Well, we’ve come to the end of another year. 2012 was a great year for us at J-List, with lots of growth for us as a company as we sold fun products like soft Totoro blankets and “shimapan” and cute bear-themed Japanese fashions while giving you slice-of-life updates from Japan three times a week. We released some outstanding English-language visual novels and eroge, too, including the legendary School Days — thanks to everyone for supporting our efforts to license and translate these unique games from Japan. It was an enjoyable year for me personally, with plenty of travel — I managed to visit Taiwan, Australia, tour Sapporo and Northern Japan by train, plus hit Washington D.C., New York and Boston over the summer…and we leave for a short vacation in Malaysia early in the new year. While the past year was not a great one for Japan, with its flagging economy and territorial disputes with China and South Korea which undid a decade of goodwill in Asia, at least things are ending on a positive note, with new leadership and hopefully some better news coming next year.
There are few J-List posts I can say I’ve waited years to write. One was my post on the election of Naoto Kan as Prime Minister in 2010. I’d literally had my eye on him for more than a decade, hoping he’d become Prime Minister someday mainly so I could make Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn jokes (warning, sound will play). I was apparently the only blogger to mark the 10th anniversary of the “All Your Base” meme, which I’d waited patiently for several years to write. Then there’s the original Super Dimensional Fortress Macross anime, the popular 1982 series which, along with Urusei Yatsura and Akira, had a huge effect on Japan’s popular culture that reverberated around the world during the 1980s, laying the groundwork for all that would follow. The last frame seen in the series shows a photo album being closed, with some enigmatic words on the cover — “A.D. 2012. So long.” — which have stuck in my brain since I first saw them. So I was pretty much destined to write this post and include the image, ever since I started blogging in 1998.
Back in 1985, the year 2012 seemed like such a far-off time. Anyway, “A.D. 2012, so long!”
