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peterpayne: I saw on online discussion board that asked ex-pats living in Japan whether life there has changed for the better since they arrived, and my answer is a resounding yes. The current age of smartphones and the Internet aside, there have been many serious improvements for gaijin living in Japan since I arrived back in 1991, from the ability to travel around Tokyo without being exposed to endless cigarette smoke to the general flow of useful innovations from the outside world that have improved the lives of people in various ways. Japan has a normal capitalist economy in which companies compete to bring the best products to market, but many industries from books to music CDs had special rules allowing manufacturers to set prices artificially, resulting in higher profits in the short term but companies that were slow to change when the Internet came knocking a few years later. One area that has improved a lot has been banking: back in the day ATMs used to close at 7 pm Monday through Saturday and were closed all day Sunday…and all holidays, meaning if you forget to get cash out before Golden Week you had to starve. Attitudes inside Japan have improved, too: twenty years ago, it would have been highly irregular for company with a female president and an American vice president to exist, but nowadays it’s not surprising at all.
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peterpayne:

I saw on online discussion board that asked ex-pats living in Japan whether life there has changed for the better since they arrived, and my answer is a resounding yes. The current age of smartphones and the Internet aside, there have been many serious improvements for gaijin living in Japan since I arrived back in 1991, from the ability to travel around Tokyo without being exposed to endless cigarette smoke to the general flow of useful innovations from the outside world that have improved the lives of people in various ways. Japan has a normal capitalist economy in which companies compete to bring the best products to market, but many industries from books to music CDs had special rules allowing manufacturers to set prices artificially, resulting in higher profits in the short term but companies that were slow to change when the Internet came knocking a few years later. One area that has improved a lot has been banking: back in the day ATMs used to close at 7 pm Monday through Saturday and were closed all day Sunday…and all holidays, meaning if you forget to get cash out before Golden Week you had to starve. Attitudes inside Japan have improved, too: twenty years ago, it would have been highly irregular for company with a female president and an American vice president to exist, but nowadays it’s not surprising at all.

peterpayne: Like other forms of media, there are many types of stories to be found in anime, including love comedy, various kinds of romance story (love triangles, yuri, yaoi), and of course plenty of hard-core sci-fi action. There’s also a healthy traditional of “alternate history” to be found in anime, such as The Ambition of Oda Nobuna, classical Japanese history remixed with cute moe girls; Koihime Musou, a reworking of the Chinese novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms in eroge form; Strike Witches, World War II-era magical girls (?) fighting aliens with the power of pantsu; and Muv-Luv, in which humans reach the moon in 1967 only to find a murderous race of aliens who then invade Earth over several decades. I recently started watching Hyakka Ryouran: Samurai Bride, the sequel to the fan service-laden Samurai Girls. The story is set in a steam-punk — or more accurately, “Edo-punk” — world in which the ruling Tokugawa Shogunate never relinquished power and the era of Bushido never ended. The show itself can be summed up as Queen’s Blade with samurai swords and lots of ecchi jokes, but the stylized world they create is surprisingly deep and interesting. Our upcoming Nitroplus eroge Hanachirasu is another example of alternate history, set in a world in which the atomic bomb was not completed in time to force Japan to surrender, resulting in Kyushu and Hokkaido being occupied by the U.S. and the Soviet Union permanently. When guns are banned from Tokyo, mega-corporations are forced to hire sword-wielding mercenaries to protect their interests.
Zoom
peterpayne: Like other forms of media, there are many types of stories to be found in anime, including love comedy, various kinds of romance story (love triangles, yuri, yaoi), and of course plenty of hard-core sci-fi action. There’s also a healthy traditional of “alternate history” to be found in anime, such as The Ambition of Oda Nobuna, classical Japanese history remixed with cute moe girls; Koihime Musou, a reworking of the Chinese novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms in eroge form; Strike Witches, World War II-era magical girls (?) fighting aliens with the power of pantsu; and Muv-Luv, in which humans reach the moon in 1967 only to find a murderous race of aliens who then invade Earth over several decades. I recently started watching Hyakka Ryouran: Samurai Bride, the sequel to the fan service-laden Samurai Girls. The story is set in a steam-punk — or more accurately, “Edo-punk” — world in which the ruling Tokugawa Shogunate never relinquished power and the era of Bushido never ended. The show itself can be summed up as Queen’s Blade with samurai swords and lots of ecchi jokes, but the stylized world they create is surprisingly deep and interesting. Our upcoming Nitroplus eroge Hanachirasu is another example of alternate history, set in a world in which the atomic bomb was not completed in time to force Japan to surrender, resulting in Kyushu and Hokkaido being occupied by the U.S. and the Soviet Union permanently. When guns are banned from Tokyo, mega-corporations are forced to hire sword-wielding mercenaries to protect their interests.
Zoom
peterpayne: Like other forms of media, there are many types of stories to be found in anime, including love comedy, various kinds of romance story (love triangles, yuri, yaoi), and of course plenty of hard-core sci-fi action. There’s also a healthy traditional of “alternate history” to be found in anime, such as The Ambition of Oda Nobuna, classical Japanese history remixed with cute moe girls; Koihime Musou, a reworking of the Chinese novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms in eroge form; Strike Witches, World War II-era magical girls (?) fighting aliens with the power of pantsu; and Muv-Luv, in which humans reach the moon in 1967 only to find a murderous race of aliens who then invade Earth over several decades. I recently started watching Hyakka Ryouran: Samurai Bride, the sequel to the fan service-laden Samurai Girls. The story is set in a steam-punk — or more accurately, “Edo-punk” — world in which the ruling Tokugawa Shogunate never relinquished power and the era of Bushido never ended. The show itself can be summed up as Queen’s Blade with samurai swords and lots of ecchi jokes, but the stylized world they create is surprisingly deep and interesting. Our upcoming Nitroplus eroge Hanachirasu is another example of alternate history, set in a world in which the atomic bomb was not completed in time to force Japan to surrender, resulting in Kyushu and Hokkaido being occupied by the U.S. and the Soviet Union permanently. When guns are banned from Tokyo, mega-corporations are forced to hire sword-wielding mercenaries to protect their interests.
Zoom

peterpayne:

