There was the legendary Cucumber Pepsi, and a soda that tasted like Menthol. There are yogurt drinks and sodas with slimy chunks of aloe. Late-night carousers can snag a turmeric-flavored energy drink, while tee-totalers can take some nicotine juice along on that smoke-free train ride.

There are sodas, milk drinks, experimental beers, canned coffees, canned teas, canned tea-coffees, soda-beers, milk-sodas, coffee-milks and coffee-milk-sodas (but as of yet, no coffee-milk-beers).

Most drinks come and go with the seasons. Companies can (and do) throw anything they’ve got onto the shelves when product runs are limited to a few weeks. Whenever the temperature drifts up or down a few degrees, food fans scour konbini shelves for new formulas or pop-up brands before they disappear.

Summer is prime time for scoring a can of Japan’s weirder drinks: Sales of cold drinks rise, and companies race to find the most “refreshing” formula to beat the summer sweats. I popped down to my local konbini to sort out this summer’s batch.

Salty Watermelon Pepsi

I’m a totally voracious consumer of Kit-Kat and soft drink news. When I first heard rumors about this drink on the Internet, I was skeptical but intrigued.

I’ve got a peculiar fondness for flavors that sound kind of revolting. Delicious soft drinks are easy, but it takes an especially whimsical product manager to whip up something truly risky. Take the brilliant tobacco company employee who thought carbonated menthol – a terrible drink, but a beautifully ambitious one.

Salt, watermelon, and Pepsi? Yes, please. Every day I’d scour the konbini shelves. I was distracted by the gruesomely named (and somewhat flavorless) alternative, the low-calorie &lduqo;Pepsi Black Lemon.” Finally, on an ill-timed jaunt to Thailand, a friend Instagrammed a photo of my great white whale.

Unfortunately, Salty Watermelon Pepsi is not a mixture of salt, watermelon and Pepsi. In fact, it’s not Pepsi at all. Much like this winter’s variety, “Pepsi Pink” – a strawberry-milk flavor – the only thing “Pepsi-ish” about it was the carbonation.

Really, it’s a liquified watermelon Jolly Rancher with seltzer. Green melon soda is a fixture of fast-food chains here, so watermelon soda was a pretty tame offering.

The flavor wasn’t even salty. In Japan, and across Asia in general, people salt fruit to bring the sweetness out. It’s also suggested to help if you’re sweating a lot (and we are) – the idea is that you lose salt when you sweat. Traditionally, people here eat salty plums (ume boshi) that are sour and salty. This summer, salt is everywhere – we even have “salty chocolate” Kit-Kats.

Verdict: Too sweet. Would not drink again.

Asahi Red Eye – Tomato Beer

If you love gazpacho but hate that it’s not beer, you’d have been delighted for the six or seven days that Asahi Red Eye was available. It’s literally tomato juice and beer. It’s red. Bits of tomato float around. The slogan may as well be, “We dare you.”

This isn’t the first beer that’s taunted me into drinking it. Last February, “Red Romance” hit the market, a seductive blend of red wine and beer that sold for 100 yen per can. No Valentine’s Day is complete without a cheap, experimental mix of undrinkable wine-beer.

Red Eye is a confusing name. A Red Eye is a cup of coffee with a shot of espresso, or the last overnight flight. It seems like tomato beer is recommended for breakfast, like a Bloody Mary with beer instead of Vodka, or a tomato omelette with beer instead of eggs.

But I was shocked by how much I liked Red Eye. It was sweet and vinegary, a very Japanese flavor combo (I don’t see Japan’s carbonated-apple-vinegar shops taking off in America). The flavor was more tomato than beer, but the tomato had a sharp taste that cut into the beer flavor and made this beer almost dangerously easy to drink.

Tomatoes are valued for their sweetness in Japan, particularly cherry tomatoes, and have a strong summer connotation. A shop in my town was selling cherry tomatoes wrapped in chewy mochi and served cold, which were delicious.

If you come to Japan, you might be able to find a few discount cans of Asahi Red Eye around, but tomato season is waning. Even the mochi shop is switching cherry tomatoes out for grapes. Let’s hope Asahi doesn’t take that as a hint.

Verdict: Pleasantly surprised. Would drink again, if free.

Suntory Espressoda

The pun-derful “Espressoda” is, as the label says, “A twist of bold coffee and refreshing soda.” The cap twisted, excited bubbles rise to the surface, delivering the scent of fresh coffee grounds before mellowing into a light fizz.

Canned coffee is a Japanese vending machine mainstay. The coffee is universally unappealing – I can never escape the (probably imaginary) aftertaste of aluminium, and the scent of coffee residue lingers on your breath for hours.

I expected Espressoda to be canned coffee with bubbles. Shockingly, the coffee base for Espressoda is actually better than the coffee inside most canned coffees, probably because it’s “Espresso.” It’s in a plastic bottle, so there’s no tin-can placebo effect on my taste buds.

The result is a kind of a totally unsweetened root beer. You know how root beer tastes a bit like sarsaparilla with vanilla? Imagine sarsaparilla with coffee, and you’d have Espressoda nailed.

