The History of J-List T-Shirts

Saying Goodbye to J-List T-Shirts

I’ve always considered this wonky, weird company called J-List to be a giant dodecahedron, a 20-sided die, with myself and the other J-List staff members living on its surface. Each face of the die represents one of our core businesses — anime figures, snacks, licensed visual novels, the naughty stuff — and occasionally we all journey to the edge of a face and peer over, discovering a new face of the die, some new business for J-List to be in.

For nearly 20 years, a big part of our business has been printing T-shirts and hoodies, with kanji messages like “Looking for a Japanese Girlfriend” and “Beware of Perverts” or “Property of Senpai,” plus parody anime T-shirts. Sadly, we’re closing out our T-shirts and hoodies out this Christmas, and I wanted to write an article about this part of our company.

The Beginning of J-List T-shirts

I clearly remember getting the idea that would turn into our T-shirt business. We were selling some kanji hachimaki headbands that said 彼女募集中 which means “looking for a girlfriend” (or more accurately, “now accepting applications for a girlfriend”), and I got the idea to make a T-shirt that said “Looking for a Japanese Girlfriend” since everyone seemed to want one. I turned to my American friend to ask him what he thought of the idea, forgetting that his Chinese wife was with us at the time. It wasn’t my most delicate moment ever.

So we started experimenting with these T-shirts and later hoodies, coming out with interesting designs. The idea of wearing a T-shirt with kanji characters on it that no one could read was quite avant-garde back in 1997, a time when the original run of Sailor Moon was still on the air. We ended up creating a separate company to print and store the shirts in San Diego, which became our San Diego shipping location. We got lots of wholesale customers, including ThinkGeek who bought 3000 shirts every Christmas season, and everything was awesome.

Great Moments in J-List T-Shirts

Every once in a while, our T-shirts would blow up on the Internet or in the Japanese media, , like this customer who found himself interviewed on the popular You Wa Nani Shi Nihon E? TV show because of his Sword Art Online 8-bit T-shirt.

Then there was this New Yorker, who became famous for a day when a Japanese TV reporter noticed his hoodie.

You may laugh about our Looking for a Japanese Girlfriend T-shirts and hoodies, but they actually worked sometimes. Occasionally customers would actually get a Japanese girlfriend and send in a picture of them together. We have several of them decorating a wall in our San Diego company. You just never know!

Saying Goodbye to J-List T-shirts

Sadly, over time it became harder to justify keeping a giant warehouse full of slow-selling T-shirts of varying sizes, and this year we made the decision to exit our existing T-shirt business. We know many of our customers love our T-shirts, and we did our best to give lots of warning their social media so they could buy extra copies of shirts they love. (We still have a lot of T-shirts in stock, too, if you want to browse now.)

Enter the J-List T-shirt Grab Bags. For a low price, we will send you three random T-shirts in the size and style you want, plus an additional gift from our staff in San Diego. Already these have proven to be ridiculously popular, and we recommend customers grab a set if they are male size L or XL, which are the sizes that will sellout quickest.

Let’s check out some of the T-shirts you can get in the J-List T-Shirt Grab Bags!

Thanks for reading as I reminisced about the history of our company. We hope you will pick up some of our T-shirts before all the popular sizes are gone. Arigatou!