Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

We will not go back.

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

We’re watching the self-immolation of the leading world power on a level unprecedented in human history.

Dear media: perhaps we ought to let Donald Trump speak for himself!

They are lying in pursuit of an agenda.

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

I am pretty sure these ‘journalists’ were not always such a bootlicking sycophants.

Stamping your little feets and demanding that they see how important you are? Not working anymore.

Mediocre white men think RFK Jr’s pathetic midlife crisis is inspirational. The bar is set so low for them, it’s subterranean.

We know you aren’t a Democrat but since you seem confused let me help you.

Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.

In my day, never was longer.

Just because you believe it, that does not make it true.

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

Live so that if you miss a day of work people aren’t hoping you’re dead.

This must be what justice looks like, not vengeful, just peaceful exuberance.

These days, even the boring Republicans are nuts.

Hey Washington Post, “Democracy Dies in Darkness” was supposed to be a warning, not a mission statement.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

Not so fun when the rabbit gets the gun, is it?

Accountability, motherfuckers.

“The defense has a certain level of trust in defendant that the government does not.”

If rights aren’t universal, they are privilege, not rights.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

You are here: Home / Guest Posts / Medium Cool with BGinCHI – Discovering Japan

Medium Cool with BGinCHI – Discovering Japan

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In case you’re new to Medium Cool, BGinCHI is here once a week to offer a thread on culture, mainly film & books, with some TV thrown in.  We’re here at 7 pm on Sunday nights.

While I would love to do an entire Medium Cool on the music of Graham Parker (my childhood & adolescent musical crush), I’m just using this to frame our discussion this week on Japanese art and culture. I’ve been watching a lot of Japanese film lately (Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, especially) and my son is getting old enough to be into anime and manga.

I’m curious what kinds of Japanese culture you’re interested in. I have a decent familiarity with literature and film, but wondering also about other areas.

I’m not sure I’ve seen a Japanese TV series besides “Giri/Haji” (and it has English actors in it). How about other art forms?

Reader Interactions

193Comments

  1. 1.

    Baud

    For a while Daughter of Lupin was on Amazon Prime.  Interesting Japanese TV show about a family of thieves.

  3. 3.

    WaterGirl

    I took a Japanese Tea Ceremony class in college that was very interesting.  Taught by a man who had lived on either Hiroshima or Nagasaki as a child when the bombing occurred.  He was a very gentle man and quite prestigious in his field

    edit: It was a full semester course, in the evening on Tuesdays, I think.  We made tea using the traditional ceremony and we also had various Japanese sweets, a differnt one every time.

  8. 8.

    BGinCHI

    We have good friends who moved to Akita this year. They’re enjoying it and adjusting. They both are Japanese language learners and his (it’s a couple) mother is Japanese. It’s really great seeing the country through their eyes, especially outside Tokyo.

  9. 9.

    NotMax

    Other than food curious, not much. While I can appreciate other parts of the culture I don’t generally seek them out (but neither do I shun them when encountered)

    Friend has long shared his opinion (and he’s not entirely mistaken) that Japan is “a country perpetually on the verge of a nervous breakdown.”

    While on the subject, dragging last night’s candy mania into the mix,

    There’re so many local souvenirs including snacks which contain the local foods and ingredients and sure Hokkaido has one.

    Hokkaido has created a lot of flavorful and tasty snacks with dairy products, vegetables like potatoes.

    And one of them is really famous for being disgusting. Source

  11. 11.

    debbie

    Relevant or not, Sparks was central to my existence for a few years. Exactly the tempo to walk home speedily and angrily.

  13. 13.

    BGinCHI

    @NotMax: Japanese snacks are endlessly fascinating. Some amazing, some…..not so amazing. But I’m a rank amateur, so what do I know.

    I’ll thank them for sushi all my days.

  15. 15.

    The Dangerman

    I’m drawing outside the lines here, but this is Balloon Juice and I think that earns me a prize.

    I loved Kamakura. Biggest Buddha. Most temples. Outstanding Japanese food (yeah, shocker). I wanna go back.

    ETA: I love love love sukiyaki but now want to try Shabu.

  16. 16.

    PJ

    I only have a few touchstones for Japanese culture.

    The first is Akira Kurosawa, one of the greatest film directors of all time.  Pretty much all of his stuff I’ve seen is great, but The Seven Samurai is maybe my favorite.

    The second is the ghost stories of Lafcadio Hearn.  Hearn was an Irish/Greek immigrant to the US, where he stayed about 20 years, most notably writing about New Orleans and the Caribbean, before emigrating to Japan around 1890, where he married a Japanese woman and became a Japanese citizen.  Hearn had always been fascinated by the other worldly, and retold in English the stories of the supernatural his wife would tell him from Japanese literature.  Ironically, his retellings, retranslated into Japanese, are now considered classics in Japan.  Some of his stories were filmed in the 1960s under the title of Kwaidan (after his book by the same name).

  17. 17.

    Brachiator

    One of the fun things of growing up in Southern California was being able to dip into aspects of Japanese culture. As a teen I would sometimes go to the local Japanese cinema, the neighborhood Kokusai and Toho La Brea movie theaters. You could see movies made for “average” Japanese audiences as well as prestige Japanese films.

    But it wasn’t until college that I really began to dive deep into movies as an art form, and here the Musashi Miyamoto trilogy by director Hiroshi Inagaki was instrumental in setting me on my journey.

    There were also two local UHF TV stations which featured Japanese programming. Loved tbe hell out of historical samurai dramas like The Yagyu Conspiracy. There was also a Spanish language station which showed samurai films dubbed into Spanish, which worked amazingly well.

    I also cannot underrate the Japanese cartoons that I would watch with my younger brothers and sister, Simba the White Lion, Tobor the Eighth Man and of course Speed Racer. I always thought it wild that Japanese animated characters would spit and sweat much more than would American animated characters.

  19. 19.

    J R in WV

    @WaterGirl:

    I have read it at least twice… fascinating work.

    I must admit my favorite Japanese art is shushi…

    Although we visited an old mansion in New England that was filled with great artifacts from Japan — the wealthy owner spent years in the 1800s touring the Far East, and filled the giant home with weapons, armor, tea settings, silk fabric, etc, etc. We were up there in August, it was really hot, and the museum had no as in zero cooling plant in their whole facility. So we moved very slowly. Wonderful stuff, tho! Armor as an art form!

  20. 20.

    Gravenstone

    In the last few years, I’ve gotten much more interested in anime. I sometimes joke that I grew up watching old cartoons, now I’m growing old(er) watching new ones. As my interest in the genre expanded, I started looking for some of the associated music on YouTube. After a bit of that, the algorithm decided to suggest a band it thought I might like – Band-Maid. It was a slow burn at first, but once I fell, I fell really really hard. From there, I have since discovered an absolutely expansive music scene of female (or female fronted) Japanese rock bands. A few examples linked below:

    Show-Ya, could be considered progenitors of the female rock scene. Formed the year I graduated HS (1981), they’re still going strong and are an active influence on many female groups through the years.

    Band-Maid, my present music obsession. This is their most recent single, which was written as the opening theme for a current anime, just to tie the themes back together. To show a bit of them outside their maid esthetic, here is a new clip from an acoustic show they streamed Christmas Eve that shows a totally different side of their talents.

