History – Page 6 – Mutantfrog Travelogue

Which Japanese prefectures sell the most lottery tickets per person?

Ever wonder which parts of Japan gamble the most? No? Well, stick with me and you might learn something about which prefectures are most willing to line up and pay the poor tax.

Each year, Mizuho Bank (which has a special relationship with the lottery from its days as a government bank) tallies the total number of lottery (Takarakuji) tickets sold and divides that number into each prefecture’s population to obtain an average per capita spending total. According to their numbers for fiscal 2007 (as reported in the Nikkei), the top ticket buyers were Tokyo, Osaka, and Kochi prefecture in Shikoku. There was a huge gap between the top of the list (Tokyo’s 12,933 yen) versus the bottom (Yamagata’s 5,328 yen). The top prefectures tended be prefectures that house large cities, such as Aichi.

UPDATE: A typical lottery ticket in Japan costs around 300 yen, meaning that Tokyo residents buy around 43 tickets a year or just about one every week.

Prefectures with the lowest home ownership rates tended to buy more lottery tickets. Tokyo and Osaka, the first and second highest per-capita lottery players, also have the two lowest home ownership ratios, in the same order. Okinawa has the third lowest, and its residents are Japan’s sixth biggest lottery gamblers. On the other hand, Aichi, another prefecture full of takarakuji hopefuls, had the seventh lowest home ownership ratio. (Bonus fact: Toyama prefecture had the highest home ownership rate in 2003 (around 80%). Toyama residents play it relatively safe with a middling per capita lottery spend of between 7,000-7,999 yen).

The outlier was Kochi prefecture, however, indicating that low home ownership, a signifier of relative poverty, does not make up the only factor explaining the results. An official from Kochi prefecture’s budget division speculated, “Perhaps the prefecture residents’ nature of determination and love of gambling had an impact.”

A brief overview of Japan’s lottery system

Though it only brings in about 1/20 the revenue of the almighty pachinko, Japan’s lottery, with its estimated 15,000 or so ticket booths outside train stations (more booths than pachinko parlors, one for every 8,600 people), has been a highly visible form of legal gambling in Japan throughout the postwar era, along with horse racing, yacht speedboat racing, bicycle racing, and mahjong.

According to Wiki Japan, lottery-style gambling in Japan got its start in the Edo period as Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples offered tomikuji (essentially the same as a lottery) in order to raise funds for repairs. Over the years, tomikuji faced various bans from the authorities, and private-sector lotteries remain criminalized to this day. In July 1945, a desperate wartime government instituted a lottery, but Japan surrendered and chaos reigned before a drawing could even be held. A national government-backed lottery was re-instituted during the US occupation in 1948, though it was abandoned in 1954, leaving only regional lotteries. Takarakuji took its current form in 1964 with the foundation of the Japan Lottery Association, a grouping of the regional lotteries.

According to association data, in fiscal 2007 (the period covered by the above survey) Japanese gamblers bought 1.0442 trillion yen in tickets, or about 8,200 yen per person. The US doesn’t have a national lottery per se, but the UK does – on average, UK residents spent 80 pounds (12,905 yen by the current exchange rate) per capita on national Lotto in 2008. The UK lottery’s press kit (PDF) claims that 70% of adults are regular players (but doesn’t cite a source), while a 2007 poll from Japan’s lottery association found that 55% of those polled had purchased at ticket at least once in the past year. The UK system, in which operations are contracted to a private company, appears to be more efficient than the one in Japan. According to the UK press kit, 10% of every pound spent on lottery tickets goes to operations and expenses (5% in dealer commission, 4.5% in operating costs, and 0.5% in shareholder dividends), versus 14.4% of each ticket in Japan (with 45.8% going to paying winners and 39.8% going into the general accounts of each prefecture and major cities).

The odds of winning a current popular Japanese game Loto 6 is 1 in 6 million, which is comparable to other lotteries I am familiar with in the US (and of course less likely than getting hit by lightning).

See the full list after the jump!

Continue reading Which Japanese prefectures sell the most lottery tickets per person?

