Hello from Japan! I’ve reluctantly returned from beautiful Hawaii to boring old Gunma, which, being as far as you can get from the sea, is sort of Japan’s anti-Hawaii. I had fun, but now it’s time to get to work!
One of the more interesting trends to emerge over the past two decades has been 萌え moe (pronounced mo-eh), through which anime and manga creators can form strong bonds between fans and their characters. It’s a genre of (mostly) female character design traits that are calculated to elicit
feelings of love and protectiveness by (mostly) male fans. While the term supposedly emerged in 1993, possibly in response to the extreme cuteness of Hotaru Tomoe (aka Sailor Saturn), the concept itself isn’t new at all, and I have fond memories of buying Macross plastic models I had no intention of putting together because of the cute Minmei box art. While moe is about many things — the large, expressive eyes, the impossibly cute hair, the oniichan this and senpai that — many aspects of the characters can become moe “charm points.” Whether it’s the
extreme cuteness of Ayumi, the imouto from Charlotte who’s always adding pizza sauce to her brother’s food, the ridiculous irony of moe girls trying to survive in their school during a zombie apocalypse, or the disconnect between Himouto! Umaru-chan’s two personalities — a model student while at school, a lazy otaku girl at home — it’s fun to see how moe changes and evolves over each new anime season.
One of the eternal rules of business is that successful brand names often become genericized, which is why you might find yourself reaching for a band-aid that isn’t made by Johnson & Johnson or blowing your nose with a kleenex that isn’t official Kleenex® brand facial tissue. This phenomenon occurs in Japan, too, and people here might find themselves referring to all ramen sold in a container made of Styrofoam™ (a trademark of Dow Chemical) as “cup noodle” even though the Cup Noodle® name is owned by the Nissin corporation, and calling all canned tuna “sea chicken” despite this being some company’s specific brand name. Compared to the U.S., Yahoo Japan has maintained its dominance in the Japanese search market quite nicely, and it’s not uncommon to see Japanese internet users “googling” up information even though they’re using Yahoo. Sometimes these generic brand names can come up in surprising places. When the E.F. Hotchkiss company started selling their newfangled “paper fasteners” in Japan in 1903, they didn’t know that their company’s name would become the generic term for stapler in Japanese, long after the company had gone the way of Nokia, Pan-Am and Blockbuster.
A reminder: the new and much retooled J-List website is coming next week, most likely on Monday-Tuesday. This will entail some downtime as the switchover is made, though much less than last month since much of the old customer and order data has already been ported. While all customer accounts and orders will be carried over to the new system, wishlists will all be erased. This means that you should take a screenshot of your current wishlist now so you can re-create it with the new system. Arigatou!
Some great news: we’ve posted even more awesome anime, traditional photo and art, ecchi and other (mostly cat-related) 2016 calendars from Japan for you to browse and preorder. Because calendars always sell out so quickly, this year we’re doing an Earlybird Special, in which you get 20% off 2 or more calendars if you preorder before October 1st. This discount will disappear on that day, so make sure you preorder the calendars you want now!