    Gacharic Spin, an alt/performance rock group that deserves more attention. They’re also the instrumental core of the group Doll$Box, adding vocalist Fuki.

    Tokyo Groove Jyoshi, is a group of female session players who formed a groove band.

    Kiyoshi, bassist/vocalist. All her “solo” work is just her and a drummer.

    Already too many links, but this is a start on my newest musical obsession from Japan.

  21. 21.

    Suzanne

    A great deal. Shoji screens and tatami mats. The work of Isamu Noguchi, Tadao Ando, and Shigeru Ban. Calligraphy and printmaking. Wonderful, wonderful pottery. Uniqlo.

  22. 22.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @Anne Laurie: 
    That looks like a really interesting read. I have to imagine it would cover the impact Japan has had on the video game industry, too. The most beloved and recognizable lPs in gaming come from Japan

  24. 24.

    Yarrow

    A friend did a year long study of kabuki theater. Interesting to learn about for sure.

    I find sumo kind of fascinating. It’s been around for such a long time and has so many rules and traditions.

  25. 25.

    Old School

    Introduced Middle School to Hayao Miyazaki on Friday night when we wanted My Neighbor Totoro.  She liked it.

    Otherwise, we watched/read manga like My Hero Academia and Toilet-Bound Hanako-Kun.

  26. 26.

    Gin & Tonic

    I learned to play Go a very long time ago, although I have not played much over the years. But that led to reading Kawabata’s The Master of Go which then led to reading more of his work.

  28. 28.

    J R in WV

    @J R in WV:

    Also, the great Philadelphia museum of art has a huge set of Japanese items, Samurai armor, swords, silks, etc, etc…

    As does the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC, with a large wing of Japanese work, mostly armor and swords, but lots of other art as well, everything Japanese that wealthy New Yorkers collected, donated by their offspring, who didn’t need foreign art in their mansions on the East Side, etc. Swords in every stage of creation…

    So I guess I’ve seen more Japanese art than my first post showed…

    ETA:  I think my photo submission a few years ago from our visit to the Metropolitan Museum included quite a few pictures from their Japanese section…

  30. 30.

    piratedan

    @Gravenstone: I would also humbly suggest the FLCL soundtrack for The Pillows and Cowboy BeBop for the awesome Yoko Konno…

    There lots of influences and inspiration as Japan has taken US Pop Culture and turned it on its head… animation is one, in that its taken as its own art form in Japan and doesn’t enjoy the same “respect” in the US, also the concepts of video games and even game shows can illsutrate how the Japanese take a US idea and go bigger and better and crazier than we would ever imagine.

    While it seems like a great deal of what the US equate with Japan is the size of Tokyo and it being a parallel to NY, I would truly enjoy getting off the beaten path and seeing the countryside, there’s a Facebook group called Images of Japan that tries to highlight those beauteous villages and provinces that are more rural with distinct cutural bents than what we are generally presented with.

  31. 31.

    Craig

    Sushi is the best.

    And when I was a kid Akira blew my mind. I got really into Japanese everything. Then Kurosawa blew my mind again.

    I have a pretty good book on Tokyo biker gangs, pretty fascinating subculture.

  34. 34.

    Gravenstone

    @piratedan: even game shows can illsutrate how the Japanese take a US idea and go bigger and better and crazier than we would ever imagine

    Case in point, Takeshi’s Castle, which was repackaged with a “comedy” dub over here as MxC (Most Extreme Challenge).

  35. 35.

    Brachiator

    A few other films and TV shows about Japan.

    SANDAKAN NUMBER 8, 1974. An old Japanese woman tells a writer about her past, in which she was shipped to Borneo and forced to become a prostitute. An amazing and heartbreaking film about “comfort women.”

    Equally compelling is the 1981 British TV series Tenko starring Ann Bell and an extraordinary cast of women.

    A group of British, Dutch, and Australian women are taken by the Japanese as prisoners of war after the fall of Singapore in 1942 and held in an internment camp on a Japanese-occupied island between Singapore and Australia.

    Less bleak is the 1983 TV series Oshin, about the life of a young woman who is the daughter of a rice farmer. Oshin is sweet and has an unbreakable spirit. Simple story with wonderful understated acting. The story of Oshin has apparently inspired knockoff series all over the world.

    The lyrical 1983 film The Makioka Sisters pops up on TCM from time to time. “As Japanese society changes, four sisters gather each year to watch the cherry blossoms bloom.”

    Equally sweet is the 2015 film Our Little Sister

    After the death of their estranged father, three siblings invite their half sister to live with them.

    I watched this a couple of times during the lockdown. In little ways it reminded me of my own family.

  36. 36.

    Origuy

    There’s a chain of Japanese bookstores in the US that carry a lot of manga and anime, along with other books, magazines, and movies and lots of kawaii stuff. I go in there for gifts all the time, and occasionally origami books and paper. They also sell online. Kinokuniya Bookstore.

  38. 38.

    Sure Lurkalot

    I liked Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore. And Suzanne reminded me of my fondness for Noguchi. I wish I could remember where I saw a special exhibition years ago.

  41. 41.

    Craig

    The LACMA has an amazing collection of Netsuke, fine carved sculptural buttons for attaching “pockets” to kimonos. Gorgeous stuff.

  44. 44.

    dm

    Astroboy taught this young science-fiction nerd that one place to look for science fiction was animation, fueling a life-long interest in consuming animation (plus a little drawing, but never enough to do my own animation).  And eventually I figured out that the good animated SF was coming from Japan (what wasn’t coming from France).

    A parallel interest in how signs convey meaning generated an interest in kanji (the Japanese use of Chinese characters), but  I never made much headway in reading untranslated manga before this past year in which I buckle down to read a few pages each day, gradually increasing my kanji.

    Then there was zen, which led to Japanese aesthetics, Japanese food, Japanese cinema.

    There’s been lots of talk about Kurosawa, who is sort of a gateway drug to Japanese cinema, but there are tons of other directors to check out.  My favorite (live-action) Japanese directory is Kore-eda, whose films After life, Nobody knows (Dareno shiranai), and Shoplifters are wonderful and widely available.

    Juzo Itami directed some great (but difficult to find) films, Tampopo — a “Japanese noodle western” about the Way of Preparing Ramen; A taxing woman and A taxing woman returns, about a tax auditor — someone we all recognize as a heroine in this age of Trump’s tax returns.  His film Minbo — the gentle art of Japanese extortion made the yakuza angry and probably led to his death.

    If you’re into design, check out How to wrap five eggs, and The art of the Japanese lunchbox.

  46. 46.

    NotMax

    Trivia:

    Japan was purposely slow to embrace or even to show sound films because of concerns about putting out of work a group of people whose jobs had been providing narration and explication to silent films for audiences.

  49. 49.

    raven

    I spent 30 minutes on the tarmac at Tachikawa Airbase and got to see Mt Fuji out of the window of the plane.

  50. 50.

    Rozziegrrl

    I will recommend ‘Midnight Diner’ (Netflix), set in a (well, obviously) diner in a Tokyo neighborhood where regulars and the odd stranger meet; every episode ends with a lesson in how to cook the nostalgic dish featured in that episode.  And in Dublin you can stay in Lafcadio Hearn’s home, now called ‘The Townhouse’.