Google logo recalls opening of Yokohama

Google’s commemorative logos have become a tradition over the years starting from simple doodles to more complex pieces, as seen in this retrospective article. When doing a search just now, I noticed that Google has made the above special logo in honor of the 150th anniversary of the opening of the Port of Yokohama, which took 5 years after Commodore Matthew Perry signed the Convention of Kanagawa. While most Japan-resident readers of this blog will probably notice the special logo, it may very well only appear for users in Japan, so here ya go.

“After death cometh judgment” – Why are there so many Christian signs in provincial Japan?

(Updated mistranslation “regional” based on reader comment)

In his liveblog of Murakami’s new novel 1Q84, Daniel Morales of Howtojaponese challenged the folks at MFT to find something out for him (emphasis added):

17:03 Done with Chapter 12. No topics on the Aum yet, but religion does come up. Will be interesting to see where he takes it. One question I’d like to see someone answer (maybe someone at Mutantfrog?) is why do so many houses in Japan have signs with Christian quotes on the side? I haven’t seen too many in Tokyo, but they were all over the town where I spent three years. Always the same color pattern – dark brown with yellow lettering. They said things like “The blood of Christ forgives all” or “He died for our sins.” Can’t seem to find a picture anywhere. (Update: Matt provided this link in the comments.)

We at MFT love a good challenge, and thankfully this one wasn’t all that challenging. Thanks to Matt‘s link, I was able to Google my way to the name of the group responsible: It is the Miyagi-based “Bible Distribution Cooperation Society” a loosely organized association of Christians at least partly led by American missionaries. This is one of the same groups who uses soundtrucks and bullhorns in the Shinjuku station area to get out the message of Christ, so those in the know might not be surprised that these signs also come from the American missionaries.

The short answer to Daniel’s question is that this group asks the owners of the house or any other public facade to let them post the signs, and the owners say yes. What follows is the same answer in much more detail, but first let’s give a little background of what we are talking about in case some readers haven’t seen the signs.

The signs

So if you’ve never been to Japan or just not to a part of Japan where the signs are visible, let me clue you in – in various places, mostly in areas outside the major urban centers, you will often see signs that look something like this:

This one reads “After death cometh judgment- The Bible.” According to the site, it is posted on a bus stop near a middle school in Iwate Prefecture. Or this:

“God is watching, even in your private life – The Bible.” (Taken in Akita Prefecture). Or this:

“The wages of sin is death — The Bible” (Akita Prefecture)

(This site has LOTS more of the signs along with some Jack Chick-style pamphlets and a heaping helping of snarky commentary)

As you can see, they are written in white and yellow text on a black background in uneven, ransom-note fonts and usually contain the starkest of messages about what the God will do to you if you fail to accept Christ. If their intent is to scare the living crap out of people then they are remarkably effective as the signs are truly the stuff of nightmares (or at least a scene out of Carrie or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre). These are not the only public displays in Japan that appear to be judging you on the spot, but they are by far the creepiest I’ve seen. I just don’t understand the point of making these signs so creepy. If you want to make Christianity appealing wouldn’t you try and make people feel welcome instead of scolding them like this?

My personal encounters with the signs come during regular trips to visit inlaws in Tochigi Prefecture, near the Gunma border. Mrs. Adamu, her parents and I usually take backroads to avoid the high tolls, so we get to see several of these signs en route.

At any rate, the placement of these signs on cracked concrete structures and rusted out corrugated aluminum bus stops and storefronts reinforces the general theme of depression and stagnation that dominates the areas I’ve visited. Whenever I see another of these white-on-black reminders that God is watching, it makes me wonder if it is meant as a protest against all the rust and malaise of Tochigi and Gunma.

The group

Now that we know what these signs are, let’s try and answer the next question: who is doing this and why?

