Notes From The Tiger’s Cave

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The most common form of Japanese mahjong is called “riichi maajan” (commonly rendered in English as “reach mahjong”). Like many other things, mahjong did not originate in Japan, but the Japanese imported it (from China) and then set about improving and perfecting the game. The result was “riichi mahjong”.

Riichi mahjong has several features which are absent in the original Chinese game. For example, in the Chinese game, everybody tosses their discard tiles into the centre of the table, but in the Japanese game you have to line up your discards in an orderly row in front of you. Your discard row provides the other players with useful information about what you are doing with your hand. Also, you cannot complete your hand with another player’s discard tile if the tile is the same as one of your own discarded tiles. This adds a dimension of calculation to the game that is absent in the Chinese version.

In addition, in the Japanese “riichi” game a player can “buy the right” to complete his hand on another player’s discard by paying 1,000 points and declaring, “Riichi!” Once you have declared “riichi” you cannot change your hand, so when it is your turn, if you have declared “riichi” and you don’t need the tile that you take from the wall, you have to discard it no matter how risky it may be.

So why would you want to go “riichi”?

Because you may have a hand that is ready to complete, but which lacks any special combinations (called “yaku” in Japanese). Building “yaku” into your hand gives you the right to go out on another player’s discard tile and also increases the value of your hand.

So, if you do not have any “yaku”, you might want to “pay for a yaku” by declaring “riichi” in the hope that someone will discard the tile you need.

Here are some other reasons why you might declare “riichi”:

1. to increase the value of your hand. You may already have one or two “yaku” in your hand, and one or two bonus tiles. By declaring “riichi” you may be able to get your score up into a higher bracket and earn more points if you go out.

2. to gain access to the “ura dora”. At the beginning of every hand of mahjong a tile (”mekuri-pai”) is turned over in the tile wall to indicate a random “bonus tile”. The bonus tile is the “next one up” in the same suit as the “mekuri-pai” - so if it is the 3-of-Coins, then the bonus tile will be the 4-of-Coins and so on. If you declare “riichi” and complete your hand, you can also use the tile underneath the “mekuri-pai” (i.e. the “ura dora”) as another bonus-indicator.

3. to frighten the opposition. Maybe your hand is not worth much, but it can sometimes be an effective strategy to bluff by declaring “riichi”. Maybe the other players will be afraid of giving you the tile you need and so will be forced to break up their hand in order to discard “safe” tiles. (Note, this tactic can backfire if not used with discretion…)

4. to take advantage of “kan”. Sometimes players declare 4-of-a-kind combinations. This is called “kan”. When a “kan” is declared, the player takes a tile from the back of the wall and adds it to his hand (to make up for the tile that was melded to make “kan”). When this happens, another “mekuri-pai” is turned over. Now, if you declare “riichi” and complete your hand, you will be able to check two “ura dora” tiles for potential bonus points in your hand. This increases your chances of getting a “lucky” high score. It can also be intimidating to the opposition if you declare “riichi” in response to somebody else’s “kan”.

5. to psychologically “crush” an opponent who has just declared “riichi”… This is a risky move, but it is often worth holding back a “riichi” declaration until somebody else declares “riichi”. By immediately declaring “riichi” after another player has declared, you deflate the impact of their declaration - and if you go out first the other player may feel that the luck is not with him, and how you FEEL in mahjong can be crucial to winning or losing…

These are just some very basic tactics for declaring “riichi” in Japanese mahjong. Mahjong is an intensely fluid game and therefore very tactical. If you want to improve your game it is essential that you learn to be observant and flexible in your approach. Even something as simple as declaring “riichi” is fraught with tactical implications depending on the particular situation at the moment when you are ready to declare.

The Book Of Five Rings was written by the samurai sword master Miyamoto Musashi while living in a mountain cave shortly before his death in 1645. The book book is essentially a guide for those who want to learn how to use a sword, but it can also be used, in Musashi’s words, as “a guide for men who want to learn strategy”.

Musashi’s Book Of Five Rings quickly became one of the most important books for students of kendo (the way of the sword), but because of its double-edged quality, it has also found its way onto the bookshelves of leading Japanese businessmen who applied its teachings to business strategy.

So, who was Miyamoto Musashi, and what is the unique appeal of his book?

Musashi was born in 1584, towards the end of the Warring States period. The Tokugawa Shogunate was established by Tokugawa Hideyoshi in 1603 when Musashi was just nine years old. The Tokugawa Shogunate ushered in a new period of stability in Japan and the disbanding of provincial armies. A lot of samurai, including the young Musashi, found themselves out of work and those who lacked land holdings wandered Japan as “ronin” or “masterless samurai”.

