One of Ours

Now that the ban on Japanese cultural imports has been lifted in South Korea, there's lots of evidence of sharing of culture between the two nations. More and more Korean stars are becoming commonplace on Japanese TV, like my favorite, the lovely Yoon Son Ha (her Korean-Japanese accent is so cute). The popular South Korean war film Brotherhood (in Korean, Taegukgi Hwinalrimyeo) is playing in theatres in Japan right now, and when Korean actor Bin Won came to Japan to promote the movie he was surprised to see 500 screaming Japanese fans at the airport to see him. We're glad to see this new cultural sharing between South Korea and Japan and hope to see more of it in the future.

Japan is experiencing a real "bug boom" right now, as millions of elementary school kids learn everything they can about various kinds of beetles like the Goliath Beetle, Rhinoceros Beetle, Eastern Hercules Beetle and a Japanese variety called Ookuwagata. Part of the interest in bugs is being fueled by the popularity of Mushi King ("Bug King"), an arcade game by Sega which spits out a bar-coded insect card that kids use to fight other 3D animated insects. My son loves this game and has a complete collection of the cards, which have information about the bugs printed on them. Last weekend we took the kids to a nearby Insect Zoo which happened to sell various kinds of beetles, and sure enough, my kids conned us into buying two of them as pets. We're now the proud owners of two red-backed Ookuwagata, which sleep in their cage in a dark corner of my son's room.

There's a fun game Japanese kids play, called Shiritori (lit. "take the rear end") Game. To play, someone thinks of a word -- say, chopsticks, which is "hashi" in Japanese. Then the next person takes the last syllable -- "shi" -- and thinks of a word that starts with this syllable, say, "shika" (deer). The next person continues, with a word that starts with "ka" and so on. In Japanese phonetics, the only consonant that can appear by itself without a noun after it is the letter "n", so in Shiritori Game, saying a word that ends in "n" (such as lion, "raion" in Japanese) ends the game for that person. This game is played by virtually all children in Japan and is a fun way for kids (or gaijin) to pick up and reinforce vocabulary words. It's a great game to play in the car, too.