I was torn on whether to import my old posts or leave them on Substack, and I opted to do the latter…for now. I wrote newsletters for two years before getting my first comment, and it wasn’t until three years in that I started seeing readers interact more regularly. There have been some nice conversations, and I’d love to bring those with me, but unfortunately Substack doesn’t have a way for comments to be exported at the moment, which shows one of the major flaws with the platform. Obviously there are other more serious problems as well.

If you’d rather opt out, please feel free to unsubscribe when the newsletter arrives, and if you’d prefer for me to delete your data, please email me at howtojapanese at gmail dot com, and I’m glad to remove your information. Thanks for reading to this point!

日本・日本語： 奇数・偶数

I’ve been having a lot of success lately with one of the “impossible pairs” I wrote about in September 2024: I have finally (after 24 years of study) ironed out the difference between よっか (the 4^th of the month) and ようか (the 8^th of the month) thanks to the mnemonic I created. I still reach for the mnemonic (“long vowel, later date”) every now and then, but I feel like when I do hear the dates themselves, I’m able to differentiate them without as much trouble. So I thought this would be a good month to expand on the impossible pairs concept.

Impossible pairs are words that are so similar and difficult to differentiate that they require extra effort, something I called “brute forcing.” I provided a road map for how to brute force phrases in the original post, and I looked at another set of pairs in January 2025. Those methods are worth reviewing, so definitely give them a read if you haven’t.

The commonality that the previous pairs all share is that they are semi-homophones. They don’t have the same exact pronunciation, but the similarity in both their pronunciation and close relationship in meaning make them extremely difficult to grasp immediately.

But impossible pairs aren’t limited to homophones and semi-homophones. I think they also encompass words that are a natural pair, such as antonyms, that are reasonably abstract. This last part is key. Because they are abstract, there’s less to hold on to, just as with 状況 (jōkyō) and 状態 (jōtai). This month I have a pair that qualifies in this respect.

I’m embarrassed to say I had to look up the difference between these two to write about them. They’re on the list of impossible pairs that I haven’t yet mastered, but they might be the easiest of the set given that the translation of at least one is nakedly transparent: 奇数 (kisū, odd number) and 偶数 (gūsū, even number).

奇数 (kisū) literally means odd (奇) number (数). So it might be as easy as forcing yourself to remember that 奇 is shared with the word 奇妙 (kimyō, strange/odd).

The Wikipedia entry for 偶数 (gūsū) explains that 偶 means “even” in the way that 偶 means “pair” as used in 配偶者 (haigūsha, partner). I recommend the post. There’s a lot of really interesting mathematic terminology. You can probably guess what 整数 (seisū) means before clicking over, but you’ll definitely learn it in the first sentence over there.

Now your job is to start associating these sounds

ぐう

き

with even and odd.

This reminds me, yet again, that it’s so difficult (impossible?) to know things without learning them. Knowledge is not some invisible spirit that overtakes you. Knowledge is experience. Humans are, to a certain extent, “large language models” that become capable of inventing their own novel combinations given enough exposure, but for words like this, ones where you’re learning a completely new symbol for a concept that you may already be familiar with, there’s no replacement for bumping up against it in your every day. It makes me want to find an introductory algebra or calculus textbook in Japanese and see what I can make of it. Anyone have recommendations?

いろいろ

• Check out the podcast over at the blog. And on my personal site, I have a piece I’ve been meaning to write for a while: a little ode to 商店街 (shōtengai, shopping arcades). I finally got my act in gear after reading Craig Mod’s newsletter on overtourism and this article in The Guardian about dying shopping arcades, which attributes their decline to supermarkets. I’m not sure it’s that simple.

• You know I’m a huge fan of Dr. Wes on TikTok, and this video is one of his best. I love this attitude toward the language. There’s so much rage/frustration/anger bait on the internet. Don’t fall for it. Put in your time with the language, stay positive, and the rules will reveal themselves.

  

  @scriptingjapanJapanese isn't wacky #nihongo #日本語 #japanese #learnjapanese

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• If you don’t already, read Tobias over at Observing Japan for the latest on Japanese politics.

• And this is the Klook link that I mentioned on the podcast for advice about the Osaka Expo. I still haven’t been yet but offered some advice on the pod.

日本・日本語： なんです

My wife loves Hoshino Gen. I myself am not really a fan, but I’ve been trying to not not develop an ear for his music…if that makes any sense at all. A lot of his songs sound very similar to me at this point, but as we were watching one of his concerts on Blu-ray recently, there were one or two that stood out to me. I’ll have to track down which ones they were…

However, there is one thing that I will never forget about that concert. During one of the interludes, Hoshino took a moment to talk with the audience. I don’t remember what the setup was, or maybe this was the setup, but at one point, he looks out at the audience and says simply: 誕生日なんです (Tanjōbi nan desu, It’s my birthday).

That’s it. Just that short little phrase. He then continues on with the banter, but this was a statement phrase, the start of something. And it felt like the perfect example of how to use this なんです there at the end of the sentence, which is notably different from just です, so I wanted to write about it this month.

What’s going on here? Why doesn’t he just say 誕生日です (Tanjōbi desu, It’s my birthday)? As you can see, I’ve used the same basic English translation for both of these expressions. Are they not more or less equivalent?

They are not.

There is a perfect was to capture the regular, vanilla 誕生日です, and that is with this image from one of my favorite episodes of The Office:

In this case, however, instead of “your birthday” it would be “my birthday.”

It is my birthday.

It. Is. My. Birthday.

No contractions allowed. No facial expressions either. A perfectly Dwight-Schrute delivery is all that’s allowed.

What does なんです add? Let’s take at a look at a definition, and in this case the Kotobank definition just calls it a polite, spoken version of なのだ, so we’ll check out the definition of なのだ:

説明、または強い断定の意を表す。

Expresses explanation or strong declaration.

なんです adds in everything else. The contraction. The facial expressions. And a lot more conveyed a-lingually.

In English, the only way to capture this would be to add some additional, similarly subtle verbiage: “So today’s my birthday.” Adding a “So” here at the beginning of the sentence actually mimics what’s going on here pretty well.

This pattern attaches directly to nouns and な-adjectives:

N + な + の/ん + です

In the spoken form, の becomes ん. The です can be in any form: だった (datta) or でした (deshita) to talk about something in the past, である (de aru) if you are using it in written form, だろう (darō) if you are conjecturing or talking about something in the future, and many others.

So how might we use this? Can we just attach it to any noun (Yes) or do we need to use it in specific circumstances (also Yes)?

Combining なんです with 実は (jitsu wa, actually) creates an easy-to-use structure that I think will help solidify the role of this little nugget:

実はXなんです (Jitsu wa X nan desu)

Actually it’s X.

Here are a couple of nice examples I found on the website formerly known as Twitter, still one of the better corpuses of Japanese out there:

Here the author sets up expectations with the photo of a (somewhat) green cityscape and funicular (?) tracks and the text 自然が多い所にいます (Shizen ga ōi tokoro ni imasu, I’m in a place with lots of nature) and then subverts them by saying 実は東京なんです (Jitsu wa Tokyo nandesu, Actually this is Tokyo). Here the なんです helps apply some of that subversion pressure along with the 実は.

So if you’re a Canadian living in Japan and constantly being confused for an American, when someone asks about your hometown and implies that it’s the U.S., you could say 実はカナダなんです (Jitsu wa Kanada nandesu, Actually it’s Canada).

Here’s another example, this time without 実は but another expectations subversion that takes advantage of にとって (ni totte) and は (wa) to draw a distinction:

猫たちにとって玄関は楽しい遊び場なんです！ (Neko-tachi ni totte genkan wa tanoshii asobiba nandesu, For cats, the entranceway is actually a fun place to play!)

So my official recommendation is to add 実はXなんです to your list of memorized phrases and then start to work it into your speech patterns when possible. Soon enough, you’ll have a natural feel for when you can jettison the 実は and use なんです all on its own.

And by that point I think you’ll start to see the same thing works for adjectives and verbs as well, except you don’t need the な:

ADJ/V + の/ん + です

So if someone asks you why you haven’t splurged on a new Nintendo Switch 2, you can respond with a simple 高いんですよ (Takai ndesu yo, Because it’s pricey).

Or if someone asks whether you ended up following through on your plans to go to the Osaka Expo, you could say 行ったんですが、ずっと雨だったんです (Itta ndesu ga, zutto ame datta ndesu, I did go, but it rained the whole time). Here you have the double usage after the initial verb and then after 雨.

We had the NBA Finals at the beginning of the month, so allow me to use a basketball analogy. Most sports fans follow the ball when they’re watching a game, but so much is going on away from the ball. This is obviously true with a sport like American football where the are 20+ players on the field at any given time, but it’s also true for basketball, which takes advantage of slight movements to create openings for easier baskets. One thing you can do as a spectator is pick a player (maybe one of the role players) and focus on that player rather than the ball. What are they doing when they don’t have the ball? How do their movements affect the rest of the game.

The same is true with なんです, and I’d argue for のだ as well, which I wrote about previously. These are not always the bits of the language that we focus on when consuming Japanese media. I’d challenge you to spend the next couple weeks or months keeping a lookout for these little phrases and how they get used. See if you can follow them around instead of “the ball.” These little interstitial explanatory bits of language will get you closer to sounding more natural in Japanese and to understanding what’s going on with the language when you’re watching a show or reading a book.

いろいろ

• Over on the blog I have managed yet again to blog about Murakami. Just a quick interstitial chapter as I get caught up on my reading of Distant Drums, still one of Murakami’s most interesting untranslated works. Someone please pay me to translate it!

• The podcast is online as well.

• I started playing Metaphor: ReFantazio. I’m only three hours in and am enjoying it, but the translators do seem to be replicating almost every instance of ellipses at the start of a sentence in the Japanese, which is one of my irrational pet peeves. I don’t think English should be locked into the same structure as the Japanese, and anchoring to an ellipsis does exactly that.

• I mentioned basketball as a metaphor this month, which reminds me that I have not yet recommended Rakuten’s mobile phone service. It’s cheap, the connection is decent (although I hear the connection is poor in Tokyo subways), and you get free NBA League Pass. It’s kind of incredible. There’s a dedicated League Pass smartphone app and an app that works on my smart TV. You get access to every game. I managed to catch some of the NBA Finals on my lunch break and many of the weekend playoff games.

• This was a good post, and it didn’t get enough attention lol

• Happy Pride.

• In other Japan recommendations, I can recommend the Adidas online shop for buying large shoes. I am cursed with narrow, flat, size-13 feet, which is 31cm in most Japanese sizes. I ordered a new pair of gym shoes, and Adidas delivered them almost next day. You can search their website by size, which makes it easy to determine what’s actually available.

• Mulboyne did the hard work with this.

日本・日本語： 五月雨式

In the spirit of the Oscar Peterson Trio, I get requests.

Not many, but they do come in every now and then, so when I get one, I try and respond. I received one a few weeks ago from a friend back in Chicago who recently learned the word 五月雨式. This wasn’t exactly a request. My friend wanted to know if I was familiar with the word and suggested it might make a good topic to write about, which indeed it does.

First, before we do anything, we have to figure out how it’s pronounced, and to do that, we need to determine what exactly is going on with this word. Clearly 五月雨式 is a four-character compound of some sort, but it’s not the most common kind, which is two two-character compounds stacked together. For example, a word like 日常生活, which combines 日常 (nichijō, daily) with 生活 (seikatsu, life).

Instead, we have a three-character word 五月雨 with the suffix 式 (shiki), which gets used to describe a “style” or “method” when used as a suffix. Many times—as a noun on its own, in compounds, and as a suffix—式 means “ceremony,” such as 卒業式 (sotsugyōshiki, graduation ceremony), but 式 also has a 的-like quality in that it can attach to larger nouns and turn them into descriptors, such as the word タッチパネル式 (tacchipaneru-shiki, touch panel-style), which gets used to describe something with touch panel functionality. For example, digital signage or ticket sales machines.

So we’ve sorted out the end of this word. We’re left with this deceptive three-character compound 五月雨.

I say deceptive because even first-year students should recognize the kanji that make up the two words contained within: We’ve got 五月 (gogatsu, May) and 雨 (ame, rain). But sadly this word is not pronounced ごがつあめ (gogatsu-ame). Rather, it is pronounced さみだれ (samidare).

五月雨 has a very interesting 語源 (gogen, etymology). Japan used a lunisolar calendar for many years until interactions with outside countries eventually resulted in a shift to a solar calendar on December 3, Meiji 5 (1872), which became January 1, Meiji 6 (1873), resulting in an effective shift of about a month for the entire calendar. Thus, the rainy season, which used to be in May, was now in June. 五月雨, then, essentially means 梅雨 (tsuyu): the long, rainy season rains that start and stop for what feels like forever.

This solves part of the problem for understanding this word, but before we return to the usage of 五月雨式 I want to go over quickly why 五月雨 is pronounced さみだれ. In the old calendar, 五月 was pronounced さつき (satsuki). This provides the さ, and みだれ is said to come from 水垂, which is made up of 水 (mizu, water) and 垂れ (tare, drop) and I assume みずたれ became みだれ at some point? Thus, さみだれ. You see similar patterns like 五月晴れ (satsuki bare), which refers to the brief moments of sunny weather during rainy season storms, although it’s often conflated to mean the pleasant, post-spring sunny season in May before the country gets unpleasantly hot.

Going back to the meaning of the word, what do we have? “Rainy-season-rain-style”? Well, yes, essentially. The rainy season starts and stops, continues on and on, for days and days, unpredictably, and 五月雨式 now gets used for something that kind of continues unpredictably. Forbes Japan has this definition:

物事が一度で終わらずに、だらだらと続くことを意味する言葉です

Things that continue to trickle in without coming to a complete stop.

If you have a translation request that you plan to submit to a translation company, for example, and need to get started on the project but also know that the text is not yet complete and you’ll have an additional request the next week, you might say 五月雨式に申し訳ありません (Samidare-shiki ni mōshiwake arimasen, Apologies for sending these requests intermittently).

And if you’re the translation company and you don’t mind this, say you’d rather receive the material as it’s available in order to give your translators more time and ensure that they aren’t as rushed as they might be if they had to wait for the complete text to be finished, you could say 五月雨式で構いません (Samidare-shiki de kamaimasen, We don’t mind you sending requests intermittently).

