Some great news about the all-new J-List website: our English-translated visual novels and eroge are finally restored and ready for full purchasing, including physical form and instant download! If you have any questions, open a support ticket to our staff.
Hello again from J-List, this time from lovely Gold Coast, Australia, where I’ve come with Mrs. J-List for a very short visit. Here I’m doing fun things like buying random Australian snacks to bring back to the J-List staff and inspecting fuzzy kangaroo balls. I’m occasionally asked through J-List’s Facebook page, Twitter feed or Instagram feed how the Japanese view other countries, e.g. what general impressions to they have about different parts of the world. Sweden, for example, is generally by Japanese as a hardworking country with many smart industries including Häagen-Dazs ice cream, which is of course wrong as it actually comes from Brooklyn, New York. When Japanese think of Canada they imagine maple trees and reindeer and the aurora borealis, and country with many different cultures, making it pretty much the opposite of Japan. The Japanese definitely have a positive view of Australians, who are always among the friendliest people in the world, and when I was an ESL teacher all my students who had visited Australia had positive experiences there. The heavy marketing of “Aussie beef” in Japan contributes to the positive image of the country, too.
In the same way that much of Western culture comes from ancient Rome and Greece, Japan has been greatly influenced by China, and many elements of their society can be traced back to the the various Chinese dynasties. For two millennia Japan used the old Chinese Lunar calendar to record time, and they inherited the Chinese Zodiac system as part of that tradition. There are twelve animals in the system, which rotate through year after year, with 2014 being Year of the Horse, 2015 Year of the Sheep, and so on. People supposedly inherit personality traits from being born in a certain year, for example Year of the Pig people are extremely hardworking, able to rush towards a goal without swerving. Each complete trip around the cycle is a useful landmark for a person’s life, a chance to look back and remember what you were doing in years past. For example, 2016 is the Year of the Monkey, and I fondly remember my first Year of the Monkey in Japan back in 1992, wondering at all the cute trained monkeys I was seeing performing on TV.
J-List’s fuku-bukuro grab bags are great fun, and we’ve got them up on the site for you now. This year we’ve got great anime/toy, doki doki random in addition to the always-popular ecchi grab bags. Browse them all now and get your order in soon!
