Greetings from Japan, the home of the Toyota FunCarGo and Crunky chocolate.
Well, after many years, Fox’s long-running TV show 90210 has finally ended here in Japan. Shown on Saturday nights on NHK at 11 pm since time out of mind, the show had many Japanese fans, who watched it in Japanese, or if they wanted to practice their English, with English turned on. Kelly, with her small, demure body and beautiful golden hair, is by far the most popular character among Japanese fans. Nearly all the foreigners I know watched the show, all of them saying things like, “I wouldn’t get caught dead watching this back home.” But when you’re an expat in Japan, you learn to adapt.
One woman holds the key to Japan’s perceptions of movies, including what they watch, when they watch it, and how they feel when they watch it. Her name is Toda Natsuko, and she’s the Carl Zeiss of the movie translation world. All studios clamor to get her to translate their movies, and any movie that opens in Japanese theaters without the honored “Translation: Toda Natsuko” credit can expect to miss its financial goals. Translation through a medium like subtitles, which must be short enough to be read easily and clearly, but sufficiently accurate to carry the meaning of the film, is a difficult process, but Japanese moviegoers like Ms. Toda’s translations the best.
Well, Golden Week is upon us. A week during which several national holidays happen to fall, Golden Week this year isn’t actually a week long — it’s two long weekends with a normal break in the middle. Golden Week is an important time for Japanese to enjoy leisure activities, and as a result, no matter where you go, there are mobs of people trying to take advantage of the holidays. Of course, the Internet rests for no Japanese holiday, so the J-List staff will be stippling our holidays, to make sure everything goes smoothly during the week.
We’ve updated the top 5 list for the past week, too.
For the weekend’s update, we’ve got our usual cool volley of interesting items for you, including:
- First, many interesting new 18+ products
- For fans of the wonderful manga and anime Love Hina, we have a very special item — the next 4 anime DVDs in the series. Each of these long-playing DVDs comes with a great limited edition PVC figure from the anime series — a great item, and hard to find!
- We have the ultimate Mobile Suit Gundam toy ever seen, a wonderful high-end fully poseable recreation from Bandai, on the anime & toys page
- Also on the anime page, we’ve posted the next 3 volumes of the popular Cardcaptor Sakura bilingual comic, so you can enjoy the great manga in English — with Japanese also written on the page, for those who want to use manga to larn Japanese
- We’ve got fresh stock of several sizes of our popular Wacky Japanese T-shirts, for those who want to sport a wacky Japanese message
- For Japanese snack and food fans, we’ve got some new items — a new deluxe box of Japanese green tea, and a new twist on our furikake — delicious beef & sukiyaki flavor!
- Finally, on our Wacky Things from Japan update for today, we’ve got some really cool traditional things from Japan, including fashionable paper parasols, a deluxe wind chime, cute hooks for your room that say “For your agreeable life,” and more!
Remember that J-List is having a sale on our popular Japanese T-shirts, to clear stock out and make room for new and interesting designs. You can choose from messages that are beautiful for the aesthetic value of the kanji — the Chinese character for “long life and happiness” (or as we’ve interpreted it, Live Long and Prosper), messages that will amuse (“Watashi wa H” which means “I’m perverted”), or more practical messages, such as “Looking for a Japanese Girlfriend.” All our shirts are 100% cotton Hanes Comfort-T’s, printed in the USA, so you don’t need to worry about Japanese sizes. Check out our cool shirts today!