Many of these redundant samurai gave up the sword and became artisans, but Musashi and others devoted themselves to the study of kendo and set up fencing schools, often sponsored by local lords as places where their sons and retainers could train.

Musashi, however, chose to wander Japan devoting himself to the perfection of his sword technique. Perfection of technique was his sole obsession; he did not marry, did not take any care over his appearance, seldom took a bath so as to avoid being surprised without his sword.

Musashi fought on the losing side in the Battle of Sekigahara against the Tokugawa Shogunate and evaded the victors who hunted down and killed any survivors they could find. He then went on to win more than sixty duels and became a legend in his own time before he had reached the age of thirty.

Musashi was renowned for his “two sword” technique in which he trained himself to fight with a common short sword in one hand and a samurai long sword in the other. So powerful was his technique that in his prime he fought his duels with a wooden sword and still came out victorious.

Musashi’s prowess was not limited to sword-fighting, however. He also applied his technique to painting in accordance with his teaching, “Study the Way of all professions” and achieved some striking results that survive to this day.

In The Book Of Five Rings, Musashi divides his teaching into five “books” (actually, they are more like short chapters), which reflect the “Five Great Things” of Buddhism: earth, water, fire, wind, void. The teachings are written in a direct style, which can be understood on several different levels and therefore appeal to all ranks of kendo students.

Also, Musashi explains that his teaching can be applied to individual cases and also to grand strategy because “The strategies makes small things into big things, like building a great Buddha from a small model”.

In The Wind Book Musashi criticizes those kendo schools that fix upon one aspect of sword-fighting, such as using a long sword. It is not that he is against long-swords, but he is against the rigidity of basing your whole strategy around the length of a sword, for example, because each case requires its own particular solution or response. It is this flexible quality of the book along with its direct style that has made it so uniquely appealing to modern Japanese businessmen and to anybody else seeking to master all aspects of their profession.

Musashi’s The Book Of Five Rings is therefore a classic book of kendo sword-fighting, of grand-strategy, and also an excellent manual for success in the cut-throat world of modern business.

David Hurley
Best Internet Marketing Strategies

Which is the best place in the world to start a new business?

According to Ejovi Nuwere, it’s right here in Japan!

And that is especially true if you are a Johnny Foreigner.

Japan is smaller in surface area than California, but has 127 million
consumers and over four million companies. Lots of those companies are
busy importing gear from all over the world. Almost half a billion dollars of goods
are imported every year.

Of course, the Japanese are also keen on modern technology, with nearly 90 million hooked up to the Internet and over 100 million mobile phone users.

So, whether you want to export to Japan from your country, or whether you are an ex-pat living in Japan, there are lots of opportunities for you if you know - and here is the rub - how to do business with the Japanese.

For those of us foreigners who live in Japan, one of the keys is to take advantage of the fact that we ARE DIFFERENT from our hosts. Accepting that obvious fact and working with it - taking advantage of our differences - can give foreigners a great business advantage, or so argues Terrie Lloyd in the video below, talking to Ejovi Nuwere manager of Japan Jump Start.

Terrie Lloyd is the CEO of Japan Inc Communications KK. Read his story HERE

David Hurley

Best Internet Marketing Strategies

Back in February I took my daughter on holiday to England. I call it a holiday, but I spent the first couple of days clearing my books and accumulated clutter. I wrapped and packed 21 large cardboard boxes and asked a shipping company to ship them to Japan.

I found the shipping company on the Internet at http://www.shipit.co.uk/ . They offered a collection service and charged just under 800 quid to ship the boxes plus a William Morris carpet from mother’s house in Yorkshire to Kobe Port.

It was up to me to get the boxes (and carpet) from the warehouse in Kobe port to my house in Hiroshima.

 I chose shipit.co.uk on the strength of their claims to take good care of packing, and also on the strength of the testimonials.

The lorry arrived in good time - always a bonus in England - and was gone in less than 10 minutes.

 We then went away on our holidays to Blore Hall in the Peak District and I forgot about my boxes - after all, they were not due to arrive in Japan until the end of April or beginning of May…

One month later, back in Japan, I received notification that my boxes were still in England and that I would shortly have to pay warehouse charges. It turned out that I had missed an e-mail advising me that I had requested insurance but not paid for it.