I got through the entire bottle, but not without second-guessing my commitment.

Verdict: Not awful, but unpleasantly confusing. Would not drink again.

Lazy Afternoon Root Beer

Root beer is an endangered animal in Japan. You can find some A&W in import stores, but I have never met a born-and-raised Japanese person (outside of Okinawa, where it’s basically everywhere) who enjoyed the taste of root beer. I’ve even heard it described as “America’s Natto.”

For what it’s worth, only North Americans and Okinawans seem to like Root Beer. It disgusts Europeans as much as it disgusts Asians. No one seems to know why, but most people think it tastes like medicine – which was precisely why I hated Menthol Soda. It was like drinking Vap-O-Rub. I couldn’t get past it.

So it was surprising to find that there’s a company making micro-batches of root beer in Kyushu. Lazy Afternoon is only lightly carbonated, but it’s a creamy brew with what I’d call “deep textures,” if I knew what that meant. And unlike the imported brands, Lazy Afternoon lacks the throat-burning sweetness of High Fructose Corn Syrup.

It also, notably, smells like a richer, deeper root beer than most canned root beers, which may be an attempt to shift it away from the medicine-ey flavors reviled by the Japanese.

Verdict: Will drink again.

For more, check out This Japanese Life!

Header photo by uzaigaijin

At least, that’s what they tell us. Travelers. Expats living in Japan. Or these guys.

But is it really as expensive as people say it is? In the four years I’ve been living here, although some things cost more in general, I’ve discovered many ways to save money, both as a resident and as a traveler. Some are fairly standard, but others I learned through trial and error, and now it’s easier to spend less money when traveling in Japan than when I first arrived.

Because who doesn’t want to see and experience all the beauty and charm and craziness Japan holds . . . without maxing out your credit card or going bankrupt.

Some of the tips below will require some Japanese reading ability to take advantage of, but that’s one of the reasons you follow Tofugu, right?

1. Travel during the off seasons. Whatever you do, avoid Golden Week (late April through the first week of May), Obon (mid-August) and New Year’s, unless you love crowds and have money to spare. Accommodation rates are typically highest at these times and rooms fill up fast. The rainy season (June and early July) is one of the cheapest times of the year to travel (and no, it doesn’t actually rain all the time, but when it does, you’ll want to be prepared).

Hotels/Accommodation

2. If you prefer to stay somewhere as cheap, or free, as possible, check out hostels, capsule hotels, internet cafes, camping, Couchsurfing, or even volunteering, to name a few options. Many of you are probably already familiar with most of these, many of which have been mentioned before on Tofugu.

If regular hotels are more your style, rest assured it’s possible to find cheap rooms, even at luxury hotels and in big cities like Tokyo. Here’s how I’ve found hotel deals, anyway:

3. Check for deals early. As in, at least a month but preferably two months or more. I’ve seen early bird deals for luxury or near-luxury hotels in Japanese for only around 5,000 yen (for two people) a night, when standard costs for these places is at least 15,000 yen and up. In Tokyo/Yokohama. Not all hotels will go this low, and it also depends on where in Japan you travel, but the earlier you look, you might just get the worm.

4. During the off-season, if you’re able to risk it, you could wait until the last minute to book, such as a week or two before. I’ve seen special plans pop up in the same month or a week or two beforehand as hotels try to fill up rooms.

5. Saturday night rates are typically higher than weekday nights, as to be expected. Fridays are either priced the same as weekdays or similar to Saturdays. Weekends, of course, always fill up quickly. You might be able to find a nice hotel to stay at during the week and a less expensive one on the weekend.

6. Book a hotel via a Japanese travel site or the hotel site. This is key. To save the most yen, I’ve found, you should try booking a hotel via a Japanese site, such as Rakuten Travel (the English version has less hotels than the Japanese version), Jalan (same as Rakuten Travel, less hotels on the English site), Rurubu, or Meitetsu Kankou. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t search for hotels in English, but in my experience, Japanese sites offer a greater selection and usually have better prices. Search for 国内ホテル予約サイト to find others.

If you find some hotels you like, check their official websites, if they have one, to compare prices. Sometimes the rates on the hotel’s site are lower than on the travel sites. Also try searching for the hotels you like in Japanese and English to see if you can get a steeper discount elsewhere. A couple times I’ve been successful doing this and saved a few thousand yen.

7. Don’t get a hotel plan with meals included, unless you’re looking for a particular experience, such as at a ryokan. The room or per person rates are lower without hotel meals, and you can find more affordable meals elsewhere. However, you’ll want to make sure there are restaurants, supermarkets or convenience stores near the hotel, otherwise you’ll end up paying for expensive hotel food anyway.

Transportation

8. Get a Rail Pass, or not. The Japan Rail Pass is a good deal if you plan to travel to multiple cities and make the money spent worth your while. If you only travel around one city, don’t get it. (And if you live in Japan, you’re out of luck, as the rail pass is only for visitors.) You can use Hyperdia or Jorudan to calculate train fares between cities.

