Month: February 2011

Seven years of Kirai: A Geek in Japan

Post author By ageekinjapan
Post date February 5, 2011
12 Comments on Seven years of Kirai: A Geek in Japan

Today, 7 years ago, I started blogging; and last December it was 4 years since I started blogging in the English version of Kirai: A Geek in Japan. When I started my Spanish blog I was 23 years old and I was finishing university back in Spain; now I am almost 30 years old. During these years many things have happened and many things have changed in the world, on the Internet, in this blog and in my life.

Thanks to you all for walking with me in this journey to have a better understanding of Japanese culture and continue learning together. During these 7 years, you have visited my blog 45 million times (almost 1 million times the English version), I have written 2635 posts in Spanish and 978 posts in English, and you have made 118,000 comments in Spanish and 4,900 comments in English. I uploaded 13,000 pictures to my Flickr, I started a new photography blog (in Spanish) and I twitted 6,290 times. I also wrote two books Un Geek en Japón (available in Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese and German) and Momentos (which includes texts in both Spanish and English) based on the contents published in this blog. More than 20,000 units of the books have been sold all around the world. I say thanks 20,000 times to you all!

At the moment I am finishing up a new book in English published by Tuttle Publishing, that includes rewritten contents of my first book in Spanish as well as brand new chapters. It is already available for pre-order at Amazon!

Pre-order A Geek in Japan

I will keep writing in my blog for many years to come!

If you are a new reader of Kirai: A Geek in Japan, these are some of the articles I wrote that I particularly like that will give you a good grasp of the blog:

Traditional

Setsubun – Oni

Yesterday, February 3rd, it was setsubun day here in Japan, which supposedly marks the end of the winter (a little bit early) and the entrance of spring. According to tradition, on setsubun day you have to scare the demon spirits away and eliminate all the bad things that happened the former year.

One of the rituals consists on throwing beans to somebody who portrays an Oni (demon). The demon has to dance and pretend to be escaping while no being able to do it. In my company we made the ritual with Maruyama-san portraying the oni/demon while we threw beans at him (you can’t really see them on the video).

For a better explanation about setsubun and the demon ritual, read this post.

JapaneseCulture

Tanuki

Post author By ageekinjapan
Post date February 3, 2011

In this post last week, a reader asked what were those bear looking figures in the penultimate picture. They are tanuki!

The “Real” Tanuki
The tanuki is considered a member of the canine family, it is usually mistaken for a raccoon. It is a native species of Japan and Manchuria but they can also be found in many places in Asia until eastern Europe.

Here’s a photo of a tanuki that I took in 2005 when I had just arrived to Japan; by that time I had no idea what it was, at the beginning I was a little bit scared but I soon realized that it is a quite calm creature and that I could easily take pictures of it.

Tanuki

The Tanuki Myth
Japanese folklore has thousands of references about the tanuki. According to mythology tanuki are able to transform into any form.

Nowadays at the entrance of many Japanese restaurants you can find a tanuki statue. On the left hand the tanuki usually holds a sake bottle, its favorite drink, and on the right hand an accounting notebook. Legend has it that tanuki bring good fortune and healthy profits.

Tanuki

Another characteristic of tanuki statues is the size of their testicles. Notice them in the picture, as the base of the statue are not the feet, but Kin-tama (literally golden eggs). The huge testicles are a symbol of good luck and many tanuki tales portray tanuki using their testicles as drums or even their scrotum skin as a parachute. The use of the “golden eggs” as drums can be seen in Ghibli’s movie Pom Poko. This could be a good example of Japanese humor.

Super Mario Tanuki
It turns out that the raccoon suit in Super Mario Bros. 3 is in fact a tanuki suit that gives him superpowers frequently associated to tanuki in Japanese mythology. When Mario is wearing the tanuki suit he can turn into an invincible statue.

Tanuki

More info in Wikipedia.