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If you r/AskAJapanese about the joke, you can't avoid it automatically becoming about bilinguals, because the vast majority of Japanese people here (and the people capable of answering the questions) are bilinguals
There are some ways to wear traditional clothing that are only valid in specific contexts — for example, 左前 (hidari mae) is the act of wrapping the front panels of the garment so that the wearer's left side is tucked under the right side.
This should only be done when dressing the body of the deceased for a funeral. A living person doing it is taboo, so you will get weird looks if you’re doing this.
Otherwise, no one really cares.
While I do understand the“foreign language = exotic and cool” aspect (we are plenty guilty of that as well), it does make me wonder about the risk profile of etching something permanent on yourself when you are by nature currently incapable of truly understanding what that something really means, with a fairly high chance it doesn’t actually mean what you want it to mean.
Sure someone can translate for you, but even translations don’t convey the full breadth of all the various nuances and connotations the word/phrase may carry.
During the pre-HD days there was also the issue of resolution, where most consoles were stuck at low res (around 200-320 pixels wide/across) while PCs were able to utilize 640x480, 1024x768 and higher. PC games ported to consoles also often suffered from this lack of resolution, making the buildings and units look huge and chunky compared to their PC brethren!
I remember the era when PC and consoles had completely different software libraries, with games that couldn’t even be decently ported due to how different the dominant control schemes were (mouse-controlled cursor vs gamepad). I guess the only holdovers remaining from those days are stuff like League of Legends and Dota 2.
It was an era hot on the heels of the Tsutomu Miyazaki serial murders and the inaccurate media frenzy surrounding it. The media made it look like the killer was deeply obsessed with anime, when in reality such videotapes were less than 1% out of many thousands found.
Affected by the news reports, the public perceived otakus as weirdos and often even threats to society. To survive the social landscape of the time it made sense to keep your otaku hobbies hidden in daily life. In its early years, on-line services and the internet were used as the few places for otakus to discuss their hobbies without fear of repression.
If you call that "special", perhaps it was.
Even if the handwriting was perfect (It’s not) and there were no grammatical errors (The first word should be 日本語 not 日本), I could still see Japanese is not your first language because the kanji glyphs used are not those of Japanese kanji, but probably Simplified Chinese.
Despite mostly looking similar, kanji/hanji used in Japan, China, and Taiwan each differ in glyph appearances. Using online platforms to talk about these glyph differences can be doubly confusing because computer programs can also frequently mix them up, making it difficult to be 100% certain that what I’m typing and what you’re seeing will look identical or not.
The issue is so prevalent that I made a webpage explaining the issue.
I guess you could make them skip grades (hey, your fiction, your rules), but heavily emphasize in-universe that the skipping is highly out of the ordinary and practically unheard of. Lampshade hanging, oldest trick in the book.
Half-Life 1
Back in the late 90s I had been playing the original Half-Life and, after several jumpscare encounters with the barnacle creatures in that game, learned to carefully look for rope-like things hanging from above.
During my morning commute I go through a place where the building above forms a short tunnel. I was walking through that area, still half-asleep from late night gaming & internet sessions, when a rope dangling from above suddenly entered my field of vision. I instantly and violently jumped aside, immediately fully awakened and heart thumping at a greatly elevated rate.
A few seconds later I caught myself and remembered this was outside of the game, and that it was really just a piece of rope, not a terrifying alien creature looking to wrap its tongue around your neck and pull you up to devour your head. But man that was intense feeling.
Half-Life 2
Several years later, when Half-Life 2 dropped, the game had a feature to zoom into things in the distance. After a while of playing that game I did develop a tendency to want to activate zoom when I saw things far away and wanted a better view of it.
Gran Turismo 7
Tetris?
Interestingly, despite having played thousands of hours of TGM, Tetris DS, Tetris 99, Tetris Effect, and many other variants and seeing blocks fall inside my head when I close my eyes, I do not get reminded of Tetris when I look at things in real life. I guess my mind has become so optimized to the detailed specifics of Tetris implementations (10 cells wide, 20 cells high, rotation wallkick rules, 20G gravity, DAS, input finesse, etc.) that it doesn't trigger when I'm organizing stuff in real life. Not similar enough.