  51. 51.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    For as long as I can remember, since I was a kid, a lot of my favorite shows were anime. Mostly typical Shonen stuff. I was lucky to have grown up in a time when anime was beginning to filter into mainstream American culture in the late 90s/early 2000s. Yu Yu Hakusho, Dragon Ball, Sailor Moon, all great stuff. Aside from SM and DB, Ranma 1/2, another favorite of mine, was also an early breakthrough in the West in the 90s.

    I also love Japanese ukyio-e, woodblock prints, such as The Great Wave off Kanagawa by Hokusai such as The Great Wave off Kanagawa by Hokusai

    There’s just something cool about how crisp the lines are in ukyio-e along with the washed out colors that I like

  54. 54.

    BGinCHI

    @Craig: I re-watched “Black Rain” recently, and it has a biker gang in it. Hard to tell how authentic it is (or much else in that film).

  57. 57.

    Steeplejack

    @dm:

    I liked After Life. Saw it in an actual theater when it first came out (in the U.S.). I’ll have to check out some of his later stuff.

    I miss that theater experience. The last movie I saw before the pandemic, almost exactly two years ago, was Weathering with You, a Japanese anime that is excellent. Visually stunning. Now available streaming on HBO Max and Hoopla, renting on Apple TV, Amazon and Vudu.

  60. 60.

    Miss Bianca

    I became very interested in Japanese culture and language pretty early on – when I was about 10 years old, I think. I read a book – have long since forgotten the title – about an American girl whose father gets transferred to Japan and she’s learning about the language and the culture. Had transliterated Japanese vocabulary.

    I guess I managed to keep this interest more or less on the down-low from my family until college, when I was offered the chance to go on a summer program to Kyoto to study classical No theater. I begged my parents to let me go, but my dad was livid. He had served in the Pacific during WWII and been on Iwo Jima. Not only would he not allow me to go, he practically threatened to disown me if I tried to go by myself.

    I was devastated – as much for him as for myself.

  61. 61.

    Anne Laurie

    Also (on a recurring theme), reasonably compact anime series that can be enjoyed by grown-ups:

    Twin Spica.  A plucky little girl dedicates herself to becoming a ‘rocket pilot’ — beginning with the challenge of getting accepted into, and finding a way to afford, Japan’s new and very exclusive astronaut school.  If you remember enjoying Heinlein’s YA novels, you’ll find these enjoyably reminiscent of books like Have Spacesuit, Will Travel.

    Moribito: Guardian of the Spirit.  A female bodyguard-for-hire in a not-quite-classical Southeast Asia becomes the protector of a child prince whose life is threatened by… his own father’s court.  Their travels / travails sometimes reminded me of Huckleberry Finn or Life on the Mississippi; there’s no cartoon gore or leering ‘fanservice’, but I’d pre-screen it if I planned to watch it with a child.

    Figure 17.  A shy little girl has just been relocated by her newly widowed father from an anonymous Tokyo suburb to a very rural part of Hokkaido.  She literally stumbles into a crashed prison-ship UFO, where she accidentally gets ‘partnered’ with a super-powered ‘Buffy the Alien Slayer’ android that is alternately her cheerful, ever-optimistic twin.

    Shingu: Secret of the Stellar Wars.  R.A. Lafferty, in cartoon form.  The united governments of the world have just announced that aliens are real… something that people pretty much suspected was true, anyway.  The narrator, your average bespectacled middle-schooler, gradually discovers that his classmates, teachers, and neighbors in the town where his parents have just relocated are guardians of some *much older*, potentially more dangerous alien contacts…

    Scrapped Princess.  Quasi-European-medieval fantasy in a world where Clarke’s ‘Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’ is the baseline.   A princess long assumed to be dead must, it is announced by the hierophants of her parents’ court, be killed before her impending 16th birthday or the whole world will end.  She goes on the run with her swordmaster foster-brother and witchcraft-gifted foster-sister, pursued by giant mecha, hostile biomonsters, and a varied cast of fellow humans.  Part Prince Valiant, part Power Rangers.

    Our Home’s Fox Deity.  The spiritual opposite of Scrapped Princess.  Two newly orphaned brothers now living with their grandfather discover their family has a centuries-long symbiotic relationship with a powerful, but erratic, fox deity.  It turns out that some of Japan’s multitude of demigods and spirits have adapted better to modern folkways than others.

    Kamichu!.   Speaking of Shinto… In a ‘sort of parallel to our world’ 1980s Japan, thirteen-year-old Yuri wakes up one morning and discovers she’s a goddess. (Puberty!)  She doesn’t know why, or what her powers might be, but her two best friends — one of them the hard-headed daughter of the neglected local shrine — are more than happy to help her figure it out.  It’s just a dozen episodes in all, but quite charming, and *very* Japanese.   The god of the local shrine is a sullen teenager who wants to be a rock star; Yuri is assigned a team of cartoon spiritual ‘helpers’ who help her sort out a UFO incursion; she attends the annual Convention of the Gods, where getting one’s passbook stamped at the educational lectures qualifies con-goers for valuable door prizes. Meanwhile, her parents are cheerfully clueless, her younger brother is suspicious, and she’s got a hopeless crush on the cutest, least socially adept boy in her class…

  62. 62.

    HumboldtBlue

    I watched two Japanese movies recently, Brother, which I remember watching years ago and enjoying very much. I enjoyed it again on the re-watch, but it has some plot holes and really terrible acting early on, but it still holds up because of the performance, writing and directing of Takeshi Kitano.

    The other was a dirge of a movie starring Jared Leto — The Outsider — that contained literally every hoary trope of Japanese gangster movies/Yakuza in the most dunderheaded of ways and the pace and plot of a naked slug. But there was a lot of finger chopping!

  63. 63.

    Snarlymon

    One Punch Man is a hilarious sendup of superhero movies. It became my gateway to some great anime series. I’ve long followed Japanese cinema from the first Godzilla movie as a child. It was only when I was an adult that someone explained to me that it was representing the fire bombing of Tokyo

  66. 66.

    Kalakal

    @Gravenstone: I can’t remember where I heard of BandMaid (Premier Guitar, I think), followed the link and at first sight I thought, “Oh wow, this is going to cheesy”, then I realised they can really play, read the interview and came away impressed. Thanks for the links

  68. 68.

    NotMax

    @BGinCHI

    Pink Lady?

    American exec at NBC: “Sure. We’ll greenlight a show pairing a middlebrow comedian with a Japanese singing group who don’t speak or understand a syllable of English. Got any more weed?”

    ;)

  69. 69.

    Lapassionara

    @Miss Bianca: What a story. How sad for him and for you. Have you read William Manchester’s memoir/history of the Pacific war? It tells the story of WWII in the Pacific from his point of view, as a Marine, and from a historian’s point of view. Very illuminating.

  70. 70.

    mali muso

    @Brachiator: OMG, thank you so much for reminding me of Oshin!!! I grew up in Indonesia due to my parents job and have very clear memories of watching that show in the 80s every week. It was so heart breaking and beautiful. We used to take turns pretending to be the heroine in our childhood games. Fun memories.

  72. 72.

    Gravenstone

    @BGinCHI: Honestly, my list barely scratched the surface of what is out there. The talent I keep finding as I poke around is just kind of mind bending. But hopefully one or more gives you a toehold to build from.