When I saw that I would have to itemize every single packed item I decided not to bother with insurance at all since I had not written down a comprehensive packing list.

All that remained was for me to pay by credit card and, one month late, the goods were on their way. Meanwhile, there was a lot of news on BBC World about Somali pirates so I would not have been surprised had I never seen my goods.

Then, at the beginning of the month, I got a fax in Japanese informing me that my goods had been unloaded at Kobe and that I had a week in which to remove the said goods from the said port. There was also some disagreement between the authorities at Kobe and Shipit.co.uk as to whether or not I needed to present a Bill of Lading. Getting that sorted out took a few days.

The next problem was finding a shipping company to pick up and deliver the goods, oh but before that could be done there was a customs check, and also I had to pay 12,000+ unloading fee. But who to pay it to? I spent the best part of three mornings on the phone trying to organize everything, and the Mrs was assisting on the phone and Internet in the evening.

A week later someone put me onto a friendly chap called Mr Kurihara who seemed to know all about my case (I guess I was getting quite well known in his office as the private individual who was bringing 21 boxes of BOOKS for personal use through Kobe Port, which is used almost exclusively for the import and export business…).

Mr Kurihara laid out a plan of action in which he would estimate the cost of dealing with my case and would then go ahead subject to my approval. He turned out to be totally reliable and a few days later I paid the landing fee and the boxes passed through customs, onto a delivery truck and arrived at our house on Saturday morning, several hours ahead of schedule, for a total cost of 95,000 yen (I was expecting the cost to go as high as 150,000).

I was out when the boxes (and carpet) were delivered. The wife told me that there was just one delivery man who unloaded everything and piled it up in our genkan. Here’s a photo of the scene:

I have since discovered that the Japanese shipping company Kuroneko (Black Cat) has an office in London and that they ship goods back to Japan for Japanese tourists, so I guess anybody in England wanting to ship goods to Japan should telephone them first… It might save you a lot of hassle with the Kobe Port Authorities.

If anybody has any legit stuff stuck in Kobe Port, drop me a line and I will put you in touch with Mr Kurihara!

David Hurley

 

At the beginning of this year SFI launched an ecommerce store where you can sell your own stuff as well as buy both new and second hand items.

http://www.tripleclicks.com/bargains

There are several great features to this site that are worth mentioning.

1. It is cheap - starting at just 19 cents a listing - and easy to list your items for sale.
2. You don’t have to relist items or pay anything extra if your stuff has not sold after the first week on the site.
3. Tripleclicks acts an escrow between the buyer and seller.
4. People from many different countries can view the listings in their own local currency.
5. You can use up to 700 words and three photos to describe your item.
6. Tripleclicks accepts a wide variety of payment methods.

Tripleclicks offers the ideal solution for people looking for a quick and easy way into Internet marketing. You can test what sells by posting it on the Tripleclicks site before committing to selling it on your own website.

For anybody who is starting an Internet business from scratch, http://www.tripleclicks.com/bargains offers a nice way to generate some income which could go towards funding your monthly expenses.

Also, anybody who joins Tripleclicks through your links becomes your affiliate for life and will generate a commission for you everytime they buy something on the site. So it makes sense both to post items on the site that are likely to sell, and tell as many people about it as possible in the hope of (1) selling your goods and of (2) recruiting new affiliates to join Tripleclicks

===

Tripleclicks Goes Japanese!

Last night I posted my first item on the Tripleclicks site. It was, of course, a Japanese mahjong set and it is on offer there for a nice low price of just $35 (plus shipping and handling), i.e. $10 cheaper than you can get it on my website at http://japanese-mahjong.com/standardmjset.html ;-).

Standard Japanese Mahjong SetI’ll be adding some more Japanese mahjong and other games-related items in due course.In the meantime, to check out the mahjong set, run a search for “Japanese mahjong” on the site after clicking this link:http://www.tripleclicks.com

 

By: David Hurley

Here is a list of completely free, useful or fun Twitter applications to help you get more out of the Twitter micro-blog social-networking site.

