No, no I’m reading!
I am preparing my JETS application for September, hopefully for acceptance next year (I’d be going one year from today)
Any books you guys would recommend to start studying up?
I’ve ORBIS’d (the pleasure of working in a library) Importing Diversity, Learning to Bow, and a few books on Japan’s unique governmental systems.
Thanks for all the great info, by the way.
hey kuri and char, i’m reading too and i appriciate all the good info. i don’t know if i will ever be able to visit there but i highly enjoy the info. keep it comming cause i love to hear about other places and cultures. thanks again 
I’m reading…
I lived there for a few months back in '97, but was on the Marine Corps base in Iwakuni… I was able to see a lot of different things, but never got into the social aspects all that much. I ate the food, hiked the mountains, even played some baseball with the locals, but I never lived within the rest of the public.
I guess that’s why your posts are so interesting.
B.
Well, good to know someones looking.
Rumbach, take some language classes at a local college. I took a coupla yrs while an undergrad and it really payed off (wasn’t my major).
& pick up some kanji books (hiragana & katakana are no sweat).
Lets get Char-dawg to speak on love hotels - another of Japan’s infamous contribution to pop culture.
heard of “imekura” ? (short for “image club”) there are theme rooms made to look like a subway car, an office etc…
Japanese are generally pretty shy & don’t talk about sex openly (without booze), even photos showing pubes are banned - but the underside is extremely interesting! soapland, love hotels, swapping cafes (“couple kissa”).
as Char alluded to, somewhat of a paradise for guys who are so inclined.
Rumbach, as a JET teacher you’ll be in a Junior high or HS, so you’ll miss out on teaching those curious university students of the opposite sex. Back when I was teaching (was single and 23 at the time), had some coed students drive pretty strong to the hoop.
Many friends of mine have been on the JET program and loved it. Your generally treated and payed well, and you can make great connections for other jobs. If I were you I would avoid Osaka & Tokyo and go to a smaller city.
Tsukuba city, in Ibaraki prefecture is one of the loveliest I’ve been to, and only an hour from Tokyo by bus. Its clean, no trains, relatively spacious (built some 20yrs ago as a scientific research city, thus designed like a western city with wide roads).
Tsukuba is close to the ocean, close to mountains - great Mt. biking around Mt. Tsukuba. Easy drive to the Jpn Alps.
LOL. Love hotels, huh? Okay…
Love Hotels
To the average westerner, a “Love Hotel” sounds like a sleazy place where people have illicit trysts and try not to get caught. There is that aspect, of course, but some of the love hotels are actually quite nice. Nicer, in fact, than most of the regular hotels, the rooms being bigger and better appointed. In your nice LH, for example, the bathroom will be huge, with a jacuzzi-type tub and lots of mirrors. Kinda cool. 
And a necessary outlet around here, where the walls in most houses are very thin. Couples who have children make extensive use of LHs.
If you decide to go to one of these places, do NOT try to get in speaking English, because they won’t let you. If you’re with a Japanese woman, let her do the talking (which she’ll be happy to do); if not, you’d best have a very good handle on the language. There is a partition so that you can’t see the clerk (and he can’t see you, more to the point), but if they hear an accent they’ll probably turn you away.
Funniest LH-related story I know: When I was teaching at Berlitz one of our students was a guy named Kishimoto, who was a LH manager. This guy looked like someone who’d manage a LH: small, skinny, pale from never having seen the sun, green teeth, the whole bit. (Think of a Japanese version of Steve Buscemi in a really sleazy role.) But he was a very nice guy.
Anyway, he most often requested a teacher named Karen, who was a very nice-looking blond New Zealander woman. One day when she couldn’t teach him she asked me if I’d check to see what his rates were, and whether it was possible to have more than two people stay in a room together overnight. She had some friends (8 people, as it turned out) coming down from Osaka in a van, and they were going to pick her up on their way down to Kyuushuu for the summer vacation. Hotels being small and expensive here, they were trying to find a way to economize.
So after my lesson with Kishimoto, I asked him. This was in English, so it took me a little while to make him understand what I wanted. When he finally go it, he drew himself up in indignation and said:
“No! No group! My hotel, one man. One woman. No child! No animal!”
The things this guy must have seen… Still makes me laugh every time I think about it.
I just watched Karate Kid. Does that count?
Just don’t try the crane kick Goldberg, you’ll rupture a disc cuz.
Love hotels are the way to stay when traveling, that is if your with someone of the opposite sex.
Rooms are about 10 times the size of a normal hotel, and the stirrups can be fun 
Hey Char, green teeth? I know dental technology is circa 19th century there but damn boy!
there are hotels in Tokyo that allow more than 2 in a room. Just for your, you know, info. Try Shibuya.
Should mention too that foreigners are rarely allowed in sex clubs, they don’t want us scaring the women & shaming the dudes (actually some truth in that).
As a tourist its fine, but those living there have probably at some point been refused service (banks, real estate etc…) on the basis of foreigness.
I’ll stop here cause I can go off on a fucking tirade that would last for pages.
Well, as of last week I no longer reside in Japan so instead I’ll kick back and enjoy the festivities tomorrow.
Happy 4th!
Language
The Japanese language isn’t like learning a European language if you’re a native English speaker (or a native any-Euro-language speaker). It will take longer; it will be more frustrating; you will throw your textbooks against the wall. At least, that’s how I found it. And - with all due modesty - I’m good at languages.
