I’ve found that in Japan, you can find a lot more unusual and various types of hamburgers, ones that you would never, ever find here in the US.

When a Hamburger is Wild

A hamburger in Japan can be wild. Japanese fast food chain Lotteria recently offered a “wild burger” in honor of comedian Sugi-chan. Sugi-chan is one of the biggest celebrities in Japan right now (for who knows what reason), and his catchphrase ワイルドだろぉ？ (“wild, right?”) was one of the biggest buzzwords in Japan last year.

In Lotteria’s case, a “wild burger” was an oversized shrimp patty on two comically small buns. Wild, right?

More recently, Lotteria is offering a burger with nine patties. In celebration of the release of the newest Evangelion movie on DVD and Blu-Ray, Lotteria is currently offering a $13, nine-patty burger, after the name of the movie (Evangelion 3.33—3 + 3 + 3 = 9). That seems pretty wild.

When a Hamburger is Candy

A hamburger in Japan can be a candy. A popular type of Japanese candy (popular, at least, with people abroad) is a kind of DIY kit. The kit usually provides you with some powders, some molds, and instructions on how to turn it all into the final product.

Japanese YouTuber RRcherrypie is internet famous (the best kind of famous) for creating step-by-step guides on how to assemble these kits, and one of the most popular (and relevant to this post) recently has been a hamburger candy.

I can’t vouch at all for the taste, but it’s definitely a cool process to watch and, presumably, to try yourself.

When a Hamburger is a Billionaire

A hamburger in Japan can be Facebook founder and hoodie enthusiast Mark Zuckerberg. At least, that’s what some Japanese women think. The way that Zuckerberg’s name is transliterated into Japanese (ザッカーバーグ) sounds a lot like the Japanese word for a hamburger steak (ハンバーグ) which, to add to the confusion.

Fortunately, I don’t think that you’ll be set back too much by these two similar words. But if you somehow are served a live, confused Mark Zuckerberg instead of a delicious hamburger, then you’re on your own.

When a Hamburger is Black

A hamburger in Japan can be black, or contain pumpkin. Japanese fast food chains like Lotteria aren’t the only restaurants that serve bizarre hamburgers in Japan. International chains like Burger King or McDonald’s also cater to Japan’s local, sometimes eccentric tastes.

As we wrote about before, last year Burger King rolled special promotional items like an all-you-can-eat meal, a burger with black buns (dyed with bamboo charcoal and squid ink), and Halloween burgers that included a thick slice of kabocha.

It may be surprising to see these items offered by Burger King when the company’s offerings in its home country (the US) are so tame, but foreign companies have to adapt to Japan’s tastes and culture if they have a hope to survive.

Sometimes a Hamburger is Just a Hamburger

A hamburger in Japan isn’t always wild and wacky, or out there. You can always get a pretty normal, regular burger at virtually any Japanese fast food chain (like MOS Burger or Freshness Burger), foreign chains, or local restaurants.

But every time I go to a restaurant in the US that only offers a regular-ol’, everyday hamburger, I wish that it could be something more. Maybe I should start bringing my own squid ink.

Unfortunately, online translations suck. We’ve covered before how online translators work, and why they’re notoriously awful; we’ve also seen how they can backfire if you don’t know what you’re doing.

So pretty much without exception, every Facebook translation I’ve seen of something in Japanese has been wrong. Or at least weird. It’s not really Facebook’s fault that machine translations are bad, but it’s their fault for implementing it and thinking it would work out.

I gathered up a bunch of translations from Japanese-speaking friends on Facebook that I thought were weird and funny. I apologize in advance to all of my Facebook friends for plundering their statuses, but I’ve blacked out their names for the sake of anonymity.

This translation isn’t actually all that awful, but for some reason Facebook thought it was necessary to translate the emoticon. I assume that “⌒” is some sort of mathematical or scientific symbol for “without,” but I’m not quite sure why Facebook translates it along with the Japanese.

One of my Facebook friends took a picture of an airplane with a bunch of Pokemon painted on it, and here were the comments:

The translation should look something like:

“Nice!”
“It almost looks like a plane version of those cars painted with anime characters, haha”

But instead, Facebook translates it to:

“A good?!”
“If you mistake one step’s flight based on versions of “itasha” w”

You can almost understand the meaning of the Facebook translation, but it still doesn’t make any sense.

Here’s a pretty straightforward interaction: somebody wishing another person a happy birthday. Here’s how it should be translated:

“Happy birthday! I haven’t seen you in a while, how’s your husband?”

Simple enough, but Facebook sees it as:

“Congratulations on your birthday and! I have not seen for some time, well my husband are you?”

The sentiment is there, but the grammar is f#@%ed.

Here, one of my Facebook friends is talking about how fast his new phone is.

