Screenshot taken at 12 noon, Tuesday August 28, 2007.

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Meiji Curl Stick — Smorky Cheese
Meiji’s superdelicious puffed corn snack Curl is a standard favorite of everyone here at J-List, and snack that you can see people eating all around Japan….This delicious flavor is the outrageously good Smoked Cheese version!

As you can read towards the end of the text that smorky is actually smoky, but this begs the issue of why there are so many “No Smorking” signs in Japan even though Japanese write it in Katakana “No Smokingu” without any “r” .

The rest-of-the-story is that “No Smorking” is an extremely common typo on Japanese signage as you can see in this Google Image Search.

The linguist Ben Finney explains the cause of smorking in the archives of sci.lang.japan as: over-generalisation… A Japanese will learn that “long
a” at the end of a Katakana word is probably “er” in English; and a
“long o” in the middle of a word is probably “or”; and a few dozen
other “rules” based on an over-generalized idea of consistency in
English orthography.

Saaaa, gee after 20 years here in Japan, I still learn something new everyday. :-)

Above screen-shots are from “Maid in Japan“—a simulation game for English study—where you can try to pick-up a virtual maid, named Sophia who comes from Vancouver.
According to a crappy but entertaining machine-translation the official website of Maid in Japan (メイドさんと英語クイズ ):

The game is an excellent—A.I.—artificial intelligence, which reacts to the words that the user inputs as they play with Sophia the Maid via a variety of English quizzes. The animation of Sophia the Maid reacts to the user input depending on how good an impression the user makes on Sophia. That “good” impression increases with the number of correct English responses the user makes…which results in a method of enjoyable English study.

Unlike this so-called “English study” game, our sponsor JList sells all sorts of wacked dating simulation games, the most famous is, Peach Princess’s “Little My Maid”. All these dating sims have been translated from the Japanese into English by JList/JAST. The objective of dating sims is to choose from among several characters to date and to score a “romantic” relationship.

Check it out if you want to cop a feel of Japanese maid simulation adventure. Also, watch a demo video the newest maid game, Bazooka Cafe.

In Japan, 3D images in your pocket
physorg.com, 07:46 EST, August 21, 2007
Japan’s Hitachi, Ltd. has developed a lightweight 3D display that can potentially be adapted for mobile devices such as telephones…using what is known as stereoscopic vision display, weighs only one kilogram (2.2 pounds) and resembles an upside-down, multiangular pyramid full of mirrors on top of a liquid crystal display…more...

Nobody but a couple of stupid droids will want to listen to the distress call from Princess Leia any longer when they can watch her in 3-D on their keitai cellphone ….NOT generated in thin air by the robot R2D2 .
Yikes, the Rebel Alliance is doomed!

We had a little bump at 4:30am this morning— a 5.3 M earthquake off the coast of Chiba just east of Tokyo—so I have an early start today. Just as I was drifting off to sleep at 7am, the PA systems in the nearby park began cranking out at 110db, the Japanese “Radio Taiso/Exercise” song for the school kids on summer vacation.

Listen to the exercise song heard everyday throughout Japan via my MP3 podcast site, taro.podomatic.com:

Poor kids don’t even get to goof off for their already pathetically-short, 6-week vacation. Most students are forced to take part in these Stalinesque exercises for indoctrination in Japanese group-think (and more importantly to get them out of their mothers’ hair).

How do you like these “food stamp cards” shown below? As you can guess, this mysterious “STAMP CARD” needs to stamped as proof students have attended their morning exercises.

The Kampo home page has little animations like these and a full explanation (in Japanese) on how to do these Radio Taiso (ラジオ体操) exercises properly.

See the Wikipedia links to Rajio Taiso, and you should watch the music video by YMO showing of the true nature of Radio Taiso as well as the following videos too.

Podcast/audio lesson for aliens called:
Japanese lesson in English
Let’s create greater harmony with those who are different from us!

kodomo no koro no natsuyasumi to ieba,
子供の頃の夏休みといえば、
Speaking of summer vacation as a kid,

「rajio taisou」
「ラジオ体操」。
“radio gymnastic exercises”.

souchou kara okite,
早朝から起きて、
Getting up early in the morning,

sutanpu oshite morau ka-do wo kubi kara sagete,
スタンプ押してもらうカードを首から下げて、
with a stamp card dangling from my neck

majime ni ittotta wa~.
真面目に行っとったわ〜。
I would attend them earnestly.

koutei de rokuji han kara hajiman nen.
校庭で6時半から始まんねん。
It starts at six thirty in the schoolyard.

more….