Note that when used as an adverb, 五月雨式 takes に. For example, 五月雨式に提出させていただきます (Samidare-shiki ni teishutsu sasete itadakimasu, I will submit intermittently). Forbes Japan has some excellent usage examples, one of which is 完成次第、五月雨式に納品いたします (Kansei shidai, samidare-shiki ni nōhin itashimasu, I will submit the delivery intermittently as I complete the deliverable).

However, you do see it also marked with で, not only when used as a noun as above with 構いません or in a sentence like 五月雨式で問題ありません (Samidareshiki de mondai arimasen, Intermittently is not a problem), but also in sentences where it’s very clearly used as an adjective like 五月雨式でアップします (Samidareshiki de appu shimasu, I’ll upload the photos as I can), which I spotted on Twitter. に gets used more frequently, but で does happen.

This is a surprisingly useful little word with such an interesting, rich history. I’m glad I dug into it a little bit.

If there’s anything you’d like me to dig into, feel free to reach out to howtojapanese at gmail anytime!

いろいろ

• On the blog this month, I finally had time to do some work on my close reading of Murakami’s Distant Drums memoir. I still have a few past chapters that I need to account for, and I put up one from the beginning of the book that I imagine would probably get cut if it ever gets translated. This is Murakami spinning his wheels, exhausted upon arrival in Europe, and just writing through that exhaustion. Not really a necessary chapter in a travel book, but interesting enough, especially since it places him at a very specific point in time: His wife turning 38 years old.

• And don’t forget to check out the podcast.

• I had a Bluesky post get more response than ever before…although not quite enough to say it went “viral,” ha. I posted about how Kindle has a lot of free public domain works on Amazon Japan. Just click buy and they’ll beam directly to your device. You can also opt to use an Aozora app. There are a number, some of which have in-app purchases, which I’d be careful of. I use one called i読書 that is free. You can find free content there as well if you don’t want to support Amazon. (On a side note, a newsletter reader joined my Japanese reading group for the very first time! Thanks for joining! And I hope to see more of y’all!)

• I mentioned this on the podcast, but there should still be spots available for the Japanese coaching that I’m doing for USJETAA. Check their events page here. Essentially we have a Zoom session, go over some study strategies, and then let everyone discuss what issues they are facing. Hopefully we can help provide solutions!

日本・日本語： 例文

I’ve started doing “Japanese Coaching” for USJETAA. I’ve been running my Japanese Reading Group through the group since 2021 (on top of the eight years I ran it through JETAA Chicago; all are welcome to join!), and the leadership wanted to create some additional Japanese language content. I brainstormed a bit with Chris Lindsay of the excellent dictionary and Japanese lessons app Nihongo, and the result is a space where students of the language who are hitting a wall in their studies can come and discuss their struggles. I’m glad to share strategies and help problem solve.

The first session earlier this month filled up in 24 hours, but we’re planning to offer them quarterly: I had so much help during my early years of study—especially learning how to read (which I wrote about in the Japan Times)—that I feel driven to give back however I can. If you’re interested, jump on the waitlist and they’ll notify you when the next session opens.

One of the questions that participants in April asked was, How do you improve your Japanese speaking skills? This is a question that is often coupled with the question, How do you learn Japanese in isolation?

This really is the most difficult question for me to answer, given that I’m living in Japan, working at a Japanese company (albeit surrounded by English speakers). Although I can sympathize, having gone through over a decade in the wilderness: three years of grad school in the mostly Nihongo-less New Orleans and then another nine years in Chicago without a car, which limited me to the city proper, away from the Japanese/Japanese-American population that has shifted to the outer suburbs in the past few decades.

The broader question in these circumstances is not just how to improve your spoken Japanese but how to learn expressions that you cannot generate on your own, how to create novel (to you) Japanese phrases that are authentic and accurate.

The good news is that there is a tremendous amount of Japanese language content on the internet, and much of it is targeted at native Japanese speakers, making it much more reliable than stuff targeted at non-native speakers (including this rag!). I mentioned this in passing back in February 2021:

…there’s an incredibly robust support system for finding answers in Japanese. I’ve previously mentioned Mayonez and Tap-Biz in JT articles, but there’s also Eigobu (apparently now known as “WURK”?), Goiryoku, and a number of others. There are a few sites like Merriam-Webster and the Grammarly blog in English, but I’m not sure they are an exact equivalent.

What is it about Japanese that generates this much content? I think it likely has more to do with SEO and the economics of clicks (which I know very little about) than the inherent difficulty of Japanese, but I think we can all admit that everyone needs a hand with 敬語 every now and then. That’s actually what I recommended previously:

One strategy is simply tacking on the word 敬語 (keigo, polite speech) to any Japanese phrase. This is a quick way to locate a more polite way to say something.

Looking back, I’m pretty happy with the way the 敬語 I created turned out:

厳格な管理のもとご利用いただきますようお願いいたします (Genkaku na kanri no moto go-riyoo itadakimasu yoo onegai itashimasu, We ask that you make use [of this information] with the strictest handling).

However, I mentioned a more general approach, also in passing, back in June 2022:

Incorporate new phrases into patterns you’re already familiar with, and use quotation marks to isolate phrases and make sure your usage resembles what’s out there online. You can usually find examples of what you need by describing it in Japanese and adding 例文 (reibun, example sentences) on the end.

This month, let’s take a look at how that might work in practice.

I didn’t have any words ready to go, so I actively hunted for unfamiliar phrases and came away with this one that I’m curious to explore with you all in real time (more or less): 諸々 (moromoro). Here’s how I would approach figuring out what it means and how to use it on my own in isolation.

First, I recognize the kanji from the word 諸国 (shokoku, various countries), a word I learned in college that has stuck with me. So I had a little bit of solid ground to walk on, but I had no clue how to use 諸々 on its own. I can’t remember the exact phrase at work that sparked my interest in this word, so I’m using the simple strategy I mentioned above: Do a Google search for 諸々 and 例文.

It turns up a number of helpful articles, one of which provides this relatively easy to understand definition:

「諸々」とは、「多くのもの、全てのもの」「さまざまなもの」「多くの人」などという意味を表します。

諸々 means things like “lots of things/all the things,” “various things,” “lots of people” and other phrases.

This is a bit vague and general but still helpful. It essentially means exactly what it means as a prefix in 諸国. Fortunately we also get this helpful explanation that gives us more context:

「多く」「たくさん」「さまざま」などといった表現よりも硬めの印象を与える言葉であり、日常における会話よりも文章やビジネスシーンなどで多く使われる傾向にあります。

諸々 is more formal than expressions like 多く, たくさん, and さまざま, so it tends to be used more often in written language and in the workplace than it does in daily conversation.

Great. Now we know the kind of situations when we can use it and we just need a few example sentences to give us a more solid understanding. Here’s one that gives us firmer ground to stand on:

お菓子やお洋服など、諸々のものをいただきましてありがとうございます

Thank you for the snacks and clothes and other various items.

The person uses 諸々 to modify もの here to express thanks for a range of different items, after giving two specific examples of snacks and clothing.

This is a really helpful phrase because we now know it can be used as an adjective and that we can use it in expressions of thanks. Another example sentence shows us that it can also be used as an adverb. Excuse this overly literal translation, which I think is helpful to understand what the Japanese is doing:

ご相談いただいた件について、諸々承知いたしました

On the topics we consulted about, I have understood all of them.

The verb here is 承知 (shōchi), a really nice polite version of 分かりました (wakarimashita, I understand), essentially, and we can put 諸々 right in front of it to express that we have understood all of the topics that were covered during the 相談.

The whole article is worth a read. It categorizes the usages into お礼 (o-rei, thanks), 連絡 (renraku, communication), 相談 (sōdan, consultation), 承認 (shōnin, confirmation), and 依頼 (irai, request), which is a good way to think about them. The author also notes to be careful using it with superiors because it is inherently vague, although it can be used in 敬語 (keigo, polite speech) expressions. The most important note is that 諸々 is best avoided in apologies because it could suggest that you do not understand what specific error you made.

In these cases, I like to take a look at how the phrase gets used on social media as well to double check that it is indeed part of the vernacular, and not just a made-up online expression. Unfortunately the bad place still has the best corpus of Japanese, so I will occasionally dip in and see what I can find. In this case, I found the very excellent and promising phrase 諸々のご調整ありがとうございます (Moromoro no go-chōsei arigatō gozaimasu, Thank you for all of the adjustments):

I can’t tell exactly what was adjusted other than something transportation related, but I can already imagine a situation in which a colleague or work partner did enough to merit using an expression like this.

I hope this example helps folks out there trying to figure out different expressions. One thing to be wary of is non-native Japanese sources, as I mentioned above. For JLPT grammar patterns especially, you are going to encounter a lot of websites with purportedly authentic usage examples and definitions. I’d err on the side of finding a Japanese source and some actual examples on social media to make sure you’re getting authentic material.

Once you’ve isolated a few of these phrases, it’s critical to lock them into your active Japanese by keeping a record of them somehow. For one possible solution, look no further than my February newsletter about collecting Japanese phrases.

いろいろ

• Check out the podcast over at the blog where I have recommendations for Kyoto this month. Let me know if you like these, and maybe I can include other tourist recommendations here and there throughout the year.

• This was a really interesting interview with Chris Maple, the designer who made the original Pokemon logo.

  

  @jackchen.atelierGlazing Graphic Designers: Chris Maple Interview Update: Chris has connected with the VP of Pokémon Marketing and they support his claim as the creator of the Pokemon Logo. #logodesign #graphicdesign #pokemon

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• I finally beat Final Fantasy VI after 30 years. In the past, I made it pretty far into the World of Ruin but never got all the way to the end. The Pixel Remasters have some nice quality of life improvements that made it pretty easy, but you still need to level the whole party and know how to get past the bosses (which I did with the help of some walkthroughs). Unfortunately I don’t think I have the patience to explore the game as was intended; it must’ve been the Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom of its time. There’s so much to find, so many little details, pieces of stories in the world. And the writing is pretty sharp! I started Final Fantasy V, and it’s immediately apparent that there was a major jump between V and VI. The latter feels more novelistic, more complicated, and most notably it starts in media res, without much of an inciting incident. We’re just in the story of this multifaceted world populated with a huge number of interesting people.

• NBA player DeAndre Jordan is studying Japanese, apparently.

  

  @deandrejordan毎日べんきょうします! #japaneseclass #japan #japaneselesson #deandrejordan #nba #japantiktok

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• Asahi’s new beer The Bitter-ist is worth checking out! Solid, bock-strength lager with a great hop profile. I was skeptical but came away impressed. It released on April 15, so if you check it out this weekend, it should be super fresh!

  

日本・日本語： 筋

When I first moved to Chicago, I refused to use Uber or even taxis. This was back in 2013, when Uber was still cheap, largely because rides were being heavily subsidized by the company to grow its user base. Instead I ran around the city breathlessly, making bus and El connections as best I could, waiting under the heat lamps on winter days and sometimes even killing time in Walgreens so I didn’t freeze while waiting for the next bus to roll up north on Broadway or east on Irving Park. This “austerity” did help me learn the city. But at what cost? I saved money but wasted time. And missed potential connections.

At some point I gave in and started taking occasional rides, and while none of the drivers that I rode with stand out to me now, a decade later, I do remember having conversations, both with drivers and with other riders during that brief period when it was very cheap if you were willing to share your ride and zig zag across the city. I guess I was willing to waste time, once again, to save a few dollars.

Fast forward ten years in the future. My aging body, which is inexorably approaching its physical limits, is less willing to do the work I did when I first moved to Chicago, and my brain has ripened; I’m wise enough to spend the money to save both time and effort: In the past few months, I’ve become a taxi rider here in Osaka. I hosted family and was preparing for my wedding, and I’m not sure I would’ve made it through either without the occasional rest that a taxi can provide both in terms of time and physical exertion.

Uber here in Osaka is linked with the taxi system, so unless you specifically ask for a larger van, you end up in one of the local cabs. I wrote more specifically about my recommendations for Osaka, about using Uber, and about my wedding over at the blog this month in a sort of post that I haven’t written for a long, long time. The last time I can remember being this excited to make specific recommendations was just after moving to Tokyo in 2008.

In the newsletter this month, I want to talk about 筋 (suji), which is a topic that came up with one of the Uber drivers when I was riding around with family.

When you’re rolling into cabs with loud foreign family like a reverse clown car-exit, taxi drivers inevitably seem to shut up or talk a lot, and we had a good mix of both over the course of a week. If you’re on your own, you might have to be more aggressive about breaking the ice, but I highly recommend it. It’s a great opportunity to practice conversation, and you might end up with small kismets, like the fact that the driver I’m about to tell you about has a daughter who married an American from Chicago.

This guy was not actually an Uber driver, now that I think about it. We just hopped into his cab on Midosuji right outside of the Parco department store in Shinsaibashi. We had a nice conversation over the course of the ride, and at some point I asked him a question that had been on my mind since moving to Osaka over two years ago: Why are there so many 筋 in Osaka and not in Tokyo?

筋 has a number of different definitions…and by “number” I mean 18. A dozen and a half!

Let’s go through them quickly:

1. Muscle or muscle fibers

2. Tendon

3. Blood vessels visibly showing above the surface of the skin

4. Plant fibers

5. A long, narrow chain of things

6. A striped pattern

7. Family lineage

8. A school of art or study

9. Aptitude/talent

10. Logic of things

11. The plot/summary of a novel/play

12. An area related to that thing (I may need some help understanding this one)

13. Something one wants to request

14. The area along a road or river

15. In go or shogi, the play considered the proper move (Need some help here as well, although this site has some information)

16. On a shogi board, either of the vertical 9 rows

17. Social standing, position

18. An abbreviation of 筋かまぼこ (fish paste)

Can you see the theme here? Things that are long. Things that are connected through an area, physically or metaphorically.

The one we’re interested in is 14. (Although it might also be the first definition from this page, which says 細長くひと続きになっているもの - a long, thin, continuous thing?) My driver let us know that 筋 are “avenues,” and they run north to south: 堺筋 (Sakai-suji), 天神橋筋 (Tenjinbashi-suji), 御堂筋 (Midō-suji), etc.

通 (tōri), on the other hand, are “streets” and run east to west: 本町通 (Honmachi-dōri), 長堀通 (Nagahori-dōri), 中央通 (Chūō-dōri), etc.