1. Friendorfollow.com - Find out which of the people you are following is NOT following you back.
2. Is.gd Another type of free application that is essential when you want to tweet about websites and link out to them is a URL shortening service. The shortest of the URL shortners is http://is.gd.
3. SocialToo.com - This service who started following you and who stopped following you over the last 24 hours. Just as with Tweetlater, you can prepare an automatic welcome message for your new followers. With Socialtoo you can run Internet questionnaires, and send them out to various social networks as well as Twitter and Facebook.
4. Retweetist.com - Follow the tweet trends by finding out what news is getting retweeted. Use the resource to retweet news to help spread it (and maybe get noticed by the original Tweeter).
5. TweetBeep.com - This is a Twitter keyword tracker. Find out who’s been using your favourite keywords on Twitter.
6. Tweetergetter.com - Gary McCaffery designed this easy-to-set-up Twitter recruiter to get you a large Twitter following on autopilot.
7. Tweetdeck.com - Download this program to your hard-drive and use it to organize your tweets into different groups. This allows you to deal with all the messages that you get.
8. TweetLater.com - This app allows you to write your messages and set them to go out at fixed times. As with Tweet beep, you can set up keyword tracking. Tweetlater also lets you auto-follow when someone follows you. You can also set up a welcome message and Tweetlater will automatically post it out to your new followers.
9. Tweetstats.com - this appealing application sets out to your Twitter posting trends in a series of coloured bar graphs. Check out when you use Twitter the most. If you wish, you can share your report with everybody else by tweeting it!
10. Twellow.com - The Twitter yellow pages.Register your Twitter page info here.
11. Twitpic.com - Share your favourite photos on Twitter.
12. Twitterfeed.com - Automatically tweet your blog posts.
13. Twittergrader.com - Check the health of your network, how often you update and how complete your profile is. You can then Tweet your grade on Twitter!
14. TwitterCounter.com - Check how many people are following you, or someone else. You can see how two different Twitter users compare. Twittercounter also predicts how many followers you are likely to have in the future. You can then post the result in a widget on your blog.
15. Twitthis.com - This is a convenient way to tweet about messages anything that takes your fancy on the Internet. Post a button to your website and maybe some of your website visitors will tweet your articles.
16. Twollo.com - Set your keywords and this handy application will seek out like-minded people for you to follow!

Yes, I know, there are a whole stack more free Twitter applications for you to play around with, and a whole bunch more coming out all the time. These are just some of my favourites…

Author Resource:-> Are You Making the Most of Your Twitter Account? Click Here to Discover How to “JUMPSTART” Your Blog Traffic in 4 Easy Steps With The Help of Twitter, and grab these 10 PLR Twitter articles to get you started.

David Hurley runs an online article marketing business from the comfort of his home in Japan. To find out more about how you too could build a successful Internet-based business from home, sign up for David’s free newsletter at Grasp-The-Nettle.com .

Article From Grasp-The-Nettle.com

As spring unfolds in all her glorious panoply here in Japan, the sound of the Japanese bush warbler can be heard in the land.

Or, as far as I am concerned, the sound of chatter about bush warblers during English class can be heard in the community centres of Hiroshima.

For the callow warble of your common or garden bush warbler is as much a harbinger of spring in these parts as the sound of the first cuckoo is in the countryside around nether regions of Tunbridge Wells.

I wonder if retired Japanese Army (er, Self Defence Force, because “Japan does not have an army”) colonels inform the Asahi Shinbun that they heard the sound of the first uguisu of spring. I expect they would use a calligraphy brush and compose an elegant haiku, something like:

Uguiso ga

uchi no niwa ni wa,

uta no renshu

Which, being translated, is as much to say,

Regarding the bush

 warbler perched in my garden,

 it’s learning to sing.

Now, if I had been a bit cleverer I would have tossed in a blooming plum tree, because any early spring haiku worth its salt really needs to feature a bush warbler that has relinquished its bush in favour of a plum tree in blossom.

And another thing…

When talking about bush warblers in early spring, it is essential that you comment on how the callow hatchlings have not yet mastered the full bush warble and spend the early days of springtime practising, practising, practising and again, practising, just like Japanese tennis club members, who are all practice and no play.

To fully master the art of early spring Japanese conversation it is essential that you also master the sound of a bush-warbler’s warble, both in its fully formed perfection, and in its callow half-cocked sweetness.

As soon as early spring has passed and the plum blossom has fallen, all talk of the callow uguisu practising his song must be put away with the winter weeds and must not see light of day until next year.

David Hurley

http://grasp-the-nettle.com

Want to spice up your boring tweets on twitter.com?? Stick a Japanese emoticon on the end! There are hundreds of these creative little character doodles and they are a lot of fun.