According to Wikipedia, these signs are mainly the work of the Bible Distribution Cooperation Society, founded around 1950 in part by an American ex-soldier named Paul Broman who has dedicted his life to spreading the word of God using this unusual method. According to this now-defunct blog of a Japanese Christian minister, Broman took Japanese citizenship in 1970 and funds the activities of the group through his IT services business GrapeCity Inc (UPDATE: Though Broman would be about 82 right now, I haven’t seen an obituary anywhere so I assume he is still alive). According to the group’s website, they initially started their activities in Iwate and Aomori but in the late 1950s expanded internationally. According to Wikipedia, other activities of the group include sound trucks (you may have heard them in Shinjuku) and a Christian school based in Miyagi. They are an independent evangelist group not affiliated with Mormons, Unification Church or any other of the major groups.

Also according to Wikipedia, the signs are posted with the permission of the building/structure owners, and often they are neither a member of the association nor even Christian. They simply allow their real estate to be used for ads, similar to political posters and some other ad schemes, though apparently the association is either not allowed or does not offer to pay in exchange for the permission.

(An aside: This willingness to ugly up the neighborhood I think speaks to the owners’ complete lack of anything resembling taste or the basic decency to maintain an appealing public space. The towns, for their part, also seem to have no interest in keeping their neighborhoods nice. I am sure someone will tell me to shut up and stop making Alex Kerr-style arguments to legislate taste, but in cases like this I have to side with those who’d rather see fewer eyesores)

The association’s official homepage, true to its funder’s background, is well-designed and contains a lot of information, though an uninformed viewer might not immediately recognize that this is the group behind the odd signs and the loud, judgmental announcements in Shinjuku (I’ll accept that maybe the cartoon sound truck at the top of the page gives it away).

On the “About” page, the group’s stated objective is to “directly communicate the word of The Bible” (「聖書のことば」をそのまま伝える」). Their listed activities are distribution of free literature at primary/middle/high schools, “broadcasting” the word of The Bible in areas where many people congregate, individual proselytizing by Christians, and communication of the word of The Bible on placards and signs. They are not a membership organization and do not solicit members. Though the group lends “mutual help” and coordination, each member is individually responsible for his or her activities. Wikipedia indicated that there are apparently other groups who are not affiliated with the original society who have imitated their style. Based on this mission statement I don’t think they would mind imitators.

The group’s activities are completely self-funded and seek no charity. They boast that they have distributed 60 million Bibles to 18 countries throughout their history. They claim to pass out 1 million Bibles in Japan each year.

It is hard to know how many people are involved with these efforts. I am still waiting for an email response from an affiliated group, the Church and Home Educators Association Japan (CHEA Japan). For reference, various estimates count between 1 and 3 million of Japan’s people as at least nominally Christian. Protestants, for their part, comprise around half a million or 0.4% of the population (this is a Wikipedia figure apparently taken from Adherents.org. Like all such estimates it is probably pretty unreliable).

Vintage evangelism

The site also features a photo gallery of the group’s work that includes some vintage signs (unfortunately undated!). Some of these are really cool so I’ll post the best of them:

“Jesus is the way, truth, life.”

“Christ died for the sinners.”

“God is not in the shrine.”

“After death cometh judgment.”

Front: “I am the way.”

John 3:16 – “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”

“The blood of Christ, God’s only son, purifies all our sins – The Bible.”

There are lots more on the site, so I advise you to check them out!

Fun with Christian signs

These signs have become something of an underground social phenomenon due their sheer ubiquity (in Japanese some refer to them as キリスト看板 or roughly “those Christian signs”). One site (linked from Wikipedia) lets you create your own scary signs in HTML. Here is my version of Nietsche’s “God is dead” quote:

ニ
｜
チ
ェ

神
は
死
ん
だ

1984 in Japanese pop: “Careless Whisper” gone horribly wrong

Our frequent commenter Peter alerted me to the following travesty to 80’s music, which appeared in the 1984 Kohaku (“Red Versus White” New Year’s Eve song battle on NHK).

The translated title, Dakishimete Jiruba, is a bit cryptic at first. “Dakishimete” means something like “Hold me tight,” and jiruba is the Japanese transliteration of “jitterbug.”

I do not know what was wrong with Japan in 1984. But as it turns out, the only way to screw up this classic song even more is to have Hide from L’Arc~en~Ciel sing it in English. You might as well ask a random drunk in a karaoke box to try it.