This was a bit of a なるほど (naruhodo) moment for me. I remember feeling thrown off by the kanji in Osaka upon first arrival. None of the kanji I included above are unusual in and of themselves, but something about the frequency and the combination just stood out from what I was used to in Tokyo. It took a few months to get the vibe, much like learning to stand on the right side of the escalator. Now standing on the left throws me off whenever I go back to Tokyo.

The driver also noted that 通 were originally residential areas, which seems to be backed up. A few sources online note that 通 originally meant “a place where people live” while 筋 meant “a road heading to a destination.” 通 were the core of the city, and 筋 were constructed to supplement and connect the areas. Each 筋 had different purposes, with Midō-suji connecting two temples and Sakai-suji providing access to a waterfront trade area. Some of these 筋 like Tenjinbashi-suji have taken on a greater role than just a thoroughfare, with the 商店街 (shōtengai) playing a vital role in the neighborhood.

So next time you come through Osaka, take a moment to pause and consider whether you’re heading north-south or east-west. Maybe you’re checking out the used books in Semba Center building along Chūō-dōri or heading to Tsutenkaku near the southern part of Sakai-suji. There’s a lot to see here, even if our attractions are not quite as big and bold as the temples in Kyoto or the neon lights of Shinjuku; we’re a matte finish city, not a glossy finish city like Tokyo or a lacquer finish like Kyoto. Our highlights are in the small neighborhood streets and eateries, far from the crowds on 道頓堀.

And when you do visit, grab a taxi to save some time. Your feet will thank you.

いろいろ

• As noted above, this month’s blog post is online with some Osaka and general Japan travel recommendations. The podcast is also linked there. I go over all of the newsletter and blog content plus an extra story from my wedding.

• Thank you for your feedback last month! I really appreciate those who took the time to send an email or leave a comment. I’m still looking into options and need a little time to explore.

• This oral history of the NBA’s COVID-19 shutdown was an interesting read. I remember those first few days pretty vividly. The day after the Jazz-Thunder game was my last day in the office because I worked from home on Fridays.

• Really inspiring dev diary for the game Balatro. I played it a bit last year but didn’t get addicted, yet this article still made me want to make a game. Instead, I doubled down on Japanese study.

日本・日本語： Collector’s Mindset

As a student of Japanese, it can be beneficial to be an avid collector.

Collectors are, by nature, hoarders. The volume of stuff they’ve gathered often precludes recollection of every individual item that they have, but that never prevents them from recognizing a new acquisition. There’s a thirst, a hunger for the novel, and the same can be true for language study.

With the right systems and thinking in place, I do believe that students of Japanese can harness this appetite for their benefit. Only with a collector’s eye can you appraise the utility of a phrase that you’ve never seen before. The language may be new, but there’s a glint of recognition: Yes, this too is mine. It belongs with me.

I had this happen to me last year when I was reading Murakami for my annual Murakami Fest in September. I’ve been reading his travel memoir 遠い太鼓 (Distant Drums) over the past couple years, and in one of the chapters I read last year, Murakami sees a Greek news report about Black Monday. It’s the first he’s heard of the news, but it’s literally all Greek to him. It isn’t until later that he realizes what’s actually happened. Here’s how he describes it:

あとになってわかったことだが、それが例のブラック・マンデーだった。 (Ato ni natte wakatta koto da ga, sore ga rei no Black Monday datta)

I realized this later, but this was Black Monday.

The first clause of this sentence hit me like the proverbial ton of bricks. It was better than a cup of coffee in the morning. あとになってわかったことだが. And I had that collector’s instinct. This phrase was now mine.

This feels like such a natural way to describe this situation in Japanese, but I’m not sure I would have been able to produce this kind of language actively if I was in a situation where I was trying to say something similar, nor had I ever read this construction before…at least that I can remember.

When something like this happens, there are two critical steps.

First, you must recognize that this is novel language for you. This step is a bit subtle. If you’re just starting to learn Japanese, everything will be new. So this recognition may take some time, and if you don’t encounter it for a while, I’d recommend boosting your input. Can you read more Japanese? Watch more Japanese TV? Listen to more Japanese?

Second, you MUST write down the phrase. Keep a list of some sort. I use the iOS Notes app on my phone, which conveniently syncs between my iPhone and laptop, but I’m sure there are a ton of other options. Evernote. Obsidian. Apps like that. This is the second step of becoming a collector of the language. Developing the habit of writing down these phrases somewhere.

I guess ideally you’d make a flashcard for it and deliver it to yourself on an algorithmically calculated schedule to most efficiently lodge it in your memory. Or you can train yourself to open the Notes app on your phone whenever you get on the train in the morning. Well, maybe not every morning, but at least every now and then.

Conveniently for the purposes of this post, both this phrase and this practice of collecting phrases are somewhat あとになってわかったこと for me. I did keep notebooks of vocabulary words when I first started reading novels, but I wouldn’t say that was the same. That was closer to building a foundation from which I could later develop this practice. I’ll be sure to dip into my collection more frequently for this newsletter, perhaps for the いろいろ section, in the future.

いろいろ

• The blog post for February with the podcast and a few additional links.

• TikTok went away for 12 hours or so, but I managed to save all of my TikToks to physical media before that could happen. I needed all the recipes I have saved (the most recent of which is Emeril’s Portuguese Chicken Thighs, which I recommend and will link on YouTube so everyone can access). I think a measured amount of the Tok each day is fine, if you can control the addiction and ESPECIALLY if you can train the algorithm to give you Japanese language learning content. The other day I saw this video from a guy learning Spanish, which I thought I’d share. There’s a lot to take away, but the key is this: Go talk to people. Find a way to interact, to get out there and make friends. He recommends the app HelloTalk, which works just as well for Japanese as it does for Spanish.

  

  @realkingivyyyGracias amigo @golf tendo #spanish #fyp #foryou #foryoupage #fypage #bilingual

  Tiktok failed to load.
  
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• More Tok: A group of Japanese hosts has gone viral over on TikTok for their dancing. The “Tyranno Dance” got a writeup on Know Your Meme, but “Nishiyama Daddy” seems to be the captain of the group. I haven’t seen anything written about this phenomenon yet, and I feel like there’s something there for the taking. The response to these guys has been an interesting combination of “weird Japan,” differing conceptions of masculinity, and mainstream vs niche culture.

• Jason Packman has a nice writeup of the 七福神 (Seven Lucky Gods) pilgrimage in Shinjuku.

質問

Platforms seem to be in a bad spot at the moment. I like what I’ve built here on Substack, but I’m not unopposed to moving elsewhere, even if it means making a somewhat substantial investment of time or money, but I’d really like to hear from all of you. What do you make of the current content landscape? Are you trying to avoid Substack? Have you moved off of other social media platforms?

I haven’t deleted any accounts because I’m optimistic enough to believe that fascists have no staying power. Sadly, though, they’ve ruined things enough that I’ve deleted Twitter from my phone and am only sending out my monthly links. Facebook I need to keep because of a few groups I manage, unfortunately, but I’ve turned off notifications and am not checking in every day. I’m active on Bluesky but haven’t fully recreated the Twitter 2009-2020 environment there just yet.

I seem to get more comments here on the newsletter than on the blog, but I wonder if that’s a function of the variation in content; my more focused writing is here these days. I’m starting to toy with the idea of self-hosting the newsletter, but the tech has really exploded and isn’t as simple and deploying a Wordpress install, which felt like the Apollo missions for me when I first started blogging.

So please do let me know what you think. Would you support a shift to a different platform if I moved to somewhere like Ghost? Is it difficult or expensive to set up a self-hosted Ghost newsletter? Would it be worth it to try and wait things out here on Substack?

This is mostly a labor of love, with the goal of helping you all learn Japanese and realize any Japanese-language goals, but I’m not interested in supporting fascists and really would like to have my own digital real estate, which is what my blog felt like for the first ten years of writing.

Thanks again for reading, and please let me know what you think.

よろしくお願いします！

日本・日本語： Various Conditions

The internet is, at once, the greatest invention of all time and (likely) humanity’s downfall. Given that it’s the start of a new year, let’s ignore the latter of these and focus on the good.

Such as one of the responses to this Yahoo Chiebukuro question: 「状況」と「状態」の違いを小学生でもわかるように親切に教えてくれる？ (Jōkyō to jōtai no chigai o shōgakusei demo wakaru yō ni shinsetsu ni oshiete kureru? Could you explain the difference between 状況 and 状態 to me so even a little kid could understand?).

There are a number of answers, but the OP gave the gold medal (rewarded to the best response) to the person who took him literally and responded as if addressing an actual elementary school kid. Hear me read it out on the podcast this month to get the full effect.

As regular readers may have been able to guess, this month is the second installment of Impossible Pairs, which I first wrote about in September 2024. These are sets of words that are frustratingly similar and require an extra effort (occasionally even “brute forcing”) to differentiate. This month I’m looking at 状態 (jōtai) and 状況 (jōkyō).

These two sound similar and are similarly abstract, conceptual words that are used to mean “circumstances/condition/state.” One of my Japanese instructors always said that

状態 (jōtai) is used for smaller things like the condition of a used book, whereas 状況 (jōkyō) is used for larger things like the political situation in the Middle East, but after reading the Chiebukuro post I mentioned above, I think it’s a little more complex than that. The responder, despite phrasing it like a condescending schoolteacher, does have a nice simple way of defining these two terms:

状態: 今の様子 (Ima no yōsu, the current state/appearance)

状況: 変わっていくこと (Kawatte iku koto, the changing state/circumstances)

That makes it possible for us to create this useful mnemonic:

状態: static

状況: dynamic

I guess this isn’t a mnemonic, per se, but we could shoehorn one in there with the TA in static and jōtai, and the Y in dynamic and jōkyō.

状態 is the static state/condition that something or someone is currently in: It’s good, bad, worn, mint, unruffled, etc.

状況, on the other hand, is a dynamic amalgamation of the 状態 of all things within a set situation over a period of time. It’s a fluid state of affairs of a larger situation; it’s a bit more zoomed out and expansive, and it’s also in flux.

This website has another useful breakdown that starts with a definition for each term but then expands to frequent usages, which I found particularly helpful.

状態:

• Condition of someone’s body/mind (体の様子)

• Condition of a product/device (商品・機器の様子)

• The object of a verb that preserves, fixes, or restores (保つ、治す、復元するなどの動詞)

状況:

• State of society/an organization (社会・組織の様子)

• State of work (仕事関係の様子)

• The object of verbs that report, explain, or investigate (状況は報告・説明・調査などと一緒に使われやすい)

Hopefully that gives you a way in to sort out the difference between these two. It did take me a while, but I think I’ve more or less mastered them. Or maybe I’ve looked at Mercari once or twice two often and have just locked in 状態 as the word used for the static condition of an item for sale:

And at work, I’m familiar with 状況確認 (jōkyō kakunin), which is what you do when there are two groups working together and maybe one of those groups needs to get up to speed. They need to figure out what is going on with a project (all the various, dynamic aspects of it), and they do so by doing 確認 on the situation.

Have you become familiar with these two words? If so, what’s enabled you to differentiate them?

いろいろ

• Just a small addition over at the blog this month, a note that 状態 is more of a video game word than 状況 due to the fact that the various PC and NPC are always getting into some sort of trouble, affecting their current “condition”/“status.”

• There’s a nice profile of koji whiskey in the New York Times. Christopher Pellegrini and Stephen Lyman have introduced a lot of these topics on their podcast Japan Distilled, so give that a listen as well if you’re interested.

日本・日本語： のです

This month I’d like to take you on a tour of a piece of writing that combines two topics I’ve written about previously. In December 2022, I wrote about 書き言葉 (kakikotoba, written language) and took a look at the elements of written Japanese in a Mainichi Shimbun editorial that give it the qualities of serious written Japanese: It uses formal phrasing and shorter 常体 (jōtai, direct style) constructions to create a more declarative effect. In August 2023, I wrote about のだ (no da), the little bit of language that comes at the end of clauses and allows Japanese speakers or writers to mark assertions, explanations, and emphasis.

Today, I’d like to look at an almost perfect intersection of these two ideas that I came across in Kakuta Mitsuyo’s book しあわせのねだん (Shiawase no nedan, The Price of Happiness).

I mentioned her book on the podcast in September this year. I discovered this set of essays at the 読書カフェ (dokusho kafe, reading cafe) near my house and knew I needed my own copy after flipping through it. Each entry in the book is just a few short pages. She writes about the cost of different things in her life, things like her health exam (which cost nothing), an electronic dictionary, and a huge range of other items. Other than the titles, which are just the name of the item and its price, she’s never very explicit about the happiness that these things bring her; it’s delicately executed.

In one essay titled 理想的中身 (risōteki nakami, Ideal Content) she writes about her bad habit of never keeping enough cash on hand and how it affected a trip to the beach with her boyfriend. Toward the end of the essay, we learn that the titular “ideal content” to always have on hand is 1,000 yen for each year you’ve lived; thus, 40,000 yen for Kakuta.

Here are the first three (very short) paragraphs of that essay, which I’ll first present without translation. I have a translation at the bottom of the newsletter, but if possible, see if you can struggle through these few sentences. In my newsletters and blog posts, I’m always most concerned with this question: How is the Japanese working? English translation often gets in the way of understanding the answer to that question.

Here we go:

私は財布にお金を入れない。いや、入れるのだが、入れる額が非常に少ない。

カードをたくさん持っていて現金を持ち歩かない、という主義でもない。ただ、入れ忘れるのだ。

2000円、3000円程度しか財布に入れずに歩いていることがしょっちゅうある。そんなに少額で困ることはないのか？とお思いでしょう。困ることは多々あるのです。　(62)

We can see from the very first paragraph that this is in 常体—the standard style for most writing including academic and business writing as well as nonfiction essays like Kakuta’s collection—because there are no です・ます (desu/masu) constructions. Or are there? If you look at the third paragraph, the final two sentences end with でしょう (deshō) and です (desu). What’s going on here? Are we dealing with 常体 writing or not?

We are, but there’s a switch that happens at the end. In the first paragraph, Kakuta sets up the problem: She has very little money in her wallet. In the second, she explains herself: She has little money in her wallet due to the fact that she forgets. In the third, she first expands on this by detailing exactly how little money she has in her wallet (2,000-3,000 yen) before posing a question to the reader. This is the key. These last two sentences are written as somewhat of a direct exchange with the reader.