It should be something like:

LTE feels about twice as fast as 3G . . . and on an iPhone 5, haha

But instead comes out as:

3 G LTE is more about twice about 7Mbps early. And from the iPhone5 w.

But I probably get the most joy out of when Facebook tries to translate emoticons, like on our status a few weeks ago about emoticons/emoji/kaomoji:

What’s really bizarre is when Facebook decides to translate the kaomoji, but not the actual Japanese.

Have you seen really bad Facebook translations before? Screencap and share ‘em with us in the comments!

Header photo by Robert Scoble

So how did Japan get so behind despite being on the bleeding edge in terms of most technologies? How is it that internet usage is can be so different? There are a lot of things at play here, but I have a theory: they are practicing internet isolationism. It’s the Tokugawa Era all over again, except this time it involves more LOLcats.

Japan’s First Big Isolationist Period

Let’s jump back a few hundred years. It’s 1641 and the Tokugawa family has gained control of Japan after a long, bloody war. In order to protect their newfound control, the new Shogun implements what is known as the Sakoku Policy. Basically, no foreigner could enter Japan and no Japanese person could leave Japan on the penalty of death. That being said, they actually allowed some foreigners (from Asia, mostly) to come to Japan to trade, but where they were allowed to go and what they were allowed to do was very restricted. It certainly was not the gay old times when everyone would sing songs together after crashing their boats off the Japanese coast.

There were a couple presumed reasons for this isolationism. First, the Shogunate was worried about foreign influence. Religion and colonialism were both a serious threat. Another reason was to keep the daimyo (basically like lords under the Shogun) down. Some of the Daimyo had pretty convenient trade routes with East Asia. Before Japan was unified under Tokugawa, these clans would use these trade routes to get rich and build powerful armies. In order to stay in power, the Shogun had to curb and control this trade so that he and only he got the main benefit from it.

Although Japan wasn’t totally cut off (just extremely restricted), it was quite isolated. During this time ship after ship was turned away. Sometimes they were even attacked. During this time the government built anti-ship defenses too just in case anyone got the wrong idea. You can see a giant list of attempts to trade with the Japanese government during this Sakoku Policy period. It certainly wasn’t easy.

After a while, though, the Western powers got pissed. Commodore Matthew Perry steamed into Edo Bay with four warships and showed off his big cannons so that the Japanese could know who was really in charge around here. A year later Perry came back with even more ships and Japan was all like “Okay, you cool. We can sign a treaty.”

The rest is history, as they say. So what about them Nyancats?

Isolationism In The Japanese Web

I should start by saying that the isolationism of the Tokugawa Era and the isolationism of the Japanese internet are two completely different situations. Of course, Japanese Internet Isolationism isn’t anywhere near as severe as the Sakoku Policy ever was (duh). It’s quite tame in comparison. It’s also more subtle, and not something that was instituted top down. Instead, the Japanese internet version of isolationism came from the bottom up. It happened naturally, slowly branching the Japanese internet off from the rest of the modern world.

The beginning of all this, I think, had to do with cell phones. The Japanese took to cell phones much faster than the West, staying way ahead of us for at least a couple of decades. Because of this, the Japanese didn’t take to computers like we did, and our internets took two very separate paths. Japan has been using the internet on their phones for a lot longer than us. Their infrastructure was made for it and the Japanese internet evolved accordingly.

One such evolution was the creation of services like i-mode. In i-mode, site creators actually make an i-mode version of a site to display that works well in cell phones. If there isn’t an i-mode version, for example, you can’t access it. It’s almost like a whole separate internet that you can only access from your phone. We experienced a very shallow version of this during the time before iPhones then smartphones became popular in the West.

Due to the speedy advancement of the Japanese cell phone internet infrastructure, the use of personal computers was a lot smaller. This means that the Japanese have seen the internet (as we know it, at least) for far less time than the West. It also means they’ve been (basically) using a different kind of internet than a lot of the rest of the world, aka a kind of internet that is very Japan-specific and somewhat isolated. This has caused web culture to develop separately as well causing a lot of the isolationist features you see in the Japanese internet today.

The Closed Japanese Internet

Perhaps the greatest example of isolationism in the Japanese internet comes from Mixi, one of Japan’s largest social network (as of 2008 it had 21.6 million users). It’s a lot like Facebook in that you share journal entries, thoughts, pictures, and so on. What makes it different is how closed it is. Due to the registration setup (you need a Japanese mobile phone email address to join) foreigners basically can never join unless they’re living in Japan and have a cell phone. As for as isolationist Japanese websites go, Mixi certainly takes the cake and has done so for a long, long time.

