JLPT Boot Camp – The Ultimate Study Guide to passing the Japanese Language Proficiency Test

This last month has been pretty rough on me to be honest. There was a lot of last minute planning for my vacation. And of course, right when you want to go on vacation, everything seems to need extra attention. More work to do at work. More fires to put out. I haven’t had as much time as I would like to sort my plan out.

My new position has a pretty hefty learning curve. I have heard that this pretty common so I’m not too worried. But it has meant that I have a lot of late nights catching up things. I think that sometime in the future I’ll be happy with my decision to take on more responsibility. Sometime.

But for now I’m getting an incredible amount of real in-your-face practice with Japanese so I’m not too worried about my skills going to waste. I’ve had to get used to a few slangy comments. My co-workers aren’t the most professional and Kansai has plenty of interesting dialects it seems like. It is making me sweat, but great practice.

Often times I tend to push my students like a coach would push his players. Constantly asking them about doing their homework and encouraging them non-stop to perform at the best level they can. More often than not they tend to push back, of course. No matter what the age, it seems everyone is allergic to studying hard. I have adult students that always talk about regretting not studying harder in school, but struggle to get regular practice in now.

And I think a good regular routine is good for you, but you can also go too far. I try to stop short of just mindlessly doing language practice. Because let’s be honest if you aren’t focused on the task, you are really aren’t doing yourself any benefits. Recently, I’ve been feeling that I’m starting to border on the way too much territory. Of course, having a vacation on my horizon didn’t really help me any.

But, as I have said before, motivation is pretty much the only thing you need to be successful with language learning. So, if you feel like you have reached the edges of burnout, it is good to take a step back and take a little mental vacation before you lose it completely. I think some people might think I’m pretty lazy with my studies, but I think if you purposefully use your time to take a break when you need it, you can focus a lot more and get a lot more done with your time when you are ‘on’.

I’ve been flirting with doing more and more meditation lately, and I feel like putting in the 5 minutes or so a day to refocus has started to really pay off. It’s not that there is this sudden change, but an overall better ability to get stuff down and feel good doing it. Meditation can really help stop burn out from anything I think as long as you stick with it.

It’s now the beginning of September and we are about 3 months away from the December JLPT (Dec 6th). It’s a good time to look around and take stock of where you are in terms of preparing for whatever level you want to take. If you are behind, you are going to have to put your head down and hold your breath to get through to the end. If you have been burning the candle at both ends, it is a great time to take a short break before you burn yourself out in this final stretch.

I personally recommend giving yourself a little holiday before the main event. I wouldn’t recommend dropping all your studies at once, though. Keep up the habit of doing your vocabulary and your drill books, just might want to tone it down a bit and take some time out of your day to just relax a little and clear your mind. Taking the time now will definitely pay off when you start doing the serious studying.

If you haven’t started, now is when you should start drafting a plan. Lay out what you want to get it done. Set some manageable goals for yourself to hit over the next few months heading into the test. What books do you want to finish? How many more words are you going to go through in that time? Be sure to leave yourself some wiggle room for a final reviewing and reinforcing session at the end of it all.

Every test, I tend to get a lot of questions about whether I’ll take the test or not. I definitely want to make another attempt, but there are a lot of things that are holding me back. I have a pretty clear idea of what I need to do and what I need to work on to get to the point that I need to be to pass, but I just can’t make the time commitment to do it.

I’ve bit off more than I can chew with the site to be honest. It has exploded with traffic and I love helping people with the test and just enjoying Japanese. I love hearing from my readers (sorry, I don’t reply to everyone, but I do try to reply to as many as I can). It’s great hearing from such a lively community and getting feedback on what is and is not working. I’ve learned a lot about effective studying and I’ve been trying to share it as much I can.

I’m also getting significantly more real world practice, and I have been learning about the differences between standard language and jargon and kansai-ben. That has been a great amount of practice for me and I love it.

I’ve always tried to make the point that N1 isn’t actually necessary to get a job or achieve your dreams of being a good speaker of Japanese. Getting N2 is arguably useful and should be something to strive for if you want to be a good speaker, but N1 is kind of like icing on the cake. Icing is totally awesome, don’t get me wrong, but it isn’t necessary.

I actually know a good number of translators and other people working with Japanese every day that stopped at the N2 level, and don’t seem to be bothered by it. Now, of course, being a guy that blogs about the JLPT, I get steady pressure to take the test, and that is why I started the blog in the first place – so that I would have something/someone to push me to pass. And I will pass it someday, just maybe not this time.

How are your JLPT plans coming along? Are you right on track? If you need some advice, check out Month 9 of the JLPT study guide for some tips on what to do now to be ready for the December test. Let me know in the comments if you have questions.

Photo by Yuki Yaginuma

When I first moved to Japan loved the city. It was nice and compact and everything is in one place. As long as you are a decent walk away from a train station you can get anywhere pretty easily without the use of a car. If you needed to buy anything that can’t be found at a store, no worries you can just order something online and give them a 2 hour window to deliver it to you. You have to live in a shoebox, but that’s the price you pay for convenience.

Japan is incredibly convenient because everyone lives so close to each other. There is actually a lot more space in Japan that people can live on. For example, Shimane prefecture is so desperate for people that they are giving away houses as long as you plan on living there for 25 years (kind of). So there is literally free space available for anyone that wants to live out in the countryside.

And cities have been getting a lot of love lately. People are starting to see them as a solution for a lot of problems with the environment as well as just being the new cool and convenient way to live. In recent years, city planners have been making cities much more inhabitable. New York City is a shiny example of that. They have shut down a lot areas to vehicular traffic and making them people-only zones as well as introduced bus lanes and bike lanes to allow for easier transit.

So living together is great for everyone, the environment, and life in general. People love the city. It’s almost like a little utopia. So, what could possibly go wrong with it? (queue ominous music)

John Calhoun did an experiment where he gave rats plenty of food and water and enough space for a good number of rats to live. He eliminated disease, natural predators. Everything just kind of came to these rats without much effort. The idea was to simulate the ideal environment that we humans live in and see what would happen.

Rat population initially grew at a fairly rapid pace after a few months of settling in. Rats were making love and getting down, chowing down on the free grub and generally enjoying life. It was a good time to be alive for the rats.

Then, before the actual physical capacity of their little utopia had been reached the population started to level off. Keep in mind that they still had plenty of food and water. That wasn’t limiting them. The population just leveled off. Then after a period of a year or so of this leveling off, the population started to rapidly die off and finally went extinct. This was back in the good old days when killing off animals was no biggy apparently.

During this leveling off, Calhoun noticed a lot of interesting behaviors that pretty much led to the population’s downfall. Mothers stopped caring for their young. Fathers would first leave their kids and then their mothers would leave them. Sometimes they acted as if they simply forgot the children existed.

There were other rats that kept themselves immaculately clean, but didn’t do much else. They simply ate, slept and cleaned. They didn’t even get it on with other rats. And apparently they were pretty stupid as well.

On top of all that, they were constantly fighting with each other toward the end, despite the fact that there was not that much to fight over. There was plenty of food and water to go around. The only thing in limited supply was space. But they blooded each other’s tails with bites.

So, is the same thing happening in well-developed countries like Japan? Well, it isn’t exactly a rat colony and there are a lot more complexities to the Japanese system obviously. The country isn’t a big box in someone’s barn or lab, but there are some alarming signs that similar behavior is starting to become more prominent.

