Want To Learn The Problem Japan Has With US Cars?

[Street Savvy]

Dear Otaku Universe Subscriber,

When speaking English, you use the word "you" when talking to people in some form or another all the time.  One of the most common mistakes that most English speakers make is talking this same exact way in Japanese and simply replacing the English word "you" with the Japanese word "anata," "kimi," or "Otaku," when Japanese is not spoken this way at all.  The right way to do it in Japanese is simply use the person's name.  But how you use that person's name depends on the politeness level that you have to use with that person.  If you're talking about a very close friend that you can talk casually with, you'll use that person's first name, but if it's someone that you have to be more polite to, then you say that person's name immediately followed by their title.  To avoid making this edition too long, and also because it ties in with another common mistake, I'll get into titles next week.

I heard recently that American cars have a very hard time selling in Japan.  Naturally a lot of people immediately jump to the conclusion that they're just being biased because they're still pissed about WWII when nothing could be further from the truth.  The thing about Japan is that space is very limited.  The country is about the same size as California, and even then the majority of the country is covered in mountains.  This is the very reason why they have no choice but to squeeze their population into some of the biggest cities in the world.  This is the reason that they choose/make small things as a way of saving as much space as possible, and this includes cars.  While Nissan and Toyota and Honda and so on know to make their cars bigger before trying to sell them in America, Japanese cars are very small and tiny.  So small in fact that the smallest and most compact American car is gigantic by comparison.  So it's not by choice, the Japanese have to avoid American cars because they're just way too big.

I'm pretty sure that I first heard about Lupin the III the same way as everyone else did, watching it on Adult Swim.  We would later find out that was the third season, and Adult Swim would later give us the second season where they were in Italy.  Now whether or not Adult Swim will ever give the first season which came out back in the 70s is a mystery, but this movie most certainly sounds like it's Lupin the III's very first adventure.  If you happen to also be a Lupin fan, we can both pre - order ours below:

Derrick McGee AKA Street Savvy the Otaku Guy

870 Wheeler St.

Gary, IN 46406 - 1952

streetsavvy...@gmail.com