South Africa’s rand is the world’s best performing – and best looking – currency

This was some interesting news (via Bloomberg):

South Africa’s rand, the world’s best-performing major currency this year, may rally another 4 percent if it breaks through 8.23 per dollar and stays there, based on technical analysis by Barclays Plc-owned Absa Capital.

Candlestick charting shows the rand closed stronger than its opening levels everyday last week, suggesting it’s “fighting” to appreciate further, said Judy Padayachee, a technical analyst at Johannesburg-based Absa. Even so, it has yet to remain stronger than the so-called “resistance” level of 8.23 per dollar, according to Padayachee.

Good for them. But thanks to this news I was pleasantly surprised at how awesome the rand looks. Buffalo power!

The notes were redesigned after the end of apartheid in 1994. Here is what the old notes looked like:

You can find out more about South Africa’s currency (with similarly intense drawings of lions and rhinos) here.

In defense of unicorns

I have noticed a recent habit of political pundits to mock perceived idealism and naivete with phrases like “rainbows and unicorns.”

For instance, a commenter on the latest episode of The Young Turks, in explaining that Arlen Spector has never been principled (he was the guy who voted for a bill that he himself argued would set human rights back 700 years), noted that “he was not voted in on rainbows and unicorns.”

In a sign of just how much of a standard cliche this has become, in the Washington Post former CIA Director Porter Goss makes the topsy-turvy argument that making the torture memos public has jeopardized national security: “The suggestion that we are safer now because information about interrogation techniques is in the public domain conjures up images of unicorns and fairy dust.” (Has anyone actually argued that the move makes us safer? I thought the whole point was it is not worth it to torture people even if it does make us “safer” and that the people who pushed for and praised releasing these memos see it as a step in disclosing mistaken and illegal policies that were done in our name)

But you know what? Unicorns are nothing to mess with! It only takes a cursory reading of the animal’s Wikipedia page to prove why:

1. Unicorns are as strong as the Lord: The bible (or rather its translators) considered unicorns “untamable creatures” and noted that God himself was only as strong as a unicorn:

“God brought them out of Egypt; he hath as it were the strength of the unicorn.”–Numbers 23:22

2. The ancient Greeks and Romans considered unicorns to be both real and fierce: The Greeks, for all their polytheism and fantastic mythology, believed that unicorns really existed somewhere in India:

Pliny the Elder mentions the oryx and an Indian ox (perhaps a rhinoceros) as one-horned beasts, as well as “a very fierce animal called the monoceros which has the head of the stag, the feet of the elephant, and the tail of the boar, while the rest of the body is like that of the horse; it makes a deep lowing noise, and has a single black horn, which projects from the middle of its forehead, two cubits in length.”

3. Unicorns are so insane that they must be placated with virgins to stop their bloodlust (see above painting): In the middle ages, unicorns were used to mix pagan stories with Christian virtues, such that “The original myths refer to a beast with one horn that can only be tamed by a virgin maiden; subsequently, some Catholic scholars translated this into an allegory for Christ’s relationship with the Virgin Mary.”

Moving into Renaissance times, Leonardo Da Vinci had this to say about how to hunt a unicorn:

“The unicorn, through its intemperance and not knowing how to control itself, for the love it bears to fair maidens forgets its ferocity and wildness; and laying aside all fear it will go up to a seated damsel and go to sleep in her lap, and thus the hunters take it.”

Bottom Line

This “unicorns are fuzzy cute happy creatures” concept apparently originates in more modern imagery, particularly the My Little Pony animated series and toys and some other “fairy princess” pop culture. A product of the 1980s, My Little Pony offered saccharine-sweet entertainment for young girls that could not have anticipated the ballooning of ironic humor in the 90s and 2000s. Hence, when Homer Simpson uttered this classic, oft-repeated line:

Ohhh look at me Marge, I’m making people happy! I’m the magical man, from Happy Land, who lives in a gumdrop house on Lolly Pop Lane!!!!…… By the way I was being sarcastic…

it was only a matter of time before someone added a unicorn in there. But as we start to retreat from irony a bit as a society (see the return of earnest saccharine with Disney hits like High School Musical and Camp Rock, along with South Park’s reaction), it might be a good time to stop equating unicorns with frivolous and naive idealism and recognize their historically badass mythological status. I mean, honestly – how happy and nice could an enchanted animal with a deadly sharp horn actually be?