9. Look into other rail passes. Japan Railways (JR) offers a variety of passes and discounted tickets, often referred to as “トクきっぷ” (toku kippu). One well-known pass is the Seishun 18 ticket which is a cheap way to travel by local trains (not shinkansen or express trains) and is valid for up to five days during specified periods of the year.

Another example is the JR Shikoku birthday ticket, which you can get for only 10,000 yen during the month of your birthday. It can be used for three consecutive days on JR Shikoku train lines and some buses. Up to three of your friends can also join you for the same price per person. This ticket is actually cheaper than the Shikoku Free Pass, which costs 15,700 yen and the only difference being it can be bought anytime of the year.

You can find some information about special tickets in English, but most of it is in Japanese. Toretabi is a good Japanese resource to search for JR passes and special tickets around Japan.

10. Take the bus. One of the cheapest options to get around Japan is via a highway or overnight bus, although you’ll probably want to make sure you go with a reputable company, considering the tragedy earlier this year and some potential problems. The night buses allow you to save on accommodation, although it depends on how well you sleep in those kind of situations.

11. Check out regional “free passes” in English and in Japanese. These might include trains, buses, and/or other forms of transportation. Sometimes these passes are an excellent deal, but sometimes not depending on what you end up doing. For example, the Odakyu Hakone Free Pass, which lets you ride the Hakone Tozan Cablecar, Hakone Ropeway, pirate ship (i.e. the Hakone Sightseeing Boat), and the Odakyu buses, is a pretty good deal if you do all those things. So unless you just can’t bear the thought of not riding a pirate ship — although you can pay for it separately — you could check out the cheaper Izu Hakone Pass and get around by bus and a regular ferry-type sightseeing boat instead. In order to find more options, searching in Japanese will help, a lot.

12. Take local trains instead of the bullet trains. Sure, they’re slower, but they’re faster than the bus, and it gives you a chance to see Japan at a more leisurely pace, rather than having it zip by you in a matter of seconds. Although things to consider: there is usually only one car with a bathroom, which you’ll have to look for; some train lines run infrequently so you might end up waiting over an hour; and you’ll have to watch out for folks who’ve fallen asleep while on the train. The sleepers will often, seriously, rest their heads on you in their sleep. And if you think a gentle shrug will get them to move, you’d be surprised.

13. Drive. This might be a better option for folks living in Japan, as renting a car can be expensive. I’ve found that the amount we pay for expressway tolls, gas and parking often works out to be less expensive than shinkansen tickets (but this does depend on where you are driving, too). If you rent a car, you probably won’t save much, and the time spent driving is going to take twice as long as riding a bullet train, assuming there’s no traffic. There are some places in Japan that are easier and cheaper to travel by car though.

14. Take advantage of all the budget airlines (LCC in Japanese) that keep popping up in Japan, such as Peach, Jetstar, Skymark and AirAsia. I’ve been watching Peach for the past month or so and have seen one-way flights from Nagasaki to Osaka for less than 5000 yen.

Food

People tend to think food in Japan is prohibitively expensive, especially fruit, due to those ridiculous 10,000 yen melons. And I’ve heard some people say vegetables are expensive as well, which isn’t true, unless you’re going for the imported stuff. A lot depends on not only how you shop, but where you shop.

15. Check out department store basements. Most major train stations have at least one or two department stores connected or nearby. I wouldn’t say they are the best place to find the cheapest food most of the time, but you can generally find prepared meals, large salads, onigiri, and bentos for a good deal. There are a variety of other food shops worth checking out as well.

16. Convenience stores or コンビニ. You’ve probably heard about this one. These are great for inexpensive, not-junk-food noodle dishes (soba, ramen), onigiri, bentos and sometimes salads. Beverages, snacks and fruit, if available, tend to be priced higher at コンビニ than at supermarkets, except the store brand 100 yen snacks, which supermarkets also have.

17. Supermarkets usually have the best deals on food. You can find lots of prepared foods (bentos, noodles, salads, onigiri, fried goods, sushi and a variety of other items) for a decent deal. Water, snacks and other beverages are generally cheaper than at convenience stores. You can actually also sometimes find supermarkets in department store basements.

18. Buy fruit or vegetables from a farmer’s market or “morning market”. Unless you’re buying strictly imported fruit in Japan, it’s not all as expensive as the ridiculously priced and carefully packaged melons/peaches/apples/grapes. I’ve found pineapple, which is normally imported, to actually be cheaper than back home (for me), along with some other fruits. Seasonal fruit is often affordable, but particularly so if you buy it from a farmer’s market or morning market. Expensive strawberries at the store might be half-price, or a bag of apples might end up being less than 100 yen a piece.

Many farmer’s markets also sell prepared food. To find one nearby, you could ask at the place you’re staying, or search for “ファーマーズマーケット” or “朝市” in your favorite map app. This is also a great way to talk with the locals and experience another side of non-tourist Japan.

