Greetings from a very busy J-List!
When you’re a foreigner living in Japan, it’s always nice to have familiar things around you. With a great job like J-List that allows me to have fun all day and go to home several times a year, I consider myself the luckiest gaijin in Japan. Because I get to home to San Diego so often, there’s never a shortage of American shaving cream, breakfast cereal and Listerine at my house. Foreigners who don’t get to go home as often can go to one of the many supermarkets that stock food from foreign countries, if you live in or near a city like Tokyo or Kobe, but if you’re in a rural area like Gunma Prefecture, the most popular way to get familiar food is the Foreign Buyers’ Club, a company started by an American family that will get you anything you want from the States, from bagels to taco shells to granola — the only catch is that you must buy it in supermarket cases, which usually means 12 boxes of cereal, 6 huge containers of dill pickles, and so on. The URL, if you want to see their site, is http://www.fbcusa.com/public2/index.php3
One of the first things foreigners notice when they come to Japan is that all food seems to be wrapped extremely well — far too well, some might argue. Kaori brought in some Oreos to work, and I was surprised that they were individually wrapped with color-printed foil wrapping. Pick up a Kit Kat bar, and you’ll find there’s another wrapping of airtight wax paper around the snack, that’s not there in Kit Kats sold in the U.S. It works the other way, however, and Japanese are sometimes surprised how flimsy American packaging can be. When Kaori opened the Kraft macaroni and cheese which we ordered from the Foreign Buyers’ Club, she was surprised that the macaroni was right there, inside the box, without a second airtight bag inside.
Today’s the day we’re going live with our huge selection of Japanese indies videos and DVDs by famous indies houses like Wanz Factory, Waap, Moodyz and Audaz. Thanks to strong customer demand and the hard work of Tomo, we’ve been able to obtain distribution relationships with some of Japan’s best erotic AV studios, whose products are almost never available to customers living outside of Japan. Over the past half-decade there’s been a massive boom of indies AV in Japan, spearheaded by companies like SOD and others, and it has split the adult video world into two groups: the “pro” video houses like Kuki, Alice Japan and Uchu Kikaku, whose products are checked by the Video Morality Association (Bideo Rinri Kyoukai), versus the independent AV studios, whose products are not checked by the VMA but are “self-checked” instead. As a rule you can expect much harder hardcore, much finer mosaics, and visible pubic hair and more. Each indies studio has a slightly different style, and so we’ve made separate product categories for each group. You can browse all the indies videos and DVDs viewing the “View all Indies” category.
We’ve got a small bug in our site, which causes the “show cart” link to show the main page instead or showing you your current shopping cart contents. We’re on it, but in the meantime you can still check out normally (just add an item to your cart and then checkout from there). The new checkout script, which will have a very cool “express checkout” for making purchases fast, will be ready soon.