We can see the question signaled with a question mark, but there are no quotations. Kakuta keeps the question right in there with the rest of the sentence and marks it as a question with a question mark and this tag: Xとお思いでしょう (X to o-omoi deshō, You must think/wonder X).

The particle と (to) is a standard quotation particle, which is preceded by the content of the question (そんなに少額で困ることはないのか？) and followed by the verb (お思いでしょう).

This is when we start to realize why there’s a switch from 常体 to 敬体 (keitai, distal style): Because Kakuta is either addressing the reader or writing with the reader more consciously in mind, she switches to a more polite form, which in this case is a keigo form of 思います. This is お (o), a prefix marking it as honorific + 思い (omoi), the stem of the verb + でしょう (deshō), the tentative form of です. She’s telling the reader more directly, You must/likely/probably think X, which in this case is the question そんなに少額で困ることはないのか？ (Sonna ni shōgaku de komaru koto ha nai no ka?, Don’t you run into problems with an amount of money that small?).

This is followed immediately by the answer to this question, which is also in distal form because it too addresses the reader more directly: 困ることは多々あるのです (Komaru koto wa tata aru no desu, I do in fact run into very many problems).

This is the first connection with my past newsletter: Japanese writers most frequently use direct style with だ・である (da/de aru) forms, but they can opt to use distal style for a more casual spoken tone or to directly address the reader. Watch for how writers use these forms.

The other connection with my newsletter is the のだ (no da), which I called one of the most difficult aspects of the language to learn how to use. Kakuta uses it three times, twice in direct style and once in distal style:

• 入れるのだが (ireru no da ga)

• ただ、入れ忘れるのだ (irewasureru no da)

• 困ることは多々あるのです (komaru koto wa tata aru no desu)

As I noted in my previous newsletter, you could easily write these sentences without the のだ and still convey the fundamental meaning. So what role is it playing here?

First, let’s think about the commonalities of these instances. The second and third examples both come at the end of sentences and at the end of paragraphs. Here Kakuta is using it to mark emphasis. It’s almost a sense of italics, something extra-textual in English and nearly extra-textual in Japanese; clearly textual because it’s in there, but cutting it would not change the underlying message.

The first instance comes at a junction in the sentence, right next to a literal conjunction. Here she’s using it to contrast the verbs in the first two sentences. In the sentence immediately before she says 入れない (irenai, I don’t put [money in my wallet]), only to go on and contradict this by saying 入れる (I do put [money in my wallet]), and to qualify and emphasize that assertion, she adds the のだが. It’s a nice little linguistic deflection that gives the writing momentum going into the explanation: 入れる額が非常に少ない (ireru gaku ga hijō ni sukunai, the amount I put in is incredibly small).

So the English may have a textual solution rather than something like italics. For example, there’s a clear but subtle distinction between “I put money in my wallet, but…” and “I do put money in my wallet, but…” How would you explain the difference between these? As a native English speaker, it does feel difficult!

This is the same with the final sentence. These two sentences are not the same, but they are very close:

• I run into many problems.

• I do run into many problems.

One of my Japanese instructors once told my class that it isn’t an ironclad rule to use のだ・のです in the final sentence of Japanese writing, but at the same time it’s also often correct. This is usually the location where you are marking an assertion, emphasizing something, clarifying the critical argument you’re making. Or at least it should be if you’re doing Japanese writing effectively.

Keep an eye out for when writers are using it, and if you can remember, try to pause and consider what they’re trying to accomplish. The same is true for the difference between 常体 and 敬体 styles. This is the first step to being able to incorporate it in your own writing.

Here’s my translation of the paragraphs above:

I don’t keep money in my wallet. Actually, I do keep money there, but the amount is incredibly small.

I’m not one of those people who goes around with a ton of credit cards and no cash. I just…forget.

I’m often out and about with no more than two or three thousand yen in my wallet. You might wonder, Hasn’t that caused you any problems? The answer is yes, it’s caused lots of problems.

いろいろ

• Check out the podcast over on the blog for an audio version of this newsletter. I include a link to the Kakuta Mitsuyo essay from the UR Journal. I also break down a great Japanese blog review of the drinkable mayonnaise that Lawson is selling right now (also linked on the blog), which has an interesting shift between 常体 and 敬体 over the course of the post.

• The new Jay Rubin translation of Murakami Haruki’s Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is also out! (Also mentioned on the podcast.) I’ve started reading and am a few chapters in but will need a little longer to gather my thoughts. I will say that it’s definitely worth reading. Rubin nails the frenetic tone of the narrator’s racing thoughts in the first chapter. I’m very curious to see what decisions he makes. So far “INKlings” have become “Murks,” but Semiotec and Calcutec remain the same. You can expect a stand-alone podcast at some point in the future, but it’s really a matter of when. I might need a month or two.

日本・日本語： Katamari Description

Just a short newsletter this month to give myself a break to come up for air at the end of a long, busy…trying year, the start of what will be another set of long, busy, trying years for many. And unfortunately my lesson this month is not the most positive: Sometimes you have to give up on something.

I’ve been running the USJETAA Japanese Reading Group for 10 years now in various forms, and we’ve read all sorts of writing from a wide range of writers. I have the full list online here. At one point in the past, we spent four months going over an Edogawa Rampo story and another four months looking at a Sakaguchi Ango story. So we know how to battle through tough writing. But I bit off more than I could chew with the November reading, which was an online essay by Kanai Mieko titled まずい (mazui, disgusting/bad/not good/inconvenient). In the essay, she looks at words like まずい and やばい (yabai, bad/badass/crazy/delicious), trendy, casual slang that have expanded from their original meanings.

When I pick the reading for the month, I generally give it a quick look to see if it seems interesting and readable, but I don’t read it all the way through because I like to experience the reading along with other readers. I wish I’d looked at this one more closely because Kanai’s writing is dense and occasionally impenetrable. She writes extremely long, complex sentences (some of which I feel could easily be divided into smaller more digestible chunks). But this is her style. I can appreciate that not all Japanese writing is as simple and straightforward as the sentences Murakami Haruki writes.

Initially we were going to divide the Kanai essay into two parts and finish up in December, but I decided to call it after one month. That was enough. We needed to switch to something more manageable for the end of the year. This is an important skill to have: the ability to know when to call it quits.

Japanese study is about balance. You need to look for challenge, especially when it comes to learning how to read. Each step you take should be more difficult than the last, but these steps should be challenging-fun. If you accidentally reach too far, you could accidentally end up in a challenging-painful situation, which is not ideal. The Kanai essay felt challenging-painful.

So this is a reminder from me to assess the level of your current Japanese study challenge and take it easy on yourself if you need to. Don’t be afraid to abandon ship and find something slightly easier or more entertaining or more fun. Don’t stop studying. You have to keep going. Just find an activity with a more suitable difficulty level.

I do want to look at a piece of Kanai’s writing here to see what she’s doing and why her writing is so complicated. Check out this passage in which she’s summarizing an interview with director Fukada Koji about harassment in the movie industry:

昔からあったハラスメントが「やっと可視化された段階」で「スタートラインに立ったところ」と語る監督は、これまで問題にされることなく当然視されていた問題が映画業界でも「ハラスメントや性暴力に対する社会の認識の高まりや業界の人手不足により「変わらなければまずい」との危機感が醸成されてきた」と語っている。

The director says that long-running harassment “is at the stage where it has finally become visible” and we’re “standing on the starting line.” He notes that the issue, which had been considered natural and wasn’t addressed as a problem, has “developed a sense of urgency that ‘things must change’ due to increased awareness within society of harassment and sexual violence in the movie industry and to the industry’s labor shortage.”

The key point I want to talk about is 修飾 (shūshoku, modification/description). This is a grammatical term used to describe when and how a word or phrase modifies or describes another word. In this case, Kanai uses a long expression to modify the 主題 (shudai, topic) of the sentence, which is 監督 (kantoku, director). Here is the 主題 and its modifying expression isolated:

昔からあったハラスメントが「やっと可視化された段階」で「スタートラインに立ったところ」と語る監督 (Mukashi kara atta harasumento ga “yatto kashika sareta dankai” de “sutaatorain ni tatta tokoro” to kataru kantoku)

How do we understand this? What’s going on? Essentially, the 主題 does the action in the description. We can turn this into a regular sentence in one of two ways.

We can make the topic of this sentence the topic (監督) of the description and isolate it into a new sentence:

監督は昔からあったハラスメントが「やっと可視化された段階」で「スタートラインに立ったところ」と語る

Or we can add the topic as subject of the verb and mark it with が (ga):

昔からあったハラスメントが「やっと可視化された段階」で「スタートラインに立ったところ」と監督が語る

And that’s essentially what I did with my English translation above. The Japanese is a single sentence, as you may notice, and breaking this sentence down to its simplest form gives us:

X監督はYと語っている (X kantoku wa Y to katatte iru, The X director said Y).

But English doesn’t have a convenient structure like a 主題 at the start of a sentence which can be piled upon with any manner of modifier. Japanese does, which gives its sentences a Katamari Damacy-like potential to roll into mammoth sizes; just keep making the modifier of the topic longer and longer. This just doesn’t work with English; 修飾 as hard as you might, you’ll never approach the potential of a Japanese 修飾.

Not that an extensive 修飾 is necessarily a good thing. If we explore the “X” above a little more closely, we can see that this sentence is effectively a double 語る (kataru, to tell/note) situation. X = Zと語る監督. Plug that in, and we get:

Zと語る監督はYと語っている。 (The director that said Z said Y.)

Which doesn’t feel like the most aesthetically pleasing combination of words.

So in English translation it’s a relatively good practice to divide 主題 sentences with extended modifiers into two sentences. Turn the modified 主題 into the subject of the phrase modifying it, and then sort out the rest of the sentence.

But knowing and appreciating how the Japanese is working is just as important a skill. And in this case I think it demonstrates a sort of forced density of expression on the part of the author. However, if we take into account the fact that she’s using this sentence to summarize and paraphrase a news article, maybe it doesn’t need to be the most aesthetically pleasing sentence. Maybe it’s doing all that it needs to do and that’s enough. Still, this was one of the easier sentences to grok, so I’m glad we’re moving on to an easier reading for December. Join us then!

いろいろ

• The English translation of The City and Its Uncertain Walls is now out, and the reviews are less than stellar. I re-ran my review podcast episode with 20 minutes of extra content on the beginning as a special emergency episode. Give that a listen here.

• I also cover a few more reviews on the regular episode this month, but my main goal was to cover the newsletter this month and add a critical usage of 伺う (ukagau, to ask/to hear/to visit) that I neglected to mention in the newsletter last month. Please accept my tremendous apologies. I wrote about it on the blog this month. The blog also has links to the additional Murakami reviews I looked at.

• This was a very interesting TikTok by a flautist talking about the Colin Stetson song “The righteous wrath of an honorable man” that’s gone viral on TikTok and the impossibility of notating it on sheet music. You can listen to the song on YouTube and read more about the trend here.

• I set my Twitter to private ahead of the change in block rules, but I plan to approve anyone who wants to follow me. I have been shifting more to Bluesky lately, so do follow me there, but you can find me on just about any social media platform that exists.

日本・日本語： 伺う

A few months ago, I made the argument that 確認 (kakunin, confirm/view) is the most useful kanji compound. This month I’d like to make a case for the most useful non-する (suru, to do) verb. Because let’s face it, する takes the cake. It does everything everywhere all at once. But it’s also a cheater. する’s ability to attach to nearly every kanji compound means that it’s the ultimate generalist. する is the Robert Horry of Japanese verbs; just plug him into an “offense” (read: sentence) and he’ll do what you need.

There are other more specialist verbs that still have a wide range of usages, and I think the most impressive of these is 伺う (ukagau).

Rather than try to cram all the definitions into the parentheses up there, let’s take a look a them individually. This dictionary lists five independent definitions, which already hints at how broadly it can be used. I’ll annotate each definition instead of translating them:

１ 「聞く」の謙譲語。拝聴する。お聞きする。「おうわさはかねがね—・っております」

The first definition shows that 伺う can be a 謙譲語 (kenjōgo, humble keigo) form of 聞く (kiku, to hear) and then provides two other equivalent forms of keigo: 拝聴する (haichō suru, to listen) and お聞きする (o-kiki suru, to listen). We also get a nice example sentence: おうわさはかねがね伺っております (O-uwasa wa kanegane ukagatte orimasu, I’ve/We’ve heard the rumors for a while).

I think the most broadly useful phrase with this definition is 話を伺いました (hanashi o ukagaimashita, I’ve heard that).

You’ll need to modify 話 with something for the specific circumstances:

You can keep it general:

その話を伺いました。 (Sono hanashi o ukagaimashita, I’ve heard that)

Or specify from whom you heard the news with either から (kara) or に (ni):

専門家から話を伺いました。 (Senmonka kara hanashi o ukagaimashita, We heard from an expert/experts.)

田中さんに話を伺いました。 (Tanaka-san ni hanashi o ukagaimashita, I heard from Tanaka-san.)

These are all very ordinary Japanese phrases that can be useful to signal to your conversation partner that you are aware of something or to specify the source of your knowledge. In English, you might translate this as “I/We spoke with experts/Tanaka-san” for a more natural rendering, but we’re mostly concerned with how the Japanese is working here and in this case the Japanese describes from whom the speaker heard information.

２ 「尋ねる」「問う」の謙譲語。「この件について御意見をお—・いします」

The second definition is another 謙譲語 keigo form, this time of 尋ねる (tazuneru, to ask) or 問う (tou, to ask). And we have a nice example sentence: この件について御意見をお伺いします (Kono ken ni tsuite go-iken o o-ukagai-shimasu, I’d like to ask for your opinion on this issue). The Japanese here is more literally “I will ask for you opinion,” but this is a sentence that an interviewer would use during an interview, either at the beginning or in the middle to transition to a new topic, which in English corresponds most closely to “I’d like to ask.”

This is a great usage to be familiar with if you’re ever interviewing anyone. You can easily state what it is you’d like to ask them: Xについて伺いたいです (X ni tsuite ukagaitai desu, I’d like to ask you about X).

This phrase is equally useful when making phone calls to level up your 聞きたい (kikitai, I’d like to ask). If you’re calling a restaurant or hotel, just start with 伺いたいですが (Ukagaitai desu ga, I’d like to ask a question) or 伺いたいことがありますが (Ukagaitai koto ga arimasu ga, I have something I’d like to ask about) to signal that you have an inquiry and get your conversation partner into question-answering mode.