19. Eat at affordable places. A lot of these have been covered elsewhere, such as ramen, soba or udon shops, Japanese curry, kaiten sushi (the conveyor belt kind), and chains such as Yoshinoya. You might also want to check out Shakey’s Pizza, which offers an all-you-can-eat buffet, lunch or dinner, for around or under 1000 yen, or an Indian curry place (search for インド料理). Mall food courts offer affordable, mostly-Japanese food options, as do expressway service areas.

Is fast food in Japan actually cheap? McDonald’s, Mos Burger, and all those other cheap joints? They can be if you buy one or two things, but if you buy an entire meal’s worth, it can end up costing just as much as what you’d pay at an affordable restaurant with more and arguably better or healthier food.

21. Search a restaurant site for said affordable places. Tabelog is one of the most popular. You can search by region, train station, cuisine, and price. So if you want to find some cheap places to eat in Tokyo, you can click on “東京” on the map, and then under 予算 (よさん, budget), choose your price range and press the green button that says 検索 (けんさく, search). As Tokyo is ridiculously huge, there are 111,849 results, so you’ll have to narrow your choices on the next page using the options on the left side.

22. Eat a big lunch, small dinner. Lunch meals are typically cheaper than dinner, though the portions might be slightly smaller depending on the restaurant. If you want to splurge on a nice meal, eat a big lunch and spend less money than you would eating out for dinner (unless you go to a cheap place, that is). (Note that this does depend on the restaurant and their lunch/dinner menus).

Other

23. Follow sites such as Groupon Japan, if you’re flexible and can read some Japanese. Groupon has regular deals on hotels, restaurants and recreation options, like onsen, so you never know what you might find. I’ve seen quite a few excellent deals.

24. Search websites for coupons. If it’s offered in both English and Japanese, check both, but most often, if the site has any information about coupons or specials, it’s in Japanese. So if you’re going to an amusement park, a water park, the movies, etc., check the Japanese website for coupons or discounted admission. Keywords to look or search for: クーポン or 割引券 (わりびきけん), or just 割引 (わりびき).

25. Check Daiso for souvenirs. Out of all the 100円ショップ I’ve been to in Japan (not that I’ve been to ALL of them), I’ve found Daiso to have a great selection of Japanese souvenir-type goods. This works especially well if you have a lot of people to get gifts for and can’t afford to spend thousands and thousands of yen at regular souvenir shops. Green tea is also a great gift (especially if it’s from Shizuoka, not that I’m biased or anything), and you can find affordable bags at the supermarket.

These are some of the ways I, and others, have found ways to travel Japan on a budget. I’m sure many of you have additional helpful tips, so let’s hear them! What are some good ways to save money while traveling in Japan?

From how to read food labels to surviving Japan’s rainy season to comprehensive packing guides, Ashley Thompson provides unique how-tos and resources for life (and travel) on Surviving in Japan. She also loves walking among the never-ending green tea fields of Shizuoka prefecture, where she lives.

About five years ago now, I sat in a meeting room being interviewed by a very senior woman executive of the American company I eventually joined. I had made the decision that after a total of 11 years working in Japanese companies for Japanese people, it was time to make the jump into a gaishi-kei (a foreign company).

She looked at my rather unusual resume, noting that I had spent my entire working life in Japanese companies, working for Japanese people and speaking Japanese. She turned to me and asked me a question which caught me off-guard.

“After all this time working in Japanese companies, what would you say is the most important thing you’ve learned?”

That’s a tough question. I hesitated, wondering how I was supposed to answer such an open ended question. But after a few seconds, a phrase popped into my head that really best summarized the sum of what I had learned through all those years of learning to cope and survive with the Japanese work ethic.

I responded: “little things are big things.”

Uh Ohhh…

Talking about “culture” is always a bit of a trap. Political correctness tells us not to generalize about large groups of people, and makes us very aware of the many exceptions to every general principle we may be tempted to observe.

At the same time however, there are broad differences in how people interact within different national cultures, that transcend simple individual differences, that are influenced by the history and customs of the location they originate from.

Such generalizations don’t work in every context, but after long resisting the idea of using them, I finally came to realize that a couple of general insights about Japanese culture really helped give me a context to understand many of the attitudes and work practices that I simply could not otherwise wrap my head around.

Boiled down to its very essence, the unifying realization that I came to is that just about every aspect of life in Japan, from all kinds of businesses, to clubs, to sports, to hobbies and recreation has the mentality of the Japanese artisan infused into it to some degree.

Understand Your Own Values In Order To Understand Others

The only way to begin to understand any culture in context, is to first have some objective understanding of your own culture, and to break through the presumption that “norms” of your own culture are not the ”universal truths” that we often believe them to be.

Working for Japanese, as a New Zealander, I found many aspects of “common sense” from my own culture, frankly, completely lacking in the way that Japanese work and play. The, admittedly very WASP values that many New Zealanders carry with them through the world include concepts such as:

• Family first
• You work to live – you work in order to be able to go home and spend time with your family while providing for them
• The primary goal of work is efficiency and productivity, finding better ways to get things done is a constant goal
• The primary purpose of out of work personal activities is enjoyment and relaxation

These aren’t all of them, but these are the values I had which I found most conflicted when trying to adapt to working conditions here.

