We’re having a blast at Anime Expo 2018 in booth 1515/1611, selling tons of fun products and hanging out with cool people like Kaho Shibuya. The JAST USA panel was a great success and we announced that Flowers Summer and Trample on Schatten are both available at the show, with preorders shipping out by July 16 if you order through the website now. (A blog post detailing everything that was announced is coming soon.) If you’re at the show, be sure and come by our booth to see all the amazing products we’ve got for you! Though poor Megumi has never seen so many onaholes in one place before…
In addition to talking with thousands of J-List fans at our booth (and giving many of them personal advice on how to pick the best onaholes), I always end up talking a lot of business at Anime Expo, chatting with the various companies we do business with. Naturally, I sometimes go to dinner with representatives from these companies, as I did tonight, which is always a fun chance to observe Japanese business and social settings. One big concept in Japan is enryo, which means “to hesitate” or “to refrain from” and usually manifests itself in the form of some delicious food being placed in the middle of the table and everyone deferring to everyone else, insisting that they’re not hungry and that everyone else should partake of the dish, which can potentially continue until the food is cold and has to be taken away. It can seem quite silly, and some Americans I know would do the opposite, fighting over the last scraps.
The group I was eating and drinking with included several Japanese, but also some staff from South Korea and Taiwan who spoke Japanese. One thing about drinking and speaking a foreign language: a little alcohol actually helps you speak better, perhaps because it relaxes you and takes away some of your inhibitions. But if you keep drinking, you’ll eventually start to slide, which happened to me as well as well as some of the people I was drinking with. It was fun to observe my own accent start to become less coherent at the same time as the guys I was drinking with, but with different accents than mine. At least we all had fun!
Will you be at Anime Expo? We hope to see you there before Sunday. We’ll try not to sell out of everything before you get there!
J-List is having a pre-Anime Expo $10 coupon, and you get it automatically, no coupon to enter, when you make a purchase of $40 or more from J-List. The only question is, what to get? Well, we’ve got some great new “ero” toys on the site that parody your favorite anime characters. Browse the new onaholes and save $10!