３ 「訪れる」「訪問する」の謙譲語。「明朝、こちらから—・います」

Definition number three, and we have a third 謙譲語 keigo verb: Are you starting to see a pattern? In this case, うかがう is a polite version of 訪れる (otozureru, to visit) and 訪問する (hōmon suru, to visit). And there’s another excellent example sentence: 明朝、こちらから伺います (Myōchō, kochira kara ukagaimasu, I’ll be visiting you tomorrow morning).

This is yet another super useful way to incorporate うかがう into your business communications. If you’ve set up an appointment with someone, it’s very natural to confirm this information prior to visiting them at their offices, and you can do so with うかがう. For example, once you’ve set a date in time, in your follow up email, you can confirm with a simple sentence like this: 15日15:30に伺います (Jūgonichi 15:30 ni ukagaimasu, I’ll visit at 15:30 on the 15th). I might even go as far as advising non-native speakers to confirm any important appointments using this phrase the day prior to the meeting as a reminder that you’ll be visiting.

４ 神仏の託宣を願う。「御神託を—・う」

This is a definition that I’m unfamiliar with but that seems related to Buddhism: To request a divine message of Buddha. Although this is likely not an everyday usage you’ll encounter on the streets of Tokyo, we can tie this in with the previous definitions: Someone in a lower position (human) is addressing someone in a higher position (Buddha). うかがう enables miracles like this. 

５ 《「御機嫌をうかがう」の意から》寄席などで、客に話をする。また、一般に、大ぜいの人に説明をする。「一席—・う」

And here is the fifth and final definition which notes that うかがう can mean “to explain to a group of people” in a general sense, but that in particular it means “care for guests in attendance” and that it’s related to the phrase 御機嫌をうかがう (go-kigen o ukagau).

Weblio provides two more specific definitions for ご機嫌をうかがう that I think are instructive:

人が別の人がどう思うかを気にすること (Hito ga betsu no hito ga dō omou ka o ki ni suru koto, Someone paying attention to how another person feels).

人がどのような状態か、どのような意向かなどについて調べること (Hito ga dono yō na jōtai ka, dono yō na ikō ka nado ni tsuite shiraberu koto, Someone looking into how someone is/what they want)

In short, it’s taking care of someone, looking after someone. It sounds like a fancier (or maybe a 謙譲語 version?) of 様子を見る (yōsu o miru, see how things are going).

So what do we ultimately have in うかがう?  We have a multi-faceted verb with an inherent sense of deference that means to listen/hear, to ask, and to visit. I’ve underlined and bolded that line because this verb is not your ordinary verb. Ordinary verbs in です・ます (desu/masu) form are polite yet neutral. You’re speaking on the same level as the other person. うかがう, on the other hand, is a step above in terms of politeness. It automatically subordinates the speaker with regard to the person they are addressing. Which is what we want. The goal of keigo is to speak about yourself deferentially and others honorifically even though you’re describing the exact same actions that regular verbs describe. The secret is knowing the right verbs or the right verb forms to use. The verb forms can be complicated and difficult to master, but うかがう is broadly applicable and requires no complex conjugations. If keigo is hard, then うかがう is a keigo cheat code because うかがう is easy.

いろいろ

• I gave a full rundown about うかがう and my thoughts on keigo on the podcast this month. Give it a listen, and check out the blog post for a few more details about the range of different kanji used for うかがう. There seem to be three core kanji with a host of other obscure ones used less frequently. Here’s the article about とんでもありません (tondemo arimasen, “Not at all”) I mention in the pod.

• Murakami did not win the Nobel Prize, again. I did, however, start up my close blogging of his memoir Distant Drums (遠い太鼓). Check out the latest post here and an index of the project here.

• One of the most pleasant things to do in Japan is explore its urban expanses. There’s a lot on offer very close to home.  This month I visited the Shiba Ryotaro Memorial Museum. I’m not super familiar with him as a writer, but Ando Tadao built the museum adjacent to Shiba’s home, and it has the best bookshelves in the country. No photos allowed inside, unfortunately, so you’ll have to take my word for it and visit yourself. (Or Google) When you do, grab lunch on the 商店街 on the way there.

• I don’t mean to alarm you, but 福袋 season has begun. Dean and Deluca has their offering online now.

日本・日本語： Impossible Pairs

There comes a time in your Japanese studies when you have to learn the difference between 確か (tashika) and 確かに (tashika ni). I don’t remember exactly what point that was for me. There’s no embarrassing anecdote I can share that shamed me into understanding the difference. There was just one day when I got sick of not having control over them and made the resolution that, dammit, I would know the difference between these two usages!

Funny enough, that resolution seems to have stuck.

確か is a signal that speakers use at the start of a sentence to reflect a trace of uncertainty about something that they are fairly certain is the case. For example, if someone asked you about the first Japanese anime you watched and you’re 95% certain it was Dragonball Z on the Cartoon Network, but there’s a slight chance your cousin had a copy of Record of Lodoss War on VHS you watched one Thanksgiving, you could say:

確か、ドラゴンボールZだった (Tashika, Dragonball Z datta)

I’m pretty sure it was Dragonball Z.

This is somewhat ironic given that 確か in adjective form means “definite/certain.” You see phrases like 確かな証拠 (tashika na shōko, definite/firm evidence), which means the evidence is rock solid and not wishy washy like your Strong Zero-hazed otaku memories. 確か in our Dragonball Z sentence is an adverb modifying the predicate. 

When you add a に (ni) to the adjective form to make 確か an adverb in a different form, that wishy washiness disappears, making it certain once again:

確かにそうです (Tashika ni sō desu)

That is definitely the case.

This is an extremely useful phrase in conversation when you need to emphasize something is indeed the way that someone described it.

You can also reassure a business partner regarding the receipt of materials:

Xを確かに受け取りました (X o tashika ni uketorimashita)

I can confirm we have received X.

Having phrases like this lodged firmly in your brain is a great way to get a handle on pairs like 確か and 確かに, but at some point you have to force yourself to remember them, one way or another. I think of this as “brute forcing” them, which I’ve written about before. As a reminder, these are the steps to brute force a phrase:

1. The first step is realizing that you’re not fully understanding something. This is a tough step sometimes.

2. Look up the Japanese definition and dissect it.

3. Diagram simple Japanese sentences that you understand.

4. Proceed to look at these over and over and use them to access and understand other example sentences you encounter.

5. Eventually come to an understanding that you then loathe to translate back into English.

There’s no subtlety about it. Saying you can’t handle 確か and 確かに after a couple years of Japanese is a bit like saying “I’m bad at Microsoft Word.” Sorry, that doesn’t cut it anymore. You just need to figure out how to use it in this day and age. 

There are a number of other sets of words like 確か and 確かに. I think of them as “impossible pairs,” and I’ll be introducing them here and there going forward. I initially put them all into a single newsletter but it became unmanageable pretty quickly, so I thought it might be more effective to divide them up.

4日　8日

This is likely one of the first impossible pairs that students encounter during their studies. The difference is so subtle. 4日 (yokka, the fourth of the month) with the geminate consonant versus 8日 (yōka, the eighth of the month) with a long vowel.

To be honest, this is a pair that I still don’t have complete control over, and I’m embarrassed to admit that. I feel like there’s dessert-desert potential here; my fourth grade teacher gave me a mnemonic I’ve never forgotten: “You always want more dessert, so it has more Ss.” 

Maybe long vowel, later date? Now just to cram that in my mind. (longvowellaterdate, longvowellaterdate, longvowellaterdate!)

The good (?) news is that it’s not just non-native speakers who mess this up. A brief review of Twitter posts shows that this is a relatively common issue amongst Japanese.

Some even use the pronunciation はちにち (hachinichi) to prevent confusion, and then double down when their drunk friends make fun of them!

So just know that this is an alternative if you get stuck, but I believe that I can do it, and that you can do it as well. We’re better than these impossible pairs, even if we haven’t perfected all of them just yet. Look forward to more of these in the near future, and let me know if there are any you’d like me to look at.

いろいろ

• The podcast is online over at the blog. I ramble for a bit about exploring your local neighborhood in Japan to find cafes, restaurants, and bars. You never know. You might end up finding a writer you like as well. I recently discovered Kakuta Mitsuyo on the shelves at a 読書カフェ (“reading cafe”) near me. I’m using one of her online essays for my monthly reading group. Give it a look, and you’re welcome to join the USJETAA Japanese Reading Group page over at Facebook.

• It’s also Murakami Fest season. I’m reading through a really interesting period during Murakami’s trip to Italy in Greece, which he wrote about in his memoir Distant Drums. Norwegian Wood has just been published, and Murakami has just run the Athens Marathon in 1987. He’s mentally and physically exhausted, so they’re taking a break, but it still seems like he’s at a loose end, unsure of how he should be spending his time. I’ve gathered all my posts on this memoir in an index.

• If you haven’t seen Shohei Ohtani’s dog Decoy throw out the first pitch at a Dodger’s game, you owe it to yourself to take a look.

日本・日本語： 確認

What is the single most useful two-kanji compound in Japanese?

I think my personal answer to this question is 確認 (kakunin, confirm/check/view). I’m not sure a more flexible word exists in the language, other than possibly いい (ii, good/fine/not good/not fine/enough), but that’s an adjective, and this month I’m thinking about kanji compounds.

確認 is generally translated as “confirm,” but what does “confirm” mean? According to the 大辞泉 we have:

はっきり認めること。また、そうであることをはっきりたしかめること。

Recognize clearly. Also, check that something clearly is a certain way.

This definition shows why 確認 is broad and flexible enough to escape the English expedient “confirm,” and I encourage you to do so whenever necessary/possible. The one that comes to mind is “view” because I see it so often in game-related material, most frequently with instructional writing like manuals or explanatory text at the bottom of a screen. I actually wrote about this FIFTEEN years ago on the blog.

Something like Xメニューでアイテムを確認することができる (X menyū de aitemu o kakunin suru koto ga dekiru). You could translate this as “check” or “confirm” here, but the English “view” is so much more natural in context. “View your items from menu X” or “On menu X you can view your items.” Any variation along these lines will get the point across. If you think about it enough, “view” really is a way to say “confirm.” You’re visually confirming that something does indeed clearly exist.

確認 can also buy you time. If someone asks you a question, respond with an immediate 確認します！ (Kakunin shimasu, Let me check!) to convey that you received the information, got on your pony, and are ready to ride…as soon as you’ve checked the information they are looking for. You’re acting on a request even if you don’t have an answer immediately. Once you’ve confirmed the information, 確認できました (kakunin dekimashita, I was able to confirm [the information]) is a quick way to start a follow-up message, after which you can provide the details that you were able to confirm.

確認 is also incredibly sticky. It picks up prefixes and suffixes as well as any compound in Japanese, transforming into a dense block of language that can convey so much is such a small space. 

確認中 (kakunin-chū) - Being confirmed

要確認 (yō-kakunin) - In need of confirmation

確認後 (kakunin-go) - After confirmation

確認前 (kakunin-mae) - Before confirmation

未確認 (mi-kakunin) - Not yet confirmed

再確認 (sai-kakunin) - Confirm again

Are there any that I’ve missed? Some of these you can throw into a document or a spreadsheet to keep track of the status for…just about anything that you can confirm. Others are useful as an introductory phrase at the start of a sentence, such as まだ確認中ですが (Mada kakunin-chū desu ga, This is still being confirmed, but…).

Speaking of which, 確認 is useful as one of those linguistic signposts that allow us to prepare a listener and make subsequent conversation more effective, an idea I am realizing I hinted at on the blog TEN years ago. If you need to ask someone for information, rather than jumping straight into your main point, use 確認 as a signal for what you’re about to do: 確認したいですが (Kakunin shitai desu ga, I’d like to confirm something). Doing so fires a beacon that silently screams “HEY, I’M ABOUT TO ASK YOU A QUESTION. GET YOUR BRAIN INTO ANSWER-SEEKING MODE.” Thus primed, your conversation partner is more likely to be able to answer your question or provide the information that you need.

So, to まとめる the idea of 確認:

- It’s a broad word that gets used to mean view/check/confirm/recognize.

- As a two-character compound, it pairs with all variety of suffixes and prefixes, forming a tremendous number of useful three-character compounds.

- It can also serve as several different discourse signals: Use it to buy time or to give your conversation partner a heads up that you’ll be asking them a question.

Here’s a fun little example I found on Twitter. Someone helps another person find a sandwich maker at Nitori:

Although I’m certain they could go one step further and 確認 which Nitori locations have the sandwich maker in stock. I’m fairly certain that technology exists. Actually, let me make sure. 確認します！

いろいろ

• Over on the blog this month, I go into a little more depth about 確認 as an “airbag expression.” Check it out for a link to this month’s podcast as well, which I use to cover some material that I should have included last month.

• I meant to share this link last month, but I found this Japanese blog post with a look at some of the mansions of Kobe, including one from Ashiya. This is the kind of wealth at the top of the slope that runs up to Mt. Rokko.

• Translator Jason Franzman has some excellent, must-read advice for all translators (subtitlers in particular) over on LinkedIn. In order to work as a professional translator, it really is critical to develop your creative writing skills, preferably in a space that’s putting your writing in front of actual readers out in the world. There’s nothing like the pressure of eyes on your words to force you to tighten up your writing.

• Dr. Wes is good at memes. He also has great TikToks, as I believe I’ve mentioned before.

  

• My tweet about beds at the Tokyo Olympics got picked up by some French accounts, apparently because they’re using similar beds in Paris. There are rumors that these were to prevent people from having sex in the Olympic Village, but I think that’s been debunked.

• Check out Old Photos of Japan by Kjeld Duits! I mention this newsletter toward the end of the podcast this month. 

日本・日本語： 日記

It’s been three years since I restarted my kanji study. A year ago, I wrote about the experience and all I’d gathered from it. Given that it’s been another year, I thought this would be a good time to write an update on where I am and how/if/whether my thoughts have changed.

The good news is that I stand by everything I wrote. I think it’s helpful to create moments of active learning during kanji study, a part of your Japanese studies that focuses on passive recognition skills. Finding and committing to an Anki deck over an extended (but not overextended) period of time is a useful way to pace yourself to fluency. I think it’s important to give yourself breaks and to build those breaks into your study plans. And you should absolutely prioritize doing something with Japanese (reading/speaking/writing/listening) out in the wild over SRS any chance you get.