Spanish flu was not Spanish

With the swine flu suddenly in the news, some might wonder why the authorities are so frantic to stop the disease in its tracks. For context, it might be worthwhile to mention the modern world’s worst disease outbreak, the deadly Spanish flu of 1918 that killed tens of millions.

But ironically, the “Spanish flu” almost certainly did not originate in Spain.

The only reason it acquired the name was because of Spain’s neutral position during World War I. Other countries at war instituted press restrictions, and the decision was taken not to report widely about the flu epidemic out of fear it would hurt morale. Since Spain had no such restrictions it was the only country in Europe reporting an outbreak, hence fooling observers into thinking that’s where the flu had come from.

(Source: Read in yesterday’s Yomiuri)

Difficulties for rare names in China

Just two weeks ago I posted a link to an article about a Taiwanese “collector” of rare Chinese family names. While his activity may seem to be a mere eccentric hobby, documenting these names and their lineage does have important historical significance, as seen in recent moves by the Chinese government. According to a NYT article from April 20, China has been phasing in an electronic ID card system which does not support many of the exotic antique characters used in rare family names, and their solution has been to ask people affected to change their names.

One of the main examples given in the article is the character [ed: oops, actually the character they reference was too obscure for me to enter using either the Japanese or Chinese IME. I confused it with the still-rare but far more common “驫”. 驫 (骉 simplified, as it would be written in the PRC), pronounced “Cheng” according to the article, but “Biao” according to the dictionary. Apparently the software used for the Chinese ID system does not support this character, despite the fact that I had no problem drawing it on the IME pad in Windows Vista using my house, and it can even be found in the Japanese language Wiktionary.

(Before I go on, I want to note briefly that the word 漢字, meaning “Chinese character” is used in Chinese, Korean and Japanese, respectively pronounced hanzi, hanja, and kanji. When using one of these three words I am specifically referring to the use of Chinese characters in that country/language.)

According to the article, the computer system currently in use by the government supports 32,252 hanzi, out of well over 50,000 found in the most comprehensive classical dictionaries. The government is currently working on a restricted list of characters approves for use in modern Chinese writing, which they estimate will exceed 8000 characters-a significant drop from even the current de-facto list of 32,252.

While these sorts of legal restrictions on one’s very name name may sound stereotypically totalitarian for the communist People’s Republic, in fact both Japan and Korea have had similar restrictions for a long time. In Japan, the Law on Household Registration (Koseki-hou) governs the kanji which may be used in personal names. Under current regulations, kanji for personal names may only be chosen from either the Joyo Kanji (Kanji for Daily Use, the list that forms the basis of public school Japanese education, Japanese proficiency tests, etc.), consisting of 1945 characters, or the 983 character Jinmeiyou-kanji (Kanji for Use in Personal Names). Both of these lists have been revised, usually expanded but sometimes with deletions, over the years.

There was an amusing incident during the 2004 round of additions to the Jinmeiyou list. The committee proposed an initial list of 489 additions purely based on statistical analysis of the commonality of various characters in modern Japanese text, and then posted it online to seek comments. While many of the names were popular, 9 of them were the target of objections from the public, and were removed from the list. Those 9 kanji were: 糞(feces) 屍(corpse) 呪(curse, magic spell) 癌(cancer) 姦(rape) 淫(lewd obscene) 怨(hatred, grudge-as in the horror film) 痔(hemorrhoid) and 妾(concubine). (Bonus word trivia: two of these kanji combine to make the word for necrophilia.) As a foreigner who has only been studying Japanese for around 8 years, I recognized all of 9 of these on first glance and could read all but two(淫 and 妾), so I would assume that any adult native-reader of Japanese knows all of these moderately obscure characters and many hundreds more, despite their not being on the official government lists.

(The current Jinmeiyo list may be seen conveniently at Wikipedia.)

