Japan Can Make Your Sailor Moon Wedding Dreams Come True
While some countries seem to be heading towards a cashless future, as usual Japan is behind the curve, with physical money still quite important in a lot of situations. Many shops and businesses are still cash only, so when I go on a buying trip to Tokyo to look for new artbooks or other products to carry on the site, I make sure to bring money with me just in case I need it. Once my wife and I were buying land for a new J-List warehouse, and at the contract signing I was flabbergasted when she produced a huge envelope of 10,000 yen notes and started counting them out, which seems to be a time-honored tradition. Another place cash becomes quite important is at weddings, where guests always present an ornate envelope containing the equivalent of $200-400 depending on their age and relationship to the bride and groom. If you’d think twice at attending a friend’s wedding if you were expected to give them a large cash gift, never fear: it’s more or less required that the person attend your wedding when it’s your turn, giving you an equal sum, so everything balances. (If you never get married, they someday give you a return gift of equal value.) If you like the idea of beautifully ornate envelopes for giving gifts, we’ve got the official Sailor Moon gift envelopes on the site, for preorder only for a limited time.
Although the Internet makes it seem like there are more bizarre TV commercials in Japan than there really are, it is a lot of fun to watch TV advertisements here. Japanese advertisers have created many innovations over the years, like showing a short commercial to you twice in a row (to make it harder for you to tune their message out), or sometimes presenting you with an emotional image like a daughter upset with her father for working too hard (so he should take this vitamin product daily), or telling you to “search for [company name or slogan]” to bring you to their website (which is called a “call to action”). There seems to be a higher standard for honesty in advertising here: when CGI toothpaste cleans teeth in an advertisement, it always leaves a small amount of plaque on the teeth to avoid making a claim of 100% effectiveness. These days the TV commercials are almost entirely dedicated to popular mobage (mobile games) showing average salaryman types slaying dragons while riding the train to work.
(One of the more interesting episodes in Japanese TV history was this official Twin Peaks commercial series for Georgia Coffee, which is more or less responsible for me starting J-List. One of my first business ventures on the fledgling Internet was, ahem, “scavenging” Twin Peaks Georgia Coffee advertisements from trains and vending machines and selling them to folks on Usenet. So your onahole purchases might just be thanks to David Lynch!)
J-List stocks some amazing onahole toys from Japan, and one of the most incredible ones in a long time is the Inwaku Suggestion Nostalgic Onahole, a toy that’s so realistic, it comes with a fictional story setting printed on the box. We’ve got tons of detailed reviews of these toys on our blog, so read them here, then choose your 2D waifu!
