A few notes about the new J-List website:
- remember, subscriptions (both magazine and snacks) are currently off the site but will be restored soon, all subscriptions are still live and will be processed normally
- customer history will be imported from the old system over the next week or so (so don’t worry)
A new anime season is upon us, and because it’s literally my job, I’ve been dipping my toes in to see which shows I’d be following this time. This season has a lot to offer, including mystery (Beautiful Bones: Sakurako’s Investigation), more yuri-tastic fun (YuruYuri season 3), more of the undying Monogatari saga, and so on. Being an old-school fan, I was especially happy to see the new Lupin III series. I take my Lupin rather seriously, so I watched closely whether the new version would tend to follow the grittier, sex-infused original series by Monkey Punch or the more refined version Miyazaki Hayao brought us, and I was happy to see plenty of respect for both traditions in the new offering. If you like remakes of classic series, there’s more good news this season: the medical anime Black Jack, created by the legendary Osamu Tezuka, has gotten a high-budget reboot.
One of the joys of being in Japan is having access to “real” ramen, which along with rice, miso and tofu, is one of the foods at the heart of Japan’s food life. Although you might think of ramen is being a Japanese dish, it originated in China around the start of the 20th century, and within Japan ramen is considered Chinese food, on par with those heavenly gyoza dumplings. (They even write the word ラーメン in katakana, the writing system reserved for writing foreign words.) Ramen comes in one of several basic soup flavors, with the most common being shoyu (soy sauce), followed by miso (my own favorite), shio (“salt” flavor, though it’s called chicken base outside of Japan), and so on. Although you can probably find a ramen shop within twenty meters of you at all times in Japan, one of the best ways to enjoy it is at a yatai, or outdoor ramen stand, which is a wonderful icon of Tokyo. If you fancy yourself a ramen fan, plan on visiting the Yokohama Ramen Museum next time you’re in town. Besides various displays on the history of the noodles, you can wander a perfect recreation of a 1958 Tokyo street and dig your chopsticks into the noodles of a bygone era.
J-List has thousands of products, and one group we like a lot are the How to Draw books, which help you approach the subject of creating art from several directions. Choose from specific books that tackle issues related to creating art, or go for some of those sexy “super pose books,” because everyone knows artists need books of nude models to create art.
