One thing I think about sometimes is the timeless nature of anime, and animation in general, the way it can live on for years or decades and never seem to grow old. I don’t often watch live-action television or movies from the 90s or 80s, but I’m more than happy to nostalgically revisit the classic anime series or films of my past. Today Japan’s Twittersphere was buzzing about a blog post that discussed the rankings of the most popular anime characters in Animage over the last 32 years. Animage is the anime magazine that popularized the term anime in 1978 — before then it was common to refer to animation as manga, and Japanese above a certain age still do — and along with Newtype has helped define the industry from the beginning. I posted the complete ranking of female anime characters on the new J-List blog, and had fun walking through the years, commenting on each group of anime series and what kinds of characters themes were popular when each show was big. So, what’s the oldest anime you’ve seen?
One concept that’s very important in Japanese society is 信頼 shinrai (pronounced SHEEN-rye), meaning “trust.” If it starts to rain while you’re at the post office, they’ve got a rack of umbrellas you’re free to borrow and bring back later, and if you should ever lose your wallet while in Japan, just go to the nearest police station and the police will loan you train fare to get home, trusting that you’ll pay it back later. Once I was building a wooden deck on my house and needed a way to get the lumber from the home center to my house; happily, the store had a truck that they loaned out for free, even to foreigners like me, which I found impressive. Japanese can sometimes trust too much. Once I went to make a purchase in an electronics store but didn’t have enough cash with me; the clerk actually offered to loan me the money I needed, even though she didn’t know me at all. Another example of Japanese trust in action is the practice of “bottle keep” at bar. Basically, most bars will have dozens or hundreds of whisky bottles on display with the names of customers written on them. These bottles have been pre-purchased by regular customers to drink from whenever they come in, trusting that the establishment won’t steal from their bottles.
J-List has been making great English-language visual novels and hentai games for more than 20 years, and we’ve got stock of many great titles. The end of our company’s fiscal year is approaching, and rather than count our games as inventory, we’d rather sell them to you! So through May 18th, we’re having a great sale on all package games! Order 3 or more titles, and get a great big 33% discount off the total. It’s the best time to stock up on the games you want in your collection!