Wax On, Wax Off

One of my first introductions to Japanese culture that did not involve WWII or Ninja Turtles, was the movie Karate Kid. I must have been about 10 when it came out, and remember watching it, being a bit puzzled, as I’m sure many other kids are, by the unusual training that Mr. Miyagi (for some reason “Mr. Miyaji” in the Japanese dubbed version) put Daniel san through, painting fences, waxing cars and sanding floors. It didn’t make any sense. Mr. Miyagi looked simply like a bully using Daniel as a servant.

As we all know, forcing Daniel san to do all those crappy jobs was an indirect way for Mr. Miyagi to build Daniel’s character, and train him without jumping straight to the super sweet ninja death grips that every kid wants to learn in karate on day one. Over time, it’s something I came to recognize as the artisan work ethic that can be seen to different degrees in most aspects of life in Japan.

The only difference is that unlike the movie where Daniel san is only tormented for a few weeks, in real life, you often end up waxing on and waxing off for decades.

Not Getting It

My own experiences often synced with those of others like me who felt frustration and exasperation working in Japanese workplaces. Getting dressed down for things like using the wrong colour pen, or there being a single spelling mistake on an 80 page document I created, or worse still, being accused of being lazy when finding quicker more efficient ways of performing certain tasks.

From part-time jobs to rugby clubs to different types of companies, this kind of obsession with superfluous detail is something that drives many people – Japanese and non Japanese – nuts when living and working in Japan. The problem that I had was that while I could understand that different people work differently in any country or culture, in New Zealand at least, I could usually understand the mentality of people, even if I disliked or disagreed with how they worked. In Japan, working weekends and late nights in ways that made no rational sense to me was something that I struggled with.

Over time, I have seen the most committed hardcore Japanophiles throw their hands up in exasperation, call BS, and leave situations like this. My problem was that coming from NZ as a university graduate, I had promised myself that come Hell or high water, I was going to stay in my first job here for at least 3 years; so I searched desperately to find a handle I could use to at least understand why I was working late into the night and throughout my weekends doing what often seemed like menial unnecessary tasks.

One Night Taichi Sakaiya and Baigan Ishida Saved My Life

The epiphany hit me after about a year being in Japan. Having done a lot of reading of books on Japanese culture and society preparing to come to Japan, and finding all of that preparation of very little help when I was here, one day I flashed back to a passage in a book about Japanese society by former METI bureaucrat Taichi Sakaiya called “What is Japan.”

When I first read it before coming to Japan, I didn’t really like the book. It was extremely broad and general, attempting to explain all of Japanese culture with sweeping generalizations, based on chains of logic that jumped all over the place through Japanese history, culture and tradition. It was very unlike western academic writing that I was used to and had pretty much ended up disregarding most of what the book had to say upon first reading.

However, what brought me back to the book was his outline of what he sees as the origins and nature of the Japanese work ethic.

Sakaiya explains that Japanese leaders around 400 years ago faced problems of economic instability caused by a large, industrious population living in a country that was resource-poor, and unable to sustain prolonged consumerist economic booms.

Rulers of the time found a useful solution to this problem in the philosophy of a school of Zen Buddhism set up by Baigan Ishida, based on the precept that “all work is the pursuit of knowledge”, whereby work is seen primarily as a means of building character, and only secondarily as being productive. By making a virtue out of hard work and frugality at the same time, the philosophy emphasized the showing of dedication to detail in work, rather than production.

The shogunate adopted and spread this philosophy throughout Japan for the “cooling” effect it had on Japan’s boom/bust economies of the time.

Blame this guy for everything.

Sakaiya cites this philosophy as lying at the root of the obsession of many Japanese with attention to detail, even where such detail is unimportant. He cites examples of imported products failing in Japan, not because of poor value or function, but because of people being dissatisfied with more superficial aspects of the build and finishing of such products.

If you go online nowadays and look at restaurant and product review forums on site like Kakaku.com and Yahoo Gourmet, you’ll see that many of the sternest reviews often obsess more over aspects of presentation and packaging more than the product or meal itself.

People have a way of judging performance not by how core functions are performed, but rather on the dedication to working hard shown by the person being judged, and their attention to unimportant detail. The sign of an artisan is someone who spent years or decades as an apprentice, tediously being forced to learn to perfect every aspect, important and unimportant, of what they do.

This philosophy remains, in my experience, deeply embedded in the culture, be it in school, clubs, sports, hobbies, service industries, or manufacturing. For me, understanding this at least allowed me to for the first time understand why I was getting in trouble for finding more efficient ways to be productive, why my superiors would never simply give me answers to questions I asked about how certain things are done, why everyone would badmouth people who left work at a reasonable hour, and why such emphasis is placed on demonstrating dedication through long hours spent on relatively menial tasks.