  73. 73.

    Marc

    I’ve been fascinated with Japanese technology since I was a child, so when my 10 year old daughter started showing interest, it didn’t take long for us to plan a trip.  She later learned Japanese, went on two summer exchange trips, spent a year living in a dorm at a Japanese/English international school in Osaka when she was 15, did two internships in Tokyo, and would likely be working at the Japanese office of the game company she now works for now, if not for the pandemic. Along the way, we became close friends with her first exchange hosts, a family that has been running a small Buddhist Church in the midst of downtown Osaka for 400 years or so.  Their son lived with us for a year while learning English as part of his PhD studies in Buddhism.

    The odd thing is none of us are really japanophiles, we’ve just found it to be a place which is both familiar yet entirely different, often in the most unexpected and entertaining ways.  For me the big thing is riding on the trains to who knows where, we always get JapanRail passes and just wander from one end of the country to another.  We’ve been to many of the larger cities, our favorite is Fukuoka in Kyushu, a bit more international than most due to the proximity to South Korea.  Another one is Yamagata, a small beautiful city nestled in the mountains two hundred miles north of Tokyo (accessible by Shinkansen, of course).  On the other hand, there are lots of fun small towns to visit, often in the mountains at the end of a slow single track railway line.  Like Gujo Hachiman, a river town north of Nagoya in the mountains that’s a bit of an artists colony.

    The series to watch on Netflix is Midnight Diner, both the original Japanese version and later Tokyo Stories. It’s really just a series of vignettes set for the most part in a diner that opens from midnight to dawn. The stories are heartfelt, funny, at times sad, but each one ends with the proprietor cooking just the right meal for the occasion.  Food is a big part of Japanese life, as evidenced by some of the other series on Netflix like Kantaro: The Sweet Tooth Salaryman and Samurai Gourmet (two series that likely won’t make much sense until you’ve spent some time in Japan).  Which leads to single best Japanese food movie of all time Tampopo currently on HBO.

    For literature, I’ve read several of Haruki Murakami’s books (translated, of course, I’m not my daughter), they’re sort of an acquired taste, but oddly interesting.  I think the two most accessible are Kafka on the Shore and Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki, both are kind of strange but fascinating stories that get a bit more into a kinks of Japanese culture than some might like.  A lot more accessible is the Detective Kosuke Kindachi series of murder mysteries written by Seishi Yokomizo, straightforward stories that give a glimpse of life in 1940s/50s Japan.  For the truly strange, try either Convenience Store Woman or Earthlings by Sayaka Murata.

    If you can afford a ticket, hop on a plane and go.  Food is inexpensive and usually quite good if you stay from fancy restaurants.  Hotel rooms can be expensive in Tokyo, but with some planning bargains can be found even there, including capsule hotels and hostels if you’re on you own.  We rarely spend much more than $100/night elsewhere in Japan, there several inexpensive hotel chains that are marketed to businessman that provide perfectly adequate, but small, rooms.  Many people speak English, and once you learn the basic trick that all train and subway stations have numbers, it’s easy to get around even if they don’t bother putting names you can read on the stations in smaller towns.  Get a JapanRail pass, it’s worth it if you want to travel around.  Otherwise, the cheapest ways to travel are bus (comfortable inter-city buses usually with WiFi), ferry, and air (there are lots of low cost flights between cities).

  76. 76.

    Gravenstone

    @Kalakal: Yeah, their image definitely seems to be going for the gap moe response. I’ll admit I was trepidatious to click on that first  recommended thumbnail, but am ever so I happy that I did.

  77. 77.

    bmoak

    @NotMax:   Every region, and seemingly every town, has the famous local product (Meibutsu).  This is different from a well-known local specialty or dish.  If you travel within Japan, you are expected to bring souvenirs or treats back to the workplace to share.  Hence the meibutsu, which are usually something that can be divided in multiple individually-wrapped portions like sweets, or Japanese rice crackers.

    One of Hokkaido’s main meibutsu is white chocolate, because of all the dairy.  Another one is adding melon-flavored syrup to white chocolate to make honeydew-colored melon chocolate.

  78. 78.

    Kalakal

    I can remember being knocked out by Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood aka The Cobwebbed Castle . It’s Macbeth done through a Japanese historical & cultural lens. Other than that I’ve always been in love by Japanese gardening, the use of space and form is stunning. I used to do Bonsai, broke part of my heart when I had to leave them behind when I came to the US

  79. 79.

    LongHairedWeirdo

    I feel very strange that I’ve seen no mention of Star Blazers (Space Cruiser Yamato). I’m not surprised if there’s no mention of Prince Planet (my favorite obscure anime that played on UHF channels, back when they were the local stations, barely scraping by) – and I’m glad to see Astroboy and Speed Racer made an appearance.

    I bought Speed Racer on DVD and at first, I was appalled, and then delighted. If you haven’t see the cartoon in forever, it’s *amazing* how many completely, *insanely*, impossible things happen. The Mach 5 can drive through a forest, cutting away the trees with a couple of buzzsaws, and the trees always fall cleanly away from the wheels. They had some impossibly huge racer, that was faster than almost any car (but certainly not the Mach 5!), and it was used… to smuggle an enormous weight of gold, which… where to *start* on how craycray that is!

    That’s when I became delighted. I mean, if you don’t have to obey any of the laws of physics, why bother with them? It reminded me of the wonderfully hilarious reason for the Fantastic Four’s Invisible Woman force field ability.

    See, she was the Invisible Girl (at that time); and she had powers over invisibility, right? Well – they were *INVISIBLE* force fields! Let’s be honest: you can’t argue with logic like that!

  80. 80.

    BGinCHI

    @Marc: Well, this is why we do MC.

    Thanks, Marc, for all of what you’ve contributed here. I’m itching to go to Japan and explore by train.

    And your daughter’s path is such a tremendous accomplishment. I hope my son finds something new and strange to get interested in.

  84. 84.

    Kalakal

    My first real experience of Japanese painting was at the Rijksmuseum Van Gogh in Amsterdam. The top floor had(has?) an exhibtion of Vincent’s/Theo’s collection of Japanese prints.It’s absolutely beautiful.

    On a more pop culture level I shall always be grateful to Tokai for providing high quality Stratocaster clones that were every bit as good as Fenders at a 1/4 the price in the late 70s-early 80s. Ditto Greco, Burny, and Tokai for Les Pauls

  86. 86.

    Anne Laurie

    @Brachiator: I also cannot underrate the Japanese cartoons that I would watch with my younger brothers and sister, Simba the White Lion, Tobor the Eighth Man and of course Speed Racer. I always thought it wild that Japanese animated characters would spit and sweat much more than would American animated characters.

    You should definitely check out Pure Invention, which has a whole chapter on those 1960s first-to-air-in-America ‘cartoons’!  I was entranced with them (remember Astro Boy? Marine Boy? The Amazing Three?) but had always assuming they were much older — like the Popeye cartoons they were sometimes partnered with on our local tv stations.

  87. 87.

    bmoak

    @Yarrow: I also liked Noh (the more stoic, slower precursor to kabuki) and bunraku (Japanese puppet theater) al little more than kabuki. The problem with all three is that they are very long and slow-paced, so it’s a chore to sit through a full performance, especially with a language barrier.  Going to a kabuki theater is Japan is a little weird in that the audience treats it like The Rocky Horror Picture Show.  They shout out the lines with the actors, and shout words of encouragement to the actors.

