Happy Birthday, Megumi! Looking Back on 29 Years of J-List

Today is the 29th anniversary of J-List, and thus, the 29th birthday of Megumi, our mascot. I thought it would be fun to look back at what it’s been like running a popular anime shop on the internet for nearly three decades!

Great news! J-List is having a $40-off-$200-or-more holiday coupon you can use for all in-stock items shipping from Japan! (Except calendars and Lucky Boxes.) This means you can make a big order of ecchi products for men, manga and doujinshi, JAV DVDs and Blu-rays, or hentai products and save big. Start browsing here!

Recently, I was browsing Reddit and received a comment from a user who remembered J-List from its early years. He said, “Wow, I remember J-List from back in the day. I can’t believe you’ve been able to stay in business all this time, considering how many small shops and drop-shippers and Amazon sellers have cropped up on the internet.” I smiled at his comment, since I couldn’t believe J-List had been able to keep going for so long, myself. But here we are!

An Exciting Time to Start a Business

The year was 1996. A company called Netscape had gone public the year before, and everyone knew the world had changed forever — the “ChatGPT moment” of the 1990s had arrived.

I’d always been interested in hentai visual novels by companies like Elf. I knew they were popular among online fans, who would download the games and click through them, even though they couldn’t read the text in the game. Eventually, some boobs would appear, so they’d keep clicking to keep advancing. It seemed to me that if people could properly understand the stories in these visual novels, they’d be way more popular. This was the beginning of what would become JAST USA.

How Did J-List Get Started?

But there was a problem. We had three initial dating-sim games for Windows, but that wasn’t much to build a business around. I’d been selling random products from Japan on Usenet since the early 1990s, dumping my products into an Excel file titled The Japan List. One of our early hit products were Twin Peaks posters I would pull off vending machines and sell online.

The logical step seemed to be to turn the concept of a random online anime shop into a proper business to tide us over “for a year or two” while we waited for 18+ visual novels to take off in popularity. My wife was sure my silly idea of starting an online store would go nowhere at first. When I refused to go out of business, she rolled up her sleeves and became the president of our company, putting her business management and bookkeeping skills to excellent use.

In the end, J-List would go on to be much more important than our sister company.

Our timing was perfect, and we were successful right from the beginning. There was a huge network of fans obsessing over JAV actresses and sharing scans of their photos online, so having a store located in Japan where they could buy adult magazines like Urecco (remember those?), photobooks, and JAV calendars was great.

We added new products every few months, moving fast whenever some new interesting thing from Japan blew up on the internet. More than a few times, we would develop some product line and find famous companies like McDonald’s or Nordstrom selling products that we’d discovered. It was a lot of fun, and J-List had tons of hit products, year after year.

What Was E-Commerce like in 1996?

The mid-1990s were a very different time from today.

Amazon had only been founded two years before, and was still only a bookseller.
Fast internet was still a distant dream, and everyone still used dial-up to connect. In Gunma Prefecture, I had to connect long-distance to a Tokyo server for nearly a year, as we had no local ISPs yet.
Online anime shops were all located in inconvenient places. AnimeNation was in Florida, and The Right Stuf was located in Iowa. Our location, right at the source, gave J-List a massive advantage.
There was no PayPal yet, and everyone was terrified of having their credit card information stolen. It took years for customers to start to trust that e-commerce was safe.

What Were J-List’s “Best Hits”?

Although I’ve got a whole post about some unique moments when J-List’s products changed the world, at least a little, here are the “greatest hits” of our company over the years.

J-List Kanji T-Shirts

In the early 2000s, there was a boom in people getting kanji tattoos. But there were also examples of people who had gotten mistaken kanji tattoos. It seemed to us that T-shirts with fun messages in kanji would allow fans to scratch the same itch without it becoming a permanent part of their body. J-List T-shirts were a smash hit for years, although we made the decision to exit the shirt market around 2017 because storage costs were so high. Now our “vintage anime shirts” sell for hundreds of dollars on eBay. How many do you have in your closet?

Riding the Domo-kun Wave

When Domo-kun — the official character of NHK’s “BS” satellite network — became a thing on the internet, our manager went down to NHK to see if we could become an official reseller of Domo-kun plush toys. To our surprise, they agreed, and we went on to supply the entire internet with authentic Domo products for years.

J List Was A Great Anime Store To Buy Snacks

The Jlist Anime Shop Sold Bento Boxes Back In The Day

Selling Everything from Bento to Black Black Caffeine Gum

I sometimes get comments from customers lamenting the fact that J-List doesn’t sell bento boxes or wonderful snacks from Japan, as we once did. Those were fun days, and we miss them, too. The Japan bento craze eventually waned as companies like Target filled the gap. Soaring shipping rates, particularly post-COVID and after Russia’s war on Ukraine, made selling $2.50 Pocky boxes impossible.

J Lists History With Visual Novels Image

Helping Make Visual Novels a Thing

Making a big contribution to pop culture was really fun, and over the years, J-List and JAST USA were always the best places to get hentai games translated into English. I was also happy to find that, while hentai anime was pirated online to the point that all licensors eventually disappeared, visual novel fans were far more likely to properly buy the games they loved. This is a big reason why JAST USA kept going strong over the years. Thanks, everyone!

Stress Relief, the Otaku Way

Of course, the products J-List is most famous for today are onaholes, those amazing “dolphin polishers” from Japan’s top companies. They allow you to simulate sex with your favorite characters from hentai anime, experience sex with a sexy dark-skinned gal, and more.

Thanks for reading this blog post about J-List’s 29th anniversary, and how the world has changed for anime shops over the years. When did you first discover J-List? Tell us in the comments below!

Peter Payne
President/Owner of J-List

Let’s Chat

You made it to the end of this post! Thank you! As a token of our appreciation, enjoy an extra 5% off your next order when you use the code BLOG at checkout. Also, don’t forget to follow J-List on all our platforms!