Oyassan

The first Japanese comedy skit I ever laughed at was “Oyassan” by a comedy troupe led by the duo Downtown. It’s the same scenario played out in various old-town settings of an old artisan mercilessly bullying a young apprentice first with verbal, and then escalating physical abuse.

[yframe url='http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oX29jtB8aVc']

Having been mystified trying to keep up with other Japanese comedy skits up until first watching this, I laughed until I cried, simply because I recognized the scenario from being sternly dressed down at my part time job at a souvenir shop in Auckland for similar transgressions, such as placing a price tag on the lower right instead of lower left of the reverse of a box, or using a blue pen instead of a black pen for credit card forms.

It’s never as bad or extreme as it is shown in the Oyassan skit, but it does illustrate in a vivid way the kind of Karate Kid training that apprentices in Japan go through in contexts that go beyond the artisan setting from which such practices originated. Young rugby players are forced to hand wash the jerseys of senior team players (and dressed down for missing spots). Apprentice chefs can spend years simply cleaning and chopping before being allowed to cook.

In office environments, I have worked in different companies where high level responsibilities such as being allowed to act as a note-taker in a meeting, or to pick up the phone and talk to clients, are privileges that can take years to earn. Staff within manufacturing companies being groomed for senior management are forced to work on all the production lines and business areas of the company over years and years, so that when they become senior managers, they understand every aspect of the companies they manage and the products they make (something that gives me huge respect for the senior managers of Japanese companies I have met).

The idea is that the people in the senior role in all these scenarios must first foster and shape the character of the apprentice through hard work and perfectionism.

But Just Remember…

In my early years in Japan, I saw many foreign workers like myself come and go: Japanese-speaking, bright-eyed, with big dreams of making an impact working in Japan, leaving after just a couple of years exasperated at the BS that people have to put up with.

Indeed, this same culture is what also drives many Japanese to live and work abroad. Japan’s high rates of burnout and stress related illness are testament to the negative side effects.

As a foreigner here, what killed me was that I couldn’t anchor myself with any kind of philosophy to understand WHY people were behaving as they were, for me to process and put in context what was expected of me and how I was supposed to succeed by the standards of those judging me.

Understanding the philosophy also helped me to  recognize the positives of this ethic. It is behind the reputation for high quality of manufactured goods from Japan, and the many humble hard working engineers, chefs and artists from Japan who have become world leaders simply through their dedication to perfection of their chosen crafts.

An explanation very similar to the one above was given to me by a Nikkei American coworker. The need to show dedication to working, and the need to not be seen to be letting the team early by leaving when your work is done when others are still busy. It felt liberating to be able to understand it. But then my friend, who is an American with Japanese parents, added the kicker:

“Just remember, it’s all bullshit…”

The aim of this is not to discourage people from coming to Japan. On the contrary, I want more foreigners to come to Japan, and for Japanese people to have greater exposure to global influences.

The point is however, that the philosophy outlined above pervades most aspects of life in Japan, and based on the values that I brought with me to Japan, it was completely incomprehensible. Understanding expectations and following them is an important part of living life here.

But at the same time, never forget or let go of your own values. Having the ability to analyze situations accurately and in detail through multiple cultural prisms is a valuable tool that few people have – even those who are able to proficiently speak foreign languages.

For me, understanding the Japanese artisan work ethic was one of those magic “keys” that made a lot of aspects of living in Japan that I was struggling with make sense. It doesn’t make living here any easier, but it gives a context through which you can understand many of the unsaid aspects of things going on around you, that often based on pure objective logic will not make any sense whatsoever. So try to bear the above in mind whenever dealing with Japanese culture, keep an open mind, and go and wax 50 cars for me. Now.

Michael from Gakuranman.com is an adventurer. He’s currently living in Japan, and one of his favorite things to do is to explore and discover haikyo (abandoned sites / ruins) in Japan. For Tofugu’s current series of “scary” Japanese things, Michael has kindly offered to share with us the things that scare him most about his adventures into the crumbling, decaying, unknown. Let’s let him get started, shall we?

“Haikyo”

You’ve seen creepy Japanese ghost girls. You’ve read about doom-bringing Japanese Giant Asian hornets. You’ve heard tales from the master of Japanese horror. But what if you could experience all of that for real? Would you take up the challenge?

Littered throughout the country are ruins known in Japanese as ‘haikyo’. They come in all shapes and sizes; from a tiny wooden medical shack to the charred remains of a love hotel, from a long-abandoned tomb to a sprawling, concrete ghost island that once had the world’s highest population density. Some haikyo have fascinating histories attached, while others, gruesome stories of murder and deceit. Certainly not places you’d like to be on your own…

But as an urban explorer, these places grab me and don’t let go. Though often thoroughly bone-chilling, they offer a sense of excitement quite unlike that found anywhere else. So grab your flashlight and come with me as we explore the abandoned buildings of Japan. I’ve selected some of the creepiest and most powerful images gathered on my explorations to date. These are the things that make haikyo exploration both exciting and scary.