Here is the official Japanese website with all the various Radio Taiso instructions.
Don’t worry about the Japanese—just click on all the links which will take to all the picture instructions on how to do the exercises: Kampo.japanpost.jp Radio Taiso.

Here’s a useful machine-translation from Japanese to English of the official Radio Taiso website

I’ve abridged a long machine translation of the Asahi.com’s “Photonews” of August 02.
Enjoy.

To commute to school with toys?　A unique streetcar appearance
2007 August 2nd
　Commuting to school can be more pleasant in this unique streetcar which started operation in Yamagata. Imaginatived called the ‘Toy Streetcar’ it is painted inside and out with colorful graphics. Inside the train, capsule toys can be bought from a dispenser and related streetcar goods are for sale. There is even baby cribs and playpens. The “toy streetcar” runs on the Wakayama Line –about 14.3 kilometers….

Sometimes it’s the little things that make me laugh here in Japan.

Today, it’s Japanese Truth-in-Advertising.

I just stumbled across an engrish school west of Yokohama called the “Poop English School.” That is, it sounds like the SCAT Engrish School must teach about animal scat (excrement) or bippity-bippity-doo-wop-razzamatazz-
skoobie-doobie-bee-bop-a-lula-shabazz scat singing.

You can find the school in the first and third listings in Google Japan, as it would be a shame to embarrass the school with a direct link. As they say in Japan, “After doing your best, happy poo awaits.”

Pythagoras Switch aka Pitagora Suitchi (ピタゴラスイッ –Wikipedia ), airing on NHK since 2002, is a Japanese educational television program promotes new and creative “ways of thinking” for children. I’ve reported on Pythagoras Switch several times before in:

–NHK’s “Pitagora-Switch” on Japanese public TV
–Prison & Penguin ‘Pythagoras Switch’, also Ninjas!!

Actually, there’s a cool boom in these Japanese Rube Goldberg Machine—machines where one action puts many other actions into motion. You can order from our sponsor, J-List.com and see the new Pythagora Switch DVD; it’s just incredible.

25 percent of students at junior high school claim to suffer from depression
MSN-Mainichi News / May 10, 2007 —A Health Ministry survey has found that one in four junior high school students suffer from depression, although the number that require medical treatment remains unknown, officials said…more...

This study is just a reflection of Japanese “maturity.” That is, most Japanese look depressed, and on the whole they revel in melancholy. Every year in Japan, they survey Japanese feelings by asking people to describe feelings with a single kanji character. The top 10 “feelings” are consistent over the years are: 1. Conceal/ endure, 2. Confused/disorder, 3. Angry/offended, 4. Depressed/melancholy, 5. Anguish/bitterness. Refer to the depressing surveys at WhatJapanThinks.com.

Like finding a lost scrap of a stranger’s to-do list or shopping list in the street…
Today I found this bit of unintentional poetry in a Japanese person’s English vocabulary list.

speculate, acoustic, excerpt, contemplation, fervor, scrutinize

For me the English vocabulary list was a creative challenge like Magnetic Poetry Kit I might come across on refrigerator door. It sounded to me oddly poetic:

Speculate acoustic.
Excerpt.
Contemplation.
Fervor scrutinize!

Using a web-based art tool called “Montage-a-google “ that employs Google’s image search to generate a large gridded montage of images based on keywords (search terms), I entered that vocabulary list. Then “Montage-a-google “ generated montages of the word pairs, which I animated into this “found-word” poem.

For more fun with pattern-forming serendipity, try using the online WordCount.org that lets you interact with patterns of the 86,800 most frequently used words in the English language.

What’s a “Pythagoras Switch” and what does have to do with Penguins, Prisons and Ninjas? .

“Pythagoras Switch” is an educational television show on NHK—a rollicking science program for kids (like me). As I first covered this a year ago in the 3Yen in report NHK’s “Pitagora-Switch” on Japanese public TV. The show is aimed at early mental development of children, as well as plain old fun.

One of the fun segments of the Pythagoras Switch show is the, “Algorithm March”—the Group Exercise/Taiso. Watch the three following YouTube videos of the Algorithm March with: Ninjas, the Japan Polar Research Team, and Pinoy Prisoners!

Pythagoras Switch - Algorithm March with Ninjas!!

Penguin Pitagora Suiichi
NHK’s Pythagoras Switch - Algorithm Taiso with the Japan Polar Research Team!

Not to be outdone, and with similar fashion sense….

Pinoy Prison Pitagora Switch
Algorithm Taiso performed by 967 inmates of the Cebu Detention and Rehabilitation Center, Philippines