Here are a few to get you started:

(^_^)/ Hi!
(^0^)/ Hi there!
( ^^) smile
(^O^) glad!
(~o~) yawn
(^-^;) cold sweat
(-_^) wink
(`O`) sing a song
(@_@) What???
(~^~) I’m proud
m(__)m
(^_^)/~~ bye~~
(=^_^=) a cat
(o|o) Ultra-man

They’ll only take you so far. For more info about emoticons check out Paperdiaries.com, the site of a certain Ms. Aya, where I found the ones listed above:

http://paperdiaries.com/2008/09/guide-to-japanese-text-emoticons-and-chibi-facial-expressions/

Ms Aya’s blog is an enjoyable read in its own right (or “write”), and Ms Aya ain’t necessarily what you might suppose… but she is a cool Asian lady!

I found Ms Aya’s blog on Google when looking for a specific Japanese text icon to tag onto the end of a Valentine’s Day Tweet - see, http://twitter.com/hirohurl .

Twitter is a great little tool and every day more and more resources are appearing on the web.

Want to see how your Twitter following compares to your friends’ and rivals’ - see http://twittercounter.com/

If your graph is looking a bit “limp” you might be interested in this new free resource which will get you a whole bunch of new followers WITHOUT having to follow them first - http://tweetergetter.com/hirohurl .

You don’t even have to give up your email address, and it takes less than 30 seconds to sign up and go!

David Hurley
Internet Marketing Success Strategies

Someone called Jimmy contacted me the other day about the Japanese mahjong sets available on http://japanese-mahjong.com to ask whether I could offer any sets of a similarly high quality with… Western numerals in the top right corner…

I explained that that was a big no-no as far as my site was concerned. Only genuine Japanese mahjong sets there, I’m afraid!

Anyway, I checked out the link in Jimmy’s signature and found out that he had made an interactive sudoku game:

http://www.sparkleinteractive.co.uk/sudoku/

“Sudoku” is a compound Japanese word that combines the characters for “number” (su) and “single” (doku). The sudoku puzzle was invented by an American architect called Howard Garns and was originally called “Number Place” when it was published in an American magazine in 1979.

In 1986 it was published in a Japanese puzzle magazine under the name “Sudoku”. Subsequently, the game was reimported into America and Europe and the Japanese name stuck, doubtless giving the puzzle an air of oriental mystery.

Funnily enough, in Japan the puzzle has been renamed “Nanpure”, pronounced “nan-poo-ray”. This is a good example of the way modern Japanese takes foreign words, mashes them together to form a new “Japanese” word. In this case, the words are “number” and “play” (or perhaps “place” from the original name of the game)…

Number = “Nanbaa” = “Nan”

Play = “Pure”
“Nan” + “Pure” = Nanpure!

So you could say that “Sudoku” is the English word for Japanese “number play”, or vice versa!

Now we have sorted that out, here’s a game for you to play!

Grab this Widget

Cheers!David Hurley
http://grasp-the-nettle.com

Ah, it must be spring in Japan - it is freezing cold outside, and boxes of dried soybeans with demon-mask covers on them are flying off the shelves of Madam Joy, our local supermarket.

It is Setsubun today, the day when winter officially turns into spring just in time for the coldest few weeks of the year to set in.

Now the chief superstitious practice of the natives of these islands upon this occasion is called Oni-yarai, or kicking the demons out of the homestead. According to the ancient rites of this ceremony, the father of the house is supposed to assume the role of the demon and put on the demon-mask while the rest of the family members hurl dried beans at him while yelling,

Demons out! Good luck in!

Why it should be thought that hurling dried beans at a demon-masked patriarch should effect the expulsion of vice and the import of luck is a mystery that has been veiled by the mists of antiquity.

I hear that death by choking on dried soy beans is the chief cause of geriatric mortality in these parts at this time of year. The reason for this is attributed to the fact that after the beans have been liberally tossed in the direction of the demon each member of the family eats as many of them as the years of his mortal existence.

I suppose the moral of the story in these recessionary times might be that if we had all taken a little more care in counting our beans we would not have been confronted by the demon of debt and depression.

Or perhaps the pantomime of hurling beans at demons while chanting that wickedness should be expelled and luck brought in is a crude dramatization of the prodigality of human folly and the absurd and presumptuous vanity of supposing that the mere and oft repeated assertion that something should be is the same as its actually being so.

Lord, what fools these mortals be!

And so they are!

Let us cast away this foolish mummery of masks and beans, this idle chatter about demons and luck.

Let us grasp the nettle and go forward in the knowledge that it is not what we say, nor external conditions, evil fortune or good luck, but the quality of our thoughts and actions that make us or mar us.

David Hurley