Tombs

Crypts are always creepy places, but this one was especially scary. Hidden deep with a cliff face in a secret cave was a small shrine with various pots and vases and a couple of marble busts. Behind that was a tiny hole leading to a further chamber. Crawling through on my hands and knees, I discovered what looked to be a storage area for special vessels and other tools used in ceremonies. I’m not sure anyone was buried there, but it looked at though it was used as a place for remembering the dead.

Skeletons

I found this rotten pig skeleton at an abandoned hotel near a river. It appeared to have gotten stuck on a second floor balcony and I can only assume died of starvation. It’s often easy to find small bird skeletons, or even a cat from time to time, but an animal as large as a pig was quite a shocking sight to behold.

Decay

Some areas found when doing urbex are just scary in and of themselves. This hallway in the Maya Hotel had an almost ghostly presence about it, with the rotting wallpaper and light pouring in from an open door. Simultaneously beautiful and creepy. I kept expecting somebody – or something – to walk out in front of me…

Decay can also present other problems as well. It’s never good to breathe mold, not to mention the asbestos that can come from decaying walls and ceilings.

Heights

This one might not be scary at all for some of you, but for others, it can be a nightmare. Heights are a very real threat when exploring haikyo, and especially in ones with crumbling, degraded concrete like Block 65 on Gunkanjima. I was consumed with awe of the place when there that I didn’t quite realize the risk. I don’t think I’ll be sitting here again in a hurry.

Fire

A huge fire has scorched the first floor of this love hotel haikyo in Kyushu, and one particular room on the second floor. It’s a curious sight – while most of the rooms remain in fairly good condition, the fire only seems to have raged in the one room upstairs, leaving a horrible dark mess. Rumour has it that the room was a murder site. Something oddly heavy in the air held me back from entering the blackened bathroom…

Spiders

Eugh. I hate spiders, and I hate spider webs even more. The number of times I’ve run into the things when wandering around old buildings… This particular one was quite interesting in the way the sticky white strands reached outwards. At the centre is only what I can assume is an egg sack. I wonder where the hatchlings are now…

Children’s Toys

Hidden inside one of the rooms of Block 65 on Hashima island is an old chldren’s toy named Poron-chan. You know the kind that rights itself when pushed over? It has an eerie bell inside that gives a rusty tinkling sounds when pushed. Once a cute, colourful plaything, now the face is warped and decaying. It gives me the shivers.

Creatures in Jars

Down in the dark basement of one abandoned museum in central Japan lurks all manner of ghoulish creatures, preserved perfectly in jars of strange liquids. In the photo above, you can see one of Japan’s squid, the hotaru-ika (firefly squid), staring long into the darkness. It gave me quite a fright when I caught its gleaming white eye staring back at me!

Murder

These hand prints have been in this old Chiba love hotel for years, even before the incident. A tacky attempt at scaring those brave enough to enter inside. It’s a spot plagued with tales of suicide and death, and well known amongst local people as a ‘ghost-spot’. But one incident in particular is confirmed as true. A young teenage girl was kidnapped by a group of youths, strangled, and her body left on the premises of this haikyo late 2004. If there’s anything more shocking than the creeping around a hotel littered with blood-red handprints, it’s knowing that a real murder case took place there. Truly chilling, and indeed extremely saddening.

Dolls

I don’t know about you, but dolls are one of the creepiest things on my list. This particular specimen I found inside the Doctor’s Shack – an old medical clinic out in the Japanese countryside. The doll’s head was decapitated, but I reunited it with the body for a few photographs, and paid a blood sacrifice. Mosquitoes swarmed around me as if moved by some angry spirit…

Koichi

A little omake from way back when Koichi visited Japan. We teamed up to explore the Maya Hotel, one of the holy grails of the haikyo world. And at night, no less! Here’s yours truly with the cool frood himself, enjoying a spooky candlelit dinner while overlooking the city of Kobe. Think yourself lucky I didn’t publish Koichi’s ‘scary face’…

So there we have it. 10 Haikyo Horrors to curdle your dreams. What freaks you out the most?

P.S. Wanna be creeped out even more? Check out Gakuranman’s haikyo explorations.
P.P.S If you love Halloween, follow Gakuranman on Google + and Twitter.
P.P.P.S If you are inspired to visit an abandoned site, be sure to know the risks before you go. In many cases it may be illegal, and you must be able to take responsibility for your own safety: Haikyo & Urbex Safety.

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Thankfully we have a guest post from our friend Ken Cannon, who runs the site Japanese Through Anime. He’s here to teach us about the most difficult dialect in Japanese. Are you up for the challenge?

What’s a dialect?

A dialect is a version of a language that can have different accents, grammar, or sometimes even vocabulary. Japan has dozens of dialects! Some varying only a wee bit, and some others varying a lot. But most of the time, a dialect isn’t so different that native speakers can’t understand.

The 3 most notable Japanese dialects are:

1) Standard Japanese: Spoken in Tokyo, on TV, in anime, etc.. This is basically the official language of Japan, the one you all know and love. It’s also called Hyojungo.

2) Kansai Dialect: Spoken in the Western part of Japan, around Osaka. This type of Japanese is often associated with the weird combination of comedians and yakuza.