Not sure if it’s the one you have in mind but the Tokyo Babel Tower concept was just as ridiculous as the name sounds, with a projected height of 10,000 meters, a population of 30 million, and a budget of 3 quadrillion yen.
I don't think the current powers-that-be in Japan acquired the fetishism for ever-higher iconic skyscraper office buildings during their childhood.
Radio towers, Olympic games, World expos, and bullet trains? Yes, they've been cargo-culting those forever to reenact the glorious 1960s-70s. But skyscrapers targeting world record heights? Naaah...
Yes, the negative psychological factor is strong. Every time BYD is mentioned online you can be sure someone will interject with a “but it’ll BURN!” heckle.
Additionally, BYD receives disproportionately smaller EV subsidies compared to domestic carmakers and even some other foreign carmakers like Tesla.
The Japanese subsidy system gives out differing amounts of rebates to each car model, saying that they decide on the amount based on a multitude of factors like power efficiency, V2H support, charger installation efforts, materials sourcing, cybersecurity, etc. but the exact equation used for each car model aren’t disclosed. The 2026 subsidies update tanked BYD’s rebates to the bare minimum (less than 1/8 of Toyota), causing some people to suspect discrimination.
Nonetheless, BYD Japan passed 5,000 cars sold last year and seems to be picking up pace. We’ll see how the Racco will fare when it releases in a few months.
The Daihatsu HiJet van and its variants have traditionally been mostly used for commercial cargo delivery, so like the N-VAN e: the electric version is also oriented towards business use. Individuals aren’t prohibited from buying them but few people do.
Hopefully business owners are more pragmatic in recognizing the financial advantages of BEVs as opposed to individual enthusiasts who often fall into the “Oh but EVs aren’t emotional and excitingggggg” camp (although I guess the Super-One is an attempt to cater to that group.)
Kei cars are Japan-exclusive, yet they constitute around 35-39% of all cars sold in the country. Honda’s N-BOX kei sliding-door wagon has been the #1 bestselling car out of all cars in Japan, kei or otherwise, for many years straight, so they have an advantage there.
The Nissan Sakura kei EV became a hit and proved there was a market for small city commuter kei EVs, so Honda is competing in that segment with the N-VAN e: and N-ONE e:. (The Super-One is not a kei car, but based off of the N-ONE e:.)
BYD is also about to release their own N-BOX rival with the BYD Racco. A foreign carmaker developing a kei car — that can be sold ONLY in Japan due to the spec limitations, so it has nowhere to go if it fails — is quite a rare event and shows how serious BYD are in trying to conquer Japan! Honda is of course developing their long awaited N-BOX BEV, but they just announced it won’t be ready until 2028. Racco will have a 2-year head start. Not encouraging.
It seems there were a lot of back and forth history regarding this through the 80s to the early 2000s.
Unlike the US, video game rentals were sued out of existence pretty early on. But for secondhand shops, it went from legally gray to game companies running awareness campaigns to lawsuits...to the supreme court finally ruling it as unambiguously legal.
A lot of details here, should be good for machine translated reading.
As for the public's sentiment, note that the aforementioned culture is that of the current day. If you went back several decades some people thought differently. I think the advent of social media (and its effects of exposing the raw posts of industry individuals to the public) made corporate entertainment products feel a lot more personal than before.
In that specific case it’s considered to belong to Kojima since he had always publicly marketed himself as the auteur artisan and the falling out with Konami was very drastic. But that was more the exception than the rule; in many cases it’s a lot more ambiguous, with no clear line between the company and the artist.
ランプの魔人や猿の手による願い事の曲解を徹底的に封じるため、法律条文や契約書みたいにありとあらゆる例外を想定して長ったらしく記述したガチガチな願い事テンプレートをみんなで作ろうっていうプロジェクトが昔あったな。
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No one in the movement is explaining the movement in fluent native Japanese. Therefore it’s just this thing other people abroad, not us, are doing. Some news articles talking about the movement do exist, but outside of those articles it’s pretty much invisible.