But it’s not just Mixi that does this. Gree and Mobage (the other two big social networks in Japan) also require Japanese mobile phone addresses to join. If you don’t have one, then you’re out of luck. Everything on the Japanese internet feels so closed, down to the users themselves. On Facebook using your picture and your full name is the norm. On Japanese websites it’s a rarity. There’s a level of anonymity on their web that you don’t see so much on the Western internet. In fact, 2chan (anonymous forum that 4chan came from) is from Japan. It doesn’t get much more anonymous than that.

This is all cultural, though. Like I said, this isolationism comes from the bottom up, not the other way around. It’s not wrong, it’s just different, and this has caused it to be very difficult for the big Western internet companies to break into the Japanese web. It’s like all those trading vessels that tried to land in Japan only to be turned away by the Shogun.

Of the big web companies to make it over to Japan, only a couple have stuck… and not even that much (though they are gaining traction, keep reading). Facebook had problems with its real name policy and real picture culture, causing it to see slower Japanese growth than it wanted or expected.

Google still lags way behind Yahoo Japan, though they recently pulled off a great deal where they took over all of Yahoo Japan’s search much like Bing did for Yahoo in America. Still, people visit Yahoo, not Google in Japan. Yahoo is the internet.

Speaking of which, Yahoo Japan is majority owned by Softbank, a Japanese internet company. It’s not even an American company, which probably explains why it did okay making the jump to Japan in the first place. Softbank knows what it’s doing over there.

Basically, if you’re in the internet, it’s hard to get into Japan. It’s closed, it’s different, and your Western trade vessels aren’t wanted here.

So Where Are Perry’s Black Ships?

If we’re going to pretend that the Japanese internet is like Tokugawa Isolationist Japan, where are Perry’s black ships? Who will come and flex some cannon muscles to get Japan open up their Internet for the rest of the world?

It’s not quite that simple, unfortunately. This isolationism has come from the people, not from the Shogun. No one person can open up the Japanese internet. It has to spread from person to person, slowly but surely allowing more and more outside internet in.

That being said, I think the black ships have already pulled into Edo Bay, metaphorically speaking. Google and Facebook have the best shot. After a bad year in 2010, Facebook made huge progress in 2011 (much to the thanks of the Facebook movie, supposedly, even though the Japanese thought Mark Zuckerberg was a hamburger). I’ve also seen a lot more of my Japanese friends join Facebook and add me as well. At the same time, Mixi is beginning to struggle. It’s having its MySpace moment. Twitter is probably the biggest success story. For the longest time, even before it was translated to Japanese, Japan was Twitter’s number two country in terms of users. It’s still very popular today, too. That being said, Twitter caters to you not having to use your real identity making it more acceptable to Japanese internet users.

As the Japanese people become more web savvy (at least on personal computers) we’ll see a lot of changes in the old internet guard. The Shogunate will crumble from within and we’ll see something interesting rise from the ashes. I think Facebook will start taking off and Google too. I don’t see all the Western internet companies getting a spot in the Japanese internet market, of course, but it will become more international. I think we’ll even see some trades, too. Japanese companies will make the jump to America and blow our socks off. Pixiv and Gree are a couple that come to mind, but more will wash up on our shores later.

But, the black ships have landed. They’re taking their time, though. They have to convince the individuals to open up, but once they get enough people on board it will snowball and hopefully allow Japan to show the internet world what they have to offer as well.

Facebook isn’t all that popular in Japan (Mixi is currently king there), but it doesn’t meant that people don’t know about it. After all, the movie “The Social Network” came out in Japan, and I’m sure that Facebook hits the news every once in a while. But what about Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg? Apparently in a recent poll, Japanese women just thought he was a hamburger (for good reason, too!).

The Zuckerburger

In Japanese, the word ハンバーグ (hanbaagu) refers to hamburger steak. This shouldn’t be confused with ハンバーガ (hanbaaga), which refers to those things us Americans order three meals a day from McDonalds (fourth meal, of course, is タコス from Taco Bell). The second half of Mark Zuckerberg’s name, when translated to Japanese, is very similar to the word “burger” from the word for hamburger steak, which makes it sound very hamburgerish.

ザッカー (zakkaa) バーグ (baagu). That’s how you pronounce his last name in Japanese. The バーグ (baagu) is the same バーグ from the word ハンバーグ (hamburger steak). That’s where the confusion sets in.

When asked what “Zuckerberg” is in Japan, 35.6% of women polled thought he was a hamburger. Here’s what else they came up with:

35.6% said “Zuckerberg” is a hamburger.

19.6% thought “Zuckerberg” had something to do with soccer, because the first part of his name, ザッカー (zakkaa) is very similar to the word for soccer, サッカー(sakkaa).

14.4% got the correct answer or something close to the correct answer.

11% chose something miscellaneous.

7.6% thought it was some kind of abbreviation.

The really fun part, though, is when you start breaking down the answers. For example, one person thought that “The Zuckerburger” was a new menu item at McDonalds. My favorite is the person who thought it was a soccer ball shaped hamburger steak. That combines #1 and #2.

