited after you’ve arrived, you may need to purchase them from a US importer or even have the items shipped ahead of time). At least one gift for each family member in the hosting family (in one wrapped package) is even better.

Think small gifts that are neither incredibly expensive nor incredibly cheap, but erring on the side of inexpensive is wise so you don’t pressure your hosts into thinking that they owe you for an expensive gift. Non-perishable foods, beverages, travel books, calendars, stationery items, apparel, and tea (although avoid green tea, as giving green tea as a gift is usually associated with funerals) are just a few good ideas. If you can’t get anything to represent your hometown, at least bring some gift, even if it’s Japanese.

When you arrive at your hosts’ home, present them with your gift with both hands. It’s generally considered more polite to pass anything, especially a gift, with two hands instead of one. Your hosts will likely thank you and then put the gift aside. It’s proper Japanese etiquette not to open a gift in front of the gift giver, so don’t pressure your hosts to open the gift before you leave or be offended when you see that they don’t. Don’t forget to remove your shoes at the door as well.

Have you ever been a guest in a Japanese home? What gift, if any, did you bring? Do you like the idea of not opening gifts in front of the gift givers?

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4
Feb 11

The Japanese Love Hotel

Valentine’s Day is approaching and chances are, the love hotels in Japan will experience an increase in business. The Japanese love hotel (actually called “rabu hoteru,” the Japanese pronunciation of the English words “love” and “hotel”) is somewhat of a uniquely Japanese cultural phenomenon for adults.

Because the metropolitan areas of Japan are especially crowded, space is limited and many apartment buildings have thin walls that can make privacy a little difficult to come by. Living with family–which is much more culturally accepted for young adults before marriage in Japan than it is in Western countries–can also complicate trying to have sexual relations with a partner. In order to have some privacy, many couples look to have their sexual encounters at love hotels. (Of course, there are people having affairs and illicit encounters that turn to love hotels as well, but the majority of customers are couples in need of privacy.)

Love hotels are different than regular hotels in that they specifically cater to people having sex and giving couples privacy. Many of these hotels have no windows and discrete entrances so that couples don’t have to worry about being seen. They often also don’t have anyone manning the front desk (but they may). Instead, couples select a room via a computer screen and deposit the room key card on their way out in order to verify that they’ve left. Couples can also often purchase sex toys and costumes via vending machines.

Many of the love hotel rooms are themed to add to the excitement. Themes can include fetishes and may also include pop culture references like anime characters or even Hello Kitty. Some theme rooms don’t resemble bedrooms at all and recreate an entire scenario, like a bad student in detention after school with a teacher, an encounter on a train car, or a nurse providing a checkup for a patient.

Love hotels are not intended for long stays. After usually 10 pm, couples may choose to pay for an overnight stay. However, they may come to the hotel at any time and stay for a shorter period (called a “rest” stay) from anywhere between one and three hours. Rates vary by hotel, but a “rest” could cost around ¥2800 to ¥4500 (~US$34 to $55) and an overnight “stay” could cost about ¥7500 to ¥12,000 (~US$92 to $147).  Leaving the hotel  before you’ve finished with your stay is usually discouraged.

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28
Jan 11

Eating at a Restaurant in Japan

If you’ve read our entry on Japanese table manners, you’ve learned a few tips for dining while in Japan. However, there are a few cultural differences that you may encounter that have nothing to do with courtesy. Knowing what to expect will help you seem less confused. You’ll find most of these differences at just about any restaurant in Japan, whether Japanese or Western in nature.

How to order: When visiting a restaruant, you may be surprised to find that no server is coming to your table. In Japan, the servers give you time to settle in and look at the menu and won’t come over until you’re ready. In family restaurant (famiresu)–restaurants with a wide variety of Western and Asian dishes, somewhat similar in decor to family restaurants you’ll find in the West–especially, you’re likely to find a call button on your table. When you’re ready to order or if you need refills or anything else throughout your meal, push the call button. This will signal to the servers that you would like assistance. If you don’t find a call button on your table, you may call over a server by saying “Sumimasen” (“excuse me”) when a server passes by.

No tipping: Unlike in the West, where servers are often paid less than minimum wage with the understanding that diners’ tips will make up the rest, there’s no tipping food servers in Japan. Servers make minimum wage or more because they do not count on tips. Of course, this means you’ll have no way to show your displeasure if you’re unhappy with service other than complaining to the manager. However, Japanese servers will more often than not provide excellent service and don’t need tips as motivation. (If you tip, you’ll likely just confuse the servers, so don’t feel obligated out of habit to tip for excellent service.)

Eating with chopsticks: Unless you’re eating in a Western restaurant, you’ll most likely be provided only with chopsticks. Taking the time to learn to eat with chopsticks can help you be immersed in the culture. However, if you’re in Japan on a limited basis or you simply can’t master the utensils, you may be able to ask for forks and knives.

