First, another reason why it is a mystery- countries that have huge fridges usually also buy in bulk, which is very rare in Japan where most household shopping is done on a bike and Costco type shops have never really taken off.

My latest conclusion is that it’s partly to make up for the lack of convenient shelf and cupboard space in the average Japanese kitchen, leading to telling my mother in law that it shouldn’t go in the fridge (Marmite! Shortbread!) leading to complete mystery as to where to put it.

Although I have seen similar things in other Japanese houses, I am perfectly aware that most of my insight into Japan comes from one not especially typical family, so others’ ideas very gratefully received. My previous attempt to explain this is part of Japanese Gadgets and Technology Explained

This one puzzled me for a while, because most Japanese didn’t strike me as the kinds of people who’d want every stranger passing in the street to know their names and where they live (especially if there name is Gomi like someone in my street!) It turns out the reason is because several houses in the same street/ block have the exact same postal address and so the only way post and guests can reach the right one is by reading your name outside. This is also why post that is addressed to you sometimes doesn’t get there if you don’t stick your name outside (and JPLT refuse to send you anything if it isn’t) or c/o someone whose name is there, although all these things are less true for flats (apaato, mansion, coopo etc) as it has a distinctive building name and then an individual room number.

Getting back to my original query on why the Japanese would be happy to have that system, despite seeming to be very private at times, privacy is not a Japanese system (hence the use of the borrowed English word in Japanese), and certainly not privacy from your neighbours!

The Japanese street and home (non) numbering system is explained someone else on this blog somewhere- one of the pages perhaps??

Was about to eat a “normal” sized one for the first time in years and was wondering whether the lack of fibre due to peeling off the skin or the pesticides due to not was going to kill me, and it suddenly occured to me that peeling a small apple is an awful lot more difficult than peeling a nice melon-sized Fuji. Japanese virtually always peel their fruit, if the look of shock on my in-laws’ faces when I ate one without is anything to go by.

The other possible reason that springs to mind is the fact that fruit is often given as a gift in Japan, so the larger, more impressive and more expensive the better- hence also the baskets of fruit that cost three times as much as buying each piece of fruit seperately (the typical Japanese opposite of bulk discount).

More of this kind of stuff in Japanese Food and Drink Explained page and posts.

Just heard Mary Beard talking on a New York Review of Books podcast (the best podcasts outside the BBC that I have found so far), and she happened to mention that for the Romans bad jokes were also cold (“frigidaria” or something, didn’t catch the exact word). So it seems that yet again what seemed like a strange cultural pecularity was nothing of the sort.

Could it come from the shudder you give when you hear a real bad attempt at humour? Not sure I do ever shudder, but I can almost imagine doing so

There don’t seem to be individual pages for each podcast, but the fascinating interview on Ancient Roman humour is third from the bottom here:

http://www.nybooks.com/podcasts/

There is little point in talking about the fundamental appeal of the countries as they are now, but I’ve come up with some possible historical explanations:

- Japan opened up to the world just as Chinoiserie was getting old hat, making Japanisme a sure fire hit. By the time that Korea also opened up, the last thing people wanted was yet another Asian fashion boom

- Like it or not, military success (even of your enemies) has a certain appeal. Just as the Nazis are much more interesting for the Hitler Channel (“affectionate” nickname of the History Channel) than the sufferings of the Dutch, the military exploits of the first Asian country to defeat a European one are much more interesting to read about, both as fiction and history, than the litany of victimhood that is the Korean past.

- Ditto for the militaristic Samurai and the bureaucratic Yangban, or at least the self image of them

- The economic growth of Korea is even more impressive than that of Japan, but happened when the Japanese overtaking the US made the news much more than the Koreans rapidly coming up behind.

- Korea simply doesn’t lend itself to the simplistic one line explanations that have spawned a million bullshit but still readable books about Japan

- Much of what we think we appreciate as exotic Japanese art (such as late ukiyoe, manga, Murakami Haruki, Kurosawa movies, and contemporary Japanese art) is much more affected by Western influence and therefore palatable to us than we might think

- Other examples of the Japanese just getting there first while we were still interested, such as Akira Kurosawa being the first Asian to win a big cinematic prize

- The conscious selling of Japanese culture by the Japanese government and business. The Koreans have mainly concentrated on selling their own pop music and soap operas to other Asian countries, a market with some understandable resistance to the Japanese, leaving the Japanese to take over the west

- Some random influences, like Memoirs of a Geisha, Shogun and The Last Samurai being the right kind of populist escapist tosh at the right time. They could just as easily have been based in Korea, but they just weren’t. Unfortunately for the Koreans, each random happening like that sets up another whole generation of people who are fascinated by Japan and so more likely to support the next Japan based Western cultural product rather than a

- Just as the Japanese economy was sinking and anyway becoming a story that had been covered to death and the Korean economic miracle looked like becoming newsworthy, the Chinese economy opened up and the film industry took off, making for a cultural version of most of their historical overshadowing

“[Unlike European knights], the samurai had no code of chivalry toward women, nor were they motivated by religious ideals… Most important, where the knights of medieval Europe saw mercy as a virtue, the samurai held it in contempt” Japanland pg 122  

A theory I hadn’t heard before that I recently read in a book about Korea is that it is connected to the wads of cash it is still common to carry around in many Asian countries, making them large wallets rather than handbags. Makes sense, but so did the other three theories I have somewhere elsewhere on this site…

I was sitting in this café for about 10 minutes thinking “Man, it smells like someone puked in here” before in a flash of inspiration I looked at the bottom of my shoe and found the squashed gingko fruits that were responsible. In Tokyo, Seoul and most other Japanese and Korean cities the smell can really ruin a walk in the park at the wrong time of year. What exactly are the benefits of these trees that make that reek worthwhile?? Pretty yellow leaves in autumn?? Small leaves so the trees don’t need hacking half to death to stop falling leaves from inconveniencing people?? Anyone got any other ideas??

Especially the internationally unusual but still existing habit of adopting a son-in-law into a family to be the head of a household with no sons or no sons who want to take over the family business. It would seem to be anti-Confucian, Confucianism being often given as a reason for the lack of adoptions in Korea. No idea, not even many possible ideas, just the one so far:

Made acceptable by the legal need for each household (“ie”) to have a male head, unlike in Korea where family connections were larger and the head of a clan was head of a much larger group??

…which would be basically what happened in China and most other places most of the time

If we are to believe Karel Van Wolferen in The Enigma of Japanese Power, it is because having a powerless figurehead goes right back to the beginnings of recorded Japanese history.

It occurs to me that maybe they were satisfied with the next best thing, which was to marry their daughters into the family and so ensure that the Emperor had at least some of the same blood (is that what the NHK jidaigeki drama Atsuhime is about?? I find it so dull that I lose concentration after 5 minutes)