P.S. If you don’t know katakana, and want to understand why Zuckerberg is like Hamburger in Japanese, I’m going to (secretly, just for people reading this article) make the Katakana lessons on TextFugu free for a while, because it’ll help you enjoy this article more effectively. If you don’t know hiragana yet, though, you should learn that first (and to do that, you should start here)… anyways, carry on.

Facebook In Japan

One thing that also stood out a bit to me was the answers from the people who got the question right (and kind of knew who The Zuck is). There were only six examples, but two of them had to do with Mixi. One was “He made America’s version of Mixi” and the other was “a person at the Mixi America Branch” (which I’m pretty sure doesn’t actually exist). My favorite in this category, however, was “(Zuckerberg) is the name of the person who made the Internet” (c’mon, that’s Al Gore).

The examples on Mixi, though, are pretty interesting. I’ve written about Mixi, as well as some of the differences (though I’ve mostly just written about how to join and get in via various loopholes… which don’t really work anymore, so don’t ask). Mixi is the big SNS in Japan (though Gree has overtaken them recently… but it’s a bit different), and it’s really tailor made especially for Japanese people.

• People rarely show pictures of themselves for their profile picture on Mixi (compare that to Facebook, where nearly everyone does).
• People rarely upload pictures of themselves for albums (try doing that on Facebook… Where’s your face!?).
• Real names are hidden and nicknames are king (Facebook has a use-your-real-name-or-get-out policy).
• People on Mixi are generally worried about people knowing who they are (Facebook, it’s really easy to find out a lot of info about anybody).

It’s mainly a cultural thing, but Facebook’s openness is basically making it hard to grab a big foothold in Japan (though I think that will change in the next 5 years), though one article I read thinks Facebook is in its own little “professional networking” niche (which I can confirm through what I’ve seen too… pretty sure all my Japanese friends are CEO’s of startups). If you want to know more about Facebook in Japan, this is a great NYT article.

Other “Zuckerberg Meanings”

To close things up, though, here were some other fun explanations people had:

“Something young people say when they’ve seen something unbelievable” (everyone should start yelling “ZUCKERBERG” when you see something awesome).

One person thought it had to do with a lot of bugs because of the バーグ (baagu) sounding like バグ (bagu), which sounds like the English word for “bug.”

“Something you say when you when you want to express the feelings of ‘You idiot!’ or ‘Quit Screwin’ Around’”

“A store like H&M that came from Europe”

“A term for when you have a lot of small things / accessories in your car, and it is becoming dirty.”

P.S. Thanks to @HirokoTabuchi for tweeting about this survey. You should Follow Her On Twitter if you’re interested in smart Japanese things.

Okay, I don’t have much time. I’m in the Portland International Airport, and my flight is boarding in about 20 minutes. I also need food. Hungry. But, before I go, I need to tell you how to vote for what you want to see on TofuguTV. I’ll be sending out emails, tweets, Facebook updates, etc., and anyone following Tofugu on those things (or all of those things, especially) will receive their God given right to vote for what they watch on YouTube… or something like that. Anyways, here are your options.

Ways To Vote

There are three ways to vote… and I won’t necessarily send voting thingies out to all three things at once, meaning I might only send things to Twitter or only send something out to the people subscribed to the newsletter. That means you should sign up for all three. That’s right, you’re held hostage (maybe). Don’t worry, they’ll be awesome.

Facebook: You can vote on Facebook by following Tofugu. Watch out for the status updates!

Twitter: You can vote on Twitter by following Tofugu. Watch out for the status updates!

Email: You can vote if you receive the Tofugu Newsletter. It’s been a while since I’ve sent one out, but surely there’ll be a few over the next few weeks.

So, there you have it. If you follow all three of them, you’ll get every single opportunity to vote. If you don’t, well, you’ll just get some of the opportunities, which is cool too.

But What Are You Voting For?

While I’m in Japan filming TofuguTV, there will be times and opportunities where I’ll be like “huh, I don’t know where to go.” This might be some time where I don’t have any preference, and I’ll ask “which direction?” or it might be a time where it’s something specific, like “do you want to see this, or this?” Based on what you vote, and what you want, I’ll do those things for you. All you need to do is vote. The power is in your hands, my friends.

Also, keep watching the blog. I’ll try to update as much as possible while on the road with pictures, short videos, and things like that. After I get back, I’ll start working on the big footage. First episode should come out first week of January! So soon! Gotta love the web :)

Thanks everyone for your support, hopefully this’ll be amazing.

P.S. Want to follow TofuguTV related posts? Use the TofuguTV Tag, and subscribe to the tag feed!

P.S. Want to get status updates as they happen? Follow Tofugu on Twitter. I’ll be tweeting as much as my overly expensive AT&T data plan and wallet lets me.