The bad news is that I have not looked at my Anki deck a single time since writing that newsletter, other than the occasional login to ensure that the decks aren’t deleted from AnkiWeb. (If you are inactive to too long, all your data will be removed from the service.) As you can imagine, my ability to write kanji has suffered greatly. I can also feel my recall of the pronunciation slipping as well. It doesn’t feel great!

I could provide a number of convincing excuses, dear reader, and an even larger number of less convincing ones, but I don’t think that would be helpful for you. Instead, I’d like to offer one piece of overall advice and one specific kanji solution/alternative.

The first is that if your Japanese study stretches into multiple decades (and mine is now in its third decade, which is almost unfathomable), it will go through seasons. You’ll have times when you’re obsessed with one author or another, one show or another, one band or another. You’ll have a JLPT season or two (which hopefully do not end like a season of Game of Thrones). And you’ll hopefully have seasons when you spend time in Japan, perhaps even living here. This is all to say that you have to ride the waves when they come. If you’re feeling inspired by kanji study, by all means focus on that. If you’re only ever able to pick up the Japanese novelization of bad American action movies from the 1990s, then by all means read those. Just read something, watch something, talk to someone in Japanese.

The language is hard enough on its own. There’s no sense in punishing yourself for choosing to do one thing over another…once you’ve reached a degree of fluency. Until that point you are, to a certain extent, at the mercy of the one requirement to gain fluency: doing something substantial each day (something written, something spoken, something read, and/or something heard) that enables you to take that next step.

Once you’ve reached a foundational level of functional fluency, there’s no longer as much of a need to crack the whip. Ease up and let your study happen naturally. I’ve found that I have an endless patience for Murakami, particularly his writing from the 1980s. My fandom has waned, but I can feel the energy required to devour his travel writing bubbling beneath the surface, contained only by my desire to also maintain a regular reading practice in English, to write, and to play the occasional 100+ hour video game. What is your Murakami? Tap into that as much as you can.

I do have one suggestion that I think might be an interesting alternative to Anki for kanji study.

I experimented with this myself and maintained it for a few months before being derailed by a trip back to the U.S. last November. And that suggestion is this: Keep a written 日記 (nikki, diary) in Japanese and write one 400-character manuscript page each day.

To me, this feels relatively substantial. It usually took me between 10-30 minutes, depending on how much I had to write about that particular day. The goal wasn’t to write kanji from memory but rather to write any kanji at all. I looked up kanji as I needed, and because life is repetitive and boring (or is that just me?), the same topics came up and, as predicted, it turned into a natural SRS system. I did try to experiment with new words and phrases whenever I could, but I also didn’t force it, especially on days when I was tired or wanted to do something else and just needed to get the exercise over with.

Part of the motivation (which clearly wasn’t quite enough, ha) was that I bought 原稿用紙 (genkō yōshi, manuscript paper) notebooks to use, the same kind that authors across Japan (including Murakami) used before word processors. Norwegian Wood was 900 manuscript pages. The notebooks I bought each have 50 pages, which means that Murakami had probably 9-18 notebooks (assuming they have 50 and 100 sheet notebooks?) per draft, and we know that he went through multiple drafts. His suitcases must have been full of notebooks.

As far as what I wrote about, I tried to do automatic writing. The goal wasn’t to create beautiful writing, but rather to let my thoughts pour out onto the page in Japanese. This becomes easier the more Japanese you know, but the only way you can get better is by just doing it.

For those with less grammatical familiarity, I’d recommend taking the same approach as I did with kanji. Spend time Googling grammar patterns as necessary until you’re able to construct a sentence. This will take a minute. Probably longer than the few seconds I needed to look up a kanji. But I’d say it’s worth it. You could start with 200 characters, half a manuscript page, if a full page feels too challenging at the moment.

But this strategy could even work for someone who’s a beginner and doesn’t know many phrases at all. Just write out what you do know, and keep doing it. Every day. That’s what Japanese students do, essentially. Writing what you know will build an increasing familiarity, and by the time you begin expanding the phrases and words in your active vocabulary, the fundamental patterns and kanji will feel like second nature.

But more than anything, don’t beat yourself up. Find a balance. The early seasons of your Japanese study will necessarily need to be more dedicated and intense. Once you shift into higher gears, the engine should hopefully have to do less work to maintain momentum, and you can let yourself coast to a certain extent…unless you happen to be doing a graduate-level degree related to Japanese, in which case, you’ll have to find a source of rocket fuel to launch yourself into a different stratosphere.

For now, though, put the pen to paper and see what results. I’d love to hear from you if you give this a shot! 

いろいろ

• Check out the blog for a link to the podcast and analysis of exactly how much a draft of Norwegian Wood would have weighed. How heavy were those notebooks?

• Shadow of the Erdtree is perfectly whelming (neither over nor under), but the ending is a bit of a letdown. I’m going to have to Google the ways to complete all the NPC quests and whether it’s possible to get a more interesting ending. Alas. But I’m excited for NG+!

• A reserved seat on the Keihan Line Premium Car from Osaka to Kyoto or back is one of the best ways to spend 500 yen in Japan. Yen for yen, maybe even better value than a Shinkansen Green Car seat. I think the Hankyu Line has implemented similar cars on their lines. Look for the kiosks near the Premium Car entrance on the platform.

• The New York Times put up a list of “The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century.” Perhaps surprisingly, Murakami got no love from the voters. His 21st Century books would be: Kafka on the Shore, afterdark, 1Q84, The Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, Killing Commendatore, and soon we’ll have The City and Its Uncertain Walls. Murakami may have lost the cool factor he had in past decades. Kafka on the Shore and 1Q84 took 78 and 79 on the reader vote, and only one judge (Morgan Jerkins) included Murakami (Tsukuru Tazaki).

日本・日本語： Finding Movement

You don’t have to study a language very long to start feeling the generation gap. In college, I learned about コギャル語 (kogyarugo, school gyaru language), which is all but extinct, and these days it’s all 推し活 (oshikatsu, lit. “activities to support your oshi”) all the time. The only 推し (oshi, favorite band member/artist/celebrity) I can really claim are Okamotos Kanoko and Taro and Murakami Haruki, although the term feels so young and new to me that I’m not sure whether they count as 推し. Judging from this tweet, Murakami at least is legitimately up for debate:

チグハグな感じがする (chiguhagu na kanji ga suru, Seems a little strange/inconsistent) indeed.

推し is associated with girl/boy bands (and choosing a favorite from the crowd), but the term feels so prevalent recently that it must have mutated to expand beyond those bounds. This 2023 article uses it in regard to anime characters, and in close succession includes the term 聖地巡礼 (seichi junrei, pilgrimage of “holy” spots). The article talks about the reemergence of travel after COVID and the subsequent economic effects. There does seem to be a noticeable uptick in the Google Trends data for 聖地巡礼:

I put “holy” in quotes above because these are not religious sites that people are visiting. They’re largely sites that are used in anime, such as the staircase at Suga Shrine from 君の名は (Your Name). The English Wikipedia article about 聖地巡礼 is quite good and as of April 2024 seems to be an almost direct translation of the Japanese article (or vice versa).

At any rate, I won’t split hairs over whether or not Murakami qualifies. He’s my 推し, even if I have become a more intense critic (some may even say a hater, but I say they don’t get the joke) over the past 15 years.

I’m loathe to give credit to the Sankei for anything, but the article above does indirectly point to one of the most important aspects of 推し活 and 聖地巡礼: They generate movement and action, both of which are critical for language study. 

Language study is not something that will happen to you passively. There are passive ways of intaking the language, of course, but even deciding to tune in to a podcast or turn on the TV to watch NHK requires an initial action. If you’re not willing to make some sort of investment, you are unlikely to get very far with your studies.

Which is why acquiring some sort of 推し, something or someone that you can be actively invested in, something or someone that will motivate you to get off the couch and go out into the world to see, hear, read, and speak Japanese, is an incredibly valuable way to ensure you have the momentum needed to acquire fluency.

I recently did my own Murakami 聖地巡礼. On a cloudy Saturday in April, I took the train to Ashiya Station and started walking. The destination I had in mind was Nishinomiya to the east, if I could make it that far, but I first headed a few blocks south and then west along the tree-lined streets of Ashiya to Henri Charpentier, a patisserie founded in 1969 and named after the creator of Crêpes Suzette.

I was feeling a little self conscious and was glad when they offered to prepare the crêpes in the kitchen, although I was equally glad I could watch the pyrotechnic performance out of the corner of my eye for a couple that had come in around the same time.

Ashiya, a wealthy suburb between Sannomiya and Nishinomiya, is somewhat well known as Murakami Haruki’s hometown, and a young Murakami apparently came on dates to this small shop. He claims there was nothing but residential areas back when he grew up, that a whole host of buildings has been put up in the area, but I didn’t see all that much. Mostly small, multi-family apartment buildings, some single family homes, with a good number of fashionable cafes and boutiques that were centered on the main avenues.

I’d been meaning to visit Ashiya for a while and had put it off. The patisserie I’d only learned about that morning, but it felt like the best place to start that afternoon as I was a little hungry. Revived with the sugar and a jolt of caffeine, I made quick work of the Tanizaki Jun’ichiro Memorial Museum of Literature before it closed and then continued my walk east.

I threaded my way through quiet residential areas that looked very similar to neighborhoods in Osaka, even the one I currently live in. The only differences I could make out were that Ashiya’s were more pristine: There was more space, fewer (read: no) small companies or industrial properties in the residential areas, and noticeably more trees. The neighborhood didn’t smack of wealth, but the area feels notable for what has been kept out of the neighborhood rather than the properties themselves.

Although, as I went north under the Hanshin Expressway, parts of which had toppled in the 1995 earthquake, I could see terraced mansions in the neighborhoods on the sides of Mt. Rokko. Ashiya is a long, narrow municipality stretching from Osaka Bay all the way up to the hills, and as best I can tell the wealth only increases as you go up. Murakami grew up south of the expressway, near the only part of the town that changed: the port and the beach, which have been built in and industrialized to a degree.

It’s unfortunate that I didn’t make my trip sooner. Past a small 商店街 (shōtengai, shopping arcade), also in pristine condition with a few lovely cafes and a still-operating 八百屋 (yaoya, green grocer), is Uchide Park, which Murakami memorialized in Hear the Wind Sing as “the park with a monkey cage.”

Up until last year, this was the kind of park you’d expect in urban Japan: a barren patch of dirt with a few benches and some aging equipment for children to climb on. The empty monkey cage was the only thing that stood out. Uchide Park was home to squirrels and birds in addition to monkeys starting in 1959. This ended in 2010 (with the last monkey dying in 2003), but the cage remained until last year when the town finally renovated the place and got rid of it.

When I learned I’d just missed it, I felt sick. Like I’d missed a critical window of history. The cage is a minor piece of trivia, not something that would ever stand the test of time, nor was it ever meant to, but I think that’s the point. It’s an emblem of that particular period of time and this particular community. How many neighborhoods in Japan had the financial capacity to even consider housing monkeys? The cage wasn’t the point. It’s what the cage stood for. And now this physical representation of that period was just out of reach.

I managed to pump myself up to make the trip anyway, using the excuse that I’d be able at least to see how the renovation looked. It’s much nicer obviously. The park itself, which I didn’t take photos of because there were so many people and children using it, is a basic Japanese park, clean and unremarkable, but I’m sure it’s more frequently used now, and there’s a nice Japanese garden and a beautiful community center attached to the neighboring library, with space to sit and do nothing for no cost at all, which is rare to find these days.

I did a lap, took a photo of the sign made with a recycle piece of the monkey cage, did a quick tour of the library and community center, and then headed back south of the expressway to walk past Murakami’s elementary and junior high schools before heading home.

I didn’t use all that much Japanese that day, but I used more than I would’ve otherwise because I got out of my living space, went out into the world to a cafe and a museum.

The one downside of 聖地巡礼 is that ultimately they require movement to Japan. 推し活 are a bit more egalitarian in that you can actively participate remotely.

So this is your モーニングコール (lit. “morning call” = wakeup call). If you don’t already have an 推し, it’s time to find one, even if it’s something unconventional like a news announcer, a TikToker, or a lesser known manga artist. Something that will motivate you to continue consuming language content in some form out in the world. Having an 推し is critical to maintaining a long-term interest in the language.

いろいろ

• Check out the podcast for an audio version of this newsletter and more. Also, this is the blog post I based my Ashiya pilgrimage on.

• Diamond has a really interesting article about whether おもてなし (omotenashi, hospitality) is a Japanese concept and the effects of overpromising on the tourism industry. Mulboyne has a nice thread breaking down the points in English.

• The JPY exchange rate-tracking Twitter account is back. I believe it took a break when automated accounts were limited, but it’s nice (albeit painful) to stay more updated on the current rate.

• There was Takadanobaba discourse:

  

• The Erdtree has cast its shadow across the land, and I, too, will bask in it this weekend. Tag me on Twitter if you want to try and get a coop match in!

日本・日本語： How to 文壇

Murakami Haruki has a short story titled 「夏帆」 (“Kaho”) in the June 2024 issue of 新潮 (Shinchō), which came out at the beginning of this month. It is extremely mid, as the kids say these days. The story starts on such a bizarre, almost misogynist note that I thought it was almost certainly irredeemable, but the last couple pages are more compellingly told. I’m not sure if they excuse the start or the overall premise: A woman is on a blind date, and the man says to her, “I’ve been on dates with a lot of women, but honestly, you’re the first ugly one.” (「これまでいろんな女性とデートのようなことをしたが」とその男は言った。「正直いって、君みたい醜い相手は初めてだ」)

Murakami wrote the story to read at an event on March 1 at Waseda with Kawakami Mieko, and her story is also included in the issue. (It’s much better.) The event is titled 春のみみずく朗読会 (The Owl Reads in Spring), which is a reference to Kawakami’s 2017 “long, long interview” with Murakami. 

This makes me think that Murakami’s choice of topic was intentional. In the interview, which was translated in part over at Literary Hub in 2020, Kawakami criticizes Murakami’s depiction of women in his works: “…there’s a persistent tendency,” she says, “for women to be sacrificed for the sake of male leads.” “Kaho” feels like an attempt to show a female character standing up to a male antagonist.

I can’t recommend purchasing this issue of Shinchō for the Murakami story, but fortunately it has 600+ pages of other content to recommend it. In fact, this is the 120^th anniversary edition and includes a virtual murderer’s row of 文壇 (bundan) writers.