However, if you know Chinese or Korean, then it’s not so tough. The Chinese have the kanji already (there’s about an 80% overlap) and Korean has a lot of cognates and very similar grammar, so that’s a huge plus. But for your AWB, it’s gonna be tough.
That said, it’s not impossible. You can go from absolute linguistic zero to being able to get most daily things done in a year or so; you’re able to have simple discussions about the weather and so on, like that. Three years will make you pretty comfortable; five will mean that you can discuss most anything that interests you. It took me seven years to reach the level of fluency that I wanted, which was basically to be perfect enough that if I were talking on the phone the other person wouldn’t know that I’m not Japanese. But unless you plan on being a professional interpreter, you won’t need to be that accurate with your accent and so on.
That’s the spoken language. The written language is another matter entirely, and is what separates the men from the boys out here. Not to disagree with kuri, who obviously knows a lot about the country, but 2-300 kanji won’t get you anything but frustrated. You need approximately 10 times that number to be basically literate; what the Japanese kids learn in school (through grade 12) is about 2000 characters. A “regular” adult native speaker will know something like 3500 or so; someone’s who really well-educated will know about 6000.
There are two syllabic alphabets, the hiragana and katakana. If you plan on taking up the language, I heartily suggest (against the advice of almost everyone else) that you learn the katakana first. The reason is that this is the alphabet used for any foreign loan-word (of which there are many), and with your already-in-place English vocabulary, knowing katakana will enable you to navigate your way around a lot of menus and such. Both for katakana and hiragana, James Heisig’s “Remembering the…” series is the best thing I’ve seen. He also has a great book for the kanji, although only Volume One is worthwhile. But his system is about ten times more effective than just trying to cram a bunch of silly-looking sqiggles into your head by brute memorization. Word up.
If you ever want to be taken seriously here, and/or if you ever want a really good Japan-related job (I mean beyond something like teaching English), you must be literate. And very few foreigners are. I know at least 50 people who can speak well enough that they could function in an office environment in Japanese; only about 7-8 of them can read and write at the same level. So if you’re thinking that maybe you want to have a career here, get cracking on the written language. You’ll be glad you did.
And what may be more to the point for a lot of the guys out there, if you ever get serious about a Japanese woman and want to marry her, knowing how to read and write will make her parents much more favorably inclined towards you.
Oh, and the syllabic alphabets have about 50 characters each, not 30.
Great thread Char, and contributions by Yuri.
Hey Char, I live “right next door” to you in Yamaguchi Prefecture in a city called Yanai.
Sorry that should read, contributions bys Kuri. Gomen nasai.
Im out in the boon docks of Mie-ken. Its nice, quiet and pretty cheap compared to the big cities. And, for my sins, Ive been doing the NOVA thing for almost 4 years.
Yuri, from Sakhalin?? ha ha - omoshiroi!
Char-dawg - a few thousand kanji? I sure as hell can’t write that many and I was just fine working in a Japanese company doing business all in Jpn.
Of course I used a PC for writing so it would translate the kana (I know, a terrible crutch)
I recognize many more kanji than I can write - and got by pretty well with a couple hundred.
Great advice on the books.
Spiderman - my best buddy in Jpn is pretty high up the ladder working at the Shinjuku honbu. if you need anything or looking to become a trainer he’d be a good one to talk to. PM me and I can put you in touch.
Happy fourth to you yanks over there - I’m back in the US of A. I’ll toast one for all of you today.
BTW, anyone study Shodo or Shuji?
How much different is Korean culture from Japanese culture?
Random: Dude, you live in Yanai?!? That is right next door! I used to live in Yamaguchi-ken (Iwakuni) for the first two years that I was here. I dated a chick from Yanai for a while…
Anyway, if you find yourself coming up to Hiroshima, give me a holler. We’ll get together, maybe catch a workout or something. (Are there any decent gyms in Yanai…?)
Kuri: If you really did have all your documents and stuff coming across your desk in Japanese, then my feeling is that you know a lot more kanji than you’re giving yourself credit for. 300 is nothing, not even enough to pass the Level 3 Japanese Proficiency Test… I knew about 2500 when I worked at Mazda as a translator, and still had to refer to my dictionaries on a regular basis.
chrismcl: Uh, you think you could be a little more specific…? It probably won’t help you to get an answer like “Japanese culture and Korean culture are 27.2% different.”
Guys…I just want to say thanks for a very interesting thread…
'Cake
Lets see, you said farther up in the thread that Japanese parents wouldn’t take too well to an American (we’ll generalize, for time’s sake) guy trying to woo their daughter without knowing anything about the culture or language. Would Korean culture be the same thing or would Korean parents be more acceptive (I’m not sure thats a word) of an American guy with no knowledge of Korean trying to woo their daughter?
(That was only one of the specifics I could think of)
Chris,
Ask that question in Korea, and if you’re unlucky… you’ll be … beaten up rather badly by a bunch of guys who can do tae-kwon-do.
Stella
Due to a population split that has given Korea more men than women it has been said that Korean men do not take kindly to foreigners trying to date their women and there have been incidents of attacks on foriegners whilst out with their Korean girlfriends.
By the same token I have heard that Korean men are quite stuck in their ways and on the mysoginistic side and that Korean women often go for foriegn guys as a result.
These are just things that I have heard from friends (male and female) who have worked and traveled in Korea.
cool thread, very interesting.