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In Japanese culture, the core fundamental notion that “large companies are inherently evil by nature and looking to screw the general public at every opportunity”… is just not really there. This may be so fundamental to western cultures that it may seem unbelievable, but it really isn’t. Therefore, all other opinions and movements popular in the west, that can be traced back to that core notion, are likewise not really there.
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In fact, the culture here is that the creators (and by extension the rightsholders) of a piece of work are considered to be at the highest in the hierarchy of authority concerning the work. The creators are considered to have full say on what to do with the work, even if it doesn’t align with what the reader, viewer, or player wants. Barring very few exceptions, if someone actively declares defiance against the creator, the community will gang up and pummel them into submission for violating the creator’s sacrosanct will.
Note that I am merely describing the situation and am not necessarily agreeing with it. Don’t shoot the messenger.
I don’t think it’s become more popular. Still pretty uncommon as far as I see in daily life.
Japanese-sounding names written in katakana are only done for things like pen names and stage names. Never for legal names. (Edit: It seems this did exist for very old Meiji/Taisho-to-early-Showa era names, but not anymore.)
Japan seems to be moving towards the word “Mobility” as a catchall term for all machines used to move around, including cars, motorcycles, electric scooters, flying cars, etc. Tokyo Motor Show was also renamed to Japan Mobility Show in 2023.
Probably unaware of the “old people with trouble moving” nuance that the word carries in English.
市街地 (Shigaichi) has pretty much the same meaning, and eliminates any ambiguity with corpses.
However, both shigai with or without the chi are very generic sounding words, like “City” (with no “The” preceding it.) It’s just, city, no specific city in particular. As opposed to something like“Hanamachi” which does sound like a specific location.
If that’s not what you’re aiming for it’s probably better to just call it Tokyo.
Since you mentioned Japan: Here in Japan, the de facto AC charging speed for EVs is not even 6kW but a mere measly 3kW. Even 6kW is considered “double speed”, with many domestic EVs having AC intake capabilities topping out at 6kW or even 3kW in the case of smaller kei cars. AC charging that exceeds 6kW is not unheard of, but quite rare, because so few cars support it.
Even with DC, legal restrictions kept most “fast” chargers around 50-90kW until very recently, and even after the lifting of that restriction, most fast chargers and EVs still are around 150kW. All in all, everything about charging speeds is just pitiful in this country.
Even if it’s technically possible to avoid the Steam store, they can sell it in that state because they’re in such a privileged position that they can be confident that people who actually avoid the store will be a negligible minority.
Only Valve can do that; imagine Epic or CDPR releasing similar consolized PCs that boot into Epic Store or GOG by default. The majority of purchasers will immediately proceed to install Steam on it and ignore the built-in store.
“Is it technically possible to avoid the store?” is only part of the whole picture. “Is it highly likely that people would avoid the store?” is the real issue that matters.
Ports of TGM 1 and TGM 2 are available on Switch and PS4 (also runs on Switch 2 and PS5) for a mere $8 each. TGM 4 is on Steam. Only TGM 3 is unavailable through official channels.
(And yes, the use of “ports” here is justified because the Switch/PS4 versions of TGM1/2 are pretty much the same games as the original arcade version)
The Tetris The Grand Master series.
By the way, beyond the few early versions of the games, I wouldn’t call them “ports.” Modern games like Tetris Effect, Puyo Puyo Tetris, Tetris 99, TGM, etc. all stand on their own as new games that add their own spins and variations to the classic formula, as opposed to merely porting the game unmodified to a different hardware platform.
As a Japanese native myself, everything revealed about FH6 so far feels like “Japan as experienced by a visiting westerner” instead of “Japan as lived in by a native resident”.
Not that it’s a bad thing, and I guess the former POV has a wider audience appeal since most of the player base is not Japanese. But it does feel that way.
I haven’t played Project Wingman but at least for AC7, I dunno, I think the developers fully wanted the composer to go very hard with the soundtrack (…to the point of asking him to compose an extra track for the final boss during the final eleventh-hour moments of development, which resulted in “Daredevil”)