Smaller portion size: America in particular is often made fun of by the rest of the world for serving huge portions. If you’re used to American portions, you may be surprised to find that Japanese food portions are much smaller.

Have you ever eaten in a restaurant in Japan? Do you have any funny stories to share about cultural miscommunication? Do you like the idea of not tipping servers and having the servers paid higher wages?

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21
Jan 11

Harajuku: Street Fashion Capital

Tokyo is Japan’s most populous city, so it’s no surprise that there are almost as many different sides to the city as there are people. For instance, there are 23 special wards in the city of Tokyo–just in the most populous area. You may have heard of some of these wards in pop culture references to Japan. These days, Harajuku is one of those pop culture words that’s popular even outside of Japan.

Harajuku isn’t a ward–it’s a section of the Shibuya ward, specifically around the Harajuku Station. But this small section of a Tokyo ward is famous globally as one of the fashion capitals of the world. However, the fashion you’ll find here is different from the high-class fashion you’ll find in other areas of Tokyo. The “street fashion” you’ll find on teenagers and young adults is usually bright, bold and one-of-a-kind.

The fashions tend to gravitate toward one of three styles: lolita, visual kei, and cosplay–however, in Harajuku, anything goes. The young people who show off their clothes in Harajuku take pride in creating their own mix-and-match designs.

Lolita: Lolita fashions (exclusively for women or men crossdressing) are somewhat reminiscent of Victorian-era clothes with much shorter skirts and a few modern accessories. There are a number of subcategories within the style, including “Gothic Lolita,” which makes use of mostly black and dark colors, and “Baby Lolita,” which emphasizes pastel colors and cutesy accessories.

Visual Kei: Visual kei, which we’ve covered as a musical genre, is known for theatrical outfits that mix Gothic black and dark colors as well as Victorian-era type of clothing. Brightly colored hair and kabuki-style makeup complete the ensembles.

Cosplay: Cosplay is short for “costume play” and it refers to dressing up as fictional characters. Most often in Japan, this refers to dressing as characters from anime, manga, video games, and famous bands, but it can also refer to roleplaying by wearing costumes, such as roleplaying as maids, nurses, and even schoolgirls.

Have you ever heard of Harajuku? Have you ever been to Harajuku? What do you think of the street fashion there?

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31
Dec 10

Japanese New Year Food

We’re rounding out our more in-depth coverage of the Japanese New Year celebration with a closer look at a couple of the traditional foods associated with the holiday.

Kurikinton (sweet potatoes with sweet chestnuts): Part of the traditional Japanese New Year meals (osechi-ryouri) is the kurikinton. This simple dish is eaten sometime within the first three days of the new year. The sweet potatoes (which are a little different than the sweet potatoes we consume in the West) are boiled along with jasmine seeds for flavor. The seeds are then removed the and sweet potatoes are mashed along with some sugar. The mixture is then mixed with sweet chestnuts in syrup and simmered on low heat for a few minutes.

Kagami mochi (“mirror rice cakes”): These mochi first act as a decoration before they’re eaten. They consist of two round mochi, one slightly smaller stacked atop a larger one. Atop of the mochi is a daidai (a bitter-tasting Japanese orange) with a leaf. Below the mochi are (optionally) dried persimmons and kelp. The entire dish sits upon a decorative sheet called a shihoubeni and a stand called a sanpou. Owners of the kagami mochi may also fold gohei (sheets of paper) into pointed lightening shapes and attach the gohei to the display.

This edible decoration was originally designed to ward of fires in the home in the new year (at least the shihoubeni part was) and to symbolize the new and the old year. It may also be meant to give the family strength and to symbolize the passage of the family through generations. After displaying the decoration for a few weeks near the home’s Shinto or Buddhist altar, the family participates in a ritual called the kagami biraki (“mirror opening”), in which they break and then eat the mochi. This occurs on either the first or second Saturday or the Sunday following New Year’s Day.

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24
Dec 10

Japanese New Year Games

Our coverage of the the Japanese New Year celebration continues. This week we’re going to talk about traditional New Year’s games that children (and sometimes adults) play with each other during the holiday. The tradition of playing these games on New Year’s is quite old. While fewer children are interested in traditional games in the modern era, you’ll still find many participating in the custom of playing these games during the New Year holiday.

Fukuwarai (“lucky laugh”): This game is somewhat like Pin the Tail on the Donkey, although a human face is used. Blindfolded, children must take the shapes for eyes, ears, mouth, nose (and sometimes eyebrows, mustache, etc.) and try to properly place them on an outline of a face. Unlike Pin the Tail on the Donkey, this is traditionally performed sitting down with the face on a table and every participant gets his or her own face to make. Once finished, all of the participants remove their blindfolds and laugh at all of the faces, sometimes (in good humor) saying who in the family each face resembles.