For this very special update, we’ve got a huge selection of new products for you, including:
- First, we’ve got new magazines posted, including (yes!) more of our popular $5-$6 magazines. Also among the reposted magazines are many “long lost” issues of Urecco that had sold out (but were really sleeping in our stock room)
- For fans of photobooks we have fresh stock of the excellent lesbian Flowers photobook, as well as a nice item featuring Eriko Satoh
- If you love Japan’s famous leg, stocking and mini-skirt fetish material, look for more photobooks and other items on the leg fetish photobooks page
- For lovers of Japan’s very specialized hardcore bondage photography, we highly recommend the new issue of The Most Obscene Slave, featuring 16 different models and some of the most amazing bondage and medical fetish pictures we’ve seen
- For fans of Japan’s hentai manga, we’ve got a fresh update for you, with new adult comic works by Watanabe Wataru and many others, as well as fresh stock of the very popular “Nationally Treasured Breast Girl Chami”
- For fans of hentai doujinshi themes that parody existing anime and video game characters like Street Fighter II, see the new Electric Fighting Daughter vol 13
- Speaking of doujinshi, we’ve got some dynamite items for you from Saigado and others, but our stock is limited, so snap it up while you can — of course our big manga sale is still on, too (save up to $4 per doujinshi you get)
- For our first massive update of Japanese indies products, we’ve got a huge ton of stuff for you. First, from Moodyz, we’ve got a positively dynamite VHS (DVD region 2 also available) starring four lovely ladies — Bunko Kanazawa, Aika Miura, Manami Suzuki and Junko Asamiya, with 200 minutes of superior hardcore action
- From the excellent AV studio Wanz Factory, we have stock of many DVD region 2 titles (VHS are also available), including their How to Perfect series (Kanabun, Yuuna Akimoto, Maria Yumeno), Be Covered Shameful Lady (Sayaka Ijiri), AV Special Training (Yuuna Akimoto), Happy Date (the lovely Lum Nagase), and Leg Fetish World (Fuuka Sakurai as a sexy and leggy OL)
- Also from Wanz Factory, the first erotic video performed and directed by Aika Miura (very nice!), a totally new production of course
- The very eccentric and zany indies maker Aroma, who publishes only on VHS as a matter of company policy, has three very interesting titles: Ticklish Boxing Woman, Dick Girl (girls with strap-on dildos who pretend they’re men), and Hard Nipples Collection (for men fascinated by what nipples look like as they get hard)
- One of the best-selling Kanabun DVDs of all tie is Go go! Kanabun Land, extra-cool for J-List customers as it’s subtitled in English — it’s been re-released at a lower price so you can enjoy this great title!
- Just because we’re carrying non-SOD indies titles now, doesn’t mean SOD’s going to go down without a fight — see Anal Torture (a 2-in-1) and a dynamite new Do Lesbian! release (both are region-free DVD)
- More than a year ago, J-List carried some Japanese “loose socks” (the baggy socks that look so cool on Japanese high school girls). They didn’t turn out to be very good, so we stopped carrying them. Now we’re happy to announce that we’ve got two different sizes of truly deluxe and authentic Japanse loose socks (80 cm and 120 cm lengths), just for you!
- We’ve had some excellent last-minute additions to the calendar pages, including high-quality desktop calendars for Ryoko Hirosue and Norika Fujiwara, as well as a Morning Musume CD-ROM calendar for Windows — and of course, we’ve lowered prices on another huge group of calendars to get the rest of our stock out (we’ve still got over 75 calendars though)
- For fans of Kodansha’s bilingual comics series, which gives you authentic Japanese manga with both English and Japanese, right on the page, we present the fantastic Tale of Genji English-translated manga for you, from Kodansha
- New and restocked “cute” items at J-List include fresh stock of Picky’s Bear cute Japanese bento boxes, more Hello Kitty color printed lunch bags, Hello Kitty small containers (you can put everything from mayonnaise to contact lenses in there), and more
- For fans of our popular and well-stocked Japanese snacks page, we’ve got fresh stock of both Blue and Black Toppo (a crunchy pretzel stick filled with chocolate or almond, very tasty), as well as fresh stock of the long-selling Sake Candy and Strawberry Milk Candy
- For those studying Japanese, or for fans of Japanese stationary with funny English on it, enjoy the new Japanese notebooks, Japanese study cards, and Japanese traditional report paper (genko-yoshi)
- Like our patented Japanese headbands? We’ve got fresh stock of our most popular headband ever, “Watashi wa H” (I’m a pervert), as well as the old stand-by, “Certain Victory”
- Finally, from a category I’ve loved ever since I was a child, we’ve now got some extra cool new soft vinyl toys of Godzilla, King Ghidora, Gamera and Godzilla (the “meltdown” version that’s very cool).
In our ongoing efforts to improve your shopping experience at J-List, we’ve added a new feature to our system: an automated mail that we’ll send to you when your order ships from Japan. This will let you know when you order is safely on its way to you. If you’re ordering products from Japan via EMS, this system will automatically let you the EMS number so you can track your package online. Thanks for all the feedback on the J-List site and how it can be improved (and please keep it coming).