In South Korea there are 5151 characters allowed, even though most people normally write their name in the natively developed hangul alphabet, which has replaced hanja in everyday use. While traditional Korean family names are all hanja, personal names may also contain hangul. Interestingly, the Korean list of name characters is written using the same Chinese characters as the Japanese one-인명용 한자（人名用漢字）, although like other shared Sinic words it is pronounced in the Korean fashion “inmyong yo hanja”.

North Korea legally eliminated hanja from their language some time ago, so even though most names can be traced etymologically to Chinese, all legal names today are written in hangul in all circumstances.

Vietnam was also historically a Chinese-character culture (known locally as chữ nôm), but they abandoned it early in the 20th century. While as much of their vocabulary is descended from Chinese words as in Japan or Korea, today they write purely in the Roman alphabet and the original Chinese characters for words or names are found only on old art or documents, or in dictionaries.

Taiwan, as befitting its role as the bastion of traditional Chinese writing, has no restrictions on hanzi name use. Hong Kong and Macao, which while part of the PRC also maintain traditional writing and also have a separate legal code from the PRC, presumably also have the same level of name freedom as Taiwan.

Now, what about immigrants? When I was first studying in Japan as an undergraduate, I know a girl whose name contained the hanja “妵” (pronounced “ju” in Korean), which is not just absent from the Japanese name-kanji list, but also not even found in standard Japanese fonts or dictionaries! On her Foreigner Registration Card, this character was pasted in using an obviously different font, as it couldn’t be typed normally. While I do not know the actual law, I assume that this is the traditional custom for dealing with domestically disallowed hanzi/hanja names in Japan, or domestically disallowed hanzi names in South Korea. (In South Korea today, Japanese names are usually rendered in hangul based on their pronunciation, and the actual kanji are ignored.) However, when a foreigner naturalizes in Japan their legal name must follow the local rules, which may force them to adopt a less exotic name. Of course, even should they be forced to change their name, nothing will keep them from using the original one in all circumstances except legal documentation.

To summarize, the freedom of choice for Chinese characters in names of the four countries which still use such names is as follows:

Taiwan* > China > South Korea > Japan

*Hong Kong and Macau may be at this level, confirmation needed

Although the NYT article implied that the imposition of restrictions on the hanzi in names is threateningly totalitarian, in fact Chinese citizens will still have FAR more options than Koreans or Japanese even if restricted to the 8000+ character list, and South Koreans today have nearly twice as many options as the Japanese do, despite that fact that most South Koreans can hardly read any but the most common of hanja. Of course, it is only in Japan where one has the option of choosing a reading for ones name that has no historical relationship whatsoever with the kanji themselves.

Shocker: Japanese people prefer “Japanese food”

The Nielsen research company has conducted a global survey on dining out preferences (Japanese PDF). The Nikkei presents the results from Japan. When asked what type of food they prefer when dining out, Japanese respondents said:

Japanese (48%)
Italian (20%)
Chinese (12%)
French (7%)

Globally, Japanese food was the fifth most preferred food. Surprisingly, the 46% of Japanese people who eat out more than three times per week is only marginally above the 44% global average.

Japanese people have a comparatively high level of what I would term “gastronomic nationalism” – that is, their preference for their own food far exceeds the global rate of 27%.

Anyone who has spent any time in this country will not be surprised to see Japanese food topping the results. Inside Japan, Japanese food is simply everywhere. The children are raised on government-supplied lunches and mother’s obento box lunches, on TV there is an endless parade of B-list celebrities fawning over the latest restaurant, and on the street the vast majority of eateries are nominally Japanese. On top of that, Japanese food is objectively scrumptious and awesome, a fact not lost on people.

But what exactly is Japanese food? The survey was apparently taken based on the respondents’ own definitions of what “Japanese food” means, but this is not always so clear-cut. Under such conditions, food that might otherwise be considered foreign must have been included under the “Japanese” rubric. “Japanese food” spans a very wide variety – from obviously Japanese foods like sushi, pickled radishes, and soba buckwheat noodles to more complicated foods that blur the lines between “pure” Japanese food and fusion dishes that have developed over the years. Other foods that may have foreign origins might not be perceived as foreign by some of the consumers (yakiniku aka Korean barbecue comes to mind as I have heard some tell me it is Japanese).