In the rat utopia experiment mother’s abandoned their kids. There have been a few sensationalized news stories of mother’s abandoning their children, but nothing statistically relevant. However, child abuse has been on the rise for the last few years. Or at least, reports of child abuse have been on the increase.

Reporting of child abuse cases started in 1990. And good statistics weren’t really available until 2000 when it became a requirement for people to report cases of child abuse that they witnessed. Reporting has gotten better, but it is still believed to be under-reported for a variety of reasons.

Corporal punishment used to be a pretty standard practice in Japan 20 or 30 years ago. Natives of my generation have told me of having to receive spankings on a pretty regular basis at school. There was a famous case a few years ago of a coach who would beat up on his team captains.

And if you ask some conservatives in their 40s and 50s, a good majority believe that this should continue. That not having corporal punishment is making the next generation weak. I’ve personally seen a few minor cases of child abuse in public, a mother slapping their child for instance. It seems like for some of the population it is an acceptable way to discipline your children.

A recent report found that child abuse costs $14 billion annually, about the estimated cost of loses from the Tohoku earthquake. It is a hidden problem that is just starting to get more and more press and exposure, but not nearly as much as it should.

There is a good number of metrosexuals in Japan. I see at least a few a week precisely positioning each of the hairs on their head in the bathroom on a windy day, only to leave the restroom without washing their hands (sorry ladies, more men than you realize do this, eck). They are definitely a unique bunch that I have a hard time relating too, but hey, to each their own.

There is also another breed of men in Japan called herbivore men. They don’t even bother to search for a mate, but instead eat, work, watch porn, and sleep. A lot of Western media have reported that this means the Japanese population doesn’t have an interest in sex, sourcing a now famous annual survey that asks people about their feelings on sex. But, the porn industry is alive and well in Japan.

In fact the Japanese market accounts for 20% of porn profits worldwide, more than double the States. The spend an estimated $157 per capita compared to a paltry $47 per capita in the States. Of course some believe this divergence is more due to Japan’s ability to get more people to pay for porn than to actual consumption. Being that the States apparently loves pirating everything porn.

So with all the porn consumption going on, it is hard to believe that the sex drive of the average Japanese person has magically evaporated. It’s just that for whatever reason, they don’t feel motivated to work for it anymore.

In the rat experiment, alpha males started to horde the ladies in their own little rat apartments, and the weaker rats simply gave up on the whole ordeal. That doesn’t exactly seem to be the case here though. I don’t know too many people in polygamous relationships unless there is some underground network somewhere I haven’t come across.

The rats also started fighting amongst themselves, constantly competing for a position in the colony. That doesn’t seem to be happening in Japan. There are definitely established positions in the society, but competition for them hasn’t quite become a bloodbath either figuratively or literally, yet, anyway.

I think this is thanks to the relative modesty that most people in power try to show. However, lately, there has been more pushing in the political arena with the recent security bills that got shoved through. And this has been met with loud protest. This might be the start of something new, or just an anomaly though.

Although the media loves pointing out this phenomena in Japan, it is definitely not unique to Japan.  Media like to tout that Japan is the most crowded country in the world (it isn’t even in the top 10) or that its fertility rate is the second lowest in the world as I saw in one article (again, not even in the top 10).  It just so happens to be the 3rd largest economy and everyone likes to look on because, well, it might be them soon.

But, I think with the awareness of the fact that, if we act like a bunch of animals and give into our instincts we will be in for a lot of hurt, at least a number of people will realize that we need to look at the world a little differently.  We need to start acting like intelligent beings instead of falling for our instincts.  Because we are one of the only species who can successfully reject our inborn instincts and create a different path.

I think there is still hope yet for Japan.  I have met plenty of mothers and fathers that stand by their family through thick and thin.  Yes, it is a lot rougher than before, but not unbearable.  It just takes a different set of tools and lot more know how than before.

I’ve heard the biggest problem facing Japan at the moment is people finding mates.  I feel like this is due to a shift in values and roles of the sexes over the years.  It used to be men provided all the cash.  In a lot of ways, they still provide the majority of the cash in a relationship, but women don’t need their money to be happy.  Men need to make women happy with their personality, i.e. be interesting people, and that is something some men find to be a mystery.

Talking to a lot of my female friends, that is the number one complaint that keeps coming up – men are too boring.  Yes, of course there is at least some concern about money.  Can they provide for me and a family?  But, there is a new requirement and a lot of men don’t spend a lot of time developing that.

This podcast went a little long this time.  I’ll cut it off here, but I’d like to hear what you think of this experiment.  Do you think humans are doomed to this behavior?  Can we fight our animal instincts?  Let me know in the comments below.

 Photo by Tatiana Bulyonkova

I’ve always found summer to be a more active time. Despite the oppressive heat and humidity we have here in Japan, I still think the increased sunlight and ability to walk around the house in a lot less clothes just makes me do something more than keeping my nose in a book.

People always ask me what my favorite season in Japan is. And I have to say that while I’m working, I love the winter. But when I’m off, I love the summer. I guess if I could wear shorts and a sports shirt to all my teaching gigs, I think I would feel a little differently. Who ever invented ‘dress’ clothes anyway?

So while I’m still keeping my reading up of Harry Potter and slowly working my way through 1q84. I wanted to steer my studies towards something more, well, physical. Even if I can’t manage to arrange meet ups online, I want to challenge myself by doing some talking practice, specifically speaking incredibly fast so that I can get my comfort level up with the language and make it easier to listen to native speakers.

And also, at my level, I just need to be really comfortable with native materials. I’ve been sitting through some meetings in Japanese lately. And like all meetings, they are pretty boring. Listening to upper intermediate Japanese of boring administrative gobbly guck can cause some serious headaches. I would prefer to digest the content a little more automatically.

So, to this end, I’ve been trying to work my way through one video on FluentU a week.  The main reason for this is that I want to create a manageable new habit.  Realistically, I probably should be consuming a lot more, but I don’t want to get hit by a hurricane and have to drop it all and then try to re-establish the habit.  The idea here is to start small and scale slowly so that I can keep it from becoming overbearing.

When I first started out, I overshot a little.  I tried to go for an advanced video.  And even though, I understood most of the video and vocabulary, I realized my ability to speak that fast and comprehend it at native speed, just wasn’t there yet.  It was a news video on the Ginza Yanagi festival in Tokyo and it was chock-full of formal Japanese – things like おこなう and ひらかれます which I still have a hard time saying fast because well, I don’t use them that much.

So, I downgraded to upper intermediate.  The idea being that I can practice this foundation more easily and get through videos more quickly, making it more motivating to keep studying.  Also, I want to be able to speak and listen fast, like really fast, like native-speed fast, and so that aspect makes even relatively easier material a good challenge.

Also, I kind of feel like the ‘captions’ i.e. sentences taken from the video, are a little too long to practice word order exercises with at that level. Some of the sentences I was unscrambling were like 30 or 40 parts long.  That made it immensely difficult to try to parse them all out.  It was and is good practice because the N1 definitely has a few monsters that you have to untangle.  However, now I want to improve speaking and comprehension speed.

So here is what I typically do to get through a video in a week.  First, I watch the video without any help.  No script of any kind (Japanese or English) and just try to pick up as much as I can the first time around.  I might even repeat this once or twice to see if I can get some more details.