  91. 91.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @LongHairedWeirdo:

    You’re not kidding about the insanity of Speed Racer! He’s pretty crazy. And violent! Here’s an excellent video essay about it

    But there’s an anime even nuttier (and far worse in every respect, but it’s so breathtakingly nuts that it’s in So Bad it’s Good territory) than Speed Racer, so much so that it was a meme in Japan for several years, Chargeman Ken

  92. 92.

    Steeplejack

    I had (in retrospect) the great good fortune to live in Japan for two years—on Okinawa, my last two years of high school (1967-69). Went back briefly for the summer of ’70 after my freshman year in college, before my father (Air Force doctor) got transferred to Minot, ND (? culture shock). I was glad to get back to college (in Columbia, MO) after that.

    But I digress. It was the height of the Vietnam War, and Okinawa was basically a gigantic U.S. military staging base. There were about 1 million Okinawans and 100,000 Americans (military and “dependents”), with many more transiting through on the way to or from Southeast Asia. The island was still under U.S. control, with an American “high commissioner,” dollars as the currency and driving on the right side of the road, thank you.

    In a weird way, it was the best of both worlds for high-school me (although I didn’t realize it at the time). I went to an American high school, lived in on-base housing, which approximated U.S. suburbia, and listened to AFRTS (not as hip as depicted in Good Morning, Vietnam) or a commercial radio station that was indistinguishable from a U.S. AM rock station. But as soon as I left the base there was this whole throbbing, neon-colored “alien” culture. I loved it.

    Art: Mostly literature for me. I discovered a little bookstore in Machinato called Tuttle’s where I could get the latest Marvel comics more reliably than at the BX (Air Force; PX = Army). Turned out that Tuttle’s was an outpost of the Charles E. Tuttle Company, a publisher founded in Tokyo in 1948 to publish “books to span the East and West [. . .] books on the Japanese language, arts, and culture, as well as translations of Japanese works into the English language.”

    I learned to play Go (badly) from Tuttle books and started to read the Japanese writers on offer in Tuttle’s editions (many translated by Edward Seidensticker): Kobo Abe, Yukio Mishima, Junichiro Tanizaki and others. My favorite (and still a favorite) was Yasunari Kawabata. Thousand Cranes hit me hard. It was just such a different way of writing a story. I went on to Snow Country, The Sound of the Mountain, The Master of Go and everything else I could find. The Izu Dancer and Other Stories was another favorite.

    I didn’t start watching Japanese films until I was in college, but I was ready and willing. At various times TCM runs an overnight batch of related Japanese movies, and I have written notes on some of them here.

    And, of course, Japanese food!

    Finally (I did a long comment on this at the start of the pandemic, with program notes), NHK’s English-language channel, available on many cable systems, is a very good portal into Japanese culture. Highly recommended.

  93. 93.

    Lapassionara

    @HumboldtBlue: Hmmm. Wonder why you did not like his Churchill biography. It was planned as a trilogy, and he did not live to finish it. I really like the second volume. I also liked American Caesar. I did not like MacArthur at all, but the book helped me understand him. And if you read it and Beyond Darkness, you have a reasonably good understanding of the Pacific war.

  95. 95.

    Another Scott

    @Brachiator: Speed Racer!  Amazing car – like how they could get those hugely extendable jacks in such a tiny vertical space?  ;-)

    And UltraMan!!

    I decided to be a rebel in college and not take Western Civ but took Far Eastern Civ instead.  Lots and lots of fascinating history and culture over there, obviously.  ;-)

    I’ve been to Japan twice – around 1997 and in 2019.  The first time was longer and we got to see more of the country with one of J’s former grad-school colleagues.  It was lots of fun.  We got to meet one professor whose young wife was absolutely over-her-head infatuated with Leo in Titanic – she saw it 72 times by the time we visited.

    My last visit, in May 2019 was just me for a conference, I got the flu and wasn’t back to mostly normal for about 3 weeks.  :-/

    Amazing trains.  Helpful, friendly, people.  “A land of contrasts”, also too.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  96. 96.

    Mousebumples

    Endorse Cowboy Bebop anime as well. The live action was interesting, but not at good. Though I really looked at it more as an “inspired by” thing than a plan to fully recreate the anime.

  99. 99.

    Anyway

    @Origuy:

    Back in the aughts i used to visit the kinokuniya store in midtown Manhattan every nowand and then — loved to browse and shop for books and “exotic” foods. Haven’t been in at least 10 years. Have been to the Uniqlo store more recently.

  100. 100.

    Anne Laurie

    @Gin & Tonic: I learned to play Go a very long time ago, although I have not played much over the years.

    You might just be interested in Hikaru no Go! A not-very-academic middle schooler goes snooping through his grandfather’s attic in search of something he can pawn to buy video games… and gets haunted/possessed by the spirit of a thousand-year-old Go teacher / fanatic.  Over the next 76 episodes, Hikaru learns to play, builds up a Go club at his school, competes in the national tournaments, ends up as a ranked member of ‘the cut throat world of professional Go’... and helps his ghostly mentor Sai realize his own destiny.

    It’s a LOT to watch, which is why I don’t usually include it in my introduction-to-the-genre lists.  But every episode closes with a brief Go lesson, and the series was popular enough to spark a nationwide Go revival when it was first aired in Japan.

    (Also, while the final arc is a tearjerker, it’s about the best example of ‘why be a teacher’ that I’ve ever run across… )

  101. 101.

    bmoak

    Despite numerous attempts, I had difficulties with my. attempts to pick up traditional Japanese culture.  Part of it is my poor coordination which made me a duffer at origami.  Part of it is that a lot of Japanese culture is absolutely right-handed.  Kyuudou (Japanese archery) bows can’t even be drawn lefty.  Martial arts like kendo and judo are designed to lead with your right.  Japanese calligraphy (and the Japanese writing system) is designed for the right-handed.

    The Japanese cultural practice I got most accomplished in is shogi (Japanese chess).  It’s quite different than western chess in that it’s played on a 9×9 board,  is more defensive and has fewer offensive pieces (no queen, only one rook and one bishop).  However, the totally bonkers things about shogi is that you can take a captured enemy piece and place it anywhere on the board as your own

    Netflix has a pretty good slice-of-life anime called March Comes in Like a Lion, which is about a teenage professional shogi player.

  102. 102.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @NotMax:

    Freakazoid was amazing. So were all the Warner Bros stuff that was coming out then.

    I like the random inclusion of the sumo wrestlers who summon HeroBoy lol. And they got the terrible english dubbing down pat too

  103. 103.

    Marc

    @BGinCHI: I’ll say that there was nothing more entertaining than being in a restaurant in an off the beaten path town and watching the reaction as a waiter suddenly realizes that the short Black girl with blue eyes and a blonde afro can speak fluent Japanese.

  104. 104.

    bmoak

    @Steeplejack:   Wow.  Those guys (Mishima, Abe, Tanizaki, and Kawabata) are my favorite Japanese literary authors.  I used to to to the main Tuttle bookstore in Kanda in Tokyo, too.

