Hello from Japan, where a car’s blinker is called a “winker.”
One of the more enjoyable pasttimes to engage in when learning Japanese is to memorize useless kanji for words that aren’t usually written in kanji (mainly because the kanji are too hard for Japanese to remember). One way to write the word “urusai” (which means “loud” or “annoying” and is the basis of the name of the 80s anime Urusei Yatsura) is literally “May flies” (as in, the dirty little insects that reproduce so much in the month of May). I’ve never figured out why Japan is overrun with flies in May, but they’re everywhere, buzzing and basically being “urusai.” We’ve got fly paper hung in the kitchen to keep them from getting into the rice cooker.
Japan is one country where a pocketful of change can be a serious amount of money. Because the Japanese use coins for 100 and 500 yen denominations of their money (roughly equal to US$1 and $5), it’s quite common for a handful of change to be a lot of money indeed — $20 or more. I’m all for the U.S. Government taking the bold step of eliminating the $1 bill altogether, without giving any choice to consumers. A coin is just as easy to use as a bill, and the savings from using coins over paper for the $1 unit would be in the millions. I’m sure it’ll happen right after the Metric System gets adopted, however…
In addition to these cool CD-ROM titles, we’ve got some great items for you, including:
- Many new 18+ items
- For fans of our unique Japanese snack foods, we’ve got a major update, including fresh stock of many candy items, Pokemon gummi, Pocky and Toppo, delicious miso soup with asari (clams) in it, sweet dried plums, and more
- We have more of our trademark Silly Wooden Signs with funny messages in Japanese on them, including the most popular sign we’ve ever carried — the famous “Do not urinate here” sign
- New items on the Wacky Things from Japan page include the ultimately cute trash can for your desk, a beautiful bamboo flower pot made of charred bamboo, We’ve also added fresh stock of many items that had sold out, including several varieties of our popular $5 Japanese-English dictionaries.
Imagine yourself walking down the street. Suddenly, you run into some Japanese people, preferably the cute kind. They might nod and walk on by, but if you’re wearing a funny Japanese T-shirt from J-List, who knows what could happen? We’ve got T-shirts that communicate cool messages like, “I want to be Japanese” or “I’m looking for a Japanese girlfriend.” If you want to confuse and confound just for the fun of it, how about “Hentai gaijin” (perverted foreigner) or the perplexing “Self-loathing.” If you admire the beauty of Chinese characters, we recommend “Daikoku-bashira” (big black pillar) or our “Happiness” T-shirts. If you secretly wish you were Japanese, send that message with a J-List shirt, too. And since we now offer free shipping on many of our T-shirts, as we try to make room for new designs, it’s a great time to check out what we’ve got to offer.