The point here is to get some freebie listening practice before beginning your speaking practice with the conversation.  Try to get the main idea of the video.  If you are feeling really ambitious you can even take notes about key words.  This is great practice for the N2 and N1 listening sections, bonus points if you can take notes in kanji/kana.

I then download the transcript (a premium feature) and read it out loud a few times, without furigana at first.  The idea here is to note any kanji I don’t know how to actually read.  I might even circle a few that I have questions about or are unsure of the reading.

Then I watch the video a few times with the English shut off, following along with the script.  FluentU really shines here because the script, in a big font, follows the video as you watch it allowing you to easily follow what is being said.  At this point, I try my best to try to read along with the conversation, but I might not be fast enough with all the words.  The words or parts that stumble upon I circle.

At this point I drill the points that I’m having a hard time saying.  I also look up furigana for any kanji that I am still having trouble reading and couldn’t quite pick up from the video.  I might read through a few times and try again reading along with the video.  I do this until I fairly comfortable with it.

And then and only then do I go to the English and check my understanding.  Usually, I just watch the video with the English showing and nothing else to follow along and get a clearer idea.  And then afterwards start drilling vocabulary and captions to really bring it all home.

The main reason I try to keep away from English until the last minute is because I want to ‘break the crutch’ that English provides. I don’t want to be doing double duty, translating Japanese into English and then trying to comprehend it.  I want to try to do it all natively.  So, I don’t use it until I absolutely need to.

I think focusing on just making the sounds, especially trying to do as fast as you can, tricks your brain into not thinking too much.  This brings you closer to native speed with comprehension.  And also pushing your muscles to work faster and faster breaks off that little safety latch that keeps stopping you from speaking at the speed you should be speaking.

In general, it just makes you feel more comfortable using Japanese, and makes it easier for you to take that mental leap and just think in Japanese and instead of reverting back to English.

Have you tried FluentU yet?  Most units allow you to download the first sentence of a video, so you can practice a little bit and get a feel of how to use this technique.  Let me know what you think in the comments.

Be sure to also take a look at the JLPT Study Guide Plan month 7 for what to do to prepare for the big test in December.

I grew up in white bread America where the corn grows high and hills don’t. I spent most of my time in a city of a mere 10,000 where everybody knew each other (and who was doing what to who). It was not uncommon to go downtown to run some errands and run into a handful of your friends on the way.

I met a girl, and thought I was in love. What was peculiar was that I never met her parents. In fact, her parents prohibited her from dating, which, of course, didn’t stop her from dating, but made things annoying for the two of us. You see her parents were 1st generation immigrants from a more traditional country. The dad was a cardiologist and the mom was a super intelligent housewife because that is what super intelligent women do in the old country apparently.

What struck me as odd was that her parents were whole-heartedly planning to spend their whole adult lives in the States, but were going to retire to their home country. That to me, seemed like a bit of shame. You spend your whole life in another country longing to be somewhere else. I’d much rather enjoy life while I live it and not while I’m decrepit and my joints lock up so much I can hardly get out of the house. But, hey, that’s me.

To this end, they didn’t go out. They didn’t come to community events. I rarely saw them at school functions. I only saw her mom once the whole time we were dating.

And granted, back then, living in backwoods America, I wasn’t racist (although plenty of my peers were) but I just didn’t have the view of the world that I do now. So, it was very frustrating to see someone making their living in my dinky little city, but not actually living there if you catch my drift.

In our city, like a lot of other small towns in the States, there were a lot of doctors and specialists from all over the globe. That was basically my main exposure to diversity. Most of them kept to themselves, while their kids tended to be incredible socialites, some of them being the most popular kids in school.

It always struck me as odd that their parents were such outsiders while the kids tended to be the opposite. While I tended to know most of my friends’ parents quite well, their parents always remained in the shadows.

There is a comment that seems to be battered about that goes something like “you’ll never fit in, in Japan.” And like a lot of things that seem to be attributed to being uniquely Japanese, I have always been a little suspect of this. I’ve never really felt this that much. On the contrary, some people I’ve worked with and hung out with have looked past a lot of my oddities and treated me as one of the gang, despite my awkwardness.

Yeah, I’ve been laughed at for wearing toilet slippers where I shouldn’t have. I’ve went into the wrong bathroom once and got a few odd looks. I’ve found myself at the drugstore looking at a package for a few minutes before realizing it was an enema. I’ve been there and done that, sometimes very publicly, but my friends have stuck with me and given me the benefit of the doubt.

Do I feel totally at home? Does everything come naturally to me? No, it doesn’t. So in that sense I do feel a little out of place, but then again that’s what I signed up for. Every day is a new adventure, and I inevitably learn something new, usually through painful failure, but I’m a guy that likes to learn things the hard way.

The one thing I don’t feel is that I don’t fit in, or that I’m a trained monkey. Why? Because I try my best to fit in. I leave my house, socialize with non-English speakers, and mingle with the locals. I participate in my community as much as I can, sometimes begrudgingly, but I’m still there.

In other words, I work hard to be here like any new resident of a place anywhere should. Even if you were to move to another part of your home country, wouldn’t you try as much as possible to meet new people? Yeah, sure you would. So why would being in a different country change that?

When I think about the people that complain about ‘not fitting in’ I think back to my earlier days and my old girlfriend’s parents. They were working in the States for sure, but were they living there? Not really. Fitting in is something that you have to take an active role in. You are not going to be passively sucked into Japan. You need to take action and surround yourself with people that can help make that happen.

People have problems fitting in anywhere. Maybe those immigrants in my old hometown felt too uncomfortable to fit into society. Maybe they felt like the culture was too radically different for them to really be able to expose themselves to it. But, the reason they didn’t fit in, at least at the root, was that they didn’t get out and try to mingle. They made up their minds that staying in America was only temporary.

And there are a few people that are like that here. They never really planned to stay that long, but nothing enticed them to go back, and so they stayed on. But, they never laid the foundation to feel at home here. They keep to their English speaking friends, go to foreigner bars, do foreigner events, and still act like they just got here.

I think, for some people, it’s fun to keep up that newness. But, that newness eventually wears off, and reality sets in. This is generally known as culture shock, and tends to happen about 3 months after you arrive. For some people though, it happens a lot latter. And they wake up and realize they don’t fit in, which does suck.

I’ve found that like other things that Japan gets a lot of flack for, this problem is most apparent in Tokyo. The bigger the city, the easier it is to get lost in one of its small little corners. It is also a lot easier to find people with similar backgrounds, do activities that are very similar to what you did back home and generally isolate yourself from the culture.

When I did my stint out in the backwoods of Japan. I felt more at home and a part of the group. There would be times when I would only see one other foreigner (a colleague) about once a week. It was actually the best experience I’ve had here. I made a lot of great friends.

But, I had to move to the big city for a variety of reasons. The biggest one was to be able to fly to the States fairly easily. In the countryside, I would have to take an overnight bus after work to Osaka, sit around for a few hours (the bus would arrive ridiculously early), then grab a transpacific flight to my parents. It was a grueling 2 day ritual that would bookend any trip I took. Something I simply couldn’t sustain if I was going to stay in Japan for any length of time.

Is it easy to find your place in Japan? Let me know your experiences in the comments.

It’s a story you’ve heard several times – we don’t talk to each other like we used to. Because ya know, back in the good ole days we used to chat it up with our neighbors and everybody knew everybody right? It was always better back then.

