Hello again from the soon-to-be-very-wet Japan! (Japan’s dreary rainy season is starting…)
The Japanese language has got to be one of the most vague, nuance-filled languages that exist in the world. Japanese is an SVO language (the word order is subject/verb/object, not subject/object/verb as English is), and it’s related to Korean, and possibly Turkish and Basque (go figure). When speaking the language, it’s very common to omit the subject, since it’s usually known to the speakers, and often other parts of the sentence are cut as well. When my wife says to me, “Iku?” at noon, I know that she is saying “Shall we go to lunch now?” even though all she actually said was “Go?” There are many words and phrases that communicate meaning in ways that are very subtle. For example, the word “chotto” means “a little bit” in Japanese, but if you ask someone if they liked the taste of some food and they said “Chotto…” the implication would be that the food didn’t taste good, but that the person wanted to say this in a more subtle and polite way. Leaning Japanese means more than just learning vocabulary words and hiragana and kanji — you have to tune your ear to what is being said around you even if it’s not actually spoken.
Japanese is interesting grammatically. It’s an “agglutinating” language, which means that a lot of information (past tense, passive voice) is expressed in the form the verb takes. The plus side is that there no “helping verbs” to learn in Japanese — “He would have been able to come” — but it does make it difficult to memorize the various forms of verbs. Japanese has grammatical “particles” that neatly denote parts of the sentence, such as the subject (“wa”), the object (“o” — nice and easy to remember), a particle for “in” or “to” (it’s “ni” or “in” spelled backwards), and so on. If you’re interested in a “bird’s eye view” of Japanese, I’ve posted an article on the subject, along with ten Japanese sentences you can memorize, on my personal page at http://www.peterpayne.net
The “top 5” categories have been updated for the past week, allowing you to see what anime, toy, magazine, DVD and other items are hot right now.
For the pre-weekend update, we’ve got another great collection of fun and rare items from Japan, including:
- First, we’ve got more nice new magazines for you, including new amateur, hitozuma and love hotel magazines
- Also, a nice treat, some classic issues of Dela Beppin from the early and middle 1990’s
- For fans of “nurse fetish” we’ve got a new photobook for you, Immoral Hospital
- If you love Japan’s erotic manga comics, we’ve got some nice ones in stock for you, including Gommene, a 2-volume set by Umino Sachi, breast fetish manga, bukkake manga and more
- We’ve got a great new doujinshi by Kenix, one of our most popular doujinshi circles, parodying the popular anime One Piece
- And we’ve got some new yaoi in for you, including the “Hard Boy’s Love Anthology” Trans 4
- For fans of our beautiful nude, swimsuit and idol photobooks, look for several new products, including the damned fine hardcover photobook of Hitomi Hayasaka
- For DVD collectors, we’ve got some nice items, including Hitomi Hayasaka’s wonderful soft-porn DVD that goes with her photobook (region free)
- For fans of cosplay, in which girls dress up like anime or game characters, we’ve got the new Big Morkal Cos-Players, with some nice characters! (region free)
- Our “Adult Video Wrestling,” which features an erotic take on professional wrestling, is always a popular item at J-List, and we’ve got a new *200 minute* in-the-ring sex-fest (region free)
- We love the erotic and sexy Nao Oikawa, who has become one of Japan’s top AV stars, and now you can see her as the Super High Class Soap Lady (region free)
- Also from SOD, Ryo Hitomi and Mao Misaki become “one-day naked employee” at the company, with some erotic results (region free)
- From Moodyz, the popular Indies Japanese studio, come Moodyz Musume, an erotic AV idol team of four girls who do things Morning Musume can’t legally do (region 2)
- We have a really erotic and romantic bukkake performance by Marina Kyouno, entitled “Semen and Love and Sex”
- Finally, we’ve restocked our DVD pages with many new products with a dozen or so items available for immediate order once again, including several volumes of “The Kageki” series, which is subtitled in English (!)
- We’re happy to report that we’ve gotten in fresh stock of our best-selling Lasonic DVB-090 region-free portable DVD player, which allows you to view all DVDs from Japan and all over the world
- If you’re a fan of Japan’s lovely swimsuit idols and Race Queens, be sure to check for newly posted items on the Idol DVD and More page
- We love our fun Japanese snacks, and we’ve added more, including Japanese rice crackers, Japan-only Mentos, fresh stock of delicious super-sour Shigekix, Tomato Pretz (one of my personal favorites), furikake, more Pocky (the last we’ll get before summer), and delicious Banana Chocolate, little banana-candy chocolates that are fun to eat
- For fans of Japan’s professional wrestlers we have some unique Japanese action figures based on Japanese famous wrestlers
- We’ve also got more items from the popular “The Dog” series, including new cute little dog straps (Shiba, Papillon, Welsh Corgi), as well as
- We also have a special item: a beautiful ceramic music box of Totoro featuring a Totoro playing an ocarina, great for collectors
- For Gundam fans, we’ve got some rare items, metal and plastic Gundam toys that are of the highest quality, from Bandai
- Finally, look for new cute items from Japan (including Hello Kitty), new
J-List carries many unique items, including many items that are very cool to give others as gifts. Whenever I go back to the States and find myself in need of gifts for my family (called “omiyage” oh-MEE-yah-geh), I never have to go farther than the J-List stock room. Anyone who has a dog will sure fall in love with our line of Japanese dog plush toys known as “The Dog.” If they’re into silly things, we’ve got some nice items, from Hello Kitty toilet paper to funny Japanese T-shirts to Japanese items to decorate your home. We hope we can help make gift-giving more enjoyable in any way we can.
At some time during the next week we’ll be upgrading the server the J-List system is on, moving to one with more power and memory which will allow us to better serve our customers. We’ll also be upgrading the shopping cart itself to squash some bugs we’ve been dealing with. We think it will go well, but server changes are always hairy things, so if you should experience any problems with the site or with email, please let us know.