For example, it’s hard to tell whether ramen would be considered Chinese or Japanese (though the recipe is distinctly Japanese, many ramen shops advertise themselves as chuuka (Chinese) and also sell gyoza, which are more or less Japanized versions of Chinese dumplings), or for that matter whether Japanese-style curry can be called Indian (it was apparently adapted from Britain, which itself adapted it from the Indian dish). And then there is the plethora of dishes that are considered youshoku (Western/occidental food) in Japan but would be hard to find on a table anywhere in the actual West. These include omuraisu (ketchup rice wrapped in an omelette) and hambaagu (a bunless hamburger often seasoned and stuffed with onions, served with a variety of toppings such as grated daikon radish (oroshi) and ponzu, a kind of citrus/soy/vinegar sauce).

Conversely, much so-called Italian food has been considerably Japanized as well (think mentaiko spaghetti), but I doubt many respondents who go into their local Capricciosa to order noodles drowned in spicy fish eggs and mayonnaise would consider themselves to be eating at a “Japanese food” establishment. Confusing things further, many “retro Showa era” restaurants serve a “Neapolitan” spaghetti-and-ketchup dishes, but in a very Japanese izakaya atmosphere. And then there are the “rice burgers” served at Mos Burger, the new soy sauce-enhanced fried chicken at KFC, and Okinawa-style taco rice (this unlike the other two would be likely termed “Japanese”). I could go on, but it’s getting close to dinner time.

So all that said, the data could be kind of biased in Japan’s case (and the same probably goes for other countries) since Japan has co-opted so much of the Western menu into its own native cuisine. As far as I am concerned, the world is all the richer for it.

****

Check the #0066cc;">Adamukun blog for Adamu’s shared articles and recommended links.

Language in The Philippines

Speech in Manila, the capitol, is a continuum from nearly pure Tagalog (if you count long established Spanish and English loan words as actually Tagalog words) to pure English, with vast fuzzy region in the middle known as “Taglish.” No Filipinos actually speak pure English to communicate with each other, outside of certain government or academic settings, (English, along with Filipino-the official name of the national language which is more or less the same as Tagalog-are both official languages of the Republic of The Philippines) but basically all formal writing is in proper English. Newspapers and magazines are also mostly in English, and virtually all books are. Lower class newspapers or magazines, such as celebrity tabloids, may be in Tagalog or other regional languages, and even entirely English language daily newspapers have the most peculiar practice of leaving direct quotes that were spoken in Tagalog in the original language, with no translation or explanation in English. This is because the audience, even for English language newspapers, is assumed to be entirely domestic and bilingual, unlike the English language newspapers in most countries, which are at least partly intended for a foreign or international audience.

The language continuum is strongly correlated with class and education, with better educated Manileños peppering their speech with more English words, phrases, and often, incongruously, entire clauses or sub-sentences of grammatically correct English embedded into the larger context of a Tagalog sentence. English words inserted into Tagalog speech are pronounced-and spelled, if written-as English words, and not adapted to the phonetic or phonological patterns of Tagalog, as actual loan words are in most cases. This is because English words are still considered English words, as opposed to words borrowed from English, and there is conscious code-switching occurring in such mixed speech, as opposed to a creolization of the two languages. (I’m sure there may also be exceptional English words that have been Tagalog-ized as loan words, but this code-switching is more common.) There are also certain English phrases of Philippine origin, such as the famous “Comfort Room” or CR for restroom or lavatory, or “buy one take one” instead of the more common American English expression of “buy one, get one free.” Aside from exceptions which are purely local usage, Philippine English follows American English norms and rules, and never British.

Here is an illustrative example I overheard on the radio while getting a haircut last week. A DJ was interviewing a musician who was playing some live songs on the show. The musician said something in Tagalog ending with the phrase “diverse acoustic alternative rock.” The DJ responded by saying, in English, “Now how do you say that in Tagalog?” The musician was left nonplussed, pausing for a moment before they both burst into laughter.