But these days, we tend to ignore each other. We aren’t as open to conversation as we used to be. Instead of striking up a conversation with the person sitting next to us on the train we choose to sit in silence. This is more true in Japan then probably most other places but you get the idea. There just isn’t as much communication going on.

But we humans are social creatures. We like talking and sharing ideas with each other. We need to communicate to get pretty much anything done. And the better we are at communicating the better off we tend to be. Do you ever notice that the one guy that doesn’t do much in your office but can chat anyone up keeps getting promoted? There’s a reason.

And one of the things I love about learning a language is that you have a very viable excuse to just start talking to random strangers. Nobody is going to think it’s strange. That’s kind of one thing I like about my job. I get to talk to people every day all day. Granted you sometimes meet people that are little too unique, but overall, it’s interesting to hear everyone’s different take on the world.

A lot of people will recommend doing Skype sessions to get some practice with real life conversations and using ‘real’ Japanese with ‘real’ people. And I definitely think that is the best option for the majority of people. Before my daughter was born and my life was a little more scheduled, I was perfectly capable of scheduling Skype chat sessions and keeping to them.

These days though, try as I might, I really have not been able to buckle down a regular pattern to my life. Even my sleep schedule has become a bit tentative in recent months. This has made me a master of being a little more portable with everything I do from blogging to emailing and checking in with friends and family. But even with all my time savings I’ve managed to hobble together, I’m still not able to consistently clear a block of time in my schedule to practice talking.

So how can someone like me squeeze in some practice? Something that doesn’t really require that much of an ongoing commitment, but does provide regular practice so that I can practice and learn new vocabulary in a more natural setting?

Well, I looked around for something to plug this hole. I thought I could get some practice in with Lang-8.com, which I have been doing a little more with, and it is a great service. However, I never really felt a compulsion to do a lot of writing. After all, it is only for me to read, and there really isn’t a whole heck of a lot of real communication going on. You just kind of shoot out a passage and get corrections back, but you aren’t really talking to someone.

Eventually, after a little poking around, I found Hello Talk, a chat app for the iPhone and Android. And on the surface it is a basic chat app, kind of like a toned down Line or something similar. But, what’s cool about this little app is it is specifically designed for language learners to practice their target language.

The app is basically free, with some of the handier tools available as a subscription service. But the base package allows you to tap and get a Google translation of what someone is saying. This Google translation isn’t the best thing in the world. But, it will give you the general meaning of what is trying to be conveyed.

I really like the app because it is nice and simple. You just login and do some chatting. It isn’t complicated by a whole heck of other utilities. This makes it easy to pick up and do some chatting and then go about doing something else.

And it’s key selling point for me anyway, is that you can have asynchronous conversations with people. Skype is great, but it can be difficult to squeeze in a chat session or find people that are free when you are. With asynchronous communication, both of you don’t have to be present at the same time.

Of course there are other platforms to chat with like Line or Facebook. But, Hello Talk is designed with language learning in mind. I mean Line probably has more native speakers of Japanese but if you can’t read a particular kanji you have to copy and paste to get a definition.  Hello Talk helps you out with a very approximate Google translation.

I have had a few problems getting a few conversations going and keeping them going. This is partly my fault as I tend to start a few conversations and then get suddenly busy and I’m not able to respond to everyone I’m talking to. Also you can have a good conversation and then the other person just up and disappears. This isn’t that big of a deal because there are plenty of people using the system and you can just go back and look at who else is available.

There also tend to be a lot of the usually suspects that you find on services like this. The overly ambitious talker that assaults you with long welcoming messages asking you to answer a list of riddles or shoving their Skype id in your face in hopes that you will suddenly call them up. But, their numbers are relatively few. Most of the people I met like to chat and keep a conversation going. The demographics, not surprisingly, skew young. There are a lot of college students majoring in English that have some free time to chat. But there are others from all walks of life.

I’ve found that if you blast someone with a huge message, you don’t get a response more often than not. Another dead end to starting a good conversation is playing the interrogator – こんにちは？　仕事は？ / しごとは？(What is your job?) どこに住んでいますか? / どこにすんでいますか？(where do you live?) etc… A lot of people ask these questions when they first meet someone and chances are there are a lot of people meeting people on a service like this. So anyone you message may have heard this a gazillion times already.

So, my tip is to instead of bombarding them with the standard questions, ask how their day or week was – 今日の調子はどうですか？　/　きょうのちょうしはどうですか？ (How is your day?) or 今週の調子はどうでしたか？　/　きょうのちょうしはどうでしたか？ (How was your week?) These tend to get a variety of responses and then you can ask questions and talk about your week as well. Be sure to have some somewhat interesting story prepared. Even if you tell a story about something that happened at a different time, telling a story is a good way to introduce yourself that is more interesting than chugging through the standard questions. It also gives you good, real world talking practice.

What is your experience like with conversation partners? Have you been able to maintain a good connection? Let me know in the comments below.

Ukiyo-e, if you are not familiar,  is a Japanese art form that was popular from 17th century  to 19th century Japan.  It basically consists of woodblocks used for mass production of pictures.  Ukiyo means floating world, and e means picture, so they were literally “pictures of the floating world.”  They generally depicted daily life, landscapes, and beautiful people.

Ukiyoe prints are some of the most famous pieces of artwork from Japan.  Almost everyone has, at one time, seen Hokusai’s “Big Wave” print featured above.  And portraits of the kabuki actors tend to crop up whenever a Japanese themed picture is needed.  The sharp contrasts of the images have a distinct style and have probably done a lot to influence manga artists of today.

Okay, so it may seem like a simple word to pronounce, but it really isn’t. You have to give it a few tries before it really rolls off your tongue. So try it a few times, quickly. If anything it is a great work out for your tongue. Here is a native saying it courtesy of our good friends at Forvo.com:

Erotica wasn’t as big of a taboo in Japanese art as it was in Western art. Although not often displayed in museums around the world, erotica was a part of ukiyoe art. And these drawings were not just for dirty minded pervs looking to get their kicks. They were actually quite common.

The style of ukiyoe depicting erotica was called shunga. And there are records of everyone from samurai to housewives purchasing and carrying shunga with them. Although not completely openly accepted (despite Western commenters attempting to portray otherwise), it wasn’t completely against any religious morals like in the West.

Almost all of the major ukiyoe artists at one time created some kind of erotica. Even Hakusai, arguably one of the most famous woodblock artists created a series of prints that depicted a story of a woman making love to an octopus, which of course would never see the light of day in the 19th century West, and to be honest is a bit shocking to see in this modern era, even as art.

Early Ukiyo-e (1670~1740)

Before around the 1670s, art was mostly limited to the nobility who had the kind of money to commission works of art, much like in the West.  Patrons usually liked to see pictures of things that reminded them of their wealthy, like wealthy people doing wealthy things.

But, once Japan was united and the Edo period began.  The merchant class found themselves making some serious yen, and there started being an interest in art, especially art that depicted every day things.  This merchant class had money, but it seems like they weren’t exactly swimming it, so being able to mass-produce artwork with woodblocks, made prints cheaper and more affordable.

These first pieces of work were mostly in the style of what had come before.  They characterized by their use of only one color, typically black, and showed limited use of prospective, usually just sticking to 2D.  A lot of them focused on the human figure and ideals of beauty.