The 文壇 is essentially the literary world in Japan. Using my sentence diagramming technique from last month’s newsletter, we can break down the first sentence of the Wikipedia entry like this: 文壇とは、X人たちのつながりと付き合いの世界のこと (Bundan to wa, X hitotachi no tsunagari to tsukiai no sekai no koto, The bundan is the world of connections and relations between people that are X).

What kind of people? 

X = 作家、文芸評論家、雑誌編集長、出版社の編集者など文学・文筆活動を取り巻く (sakka, bungei hyōronka, zasshi henshūschō, shuppansha no henshūsha nado bungaku/bunpitsu katsudō wo torimaku, involved in literary/writing activities such as writers, literary critics, magazine editors, and editors at publishers).

(Here’s the Japanese sentence in full: 文壇とは、作家、文芸評論家、雑誌編集長、出版社の編集者など文学・文筆活動を取り巻く人たちのつながりと付き合いの世界のこと)

The 目次 (mokuji, index) of this issue almost cascades out of the magazine. I’m remembering fondly my article on indexes for the Japan Times. The index for this issue in particular is so highly regarded that the Shinchō website recreates the physical version online rather than just posting a digital list of the writers (as the June issue of 文藝春秋 [Bungeishunjū] does):

目次 really are the best way to get familiar with literature in Japan: Take 30 minutes every month, stop by a bookstore (or a website), and scan the index of every literary magazine in the store to see the names of the writers, what they are publishing/serializing, who is critiquing whom, who has won a prize, and who else got shortlisted. The more frequently you scan the names, the more familiar they will become.

The index here is six pages and in addition to Murakami and Kawakami, it includes stories from Yoshimoto Banana, EnJoe Toh, Machiya Ryōhei, Kanehara Hitomi, Kawakami Hiromi, and Yamada Amy amongst others (whom I’m just not familiar with but I’m sure are equally weighty in reputation).

However, I’d recommend skipping these writers for now and proceeding directly to the massive collection of 随筆 (zuihitsu, “miscellaneous writing”/essays) written especially for the issue under the theme 創作の小さな真実 (sōsaku no chīsa na shinjitsu, a small truth about creating). This section also includes a ton of big name writers! Murata Sayaka, Takahashi Gen’ichirō, Matayoshi Naoki, Ogawa Yōko, Ekuni Kaori, Yū Miri, and others. If you’re an advanced beginner or intermediate student, I feel like 随筆 is the kind of material that you will really benefit from reading.

First, 随筆 are short. Most of the essays are two pages each and give you the pleasure of finishing something you’ve read sooner than if you were reading a longer novel or novella. Even if you only read half a page a day, it will take you just four days to finish a complete work.

Second, the length and the fact that they are generally non-fiction encourages the economic storytelling of specific events. This gives students something to hold onto as they read. Fiction writers will often spend the first couple pages waxing poetic with intentionally difficult to decipher language. 随筆 writers do not have that luxury. They just get into it. I can recommend the Takahashi and Ogawa pieces in particular for these qualities. And if you’re looking for something slightly more abstract, check out the Ekuni essay after those.

The best thing about this issue in particular is that if you complete my 随筆 challenge, you’ll have read 34 different Japanese writers! You’ll have experienced a massive range of different writing styles, tones, subject matter, perspectives, figures of speech, and vocabulary. Perhaps one of these new writers will inspire you to read more, and more after that, eventually creating enough escape velocity to move beyond the gravity of Murakami Haruki so you can explore the farther reaches of the 文壇.

いろいろ

• You may want to get your copy of Shinchō at a physical bookstore. Apparently it’s been selling out online. Check out the blog and podcast for details on other ways to pick up a copy.

  

• I was briefly in Tokyo last weekend, and when I found myself near Aoyama Cemetery, I droped by Kunikida Doppo’s grave. If you haven’t read 忘れえぬ人々 (Wasure’enu hitobito, Unforgettable People), it’s worth struggling through.

  

• This YouGov report on global podcast listenership got a lot of attention amongst expats in Japan online because of how little Japanese listen to podcasts: “Only 10% of Japanese consumers listen to an hour of podcasts per week or more.” This seems especially strange given how much commuting the Japanese do. I’d be curious to know how much time they spend listening to music and how that compares to the rest of the world. Or maybe the survey was off? Maybe something (news broadcasts? comedy shows?) were not included as podcasts? I could see that being the case.

• I had my first million-view tweet! It’s that genre of tweet that takes a popular Japanese tweet and translates it in a quote tweet, but I’m still thrilled. It’s the first time I’ve muted a conversation. Please clap.

日本・日本語： Sentence Diagramming

I may be the biggest fan of the Edge web browser in the Northern Hemisphere. (In my imagination, there’s a bizarro antipodean Morales who is an equally big fan of Edge.) I switched to Edge from Chrome a couple years ago after hearing about its stability and speed and only recently switched again to Brave for its more robust security and ad blocking.

But I still make use of Edge at work and at home for different reasons, the biggest of which is the Japanese news features on its home page.

Tap the gear icon in the upper right hand corner of the homepage, set it to 日本（日本語） and magically all the news articles will be about Japanese news in Japanese.

You’ve got brilliant study material easily accessible on your monitor, refreshed several times per day. (It does feel like the articles update every time I open a new tab, and it’s occasionally frustrating to see something interesting just as I close a tab or click on another article, thus rendering me unable to ever locate that topic again.)

Once you have this variety of Japanese news available to you, the difficult thing, then, is getting yourself to read it, but I find that browsing headlines is a nice little study break.

I also find myself strangely compelled by the blog-like posts about the latest konbini and fast food items, one of which is the ベーコンポテトパイ (Bacon Potato Pie) at McDonalds.

Microsoft generally aggregates the stories into its own website, like this post about Yamamoto Yoshinobu celebrating his first win as a Dodger. I’ve hunted down the original news article about the Bacon Potato Pie because I wanted to show how something light and ridiculous like this can provide excellent Japanese study. As I was reading through it, I was struck by this sentence:

マクドナルドでは基本的に一度レギュラーから外れたメニューが再びレギュラーに返り咲くことはないのだが、ベーコンポテトパイは復活を望む声が数多く寄せられたことから09年に7年ぶりにレギュラーメニューに復活。

Items that are removed from the regular menu generally do not return, but due to the massive number of calls for the revival of the Bacon Potato Pie, it was added back to the regular menu in 2009 after being gone for seven years.

There’s so much to love here. The use of メニュー (menyū, “menu”) to mean “menu item.” The ending of the sentence on a kanji compound instead of a verb. And more than anything the simplicity of the overall sentence structure compared with the complexity of the clauses that are inserted into that structure. 

Quibble with my translation all you want, I don’t mind. That’s not the point here. I want to use this sentence to show the importance of diagramming Japanese sentences to understand how they work and to create stronger skeletons for your own Japanese sentences.

The first thing to notice is that it ends in a noun. Well, technically a noun, but also a kanji compound without a verb attached: 復活 (fukkatsu, revival/resurrection/rebirth). Looking first at the end of this sentence, which is generally a good strategy given that Japanese sentences are backwards, we can simplify this to:

ベーコンポテトパイは復活。

Or, to put it even more simply:

AはB。

How do we make this make sense? What’s being left out? In this case, it’s the passive form of the past tense of する (suru, to do): された (sareta).

復活した does get used, such as when you’re starving, eat a big meal, and feel brought back to life. Here, however, the Bacon Potato Pie is being brought back by a separate actor (perhaps Ronald himself?), so passive makes the most sense. Thus we have:

AはBされた。

ベーコンポテトパイは復活された。

So we have our core structure for the second half of the sentence. The first half can be distilled into a much simpler structure:

XではYが

So overall we have:

XではYが、AはBされた。

You already have a fairly visceral sense of the Japanese, how the logic is flowing, and what the writer is trying to say, even without any content in the sentence! “At X, Y is the case, but as for A, it was B’d.”

Building out our skeleton, we start to see how the the gears are turning:

X ではYことはないのだが、AはCことからBされた。

At X, Y does not happen, but as for A, due to C, it was B’d.

Digging in even further, we can see the clauses that make up Y and C:

Y: 基本的に一度レギュラーから外れたメニューが再びレギュラーに返り咲く

C: 復活を望む声が数多く寄せられた

We could even simplify these.

Y → Zが返り咲く: Z returns

C → Dが寄せられた: D were delivered/received

Giving us:

X ではZが返り咲くことはないのだが、AはDが寄せられたことからBされた。

At X, Z does not return, but as for A, due to D being received, it was B’d.

Going any further will essentially build out the sentence in its entirety and define each word for you, so I think I’ll end the exercise here, but I hope that the point comes across. Sentences like this one can be intimidating at first. By locating the overall structure of the sentence on different levels of granularity, you give yourself stepping stones to complete understanding.

The ultimate goal is to be able to read and understand sentences without pausing to break them down—to parse them in the moment—and I think the only way to achieve that is to read sentences and break them down over and over again until you build up a volume that leads to a natural understanding of the language. Slowly the number of sentences you need to dissect will decrease, and you’ll find yourself living in the Japanese sentences as they are.

You can also apply these structures to your own writing. Beg, borrow, and steal structures that you encounter. Save them. Break them down into the basics, and then fill them with your own ideas. Do this with enough sentences, and I promise you’ll find brilliant, original ideas draped over the same skeletons we all have underneath.

いろいろ

• An audio version of the newsletter is up online over at the blog with a few additional articles that might make good reading material!

• Hanami on the Kamogawa River in Kyoto was very nice:

  

• This is my latest favorite recipe: Baked/nuked sweet potato with chickpeas, spinach, and sesame dressing. Super easy to put together in 15 minutes or so if you use a microwave, and pretty healthy.

  

  @christinasots_15/31 of our Veganuary Recipes! Watch to the end to see how to perfect the baked potato to filling ratio. Hint: It involves some smoking and lots of extra sauce. The tahini butter sauce is inspired by the wonderful @lallimusic! I’ve tested three different ways to bake a sweet potato, you can find them all up on site now via the link in bio. Link to the recipe in our bio x #vegan #vegantiktok #veganuk #ukvegans #plantbased #veganuary #veganuary2023

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• ブラッシュアップライフ (Brush-up Life), my favorite J Drama of the last few years, is available in English translation on Netflix as “Rebooting”! I can’t recommend it highly enough. It’s a variation on the Groundhog Day idea, but very unique. It’s also free on TVer (for a limited time?).

• I posted this poll on Twitter last month, and while this isn’t exactly a representative sample, it is heartwarming to know that Japan residents who follow me are eating konbini onigiri regularly. Konbini onigiri are one of the most reliable and affordable hunger busters around.

  

日本・日本語： 角ハイ

角ハイ (kaku-hai) is a word you may have encountered on menus in Japan. Given my Rip Van Winkle-esque experience living here (2005-2010, and now 2022 onward), 角ハイ has only recently become familiar to me, although the word itself came into prevalence around 2008-2010:

角瓶 (kakubin) has been around longer, but it has similar Google Trends data:

What are 角ハイ and 角瓶? The latter is Suntory’s flagship blended whiskey, which began its life as サントリーウヰスキー12年 (Suntory Whisky 12 Year) but took on the popular—and later officially trademarked (PDF)—name 角瓶 because of its unique 亀甲模様 (kikkō moyō, hexagonal pattern) glass bottle, more casually referred to as 角型 (kakugata, square/oblong/rectangle shape) or 角ばった (kakubatta, to be square/angular/jagged). Consumers took this kanji 角 (kaku, angle/angular) and combined it with 瓶 (bin, bottle) to create a new compound, which Suntory was able to co-opt.

Or so goes the story. The questions I am unable to answer at this point in my shallow dive into Japanese whiskey history are “What was the first product referred to as 角瓶?” and “When was the 角瓶 bottle first produced?” The 角瓶 that exists today originated in 1937, but there does seem to be a different whiskey sold in 1932 called サントリー十年ウヰスキー 角瓶 (Suntory 10 Year Whiskey Kakubin). So if 角瓶 was actually a word that bubbled up from drinkers, then there had to have been a product pre-existing that…or so one would think.

Speaking of bubbling up…the story is clearer for 角ハイ, but its boom required Suntory to weather the vicissitudes of the whiskey market over several decades. 角瓶 had to gain popularity as a whiskey balanced for Japanese tastes, be designated a 海軍指定品 (kaigun shitei-hin, Navy specified good) during the war, and go on to become the best selling whiskey in Japan. Then the whiskey market had to slowly decline as demographics, economics, and tastes changed in Japan. Whiskey got a regulatory boost in 1989 when tax laws were adjusted to bring spirits of all strengths under the same tax rate, dropping prices, but despite this price stimulus, the percentage of people who had drunk whiskey in the past year fell from 70% to below 40% in Japan in the 10 years from 1998 to 2008.

Enter 角ハイ, which at this point you might have already figured out is a combination of 角瓶 and ハイボール (haibōru, highball). In 2008, Suntory began a marketing campaign that would make 角瓶 what one writer has called a 救世酒 (kyūsei-shu, literally “savior liquor”) for the second time. The first time was in 1937 when it was first released and provided a less intense alternative to the smokey, peaty Scotch-influenced options on the market. This second time, Suntory looked for a way to overcome whiskey’s staid, high-proof image. They also had to beat back beer’s stranglehold on the “first drink” market in Japan, which is best demonstrated by the ubiquitous phrase とりあえず生 (toriaezu nama, “beer for now”).

Suntory nailed it with the decision to promote hyper-carbonated highballs, deploying highball dispensers set at Champagne pressure to bars such as 立呑みマルギン (Tachinomi Marugin) in Ginza. They also created a set of commercials with actress Koyuki, which are instructional and aspirational. They both give viewers permission to order a highball when they’re out and demonstrate how easy it is to make one at home: Just pour a half-inch of whiskey and top it off with soda water.

You can see the language quite plainly in the campaign:

夜は、ハイボールからはじまる

The night starts with highballs.

とりあえず、ハイボール

Highball, for now.

(YouTube perma-search)

This set of commercials was later updated with other actresses taking over the “Madonna” position, with interest seeming to spike somewhat in 2014 with Igawa Haruka’s ascension to the highball throne.

