Hello again from your friendly neighborhood gaijin!
When you live in Japan, you get used going without some things that they just plain don’t have in Japan. First of all, there are no school buses. It’s part of the “school experience” for children to walk to school no matter how far it is, or in extreme situations, to take public transportation. For all the varieties of alcohol that are consumed in Japan, no one ever decided to bring American-style wine coolers here. When you go to a restaurant and can’t finish your meal, you don’t ask for a “doggie bag” — you just leave, and they throw your food away. It’s far too embarrassing to bring your food home with you, and as a result, the Japanese have the highest percentage of food waste in the world. And amazingly (from my own perspective as an American), there are no fire alarms in homes in Japan, and no laws requiring them — but then, Japan’s child safety seat law didn’t get passed until 1999, and before that time it was very common to see children standing up, playing, inside moving cars. We have American fire alarms installed in our Japanese home.
A strange aspect of written Japanese is that many Japanese people cannot read their own language. While the vast majority of Japanese can read the 1900+ “joyo kanji” (the standard characters all Japanese must learn by the time they graduate from high school), there are many very difficult characters that fall outside of the “official” lists, and thus, many people aren’t sure how to pronounce them. Family names are notoriously difficult to read, and even my wife’s family’s last name — Yanai — is read as “Yanagi” in almost every other part of Japan besides our city. Place names are also very difficult for Japanese to read, unless they happened to grow up in that area. All the place names in Northern Japan, which was inhabited by the indigenous Ainu people for thousands of years, have odd names can’t be written with standard characters — and as a result, most Japanese often can’t read the names.
For the mid-week update, we’ve got some splendid items for you, including:
- First, we’ve got a new category, Unique Adult Toys, where we’ll be introducing a variety of interesting adult toys made specifically for the Japanese market, including some of the items seen in Japanese adult videos and DVDs — check out our new offerings now!
- For magazine fans, we have the new issues of Penthouse in stock, and they are lovely, filled with dynamite photography of Japanese models by Japanese photographers
- For the leg or stocking fetishist in you, we’ve got the dynamite Mini Skirt and Panst Collection vol. 3, featuring some of the most lovely, leggy Japanese AV idols ever
- For photobook fans, we’ve got some excellent hardcover photobooks in stock for you, including the dynamite photobook of “hitomi” (you always have to write her name in lower case), Sayaka Morimoto’s charming youthful photobook, and the very sexy Sou Takanashi
- For hentai manga fans, we’ve got another great update for you, with many excellent new volumes, including the new hentai manga by U-Jin
- In addition, Yasu has posted fresh stock of a dozen or more volumes that have proved so popular we couldn’t keep them in stock, as well as a killer new doujinshi in the Angel Pain series for you
- Also: for our yaoi customers, a major update including fresh stock of many popular books that had been sold out for a long time
- For erotic DVD collectors, we’ve got some great new items for you, starting with a great new No Cut!! DVD featuring 3 hours of AV performances by Tsubomi Kanno (region free)
- Soft on Demand invites you to meet their new flagship AV idol, the lovely Ruri Anno, who is very bold in her “new face” debut adult DVD (region free)
- Lovers of lesbian “deep kissing” can enjoy the erotic Chu-Doku DVD offering from Bero Zence (region 2)
- For fans of the very busty Russian Yulia Nova, whose products are only available in Japan (go figure), we’ve got her dynamite second video in stock
- For Japanese idol and Race Queen fans, we’ve got several nice new items for you, including two great DVDs featuring Yinling and others!
- For fans of Hayao Miyazaki’s movies, we’ve got fresh stock of the My Neighbor Totoro and Kiki’s Delivery Services DVDs (which comes with full English dubbed and subtitled versions)
- For Leiji Matsumoto fans, we’ve got fresh stock of the large size die-cast “completed model” of the Andromeda from Yamato/Star Blazers
- Also: for Totoro lovers, we’ve restocked the very cool Totoro’s Wonder Tin Toys, highly collectible wind-up tin toys
- In commemoration of the upcoming Star Wars movie, we’ve restocked our Super Deformed Star Wars toys
- People liked our cool Cup Noodle coffee cups so much we sold out of them right away — but we’ve got more for you in stock now!
- If you love Japan’s bento culture, we’ve got some nice items for you: large size two-level bento boxes with matching chopsticks that are just great
- Also for your kitchen, fresh stock of chopsticks, Hamster Club items, onigiri makers and sushi molds, and more
- For fans of cute things, find Hello Kitty snacks, pasta, toilet paper, and those really cute mayonnaise cups
- If you are enjoying the English and Japanese bilingual comics being published by Kodansha, we’ve got the newest issue of Cardcaptor Sakura (vol. 10)
- Fans of Japanese snacks should sample the ume hard candies, flavored like delicious pickled Japan ume-boshi (tried, tart plums)
- Finally, one of the most successful products in the history of J-List has been Lotte’s Black Black spicy caffeine gum, which uses methyl flavor and spices to keep you awake when you have things to do. Now we’ve got Xylish Hyper Cool, a sugarless spicy gum that keeps you awake as it improves the health of your teeth. It’s great!
At J-List we sell many interesting items from Japan. One of our most rapidly growing areas is our Japanese snacks and gum categories, where we sell anything from Japanese Pocky (the original Japanese chocolate covered pretzel) to our very popular gummi sushi. If you’d like to sample a bunch of delicious treats from Japan, mosey over to our Japanese snacks and food pages and see what we can get for you!
The J-Mate site has been updated again, with reviews (and many screenshots) of new titles by Madoka Ozawa and Maiko Kazano, along with a super interview starring Anna Ohura. The URL is http://www.jmate.com/