Beginning of Color Prints (1740~1780s)

Starting in the 1740s, ukiyo-e prints started to be printed with multiple woodblocks each using a different colored ink.  This somewhat complicated process led to more flexibility in creating different images.  Landscapes and more complicated scenes became more popular.

During this time, due to influence from the West, paintings started to take on more geometrical prospective.  The paintings, in particular Masanobu’s works appeared a lot more 3 dimensional, something that we take for granted today, but was actually a major breakthrough back in the day.

The Peak and Popularization of the Genre (1780~1804)

This era brought on some of the greats like Utamaro and Sharaku who placed more emphasis on beauty and harmony.  Portraits also began to focus more on the head and torso of someone as opposed to the whole body.  Some of the popular woodblocks were of famous kabuki actors and every day beautiful women.  A lot of the faces look very similar due to the emphasis on harmony and perfection.

Move toward Landscapes (1804~1868)

Due to the Tenpo Reforms of 1841 to 1843, printmaking of kabuki actors, geisha and courtesans was banned.  Artists turned away from people as the subject matter of their prints and focused more on landscapes.  This is the area when a lot of the major prints that are famous today were created.  Prints like the Big Wave off Kanagawa by Hokusai as well as Hiroshige’s more subdued prints.

There were still scenes of villagers, but there was less emphasis on beauty and perfection of the human form.  Artists and the Japanese government didn’t want to focus on decadence.  Instead, artists seemed to look for beauty in the every day life and nature that surrounded them.

Moronobu was one of the first woodblock artists.  He did a lot to popularize the art form and get it started.  Although he wasn’t the first, he formalized and refined the art style.

Sukenobu was famous for his shunga, or erotic prints.  He published at least 30 volumes of erotica.  Being based in Kyoto, which was rather rare for ukiyo-e artists of the time, he tended to focus on beautiful women going about their hobbies and daily activities in beautiful kimonos.

Masanobu came to prominence during the second era of ukiyo-e artists when color printing became popular.  He is best known for employing geometrical perspective in his prints to give them a depth that hadn’t been seen before.  He used multiple colors to give his prints a tremendous amount of detail.

Harunobu was a pupil of Sukenobu and was believed to be the first artist to use multi-colored printing or nishiki-e, sometimes called brocade printing for his works.  In 1765, he and a group of poets published a deluxe edition of calendar to be distributed amongst friends.  This calendar eventually brought him fame and he went on to create around 600 prints in 6 years before his untimely death at age 45.  He was famous for his expressive and creative designs.

Shunsho is famous for creating portraits of kabuki actors that were more true to life.  The portraits allowed viewers to not only recognize the character, but also the individual actor playing the part.  Although famous for his woodblock prints of kabuki actors, he was also a versatile painter that painted several images of beautiful women, bijin-ga, as well.

Kunisada was a giant in the woodblock industry, producing well over 20,000 prints in his lifetime.  He created prints that often did not follow the norms of the day.  Just looking at a few of his prints you can see his bold use of color and composition that was completely different from the previous norms.

Kiyonaga painted idealized female forms in the latest fashions. Despite being of humble origins he managed to capture an air of aristocracy. His female forms were said to be fuller and more mature than his predecessors. His prints portrayed scenes very plainly not idolizing them in any way.

Utamaro is said to replace Kiyonaga as the go to guy for bijin okubi-e (large headed pictures of beautiful women). His women tended to be even more fuller and mature. Although they were far from being realistic. Most of the women in his prints were tall and slender, their faces long with small eyes, which were apparently coveted at the time.

Sharaku was a mysterious ukiyo-e artist that appeared in 1795, made prints for about 10 months and disappeared shortly there after. His artwork was met with disapproval at the time, but they are now some of the more iconic images from that time. They showed a lot of expression due to the contorted expressions on the kabuki actors faces.

Hokusai is arguably the most famous ukiyo-e artist. He was famous for prints with sharp contrasts and hard edges. His print the Great Wave off Kanagawa is probably the first image that comes to mind when you think of ukiyo-e prints other than the countless portraits of kabuki actors and beautiful women. He had a personal obsession with Mt. Fuji and painted several views of the mountain in his lifetime along with a lot of other studies of nature.

Hiroshige is famous for his The fifty-three stations of the Tokaido which portrayed the sights he saw on his trip to Kyoto from Edo.  During the Edo period, tourism was booming, making his prints very popular.  Although he made good use of color his prints tended to be more realistic and with more subtle colors than Hokusai.  He was also known to paint flowers and birds, which up until then hadn’t been a popular subject of ukiyo-e prints.

I’ve just given you a small glimpse of the massive world of ukiyo-e artwork.  If you are interested in checking out some more prints for yourself, I encourage you to visit ukiyo-e.org, which has a massive library of prints from around the world cataloged and named for you to sort through.  I consulted it several times for some good prints for this article.

If you’d like to be able to identify some of the great’s artworks, I put together my own short ukiyo-e course on Memrise.  There you can learn to identify some prints created by some of the great ukiyo-e artists.  There is also a course that walks through Hiroshige’s 53 Stations of Tokaido.

Also if you are interested in doing some further reading, be sure to check out Japan Journeys (JPN), which a nice book that arranges some select ukiyo-e prints to show what some of Japan’s greatest cities used to look like.  Andreas Marks also has another beautiful book, Japanese Woodblock Prints: Artists, Publishers and Masterworks: 1680 – 1900 (JPN), if you are looking for something large format to enjoy these prints.

Another small primer of ukiyo-e history is Ukiyo-e: An Introduction to Japanese Woodblock Prints (JPN).  It is a short and sweet 96 page intro to the art form.

Who is your favorite?  Let me know in the comments.

In school, I always had a hard time paying attention in class.  The teacher would lecture away and we were suppose to be taking notes, but to be honest I could never proper filter out what was important and what wasn’t.  Half the time I left the class knowing that I had listened to something interesting, but not having any clue as to what the main points were.

And there are a lot of classes out there that are just teacher lectures, students take notes, read the required material, and there are periodic tests or papers to check everyone has a pulse.  It is the same rhythm.  A lot of English classes are set up like this.  There are certain steps that I go through every class.

They tend to be boring for me and boring for my students.  And it seems like a students aren’t retaining the material as well as they should be.  So, why do we do it?  Because it is easy to organize, it is measurable (with tests), and we can clearly ‘see’ students ‘learning’.  But, are they really learning?

Mmm, maybe.  The good and focused students are.  But, that isn’t your average student.  In our effort to make everything streamlined and measurable, we seemed to have forgotten how to learn.

Last month, I talked about moving away from digital and being slightly more analog in my study approaches.  I’ve been trying to do a lot more unplugged as well as make things just a little more interesting for myself.

Part of that has been working on an improved vocabulary notebook system.  I’ve been so willy nilly about keeping a vocabulary notebook in the past.  I’ll start off taking good notes and with good intentions only to abandon it a few weeks later, so I want to build something that is easy to stick to, but hard to do.  Let me explain.

Memrise and Anki, they are my best friends. They have seen me through some tough spots and have accelerated my vocabulary learning immensely.  I don’t think I could have gotten through all the vocabulary words you need for N2 and N1 without their assistance. But, there comes a point where this regular pattern of learning just causes your brain to shut off.

Much like my classes back in high school and college that followed the same formula day in and day out.  Show up, take notes, go home, go over notes, take quiz/test, rinse wash and repeat.  Without variation or any surprises, my brain just kept going to sleep.