3) Tohoku Dialect: Usually associated with farmers and country folk. Cool, right?

What’s Tohoku-ben?

Tohoku-ben is a Japanese dialect that’s interesting because it’s known as the hardest dialect to understand. In fact, Tohoku-ben is so different from standard Japanese that even native Japanese speakers often can’t understand it and need subtitles whenever people speaking this dialect appear on TV or in movies.

Here’s an example of pronunciation in Tohoku-ben:

[yframe url='http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAUHzjgI6Dg']

Tohoku-ben is spoken in the Tohoku region of Japan, which extends from slightly east of Tokyo all the way up to Hokkaido. And to get you really motivated, there isn’t just one Tohoku-ben, but about a dozen different versions of it spoken throughout the region.

Today we are going to be focusing on Tsugaru-ben in particular, which is spoken in Aomori, the northern most part of Tohoku. Tsugaru-ben is arguably the furthest sounding dialect from standard Japanese.

[yframe url='http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2fnAgnbp7c']

The Stereotype

One of the reasons Tohoku-ben is so hard for most people to grasp is that unlike Kansai-ben, most Tohoku-ben speakers hide their accents when speaking to anyone outside of Tohoku. Therefore it’s hard to get any practice with native Tohoku-ben speakers.

A big reason Tohoku-ben speakers are so shy is the negative nickname “zuu zuu ben” I mentioned in the video. Tohoku-ben is sometimes called “zuu zuu ben” because speakers avoid opening their mouths too much when speaking and in effect causes their speech to sound very slurred and lazy, kind of like they were saying “zuu zuu muu nuuu buu” instead of words.

This nickname brings a big, negative stereotype to Tohoku speakers with other Japanese. Tohoku speakers are seen as  lazy country bumpkins. Most speakers of this dialect don’t like to be seen speaking it outside of their hometowns, especially the younger crowds.

[yframe url='http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uiVZdEIscA']

This vending machine in Japan has a Tohoku-ben setting!

And this isn’t even mentioning the fact that Japan is currently trying to blotch out most dialects and create a single standard Japanese language by forcing all printed material and media to be in Hyojungo. This kind of goes hand in hand with Japan’s need for conformity or, if you don’t want to be a jerk about it, unity. But all the same, it is quite a shame.

Tsugaru-Ben Vocab

Now getting into some vocab I promised you in the video, we’ll start with my favorite Tsugaru-ben vocab:

1)  まいね – (maine) – bad

Maine is the Tohoku version of the standard Japanese dame or ikenai, which mean “bad.”

Let’s try an example sentence!

Tsugaru: Geimusho sa iganeba maine jya
Standard Japanese: Geimusho ni ikenakucha ikenai
English: I gotta go to prison/ If I don’t go prison it’ll be bad

You’ll notice in this sentence that sa is used in place of the standard ni.

Next, the two most common Tsugaru ben words.

2) わ + な – (wa and na) – (I and you)

These mean “I” and “you” respectively, and come from shortened versions of the standard watashi and anata.

Tsugaru: Wa shinobi da be
Standard Japanese: Watashi wa shinobi darou
English: I’m probably a ninja

Tsugaru: Na shinobi jya nee be
Standard Japanese:  Anata wa shinobi jya nai deshou
English: You’re probably not a ninja

3) んだ + んだが – (nda and nda ga) – (That’s right and really?)

If you didn’t know, sou desu and sou desu ka – or “that’s” right” and “really?” – are used all the time in Japanese. So as you can guess, the same goes for their Tsugaru-ben counterparts: nda and nda ga.

Tsugaru: Nda wa megoi jya
Standard Japanese: Sou da watashi wa kawaii yo
English: That’s right, I’m cute!

Tsugaru: Nda ga? Koichi-san, jikko ga?
Standard Japanese: Sou desu ka? Koichi-san wa ojiisan ka?
English: Really? Koichi is a grandpa?

And for our last bit of vocab for the day:

4) だはんで + はんで – (da hande) – (therefore)

Dahande is the Tohoku-ben equivalent of the standard dakara, or “therefore” in English. This word goes in between two clauses that you want to cite as being the cause of another.

Tsugaru: Wa sekushi da hande, Hashi-san wa no godo ni agogareru jya
Standard Japanese: Watashi wa sekushi dakara, Hashi-san wa watashi no koto ni akogareru yo!
English: I’m sexy, therefore Hashi yearns for me.

And if you want to hear more Tsugaru-ben, there’s a movie that was recently produced in Japan all in Tsugaru-ben, which is very rare for the reasons stated above. It’s called Bare Essence of Life Ultra-Miracle Love Story, and for the amount of self-inflicted brain damage it includes, it might make it on some people’s list of strange Japanese movies.

[yframe url='http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IA7azF3HZ4k']

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Anyways, seriously cool artist. We definitely enjoyed reading this comic! You can check out what Aerin is doing now by saying hello to her on Twitter (@Inverce), or checking her latest updates on her blog, as well!