  105. 105.

    randy khan

    I’ve been to Japan twice, once for business and once for pleasure, and I’ve spent a lot of time looking at Japanese art.  (I cannot recommend the Japanese galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art highly enough.)

    One thing that interests me a lot about Japanese material culture is the underlying thinking about aesthetics.  When my wife and I were there, we went to an exhibition of tea bowls at a museum next door to our hotel – lots and lots of them, at least a hundred and maybe twice that many.  And it was really instructive because seeing a lot of them in the same place you really got a better sense of what was valued.  Perfection is nice enough, but a lot of them were not just imperfect but intentionally so, because they were deemed to be more interesting that way.  On the same trip we visited a ceramics-making family’s compound, and you could see the same thing.  (They had examples going back hundreds of years.)  And it’s a culture filled with (acknowledged) artifice – the tea ceremony, kimono (which you can see on the streets occasionally in Tokyo, and likely will see on the streets if you wander around Kyoto), Noh, geisha culture (which honestly weirded me out a bit), and much more.

    But I can’t forget Iron Chef (the original, with the dubbed translation).  Besides that it was wildly entertaining, there was a lot of subtext about Japanese culture (like the thing about Morimoto and how traditional Japanese chefs didn’t like him) that was interesting to try to understand.

  106. 106.

    Benw

    @WaterGirl:

    I was also majorly into the book Shogun for a time.

    Same!

    I love Japan and was lucky to get two work trips there. One to Kobe and one two Hamamatsu. I especially can’t get enough of traditional Japanese breakfast, Miyazaki especially Totoro and the soot sprites, Robotech (the original terrible US dub), The Wind Up Bird Chronicle and other Murakami, oh and AKIRA.

  109. 109.

    randy khan

    @Marc:

    Any recommendations for where to start with Murakami?  My b-i-l gave me his little t-shirt book (which was pretty fun) and it reminded me I’d been thinking about trying his novels.

    Also – from my limited experience I’d have to say that it was surprising how much affordable food there was in Tokyo.  Our first day there, my wife and I walked into a little lunch place where we were the only non-Japanese and had a pretty nice meal for about $20.

  110. 110.

    Sure Lurkalot

    This is a wonderful thread with so many great suggestions to explore a country and culture I am fairly ignorant of. Thanks to everyone, I’m coming back to this when I have more time.

  112. 112.

    NotMax

    Remembering a segment from the Japanese cultural cornucopia series Soko Ga Shiritai which featured a gentleman who made his living selling hand carved Japanese wooden earwax picks. But not just any old earpicks. He sought out houses at least 200 years old, looking for any scheduled for renovation or razing, in search of original wooden ceiling beams from rooms with a cooking fire or other type of fire pit, insisting that only old smoke cured wood would do for his craft.

  114. 114.

    bmoak

    @Rozziegrrl:  Midnight Diner is pretty good.  I would also recommend the short Netflix series Samurai Gourmet.  It’s about a just-retired workaholic salaryman trying to adjust to his new life and the the question of where is he going to eat lunch today.  Like Midnight Diner, it features Japanese nostalgic dishes and the kind of Japanese cooking you don’t see in restaurants in the states.

  115. 115.

    randy khan

    @randy khan:

    Oh, man – how could I forget all the cultural obsessions – Hello Kitty, Kit Kats, all that stuff?  Hello Kitty really is a big thing there, as there’s a while “cute” subculture and people literally wait for seasonal releases of new Kit Kat flavors.

  117. 117.

    Steeplejack

    @Gravenstone:

    Nice. OMG that schoolgirl costume. Reminds me of the Okinawan girls I used to ogle on my bus ride to and from school. Ah, high school . . .

  120. 120.

    bmoak

    @BGinCHI:  Most people know the 5-6-7-8s from their appearance in  Kill Bill.  Sadly both Shonen Knife and the 5-6-7-8s were more popular in the States than in Japan.

  125. 125.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @Steeplejack:

    It’s pretty weird how Japanese schools adopted the sailor uniforms that the rich and sailors in the West wore for student uniforms.

    I know the reasons why, but it was still weird

  127. 127.

    eddie blake

    i’ve been into anime since the mid eighties. tomino’s mobile suit gundam is a favorite. the studio ghibli films are mindblowing. i also like live action japanese films from kurosawa to miike. (and of course the toho kaiju movies that are sort of in-between, live action but very cartoonish.)

  128. 128.

    Anne Laurie

    @Mousebumples: Endorse Cowboy Bebop anime as well. The live action was interesting, but not at good. Though I really looked at it more as an “inspired by” thing than a plan to fully recreate the anime.

    When you need some entertainment, check out Outlaw Star — same studio as Cowboy Bebop, but (intended to be) not as ‘gritty.’  Still not kiddie fare, mind you!  A 25-year-old gunslinger / bounty hunter and his 11-year-old tech-genius partner accidentally acquire the Most Powerful Spaceship in the Universe… which is powered by a mysterious amnesiac naked android girl delivered to them in a suitcase.  (No, this was years *before* Firefly… )   They are joined on their quest by a super-strong, extremely impulsive cat-girl, and a female assassin in full kabuki gear, on their quest to solve the mystery of the Galactic Leyline one step in advance of  the endless ranks of pirates, fellow outlaws, and the Chinese-speaking ruling empire…

  131. 131.

    NotMax

    @randy khan

    Last time I was in Times Square (year before the pandemic), noticed a Hello Kitty store there. close to where the TKTS booth is. Quickly peeked inside. It appeared well over 90% of the shoppers were Japanese tourists.

  133. 133.

    trollhattan

    Have thoughts about Japanese culture, but they’ll have to wait. Which Japanese will understand.

  135. 135.

    Suzanne

    @Dan B: I got to see Shigeru Ban speak when I was in graduate school, before he won the Pritzker. He is amazing and his work is incredibly inspiring and creative.

    Other Japanese architects who are amazing are the team behind SANAA, Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa. They have worked in this country, too, so you don’t necessarily have to go too far. Toyo Ito, as well.

  136. 136.

    HumboldtBlue

    @Benw:

    Helluva playoff weekend, and this Bills v Chiefs will go down as an epic.

    This has echoes of Kellen Winslow and the Chargers beating the Dolphins in 82. One of the best games in history.

  139. 139.

    Leto

    Japanese woodworking, specifically Japanese wood joinery, is something that absolutely amazes me. Some of their largest and oldest temples are held together, not with screws and nails, but incredibly strong wood joints.

    Youtube video showing some of them: The Art of Traditional Japanese Joinery

    I also follow a Japanese woodworker who mainly crafts in a traditional style. He films his entire process and it’s a form of mediation watching them: Ishitani Furniture

  140. 140.

    piratedan

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): would suggest a range of titles…

    Ano Hana

    Mysterious Girlfriend X

    Bakuman

    FullMetal Alchemist

    ToraDora

    Haikyu!!!!!!