On the other hand, if you give me a piece of software to learn or a computer to fix, I can get it done in a day or two.  Part of that is because learning software or fixing things is a lot more interactive, giving you feedback on whether you are doing the right thing or not.  And that definitely plays a huge role in learning a language.  You really need to have interaction with someone so that you can get that instant feedback.

But, another part of it is that every time I went to fix a computer it was just a little different.  There was always something a little different about what was wrong.  The same with learning a new piece of software, it was something new for me, so my brain could soak it up.  So the more new something or how different it is to what you are used to, the easier it will be to remember it.  Your brain tends to take note of things out of the ordinary.  If you do the same hum-drum every day, it isn’t going to pick up on anything.

I also failed a lot and made (sometimes expensive) mistakes.  When the stakes are higher, you also tend to pay more attention as well.  That’s why it is kind of a good thing that the JLPT costs ~$50, because you are going to study a little harder knowing that if you fail, you have just lost $50 (kind of, I mean you do get feedback on how your studies are progressing).

All of this reasoning is driving my design behind trying to put together a good, maintainable vocabulary notebook.  It is a bit hard work to keep notes and look up extra words and definitions, but I’m already starting feel a difference.  It’s still not really ready yet though, so stay tuned.

A couple of month’s ago, one of my readers suggested that I start studying with FluentU, a new website for learning languages.  At the time, I kind of just thought of it as yet another ‘learn languages with our patented, proven, super-duper system’ kind of site.  The internet seems to be packed with these.

But, FluentU is a bit different.  They take YouTube videos and help you along with the script as well as the translation.  They then slice up the vocabulary for you to practice with.  They also build out handy flashcards (complete with pictures).  What I like about their system is that they give you scrambled sentences to help you practice word order.  This is great practice for the JLPT.

Right now, I’m testing out their iPhone app, which is due out at the end of May.  It’s pretty handy to have and gives me a good counterweight to the Memrise app.  The FluentU system isn’t focused on a particular list of vocabulary, which is handy if you are going for a good background of vocabulary.  Instead, they dissect one video, which typically has around 100 words or so, and give you context for each word.

This scatter-shot approach is great to be honest.  I think if you stick to the lists, which aren’t technically accurate anymore, you are selling yourself short, and probably boring yourself to death in the process.

They are still in their infancy, but they have around 300+ videos for Japanese so far, and it takes a surprisingly long time to get through one video.  I’ve yet to feel the need for more material, even at the more upper intermediate/advanced level.  Definitely worth the few minutes to check it out.

Have you tried studying the ‘hard way’?  What do you do?  Have you tried FluentU yet? Let me know in the comments below.

Photo by Tambako the Jaguar

A few years back, I was working at a school and we were trying to arrange a farewell party for one of our fellow teachers.  One teacher found a great Indian restaurant that wasn’t too far away from the school.  It seemed like a great place.  It had a big room to accommodate everyone and it was something different for us, since we usually go to Japanese restaurants for these kinds of things.

The problem was that the restaurant only had the typical ‘all-you-can-eat/all-you-can-drink’ deal for large groups like ours on weekends which is when we wanted to go.  The grand total of which was Y4000.  Not too bad if you like to drink yourself blind, and, to be fair, the usual price for this kind of party.  Some people grumbled a bit about the price, because, well, we’re teachers and are perpetually broke.

Another more generic, slightly farther away Indian restaurant offered ‘all-you-can-eat’ plus order/pay for your own drinks for just Y2000.  And this was offered up as a better option.  I was a big fan of this option, because I hardly drink nowadays.  However, another foreign teacher objected because the other restaurant wasn’t so nice and farther away.  The Japanese staff listened politely and then it was decided that we would ‘think about it’.

Well, we thought about it long and hard. But, nothing ever came of it.  In the end, we went back to our old friend, the izakaya, a Japanese-style pub.  The other foreign teacher threw up his hands in frustration wondering why we couldn’t have come to an agreement on the Indian restaurant and the Japanese staff found excuses to look away and change the subject.  So what happened?

Well it turns out that the problem is that about half the staff really had no desire to drink and didn’t want to pay the premium for ‘all-you-can-drink’. Did anyone really expressly say that or explain it to my foreign colleague? No. I hadn’t made the conclusion myself to be honest. I just didn’t want to spend more money.

I think us Westerners expect there to be a thorough discussion about these kinds of things. And that everyone’s opinions should be heard, weighted, and sorted. And after all that, a proper decision should be made. But, in Japan a lot of these arguments need to be implied from the situation.

In the above situation, the Japanese staff didn’t want to cause conflict by outright disagreeing. And they probably felt uncomfortable structuring their arguments in English, so they just kind of gave silent resistance to the argument.

This is a common situation that has led to many an expat getting frustrated and throwing a fit. But, in Japan it is an every day thing, and even openly accepted and appreciated. It is seen as being polite in some ways.

The Japanese staff in the situation above were showing their ‘tatemae’ or outside face not their true feelings ‘honne’. This a key part of Japanese society that most people believe helps everyone get along in such a crowded country. Basically, it is a way of being extremely indirect in conveying a sometimes uncomfortable message. It is considered polite to do so, even though you are essentially lying to someone’s face.

It can also mean doing something that you really don’t want to do, but are obligated to do. For example, for Valentine’s day, women are expected to give male co-workers and their boss chocolates (called girichoco – obligation chocolate) even though they really don’t want to. They also give chocolates to romantic interests that they would like to see more of.

Girichoco tends to be of the rather cheap kind that you can buy at the supermarket. Not exactly a plain old candy bar, but one small step up from that. On the other hand, for those they hold most dear, they will go to the department store and get special chocolates.

And this is not necessarily seen as a negative thing even though it is pretty obvious that people are just doing it out of obligation. This is in contrast to the Western idea of being true to yourself and being honest with others.

That’s not to say that people in the West don’t, from time to time, do things they are obligated to do. It seems like the higher you go in society in the West the more obligations you have to uphold. We’ve all heard of the suburban mom who keeps track of how much everyone spends on presents so that they can give an appropriately priced gift in response at a later date. Or the sudden need to wash one’s hair when someone makes an unwelcomed advance.

I think we in the West tend to also use a tremendous amount of sarcasm to soften our blows and achieve the same purpose of tatemae. But, sarcasm is noticeably absent from Japanese culture. It’s actually quite amusing to hear someone try to use sarcasm in Japan. It usually ends up being way to blunt or way too soft. It is a tough skill to master, not unlike tatemae.

But, people will sometimes appreciate hearing your true feelings in the West. As a matter of fact, it is seen as a brave and respectable thing in some situations. And people in Japan, may often be shocked and not be able to really deal with true feelings. I have seen many a foreigner explode with frustration, and the shocked expression on someone’s face, puzzled as to how to deal with it. I’ve been the foreigner sometimes when I’ve had enough with some sales rep monopolizing my time and I’ve tried to politely brush them off with some ‘arigatou gozimasu’s and ‘sumimasen’s.

Softbank has recently taken this to new extremes with their incredibly long walk through of all the add on services that you could possibly need. I just need an iPhone with a data plan please. I sometimes feign ignorance of Japanese at this point and keep repeating what I need until they give in and let me sign the contract. Or my favorite “chotto jikanganainode…” which seems to hurry along most people and force them to make their point.

