Hello from Japan, the home of “rinse in shampoo.”
It’s well known that famous actors from America and Europe appear in TV commercials in Japan. We’re constantly amused to see famous faces like Brad Pitt or Kevin Costner or Jean Reno or Tiger Woods pitching this Japanese product or that on the television. Back during the 1990s, there was even a series of Georgia Coffee “Twin Peaks” commercials that featured most of the cast of the show and a murder mystery that was slowly resolved as each commercial was aired. Sometimes these commercials are awful (Meg Ryan trying to speak Japanese in a tea commercial) and potentially embarrassing to those appearing in them (Pierce Brosnan pitching cigarettes). Sometimes they’re great though, like the long-running Nicholas Cage commercials for Sankyo, a company that makes Pachinko machines in Japan. If you want to see them, the URL is here (Quicktime required): http://www.tokyodv.com/feature/index.html
Grammatically, Japanese is quite interesting, and different from most other languages. One interesting aspect of Japanese is the use of grammatical “particles,” words that denote the subject, object, predicate and other parts of a sentence — kind of like XML for humans. One particle is “no,” a particle with a “glue-like element” (to use the words of my old Japanese teacher) that binds two words together, for example to show possession. “Peter no kuruma” ties the words Peter and kuruma (car) together, and denotes “Peter’s car.” Back in the Golden Age of anime fandom, the first Japanese most of us learned was “Darling no Baka,” the words Lum says before she gives Ataru a lightning bolt. This phrase ties the words darling and baka (stupid) together to produce an insult to Ataru. When Japanese clothes retailer Aoki opened branches in Taiwan, they inadvertently altered the local language: the hiragana character for “no” which appears on the company’s signs (“Gentleman’s fashions no Aoki”) caught on with Taiwanese, who started substituting the easy to write Japanese kana for the more difficult Chinese character that carries the same meaning.
Tragedy has struck the Japanese AV world, with the murder of one of its brightest stars, Nozomi Momoi, age 24. Details are still sketchy, but her body, stabbed six times with a knife, was found 10 meters from the charred remains of a car in her native Nagano Prefecture. The car contained the body of a man, and police believe that her death might have been tied to a murder-suicide pact. It’s a very sad end for one of Japan’s cutest and brightest AV idols, and it has all of us at J-List feeling very sad as well.
We’ve gone through and added many more interior shots from our stock of high-quality Japanese 2003 calendars, which will hopefully allow you to make better buying decisions. Please note that these photographs are being taken with a digital camera on the fly, so they’re don’t accurately represent how beautiful the printing on the calendar pages is. Remember that calendars are selling out even as we speak, and our current stock is all that we’ll be getting in. We hope you’ll browse our excellent
For the new update, we’ve got a great selection of items for you, including:
- For fans of our children’s shoes that squeak, which help you always know where your little ones are, we’ve got a few new items posted to the site for you
- We’ve got some nice plush toys from Sun Arrow, including a new Totoro backpack that is SO cute, and cute plushes from Spirited Away that jiggle when you pull a string
- We’ve got some cute toy items, including the Tokyo Mew Mew action figures from Takara, fully poseable with many fun extras
- We were impressed with the popularity of the extra-soft blankets, and we’ve got a new item: a deluxe Hello Kitty floor mat (usable as a rug too) that is very soft and cute!
- Other Hello Kitty items from Japan for your enjoyment include the super-cute Hello Kitty Kimono Version plush toys, the popular Kitty toy refrigerator, Hello Kitty writing items and toilet paper, and more
- We love the pre-painted resin models sold in Japan, and we’ve got another one for you, lovely nurse Asuka Senou from Hiroki Yagami’s G-Taste series
- Also, look for many restocked items, including the deluxe Ultraman alarm clock, fresh stock of the Laputa music boxes that are excellent, the cute “tiger” Japanese mirror, a fantastic Snoopy music box, some dynamite Totoro alarm clocks that are great for collectors, and more
- For fans of Japan’s unique and lovely Race Queens, we’ve got fresh stock of the giant life-size posters of Miho Yoshioka, Toko Ushikawa and Yinling
- We’ve got some great items for your kitchen, including some beautiful traditional potholders, new Japanese bowls and bento items, and more
- Finally, look for many cool and wacky things from Japan, including all-purpose Wonder Bunny containers, funny Japanese signs, hot springs powder so you can enjoy Japanese hot springs in your bath, fresh stock of our Cup Noodle coffee cup, a funky CD holder for your car, and more!
For our adult customers, we’ve got many new 18+ products. These new items include:
- We’ve got new magazines, including the great new Penthouse Japan and Penthouse Special, loaded with beautiful Japanese women including the sexy Yinling
- Also, a special treat for Urecco fans: a few issues of the previously sold out Urecco Super Beauties vol. 2 have turned up and are posted to the site now
- Japanese magazines dedicated to beautiful Western women are popular in Japan, and they feature busty AV actresses from Russia, Eastern Europe and the U.S. — we’ve got the new Bachelor for you
- Enjoy great Japanese glossy photobooks including the lovely Ryoko Mitake, posing using her previous professional name of Ryoko Kimoto — it’s great!
- Also, fresh stock of many popular photobook items including Maiko Yuki’s excellent photobook, the special Anna Ohura “Love Love” magazine, the best-selling Kaoru Private Collection photobook, and more
- For hentai manga fans, we’ve got an excellent selection of new and restocked items, with about a dozen items for you today including the great “Temptation Panty”
- Also, for fans of the excellent Blue Eyes hentai manga series by Tohru Nishimaki, we’ve got his 2003 calendar available for preorder — and it’s going to be a great one!
- For DVD collectors, we have another great offering of titles for you, starting with the “Premium” offering by the tragic sad Nozomi Momoi, for fans who want to remember her (region free)
- Then, we’ve got the dynamite Race Queen Kaori in her “Private Venus” erotic performance (region free)
- Minori Aoi continues to be an extremely popular AV idol because of her small, lithe body and beautiful face — see her new “Love Theory of Minori Aoi” offering today (region free)
- From Soft on Demand, a superb 140 minute leg fetish DVD featuring their very best leg, stocking, high heel and mini-skirt fetish material (region free)
- From Dash, a great new lesbian offering featuring Mariko Kawana, Yuki Sawamiya and Ayumi Hazuki as they experience lesbian sex for the first time (region free)
- From Waap Entertainment, enjoy the best of the Dream Shower series, featuring 26 dynamite AV idols performing their bukkake magic (region 2)
- Finally, we’ve got an excellent restocking of hardcore DVDs, including The Big Breast Girls’ School, Rio Sannomiya’s subtitled DVD, great works by Akira Watase, the Best of Gokkun, Let’s Go Marine-chan, and more!
The J-Mate site has been updated again, with a great interview with Bunko Kanazawa, one of the most popular Japanese idols in the history of J-List. See her talk about her life outside of her work. The URL for J-Mate is http://www.jmate.com
Remember that J-List carries all the excellent anime films by director Hayao Miyazaki, including My Neighbor Totoro, Laputa Castle in the Sky, Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, and more. These come in multiple DVD sets with many extras added by Studio Ghibli. Best of all, they’re subtitled and/or feature full English soundtracks, so you can enjoy the story! These are region 2 DVDs, however, so you’ll need a region free player to view them.
