Over the recent winter break, I had occasion to re-watch one of my favorite Japanese movies, Summer Vacation 1999. Wracked with anxieties about achievement, maturity, and mortality that always seem to descend as one attempts to represent the life one has led during the last year to one’s extended family, I found myself enchanted once more by the movie’s peculiar, self-contained universe founded on carefully suspended temporality and an airless yearning that seems to replace the very air the characters breath within the film’s gauzy, stylized frames.

One of the earlier memories I have of Japan took place during an “orientation” seminar I attended as a part of the first exchange program I participated in, which was designed to brief us on general rules of behavior and the like so as to avoid at least the most obvious embarrassments. Scattered amongst the customary warnings about proper chopstick usage and the wisdom of bringing your own supply of tissue to public toilets came the puzzling warning, “Don’t ask someone what he or she is doing for Christmas. You’ll be misunderstood to be making a romantic proposition.”

As promised, this week’s column is on one of Japan’s most spectacularized exports, the pornographic genre Wikipedia rather demurely refers to as “tentacle erotica.” But where to start? As any ancient mariner of the cyberseas can tell you, the internets are woven in no small part out of endless, clammy, somewhat salty-smelling threads devoted to the subject, slithering over publication histories, generic boundary confusions, censorship codes and the like with unsettling single-mindedness.

It is with the precious, ever-so-mannered “reluctance” of the self-appointed expert that I find myself approaching the writing of my inaugural column on Japan here at Wordsmoker. But as I thought about it, my apparent conundrum began to seem hardly unique to my situation as “Japan scholar” and “translator,” but indeed was something everyone faced, all the time, at all levels.