Honne, of course, is the opposite. Instead of hiding your feelings or adhering to social norms, you are staying true to your feelings. This is usually limited to close friends or family. But, like anything else there is a spectrum of people that are on the edge of tatemae, and others that are completely honne.

A lot of those that have a hard time fitting in in Japan, tend to look abroad and to English to be their way of expressing themselves. What this means is that the people that you meet from Japan that are fluent speakers of English tend to be quite Western and quite honne.

Some people can be quite brutally honest. I have been around more than a few people that have blown their top in an epic explosion of anger or frustration. It is pretty rare, but it does happen. Another thing that kind of happens is that some people don’t carry their tatemae filter with them into English. One time an acquittance, that I hardly knew, poked me in the belly and said “metabo” (short for metabolic syndrome, basically calling me fat). I wasn’t really offended but just surprised that he would do that.

Another time, I was out with an all male cadre of sales reps that I had been teaching for about a year. And even before the drinks started really poring they were asking about how my wife was in bed. Their boss lucky cut them off and redirected the conversation, but it just seemed kind of a funny thing to ask. I mean when is that ever acceptable? But, I think speaking another language (they had asked the question in English) tends to shake off those inhibitions you have when using your native language.

In America, we also tend to hold back on true feelings. For instance, breaking down and crying in the office is not going to get you a promotion any time soon. Neither will violent outbursts. So, its not unheard of that some people in the West keep their true feelings hidden.

This desire to keep everyone happy by not saying too much extends into language use of course. There are more than a few phrases that are meant to never be completed. For instance, you can complain about something politely by just saying ‘chotto…’ and leaving it hang. For example, if you wanted to complain about someone’s shoes, you could simply say ‘sonokutsuwa chotto…’.

Some N1 essays and listening questions prey on this and leave a lot unsaid because it is implied.  It is one of the toughest skills to master when learning Japanese.  Reading between the lines can be difficult even in your native language, but adding in the difficulty of reading Japanese at a rapid pace, this can be a huge hurtle to passing the N1.

That’s why, as frustrating as it can be sometimes, I always ask questions to try to get a little more information and fish out what people are actually trying to say.  This can be true even if they are speaking in English.  And there are more than a few people that have gotten frustrated with me because I just didn’t get it.  But, hey, at least I’m trying.

Have you gotten a little frustrated trying to see through the fog of tatemae?  Are you a master of the BS?  Let me know in the comments.

I’ve been taking it pretty easy with my studies recently due to some re-prioritizing of my time. I’m chugging away on Hirugao and Harry Potter but I’m giving myself a little more time to digest things. I felt a bit rushed of late trying to get through study sessions and I’m finding that is not the way to go.

In addition to toning down my reading and watching, I’m trying to get my vocab binging under control. I just feel like I have a hard time with long term retention of vocabulary when I practice it purely through SRS. I’m trying to shift my studies a little bit in order to fix that problem.

There is a lot of new research out there that is starting to analyze the advantages and disadvantages of using electronics in order to study and retain material. It turns out that it isn’t quite time to throw out all your dusty drill books quite yet.

With all the things on my plate recently, a new assignment, along with being busy helping my family, I’m going to have to make a change to my priorities. Something is going to have to go. But, don’t worry the posts will keep coming.

So, as I wrote last month, I’ve been watching Hirugao, a scandalous jDrama about two housewives and their adventures into having affairs. It has some interesting and somewhat poetic lines of dialog at times. Overall, the language they use is pretty common (not limited to a certain industry or certain age group).

I haven’t really spent much time or effort writing down and reviewing new words. I already have too many word lists to chew through, so I’m treating it as more of a fun side project. I think it helps to keep your ear ‘tuned’ to Japanese, so that it is that much easier to focus.

I’ve also been taking it more slowly with Harry Potter and taking the time to go back and review the material until it is automatic for me to understand. The audiobook is absolutely priceless in the sense that I can practice while I’m walking or doing the dishes or something. It’s great to go back now to the first few chapters and be able to listen to the audiobook at double the speed and not have any real issues with understanding.

Another reason why I’ve slowed down with Harry Potter is that my vocab bulking had been getting out of control. I finished off the first stage of Harry Potter that I had created. And now I just want to get my study time under control. I think it is a bad sign when you are consistently beating your friends on the leaderboards by a significant amount. It’s great to be competitive, but when you are studying twice as much as the average, it’s a bit overkill.

So, I switched to simply reviewing vocabulary and building up mems as much as I can to keep everything from spiraling out of control with Memrise. If SRS makes up more than about 10 to 15% of your overall studying, it can lead to an unhealthy balance. You really need to get out there and use it (writing or speaking) or consume words in context (reading or listening).

Electronics and the digital revolution is amazing. To be able to hold literally thousands of books on your tablet and be able to read them anywhere you go at anytime, that is incredible power and convenience. And programs like Memrise and Anki make memorizing things a cinch with their proven learning algorithms, cool graphs of stats, and points to make you feel like you are in a game.

But new research is finding that digital is not always better, especially when it comes to retention. According to a recent study, writing notes out is better for long term retention.  The study basically concluded that when taking notes on laptop you are more likely to take notes verbatim instead of critically thinking about them.

As if that wasn’t enough bad news for digital, there is another study that focused on overall retention using paper books and digital books using tablets. The study focused on plot reconstruction and not vocabulary retention, but it does give us a glimpse into some of the problems that can arise if you rely too much on digital.

I’ve tried note taking before, but found it to be a bit cumbersome for me to keep and maintain. I also had a hard time scheduling reviewing and keeping things sorted. But, lately I’ve had some serious issues retaining abstract words that I’ve been studying off a particularly popular N1 Memrise list. My list of Harry Potter words is a lot easier because I had context and I review the material on a regular basis, and the words aren’t quite as abstract and more colorful.

So, I’m going to try to develop a new note taking system that provides a better experience and something that I can keep up with instead of letting it just drift away. I’m not a particularly well-organized person so I need to make something fairly fail-safe and doable. Anyway, I’ll keep you posted on what I come up with.

Currently, I have 4 forces pulling me in different directions for my time – my family, my new position, JLPT Boot Camp, and my goal of passing N1. All of these are things I’d like to achieve and would be useful for me to achieve. However, 4 is just too many things to keep managing.

My family is in need of my time more than ever. My new position is taking up more of my time as I learn the ropes and try to get everything organized. Not to mention that I need to put in a few more hours to keep up on all my new responsibilities. JLPT Boot Camp has been growing by leaps and bounds and so has Memrise, which is great. I’ve gotten so much great feedback, as well as great questions and suggestions on what to do and improve.

And the thing is, I love building courses and doing research about Japanese and making it easier for people to learn the language. And I’m a bit disappointed in myself for not being able to keep up and help everyone out. So many people are asking for updates and help and I love trying my best to deliver that (and learn a lot in the process).

What about N1? Well, I really don’t need it as much these days. I got the position I wanted to get without it. And yes it is good to have for job security but what is more important is making sure I do my current job well, which will help my job security. And that, at the moment, doesn’t depend on me taking the test. So I’ll be taking a break from it for a little while.

This means more support for Boot Camp and less stress for me, which should be good news for everyone. I’ll be gaining enough real world practice with Japanese in the future, that when I do turn my focus back to the test it should be a lot easier and I’ll be a lot more comfortable with it.

Anyway, I look forward to writing and creating more for you all. And organizing what I have done already so it is easier to access. I hope to get some upgrades out to you as soon as I can.