    BECK (aka Mongolian Chop Squad)

    Silver Spoon

    Komi Can’t Communicate

    or if you want something that’s popular right now, My Hero Academia

     

    you can find some of this on you tube, or Crunchyroll or the funimation site

  142. 142.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @NotMax:

    Oh dear god. Yeah, definitely giving that hard pass. I’ll do you one better. There was a popular father/daughter anime/manga called Usagi Drop that ended with, at least in the manga the anime was based on, with the step-father marrying the adopted daughter he had known since she was a child. Yeah, yikes. It was created by a woman, in case you’re wondering. It caused quite uproar when it came out. Even the Japanese director of the anime felt uncomfortable with it, which is why it had a different ending from the manga. Apparently, Usagi Drop was based on the plot of one of the earliest surviving Japanese novels

  146. 146.

    Rafaelh

    @Gravenstone: A friend got me into that rabbit hole. I would add Waggaki Band, Aldious, Asterism, Mondo Grosso. There are too many to count.  I’m betting most of the musicians were trained for years in classical music before they switched to rock and other genres. Their technical skill level is so incredible. I love Japanese bands even if I can’t understand what they’re saying.

  148. 148.

    David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch

    I can’t wait for the inevitable future Ken Burns documentary on this game.

  149. 149.

    Spanish Moss

    My exposure to Japanese culture has been limited. I enjoyed quite a few Miyazaki/Studio Ghibli films as my kids were growing up. “My Neighbor Totoro” is one of my favorite animated films, and I loved his more recent “The Wind Rises”.

    I have tried some Japanese fiction (“IQ84”, “A Wild Sheep Chase” come to mind), and though I am glad I read the books, I found them difficult. I have enjoyed quite a few books set in Japan but not written by Japanese writers: Clavell’s books, “Memoirs of a Geisha”, … My absolute favorite is Lian Hearn’s “Tales of the Otori” set in a fictional feudal Japan.

    Hated Pokemon, but I had four kids during that craze so perhaps it was just overexposure.

  152. 152.

    bmoak

    Of course, manga and anime  were my introductions to Japanese culture and me going to Japan.  I got into anime my senior year of high school (’88) before there were any companies translating anime and when publishing translated manga was in its infancy.  I used to take the bus to NYC to a Japanese video store that was basically a pirating outfit to be untranslated VHS tapes.  I co-founded the anime club at Rutgers about two months into my freshman year and held meetings in my dorm room.

    When I went to Japan, I found an out of the way shopping center in Nakano that was like anime/manga fan heaven.  I found a store selling animation cels a picked up a bunch of cels from my favorite 80s/early 90s anime:  Macross (Robotech was really my gateway), Urusei Yatsura, Ranma 1/2,  Nadia of the Mysterious Ocean, The Mysterious World El-Hazard, You’re Under Arrest!, Vampire Princess Miyu, Dragon Ball,  Giant Robo, and a few more.  This would give me a lot of bragging rights with anime fans, but most fans today don’t remember these series..

  153. 153.

    Steeplejack

    @bmoak:

    The weird Japanese snack thing I remember from years ago is Felix chewing gum. It had a string, weird taste that definitely had to be acquired. For some reason my brothers and I got into it, maybe as one of those “I dare you” things, and then it became a family in-joke. Years later my father (still in the Air Force) would surprise me with a batch of Felix after one of his trips to Japan. I also remember that a lot of little snack shops on Okinawa had Felix statues in front of them.

    LOL, I see it’s still available on Amazon.

  154. 154.

    Tehanu

    Hokusai and Hiroshige, the greatest of the ukioye (sp?) woodblock artists.

    And sumo — the January Grand Sumo tournament’s last day is today. The kimonos worn by the gyoji (referees) and the outfits worn by the yobidashi (attendants) are awe-inspiringly beautiful, and the more we (Hubby Dearest & me) watch sumo, the more convinced we are that it is one of the greatest sports, because a great rishiki (wrestler) has to be strong, tough, fast, agile, smart, aggressive, and almost supernaturally self-controlled.

  155. 155.

    MomSense

    I have several friends who are masters at sashiko (Japanese visible mending).  I do a little bit but I’m not very good at hand sewing.

  156. 156.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @Steeplejack:

    That was really fascinating! I never really thought much about the significance of the boats in the painting. Incredible that these oar powered boats could travel such great distances in only a day or less because of the rowers taking shifts and the sleek design of the boats themselves

  158. 158.

    Rafaelh

    @Rozziegrrl: I was looking to see if anyone had recommended this one.  I second your mention.  Midnight Diner also shows a more hidden side of daily life in Japan for the lower middle class.

  159. 159.

    eddie blake

    @bmoak: haven’t thought about urusei yatsura or ranma 1/2 in a very, very long time. not as familiar with some of the other titles you mentioned, but dragon ball? dragon ball and its sequels are like, HUGE. goku and company are pop-culture icons.

  161. 161.

    Rafaelh

    @HumboldtBlue: Netflix recently put out a biopic movie about Takeshi Kitano’s start in entertainment.  He started as part of a traditional style of Japanese comedy that looked pretty much like the pre-movies vaudeville acts in the US.

  165. 165.

    scav

    Most of my points of contact have already been mentioned (so I’ll skip them) but I’ve a strong affinity for their architecture and gardening style since forever, an addiction to their tools since a little after that (mostly gardening, but woodworking if I ever took it up) and became obsessed with The Tale of Genji and other pillow books about 10 years ago.  (obsessed being defined as 3 translations, which is distinctly overboard).  Now I’m hungry.

  166. 166.

    NotMax

    @Tehanu

    Read someplace years ago that the family tasked with weaving the traditional baskets used for holding the salt to be tossed into the sumo ring was essentially down to one man approaching his 80s (might even have been his 90s). Apparently none of his children evinced any interest in continuing with it.

    No idea what may have unfolded in that area since.

  168. 168.

    bmoak

    I also like reading Japanese mysteries.  Edogawa Rampo and Seicho Matsumoto are the fathers of the Japanese mystery.  My favorite modern writers are Keigo Higashino and Miyake Miyabe.

  169. 169.

    HumboldtBlue

    @Lapassionara:

    I haven’t gotten to American Caesar yet, but I thought his Churchill was a bit of a hagiography, although I will admit I read it when I was far younger and it did give me some insight into Churchill’s childhood and schooling.

  170. 170.

    Marc

    @randy khan: I mentioned Kafka on the Shore and Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki, another I liked was 1Q84, any of these would be a good way to see if his work is to your liking.

    As for food, the ramen restaurants in Tokyo (and elsewhere) where you buy a ticket from a vending machine for a bowl and a drink ($5 to $10) are usually a good cheap quick lunch option.  In general, sushi is usually the most expensive way to eat in cities, so we tend to avoid it, unless someone else is paying.  Sticking with regional favorites (like, say, okonomiyaki in Osaka or Hiroshima) is usually the economical choice.  Another good low cost option is izakayas, bars that serve meat and vegetables grilled on sticks over a hibachi.  Some of the Japanese folks I know love Korean barbeque and shabu-shabu, these are also popular not very expensive options in most cities.

  171. 171.

    Craig

    @Leto: I have a book on how a traditional Japanese house is built. So fascinating. All the tools and techniques, really amazing stuff I’d have never known. There’s a Japanese hardware store in SF Japan Town where you can buy a lot of the tools. The trim saw I got there years ago is my goto home tool.

  173. 173.

    Anne Laurie

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):  Yeah, the Usagi Drop (Bunny Candy) anime stopped at the end of the first ‘arc’ of the manga.  It focused on the adult male protagonist finding out how very difficult it was to be a single parent in modern Japan, and implied that he was getting interested in the divorced single mom he met when her little boy became his adopted daughter’s friend.