Hanetsuki (“shuttle passing”): This game is often called Japanese badminton. It’s similar to badminton except that there is no net and the two players simply try to pass the shuttle (called hane) back and forth. The hane also looks different from a Western shuttle and is usually a very small round ball with feathers attached. The paddles, called hagoita, are ornately decorated in traditional Japanese style. Some people even collect these paddles without using them.

Sugoroku (“two sixes”): A board game that’s existed for over a thousand years, sugoroku is another traditional New Year’s game to play. A bit similar to backgammon, you roll a die and advance across the board. There’s a simpler version that’s popular with children that’s closer to Snakes & Ladders.

Karuta (“cards”): Playing a traditional Japanese card game is another common activity around New Year’s. However, karuta is not like the card games you tend to think of. Instead, cards are arranged face up on a surface. Each card has something on it–a vocabulary word, lines of a poem, pictures–and the goal of the game is to find the right card and grab it before the other people playing do. Someone directing the game will call out whatever he or she wants you to choose (reading the first few lines of a poem and asking you to complete the poem, saying a vocabulary word in one language and asking you to find it in another, etc.) and it’s up to the other players to find the right card. This is a great game for learning vocabulary words.

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17
Dec 10

Kouhaku Uta Gassen: Red and White Song Battle

Now we’re going to switch our focus over the next few weeks to New Year’s celebrations in Japan, as the New Year is a much more important holiday in Japanese culture than Christmas. For the basics of the New Year celebration, read more here. We’ll look at a few fun specifics of the holiday celebration over the next few weeks.

Since 1951, an annual entertainment tradition has become a part of the Japanese culture on New Year’s Eve. First broadcast on radio for a couple of years, the Kouhaku Uta Gassen (“Red and White Song Battle”), often called the Kouhaku for short, has been aired on TV since 1953. A live-broadcast singing competition, the Kouhaku now lasts about four hours and ends shortly before midnight, allowing for the more typical TV countdowns when it reaches the midnight hour.

The Kouhaku is a showdown between singers. Not at all for amateur singers, the annual competition extends private invitations to popular or upcoming Japanese pop and rock singers as well as classic enka singers. It’s considered a great honor in the music industry to secure a position in the competition, as it can either propel your career or validate your position as a current hot commodity in the industry. Decades ago, as many as 81% of the population tuned in to watch this event. These days, the percentage of people watching may be as low as 30% to 40%, but that’s still extremely high in terms of television ratings, so the event is an annual cultural spectacle.

The competition features musical performances by the invited guests split into two teams. The red team (akagumi) consists of all female performers and the white team (shirogumi) consists of all male performers. (If there are groups or bands with male and female performers, their team membership is determined by the gender of the lead singer.) There are ten judges from a variety of fields to offer commentary and vote on the winning team, but the audience in the venue can vote as well. Like American Idol, some viewers at home are allowed to vote and help determine the winning team, but the home voters must be subscribers to a certain digital broadcasting service.

One more note on the program–sometimes the fashions, makeup, hairstyles and dancing routines can cause as much fervor as the actual singing! Since the performance is broadcast live, some last-minute costume changes sneak by the program’s directors (a somewhat common ploy when singers want to wear risque or outrageous outfits).

You can see some clips from a Kouhaku here.

What do you think of the Kouhaku? What would you compare it to in your country? Would you like to see an all-stars performance of popular singers from your country?

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10
Dec 10

Christmas Love in Japan

Continuing from last week’s look at the typical Christmas meal in Japan, this week we’re going to take a closer look at the way the holiday is usually celebrated in Japan. In the West, with a number of notable exceptions, the holiday is primarily a reason to gather with family and friends to enjoy each other’s company and exchange gifts. While some Japanese families give Christmas presents to their children on Christmas morning, the holiday is primarily associated romance in Japan.

Christmas Eve is actually the focus of most of the Christmas celebration in Japan, although most Japanese don’t get either Christmas Eve or Christmas Day off from work or school. The time for celebration is in the evening on the 24th of December. Friends may get together for a party, but many couples choose to have a special evening alone. While not everyone cares, some people feel especially lonely if they don’t have a date for Christmas Eve, sort of like some people feel on Valentine’s Day in the West.

Confessing your crush to someone on Christmas Eve also has special significance. And no one except the very socially clueless would ask someone of the opposite gender to do something alone with them that evening unless they intended it to be a date because the evening has a particularly romantic connotation.

Going out to eat at classy restaurants, having a romantic evening in a love hotel (a topic for future blogs!), or just walking along the sidewalks and shopping centers to look at Christmas lights in the dark are popular activities for dates on Christmas Eve. Not all of Japan gets a lot of snow each winter (the northern part does, however), but much of the country is cold in December (excluding the tropical-climate southern islands), so couples bundle up on their dates–but fashionably. Many Japanese women wear fashionable skirts year-round, but they may pair them up with a warm coat, tall boots, mittens, scarves and hats.

