Hello from your Friend in japan, J-List! The San Diego Comicon is upon us (we’re at booth 4929), if you’re not fortunate to be at the show, never fear, because we’ve got great Comicon 5% Off Sale for you! Use code SDCC2016 to get a 5% discount when ordering through Sunday!
One of the challenges of being an older anime fan is watching highly dramatic stories about love and romance in school involving characters who are half my age (if I’m lucky)…or one-third my age (if I’m less lucky). It never fails: I’m enjoying an amazing show like Your Lie in April or Toradora or Amagami about characters who experience intense romantic love, yet who are not old enough to vote, let alone buy a beer. That’s why I’ve been happy with the newly launched anime called New Game!, about a young 18-year-old girl named Aoba who gets a dream job at a game developer. There she starts her life as a 社会人 shakai-jin or “society person” — what an adult earning wages is known as in Japan — working alongside a colorful cast of moe characters who highlight the zaniness of developing game software. I like the show because it’s a break from yet another series about upcoming school cultural festivals and characters trying to start a school club, but they can’t find enough members to get approval, and so on. Since J-List is involved in licensing and localizing eroge and visual novels, I can confirm that every day involves interacting with super cute moe staff members who are hopelessly cute and clumsy. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.
One theme I write a lot about is how there’s exactly one “correct” way to do things in Japan — a correct way for students to sit at their desk while in school, a specific stroke order that every kanji character must be written in, and so on. There’s even exactly one “correct” way to hold chopsticks, though when my son got a girlfriend, the fact that he held his chopsticks in a not-totally-standard way became an minor issue in our family. (“Whatever you do, make sure you don’t eat with chopsticks in front of her!”) A symbol of the Japanese approach to how to do things can be seen in the marks they make on paper when counting objects. While most Westerners count by drawing sets of five “chicken scratch” lines, the Japanese draw the five-stroke character for honesty and correctness, which is 正 tadashii.
J-List is preparing our usual awesome booth at the San Diego Comic-Con, booth 4929, where we’ll have our popular anime T-shirts, visual novels and “H” games (including Super Sonico and Jessica Nigri!), naughty magazines and related products, and more. If you’ll be at the show, come by and say hi! If not, enjoy shopping on the site during our sale! Use code SDCC2016 to get 5% off $60 or more!