Do you prefer digital to analog? Do you still use a notebook? If you are studying for the test, be sure to check out Month 4 of the JLPT Study Guide to help you with what you need to do to prepare.

Photo by Terry Madeley

I should start off by saying that I’m not getting divorced.  I’m still happily married and probably will be for the foreseeable future.  Some of my fellow expatriates and Japanese friends haven’t been so lucky though.

Which, to my naive self, seems a little surprising.  Don’t get me wrong, I come from a divorced family and pretty much everyone in my family has gotten divorced at one time in their lives.  I know it exists and is out there.  I just didn’t think it was all that common in Japan.

The divorce rate (the red line in the linked article) is in line with a lot of other developed countries and it actually peaked around 2001, and has been slowly drifting down, but it didn’t use to be like that.   Some people believe that this slow drift down is due to the lower marriage rate in Japan.  As you can see from the linked article, Japan’s marriage rate is also on the decrease (it’s the blue line in the graphs).  People are also getting married older, which has been shown to lead to happier more successful marriages.

However, Japan, pre-2000s, was known for its low divorce rate.  You may even heard that it still has a low divorce rate.  There is a general perception that people get married for life and that’s that, much like the lifetime employment system that Japan supposedly has.  But, like that lifetime employment system, the old ways of doing things are finally giving in to modern problems.  So, what happened?  Why was it relatively low in the first place?

Getting divorced in Japan is a simple matter of filling out the paperwork to do so. There really isn’t that much fuss to be honest. More often than not lawyers aren’t called in. Instead, counselors at the city office help sort things out. This is probably in part due to the fact that assets are generally not held jointly by the couple. For instance, people usually don’t have joint bank accounts in Japan. I’m not even sure if you can have joint accounts.

Divorces don’t generally tend to be the all out blood bath that can result from some divorces in the States. And the whole process won’t cost you, financially speaking, that much. Just a few processing fees.

There are even divorce ceremonies where the former betrothed get together to smash their wedding ring and symbolically let it go. The trend supposedly started here and has spread to other countries. I’m not sure if I could possibly go through anything like that to be honest, but many report a feeling of closure.

The divorce rate is currently 0.18%, which sounds really small, but what that means is that 0.18% of the population, every year, is getting divorced.  Considering only about 0.52% of the population is getting married every year, that is a pretty high rate of divorce.  And there is still a pretty strong stigma against it.  A lot of woman have found it difficult to get a job.  Although, Junichiro Koizumi, Prime Minister of Japan from 2001-2006, was a divorcee that never remarried.

Another sad fact about divorce is that there is no joint custody system in Japan.  This means that one parent, usually the mother, retains sole custody of the children.  Any visitation is arranged informally and can not be enforced by the courts.  In some cases, children never see their father again.  Prime Minister Koizumi, has two children from his marriage that he has custody of, but a third child, born after the divorce has never met his father.

It doesn’t always end that way of course.  I have a friend that did not have custody of her kids, but is able to see them on a regular basis.  She even went on a few vacations with her ex-husband and his new wife to be with her kids.  But, of course, that has to be a fringe case.

I recently read an article in Aera, a weekly newspaper, that detailed a roadmap to getting divorced.  It even had a trendy looking infographic about how to prepare for the big event, detailing tips like keeping a diary on all the negative interactions that you can use in your favor to argue for divorce.  The article went on to talk about a handful of horror stories about woman that weren’t able to escape from a marriage and how to avoid the same fate.

A Japanese friend of mine recently confided in me that he had found his wife’s journal that detailed every argument they ever had.  The date and time and what was discussed.  And, at least from my prospective, he just seems to be a regular hard-working guy with 2 kids that he worries about a lot. I find it hard to imagine living in the same house as someone that is planning and making arrangements to get divorced.

But, actually, another, much older (60s) Japanese friend of mine, told me about how him and his wife had made plans to get divorced in a few years so that he can start work overseas, and she could get his full government pension.  It seems a little odd to me, but in a country where men are still the major, and sometimes only money maker in the family, it is a reality that sometimes plays out.

About a year ago, I was leaving the house to go to work and a distraught woman buzzed my doorbell.  When I stepped out I saw a huge moving truck parked in front of my house.  Apparently, she was a friend of our neighbor’s and they were moving out that day.  It seemed a little odd to me because we had just talked to her and she didn’t mention anything about moving out despite the fact she was the hancho (neighborhood leader, and yes that is where the phrase ‘head honcho’ kind of comes from).

And then *poof* she was gone.  The husband is still there.  The sad thing is they had 4 kids, which is positively nuts, but I haven’t seen them since either.  So, she hit the road, took the kids with her, and didn’t look back.  At first it seemed a bit odd, but through a long, roundabout neighborhood connection, we later found out it had been a case of DV – domestic violence.   So, I hope her and her kids are living a better life somewhere.

So, from all these anecdotes, you might think that I’m pretty pessimistic about marriage, or at least terrified of getting divorced.  But, I always try to think positively, and although my wife and I are going through a bit of a rough streak (for non-relationship reasons, sorry long story), I feel like we are good for the long haul.  In my humble opinion, I think we have a few advantages to our marriage that keeps us together through thick and thin.

First, I think a lot of people in Japan have a communication problem.  Men and women think and act fairly differently.  They tend to be motivated by very different things as well.  And in Japan, a place where men and women live pretty different lives, that gap is even more pronounced.  In the West, communication skills are learned through the tough and sometimes unforgiving social interactions that arise from junior high and high school through countless nervous first phone calls to awkward conversations sitting in cars to timid requests for a dance.

That proving ground doesn’t really exist in Japan.  There are no dances, there is not a lot of pressure to ask a date to a dance.  There is no prom, where everyone that’s anyone must have a date.  There is no engine for forced interaction between the sexes.  This of course keeps everyone focused on their studies, but does little to develop their emotional intelligence.

I know a lot of people, in their 30s, that have only had 2 or 3 boyfriends/girlfriends in their lives.  I’ve also met others on the other end of the spectrum, but I would say on average, people here just don’t have that many boyfriends/girlfriends.  How can you know who you want to marry after dating only a handful of people?

And that communication problem used to be solved by a very simple machine of arranged marriage and lifetime employment.  That machine brought post-war Japan to the forefront of the world.  And people got married, the man worked his tail off in the office, the wife worked her tail off at home cleaning, cooking, networking with neighbors, and helping kids with homework.  Love grew out of simply being together a lot like brothers and sisters end up loving each other even after all the fighting with each other.

Society kept the couple together because you had two whole families (not just two people) interested in keeping the union together.  This by the way is not ‘traditional’ Japanese culture.  Before new Meiji regulations came into effect in 1899, the divorce rate in Japan was sky high, higher than the current rate in the States.  It wasn’t until the government started making changes to the law to help make the country more stable that this new cultural norm was created.

Now of course, Japan is facing all the modern craziness that other developed countries are experiencing.  There is a rapid urbanization of the population that separates kids from families.  Individuals are being transferred all over the country away from family that could enforce the social norms of keeping a marriage together.  The perpetually sagging economy that can never quite take off coupled with worker inefficiency keeps people working late hours and away from being able to just sit and have a decent conversation with their spouses.  These are all factors that make keeping a marriage together pretty tough.

Do you have any anecdotes you can share?  What is your experience?  Let me know in the comments.

Photo by Marc Hatot