Typical gifts exchanged between couples on Christmas Eve include cute and handmade items as well as more expensive jewelry and watches. It’s especially traditional for young women to hand-knit scarves (called “mafuraa,” from the English word “muffler,” in Japanese) for their dates or even for a boy to whom they intend to confess on or before Christmas Eve. The young man would then, of course, wear the scarf on their night out in the cold.

Would you like to think of Christmas Eve as a romantic occasion? Would you hand-knit a scarf as a gift if you could?

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3
Dec 10

Food During Japanese Christmas

All this month (and probably a little into next month), we’re going to be taking a closer look at the Christmas season in Japan as well as New Year’s, which is way more important than Christmas in Japan. Although we’ve covered this time of year on the site in the past, focusing on the holiday season in more detail via this blog will give us a greater opportunity to share what it’s like to experience the end-of-the-year holidays in Japan.

We’re going to start this week by talking about the stereotypical Christmas (Eve) meal in Japan–which is actually more foreign than Japanese. Christmas Eve is more widely celebrated than Christmas Day, and as we’ve mentioned before, it’s typically viewed as a lovers’ holiday, although children may get a few Christmas presents as well. Christians make up only about 1% of the Japanese population, so there is no national holiday giving people time off from work or school on Christmas Day. Nevertheless, couples and friends look forward to celebrating Christmas Eve together.

The typical Japanese Christmas Eve dinner is a bucket of fried chicken, particularly from the most famous of fried chicken chains, KFC. (McDonald’s is launching a competitive ad campaign this year to get people to order fried chicken from them instead!) People actually make reservations for their large fried chicken orders weeks or even months ahead of time. KFC’s marketing department is likely responsible for this Japanese tradition. In 1974, they began the marketing campaign, “Kurisumasu ni wa kentakkii!” (“Kentucky for Christmas!”). Since eating turkey isn’t popular in Japan, KFC thought they would step in and offer their own poultry for the holiday. The marketing campaign was very successful and these days you’ll find long lines of people waiting to pick up their Christmas chicken that stretches several blocks long!

Another popular food item during Christmas in Japan is the Christmas Cake. The most popular variety is a sponge cake in multiple layers separated by strawberries and whipped cream. The cake is also frosted with whipped cream and covered with strawberries and other fruits. Bakeries and convenience stores will sell these cakes in convenient ready-to-go boxes right in front of the stores in the weeks leading up to Christmas.

(A strange aside: It was once popular to refer to unmarried Japanese women 25 or older as “Christmas cakes” in Japan. The joke was that they were past their fresh-by date and were unattractive on the marriage scene. It’s pretty offensive to call a woman a Christmas cake!)

Photo credit goes here.

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19
Nov 10

The Japanese Game/Variety Show

“Japanese game shows,” perhaps more accurately referred to as Japanese variety shows, are fairly famous around the world as a genre. Known for their over-the-top wackiness, Japanese variety shows have inspired spin-offs in other countries, such as America’s I Survived a Japanese Game Show, as well as parodies in popular programming like The Simpsons. Of course, an outsider’s view of the genre can be a little warped, as some of the parodies make the variety shows seem even more wacky than they are, but the fact is that a Japanese variety show can be pretty strange to a person not accustomed to the genre.

Most Japanese variety shows combine a series of quizzes, musical performances, stunts, pranks, and comedy routines. They may have Japanese celebrity guests who do more than just answer a few questions and put on a performance–they can participate in all the stunts and quizzes as well. The stunts can range from physical challenges to eating food to designing underwear. There’s always something new and bizarre awaiting those who tune in.

The Japanese variety show may also be known for its over-the-top costumes and set designs. Perhaps more over-the-top than costumes and set designs are actually the actions of the host(s) and guests on the show. Japanese humor relies largely on physical humor and zany expressions, perhaps somewhat like Jim Carrey humor during his height of popularity in the 1990s. So when Japanese variety shows are trying to get a laugh, the host(s) and guests can do some pretty strange-seeming things to someone who’s not into physical humor.

Perhaps the most popular Japanese variety show is Waratte Iitomo! (“It’s Okay to Laugh!”), which has been on air with new episodes five days a week since 1982. Japanese comedian Tamori (real name Morita Kazuyoshi) has been the host the entire time and has even earned accolades in the 2003 Guinness Book of World Records for having hosted 5000 episodes of the show.

Here are a few examples of Japanese variety shows:

Waratte Iitomo

Eggs

Have you ever watched any Japanese variety shows? Did you like them or find them odd (or both)? Do they remind you of any shows from your own country?

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