    In a similar mode, if you haven’t already seen them, you might enjoy Yotsuba (endlessly cheerful 5-year-old discovering the mundane wonders of the world).  And/or Azumanga Dai (half a dozen high school girls and a couple of their temale teachers just living their lives… one of the other teachers is a stone pervert, but he doesn’t go beyond talking about his unnatural interest in high-school girls, and he’s treated as just another one of life’s minor irritants).

  175. 175.

    Anne Laurie

    @bmoak: We loved Ranma 1/2 and You’re Under Arrest! when we started watching anime back in the 1990s.  Wonder how they’d hold up to re-watching…

  176. 176.

    dm

    @Leto: Many major Japanese shrines (Shinto, Buddhists have temples) are rebuilt every 20 years to keep the skills needed to build them alive. Some things you can’t just put in a manual.

  180. 180.

    Feathers

    Since we have many noir fans, there is a strong noir tradition in Japan. Kurosawa made the incredibly dark High and Low, also Stray Dog and Drunken Angel. Another director to check out is Seijun Suzuki. He made low budget crime films at Nikkatsu Studios in the 50s and 60s, often about the yakuza, and featuring the disaffected youth of postwar Japan. Tokyo Drifter is like Sam Fuller made an Elvis movie. Branded to Kill is probably his most emblematic film. The studio told him to tone it down, he ramped it up instead, and got fired for it. Allegedly students rioted. Gate of Flesh is an incredibly lush color film about prostitutes who live and ply their trade in bombed out buildings, protecting each other with a strict code. Many other directors worked at Nikkatsu as well, Pigs and Battleships, The Weird Ones, Cruel Gun Story, and A Colt is My Passport are a good place to start.

    Janus Films brought Kurosawa’s (and Bergman, and Tarkovsky) films to the west. All of the above are from their catalog and most key available from Criterion, rotating through their streaming channel or on DVD/Blu Ray. They show up on TCM. HBO Max has access to their catalog, so keep an eye out there as well.

    I’m also a figure skating fan, and Japan has some of the best. Daisuke Takahashi has been a fave throughout his career, he has returned to the sport as an ice dancer. In a tragic mistake by the JSF, he’s not going to the Olympics. But the rest of the skaters are great.

    There’s a great skating anime, which goes to show the range of the genre. It’s called Yuri!!! On Ice. It’s basically a Evegeni Plushenko-ish Russian skater quits competitive skating to coach a younger Yuzuru Hanyu-esque skater who idolizes him, and they fall into a very chaste love. It’s really sweet and very fun. It was written by a woman who’s a huge skating fan, so it’s very realistic, except for the whole world champion quitting to coach a competitor thing.

    I could go on, but I’ve said a lot. Japan does art and culture very well.

  182. 182.

    ljdramone

    @bmoak:  I saw the 5.6.7.8s play the Black Cat in DC in 1997, years before Quentin Tarantino discovered them. I got the impression that the only English they knew (apart from song lyrics) was “Hello Washington!”Seems like they’re still around: http://www.the5678s.com​​

  183. 183.

    Madeleine

     

    @Steeplejack: I loved After Life.

    The Japanese garden within the St. Louis botanical garden is wonderful. I visited it quite often when I lived there. And museums: in addition to the NY Met, which has beautiful screens and, my favorite thing, the water stone, there is the Noguchi Museum, also in NYC, and the wonderful collection in the Kansas City Museum.

    And bmoak mentioned Edigawa Rampo, a mystery writer, at #168. Edigawa Rampo would be Edgar Allen Poe in English.

  185. 185.

    Marc

    @dm: Buddhists have temples

    Our friends belong to a sect of Pure Land Buddhism, which is working class Buddhism as opposed to Zen which is distinctly upper class (Pure Land Buddhists don’t so much meditate, they do a quick chant then go off to work).  They generally use the English word church both in Japan and here.  There is a Japanese Buddhist Church here in Oakland that dates back 100 years, it’s Pure Land but a different sect.

  186. 186.

    Sister Golden Bear

    NHK World-Japan — the international service of Japan’s public media organization NHK — has numerous interesting English language programs online.

    “Journeys In Japan” makes for good pre-bedtime viewing thanks to it’s languid pace. It’s essentially a Japanese version of Huell Howser’s show (if Huell was mostly sedated) where each week an English-speaking gaijin is sent to spend a few days somewhere in Japan, typically small towns. Definitely gives a look at life outside Tokyo

    “Core Kyoto” features lots of traditional arts and crafts, while “Trails to Oishii Tokyo” focuses on foods — who knew you could do a whole show on the different variety of soy sauce.

    YouTube also has a lot of “weirdly Japanese” videos. There’s a whole genre of half-hour/hour long videos of first-person POVs of walking around various tourist (and non-tourist locations). It’s both relaxing and kind of like actually being there — which has helped keep me sane, since I’ve been unable to travel since mid-2019. (There’s similar videos done by folks in other counties.) The first-person POV and lack of narration made it unlike most traditional travel shows.)

    Right now there’s a bunch of snow walks, including this lovely one taken in the historic village of Shirakawa-go, famous for its traditional thatched roofs and heavy snowfall.

    Then there’s a whole genre of similar videos on various train trips (check out this train that has an actual Zen garden onboard — yes seriously) , and a guy who specializes in doing various overnight ferry journeys (sampling different levels of accommodation from first-class to capsule cabins).

  187. 187.

    Dan B

    @Suzanne: Wow!  I was booted (shunned) out of architecture school in 1970, long efire these amazing architects.  I bought many magazines and saw their genius unfold.  My two years in Chicago were a memorable experience in some amazing architecture, and art.  It would be great if Seattle’s hoi poloi got the Japanese bug.  They got the most amazing library but we’re still at an outpost.

  189. 189.

    Miss Bianca

    @Brachiator: Kimba. Kimba the White Lion. (Simba’s the rip-off, as far as I’m concerned.) A hugely influential cartoon on young me as well.

  192. 192.

    reppa

    rather late, but Idol — specifically Chika Idol (Underground)…
    for instance —
    Necronomidol — Skulls in the Stars, or Ithaqua…
    Zenbu Kimi no Sei da (or, it’s all your fault) — almost original lineup, with my girl Togaren, and the current lineup
    Yanakoto Sotto Mute — Stain
    Tokyo Tefutefu (this is probably my favorite song from last year) — tokyo tragedy
    and something from a “mainstream” idol group — Beyooooooooooooooooonds — Atsui

    I am probably insane…

  193. 193.

    wenchacha

    My son married a Japanese woman he met in college. My good luck: she is a working artist, and it is great fun to go to museums with her!

    She is so generous in describing Japanese customs or folk tales to us. Japan is not always a great place for women to excel. Harumo’s grandfather suggested that she might fare better in the states! So far, she has done a mural for Facebook at Fremont, a mural for San Jose Walls, (formerly Pow Wow San Jose,) a mural in the Tenderloin, lots of paintings, and she was featured in a Bay Area arts magazine!

    Now, I have a grandson who is attending a full- immersion Japanese language daycare in California. So I think his grandparents from the states need to start learning some Japanese.

    harumosato.com is one of her links

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