(YouTube perma-search)

(YouTube perma-search)

角ハイ was off to the races. In 2010, Suntory had to adjust the sales volume of their whiskey because they couldn’t keep up with highball demand. As the Google Trends data shows, there’s no signs of it letting up. It’s as if Brown-Forman had invented the term “Jack and Coke” as part of a marketing campaign. That’s how powerful it seems to be. It helped to revitalize the whiskey market in Japan and seems to have preceded the intense international interest in the Japanese whiskey market, which began driving up prices sharply from 2010-2015. It singlehandedly boosted interest in the word ハイボール:

And this seems to parallel interest in the U.S. to a certain extent:

I’ll end with another Rip Van Winkle observation. Diluting liquor with something to make it more palatable is not a new concept for Japan. お湯割り (oyuwari, cut with hot water) has been a popular way to drink 焼酎 (shōchū) since the late-1970s. 酎ハイ (chūhai, shōchū highballs) have been on menus at izakaya for a long time and sold in cans at konbini since 1984. When I first arrived on an internship in Okayama organized by the Rotary Club there in 2002, the members used still water and the term 水割り (mizuwari, cut with water). Bars had ボトルキープ (botoru kīpu, literally “bottle keep”), a service that allows regular patrons to purchase a full bottle of liquor from an establishment and keep it there for future visits.

But consumer tastes are amorphous and ever-shifting, and beverage companies in Japan—like those everywhere—will continue to chase each other like the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote. Suntory momentarily captured something with 角ハイ, creating a noticeable change in the landscape that predates not only the international whiskey craze but also the U.S. sparkling water and alcoholic seltzer boom, which kicked off around 2015. It will be interesting to see where things go next.

いろいろ

• We have a publication date. The English translation of The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Philip Gabriel will be published on November 26, 2024. There’s also a cover for the English edition.

  

  I have nothing else to say about this topic except to note that it appears that the publication date for Jay Rubin’s translation of Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World was delayed until December 10, 2024, which pushes it back after this new novel. It seems like the publishers and Murakami finally sat down and hashed out a publication plan that works. From the point of view of the average English reader, it would be strange to put out a new translation of an old novel and then two months later publish a new book with a very closely related story. It makes way more sense for the new novel to go first and then to follow up with an updated version of the old novel. But it’s very curious to know that at some point, Hard-boiled Wonderland was scheduled for September.

• Check out the blog this month for further Google Trends examination, including a close look at the most interesting data I found, which was for お湯割り.

  

• I’ve been meaning to mention this here for a while, but if you’re not making cornbread in your rice cooker, you’re not using it to its full potential. The hardest part is getting the corn meal, which is available on Amazon or at shops like Tomizawa (Tomiz for short). I usually do some sort of combination of this recipe with a Japanese one like this recipe. Just use the cake setting, and let ‘er rip. This reminds me that if you need baking soda in Japan, it might be easier to find at a pharmacy, but you have to ask for the kind that you can cook with.

  

日本・日本語： Here

まとめる (matomeru) is another word that solidified for me only recently. I’m sure I’d heard it and even used it in the past, but I could viscerally feel my understanding of it click into place, so to speak, when I saw it as the “conclusion” to academic papers during my time at IUC.

The デジタル大辞泉 (Dejitaru daijisen) gives three definitions for the word, and the first is the most concrete and likely the one that students will encounter first:

ばらばらのものを集めてひとかたまりのものにする。

Collecting separate things and making them into one (mass/lump). 

You may recognize part of that word ひとかたまり (hitokatamari, one lump/mass) from the Namco game Katamari Damacy. This association might even serve as an expedient for understanding what まとめる means: Bringing objects together into close physical proximity, sometimes even combining them into the same thing.

(On a total sidenote, has anyone written about how Katamari Damacy is one of the all-time great titles for any piece of media in any language ever? I have quibbles with the English romanization, but the Japanese title? I mean, just look at it!

塊魂

The genius becomes truly apparent when you see how it’s displayed on the box art.

)

I think まとめる has been on my mind because of my recent move, during which I was literally まとめるing my 1LDK life into boxes and bags and moving it to a different part of Osaka.

But definition number two is the real reason I’ve had the word sitting with me the past couple years:

物事の筋道を立てて整える。

Establishing and putting into order the reasoning of things.

This is a more figurative meaning of the word, but it follows pretty naturally using the physical definition as a metaphor: All these ideas are all over the place; here, let me show you how they all relate. Ideally, this is what a writer does at the end of a piece of writing, thus the noun form of まとめ is used as conclusion.

The final definition is another more conceptual, less physical usage:

決まりをつける。互いの意志を一致させる。

Coming to a settlement. Putting everyone on the same page.

So rather than physical objects or reasoning, you can also use まとめる to “align” people’s thinking, which also makes sense given that first definition.

The more you look around, the more likely you are to encounter this phrase in your daily life in Japan/Japanese. I saw it the other day on メルカリ, which I mentioned last month: まとめ買い (matomegai, bulk purchase) is an option that sellers can used to give buyers the option of buying multiple items from them at the same time.

Once you’ve mastered the 他動詞 (tadōshi, transitive) version, you should also try to wrap your brain around the 自動詞 (jidōshi, intransitive) version: まとまる (matomaru, to be brought together/collected, to be arranged/in order, to be settled/resolved).

自動詞 are, on the whole, more difficult to come to terms with, so I wanted to give you three phrases with examples from social media that will hopefully prime your brain to take in other usages.

きれいにまとまった (kirei ni matomatta)

Came together nicely

This first one is, I think, relatively easy to understand and follows naturally from the 他動詞 definition. In this tweet, the author writes about how nicely his Strike Freedom (ストフリ) Gundam has come together. There’s the physical sense of pieces coming together into a single object with this phrase that makes it more tangible. Note that the 自動詞 is used despite the fact that the writer is likely the person who did the まとめるing.

まとまった時間 (matomatta jikan)

An undivided period of time

Here’s someone studying to become a 社労士 (sharōshi, labor and social security attorney). They note that まとまった勉強時間の確保が難しい (matomatta benkyō jikan no kakuho ga muzukashii, it’s difficult to secure an undivided period of time to study), so by setting out all the textbooks as in the photo, they can use 隙間時間 (sukima jikan, spare moments) to fit in study. The contrast here between まとまった時間 and 隙間時間 makes it easy to understand, and “undivided” is a nice way to render this naturally in English, although you could also go with “a big chunk of time,” depending on the context.

なかなかまとまらない (naka naka matomaranai)

(Something) doesn’t come together

In this tweet, the writer has just seen the movie Silent Love, but they aren’t quite sure what to make of it yet: 感想がなかなかまとまらない (kansō ga nakanaka matomaranai, my thoughts aren’t coming together). So rather than a physical Gundam or the less tangible time, here it’s the invisible thoughts themselves (ideas!) that won’t form into some comprehensible state. I like the efficiency of the phrases in this tweet: 頭整理中 (atama seiri-chū, literally: “I’m currently organizing my head,” i.e. I’m getting my thoughts together).

Equipped with these three phrases, hopefully you’re ready to express your thoughts, whether or not you’ve had a minute of undivided time to get your thoughts together so early in the New Year.

いろいろ

• Dr. Wes Robertson is on TikTok (@scriptingjapan) and predictably it’s great content. If you don’t follow him on social media, he researches and teaches Japanese language and is working on a free Japanese textbook. He mines Twitter to find usage examples and trace the developments of the Japanese language. Here he’s looking at whether or not you can verb different nouns in Japanese. Really fascinating stuff.

  

  @scriptingjapanIn this episode of Can We Verb It? I look at if we can verb five common Japanese foods #japanese #日本語

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  And in a funny coincidence, one of the words from this month’s newsletter—まとめ買い—comes up in a video here about the phrase 大人買い (otona-gai, lit. “adult buying” i.e. buying everything in a category/buying lots of one thing). Check out his TikToks!

• Moving into a larger apartment in Osaka has been kind of eye-opening. For the longest time, I was basically locked into the least expensive option in Japan. The cheapest, smallest room, with many roommates. The cheapest bentos. But that hasn’t been the case with my most recent time in Japan. I managed a reasonably sized apartment—a 1LDK—before my current spot, and I probably should have gone even one bedroom larger. Having the extra space is so nice. If you can, try to get that extra space. It makes a major difference. Especially if you like to cook. My last place had the kitchen of a 1K in a 1LDK. Now I finally have reasonable counter space. What a difference it’s made. However, moving can quickly cause major GAS (gear acquisition syndrome). If you get a bigger place, you need to fill it with expensive stuff. Sofas, beds, fridges, microwaves, yada yada. Or you can find some sort of middle ground, which is what I did with my first Osaka apartment: Instead of buying a bed, I used a foldable mattress. 

  

  I think mine ran me about 30,000-40,000 yen, which is somewhere between the dirt cheap futon I slept on in Tokyo and the regularly priced bed I just bought for my new spot. Foldable mattresses store away cleanly in a closet, which opens up space when you’re not asleep (assuming you can commit to putting it away each morning). They also buy you some time. You can live in your new space before committing to the real estate of a bed. And once you buy a bed, you can always keep the mattress for guests to use.

• When I moved apartments, I also had to find a new barber. My last place was near a couple small shopping arcades, so there were easily 4-5 different barbers to choose from. I rarely had to wait. My new spot isn’t quite as fortunately located, in terms of barbers, but I did manage to find a decent spot and got the best cut I’ve gotten in Osaka for 1,700 yen. This got me thinking about the 1,000-yen haircut vs. the 2,000-yen haircut in Japan. How do they hold up in terms of value? I talked about this on the podcast this month. Give it a listen over on the blog!

日本・日本語： Here

I was certain I’d written about 見積もり (mitsumori, estimates) over on the blog at some point in my past life as a project manager at a small translation company. So much of my time there was wrapped up in the estimates that my Japanese counterparts put together, which then enabled me to confirm specific rates for the freelance translators we worked with. But I checked, and apparently I did not.

“Estimate” is the “official” translation, but a more natural English rendering will often be “quote,” and the Japanese for RFQ (request for quote) is most natural as 見積もり依頼 (mitsumori irai). The document itself is a 見積書 (mitumorisho, quote/estimate).

But more recently I’ve been involved with 見積もり of a different variety. The ones that involve purchasing major home appliances. I’m moving to a larger apartment this month, and it’s required upgrading my refrigerator as well as buying—for the first time in Japan—air conditioners. 

Even as recently as five years ago, I probably would have pinched pennies and looked for the cheapest option, which is probably Nitori. They have super affordable options that don’t skimp on features or warranty. But I’m in my forties now. I don’t have the financial leeway to buy without complete concern for cost, but I am more interested in being comfortable than I was in the past; I’m less willing to suffer to save a few dollars. Osaka doesn’t get frigid, but I want to be able to heat all the rooms when necessary, and I want to be ready for the summer. The past two years were so bad that in 2023 I kept my AC running all day (on a relatively warm setting) because I was so worried about mold.

So I got a few quotes to see what it would cost to get a brand name air conditioner. Here are my takeaways from the whole process.

- Skip Yodobashi and Bic Camera. The giant stores are just miserable, although maybe this was due to the fact that it was around the holidays. They are useful for getting a baseline estimate for what the cost could be, but I don’t think they’d actually be helpful at making a purchase or servicing an existing unit. Yodobashi’s quote gave me a ceiling on the price, but they had to quote the full price of the appliances. They couldn’t quote the sale price actually displayed on the sticker. 

- Quotes are only good for a certain amount of time. For Nitori, it was a month, and I think this was the case for the refrigerator quote I got as well. If you see a price you like, getting an estimate is a nice way to lock it in.

- You can negotiate the cost of many appliances. We finally found a salesperson we were comfortable with at Edion. She took the time to actually walk us through the different options, and she helped us set up an inspection. Once she put together the estimate, it had two prices: the retail price, and then the sale price they were quoting us. Once we had that number, I was able to negotiate the price down by asking for slightly lower end models by the same brand and then by asking for something in a range lower than what we were initially looking at.

- For something like an air conditioner, you have to do a 現地調査 (genchi chōsa, location inspection). You’ll also see this referred to as 下見 (shitami, preliminary inspection, advance look). For things like a fridge, this isn’t necessary, but you do want to have measurements of your kitchen. In our case, once the store technician had a look at our place, the size of the balcony where the outdoor unit would be installed effectively limited us to a single brand. If we’d bought one of the other brands we were considering—and I’m positive that someone at a different store would have sold it to us without checking whether it would’ve fit—we might’ve been left high and dry with an air conditioner that we couldn’t use.

- The negotiation/quote process will likely take several visits to the store. I think we eventually went with three visits, and we made sure to work with the same staff each time so we weren’t starting from scratch. But in the end I think we got units that we’ll be comfortable with from a store that’s big enough to be able to discount but small enough to offer reliable service and warranty. I bought my washer from Edion last year, and when there was a small leak from the connection with the faucet, they came twice to fix it, so I can recommend working with them if there’s one near you.

Apologies for the short post this month and for skimping slightly on the language side of things, but hopefully this is helpful to someone. I’m giving myself a little reprieve with the move upcoming. Do you have any horror stories/victories at electronics stores in Japan?

いろいろ

• I’ll supplement this month’s post over on the blog and podcast with some thoughts about Murakami. I managed to get another (very affordable!) copy of the Birnbaum translation of Norwegian Wood, so I’ll write about that process. And, very quietly, the new translation of Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World seems to have been given a release date, so I’ll discuss that as well.

  

• The Washington Post has a new podcast called American Carnage about political violence, and the first season is on John Brown. I remember learning about him in school, but it’s incredible to get more detail about exactly how large a figure he was at the time. I mean, he met both Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass! This also gives me an excuse to share Oscar Peterson and Milt Jackson’s version of “John Brown’s Body,” the best rendition of all time.

• I was in Tottori over the New Year’s holiday, so my 初詣 (hatsumōde, first shrine visit of the year) as at the Yōkai Shrine in Sakaiminato, Mizuki Shigeru’s hometown. Worth a visit! Unfortunately the museum was closed for renovation, so I’ll have to make another trip.

  

• Not sure how many people this will help, but it is possible to pay down a Japanese credit card before the payment date. In the U.S., I was able to clear my debt whenever I wanted at the touch of a button on an app. In Japan, however, I had to go to the credit card website, put in an application to pay early, specify a date I would make a bank transfer, and then make the bank transfer via an ATM. This meant I covered the cost of the bank transfer, but within 24 hours the payment had been reflected and my spending limit was reset. The only option was for me to pay down the entire credit at the time of application, so it wasn’t very flexible.

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