Like other forms of media, there are many types of stories to be found in anime, including love comedy, various kinds of romance story (love triangles, yuri, yaoi), and of course plenty of hard-core sci-fi action. There’s also a healthy traditional of “alternate history” to be found in anime, such as The Ambition of Oda Nobuna, classical Japanese history remixed with cute moe girls; Koihime Musou, a reworking of the Chinese novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms in eroge form; Strike Witches, World War II-era magical girls (?) fighting aliens with the power of pantsu; and Muv-Luv, in which humans reach the moon in 1967 only to find a murderous race of aliens who then invade Earth over several decades. I recently started watching Hyakka Ryouran: Samurai Bride, the sequel to the fan service-laden Samurai Girls. The story is set in a steam-punk — or more accurately, “Edo-punk” — world in which the ruling Tokugawa Shogunate never relinquished power and the era of Bushido never ended. The show itself can be summed up as Queen’s Blade with samurai swords and lots of ecchi jokes, but the stylized world they create is surprisingly deep and interesting. Our upcoming Nitroplus eroge Hanachirasu is another example of alternate history, set in a world in which the atomic bomb was not completed in time to force Japan to surrender, resulting in Kyushu and Hokkaido being occupied by the U.S. and the Soviet Union permanently. When guns are banned from Tokyo, mega-corporations are forced to hire sword-wielding mercenaries to protect their interests.

peterpayne: A few weeks ago I went with my son to an onsen hot spring, which is a rarity these days since he’s getting too old to do boring stuff with his dad. While we were in the bath area, he asked me to get him a “buckets,” using the plural form of the English word, and so I brought him two of the little buckets used for splashing water on yourself, knowing of course that he only wanted one. For phonetic reasons, some English words are imported into Japanese in their plural forms, including words like shirt, suit, swimsuit, peanut, fruit and sport. These words are always used with the ‘s’ sound on the end (e.g. shirts, suits, swimsuits, peanuts, etc.), even if you’re talking about just one of the item. In Japanese, one refers to a suitcase as a “suitscase,” and it takes the brain a few months to get over the weirdness of this. Learning to ask for a “peanuts butter sandwich” or some “Minutes Maid Orange Juice” are similar, as is the English word “bucket,” which always appears as “buckets” in Japanese. There seem to be three reasons for some English words being mapped to their plural forms like this. First is the rather convenient lack of singular/plural in Japanese grammar: saying 花が奇麗 hana ga kirei could mean either “the flower is pretty” or “the flowers are pretty” depending on how many flowers you happen to discussing, and as a result, the Japanese don’t sweat the plural/singular state of a word any more Americans consider the gender of nouns in Spanish when they speak English. Another reason is that the softer tsu ending on the plural forms is easier for Japanese to pronounce than a hard ‘t’ consonant sound. Finally, converting some words to their plural forms also avoids the dreaded L/R confusion that can be a problem in the language. Because “fruit” and “flute” would have the exact same pronunciation when rendered in katakana, the musical instrument became フルート furuuto and the stuff you eat became フリーツ furuutsu. So now you know where Fruits Basket gets its rather unique name from.
Zoom

peterpayne:

A few weeks ago I went with my son to an onsen hot spring, which is a rarity these days since he’s getting too old to do boring stuff with his dad. While we were in the bath area, he asked me to get him a “buckets,” using the plural form of the English word, and so I brought him two of the little buckets used for splashing water on yourself, knowing of course that he only wanted one. For phonetic reasons, some English words are imported into Japanese in their plural forms, including words like shirt, suit, swimsuit, peanut, fruit and sport. These words are always used with the ‘s’ sound on the end (e.g. shirts, suits, swimsuits, peanuts, etc.), even if you’re talking about just one of the item. In Japanese, one refers to a suitcase as a “suitscase,” and it takes the brain a few months to get over the weirdness of this. Learning to ask for a “peanuts butter sandwich” or some “Minutes Maid Orange Juice” are similar, as is the English word “bucket,” which always appears as “buckets” in Japanese. There seem to be three reasons for some English words being mapped to their plural forms like this. First is the rather convenient lack of singular/plural in Japanese grammar: saying 花が奇麗 hana ga kirei could mean either “the flower is pretty” or “the flowers are pretty” depending on how many flowers you happen to discussing, and as a result, the Japanese don’t sweat the plural/singular state of a word any more Americans consider the gender of nouns in Spanish when they speak English. Another reason is that the softer tsu ending on the plural forms is easier for Japanese to pronounce than a hard ‘t’ consonant sound. Finally, converting some words to their plural forms also avoids the dreaded L/R confusion that can be a problem in the language. Because “fruit” and “flute” would have the exact same pronunciation when rendered in katakana, the musical instrument became フルート furuuto and the stuff you eat became フリーツ furuutsu. So now you know where Fruits Basket gets its rather unique name from.

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